Rose Gold (35 page)

Melvin had much more trouble with the woman on the backseat cushions. She wriggled and bucked, would have bitten and scratched if she could have. But he finally managed to bind her.

When they were lying facedown and bound, ankles and wrists, to the chrome door handles, Melvin and I turned our attention to other matters.

Suggs took the keys from the ignition and opened the trunk. Therein we found two dark green trunklike suitcases that were large enough to need wheels and handles on both the long and short sides.

We each pulled out a bag.

“You think Daddy might have laid a booby trap?” Melvin asked.

“No,” I said. “I mean he could have. He’s got the right tools at that research factory. But there would be no way for him to plan who was going to get killed.”

“You really believe that?” Melvin asked.

I nodded.

“Then you open one,” he said.

Both bags had three latches along the side. I snapped mine open and lifted the lid.

“Shit.” That was Melvin but it could have just as well been me.

The traveling trunk was filled with cash—filled. Mostly tens and twenties that had been in circulation, in wrappers that had amounts scrawled upon them.

Melvin opened the other case. It was the same thing there.

“A goddamned million,” Melvin whispered. “A goddamned million dollars.”

The silence in that hangar was akin to the hush of a church.

We were both thinking the same thing: about Moving Day. This was a once-in-a-lifetime moment. We could take the money and leave the radicals to be found by Delbert later that day. I’d fly off to Liberia or Brazil. Later I’d call Bonnie and she could bring Feather.

It wasn’t stolen money.

We were Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn falling into a cave and landing
on a fortune. And in this story Becky was one of the bad guys and Injun Joe was on our side.

“You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?” Melvin asked. He sounded like a child.

“Uh-huh” was all I could manage.

“We could just take this money right now.”

“Too many loose ends, Melvin. Anyway, we got to leave
some
money for your brothers in blue to find.”

We drove the car sixteen blocks to a brick house with an attached garage. This was the LAPD safe house for that neighborhood. It was where they secluded themselves when planning one of their larger operations or when a senior officer needed some private time with his mistress.

The keys were in a false brick on the right side of the stronghold.

We unlocked the door of the garage and parked inside. After that Melvin and I lugged the bags inside, leaving our squirming prisoners in the backseat.

Officer McCourt had paid off the right people to have the house for the night. He told the district supervisor that he was giving a bachelor party for some fellow officer and promised the requisite three hundred and fifty dollars.

The house’s walls were thick and the few windows bulletproof. The front, back, and side doors were solid steel. There wasn’t much wood and so fire wasn’t a concern. It was a fortress and we were defending sentinels.

Sitting in the kitchen, Melvin was drinking a beer while I satisfied my thirst with a glass of tap water. I knew what was to come next.

“So, Easy,” he said. “Which one?”

“Either you or me.”

“We could both go.”

“You wanna leave a million dollars and two murderers with no supervision. There ain’t a bank vault outside’a Fort Knox that secure.”

“You can trust me,” he said.

When I hesitated he said, “We could flip a coin.”

“Why not a simple math problem?” I suggested. “An equation.”

“What kind of equation?”

“Which is greater,” I said, “the possibility of me running off with a million dollars or the woman back home in your bed?”

Reminding Melvin of Mary/Clarissa was all I had to do. In a week or maybe two he would no longer feel indebted to me, but after long weeks of pining for his lost love he couldn’t turn me down.

“You know I’m gonna be quick,” he warned.

“Take the keys to our friends’ car,” I offered. “Take off the distributor cap and flatten all the tires. I will be right here when you get back.”

Maybe ten minutes after he left I went out to the garage to check on our captives. They were secure but all the tires were flat. Mel didn’t have time to let out the air. He came through with a knife and punctured each one.

Half an hour later I was sitting in the kitchen reading the only book I could find,
Atlas Shrugged
, a work I’d heard lots about but never read. I knew that Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, was the talisman of free thinkers and capitalists around the world but in the few pages I got through I couldn’t make out her argument.

Of course I wasn’t so much thinking about abstract ideas of laissez-faire capitalism with a million dollars in the hall closet.

