Rose Gold (2 page)

“So he sent you to take his place?” I asked. I could feel Percy Bidwell starring daggers at my back.

“Mama did. When you called to ask for Dad to help, she send me.”

“How long you been back from Texas?”

“Nine days.”

“You outta all that trouble now?”

“I ain’t in no gang no more,” he said, looking down a little sheepishly.

EttaMae, LaMarque’s mother and Raymond’s wife, had sent the young man down to Texas to work on her brother’s farm for a while. She did that to save the lives of the gang members who had tried to claim him as one of their own. Raymond would have killed them all if she hadn’t interfered.

A car pulled up to the curb just then. It was a dark Ford with four male passengers. Most cars in Southern California transported a solitary driver, a couple, a double date, or a family. Four men in a car most likely spelled trouble if there wasn’t a construction site somewhere in the vicinity.

“Well,” I said to LaMarque while watching the men confer, “you get back to work and I’ll give you twenty dollars to go home with.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. Etta had taught the boy his manners.

LaMarque ducked his head and ran back to the truck.

“Mr. Rawlins,” Percy Bidwell said.

“Yeah, Percy?” I was watching the men as they prepared to disembark.

“About Mr. Middleton.”

“What is it you want with Jason?”

“That’s private,” the young man said.

“Then you better just call him up yourself and leave me out of it.”

“I don’t know him.”

“And I don’t know you.”

“Jewelle told me to tell you to call him.”

“You don’t tell me what to do, son, and neither does Jewelle.”

The four men were out of the car by then. They were all white men, tall, and burly. Three of them wore off-the-rack suits of various dark hues. The eldest, maybe fifty years of age, was dressed in a dark-colored, tailored ensemble that was possibly even silk.

The leader began the stroll up the slight incline of my lawn.

“Easy,” Jackson warned from an upstairs window.

“I see ’em, Blue.”

“Is it all right?”

“I hope so.”

“Mr. Rawlins,” Percy was saying, trying once again to impress his will upon me.

“Either get back to work or go home, Percy,” I said. “I got other things on my mind right now.”

“Mr. Rawlins,” the headman said as he approached the front door of my new home.

My new home
. How did this stranger know where to find me on Moving Day?

“Yes?” I said darkly.

Percy was headed back toward the truck. Jesus put down a hassock he’d been carrying and gazed up at us.

“Roger Frisk,” the white man said, holding out a hand.

I say
white
but Frisk’s skin was actually ruddy pink in color, a mottled salmon.

“Do I know you, Mr. Frisk?” I asked, refusing to take the proffered hand.

When the slighted hand darted under the left-side breast of my visitor’s elegant jacket, I wondered if I should tackle him. After all, he looked like an upscale hood. But I couldn’t imagine some fool driving up in a car, walking to my front door, and then shooting me in broad daylight on a Sunday.

The hand came out with a white business card between its fingers.

I stared at the card like a NATO sentry watching his Russian counterpart handing a note through a chink in the Berlin Wall.

“I’m the special assistant to the Chief of Police,” Frisk said.

I took the card. It said the same thing.

“So?”

“I need to speak with you, Mr. Rawlins.”

“A cop named Frisk?” I replied.

He smiled and gave me a quarter nod over a shoulder roll.

“It’s Sunday and I’m in the middle of a move,” I said. “I can come down to your office say Tuesday afternoon.”

“Maxwell!” Frisk commanded while staring me in the eye. His eyes were green like those of a pet cat that my long-dead mother had, named Speckles.

“Yes, sir,” one of the suits responded as he ran from the sedan up to his boss’s side.

“You, Sturgeon, and Moorcock help Mr. Rawlins’s friends finish off the move.”

“Yes, sir.”

The yes-man in the dark brown suit waved at his fellow cops, pointing toward my twenty-five-foot moving truck. Before I knew it, they were climbing into the back and pulling out furniture and boxes. I suppose I could have stopped them but there were over one hundred boxes of books alone left to move—and the heaviest furniture was yet to come.

“That’s very nice of you, Special Assistant Frisk,” I said, “but it’s still Sunday and I don’t know you from Adam.”

“The police department needs your help, Mr. Rawlins.”

