Rose Gold (17 page)

The backyard was eighteen by eighteen feet surrounded by a high pine fence, behind which loomed the apartment buildings on either side and a white one from the back. Like the front yard, there was no lawn, just concrete. In three half-barrel tubs Davis had small lemon, tangerine, and kumquat trees growing. There was also a round redwood table that was shielded by a huge aqua and white parasol.

“I got that umbrella so that people cain’t spy on me from their windows up above. You know they always lookin’ down tryin’ to get some dirt. Some’a the younger ones have jumped ovah and tried to burglarize me but my doors and bars is too much for ’em. An’ they lucky at
that ’cause if they did get in I’d shoot first with my twelve-gauge and follow that up wit’ my forty-four. You know just ’cause I’m seventy don’t mean I cain’t kill a man half my age.”

Davis Walton wasn’t seventy. He was more than eighty but had lied to keep his janitor’s job past the required retirement age. He’d been lying about his age for so long, he might have believed that he was a younger man.

“Have a seat, Easy.”

I sat on one redwood bench and Davis took the other. He was ready to do business—which in the eyes of a man from his generation was somewhat like dueling.

“You still own that cabin out in the desert?”

“Yes, sir. Ruthie been too sick to travel but I go out there now and then to hunt rabbit. You know I appreciate the quiet.”

Davis and Ruth were poor people. They were too old to be members of the Social Security system and had spent most of their money raising three sons. She took in piecework and he supplemented that with a small retirement check from the city, and a bank account in which he had squirreled away every excess dime that he’d ever made.

“I need to use your place for a few weeks,” I said. “I’ll give you four hundred dollars.”

“What you mean use it?”

“Five hundred.”

“What if somethin’ gets broken or damaged?”

“Six hundred and if you find anything less than it was before I stayed there, then just give me the bill.”

That was the end of our little talk. Davis took a small brass key from a big ring of keys in his pocket and handed it to me.

“This is for the padlock on the door,” he said. “It also work on the generator hut and the outhouse.”

I handed him six Ben Franklins and he led me back through the rooms. Ruth was waiting at the front door to shake my hand. Her touch was akin to a blessing but I walked to my car knowing that I was still damned.

Detective work, police work, riot duty—these are all inexact practices. Sometimes you might bust the wrong head or arrest the victim instead of the perpetrator.

I know a man named Charles Banning who is in prison to this day for a crime he could not have committed. I know this because he and I were in San Francisco together at the time he was supposed to have raped, robbed, and beaten the young white woman who identified him. I was in the courtroom for the entire three-day trial. I said my piece but the jury, mostly white people, didn’t believe me. I could hardly blame them. That girl detailed the crime, identified Chuck, and cried so piteously that I believe a jury of twelve black sharecroppers would have sent him off to jail; maybe even to the gallows.

I try to drive up and visit Charles every other month just so he’ll know that I remember; so that he can see his reflection in my eyes and behold an innocent man.

No … detective work is not an exact science. Sometimes, even when you do everything right, you come up with the wrong answers.

I was remembering this dictum while walking beside a hedge of poinsettia bushes. It was summer and there were bees working around the blossoms, gathering raw pollen for the master alchemists back at the hive.

I was navigating through a mazelike court of twenty-seven tiny cottage apartments not far from Avalon Boulevard. It was late morning and so most of the residents were either out at work or looking for a job. When I neared unit 213 at the back of the complex I dropped my half-smoked cigarette on the concrete and crushed it underfoot. The light
green door of 213 was flanked by trellises that supported hundreds of bright red snapdragon flowers.

I was wearing a dark blue sailor’s cap pulled down over my forehead, and sunglasses so dark that the midday world looked like twilight.

Somewhere there was an answer about the intentions and the whereabouts of Uhuru Nolicé. Maybe it was at the liquor store. Maybe this apartment was filled with the light of truth.

Balled up in my right hand was a small leather sack filled with nickels. I knocked with my left and took in a deep breath.

The man who opened the door was four inches shorter, fifty pounds lighter, and at least twenty-five years younger than I. He looked at me wonderingly. Maybe there was something familiar about my jawline or stance from Benoit’s Gym.

