Rose Gold (34 page)

“Oh yeah.”

“Two men could do this,” he said, trying one last time to convert me.

“Not without some serious violence.”

The aboriginal American hunched his shoulders maybe a quarter inch. The downturn of his lips could be measured only in millimeters.

“You got kids, man?” I asked him.

“Three.”

“Where are they?”

“In Berkeley with their mother.”

“My girl’s on a plane right now but when she comes home she expects me to be there. It’s only me that she’s got.”

Redbird made a small gesture with his left hand, conceding with a flick of fingers.

“What now, Easy?” Melvin Suggs said on the line.

Mary/Clarissa had answered the phone. When I told her who it was she was delighted to go and get her man.

I was calling from a pay phone in the tiny lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel, a four-story ramshackle inn, two buildings down from Scorched Earth’s HQ. The Roosevelt was the kind of establishment that rented rooms by the week or the night, or by the hour if that’s all you needed. Redbird was up on the roof watching the front door, side windows, and backyard of the hideout.

“Officer McCourt find anything yet?” I said into the phone.

The short span of Suggs’s hesitation told me more than words.

“Melvin,” I prompted.

“There was an investigation of Leonard Scores.”

“Who’s that?”

“The senior officer killed in the shootout. They thought that he was doin’ work in the drug trade.”

“Somebody actually told him this?”

“Score’s precinct captain’s secretary. Women like Anatole.”

“You said,
there was an investigation
. They called it off after the killings?”

“Before.”

“Why?”

“Because Roger Frisk, after delegating the investigation to Tout Manning, said that there was no foundation to the accusations.”

“Oh.”

A paunchy and middle-aged white man wearing a polyester green suit came in with his arm around the waist of a reed-slender, teenaged Mexican girl. Impossibly, she seemed to be holding him up. They went to the podium that stood for the front desk. A tall and slender woman
appeared from behind a red curtain. She was a dark-skinned Hispanic woman with suspicious eyes and an incongruous smile on her lips.

The desk clerk and girl had a short conversation in rapid Spanish.

At the end of the exchange the girl turned to the man and said, “She wants fifteen dollars.”

“That’s too much,” the man slurred.

“It’s the honeymoon suite,” the woman said through her false smile.

“Easy,” Melvin Suggs said in my ear.

“Yeah?”

“Frisk must be putting a frame on Mantle to hide his involvement with Scores. If they can prove that he was part of the Goldsmith kidnapping nobody’ll even question the shootout.”

“And Art Sugar goes away smelling like a rose.”

“Sugar killed them?”

“That’s what I hear.”

“From who?”

“Why don’t you grab Officer McCourt and come down to the Roosevelt Hotel on East First?”

“I asked you a question, Easy.”

“Ask me again when you’re reinstated.”

“And you’ll tell me then?”

“Probably not.”

The paunchy man paid the desk clerk from a crushed-up wad of one-dollar bills, then he, with the help of the girl, climbed the narrow and rickety staircase. I wondered, while watching them, if someone were looking at the way I conducted my life, would they see what I was seeing in the desultory climb of that man and that girl?

Melvin was muttering something.

I cut him off, saying, “I’ll see ya when you get here. We’ll probably be up on the roof.”

Redbird was watching the extortionists’ front and back doors from the top of the hotel.

“Are they coming?” he asked.

“Oh yeah.”

“They won’t act like fools?”

“They won’t call in their brothers in blue until we’re sure how to get done what we need.”

I lit a cigarette. Redbird snorted once then left it alone.

The roof was layered with tar paper, and there was a ledge against a defunct brick chimney that we propped ourselves against.

Scorched Earth’s backyard was completely paved in pale asphalt and surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. There was a long clothesline stretched from one corner of the fence to the other. At twilight a man came out and started hanging shirts and pants along the line.

“We might be able to get in through the back,” Redbird suggested.

“We were lucky once, man. Why push it?”

Forty minutes later Melvin and Anatole joined us. They were dressed in black jeans and medium-colored shirts—McCourt in blue and Suggs in dark red.

