Rose Gold (7 page)

When I got to Motor and Pico I pulled to the curb and took in a deep breath. At some point, I wasn’t sure exactly when, I had lost the thread of my chosen profession. I was off-kilter. Hardcase Latour heard it in
my words, saw it in my gestures. It had marked me as the target for an unknown assassin on a city street.

I rubbed the middle finger of my right hand across the scab that had formed on my cheek. For some reason I sniffed the tip of that finger. There was no odor but I was reminded of the strong scent of garlic.

My mother kept a garlic patch behind our shanty shack in New Iberia, Louisiana, when I was a child. Sometimes I’d go out there in the afternoon while my mother was cooking. I’d pull out a bulb, break off a section, and bite into it. The garlic was so strong that it would burn my mouth. Tears came from my closed eyes but I didn’t cry out. My father said that garlic was too strong to eat raw. He couldn’t do it but I could.

I’d bring the rest of the clove to my mother because she was always using garlic in whatever meal she was cooking.

“I got this for ya, Mama,” I’d say, gleefully aware that I had bested my old man and no one even knew it.

That memory was all I needed. I took another deep breath and I was back in alignment. Like the junker I was driving, I was both new and seasoned.

I came to a cube-shaped apartment building, slathered in violet-tinted plaster, on Sutter Street toward the southern border of Culver City.

Three stories high, the building housed five apartments, one unit covering the first floor and four smaller living spaces making up floors two and three.

Melvin Suggs lived in the bottom unit. Next to his front door was a staircase that led to the other apartments.

Melvin’s door had an official eviction notice nailed to it.

I knocked.

It was a lovely August morning. The jays and robins, sparrows, and a few pigeons flitted and waddled, sang and searched for food.

I knocked again.

A large cockroach was staggering around the white concrete path that led to Melvin’s door. A young sparrow swooped down and grabbed one of the insect’s hind legs. The tug-of-war between them was a
drama of the highest order. This was life and death in its rawest, most naked form.

After half a minute of struggle the sparrow let go of the roach’s foot, hopped over the bug, and pecked at its head. The roach scuttled halfway into the overgrown lawn, where its nemesis clamped its beak on his leg again. They seemed to be of equal strength, but the sparrow had youth on its side where the huge cockroach gave the impression of old age.

The fight made me nervous. I wanted to protect the roach.

The roach made it a few more millimeters into the brush. The sparrow was flapping its wings furiously.

I might have moved to scare the bird off but I heard the door coming open behind me.

“Rawlins?” a familiar gruff voice said.

I didn’t want to turn away from the drama but I had my own struggles to be concerned with.

Melvin was maybe five-nine, four inches shorter than I, but we weighed the same. He wasn’t so much fat as bulky, with a squashed face, lovely doe-brown eyes, and powerful hands. He was wearing blue-striped boxer shorts and a gray T-shirt with a dozen tiny tears across the front. His basic brown hair had a few more strands of gray than at our last encounter. The unruly mop was getting longer and he hadn’t brushed it yet that day. The only concession he had made to civility was to step into a pair of dilapidated brown slippers.

“Mornin’, Melvin.”

“How’d you know where I lived?” he asked.

“Guy named Gilly used to make bottled water deliveries in this neighborhood. He’s a friend of a friend who knew I knew you. You’re famous among the brothers, Mr. Suggs. The only white cop we know of that would never call us a nigger.”

He glowered at me. “Why are you here?”

“I heard you were in some kind of trouble.”

“What the hell does that have to do with you?”

“My source told me that you were facing jail time if you didn’t resign.”

“Who said that?” Suggs asked the question as if the notion was ridiculous.

“Roger Frisk.”

Suggs’s shoulders dropped half an inch and his mouth went slack.

“I don’t believe it.”

“I never lie to you, Melvin. You’re my favorite cop.”

“So? What do you want?”

“I was thinkin’ maybe we could help each other out.”

“How can you help me?”

“My father told me when I was a boy,” I said, “ ‘Ezekiel, when you’re in trouble the first thing you look for is somebody that wants to help you. Because that want alone is half the way home.’ ”

Suggs was built like an oaf but that rough exterior was blessed with a razor-sharp mind. He knew that I represented at least a chance at hope.

