Rose Gold (23 page)

I looked around the cabin; under the table and in the corners. There were no weapons in sight.

“What now?” she asked when she was finished with the initial dressing.

There was a washbasin on a counter next to the fireplace. I went there and saw a big wooden salad spoon in the drying rack. I took it and returned to the patient and his reluctant nurse.

“Put this under the loose bandage and twist until it’s real tight,” I said.

On the fifth turn Uhuru-Bob groaned in pain.

“Is the bullet still in there?” I asked him.

“Where else it gonna go?”

“So you were gonna sit up in here fuckin’ and bleedin’ till you got gangrene and died?”

“My girlfriend went down to get help. She probably comin’ right now.”

“I don’t think so,” I told him.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m just not that lucky.”

Some private detectives spend long nights in darkened rooms listening to and taking pictures of the people next door; they sit for days parked down the block from the homes of insurance cheats or adulterers, waiting to get just the right incriminating photograph. Some upscale gumshoes are little more than accountants who go through thousands of pages of financial transactions until they find the one entry that indicts the subject of their investigation.

That’s not me.

I’m the guy who helps put the bloodstained white dress shirt on a naked man who has a bullet in his leg. I’m the guy who, with the help of a lusty hippie chick, drags that same man uphill through a field to a car that he had to buy because someone shot the windshield out of his last automobile.

When we got to the Dodge I had the girl named Meredith sit on the farting Petrie’s lap. Then I made Bob lie down in the back and cuffed his wrists to a metal rod under the driver’s seat.

That was how I worked. My puzzles had human pieces and no one
resolution. I was like the guy with the sack of corn, the goose, and the fox trying get across the river in a boat that could only take two passengers at a time.

Half the way down to the highway, where there was no human structure in sight, I stopped the car. All the way, Petrie farted and Bob moaned. Meredith kept silent. I liked her for that reason.

“You two listen to me,” I said to Petrie and Meredith. “Bob here is wanted for robbery, kidnapping, and murder. You guys are what the police call accomplices. If I tell them about you you’ll spend at least five years in the penitentiary. A solid five with no parole, no time off for good behavior. I don’t need the headache, however. I don’t care what you did. So I’m gonna let you out and give each of you a hundred dollars. I suggest that you hike back up to Meredith’s car and drive north or south, anywhere but back to that commune. Because the police will be coming and I won’t lift a finger to help.”

After freeing Petrie I gave them both money and left them on the dirt road in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night.

Now and again I wonder about Petrie and Meredith. Maybe the trauma of that night brought them closer together and they married and had kids. Maybe they fell asleep in the cabin and Meredith woke up early taking his hundred dollars. It doesn’t matter but I like to speculate—there’s no harm in that.

“You really a cop, man?” Uhuru-Bob asked from a prone position on the back floor of my Dodge.

We were headed for Isla Vista.

“Private,” I said. “I’m working for a guy who thinks that you’ve been set up but he doesn’t know how and he wants me to prove it.”

“What guy?”

“He doesn’t want to be identified, for obvious reasons.”

I figured this was all true. Because, as far as Bob was concerned, I was working for myself.

“Well, he’s right,” Bob said. “I haven’t done none’a that. I mean I was
there when Rose robbed that liquor store but I didn’t even know she was gonna do that.”

“What about that vice principal you said that you killed?”

“I never said I killed nobody,” he proclaimed. “I called the paper and told them that he deserved it. I went to a high school where he taught at. Mr. Emerson always had a high-school girlfriend. He was just a dog. Some father or boyfriend prob’ly shot him.”

“What about the shootout with the police?”

“The only shootout I had was when they shot me in the leg.”

The name of the coffeehouse where I left Coco was Dylan’s Dawn.

Uhuru-Bob gave little resistance when I wrapped first-aid tape over his mouth and around his head.

There was a lovely young woman with natural red hair strumming a guitar and singing about ugly things on a small dais next to the coffee bar. There were probably eighty customers, not one of them over the age of twenty-five. They all, except for the singer, looked my way when I entered. They all, except for Coco, were suspicious of a suited man my age among them.

Coco was sitting at a table flanked by three young hippie men. They could probably feel the passion she had for Jo and were hoping to get a little of that precious commodity for themselves.