After introducing McCourt and Redbird I told the cops what we were looking at.

“We should just get a riot squad and break down the doors,” McCourt said.

“What if they’re barricaded?” I asked. “And what about Frisk?”

“What about him?”

“He wants to hang this thing on Bob Mantle but in order to do that he needs to take out these guys too.”

“Then we just won’t tell Frisk.”

“You can bet that he’s told every precinct chief and desk sergeant to report any news about Mantle or Rosemary.”

“We don’t have to mention them either,” Anatole argued.

“So we just point the riot squad at a house full of armed radicals and let the bullets fly,” I said.

“How do you want to handle it, Easy?” Suggs said, intervening.

“Watch and wait. If anyone leaves we let them go but grab ’em before they come back.”

“Why not pick ’em up as soon as they’re out of sight of the house?”

“Tonight they’re picking up the ransom.”

“Then the law is already on it,” Anatole put in.

“Mr. Goldsmith didn’t tell the police,” Redbird said. I was a little surprised that he said anything to the white men.

“That’s against the law.”

Teh-ha went to the edge of the roof and squatted down. With this movement he effectively turned his back on the younger cop’s stupidity.

“They’ll probably only send two or three of their people to pick up the money,” I said to Suggs. “If so, I think I might have a plan.”

“What kinda plan?”

“Cops got one’a them safe houses around here?” I asked.

“Not too far,” Anatole said.

“Can we get it?”

“I’ll see what I can do.” I had the feeling that the Irish cop was good at working the system in ways that his mentor couldn’t even imagine.

I laid out a far-reaching plan that included everything from stalking and abduction to health insurance and retirement benefits. By the time I was through I had converted all three men to my religion.

After that, things moved slowly for a while. Redbird and Suggs watched the clothes dry in the backyard while Anatole went off to secure the safe house. I went down to the room we’d rented, sat in a chair next to a window, and watched as the mostly Mexican population moved around on foot and in cars, on bikes and in baby carriages, even in wheelchairs and with the help of canes and crutches just like other people did in other parts of town and all over the world.

At a little after nine the door to the small room came open and Melvin Suggs rushed in.

“White guy and a Chinese chick just left the house,” he said. “Your boy climbed down the fire escape and followed them.”

“Alone?”

“He said that they wouldn’t even see a brown man on the street around here.”

“What’s the plan?”

“Anatole is watching which way they go. He’ll meet us downstairs and we can follow.”

Moving down East First we’d made it about a block and a half before encountering Redbird, who was on his way back.

“They went to a locked one-car garage,” Redbird told us right there on the street. “Then they came out in an old blue Buick.”

“Let’s go check it out,” Melvin said.

It was a solidly built concrete bunker of a building, freestanding with a heavy oak door. There were four thick padlocks securing the entry port. On the right side there wasn’t enough space for a dog to traverse but on the left there was a constricted concrete pathway that we managed to negotiate.

There was a door at the back of the building that was solid and also locked.

But a strong lock didn’t mean much to Anatole McCourt’s impressive shoulders. He slammed into the green door five times and it flew open.

I found myself wondering how many blows it would have taken Percy Bidwell to achieve the same end.

Redbird found the light and Melvin located a small armory in a large wooden locker on a sidewall. While Anatole looked around I stood in the center of the car-sized empty space imagining myself transforming into another kind of man with a slightly different life.

“Two of us should wait here for the man and woman to return, and one should keep watch on the house,” I said.

“What about the fourth?” Melvin asked.

“You remember where the desert cabin was?” I asked Redbird.

He nodded.

“You go out there and bring back Bob.”

“What you want with him?” Melvin wanted to know.

“Trust me, Mel,” I said. “I got this shit covered.”

It was decided that Anatole should head back to the Roosevelt because he was the only official lawman among us. We agreed that if the man and woman in the blue Buick came back to the hideout rather than the garage, and Delbert and his merry band decided to move, McCourt could call in the riot squad. Redbird didn’t like that wrinkle but he finally agreed.

