Rose Gold (12 page)

My brown leather jewelry box was on the dresser. Feather had put it there, no doubt. I opened it to see if there was anything that caught my fancy for the day and the job at hand. There was in the upper corner of the second level of the box a thick platinum ring festooned with a three-carat emerald. That ring once belonged to Mouse. When I saw it on his hand I told him how much I admired it.

“Take it, Easy,” he sang, tugging the bauble from his middle finger. “It don’t fit me too good anyway.”

It was too small even for my pinky but I took it. Mouse got sour when people turned down his gifts.

Something about the jewel seemed to resonate with the Rose Gold case and so I put the ring in my pocket.

I liked to think that I was a modern child of the twentieth century but the superstitions of Louisiana were snagged in the crevices of my brain. It felt like I needed a good luck charm from a powerful deity, and Mouse’s juju was some of the strongest I knew.

Feather was in the kitchen making bacon and eggs, and Bisquick waffles on a machine that had been packed away for years. She was wearing blue jeans and a checkered blue and white shirt shot through with
black lines that complicated, or maybe exhilarated, the design. The shirt had once belonged to her brother.

“That coffee I’m smellin’?”

“I’m using the percolator that Bonnie brought back from Marseille. But I got the French press out if you want that kind.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “You goin’ to work with your friend again today?”

“I thought I could use the money to buy a new bike.”

I took a seat in the dinette, wondering if I should get a round or an octangular table for that room.

“Are you in trouble, Daddy?” my daughter asked, putting the breakfast plate and thick white coffee mug down in front of me.

Her question told me many things. First and foremost, she was saying to me that she’d accepted my story about her parents and my part in that tale. She would take her time and consider the details and one day she’d come back to me with more questions—and requests. But she could also see that the job I had undertaken had gotten under my skin and into my unconscious mind. I looked like I was in trouble because trouble had colored my mood.

“No,” I said. “Why?”

“You always get that serious look on your face and stare out into space when there’s trouble.”

“How’d you come up with that theory?”

“Juice used to tell me when I was a kid.”

“You’re still a kid.”

“Are you okay?”

“You remember those men that came over the house while we were moving?”

“Yeah.”

“They were the police. They’re looking for some guy and want me to find him.”

“What do they want him for?”

“He knows a woman who’s the daughter of a rich man. She’s missing and they want to ask him if he’s seen her anywhere.”

Frenchie sauntered into the room then. Feather picked him up and sat down across from me with the dog in her lap.

“Aren’t you eating?” I asked.

“I already did.”

Somewhere in the world I had a blood daughter: Edna, whom I sired with Regina. Regina had left me for an old friend of mine from Houston. I wondered if Edna was as wonderful a child as the one keeping me company before she got on with the business of her life.

“Bye, Daddy,” Feather said at the curb before crossing the street to Peggy Nishio’s house.

“Look both ways.”

She laughed at my trying to make her stay a child.

Peggy was outside waiting for her, smiling and waving.

Walking back to my front door, I glanced to the right and saw two white men in suits and ties coming toward the house. They were both the same height and hue, they had virtually identical haircuts, and probably tipped the scales within two pounds of each other. They reached the path of hand-cut granite brick, paused a moment, and then headed for me.

I considered backing into the house, slamming the door, and making it out the back. I had already placed a pistol on the high shelf of the kitchen cabinet. I could grab that on the way.

The idea of the gun called up the image of Stony Goldsmith sitting in a hole in the ground and stockpiling weapons. This thought arrested me. I turned my head to catch a last glimpse of Feather but she and Peggy had already gone into the Nishio home.

“Mr. Rawlins?” one of the men, who wore a dark gray suit, said.

“Yes?” I answered, addressing both the fraternal twins.

“I’m Agent Sorkin and this is my associate Agent Bruce. We’re from the FBI.”

“Do tell.” I took a step backward so that I was standing inside the front doorway.

“We have been informed that you are looking for Rosemary Goldsmith.”

“By whom?”

