Rose Gold

by Walter Mosley

  Bob’s facility was amazing. He must have met Mouse at one time or other because he was playing the role perfectly.

  There was a span of silence on Delbert’s side of the line.

  “So if Rose goes with you, you give me the money?” Delbert asked, his anger held in abeyance.

  “Naw, mothahfuckah! Shit no! You give me Rose an’ I give you one bag. You got to pay sumpin’ for takin’ my woman and leavin’ me up in the mountains to die from my wounds. And don’t you even think about arguin’ wit’ me or I’ll cut you down to half a bag.”

  Bob was following the script just the way Raymond would have; with a flavor of his own.

  “All right, all right,” the criminal-turned-revolutionary said. “Just tell me where to be.”

  “Listen, mothahfuckah, I know you thinkin’ that you gonna come ovah here an’ kill me an’ take your money but that ain’t about to happen, man. Not nearly. I got four men with guns up in here and you gonna come alone with Rose or I’ma shoot you in the head myself.”

  Bob gave Delbert the address and warned him again to come only with Rose.

  “I’ll be there in a hour,” Most Grand said. “I’ll have Rose an’ you bettah have my mothahfuckin’ money.”

  56

  The so-called safe house had a six-foot-square raised extension above the third floor. It was like a crow’s nest on an old-time sailing ship. There was glass on all four sides maybe eighteen inches high. From that vantage point one could see up and down the street and in the backyard. The house was also wired with intercom speakers in every room. I went up to the crow’s nest thinking that the secret existence of houses like that was why Ian Fleming could come up with a character like James Bond.

  Our plans were set and yet fluid because we didn’t know exactly how it would play out.

  “There’s a white Impala slowing down in front of the place,” I said into a microphone. My words were heard throughout the house.

  It had been thirty-seven minutes since the phone call. I had reported on the passage of more than a dozen cars while Redbird, Melvin, and Anatole executed our impromptu plans.

  “Anybody out back?” Melvin asked for at least the sixth time. He was waiting at the rear door, ready to move.

  “Not that I can see.”

  Anatole had promised me that the thin band of windows I was watching through were invisible to anyone in the street. I trusted him but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my head was a melon at target practice.

  The front of the house had two doors. The outer door opened onto a walled-in external vestibule and was seven feet from the proper entrance. It opened easily but was weighted to close immediately and lock, barring either entrance or exit. There was a waist-high trunklike gardener’s cabinet to the left on the inside of this entryway. It was secured by a simple padlock. My cohorts had loaded the box with eight pillowcases filled with the contents of one suitcase.

  “The car’s coming back around,” I said.

  “How’s the back?”

  “If I don’t say it then there’s nobody there, Mel.”

  The white Impala cruised by a little faster than before. I could tell it was the same car by a small rust spot on the front hood.

  New Bob, Anatole, and Redbird were crowded around the front door.

  There were four or five possible resolutions to the upcoming encounter. They ranged from very good to acceptable to very bad.

  The Impala came around a third time. I told my people that. It pulled to the curb three houses down and Rosemary Goldsmith got out with a black man, not light-skinned Delbert “Most Grand” Underhill.

  I used a pair of binoculars and studied the car.

  “Rosemary and one other are coming to the door,” I said. “I think the rest are all in the car, Mel. You can head out now. And you can make that call, Officer McCourt.”

  For my part I rushed down the stairs with a pistol in my hand. By the time I had reached the front there was already a conversation going on over the intercom.

  “Where the fuck is Delbert?” Bob shouted into the microphone.

  He was looking up into a pane of glass over a mirror face that was connected to a periscope-like device used to monitor the inner entrance. The police were taking no chances with bullet-vulnerable peepholes.

  The slightly distorted images in the pane were Rosemary Goldsmith and a slender black man in khaki and black. The man pulled out a pistol.

  “No, no, no, mothahfuckah,” Bob said as if he had lived that role for a lifetime. “Do’ is solid steel. You tryin’ to shoot through it is the same thing as shootin’ yo’self in the head.”

  Behind me Anatole McCourt was talking softly on the phone.

  The slender black man tapped on the door with the muzzle of his gun. We could hear the ring of metal on metal through the intercom and through the door.

  “Where is Delbert?” Bob asked again.

  “He’s in the car, Uhuru,” Rose said into the ether.

  “Why ain’t he here?”

  “I don’t know,” she said but I didn’t believe her. I knew, and she did too, that Delbert didn’t come because he was afraid that Uhuru-Bob Nolicé wanted vengeance. He was waiting in the car to see if the money made it back to him. If it didn’t he was probably planning to go to war.

  “You the niggah called Tom, right?” Bob said.