I wasn’t worried, because there wasn’t enough room for all of them in the one car, and even if they did try to leave, the cops could get the drop on them outside their fortress.

Melvin and I moved to the opposite corners next to the port door. That way, if the extortionists returned, we could come up behind them as they exited the automobile.

We turned out the lights and hunkered down. Anatole levered the back door into place from outside, and so the garage was in almost perfect darkness.

“You get much sleep lately?” I asked my unseen confederate.

“In the desert I did,” he said. “You know when the sun goes down out there it’s just like you got to close your eyes. But since Mary’s been back I’ve hardly even blinked.”

“You need me to goose you every now and then so you don’t doze off?”

“I won’t,” he said. “And even if I did, a car driving in here would wake me.”

“Okay,” I said.

“But before we go silent tell me something.”

“What’s that?”

“How did you tumble to the hideout?”

I told him most of the story of the dead bodies and the clue innocently given up by Bob Mantle’s son.

“Did you call Emergency when you found the bodies?” Melvin asked when I was through.

“They were already dead, Mel. There didn’t seem to be any emergency.”

After that we were quiet.

I sat in the darkness with no real thoughts in mind. I was a Neolithic hunter, maybe one of Redbird’s ancestors, waiting by a watering hole for some big dumb creature to raise its woolly head.

I might have heard the engine idling on the other side of the garage door, or maybe it was the padlocks clacking open and banging against their brass hinges. Whatever it was, I was fully awake by the time the dark sedan with its headlights blazing pulled past me into the space. I wondered if Melvin had fallen asleep too.

I couldn’t worry about that. My only choice was to scuttle forward toward the passenger’s door and hope that Melvin was doing the same on his side.

My target door was only halfway open when I heard Melvin shout, “Hold it right there, sister—police!”

That meant the woman was driving and that the man was in a position to shoot through the window at my partner. I leaped toward the car door, swung it open, and slammed the side of my pistol into the back of the white man’s head. He staggered in his seat and I hit him a second time, remembering again the blessing of Percy Bidwell.

“Easy!” Melvin shouted.

I stood up and he threw me a pair of official handcuffs. I then pulled the skinny white guy out of the car and he tumbled onto the concrete floor like a half-empty bag of laundry.

While I was securing his wrists behind his back the woman screamed—or, more accurately, she began a scream that was cut short by a hard slap.

I went to the garage door and pulled it down before anyone could
come investigate. I was still a little disoriented by sleep but it seemed to be very late. The little I saw of the street was empty, even desolate. The car’s headlights were still on but I flipped the switch for the overhead light anyway.

Melvin was putting the cuffs on the stunned woman. I never liked hitting women but in this case I understood. Melvin was acting on his own while under suspension. If we were caught the whole game would go south. But my indifference toward the extortionists had other origins also; first among these was the hanging corpse in the Studio City hideout, the woman who tried and failed to save herself from strangling with one big toe.

There was a tool cabinet at the back of the garage next to the cache of arms; in there Melvin found a roll of black electrical tape. He used this to cover the woman’s mouth, then he threw the roll to me. I did the same to my captive.

“We should use the tape to bind their legs,” I said. “And then we could put them in the backseat of the car and tape their hands and ankles to the handles on the doors.”

“Why not put them in the trunk?”

When Melvin asked this the woman jumped and tried to run. Melvin caught her by the arm and pulled her back. She kicked him in the leg and he pushed her hard enough that she lost her balance and fell to the floor.

“Throw me that tape,” he grunted.

I did as he requested.

My captive had his eyes open but I don’t think he was seeing anything.

He was a featherweight with acne scars on his face. He, and the Asian woman, wore dark pants and shirts. It was like they were playing at crime. Just wearing those clothes at night could have gotten them arrested. At the very least their attire might have brought cops snooping around.

Melvin whistled and I looked up to see the tape flying at my head. I caught it and bound the man’s ankles. Then I dragged him onto the floor of the backseat and bound him to the handles of both doors in
the way I’d suggested. His hands were behind his back and so I twisted the tape, making it like a rope pulling his arms up so that movement was almost impossible.