Rose Gold (13 page)

“I’m waiting,” I said again.

“I’ll only be a minute,” he said.

And then the phone rang.

“Easy?” Melvin Suggs said.

“Yeah, Mel.”

“You got a pencil and paper?”

“Right here.”

I took the small notepad and Bic pen from my breast pocket and wrote down an address on Hoover.

“That’s for Belle Mantle,” Suggs said, “his mother. She’s the only blood relative currently residing in Los Angeles, at least that the department has on file. He has a cousin that lives in L.A. sometimes but right now he’s overseas in the military.”

“Thanks, Mel,” I said. “You mind if I ask you to run a partial license plate past your friend?”

“Sure. But it might take some time.”

“California plates. A-X-I were the first three characters,” I said. “Then there was a two. I didn’t get the last two digits. But it was a gold Ford Fairlane.”

“Got it,” he said, and then he hung up; going off to continue with his morning vomit, no doubt.

“Excuse me,” a man said.

It was a policeman. He stood there with a partner and the angry white woman. The man in the straw hat was gone. I wondered, while taking in my latest visitors, if the young black woman had gotten in touch with her aunt.

“Yes, Officer?”

“This woman said you threatened her.”

“She did?”

“Yes.”

I produced my detective’s photo ID from the outside breast pocket of my jacket.

“Easy Rawlins,” I said. “I’m on the job for the LAPD. Call a man named Tout Manning in Roger Frisk’s office. He’ll vouch for me.”

“This call had to do with that job?” the freckle-faced and beefy policeman asked, pointing at the pay phone.

“Yes, sir.”

“Dwight,” the one cop said to the other.

“Yeah?”

“Call it in.”

“Okay.”

“What are you talking about?” the white woman said in a very stern, almost loud voice.

“We’re checking out his story, ma’am.”

“There’s no story. He assaulted me.”

“He hit you?”

“With words,” she said. “He assaulted me with words. He threatened me. He blocked my passage. I want you to arrest him.”

“Make the call, Dwight.”

“I want your name and ID number,” the woman demanded of the policeman not named Dwight.

“Can I see your identification, ma’am?” he replied.

“My, my …” She turned away again and stomped off.

The officer watched her for a moment and then handed me my PI’s license.

“I’m sorry about that, Mr. Rawlins,” he said. “When a civilian comes to us with a complaint we have to ask some questions.”

“That’s okay by me,” I said. “I got plenty of answers.”

“Excuse me, mistah,” a familiar voice said.

I was walking toward Point View.

The young woman who had to call her aunt wore a short, dark blue, one-piece dress. The tones of the dress and her dark brown skin were almost equal, suggesting the image of what she might look like naked. She carried a pink plastic purse and wore a thin silver band on the index finger of her left hand.

“Yes?” I said.

We had stopped there at the southwest corner of Crescent Heights and Pico.

“I wanted to thank you for givin’ me the money to call my Auntie Lee.”

“You already thanked me. Was she home?”

“She always home. Auntie Lee got arthritis in her legs an’ she hardly go nowhere.”

“Was it a good talk?” I had a soft spot for people from down home. Los Angeles was like the New World for Southern black immigrants as much as New York must have been for the Italians, Irishmen, and Jews at the turn of the century and before.

“Her father, Granddaddy Arnold, is in the hospital. I called her to ask him for help and she ended up askin’ me to go help him.”

Tears that refused to fall flooded her eyes. She was angry, sad, and lost all at once. For some reason I thought of the door labeled
COMBUSTIBLES
in Stony Goldsmith’s underground weapons research fortress.

“What’s your name?” I asked the young woman.

“Natalie,” she said. “Natalie Crocker.”

“My name’s Easy Rawlins,” I said.

We shook hands.

“Do you know how to clean houses, Natalie?”

“Of course.”

I took out my little wire-bound notepad and scribbled a number and a name. I tore out the page and handed it to her.

“Julie?” she said in an attempt at phonetically sounding out the word
J-e-w-e-l-l-e
.

“No,” I said. “Jewel like a diamond.”

“Who is she?”

