Rose Gold (11 page)

Toward the back wall stood a huge asymmetrical desk that was made from metal and looked like some gargantuan gray and extinct member of the pig family. Upon the desk were blueprints, files, a few paper coffee cups that had soaked through along the seams, and at least a dozen telephones.

Behind this desk sat a man who was maybe sixty but solid. This man stood up as I approached.

Foster “Stony” Goldsmith might have also been constructed from steel. His hair, skin, eyes, and even his suit were all various shades from silver to gunmetal gray. His posture was solid and his hands soiled with the materials from his worktables.

“That’s a whole lotta phones,” I said.

“Makes you wonder why JP Villard didn’t call me in person,” Goldsmith said. “He has the numbers of four of them.”

I took the envelope from my pocket and handed it across the broad back of the porcine desk.

He tore open the letter and read it closely. Then he looked up, suddenly intrigued by my presence.

“What could you possibly have to say to me?” he asked. “And why would the CEO of Proxy Nine need me to listen?”

“Rosemary.”

It was a pleasure to see that the captain of industry could be rocked by just a word. He gazed at the letter in his hand, questioning its origins, and then looked up at me with the same query in mind.

“Where do you come from?”

I went into the story that had been going through my mind for the last twenty-four hours. I told him about Moving Day and Roger Frisk, about Tout Manning and being shot at in front of Benoit’s Gym.

“Why would the police come to you?” Goldsmith asked.

“I’m a private detective. Not too many my shade of brown in L.A. The cops find that I can get work done where they cannot. Also I know things about the world outside my neighborhood.”

“What kind of things?” he asked.

“Like that the man sitting outside your door wasn’t you.”

“Tom Crispin is so close to me that he could finish my sentences.”

“Well,” I said with a shrug, “I’m talking to you.”

“And the police sent you here?”

“No, sir. The police told me not to contact you under any circumstances. But I’m suspicious by nature. I haven’t read about the supposed kidnapping in the newspaper. And even though I’m aware of some of the crimes this Uhuru Nolicé is supposed to have committed, I haven’t ever heard about him before either.”

“So you don’t believe the police?”

It was an odd interrogation. Goldsmith had no intention of sitting or of offering me a seat. I decided that this was some kind of superstition; that if he treated me in a civil manner he couldn’t have me shot on the way out.

“Not necessarily,” I said.

“And what do you want from me?” he asked.

“Like I said, somebody paid me six thousand dollars to start this investigation. I figure that was you. And if I’m working for you it’s only right that we meet face-to-face.”

Goldsmith’s eyebrows creased slightly.

“And there’s another thing,” I added.

“What’s that?”

“I have a daughter of my own and I wouldn’t want somebody out looking for her that I hadn’t met.”

“I’ve never served in the armed forces, Mr. Rawlins, but I’m military just the same,” Goldsmith said. “I live a Spartan life and work in armaments. I taught Rose how to make her bed when she was six years old. I told her that when a man or woman makes their own bed they sleep in it too.”

His words were facts tinged with lament.

“So you’re saying that you don’t want me to find her?” I asked.

The gun-maker gave me a long hard look then. He was angry about something; maybe it was my question.

“Have you ever killed anyone, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Why? Have you?”

“Not by direct physical contact,” he said as if he had been practicing a legal defense. “I have never shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, or asphyxiated another human being. There are people out there, however, who blame me for the deaths of thousands. They think because I make bombs that I am responsible for how those bombs are used. If a child is shot in the DMZ or Johannesburg with one of my guns they lay the crime at my feet. What about you?”

“Are you asking me if I blame you for people killed with your weapons?”

“I’m asking you if you have ever killed anyone.”

“Why?”

“Like you said, I want to know what kind of man is out there looking for my daughter.”

Less than two months had passed since I last killed a man. Keith Handel was a thug and a killer, a ruthless man who would, who
had
murdered his own confederates for money. I thought he was trying to kill me. If he got the upper hand he probably would have. But that night I was lucky. I strangled him while he was trying to do the same to me.

“In the war,” I said.

“Is war your excuse?”