“That may be,” I said, “but I feel no compunction to help them. You know my relationship with the constabulary is tenuous at best.”

I used the upscale language to show Frisk that he couldn’t run roughshod over me, but he just smiled.

“Be that as it may, Mr. Rawlins, I think you will find that it is in your own best interest to concern yourself with our needs.”

“Look, man. I don’t know you. Send Melvin Suggs over here and I will discuss whatever concerns you have with him.”

Suggs was the only Los Angeles cop that I trusted. He was white but he had always been fair with me.

“Detective Suggs is on an extended leave of absence.”

“Wounded?” I asked.

Frisk shook his head in such a way as to let me know that my police contact was in trouble with his masters. This in itself was no surprise to me. Melvin was too smart, in a basic human sense, to last forever in the morally bankrupt LAPD. But the fact that he had been put on
leave without me having any notion of it was the cause of a familiar pang.

This distress was based on the fact that people in L.A. often disappear without anyone noticing. Months, sometimes years later you found yourself wondering, whatever happened to so-and-so? By that time there would be no sign of their passage even for the most seasoned investigator.

But modern-day alienation wasn’t my problem right then.

“Excuse me,” one of the cops-turned-mover said as he carried two heavy boxes of books marked
Encyclopedia
past me and his boss.

“Look, Mr. Frisk,” I said as we shifted onto the lawn. “Today I have this move and after that I have building citations against my properties for code violations. I don’t have the money to pay for the upgrades, exterminations, and fixes and so I’m going to have to do most of it myself.”

“I’m in the chief’s office, Mr. Rawlins,” Frisk said easily. “Every day I’m on the phone with the mayor or one of his top officials. Any city ordinance can be relaxed, even wiped away. At the very least I could make it so that your problems with the city can be put off until such time that you can afford to attend to them.”

Roger Frisk didn’t strike me as being an immediate threat, but he was a danger. Whenever top men left their homes on a weekend to lend a helping hand to a black man, there was danger in the air. I didn’t know how this hazard might show itself but I was hell-bent on avoiding it.

“It’s not just that,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. “Other expenses have come up over the past month, and I have to make some serious money if I want to keep ahead of the curve. Pro bono work for the city won’t get me where I need to be.”

I wasn’t lying. Unknown to me or my daughter, a counselor at her elementary school had given her name to the admissions office of the prestigious private school Ivy Prep. This counselor, a Miss Timmons, had sent Feather’s test scores and grades to the school, and so we had received a letter of acceptance without even applying.

Feather was ecstatic. Ivy Prep would put her education on a whole new trajectory. She could consider Harvard or even Oxford for college.
And all it cost was a mere thirty-five hundred dollars a semester plus books, uniforms, travel, and special events.

“We understand that you have to make a living, sir,” Frisk said in a respectful tone. “There is an independent party that is willing to pay eight thousand dollars for you to take on a missing person’s case, and there will be a twenty-five-hundred-dollar bonus for the satisfactory completion of that situation.”

I was speechless for at least thirty seconds. No policeman had ever offered me money—and I had been stopped, rousted, beaten, and caged by a thousand cops in my years on and near the street.

A black-haired, charcoal-suited cop walked past carrying a red-lacquered Chinese box across the threshold of my new home. I had owned that chest for more than twenty years.

“Well, Mr. Rawlins?” Frisk asked.

It occurred to me that if Melvin was off the force I’d need a new contact. Frisk seemed like a possible candidate.

“What happened with Melvin?” I asked. I really wanted to know, but this was also a test. I didn’t expect to be told the actual circumstances, but even if he held back what had really happened with Suggs, it mattered to me how Frisk answered.

“Detective Suggs was discovered to be in a relationship with a woman that he’d arrested a few months earlier,” Frisk said. “There was no proof of wrongdoing but the department gets very suspicious of liaisons of that nature. He’s under a heavy review. If he quits, the department will drop the investigation; if not, he might be facing jail time.”

It wasn’t unusual for a policeman to show up unexpectedly at my door, maybe even surprising me with a request, but Roger Frisk went beyond surprise—his candor was stunning.