“Cedric Reed?” I asked.

“Yes?”

“Did you lose your wallet?”

In order to reach behind him to feel for the billfold Cedric had to turn and lower his head, just a little.

Getting as much torque as I could in my hips, I hit him in the left temple with the fistful of nickels. The first blow stunned him; the second sent him stumbling backward and to the floor. If I was Mouse I would have shot him in the knee. If I was Fearless Jones I would have taken my chances with fisticuffs even though Cedric was a professional welterweight boxer.

We all had different ways of dealing with the world. The men who made it were the ones who figured out what worked best for them.

While Cedric floundered on the floor I closed the door and found the pull-cord for the overhead light. I also took a pistol from my waistband. There was blood dripping from the boxer’s head and his eyes were rolling around looking for the cause of his sudden inebriation.

“Stay down,” I told him.

The loopy boxer turned his attention toward my words like a man grabbing for a rescue line. He looked in my direction but saw little.

“You made me wrong, man,” he slurred.

The words might not have made sense in that situation but I knew what he meant.

“Why you shoot at me, brother?” I said, gesturing with my gun hand.

Instead of answering he tried to get up.

I kicked him in the forehead with the heel of my left shoe.

“Oh no!” he cried.

“Stay down and tell me why you shot at me.”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t. I didn’t shoot no gun. I was drivin’ the car. Bobo the one. Bobo the one that fired. An’ he was just tryin’ to scare you.…”

“Get up in that chair,” I commanded.

The small room had four chairs in it. Every one of them was from a different breed of furniture. There was straight-back oak, partially padded walnut, full sofa, and the folding variety made from gray metal piping and dark brown leather. There was a TV tray like at Davis Walton’s house but no television at all.

“Get up in the chair,” I said again.

When he didn’t move I kicked him in the pelvis with the hard toe of my shoe. He squealed from the pain but he got up into the sofa chair. The blood and cries of pain did not move me. Cedric drove the car that carried the gun that could have killed me.

“I need a doctor,” he told me when I leveled the pistol at him.

“You gonna need a undertaker you don’t answer me quick.”

“What you want with me?”

“Why you and Bobo shootin’ at me, man? Do I know you?”

“Uhuru Nolicé,” Cedric said as if the name alone were a political manifesto.

“Bob Mantle?”

“That’s right!” Cedric claimed, coming more than halfway to awareness. “Bob out there standin’ up for us.”

“Us?”

“Seventeen months, two weeks, and three days ago I was stopped by the cops when I was out in Compton drivin’ wit’ my girl. They pult me from the car, took out they guns, an’ say, ‘Niggah, get down on your knees!’ Here I haven’t done nuthin’ an’ these men want me to beg in
front’a my girl. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t get down on my knees. I wasn’t even speedin’. I hadn’t had one drink. I told them that I was okay standin’ an’ happy to put my hands ovah my head. An’ you know them mothahfuckahs beat me so bad that the next time I saw Elda I was in a hospital bed in three casts. The only reason the judge didn’t put me in jail for assault was because I had to be wheeled into the courtroom. So when I hear that Bob Mantle kilt three cops down around where them four pigs done beat me I went out and drank a toast. And if you workin’ for them cops I wanna be brave too. I wanna say sumpin’ too. We wasn’t gonna to kill ya. I hit a bump an’ Bobo’s aim went off. We didn’t even mean to hit your car.”

“Who said I was workin’ for the cops?”

“Tommy said you smelled bad.”

I pulled back the hammer on my gun because Cedric was getting excited enough to make a mistake. That sat him back in his chair.

“Did Bob say that he killed those policemen?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“To you?”

“Not to me personally. He on the run. But Bobo heard it from Angela Dawson who got it from one’a her girlfriends that Bob was on the hunt for the man in blue.”

That was how we made myths back then. Something happened and then somebody said something; that story passed from mouth to ear until a whole cloth was woven from smoke and wishes.

“Stand up, man,” I said.

Cedric obeyed the cocked pistol.

“Turn around.”

“Why?”

“Mothahfuckah, turn around or I will shoot you in the gut.”