He grunted and snorted like that old cockroach might have done while rooting through the garbage. There was a predator yanking at his leg and he needed a miracle no matter where it came from.

“Come on in, Easy,” he said. “You know the doctors are saying that too much sunlight might give you cancer.”

Suggs’s living room was in shambles. It consisted of a blue sofa, a dark red stuffed chair, and a four-foot-square coffee table that was light brown and frosted, like a maple-glazed cake doughnut. There were half a dozen white boxes from Chinese takeout on that table. On the other side of the room, across from the blue sofa, was a portable TV on a folding pine chair just like the temporary setup my daughter and I had the night before. There were socks and shoes, T-shirts and underwear, newspapers, books, and even a .45 revolver strewn upon the tan carpet.

A thin layer of dust covered everything and there was a sour tang on the air.

“Have a seat, Easy,” Suggs said.

Walking to the red chair, I heard the carpet crunch under my feet.

“You want me to make you some instant?” the gruff cop offered.

“No thanks, Melvin, I already had my jolt this morning.”

I sat down and put my hands on my knees.

He stared at me for a few seconds. I imagined that I was his first guest in many days. He was trying to recall how to be a host in his own home.

“Why don’t you sit, Melvin?” I said.

He regarded the sofa for a moment before sitting down at the end farthest from my chair.

“Dodgers lost last night,” he said. “Back east somewhere. I said when Koufax quit that they were in deep shit.”

I knew men that had gone senile and forgotten their children’s names but they could still reel off sports scores from a dozen years before.

“Why’s the LAPD on your ass, Melvin?”

He jerked his head as if he’d been slapped.

“What’d they say?” he countered.

“That you hooked up with a woman you arrested.”

He squinted at the words as if they were bright, cancer-inducing sunbeams.

Then he nodded and said, “Mary Donovan. Seven months ago. I arrested her for passing bad hundred-dollar bills at a fancy downtown clothes shop. It wasn’t even my beat. I was covering for a guy had appendicitis. Just followed the numbers to her door in West Hollywood. Just followed the numbers.”

“And you had a thing?” I asked.

On the wall behind Melvin I saw a line of tiny black ants that had discovered the trove created by his despair. He had been looking down upon the dirty carpet, but when I asked about his connection he raised his head, fixing me with a confused stare.

“I’m in love with her, Easy.” These words tore from his throat. “I’m in love with her,” he said again, “and she’s gone.”

He didn’t care about the ants, the eviction notice, the police investigation, or even the possibility of going to jail. He probably hadn’t bathed in a week, hadn’t cut his hair in a month. Melvin Suggs, as cynical a man as I had ever met, was, maybe for the first time in his life, heartbroken.

At that moment I felt, keenly, that he and I were of the same race despite any color schemes.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “One day we were drinking Champale on a blanket at Redondo Beach and the next she was gone.”

Moving Day
.

“She was gone and a week later I got suspended,” Melvin was saying. “I hadn’t been to work for days. They said that I was on forced leave without pay and subject to review for conduct unbecoming an officer. I wasn’t even positive what they were looking for until you just told me.”

“You knew that you let Mary off.”

“I would have,” he said. “I would have, sure, but I didn’t need to. I couldn’t prove intent. She’d taken a thousand dollars in hundred-dollar
bills out of a downtown Bank of America three days before I busted her. Even a court-appointed attorney could have claimed that she got the boodle from the bank without knowing what it was.”

“You think her disappearance had anything to do with your troubles?” I asked. I had to.

“No,” he said, shaking his head like an old Roman general after his last defeat. “No. We were good together, Easy. I know her.”

He slumped back on the sofa and stared out over the detritus of his coffee table.

The problem was him and possible charges by the police department. But all Melvin cared about was the woman that had probably betrayed him.

“I’m on a case, Mel.”

“Yeah?” he said, not looking at me.

“Missing girl.”

He grunted.

“You help me with that and I will find your Mary Donovan.”

