Rose Gold (18 page)

Moving only her shoulders, Coco shied away from the witch.

“The only reason you here is because’a Easy. The only reason you know me is because’a him.”

“He didn’t bring me here for you,” Coco argued. “He just wanted to help that boy.
I
was doing
him
a favor.”

I could have been a fly on the wall or maybe on the other side of the wall, as far as their argument was concerned.

“You been in this house wit’ me for six weeks, Coco, an’ you still don’t know that everything in the world depends on everything else. You ask me to teach you but then refuse to learn.”

“That’s not true.”

“Easy Rawlins is my best friend in the world an’ here you cut your eyes away from him an’ say you ain’t got the time.”

Coco took in a breath as if she were about to say something, but there was nothing to say.

“When my friend come in here an’ ask for sumpin’ I give it,” Jo added. “I give it because he have never refused me since he was younger than you are now.”

For a moment I remembered the sweaty evening when Jo showed me that I really didn’t know anything about physical love. She was the first woman since my mother who proved to me that I wasn’t alone in the world.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Rawlins,” Coco said softly. “What can I do for you?”

“I need you to talk to some people for me,” I said, “college students up at UCSB. You need to look half-hippie and half-student.”

“Most of my clothes are in storage up at Terry’s.”

The first little while on our trip from Compton to the hills above the Sunset Strip, Coco was turned toward the window, looking out on the streets of L.A.

Her youthful, gorgeous body reminded me of something I had almost forgotten after my near-death experience some months earlier. But it was her staring out the window that grabbed my imagination.

Since I moved to L.A. in the late forties, the center of my life had moved from sitting rooms and street corners, booths in bars and cafés—to cars. I was always getting into or out of some automobile as a passenger or driver. A big part of my life was spent getting the keys for or driving my car. My constant friend was the radio, and most of my conversations were not face-to-face but side by side in the front seat or through the rearview mirror of some jalopy that I would drive until it gave out and I had to buy a new one.

I was like some kind of futuristic hermit crab being carried by my temporary husk from place to place rather than feeling the sun on my head or my feet on the ground.

“I didn’t mean to be rude to you, Mr. Rawlins,” Coco said when we were nearing our destination.

“Come on now, girl. I know when I’m bein’ shined on. You wanted me gone.”

“And I’m sorry for that.”

“Then I accept your apology.”

“So what is it you need me to do?” she asked, the past forgotten.

I told her about Rosemary Goldsmith, Bob Mantle, the LAPD, FBI, and State Department.

“The only reason I took the job was so I could send Feather to that school,” I said at the end of the tale.

“So you want me to ask around and find out where she lived?” Coco asked.

“I’ll be close at hand,” I said. “Jo would string me up if I got you hurt.”

“How long have you known Jo?”

“I met her in ’thirty-nine,” I said, “twenty-eight years ago. She hasn’t hardly changed a bit.”

“I’m in love with her.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think there’s something wrong with that?”

“No.”

“Then why did you say it like that?”

“Helen,” I said. “I don’t prejudge people and I don’t judge ’em. You’re a free woman in the free world. Whatever it is you want, that’s just fine by me. And you know I wouldn’t even think about criticizing Jo.”

I was pulling up into a driveway cut through a huge hedge in front of a cockeyed mansion on Ozeta Terrace. Terry Aldrich’s big house was built slowly and over time by a dozen or more architects. It was both round and square, with pieces missing and additions tacked on. Terry was a young man, seventeen and quite ugly. His rich father had moved back east and sent his son regular checks so that Terry could finish high school while they lived separate lives.

“I guess I’m just a little sensitive,” Coco said. “I’ve never been with a woman before. I feel like everybody is looking down on me.”

“I’ll pick you up in the morning at eight?”

“What are we going to do up there?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I guess we could start by you going to the registrar’s office and telling them that Rosemary is your cousin or something. I have her picture. You could go to the student center and ask around if the administration turns us down.”

“Why can’t you go yourself?”

“Yeah,” I said, “right. I’ll pick you up at eight.”