“That’s not important,” Agent Bruce, who wore a suit of dark blue, said.

“It is to me.”

“May we come in?” Sorkin asked.

Neither man, at any point in our conversation, smiled.

“No you may not.”

“We have to talk to you about this case, Mr. Rawlins,” Bruce told me.

“That’s your problem. You need to talk to me but I don’t need to talk to you.”

“You are getting involved in an ongoing federal investigation,” Sorkin replied. “If you don’t tell us what you’re doing we can have you arrested for interfering.”

“Okay. If you got a warrant or I committed some kinda crime, you got to do your duty. But I’m a citizen and I will not be bullied by the loose talk of strangers.”

“This case involves kidnapping and national security,” Bruce said because it was his turn. “You have a duty here.”

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“We got your address from the LAPD.”

“Really?” I was sure that neither Frisk nor Manning had given them my address.

“May we come in?” Sorkin asked.

“No.”

“Have you been in contact with a man named Robert Mantle?”

Robert
.

“I have not.”

“Who hired you to look for Miss Goldsmith?” Bruce asked.

“I didn’t say that I’m looking for her, and even if I was I have no idea of any supposed client’s name. I don’t even know if you’re really FBI agents.”

“You don’t want to run afoul of the government, Mr. Rawlins,” Agent Sorkin told me.

I figure that he and his partner were in their early thirties, college graduates who had a taste for law enforcement but didn’t like doughnuts. Sorkin’s flat pronunciation marked him as coming from the nation’s heartland, and his consternation told of a deeply held belief that his culture was the true America whereas mine was that of Other.
He, and Agent Bruce, would never understand how I might rightfully refuse their superiority, their official status, or their birthright.

“Is there anything else?” I asked.

“Are you going to answer my questions?”

“I am not.”

The FBI agents, who never showed me their ID, turned their heads to regard each other. Should they arrest me? Should they push me into the house and force me to answer their questions? I had no doubt that they might utilize such tactics. And if I was another kind of man in a different profession I might have tried to placate them.

But I was who I was and what I was by choice and inclination—and then there was history. Maybe if they had shown me their identification, asked for help, or at least smiled, I might have been persuaded to accommodate them. But the freedom I had to refuse had its own story. Millions of people had died, and there were those who were still dying for my freedom to say no.

Maybe one day Agents Bruce and Sorkin would understand that simple fact.

“This isn’t some kind of game, Mr. Rawlins,” Agent Bruce said. “We have to ask you to stop any activity you’re involved in that has to do with Rosemary Goldsmith or Robert Mantle.”

I gave him a wan smile and a crooked nod, then closed the door in his face.

There was a quarter cup of cold coffee left in the white diner mug. I took my time drinking the strong, bitter dregs, making plans as well as I could. I was almost completely in the dark about what case I was working on and exactly what crime had been committed. I’d been paid and paid well for this confusion.

The involvement of the FBI was a sign that I had strayed into some kind of minefield. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine Rosemary Goldsmith. Was she dead, tied up in a closet and scared to death, or laughing with her friends?

Because I couldn’t answer any one of those questions I decided to take a walk.

There was no evidence of a surveillance team keeping watch on my new home, not that I would be able to tell if Uncle Sam really wanted to keep tabs on me. I didn’t think that I was that big or that expensive a threat. Every pair of eyes used to watch a suspect had an hourly rate that went into time and a half before you knew it.

I couldn’t imagine that I was being watched, but the world I lived in was quite a bit larger than my imagination.

So I grabbed a handful of change from a jar that survived the move, then sauntered up to Pico, took a left turn, and stopped at a phone booth outside of a Winchell’s Donuts store near La Cienega.

“Hello,” he said, answering the phone on the twelfth ring.

“Hungover again, Melvin?”

“What do you want?”

“I thought we had an agreement.”

Suggs groaned.

“I asked about your guy and the girl too,” he said. “Nobody knew
anything more than what I already told you. For whatever reason the top brass seems to be holdin’ this one close to the vest.”

