Rose Gold (24 page)

First I took off the padlock from the front door using the key that Davis Walton gave me. Then I unhooked Uhuru-Bob from the backseat. He opened his eyes for a moment but didn’t say anything.

He only moaned a little when I lifted him up in my arms and carried him into the shack.

I put him on a wide bed that doubled for a sofa, thinking that I’d have to get Davis’s bedclothes laundered and bleached. I shackled Bob’s left wrist to the steel bar at the head of the bed.

“Ow,” my prisoner complained. “That shit hurts.”

“It didn’t hurt you when you were bangin’ on that girl.”

“I didn’t know it was that bad.”

“Go to sleep, Bob. You need the rest.”

He closed his eyes and I believe that he actually went to sleep. I wondered if being chained and in tatters made the chameleon-man think that he was a convict or slave; bound to take orders from a reluctant overmaster like me.

Carrying a plain pine chair from the kitchen table, I went outside to sit and smoke.

Prehistoric-looking Joshua trees stood out in the desert morning
like ancient sentries watching over me and my prisoner. It was flat out there, the air clear and silent. You could see for miles across the dun-colored rock and sand. Here and there stood great piles of pale crimson boulders that had resisted the erosion of millennia while the soil around them had washed away. There was a chill in the morning air but soon that would give way to hundred-degree heat.

In a little shed next to the small house, Walton had a gasoline-operated generator. With that he could run a small air conditioner. I’d fire that up later. But in the meantime I sat outside watching the dew dry and the world turn.

I was a soldier again, my mind empty as I waited for the next challenge.

I saw the car coming down the country road from five miles off; a small puff of dust on the horizon. It was pleasant to see something coming; it gave me the illusion that I was in control.

Eight or nine minutes later the pale green 1956 Pontiac rolled up next to my dark car. Melvin Suggs was the first man out. He was wearing khaki Bermuda shorts, a blue and white Hawaiian shirt, and a wide-brimmed rather floppy Panama hat. Carrying a small straw suitcase, he waved as the passenger’s-side door came open.

Dr. Edwin Simpson was the opposite of his squat and powerful driver. Not yet forty, Edwin was tall and almost as dark-skinned as I. He was lean and wore horn-rimmed glasses, the lenses of which glinted in the sun. He had on a short-sleeved white dress shirt and dark slacks. His shoes were dark leather. And he carried a medical bag like the one I used to transport my pistol, various handcuffs, and bags of change.

“Mr. Rawlins,” he said, walking up to me.

I stood and shook his hand.

“Your patient is inside, Doctor,” I said.

“What patient is that?”

“Like I told you on the phone—a man that’s been shot in the leg.”

“I’m not a gangster’s doctor.”

“Good,” I said, “because he’s not a gangster.”

“How did he get shot?”

“It was, I believe, a misunderstanding.”

“Why not take him to the hospital?” Edwin asked. “Why not call the police?”

“As I remember it, Doctor, the last time you thought about calling the police you ended up coming to me.”

Edwin had an identical twin brother, named Tamber for their maternal grandfather.

Since childhood Tamber Simpson liked to play games of skill and chance while Edwin enjoyed reading and math.

Edwin went to Howard University medical school.

His brother moved to Reno. When Reno got too small, Tamber settled in Las Vegas. That was all good and well but Tamber was something a black man should never be—lucky; not only with cards but with women too. It was bad enough that he won $17,568 from an Oklahoma oilman named Joseph Hardman, but that same night he bedded Joe’s mistress. The betrayal of his girlfriend somehow convinced Hardman that Tamber was cheating at cards too and so he hired a man named Tiberius Adderly to kill the gambler.

Tamber got wind of Tiberius from the mistress and ran to Edwin. Edwin went to the police. The police told the good doctor that maybe Tamber could go to Africa, where he could see Tiberius coming from a mile away.

That’s when Edwin talked to some of his patients and came up with my name.

I told the good doctor that I could probably save Tamber this time but that a man like his brother was destined to die—violently.

“The good thing about it,” I added, “is that he’ll live life to the fullest every minute up to the moment of his death.”

But Edwin loved his brother and felt guilty, as only a sibling can, about his good life compared to Tamber’s world of trouble.