When I walked up to the table a hale, black-haired, black-bearded young suitor stood and said, “What do you want here, brother?”

“Not you,” I replied easily.

“Then maybe you should go,” he suggested.

He had big muscles under a loose blue shirt and held himself in a military bearing. A vet, I thought, but that didn’t bother me. I was a wartime veteran too—and I had a gun in my pocket.

“Hi, Uncle Thad,” Coco said as she jumped up and kissed my cheek. “I was getting worried about you.”

“Uncle?” the standing hippie said.

“Is something wrong with that, Roger?” my newly minted niece asked.

“But …” he said.

“Thad is married to my mother’s sister. He used to change my diapers when I was a baby.”

“We gotta go,” I said.

“It was nice meeting you guys,” Coco said as she went to get the purple bag, which was hanging from the back of her chair. “Sorry I can’t go to that Doors concert with you.”

“How can I call you?” Roger asked.

“I’ll be back,” she lied.

I installed Coco in the backseat, where she could keep up the pressure on Bob’s wound while I drove. It wasn’t the first time she had sat in the backseat of my car tending to an injured black man.

She took the tape from his head.

“Do you mind if I let you off at Terry’s?” I asked the girl. “I don’t think I have time to go all the way out to Mama Jo’s.”

“That’s okay. She had this shopping list for me anyway. I can get somebody to give me a ride.”

“You got to help me, girl,” Bob said. “This man’s gonna kill me.”

“No,” Coco said in a surprisingly sympathetic tone. “He will help you. That’s the kind of man he is.”

Half an hour later we were on the Pacific Coast Highway cruising southward. Bob grunted now and then. Coco and I had nothing to say. She didn’t ask about what had happened with Petrie. Her deep trust, I felt, came from that four- or five-sentence exchange with Mama Jo.

When we saw the five-mile sign for an all-night gas station I had Coco put tape over Bob’s mouth again.

“Hold him down,” I said as I sidled up to the self-service pump.

“How?”

“He’s weak from loss of blood. Sit on his wounded leg if he moves.”

I got fifteen-point-three gallons for just under seven-fifty. After filling up and then paying the attendant, who was locked in a booth at the center of the station, I drove to the edge of the lot, where there stood a solitary phone booth.

“Hello?” a woman answered sleepily.

“Mrs. Simpson,” I said. “Is your husband in?”

“Do you know what time it is?”

“All too well, ma’am, all too well.”

I believe that it was the gravity of my tone rather than the words that moved her.

“Who should I say is calling?”

“Easy Rawlins.”

She went away and a minute or so later a man said, “Mr. Rawlins?”

“It’s that time, Eddie.”

“What do you need?”

“A little while from now, not more than a few hours, a man will come to your door. He’s going to say that he’s from me and that you should go with him. Bring your bag and whatever you might need to treat a wound.”

“What kind of wound?”

“The kind with the bullet still inside.”

There was a moment of silent hesitation but then he said, “I’ll be ready.”

“Who the hell is this?” Melvin Suggs said, answering his line.

“Me.”

“Rawlins?”

“You sober, Melvin?”

“Pretty much.”

“Enough to drive?”

“As long as it ain’t the Indy Five Hundred.”

I gave him instructions and directions. He asked three questions about routes and then said, “See ya in the morning.”

“How’s the bleeding?” I asked Coco when we were getting near Terry’s mansion.

“Stopped. But he needs to see a doctor.”

“He will.”

I stopped the car and she got out the passenger’s side. Coming around to my window, she kissed me, once again on the lips, and said, “Be careful, Easy.”

“So, Bob,” I called out when we were well on the way to the desert. “You awake?”

“Why you doin’ this to me, man?”

“I know it’s hard to believe, brother, but I’m tryin’ to save your ass. The federal government wants you from two different sides and the LAPD will shoot first—but you already know that.”

“Why you wanna help me?”

“There’s the man I’m workin’ for, like I said, and then there’s Belle.”

“Mama?”

“I kind of made a promise to her that I’d keep you alive—at least. I have also been hired, by parties unknown, to rescue Rosemary Goldsmith from you.”

“From me?”

“They say that you kidnapped her and then demanded a ransom?”