He obeyed and I fastened a handcuff to his left wrist.

“What the fuck!” He whirled around and I held the barrel of my pistol three inches from his left eye.

“Turn around or die, Cedric.”

He hesitated but there was no girlfriend around to impress. I attached the other cuff to his right wrist so that his hands were held firmly behind his back.

“Bobo should’a kilt you, niggah,” Cedric said.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “and maybe I should kill you—but I won’t. What I’m gonna do is leave the key to these cuffs on your front stairs. Wait a minute or two after I go and then you can go out there and figure out how to free your hands.”

“You scared’a me?”

“You bettah believe it, C. You’d bettah believe it.”

I uncocked the pistol and hit Cedric on the right temple pretty hard with the butt. He went down on his knees and groaned.

I walked out of his house dropping the small steel key on the top stair as I went. I kept half a dozen pairs of handcuffs to use when necessary. I didn’t mind losing one pair for a little satisfaction.

By noon I had made it to the dead end of Tucker Street, in Compton. I parked on the unpaved patch of land that neighborhood kids used for a baseball diamond after school. Then I struggled through a dense stand of avocado trees, eucalyptus trees, and thorny bushes. After all that I arrived at a yellow door that was crusty with green lichen.

I was ready to knock but the door came open before I could manage that feat.

“Easy,” she said.

Mama Jo was taller, blacker, and might have been stronger than I. She was wearing a brown robe that was homespun and heavy. Somewhere around twenty years my senior, Jo came from another era than most other citizens of the modern world. She lived in a realm where true knowledge passed between those that were a part of history, not subjects to it. She was a healer and a seer, a fortune-teller and a repository of tragedy and love. For years she had lived with a black raven, a small cat that looked and acted like it was a lynx, and two armadillos that wrestled day and night.

“Come on in an’ take a load off, baby,” she said.

The floor was packed dirt and the walls were made from woven straw, adobe, and other, less identifiable materials. I sat in a chair framed by tree branches and fitted with unshaven animal hide. There were no windows in Jo’s house but there was always a slight breeze moving through.

Jo sat down on an ancient bench behind which stood her alchemist’s table piled high with hand-blown bottles and earthen jugs, twigs, blossoms, powders, and various crystals. She had a fireplace, above which
was nailed a mantel. There were thirteen thick round candles glowing on that ledge, giving off a good deal of the light in the shadowy room. Thirteen candles that had been skulls the last time I was there.

Jo saw what I was looking at and what I was thinking.

“Coco thought that it was too grisly havin’ them armadilla heads an’ Domaque’s skull on display like that,” she said. “So I had Martin Martins come out here and build me a little shed out back to hold D and his friends.”

Domaque Sr. was Jo’s husband, the love of her life, who had died young. She’d named her unspeakably powerful and deformed son Domaque Jr. Jo loved both men, dead and alive, more than the ground any prophet ever trod upon.

“That’s why I came,” I said.

“To see the vault?”

“Helen Ray,” I said. That was Coco’s given name.

“Coco, baby,” Jo said, raising her voice ever so slightly.

From behind a heavy burlap curtain printed with indecipherable sigils she came. Coco was what the culture of America calls a white woman. In her early twenties she had thick peltlike brown hair and sun-kissed skin. She was wearing a raw silk shift that barely came down to her knees. I had once seen her naked but that was only because she was a hippie and didn’t mind what people saw. She was as beautiful and potent as Jo in her own way. That was why, I supposed, Jo had taken her on as an apprentice and a lover.

“Hello, Mr. Rawlins,” she said in a remote tone. Like many young people who had suddenly changed direction in their lives, she saw the rest of the world as if it were at a distance.

“Coco.”

She sat down on the table’s workbench.

“What can we do for you, Easy?” Jo asked.

Coco shifted closer to her.

“I need to find out some information up in Santa Barbara and Coco here is just the one to ask my questions.”

“I’m busy,” Coco said, barely even glancing at me. “I have my work here with Jo and I’m studying for the SATs to get into UCLA. I’m going to do premed.”

“Coco,” Jo said in a tone that could have been the double beat of a steel hammer on a helpless iron nail.