By then it was early in the morning, a little after five. The reason I fell asleep was that the man and woman, Willy Buckingham and Sheila Yamagata, had taken five hours to retrieve the ransom. It was much later I found out that Sheila and Willy were secret lovers. Delbert considered all the women of Scorched Earth to be his private domain and so they took part of the time to satisfy their lust.

Who knows? Maybe Mel and I saved their lives by grabbing them, because if they had come in so late Delbert might have suspected their purpose and hung them both from the clothesline in the backyard.

On page twelve of
Atlas
the front door to the police house banged open. Melvin came in followed by the motley crew of Anatole, Redbird, and Bermuda shorts–wearing Uhuru-Bob Mantle. Bob walked with a pronounced limp and Redbird seemed like a nervous patriot, unhappy to be in the consulate of an enemy nation. Officer McCourt didn’t like their company but was exercising toleration. Mel went right to the closet where we stashed the trunks. After a few minutes he came out again.

“What?” I said. “Don’t you trust me, Mel?”

His wry grin was strong enough that I could almost smell it.

“So what’s the plan?” Anatole McCourt asked.

“Are they still in the house?” was my answer.

“They were when we left.”

“Then we need to call them if they have a phone.”

“I got the number,” Officer McCourt said.

“How?”

“I thought we might need it so I called a friend at the phone company and he looked it up.”

“A friend?”

“What good is it being Irish if you can’t be friendly?” he said.

This sounded like some kind of self-deprecation but I couldn’t fathom it; and neither did I care.

“Is it connected?” I asked.

“Only one way to find out.”

“Bob,” I said to my actual client.

“Yeah?”

“I need you to do something for me.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you know who Raymond Alexander is?”

“Sure I do. That’s Mouse you talkin’ ’bout right there. Everybody know Mouse. He the man give bad a good name.”

“I want you to pretend to be Mouse and to call Delbert.”

“But Delbert knows me.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But what I want is for you to feel like Mouse in your heart and then tell him that you got his money and if he wants it he has to give you back your woman.”

He gave me a questioning scowl and I said, “Rose.”

“Uh, um,” he mumbled. “I don’t know, Mr. Rawlins. I mean I could call him and say that but maybe not the way you want. I mean I don’t know how to do anything like that.… I mean not on purpose.”

That moment was the only true experience of revelation that I had on the Rose Gold case, outside of the Blessing of Percy Bidwell. Bob didn’t know what he was capable of; he just did things and only believed in what he was doing while he was doing it.

I took the totem ring from my pocket and handed it to him.

“This here is a present I got from Ray some years ago. I told him that I liked it and he just gave it to me.”

Bob took the ring gingerly, cradling it in his left palm and stroking it lightly with the fingers of his right hand.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

“I want you to have it.”

“I couldn’t.”

“If you just try and talk to Delbert you will have earned it.”

The chameleon-man looked up at me, his eyes filled with surprise and wonder. He slipped the ring on the pinky of his left hand and said, “What is it exactly that you want me to say?”

I went over what we needed a few times with Bob. He fiddled with the ring on his finger and looked everywhere but in my eyes.

His attention seemed to be wandering and so I asked, “Do you need me to write it down?”

“Naw, man,” a different Bob said. “I’ont need that. I
know
what I’m gonna say.”

We set him up at the phone in the kitchen. I hurried upstairs and lifted the receiver on an extension line while keeping my hand on the button. At a prearranged moment Anatole handed Bob the number. After he dialed the seven digits, Anatole motioned to Melvin at the foot of the stairs, Melvin signed to Redbird, who was stationed outside my room, and Redbird waved at me. When I let go of the button there was a phone ringing in my ear.

After six rings someone answered, “Yes?”

“Delbert there?” new Bob said.

“Wrong number.”

“I call him Delbert but you say Most Grand.”

“Who is this?”

“Get Delbert, man. That is unless you wanna lose all yo’ money.”

“Hello?” another voice said.

“Hey, Del, I need you to do sumpin’ for me, man.”

“How you know my name?”

“Delbert Underhill, right?”

“Is that you, Uhuru?”