That got his attention. He looked up warily.

“How would you do that?”

“I’m good at what I do, Detective,” I said. “They don’t see me comin’, don’t know when I’m there, and couldn’t tell you when I left. People so worried about my threat that they don’t see the danger.”

Suggs was a smart man who liked smart men. He was a fool for love but if you have to be a fool that’s the best way to go.

“You can find her?” he asked, a child in his voice.

“Frisk said that if you quit the force, jail time would be off the table,” I said.

“Fuck that. I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “Can you find her?”

“I can do my level best.”

“What do you need from me?”

“Some police work and some personal things.”

“What’s the police work?” the cop asked.

“Roger Frisk came to my door yesterday when I was moving into a new place. He told me that he was looking for a girl named Rosemary Goldsmith, said that she had been in the company of a broken-down boxer named Bob Mantle. I tried to turn him down but he insisted. He
finally persuaded me and sent a guy named Tout Manning to give me what I needed to move forward.”

I went on to tell him about Benoit’s Gym and the attack. I didn’t waste time complaining about the police interrogation. We both knew that the game was hardball in the street.

When I was finished Melvin said, “Frisk is who he says he is. He’s high up on the chart and there’s nobody above him except the chief. I never heard of this Manning guy. But Bob Mantle … you hit a note with him.”

“What kinda note?”

“The kind they tie to a dead man’s toe.”

I waited while Suggs put the story together in his head.

“Mantle has an alias,” he said after a minute or so, “Uhuru Nolicé.”

The senseless shout that accompanied the shots took form in my mind.

“He’s suspected in the shooting death of a high-school vice principal in Watts,” Melvin reported. “A guy named Emerson, I think. Then there’s an armored car heist in Burbank, and finally a shootout that left three cops dead in Watts.”

I knew about all three crimes. They were front-page news.

“They weren’t connected in the papers,” I said.

“No. The only connection was a telephone call and a letter, both to Bill Tarkingham at the
Herald Examiner
. The call claimed that the vice principal deserved death because he was a traitor to his people. About a week later a letter made of letters cut out from magazines was delivered to Tarkingham. It claimed responsibility for being the mastermind of the shootout. On the phone the caller said he was Uhuru Nolicé. The letter had that name glued to the bottom.”

“What’s that have to do with Bob Mantle?”

“When he was a student at Metro College he became politically active and started going by the name Uhuru Nolicé. He would dress up in African robes and give fiery speeches in the student union. Nobody paid any attention officially until the telephone call but by then he had gone underground.”

The ants were still marching down the wall behind Melvin. Their relentlessness felt somehow daunting.

“Why didn’t Tarkingham report on all this?” I asked.

“He told his editor,” Suggs said, “but because there was no actual confession it wasn’t considered newsworthy. After the letter his boss had a meeting with Chief Parker. They decided to hold back until the police could get a handle on the case. They didn’t want to erode public confidence in the LAPD, and there was some concern that Mantle would be hailed as a hero in some parts of the colored community.”

“He killed those three cops?”

“That’s what the brass thinks.”

“Why? I mean, it was a crank letter made from cutouts. Were there fingerprints?”

“I don’t think so,” Melvin said. He sat up straighter when talking about the details of his profession. “But there were details about the killings that were never in the news … and nobody outside of Tarkingham and Parker’s office knew the name Nolicé.”

“How do you know all this, Melvin? Aren’t you on probation?”

“I got my contacts.”

“And so what am I to Frisk and Manning? Like a sacrificial lamb or somethin’?”

“You are the man to go to if they want their finger on the jugular of the colored community.”

I closed my eyes and brought my hands to the top of my forehead. I wished, irrationally, that I had not come to Melvin; that I had not heard about the killings and Uhuru Nolicé. But I knew that ignorance couldn’t save me. Maybe nothing could.

“You got a cigarette, Melvin?”

“In the kitchen. I’ll go get it.”

He went through an arched doorway that had no door. I reached into my gym bag, into a secret sleeve under a Velcro strip that the police had missed, and came out with an envelope I had thought I might need before the day was up.