Rose Gold (14 page)

“Can I look in his chest?”

“I guess you can. The other police already looked in there and didn’t find nuthin’. My son don’t have nuthin’ to hide.”

The balled-up socks and T-shirts were jumbled. I figured this was because of the police, or maybe it was an FBI search.

There was a black photo album with Kodak snapshots and, more recently, Polaroid shots of Mantle in various costumes going all the way back to when he was a child. Some of those costumes were in the chest.

His bookkeeping workbook was there. When I opened it a pink slip of paper fell out. It was a property receipt from the Beverly Hills Police Department issued to a Beaumont Lewis. The date stamped on it was the morning of August fifth.

“Who’s Beaumont Lewis?” I asked.

“That’s Bobby’s cousin,” she said, “my sister’s son. She live in Houston and he’s in the navy.”

“He been here recently?”

“No, sir. He’s over off the coast of Vietnam.”

I looked a little further and took a few notes but there was nothing incriminating in the room.

“Did the other policemen take anything from this trunk?” I asked the fretful mother.

“Not that I noticed, sir. They didn’t even write nuthin’ down.”

“Did you tell them anything that you haven’t told me?”

“They just aksed me where he was at. They aksed that six times and I always answered the same: I don’t know.”

“Did you tell them about Youri?”

“They didn’t ask.”

“Do you know Youri’s last name?”

“No, sir.”

At the front door of the dark home Belle asked, “Can you help my son, Detective Rawlins?”

“I can try to keep him from getting killed,” I said. “Maybe he hasn’t done anything wrong. If he hasn’t I’ll try to get the police to understand that.”

It wasn’t much, but people like Belle and I had learned long ago to live with not quite enough and then to make do with somewhat less than that.

“Mr. Rawlins,” a man said.

I was standing at the door of my nearly nondescript Dodge. The white man who called my name and the white man he was with walked toward me from a dark sedan parked two cars up ahead.

They were alike inasmuch as they both wore light-colored suits and out-of-style broad-rimmed fedoras. But that’s where the similarities ended. The man who called me was pink-skinned and fat, not over five foot six. He was the elder, maybe fifty. His partner was tall and string-bean thin. He was a thirty-something white man with olive skin, dark eyes, and the thinnest lips I had ever seen on a human being.

“Yes?” I said.

“Andrew Hastings,” the elder said. He didn’t hold out a hand. “This is Ted Brown. We’re with the State Department.”

“Don’t tell me. You’re looking for Rosemary Goldsmith and Robert Mantle.”

Hastings was breathing hard after the short walk from his black sedan to my maroon one. He wasn’t happy with my tone.

“There is a national security aspect to the Goldsmith case, Mr. Rawlins,” the fat man said as the thin one stared.

“I had no idea. Neither the police nor the FBI informed me of that fact.”

“Neither the local police or the Bureau has any authority in this situation. Certainly no ordinary citizen, no”—he paused a moment for dramatic effect—“no Negro in white man’s clothes has any authority whatsoever.”

I have always considered myself a reasonable and intelligent man, familiar with the ways of the world I lived in. I know enough to know that if three different governmental law enforcement agencies seek me out, I am being told to back down, back off, and back away from a line chiseled in stone.

“What is it that I can do for you, Mr. Hastings?” I could have asked him for identification but by then I was sure that every official agency operating in Southern California was on the trail of Rose Gold and Bob Mantle.

“Where is Bob Mantle?” His lips were fat, having the blubbery quality of the wattles on the rooster that stalked Mona Martin’s picket fence.

“I have no idea. I asked his mother but she didn’t know. I asked at the boxing gym he teaches at but they didn’t say.”

“What did Foster Goldsmith tell you?”

“I told him that the police told me that his daughter had been kidnapped, but he did not corroborate that claim.” I ratcheted up my language in an attempt to keep my head above water with the government men.

“What did the police say?”

“That she had been.”

“What did they want you to do?”

“The police?”

“Yes.”

“Find Bob Mantle so that they could ask him if he knew where Rosemary was.”

Hastings had robin’s-egg-blue eyes. The predatory attitude of those pretty orbs was contradictory and made him seem all the more dangerous.