I gathered some information that I typed out on a clean white sheet of typing paper. After that, through gambling friends of my own, I let it be known that Tamber Simpson was residing in a flophouse near Skid Row in downtown L.A.

I rented a room in Tamber’s name and then took another room across the hall. I only had to wait thirty-seven hours.

The man who worked the front desk had fifty of my client’s dollars in his pocket. He knew that if he called me when somebody asked for Tamber he’d receive fifty more.

The white man came to the door and knocked; I saw that through my peephole. When nobody answered he tried the knob. It was unlocked and so the man took out a pistol and, ever so slowly, pushed the door open.

That was my cue. I stepped out quickly and hit the hit man in the head with a long-barreled .41-caliber pistol. He fell headfirst into the room and I rushed in, hit him again, and then kicked his fallen pistol into a far corner. After closing the door I sat backward on a maple chair, aiming my gun barrel at the battered man’s head.

He wasn’t completely out of it, just stunned.

When he rolled his eyes in my direction I said, “Hello, Tiberius.”

“What the fuck?” He moved as if he was going to rise and so I pushed the muzzle of the gun a little closer.

“I will kill you,” I promised, and I meant it too. We were both killers. There was no wiggle room to that.

“You’re not Simpson.”

“No,” I said, and then I handed him the sheet of paper that I had so neatly typed.

On the page was Tiberius’s full name, the name and address of his ex-wife, the name of the Vegas casino in which he worked security, the license plate numbers on all three of his cars, and the address of his mother, who lived in Austin. Between my fellow detective Saul Lynx and myself, we gathered that information. Saul only charged three hundred for the phone calls. I knew some black gamblers here and there but Saul had connections in Vegas that I couldn’t even dream of.

“What the fuck is this?”

“Did you know that the Roman emperor Tiberius was the stepson of the great Octavian and that Octavian was adopted by Julius Caesar himself?”

“Huh?”

“I’m just proving to you that I know you and you have no idea of
who I am. The next time you get a lead on Tamber it might be him and it might be me or one of my friends waiting. If Tamber dies I will go looking for you and if I can’t find you I will ask somebody on that list. And believe me, Tiberius, I have all kinds of help. I know white men and women and Chinese and Mexican too. You will never see the knife coming.”

I knew I was having an impact because he didn’t respond.

“It would be best if I killed you but that shit is messy so instead I’ll make you an offer.”

“What’s that?”

“I can promise you that Tamber will never again go to Vegas and so you can tell Hardman that he’s dead and buried. If he does go there it’ll be open season.”

“And if I don’t take the offer?”

I smiled and let my head loll to the left.

“What if Hardman finds out?” Tiberius asked.

“Will he come up on you with a big gun like this here?”

“Why didn’t you just shoot me then?”

“Because I’m tryin’ to save Tamber’s ass. If you tell Hardman that he’s dead then the problem is solved. If I kill you he could just hire somebody else.”

That was a tense moment. Maybe Tamber
would
have to move to Liberia. But after a long moment Tiberius nodded.

“But if you fuck with my family I’ll kill you,” he said.

“Man, you don’t even know who I am.”

Tamber was poisoned by a jealous woman two years later. He died under his brother’s care. In spite of that, Edwin owed me a debt.

I told him and Suggs not to give their names to Bob.

We went in and tied and held down the ex-boxer while Dr. Simpson extracted the bullet. Bob screamed and struggled but the restraints were enough. Edwin got the bullet and shot him up with antibiotics, penicillin I think.

“You need to keep him stationary for at least a week,” he told us. “I’ll give you a week’s supply of morphine if he experiences too much pain.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” I said. “Now if you’ll wait here for a few minutes, I need to talk to my friend outside.”

“That’s the guy killed the cops?” Melvin asked when we were outside smoking next to his car.

“I’m ninety-nine percent sure he didn’t do it, Mel.”

“Then turn him in with your evidence.”

“I do that and he’ll die in his cell.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Just give me a few days to get my ducks in a row,” I said. “I can promise you twenty-five hundred at the end, whether he’s guilty or not, and in less time than that I will be able to tell you where Mary went.”