“Who is Uhuru? Some kinda punk? You know who I am, Del, at
least you should. For a few years there you lived just a couple’a blocks from my mama’s house.”

“I’on’t know you, niggah.”

“Maybe not but I’m ovah here sittin’ on two trunks full’a money, mothahfuckah, and you ovah there messin’ wit’ my woman. I want Rose and you want yo’ money. That’s grounds for a trade right there.”

“Fuck you, man! You ain’t got shit.”

“I got yo’ numbah. I got Willy and Sheila. I got a million dollars in two big bags. What the fuck you got, niggah?”

“I’ll kill you,” Most Grand warned. “Gimme my money or you a dead man.”

“You don’t wanna get me mad, Del, ’cause when I hang up this phone that’s it. I’ma be on a plane headed somewhere outside the country and here you is some loser ex-con cain’t even get no passport.”

Bob’s facility was amazing. He must have met Mouse at one time or other because he was playing the role perfectly.

There was a span of silence on Delbert’s side of the line.

“So if Rose goes with you, you give me the money?” Delbert asked, his anger held in abeyance.

“Naw, mothahfuckah! Shit no! You give me Rose an’ I give you one bag. You got to pay sumpin’ for takin’ my woman and leavin’ me up in the mountains to die from my wounds. And don’t you even think about arguin’ wit’ me or I’ll cut you down to half a bag.”

Bob was following the script just the way Raymond would have; with a flavor of his own.

“All right, all right,” the criminal-turned-revolutionary said. “Just tell me where to be.”

“Listen, mothahfuckah, I know you thinkin’ that you gonna come ovah here an’ kill me an’ take your money but that ain’t about to happen, man. Not nearly. I got four men with guns up in here and you gonna come alone with Rose or I’ma shoot you in the head myself.”

Bob gave Delbert the address and warned him again to come only with Rose.

“I’ll be there in a hour,” Most Grand said. “I’ll have Rose an’ you bettah have my mothahfuckin’ money.”

The so-called safe house had a six-foot-square raised extension above the third floor. It was like a crow’s nest on an old-time sailing ship. There was glass on all four sides maybe eighteen inches high. From that vantage point one could see up and down the street and in the backyard. The house was also wired with intercom speakers in every room. I went up to the crow’s nest thinking that the secret existence of houses like that was why Ian Fleming could come up with a character like James Bond.

Our plans were set and yet fluid because we didn’t know exactly how it would play out.

“There’s a white Impala slowing down in front of the place,” I said into a microphone. My words were heard throughout the house.

It had been thirty-seven minutes since the phone call. I had reported on the passage of more than a dozen cars while Redbird, Melvin, and Anatole executed our impromptu plans.

“Anybody out back?” Melvin asked for at least the sixth time. He was waiting at the rear door, ready to move.

“Not that I can see.”

Anatole had promised me that the thin band of windows I was watching through were invisible to anyone in the street. I trusted him but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my head was a melon at target practice.

The front of the house had two doors. The outer door opened onto a walled-in external vestibule and was seven feet from the proper entrance. It opened easily but was weighted to close immediately and lock, barring either entrance or exit. There was a waist-high trunklike gardener’s cabinet to the left on the inside of this entryway. It was
secured by a simple padlock. My cohorts had loaded the box with eight pillowcases filled with the contents of one suitcase.

“The car’s coming back around,” I said.

“How’s the back?”

“If I don’t say it then there’s nobody there, Mel.”

The white Impala cruised by a little faster than before. I could tell it was the same car by a small rust spot on the front hood.

New Bob, Anatole, and Redbird were crowded around the front door.

There were four or five possible resolutions to the upcoming encounter. They ranged from very good to acceptable to very bad.

The Impala came around a third time. I told my people that. It pulled to the curb three houses down and Rosemary Goldsmith got out with a black man, not light-skinned Delbert “Most Grand” Underhill.

I used a pair of binoculars and studied the car.

“Rosemary and one other are coming to the door,” I said. “I think the rest are all in the car, Mel. You can head out now. And you can make that call, Officer McCourt.”