  “Yeah,” the skinny black drone replied.

  “Well, Tom, you need to know some facts. The first thing is that the wood box on your right has eight bags of money in it. The second thing is that the door behind you is locked by bolts. You might shoot the lock off the box but you won’t make it past that door before me an’ my boys shoot you through our holes in this door. So I want you to put the gun down on the floor, stand with your back to that door, and let Rose stay by the front.” I noticed then that sweat was pouring down Bob’s face. He was working harder than he ever had in his brawling years in the ring.

  “That’s right,” he said when Thomas had completed the instructions. “No, no, Rose. You stay by my door.

  “Now up above your head, Tom, there’s a ledge. On the ledge is the key to the money box.”

  When Thomas turned to reach for the key I yanked open the front door and Redbird grabbed Rosemary, pulling her into the house. She yelped in protest but Redbird was fast and strong. Thomas turned to help his comrade but I slammed the door shut.

  “Forget the girl, man,” Bob said. He was wilting from the strain of the role. “Take the key an’ get yo’ money. After that we through here.”

  “Redbird,” Rose said. Something in her voice had changed from one room to the next.

  “Miss Goldsmith,” the last known surviving member of the Taaqtam said.

  I could see Thomas fiddling with the lock, lifting the lid, and then grabbing at three pillowcases. Anatole hit a lever that unlocked the outer door. Thomas managed to gather up a fourth bag in his arms before scuttling out to the street.

  Bob was sitting on the floor against the wall, sweat dripping down from his forehead.

  Rose was staring into her mother’s agent’s eyes.

  “I was doing it for your people,” she said.

  He said nothing. When she began to cry he embraced her.

  “I’m gonna break down this mothahfuckin’ door!” This shout was broadcast through the intercom.

  In the mirror I could see Most Grand Delbert holding an M1 rifle. Two of his minions, a white man and Thomas, were behind him.

  “You could try,” I said through the speaker system. “But you know we called the cops already. How much you wanna bet that their guns are bigger and better than yours?”

  He battered the butt of the rifle against the door a few times. When this had no effect he grabbed a bag of money and his two men took the rest.

  Less than half a minute later, before they could have pulled away from the curb, there came the weedy and plaintive sound of police sirens—lots of them.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Mantle,” Officer
McCourt said, “but I’m going to have to put you in handcuffs. I’m doing it because I want them to know that you’re my prisoner.”

  Bob sighed, nodded, and staggered to his feet. There was a spot of blood on the floor from his bullet wound.

  “Hold up a minute, man,” Bob said. He took off the emerald and platinum ring and handed it to me. “I’ma give you this back, Mr. Rawlins. Thanks for givin’ it to me but I never wanna to go through no shit like that ever again.”

  57

  “What happened after all that?” Mouse asked me three weeks later.

  We were sitting in my living room at around eleven a.m. on a Tuesday morning. Feather had been back for ten days and was attending her first full week at Ivy Prep. The room was still pretty bare—I’d been too busy fixing up my rental properties to shop for furniture.

  Raymond had come over to visit my new home. His right arm was in a sling but that didn’t weaken him; my friend, among his many other talents, was ambidextrous.

  “Melvin had cut out through the back with the rest of the cash,” I said. “Redbird went after him to bring Rosemary to her mother at the Dumbarton. When the cops got there McCourt said that he’d been called by Melvin and apprised of the situation. He told them that because he didn’t know who he could trust in the department he drafted me into service. Again, Melvin had vouched for my honesty.”

  “I heard about the shootout with Delbert and them,” Mouse said. “Papers say that they went down in a hail of gunfire.”

  “That was because Frisk had given the kill order.”

  “He didn’t want no contradictions, huh?” Mouse said.

  “No, but he didn’t know that we had Willy and Sheila locked up in their car.”

  “And you got half the money?”

  “Split it five ways.”

  “Five?”

  “Me, Melvin, his friend Anatole, Redbird of course, and then there was Bob’s family.”

  “His family?”

  “Lenore Goldsmith helped us to set up a kind of trust fund for Belle and the mother of his son, Sister. Lenore sent her lawyer to talk to the Chinese liquor store clerk—he had serious memory loss after that. Then, when McCourt convinced the police that Bob was innocent, we got him enrolled in this drama school up in Portland. His mom is paying for it.”

  “Damn. But why the rich lady wanna help you?”

  “It tickled her that we stole her husband’s money. And Redbird told her that it was my plan that saved her daughter.”

  “Damn, man,” Mouse said. “You got luck so strong it’s likely to get you killed.”

  “What happened to your arm, Ray?”