I got back to my office at twelve minutes past three. That gave me time to sit without watching out for some two-ton steel automobile ramming into me; time to sit in a chair that wasn’t vibrating.

I read the newspaper for relaxation as much as anything else.

The Buddhists in Saigon couldn’t winnow down civilian opposition to a single opponent against the military strongmen Thiêu and Ký. Two U.S. bombers had been shot down over China; the U.S. government claimed that they went off course after a bombing mission in Cambodia. In Santa Barbara, 782 people had signed a public petition against the war. The McCone Commission had reported to Governor Ronald Reagan that “the most serious and immediate problem facing the Negro … is the lack of employment.” A young black man had been convicted for draft evasion but failed to show up for the decision. Another defendant failed to show up for prosecution in an antiwar march in Century City. Mace, the chemical paralyzer, was used for the first time to quell Negro disturbances in New Haven, Connecticut. Two Southland soldiers had died in action in Vietnam. And, finally, the Burbank Board of Education set the high-school miniskirt limit at two inches above the middle of the knee.

There was nothing about a liquor store robbery on La Brea.

When the phone rang I was thankful for the distraction.

“Easy,” Melvin Suggs said before I could muster a hello.

“How’s it goin’, Mel?”

“Crazy as a motherfucker in a room full’a beauty queens.”

“Um.” What else could I say?

“Chinese clerk at the liquor store says he was robbed by a woman.”

“Not Bob?”

“Oh, Bob was there. He stood at the door looking scared. She had a sawed-off shotgun and pushed it up under Mr. So’s jaw.”

“What did she look like?”

“Your girl.”

Damn.

“And Bob didn’t do anything at all?” I asked.

“Just stood with one foot out the door and one foot in. The girl hit Mr. So upside his head and cursed him for being a traitor to his people. Then she stole his wallet.”

I was considering the ramifications of Melvin’s discoveries more like a lawyer than a private detective. I thought that if Uhuru-Bob made it to court he might have a case against the rich white girl.

“Easy,” Melvin said, to bring me back into the conversation.

At that moment the door to my office came open and five very dark-skinned men in bulky suits walked in. It was over ninety degrees outside but they were wearing wool. I recognized three of them.

“I gotta call you back, Mel. Somethin’ just came up here.”

I cradled the phone and got to my feet just as the leader approached the desk.

This elegantly dressed and handsome killer smiled at me. His skull was oblong, making me think of some evolved species of human. But I wasn’t fooled—Art Sugar was as primitive as a man could be.

“Easy Rawlins.”

All of the men were wearing dark suits and shiny black shoes. Two of them sat on my blue sofa; another, Jess Johnson, perched on the walnut visitor’s chair to the right. Art took that chair’s mate, and Whisk Hill stood sentry behind him.

I waited a moment and then reseated myself. I considered reaching for the pistol wired under my desk drawer but nixed the notion.

Art Sugar was the top thug in South Central that year. He and his four associates ran roughshod over the majority of small-time hoods and held the grudging respect of the tougher class of crook. Almost everybody gave Art and his men their due.

And if Mouse was right he was the man that had slaughtered three officers of the Los Angeles Police Department.

He smiled and waited.

“Art,” I said.

“You an’ me can be truthful with each other, right?”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Sometimes the truth hurts.”

That put some teeth into Sugar’s smile.

“I got a man in the po-lice department, Seventy-seventh Street precinct,” he said. “He tells me that the Crenshaw precinct has reported that you were involved in a shootout ovah thataway.”

“Not me.”

“He’s lyin’?”

“The term
shootout
implies at least two guns.”

“In what?”

“There was just one gun and it was firing at me. In order for it to have been a shootout I would have had to shoot back.”

“Uh-huh.” Art didn’t have a proper education and felt a little intimidated when people used language he didn’t understand. You couldn’t do it too much but a word dropped here and there might help give you the upper hand. “The thing is I don’t care about who was shootin’ and who wasn’t. But I heard that you was in Benoit’s Gym lookin’ for Battlin’ Bob Mantle.”

I didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say—yet.

“Listen here, Easy Rawlins, I need you to understand something: I’m not afraid of Raymond Alexander.”