“Where I come from people don’t have any use for excuses.”

That got me another minute-long stare.

“Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Rawlins?”

“You could answer my question.”

“Let me be very clear,” he said. “I did not summon you or go to your house on Moving Day, as you call it. I didn’t give you any money or suggest these things you say about my daughter are true. You are in the employ of the Los Angeles Police Department. So I suggest you address your questions and bring your findings to them.”

Looking at Old Stony’s hard facade, I wondered if stainless steel could rot.

He had, I believed, given me the answers to my questions, but I didn’t understand their meaning.

The door behind me opened and I didn’t have to look to know that Red and Mr. Push-up had somehow been summoned to see me out.

As we climbed out from Goldsmith’s underground lair—Red, Mr. Push-up, Gregory Teeg, and I—I wondered about what crime had been committed. It could be that this was a simple kidnapping for ransom. It could be that Goldsmith’s desk was actually a prehistoric boar trained to stand still and act the part of an inanimate piece of office furniture.

I was breathing pretty hard at the halfway mark of our ascent. This exertion made me crave a cigarette. When we were outside of the concrete bunker I pulled out a Pall Mall and a box of matches.

“No smoking on the property,” copper-hued Teeg said.

“Why not?”

“Too many combustibles and flammables in the air.”

I made it home by six forty-five. Feather was there in the bare living room, sitting in the chair and reading a book. She had rooted out our old brass lamp and a dark side table made from elm.

“What you readin’?”

“La Condition Humaine,”
she said. “
Man’s Fate
by André Malraux.”

“In French?”

“I don’t really understand it but I can read the words pretty much. Bonnie gave it to me.”

“You hungry?”

“There’s chicken and dumplings on the stove,” she said, putting the book down and standing up to kiss me.

She’d also made a green salad in the French style with a garlicky vinaigrette dressing. I sat at the rectangular table in the eight-sided room and my daughter served. Both my children had matured early. They were smart and focused from childhood, responsible and willing to help. These traits might have had something to do with my child-rearing but I couldn’t explain it. I was a single parent who was often out in the world rather than at home. I had moved my kids around, kicked the woman we all loved out of the house, and was subject to sour moods. I had nearly killed myself and subjected Feather to a prolonged and spotty resurrection.

“How was it out at the Nishios’?” I asked when we were both seated.

“Nice. They have a big family and they all work together making clothes for Bryant’s Department Store in Beverly Hills. They have aunts and girl cousins and wives all there working. Mr. Nishio is the only man, he answers the phone and cuts fabric. Me and Peggy sewed yellow trim into the hems of black cloth dresses. I even learned a few things to say in Japanese.”

“That sounds nice,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “What happened to your face?”

“Something hit the windshield of the Barracuda and it shattered.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Blessing in disguise,” I said. “I turned it in and got a new car doesn’t hit you like a neon sign.”

“Oh well,” Feather said, putting the old car from her mind.

The house seemed empty, not only because of the sparse furnishings; it was also a new space that felt unlived in. This brought about a certain quality of intimacy that we’d never experienced in the home we knew so well.

“Daddy?”

I knew from her tone that something serious was up.

“Yeah?”

“You said that you were going to tell me about my real parents.”

I think it was her making dinner that defeated me. She was a young woman asking a man she trusted to tell her the truth.

The story of Feather’s parents’ lives, and deaths, was X-rated. She
shouldn’t have heard it until she’d reached her twenty-first year, not her twelfth, but I knew I couldn’t avoid it for a decade more.

“It’s a sad story,” I said.

“Are they dead?”

We sat there in the dinette for more than two hours. I told her about Vernor Garnett, her maternal grandfather, who killed her mother and her father. I said that it was because he was an important man and was embarrassed by his daughter Robin’s wild lifestyle. I didn’t say it was because Robin had had a Negro daughter and tried to extort money out of Vernor to hide that fact.

“I was on another case,” I told her truthfully, “and came across those killings. After it was all over I found you with a friend of your mother’s. Vernor was going to prison and your grandmother and her son Milo had left for the East Coast. I didn’t want you with the county so me and Juice took you in.”