“She owns an apartment building up in Beverly Hills where they let out the place by the week to businessmen and people in the movie business. After they move out she has people come in and clean up. Tell her that Easy Rawlins told you to call. And here,” I said, handing her two ten-dollar bills. “Use this to keep yourself together until you get the job.”

“Why?” she asked. The question didn’t need elaboration.

“It’s nice to find a little bit of down home in a new place.”

Her nostrils flared and once again she became wary.

“Call her,” I said. “If you don’t trust what you hear, buy a newspaper. There’s a thousand jobs listed every day in Southern California.”

I turned and headed for my new house.

Belle Mantle lived on South Hoover near Gage, down the block from the Good Shepherd Baptist Church. It was a single-story flat-topped bungalow, dirty pink in hue. It looked more like an incinerator building for some large manufacturing company than it did a residence. This industrial cottage consisted of two apartments; I could tell that by the two mailboxes standing on weathered posts at the outer edge of the barren lawn, that and the two front doors set side by side at the middle of the building—Belle was the door on the left.

I knocked and waited, knocked again.

“Yes?”

“Ms. Mantle?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Easy Rawlins and I’ve come to ask you some questions about your son.”

“I don’t know anything,” she said. Her words could have been the first sentence in a French-existentialist monograph. I smiled at that.

“Please, ma’am, it’s just a few questions.”

“Who are you?”

“Easy Rawlins,” I said. “I’m a private detective.”

“What do you want?”

“Do you attend Good Shepherd?”

“Yes,” she said. There was reluctance in her tone because with those words I was insinuating myself into her life.

“Is Wanda Bateman still Reverend Atkins’s aide?”

“You know Wanda?”

“Why don’t you call her and ask about Easy Rawlins. I know Wanda
and
Francis Atkins too.”

“You wait here,” she said through the closed door.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Wanda says that she didn’t send you,” the woman’s voice said a few minutes later.

“She didn’t,” I agreed, “but I bet she also told you that I’m a good man who doesn’t try to hurt my black brothers and sisters.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to talk to you about your son.”

A few moments more passed and then the chain rattled and more than one latch clicked. The brown door in the dirty pink wall pulled inward. In the shadowy room stood a buttery brown woman in a full-length gray-green dress that had big yellow buttons down the front. She was barefoot and wore white-rimmed glasses.

“Do you know my son, Mr. Rawlins?”

“I only ever saw him box, Ms. Mantle.”

She couldn’t help but smile.

“His father should have never given him them boxin’ gloves,” she
said. “He wasn’t meant to be no boxer but he sure did love it when he put them gloves on.”

“May I come in?”

The small sitting room was almost a perfect cube. It had only one small and heavily curtained window. Three padded turquoise chairs were set in a semicircle around a low walnut coffee table. There was a partially completed twelve-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle of the Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of the broad table. The box was on the floor.

“I don’t have nuthin’ to offer,” she said after we were seated.

“That’s okay. I’m only here to ask about your son.”

“I already talked to them other policemen, Detective,” she said. “I told them that I don’t know nuthin’ about where Bobby is but he didn’t do nuthin’ wrong.”

“LAPD has already been here?” I asked.

“They was policemen in suits like you. They had badges and cards with pictures on ’em but I didn’t have my readin’ glasses.”

“Do you remember their names?”

“No, sir. How do you know Minister Atkins?”

I knew Atkins because, a dozen years before, the married minister had had an affair with a young woman named Doris Mayhew. Doris had become pregnant by Francis and was blackmailing him. The congregation would have splintered if they knew about the liaison and so going to the police was out of the question.

After a day and a half of nosing around I learned from Doris’s half sister, Maxine, that their mother, Lainie Mayhew, was devout in her beliefs in God and the right of a black man to make it in this world. I called down to Arkansas to the Hartwells, neighbors of Lainie Mayhew, and had them bring her to the phone. I told the pious Lainie about her daughter and sent her a Greyhound bus ticket to ride back to L.A. and confront Doris.

It worked out well enough. Francis agreed on child support and Doris moved back to Texarkana.

That was how I knew Francis Atkins but I couldn’t share that story with Belle Mantle.

“He hired me to help a young mother whose wayward daughter was lost in the big city of Los Angeles. I was able to get her to go back home and start a family.”

“That’s strange,” Belle said.