Ted Brown made his hands into two fists and stacked them one on top of the other as if he were holding a baseball bat.

“You are going to stop any inquiries into the Goldsmith case,” Hastings informed me. He took a wallet from his back pocket and a white card from there. “This is my phone number. If any question you have asked so far yields an answer you are going to call me and give that information. You will only call me. Do you understand?”

It was, I believe, the last three words that obliterated my common sense. Sure, give me a gold-embossed card, tell me that you’re the boss-man, tell me not to earn the only living I know how to make, but don’t call me stupid on top of all that. Don’t steal my money and then take my woman out to dinner with it.

No.

“I understand completely, Mr. Hastings, Mr. Brown,” I said. “I am a patriotic American. I served in the war and learned to respect the chain
of command. I’m sorry if I caused any trouble. You know I believed that the police were trying to do what was right.”

“That’s understandable,” Hastings said. He clapped my shoulder and even grinned, but the smile came too late.

My next stop was a dirty brown-brick office building on Wilshire Boulevard, downtown. It was one of the older structures, eight stories high and without any kind of architectural personality. The blueprints for the boxlike edifice had been used in the fabrication of ten thousand of its kind throughout the country between world wars.

There was no doorman or front desk, no security guard or concierge to show you which way to go. Next to the elevator, under a glass pane held in place by a corroded chrome frame was a typed list of the residents and their office numbers.

Suite 5C was once occupied by Nifty Notebooks and Office Supplies, but that name was crossed out with blue ink and the name
L Lambert and Associates
had been scribbled in in pencil. The use of ink and then lead told me that some time had elapsed between Nifty Notebooks’ departure and L Lambert’s arrival on the scene.

An Out of Service sign had been attached to the elevator doors many months before. The cellophane tape that held up the handwritten sign had yellowed in that time.

And so I went through a doorway to my right that had a stenciled sign above it announcing
STAIRS
.

On the way up I thought about Belle Mantle calling me Detective Rawlins. She knew that I wasn’t a real officer of the law. The use of the title was her attempt to show me respect and deference in hopes that I would help her boy. She was well aware that Bob was in trouble. Ever since he was a child pretending to be every kind of hero, she had known that he was going to get into hot water. Mothers and fathers of our heritage nurtured hopes of our children fading into the background like that uninspired building and its brethren. If they went
unnoticed they had a shot at living fruitful lives, unmolested by the predators that picked off our heroes, and villains, every time one of them reared their head.

The door to Suite 5C was the color of a blood orange. It was ajar. I pushed it open and came into a sun-drenched room that had yellow walls and a forest green tiled floor. The blond desk opposite the door was big and solid. The windows through which the sunlight poured were thick and laced with metal wire. The door beyond the ash desk was made from unpainted metal.

But it was the man behind the desk that dominated the room. He was apelike and white with a thatch of medium brown hair and the slumped shoulders of a blacksmith. He had one foot up on the blond desk.

“Who’re you?” he said, peering over his own big toe. He wore tan pants, a grass green sports jacket, black T-shirt, and polka-dotted yellow and purple socks under shoes the same color as his hair.

“I’m looking for a man called Light Lambert,” I said.

The ape took his foot down and stood. He was of medium height with a chest that was truly barrel-shaped. I fought down the urge to pull the pistol from my pocket.

“I asked you who you were,” the brutal man said. Even the way he talked sounded like fighting.

“Rawlins is my name.”

“Get the fuck outta here before I kick your ass.”

“That,” I advised, “would be an uphill climb.”

“The fuck?” he said.

He came half the way around the desk. I knew my words would set him off. I knew it but I was angry. I had been accosted by three different branches of government, shot at, cursed out, and insulted over and over again—and it was only Tuesday. I wanted to strike back. I intended to strike. But before the sham of a receptionist could get to me the door behind him swung inward and a tall man walked out.

“Elvis,” the man said.

My opponent pulled up short, almost as if someone had grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and yanked.

The tall man smiled. He was wearing a coal-colored three-button suit with a light blue dress shirt and a lime and cranberry tie. He was well built, on the slender side, and pale-skinned.