“Is my grandfather still in prison?” Feather asked.

“He died.”

“And my grandmother?”

“She knew about the crimes but the law couldn’t, or wouldn’t, prosecute her. She moved back east, like I said, I don’t know where.”

Feather got up from her chair and sat on my lap—there were tears in her eyes. I held her and she held me; both of us orphans on a dark street at night.

After some time I carried her up to her bedroom. She changed into her nightgown in the bathroom, crawled into her bed weeping, and I sat there beside her bed until an hour after she’d fallen asleep.

The phone rang at seven minutes after midnight. So much had happened that I forgot about the possible appointment.

“Hello?”

“Ease,” Mouse said. “What’s happenin’?”

“It’s all fucked up, Raymond,” I said to my oldest and deadliest friend.

I went on to tell him about Frisk and Manning, Mantle and Rosemary
Goldsmith—who I had begun to think of as Rose Gold. I mentioned Uhuru Nolicé and almost getting killed on Crenshaw.

“Who is this Uhuru whatever?” Mouse asked.

“It’s an alias that Mantle’s using.” I went on to tell him about the shootout with the police, the so-called assassination, and the armored car job Manning had mentioned.

“That’s some bullshit right there,” Mouse said.

“What you mean, Ray? I read about all those crimes in the papers. You sayin’ they didn’t happen? Men shot at me in my car.”

“Did they hit you?”

“No.”

“Then they weren’t real killers, now were they?”

“They might have meant to kill me and missed.”

“Look, Easy, I don’t know about this Bob Mantle dude. I mean I seen him fight before but I don’t know about his politics or whatever. I do know that those three cops got shot was killed by Art Sugar and his crew. Art was runnin’ drugs and there was a shootout over on Slauson. I know that ’cause Art’s right hand in Chinatown, Lem Leung, wanted me to help him get on a slow boat to Hong Kong.”

I didn’t ask if Mouse had helped the middleman on his journey; nobody was paying me for that.

“I guess he could’a shot that vice principal,” Mouse continued, “but the armored car job couldn’t have been your boy because I know the people did it. They offered me a piece but you know I don’t shit where I eat.”

Raymond Alexander had his finger on the pulse of crime in L.A., and elsewhere. He wouldn’t have lied or passed on possibly faulty information, not to me. But if Bob Mantle couldn’t have committed at least two of those crimes, then why was the LAPD so sure of it? Why didn’t Stony Goldsmith show any real concern for his daughter?

“Easy,” Mouse was saying with an edge to his voice.

“What?”

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“I asked if you needed me to come back there.”

I was lost in the tangle of the case, or the possible case.

“No, Ray. No. I just have to muddle through this shit.”

“I don’t know about Mantle,” he said, “but if you get mixed up with Art Sugar your ass be in a sling.”

“I’ll tell Etta if I get in over my head.”

“Okay.”

“I have another question, though.”

“Shoot.”

“You ever hear of a woman named Mary Donovan?”

“Not that I remember. What she do?”

“Makes her nut movin’ boodle. At least she used to.”

“What denomination?” Mouse knew the right words when need be.

“C-notes. Not very good ones, I think.”

“Talk to this dude named Lambert, Light Lambert.” He gave me the address. “Light’s got his thumb all the way up in the counterfeit pie.”

“Thanks, Ray.”

“Try and stay alive till I get home, Easy. I found this new soul food restaurant make you think you was in Lake Charles.”

Feather was asleep but I could tell she was having nightmares; the blankets and top sheet were on the floor. I covered her up and kissed her forehead, wondering if I should have lied to her about her mother and father.

I had just lain down on my bed when I realized that a streetlamp was shining in my eyes. There was no shade or curtain to block it, so I accepted the glare and turned on my side. In the morning I would fix everything—or die trying.

Coffee brewing in the morning brought me closer to feeling at home in the new house. Sunlight danced on the white walls and played interesting patterns through the mild prism of glass in my shadeless windows. I put on my tan linen suit, a milk-chocolate-colored turtleneck shirt, and finally, after deep consideration, decided on dark green shoes.