“What is?”

“You don’t evah think about a detective doin’ the Lord’s work.”

“Mysterious ways,” I replied.

“Are you here doin’ the Lord’s work for Bobby?” she asked.

“I need to find him before I can tell you that.”

“What you want with him?”

“The police say that he’s been involved with robbery, murder, and kidnapping,” I said. “I’ve asked around and there’s some people who don’t think that he’s done a thing.”

“He haven’t,” Belle Mantle said with a mother’s conviction.

“How do you know that, ma’am?”

“They say he was the one in that shootout where the police got killed, right?”

“Yes.”

“Three days after that shootin’, that was Thursday, Bob was here with me in this room doin’ a fifteen-hunnert-piece jigsaw puzzle of the Eiffel Tower.”

“So?”

“He was wearin’ a white T-shirt and brown pants.”

“And that means he didn’t kill anybody?”

“Bob has played dress-up since he was a child, Detective Rawlins. If he put on a fireman’s hat he was a fireman until that hat came off. Whenevah I wanted him to water the backyard I just put that hat on ’im and told him the fire hose was out back. His daddy give him boxin’ gloves and he was a boxer until the day they banned him from the ring. If he had done that killin’ I would’a seen it by what he was wearin’. He wouldn’t have been able to even put on those jigsaw puzzle clothes if he had kilt anybody. He likes to pretend and once he starts he cain’t stop till whatever story he’s dreamin’ is ovah.”

“He became a real boxer,” I suggested.

“An’ once he did he carried his trunks and his gloves everywhere he went. When he came ovah here to help me with my puzzle he didn’t
have no guns or weapons. He was just glad to sit on the flo’ an’ look for the right piece.”

“Where does he live?”

“Here since he quit boxin’. He goin’ to Metro College, though. He wants to be a actor but first he gonna learn how to be a bookkeeper. I told him that he had to have a way to pay the rent because I nevah see more than two Negro actors on the TV in a week’s time.”

“So he lives here with you?”

“Yes, sir,” she said with almost no hesitation.

“Has he been here for the past two weeks?”

She twisted her face away, avoiding my scrutiny by concentrating on the puzzle.

“I can’t help him if I don’t know the truth, ma’am.”

“He been runnin’ with this new friend’a his.”

“Who’s that?”

“A white boy name of Youri, sumpin’ like that. I don’t like him much. I told Bobby that. But he still spend most the time with him, except that one night we did the puzzle. Other than that night he done slept out. I don’t know what he been doin’ but I swear he ain’t killed or kidnapped nobody. If he had why haven’t Jerry Dunphy said so on the news?”

“Will you let me look in his room?”

“So you can arrest him?”

“Listen, Belle, I’m a private detective. I’m workin’ with the police but I’m not part of them. If Bob committed a crime I can’t lie about that but you and I both know that if the cops find Bob they will shoot first. They will kill your son. If he’s innocent I’ll try and prove it. If he’s guilty I’ll make sure that he doesn’t get gunned down like a dog.”

The words I spoke fully encompassed the world we lived in; she knew that.

Belle stood in the hallway while I went through her son’s things. The room wasn’t large enough for the both of us. It was the size of a janitor’s hopper room. There were box springs under a single mattress for a bed, with a drab green army-surplus trunk next to it. The trunk worked as both his night table and his closet. The window that looked out on the backyard wasn’t wide enough for a man to squeeze through, giving his bedroom the feel of a jail cell.

Nailed to the wall over the bed was a cork bulletin board, four feet wide and three high. Upon the board were tacked pictures cut from magazines, newspapers, books, and comic books; photographs and drawings of men in all kinds of uniform. There were soldiers of differing rank from private to general, a policeman, a football player, Green Lantern, a head chef, an Eskimo, a Catholic priest, a rodeo rider, and many others.

The bed was made and the oak floor swept.

“You clean up in here, ma’am?” I asked.

“Not really, Detective. Bob has always been very neat and orderly. I only made up his bed again after the police pulled it apart.”

“Interesting bulletin board.”

“He don’t have no girls up there but he likes girls. It’s just that he looks at clothes and thinks that’s what it takes to be somethin’. He always told me that clothes make the man.”