“That’s not a surprise. Them comin’ to my home on Sunday says that. But I was thinkin’… maybe I could be a little proactive.”

“Pro-what?”

“Preemptive.”

“Say again?”

Melvin knew what the words meant. He just liked to fuck with me sometimes.

“I’d like you to call your contact and find out if there’s anything in the files about Bob’s closest relatives,” I said. “Maybe one of them knows something. Somebody said that he lives with his mother, at least he did until recently.”

“I could do that.”

“If you called ’em now then you could get back to me at this pay phone.” I rattled off the number printed on the pay phone’s dial. “My phone at home just might be bugged.”

“Now?”

“Why not? The sun is up and the FBI just told me that the sands are already runnin’ out.”

“FBI?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I haven’t finished vomiting yet this morning, Easy.”

“And here I am sober, out on the street looking for your wayward girlfriend.”

Suggs paused then. He didn’t like me calling him at home and giving orders, but the chain of command was wrapped around his desire to find Mary Donovan.

“Gimme that number again,” he said.

I did.

“Okay, Easy. You sit tight and I’ll see what I can see.”

I stood there inside the modern, three-walled phone booth feeling as if I was at least in the game. I had always been a man of actions. I liked
reading and thinking and making plans, but it was when I was on the move that I felt most balanced.

“Excuse me, mistah,” a woman said. She was young and black-skinned, five-two in flat shoes, and lovely in the hard way that poverty imparts to its denizens.

“Yes?”

“I need to make a collect call to my auntie down Galveston.”

“What she gonna say when the operator tells her that?”

“She gone be mad at me,” the young woman said with emphasis. “But I need to talk to her father ’cause I lost my job an’ been th’owed out my room.”

I reached in my pocket and came out with a handful of quarters, nickels, and dimes. These I held out, offering them to the young woman. She must have been about nineteen.

“I need this telephone,” I said. “I’m waiting for an important call. But take this money and call your aunt direct. There’s a whole bank of phones in the parking lot of the five-and-dime across the street.”

The woman looked at the money before taking it, and then she eyeballed the store and its parking lot. She turned back to me, peering deeply to perceive any catch to my actions or advice.

“Thank you,” she said when she could find no defect. “Thanks a lot.”

I was thinking that I should find out the name of Suggs’s contact and go straight to the police with Roger Frisk’s name, telling them that I’m on the case but a little confused.

“Pardon me,” another woman said. This one was older than I, white, and tall—maybe five-eight. She wore red and had coiffed brown hair that was streaked with gray.

“Yes?”

Instead of saying anything she moved her head in a somewhat intricate fashion, communicating quite clearly that I should move away from the phone.

“I am waiting for a call,” I said in Standard English.

“I need to use this phone.”

“
This
phone?”

She stared.

I shrugged and leaned back.

“You aren’t using it,” she reasoned.

“If you saw a man sitting down in front of a plate of pork chops,” I replied in the same condescending tone, “but he wasn’t eating right then, would you just take his dish away?”

“Move,” she ordered.

“There’s a phone in the parking lot across the street.”

“I’m standing right here.”

“I know that,” I said. “And I’m standing in your way.”

The lady’s neck quivered. She was, I believe, considering pulling me out of that booth bodily when suddenly she turned on her high heel and stormed off.

“Hey, pal,” someone said as I watched the woman head east at a fast clip. “Let me get in there and make a quick call.”

This phone patron was also white, in his thirties, and dressed in a sky blue suit that would melt, not burn, if exposed to an open flame. He was wearing a straw hat that was rigid and well formed. One lock of blond hair had escaped the band and hung down next to his left ear. I remember thinking that he might have been a hippie in disguise.

“I’m waitin’ for a call.”

“I’ll just be a second and if they call while I’m on they’ll just call back.”

He was right, of course.

“I’m waiting,” I said anyway.

“But this is a public phone,” he argued. “You have to let anyone who wants use it.”

It struck me that if I was lonely all I had to do was go to a pay phone and wait for people to come up and engage me.