“No, I didn’t.” He could have been an eight-year-old denying pulling his sister’s hair.

“Did she have somebody else do it?”

“I, I don’t think so. I mean I guess I don’t know. Last time I talked to her she said that she was gonna go get help like I told you.”

“Help from where?”

“She just told me that she was gonna get help to get us both out of the country.”

“You didn’t ask how or from who?”

“I was shot, man. I just told her to hurry up.”

“How long ago?”

“Right after we got away from those cops shootin’ at me. Maybe two days, maybe not even. She was supposed to be back by last night.”

“And how did you,” I said, “an L.A. student from Metro Junior College, meet a coed at UCSB?”

“It’s like this, man,” he said in such a way that I knew I was in for a story. “I got this thing about costumes, have ever since I was a kid.
Cowboys, clowns, cops, or criminals; if I dressed up like something it’s like I became that person, that thing. When I was a kid I always knew in the back of my mind that I was really Bobby Mantle. When my father gave me my boxin’ gloves I let it go so far that after a while I really was a boxer. But then when they banned me from the ring and I went to college I started gettin’ high. At first it was only grass and hash. I’d get high and put on one’a my outfits and it was like I was changed for real.

“Then I met this white dude named Youri, Youri Kidd. He was like a dealer. Mostly he just sold grass to college kids. We would get high together and I’d play around with hats and such. Then one time him and me ate mushrooms and I found these tap-dancer shoes. The whole night I was a fool tap dancin’ and you know I believed I was the real thing. Youri liked that shit and he would bring me mushrooms or mescaline or even LSD sometimes and we’d go out lookin’ for some kinda costume. When he brought me them African robes it hit me like some kinda magic. In my mind that meant I was some kinda political revolutionary. I started givin’ talks and eatin’ mushrooms. I didn’t go to class or nuthin’. I was Uhuru Nolicé. I was a leader of the revolution. I gave talks and people listened. And I guess I got a little lost.

“I called the papers about Mr. Emerson because I knew that he was a dog. But I never said nuthin’ when them cops was killed. I swear I didn’t.”

“Maybe you don’t remember,” I suggested.

“It ain’t like that, man. I
see
what I’m doin’, I remember it but it’s like I cain’t help it. But I know I never said nuthin’ ’bout those cops. I know it.

“Anyway, the police started comin’ around lookin’ for me and Youri said he had a friend that lived in this house up in Isla Vista. That was Rose. One time he helped her somehow.”

“Helped her do what?” I asked, just to stay in the conversation.

“I don’t know. But he said that she was real political like and you know in my mind I was Uhuru Nolicé runnin’ from the Man. I went up there with a baggie full’a mushrooms and gave speeches and they loved me; especially Rose. We hit it off the second night. She said she was in love with me. One time when Meredith tried to get with me Rose beat
that girl with a stick. Shit. After that we came back down to L.A. I had run outta mushrooms and had to take off the robes so nobody would recognize me.

“That’s when Rose realized that I wasn’t what I acted like, that I was just playin’ a part. She didn’t leave me but it was like she took over. We met up with Youri again. He got us hooked up with this guy I knew about from the old neighborhood. Then after Rose took out that sawed-off shotgun and robbed that store I made up my mind to get away. I was gonna go down Mississippi where my mama’s people is from but then the cops started shootin’ at us and I was wounded and Rose brought me back up to Isla Vista.”

“Who was this man you knew?” I asked.

“What man?”

“The one from your old neighborhood.”

“He used to be named Delbert but now he calls himself MG. He didn’t know me but I knew him from when I was a kid. Rose knew about him from her political shit.”

It was quiet for a while after that.

“So do you know where Rosemary is now?” I asked.

No answer.

We were way out in the desert by then; no cars in front or behind us.

I got out and checked on Bob. He wasn’t bleeding and he wasn’t dead. The ex-boxer had fallen asleep on the floor of my anonymous Dodge.

We got to the Waltons’ desert cabin a little after six in the morning. It was even smaller than their city home. The outer walls were tar paper tacked down under a frame of pine timbers. The slanted roof was made from cascading sheets of aluminum and tin. The structure was raised two feet or more above the desert floor, standing on a dozen four-by-four stumpy timber legs.