“This guy just busted in here, Light,” Elvis the ape said.

“This is Mr. Rawlins,” the elegant counterfeiter replied. “Mr. Rawlins is a guest.”

Elvis cocked his head, adjusting to this new view of me. He nodded once and went back around to sit in his chair. There he waited a moment and then put his foot back up where it was before I entered.

“Come into my office, Mr. Rawlins,” Light Lambert said to me. “I’ve been expecting you.”

He stepped to the side and gestured for me to go through.

Lambert’s fifth-floor office had a ceiling that went to the top of the sixth floor, maybe twenty-two feet high. I thought at the time that this must have been a storage room for the previous tenants. The clear windows went all the way up and looked down on Los Angeles with its asphalt streets and palm trees, its blue sky over a dingy brown, smoggy horizon. The floor was laid with square black and white tiles, giving it the feel of a fancy Creole restaurant down on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. The walls were painted enamel white like a high-school toilet.

The furnishings of this office were incongruous for a business. Under the window there sat a fancy cream-colored couch that had dark wood legs and a corrugated arching back like the collar of an Elizabethan noblewoman. There were matching chairs at either end of the divan and a low coffee table where sat three telephones—white, black, and red. This plethora of phones reminded me of Stony Goldsmith’s subterranean lair. In the far corner to my left was a folding card table surrounded by four folding pine chairs. There were poker chips and cards on the fabric-covered tabletop.

I looked around like Belle Mantle looking for a puzzle piece.

“Something wrong?” Light Lambert asked.

“Where’s your desk?”

“Don’t need one,” he said. “I never write anything down.”

“Not even a letter?”

“Not even a phone number.”

“But you have phones.”

“Have a seat, Mr. Rawlins.”

I took one of the chairs because it was set at such an angle that I could look southward at my adopted city.

Lambert sat on the sofa in a very erect posture.

“How do you know my name, Mr. Lambert? Do you have the front office bugged?”

“Raymond Alexander called and told me that you might be dropping by. And yes, I do have a microphone in the front room. Whenever somebody crosses the threshold it comes on for one hundred and eighty seconds.”

“You know Mouse?”

“I know everybody that needs it.”

I sat back, absorbing the strangely domestic office and the idea that Mouse had built a reputation that included apes and counterfeiters. I stayed quiet because, even though I had a simple question to ask, I got the impression that Light Lambert was a man of custom and ritual.

“I got a pocket full of nickels and dimes for my calls,” he said. “And even with that I replace my phones every six weeks.”

I was thinking that if I met Lambert at a party or on the street I would have guessed that he was an undertaker.

“Is Light your given name?” I asked.

That was the right question. He smiled broadly, sat back, and crossed his left leg over the right knee. I noticed that he wore black and white scaled snakeskin shoes and no socks.

“My old man was a drunk,” he said happily. “At least he was before I was born. But when the backwoods Tennessee midwife put me in his hands he stopped drinking and got a regular job in the coal mine. My mother, Lucretia Lambert, said that when he looked at me there was a light shining in his eyes, that he had seen the light and so that’s what she named me.”

“Now that’s a good story,” I said. I meant it.

“Our mutual friend tells me that you’re the most trustworthy man he’s ever known,” Light said, letting me know that he was ready to get down to business.

I nodded and smiled, still biding my time. Raymond meant that
he
could trust me. I wondered if Light was aware of that subtlety of language.

“If you were to take a Greyhound bus to twelve, thirteen cities around the Midwest, Easy, pick up a package from general delivery downtown and then make a series of deliveries, I could guarantee you a windfall of fifty thousand dollars. Six weeks tops.” He straightened his legs and sat forward, clasping his hands.

That little speech stopped me. I hadn’t come there looking for a job but I wasn’t a fool either. It was a safe deal. Mouse was better than Lloyd’s of London when it came to insurance. Add to that the fact that my experience with the law of late (and during the course of my entire life) had been that it was at least corrupt and often downright evil; I could be arrested for bank robbery or loitering and end up on the same damn chain gang.