Melvin was a cop. And there was nothing that cops hated more than cop-killers. But on the other hand he would soon be banished, maybe tried for some crime himself—and then there was Mary.

“What do you want from me?” he asked.

“Babysit Bob for a few days. That’s all. I’ll come back out here then with proof one way or the other.”

“It’s a felony to shield a criminal,” he said.

“I haven’t heard about any warrant out on him. Have you?”

That caused the lawman to grimace. He knew what I was saying: There was something hinky about the LAPD’s persecution of Uhuru-Bob.

“Three days,” he said.

“It’s always a pleasure doin’ business with you, Mel.”

I drove Edwin to a bus station in Palm Springs.

Before getting out of the car he asked, “Are you planning to hurt that man, Mr. Rawlins?”

“No, Eddie, I’m not. They say he’s committed some terrible crimes but I don’t believe it. So either I’m going to prove him innocent or I’ll turn him in. Right now I’m just tryin’ to keep him alive.”

“Who’s that man you left him with?”

“He’s all right,” I said.

Edwin stared hard at me. He was a doctor and consequently expected to be in charge of any space he occupied. But there I was, the last piece of uncontrollable heartache left him by his brother.

“Don’t call me again,” he said.

“What would you say if I told
you
that?” I replied.

From Palm Springs I made my way to 29 Palms, stopped at a phone booth in yet another gas station, and called the information operator.

“Information,” the lady said.

“Terry Calhoun from Floral Express. I’m looking for the number of a Clarissa Anthony. She’s on Cholla Terrace,” I said, looking up at a street sign at the corner. “I went to her house to deliver these red roses but nobody’s home and there’s another name on the mailbox. I want to make sure she’s there before leaving anything.”

“I see your problem, Mr. Calhoun,” the friendly local said. “It says here that Clarissa Anthony has a new listing on Jacaranda Drive. Number forty-two. It doesn’t say anything about Cholla Terrace. She must
have lived with a friend, then moved and your company was given the old address.”

“Well, I’ll be,” I said. “Thank you so much, ma’am.”

Forty-two Jacaranda Drive was a catchall address for a trailer park on the outer edge of the small town. I should have spent the time waiting for Mary/Clarissa to show, but time was the one thing I didn’t have.

There were twenty or more mobile homes in the big arid lot. Most units had been there so long that the tenants had landscaped the desert soil around their doors, putting in little gardens and small statues; one had a fir tree growing in a large terra-cotta pot. The fir had gotten big enough that it actually provided some shade.

The manager pointed me to a double-wide trailer that was painted pink, interspersed by patches of rust. It had been there quite a while.

“That’s it over there,” Park Manager Madeline Thrusher said.

She was short and wide, looking older than her years, and she was at least sixty. Her eyes were so beady and small that I couldn’t make out the color. But I could tell that she was no fan of men of my race.

“That one looks like it’s been here quite a while,” I said. “The woman I’m looking for moved out here recently.”

“That one’s a rental,” Ms. Thrusher said. “Man named Arneaux lived in it for eight years before he died last spring. He didn’t have a family so it just stayed there.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“What do you want with her?”

“Just a moment of her time,” I said, thinking that this shortcut might get a little bumpy.

I knocked on the flimsy aluminum door and waited.

“Who is it?” a woman called from somewhere inside.

“Mr. Rawlins.”

The ensuing silence wasn’t long. The door swung inward revealing a fair young woman. She was wearing a peach-colored one-piece, short-pants suit. Her hair was now blond, permed, and shorter than it
had been when the picture Melvin gave me was taken. On paper she was dark but out here in the desert sun she was light and even bright. It wasn’t just the dye and hairstyle that was different, however. The photograph hadn’t done justice to the thirty-something counterfeiter’s leg-woman. She was beautiful, yes, but there was something else about her that set off a charge down inside a man’s chest.

I think it might have been the way her brown eyes took you in. It was a complete experience, giving rise to the notion that she could know you through and through and never turn her nose up at a thing.

“Yes?” she said.

There was the shadow of a mouse under her left eye. This reminded me of the ex-boxer Bob Mantle half naked, chained, and languishing—under the watchful eye of the man I was there representing.