  “Mothahfuckin’ guard that sold us the information about the armored car decided to try an’ double-cross us. We had to shoot our way outta there. Shit, here I only get seventy-five thousand and you make more and never even have to fire a gun.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “The cops after the girl?” Mouse asked.

  “No. As far as the cops were concerned she was a kidnap victim and she had the missing finger to prove it.

  “Melvin went to Parker and his staff and laid out a story. He told them about Tout Manning and Roger Frisk; about the cops in cahoots with the drug dealers. They arrested Manning for conspiracy, fired Frisk, reinstated Suggs, and now I hear that he’s in line for Frisk’s job.”

  “No shit?” Raymond said. It was one of the few times I had seen him impressed with my machinations. “You mean now you got a friend in Chief Parker’s office? Damn! That’s better than any money.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean Mel still has that bent girlfriend but maybe it’ll work out. McCourt will be his new Tout Manning. I wouldn’t want to be Light Lambert or Art Sugar right now. Suggs and McCourt said that the girl was innocent.”

  “Was she?” Mouse asked, his gray eyes in mine.

  “No, I don’t think so. I mean she had to allow Delbert to cut off her finger. I don’t know if she was party to the murders of Youri Kidd and Deirdre Melbourne, that girl in Studio City. Delbert was a crazy motherfucker who believed that everybody was tryin’ to betray him. That’s what everybody that knew him said. But it was Rose who planned to extort and embarrass her father, I’m sure of that.

  “Melvin made a deal with Willy Buckingham and Sheila Yamagata. He worked it out with the prosecutor for reduced charges and they testified against their dead friends and claimed that Rose was a prisoner the whole time. The police thought that the half million in the getaway car was the whole amount that Stony paid and he never said any different. His lawyers won’t even let the cops talk to him.”

  “What I don’t get is why the girl’s father agreed to pay at all,” Mouse said. “He must’a suspected that she was workin’ with them.”

  “Lenore found out,” I said, “and Redbird told me. They sent only the finger to Stony first. There was a ransom note but no details on how to pay. Later that day they had Rose call him on his private line. She cried and screamed and begged him to save her. No matter what he thought, he really did love his daughter and she played him like a violin.”

  It was good to be able to talk to Mouse. He’d never divulge my secrets, nor would he judge me.

  After he left I drove downtown for lunch with Jackson Blue at the Proxy Nine cafeteria. Jackson liked going down to the basement lunchroom to eat among the rank and file of the international insurance company.

  We sat at a little table for two in a corner. On his red plastic tray he had carrot soup and fried rice. I was eating pastrami on rye with mustard and onions.

  For twenty minutes or so we talked about Ayn Rand and her Objectivist philosophy.

  “But she ain’t really no real philosopher,” Jackson said at last.

  “She writes philosophy,” I argued.

  “Yeah but really it’s just ideas that’s alive in the air,” he said. “She pluck out them concepts and act like they were her own. But you know a real philosopher tells you what’s comin’. ’Cause you know the world always gonna change an’ the genuine thinker give you some warnin’ ’bout things nobody else even suspects.”

  I stopped arguing after that. I had learned over time that even if Jackson was wrong he could still talk circles around me.

  “So why you invite me up here to lunch, Jackson?”

  “I wanna thank you, Easy. Jewelle came up all sheepish to me and said that she had give Percy Bidwell three hundred dollars and he used that to move back east. She said that he went to talk to you and then called her and asked for the loan. She said that she didn’t want me to think that she was throwin’ away our money but she did give it to him. I know that was you, Easy, and I wanted to say thanks.”

  “No problem, Jackson.”

  “So what now?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You saved that rich girl, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So her parents must have paid you.”

  “In a way they did.”

  “So you still gonna run the streets and risk your life for peanuts or you gonna try and change up? You know Jean-Pierre still got that security job open.”

  He was talking about a kind of metaphysical Moving Day.

  “Thanks for that but I’ma have to say no. I got other plans.”

  “Like what?”

  “I think I’ll move my office downtown,” I said. “And maybe … maybe I’ll take on a few agents. Maybe I’ll even try and bring in a partner so I can take some time off now and then.”

  “You mean like a detective agency?”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding to some other place and time. “Maybe it’s time I learn to count my blessings.”

  About the Author

  Walter Mosley is the author of more than forty-three books, most notably thirteen Easy Rawlins mysteries, the first of which, Devil in a Blue Dress, was made into an acclaimed film starring Denzel Washington. Always Outnumbered, adapted from his first Socrates Fortlow novel, was an HBO film starring Laurence Fishburne. Mo
sely is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy Award, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. A Los Angeles native and a graduate of Goddard College, he holds an MFA from CCNY and now lives in Brooklyn.