I tried to keep my look from imparting the deeply held conviction that nobody ever says that they’re not afraid of somebody they’re not afraid of.

Art sat back and gazed at me. His four men considered me too. All of those eyes were saying that if Sugar wanted me dead right then, or later on, then I’d be dead and that would be that.

“I see myself as a peacekeeper,” Art said after our nonverbal roundtable. “I like to keep the peace.”

“And me gettin’ shot at is not according to your rules?”

“The cops is all ovah the streets lookin’ for Mantle. They bustin’ up poker games and takin’ party girls to jail before the night even starts. They rousted old Jess here when he was just sittin’ on his mother’s front porch.”

“That’s right,” Jess averred.

“I cain’t have that,” Art added.

“I don’t understand, Mr. Sugar. I asked a question and somebody tried to shoot my head off. What’s that got to do with the cops up in your business?”

“I know what’s goin’ down, Easy,” he said. “I know that rich girl got kidnapped and that the police think it’s got to do with them cops got slaughtered in that junkyard. My man at the Seventy-seventh told me that much. But let me tell you somethin’, brothah: If you and Mouse think you can score on this shit while my business goes to hell you got another think comin’.”

Art was like a wild horse seeing threats behind every bush, smelling it on the breeze. I had to think of something to say that would calm down the situation.

“Raymond’s not even in town, man,” I said. “He’s gone for a few weeks and I was just lookin’ for Bob because his mother wants to know where he’s at.”

In my opinion this was just the right balance of truth and prevarication.

“I don’t budge, Easy,” Art said.

Before Art took over the wrong side of the street, a rawboned Mississippian named Brown held that position. Brown made the mistake of telling Mouse that he had to pay a tithe on his various liquor hijacking gigs. This demand led to a true shootout that left three dead and one wounded. Brown was among the deceased.

That was when Raymond decided to make a full commitment to the national heist syndicate.

All of this was before Art Sugar came on the scene but he, Sugar, was still worried that one day he’d have to square off with my friend.

“I’m not pushin’, brother, and neither is Raymond. I just asked a question and they got mad. They overreacted, that’s all.”

“You know where that white girl is?” the gangster asked.

“No, sir.”

“What about Bob?”

“I hear he got in a firefight with the police down on a Hundred and Ten and Central last night. He’s prob’ly bleedin’ to death in some flophouse right now.”

This was news to the cop-killer and that was a good thing.

“How you know that?”

“I got friends on the force too.”

“They shot him?”

“Think so.”

“So you not lookin’ fo’ him no more?”

“They asked me down at his mother’s church, the Good Shepherd, to find her son. I will still try to do that but I’m just lookin’, not stirrin’ no pot.”

“I won’t budge, Easy.”

“And I won’t push.”

“If you find Bob I want you to tell me before you tell his mother, the police, or the Lord,” he added.

Our eyes were on each other. Sugar was waiting for the right answer and I was counting the seconds that he would think necessary to consider that answer.

“If I say okay does that mean I’m workin’ for you now?”

“No, brothah,” he said. “It means you workin’ to keep yo’self healthy.”

After a moment we both smiled. Then he got to his feet and sauntered out of my office. His cohorts followed suit and soon I was alone again.

I locked the door and went to sit on the blue sofa.

It struck me that I was very calm for a man who just had a brush with death. You would think that being in close proximity to a man like Art Sugar was enough for me to change my life so that I would be safer and live longer. And that would have been true if it wasn’t for John Smith.

John was a shipbuilder, a churchgoing one-woman man, married with three beautiful children. He attended Regent’s Baptist on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights and never so much as stole a penny.

One day John was walking down the street with his wife, Jane, when his minister, Dorothy Saunders, called out hello from a passing automobile. John turned to wave, took a misstep, and fell to the curb, cracking his skull on the granite edge.

It was a fatal blow but poor John wasn’t blessed with a quick death, no. His brain swelled up in its casing and he never slept, much less lost
consciousness. He went mad in an isolated hospital ward, cursing and biting and spitting at anyone who came near. His last words were a curse for God and everything in His kingdom.