Melvin had admitted to me that he’d been seeing a woman named Mary whom he’d arrested for passing counterfeit one-hundred-dollar bills. Before that bust and without exception, Melvin had been an unkempt and messy dresser. But when he told me about Mary he was wearing a white shirt and a pressed suit that had nary a grease stain. His shoes were shiny and his teeth bright.

Love will spruce up the most disheveled bachelor; like an undertaker would do after that bachelor gets shot in the back.

I’d worry about my friend at another time. Right then my attempt to avoid any meaningful conversation with the special assistant had been scuttled by his offers and his honesty.

“There’s a Cuban diner over on La Cienega,” I said. “We could go over there if you want.”

“Perfect,” Frisk said. “I love Cuban food. I’ll even drive.”

Arturo’s was on the east side of La Cienega, two blocks south of Pico. It was a classic American diner with a facade made from chrome and glass. The parking lot had white-lined slots for six cars and only three of them were occupied. Frisk pulled his dark Mercury Marquis up between a sky blue Pontiac station wagon and a red Chrysler truck.

When he got out of the car he surveyed the street by moving his head from side to side. He was a careful man in a land where most so-called white men took their security for granted.

The restaurant comprised one long counter that sat eight and had a small window for takeout orders. Arturo was somewhere behind the window and Manny, a sparsely whiskered man with black eyes and wearing a bright white T-shirt and pants, worked the counter.

“
Hola
, Señor Rawlins,” Manny hailed. The pale-skinned counterman was in his middle years, somewhere between thirty-five and fifty. He looked both suspicious and friendly, an unstable combination but, I felt, acceptable in the service profession.

“Manny,” I said. “This is Roger Frisk.”

“Welcome,” Manny said.

Frisk surprised us both with a barrage of Spanish in reply. He was very comfortable with the language and Manny responded with verve. I recognized odd words but I was no linguist. When I was a child I spoke Creole French, but that language was now mostly lost to me.

There was an older Spanish couple sitting at the two stools farthest from the street, next to Arturo’s service window. They were drinking beer and eating homemade potato chips from a blue plastic basket.

I moved to the red vinyl stool overlooking La Cienega. Frisk followed slowly, still chattering away with Manny.

When we were both seated I interrupted, saying, “Two deluxe
mixtos
and twelve to go. Also you can add two sweet plantains and four orders of beans and rice.”

“How is Feather?” the counterman asked.

Whenever I ordered plantains he knew it was for her.

“She might be going to this fancy private school if I play my cards right.”

“I’ll ask my wife to pray for her,” Manny said. “Café con leche?”

“For me,” I said.

“Me too,” Frisk added.

Manny went through a crevice into the back to submit my order.

“You come here a lot?” the pink cop asked.

“So what can I do for you, Mr. Frisk?”

He smiled, glad to be getting down to business at last.

“You ever hear of a man named Foster Goldsmith?” he said.

“Goldsmith Armaments,” I said, “International. I read the papers.”

“They got a major research facility out past Arcadia.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

Manny brought our coffees. Frisk thanked him in Spanish.

When the server moved off, Frisk said, “Old Stony Goldsmith is a regular contributor to Sam Yorty’s campaign fund. He’s also involved with many city projects; after-school programs, charity donations, he even plans to build a new wing at L.A. Hospital.”

“A regular robber baron.”

Frisk didn’t like that jab. At least, I thought, he had some kind of value system.

“Goldsmith is a very important citizen in City Hall’s eyes,” he said.

Then our pressed sandwiches came. I was hungry and took a bite before commenting.

“Goldsmith has a problem?” I asked.

“America has a problem,” Frisk said. “With all these hippies, anarchists, communists, and criminals, we have to keep a close watch on our democracy if we want to stay being free.”

This was a new topic of conversation between white men and black in America. There was a time, a time I could remember, when Negroes
were not considered full citizens. Patriotism was not expected from us; and, in return, the majority of our people were denied the vote.

While times were slowly changing, my memories remained. But I didn’t feel like arguing with Frisk. If he actually believed what he was saying there would be no changing his mind. Though I suspected, by the way he was talking, that he was just mouthing these catchphrases. He was a pragmatist saying the words that his superiors liked hearing.