Rose Gold (21 page)

“Easy. What can I do you for?”

“Could you and Jewelle keep Feather one more night? My day might get pretty long.”

“Sure. Jewelle loves that girl. They sat up nearly all night talkin’.”

“Is Feather up?”

“Naw. She still sleep. Jewelle is too. She don’t usually go in to work till after nine.”

“I’ll make sure that Percy leaves you and Jewelle alone, Blue. Don’t you worry ’bout that.”

“Thanks, Ease. You always come through, man.”

Behind the high hedge, in the circular driveway in front of Terry Aldrich’s house, I was barely out of the car before Coco appeared carrying two flat seat cushions. She had the pads hugged to her chest and was wearing a one-piece tie-dyed dress that was red, yellow, and green—mostly. She was dressed perfectly for the job.

“Hi, Easy,” she said in a friendly tone.

“Hi, Easy,” a young male voice echoed.

Coming after Coco was the teenaged hippie who owned the mansion/commune. He was barefoot, wearing jeans and a torn white T-shirt. Terry was tall and thin and ugly. His stringy dirty blond hair
came down a foot or so below the shoulder. His nose was bulbous and he’d been scarred by repeated attacks of acne. None of this seemed to bother him, though. He enjoyed his life and seemed somehow blessed with luck while instinctively managing not to be blinded by it.

“Terry,” I said.

“I gave Coco my special seat cushions. It’ll make your ride easier.”

“Okay,” I said. I had the manners not to insult a gift, no matter how insignificant.

For most of the drive Coco’s palaver was about Jo and how wonderful and smart and transcendent she was.

“She has this paste that she can put on a cut and it heals in less than a day and a half,” she said at one point.

“I know.”

“You do?”

“Yes, I’ve known Jo longer than you’ve been breathing.”

I tried not to take away all of her excitement, however. I appreciated new love and also I needed to keep Coco friendly for the task at hand.

The tenor of her talk changed when we neared Isla Vista and the UCSB campus.

“So what do you need to know about this girl, exactly?”

Before I could answer a siren began its wail. The Highway Patrol car was in my rearview mirror reminding me of who I was, whom I was with, and where I could end up if I wasn’t careful. While I was pulling onto the shoulder at the side of the highway, Coco got up on her knees in the seat, looked out the back window, and said, “Oh, shit.”

“You got any drugs on you?” I asked.

“No,” she said in a tentative tone.

“ID?”

“Driver’s license.”

A few moments later the highway cops were at our respective doors, hands on their guns.

I rolled my window down and said, “Hello, Officer, I wasn’t speeding, was I?”

“Get out of the car.” I noted that he didn’t say
sir
or
please
.

I complied. Coco tried to open her door but her personal policeman said, “Not you.”

“Arms up at your side,” my cop told me. He was tall and gaunt, white of course, and green-eyed.

He patted me down. I could have gotten him then. With my training I could have kneed him, taken his weapon, turned, and shot his partner before wheeling back to kill him. These thoughts were so real in my mind that they were just an inch away from becoming reality.

“ID,” my thin antagonist demanded.

I took my driver’s and PI’s licenses from my tan jacket pocket. He read both quite closely.

By this time the other patrolman, who was paunchy and shorter, allowed Coco to get out. He was going through her purse and asking her questions that I couldn’t make out over the sounds of passing cars on the highway and waves from the surf.

“What are you two doing here?” my cop asked.

“Terry,” I said, “my friend from down in L.A., wanted me to give Helen a ride. She’s going to stay with some friends of his on an organic farm up here.”

Coco and I had decided on this story in between her long and rambling elegy of love to Jo. I was expecting the law to stop us. I’m always expecting that.

“What’s the name of this farm?” the cop asked.

“Nugent Farm,” I said. I knew from a previous encounter with the hippies that this was where they often got their eggs.

“That was two turnoffs back.”

“I realize that now,” I said. “We were going to go down to Isla Vista and get there through back roads.”

I looked the man in the eye. He hated that. But if I had cast my gaze downward he would have suspected that I was guilty of something. This way all I got was his ire.

“You two go stand over next to the rocks,” he said. “Henderson.”

“Yeah, Harley?” the other cop answered.

“Watch them while I search the vehicle.”

There was a sandstone mountain at the side of the highway. Coco
and I waited there while the chubby cop called Henderson stood between us and the car.

Again I worked out a plan to incapacitate my warden, killing him and his partner. If it was nighttime and I was Raymond Alexander they would both most certainly be dead.

The patrolman named Harley searched the front and back seats, investigated the cushions that Coco and I had been sitting on, and every paper in my glove compartment.

“You suck black dick?” Henderson asked Coco.

Harley used my key on the trunk. I held my breath, standing as I was between a rock and a hard place.

The rock was Coco’s temper. I’d seen her get angry before.

The hard place was a .32-caliber pistol I had put in the trunk, thinking that the cops, if they stopped me, probably wouldn’t look back there.

“I went to this club once in Frisco,” Henderson was saying, “where they had this girl younger’n you suck on three black dicks at the same time.”

Harley pulled out the leather medical bag I used to carry my piece.

“They came all over her,” Henderson continued. “You ever been there? It’s called the Black Pussy but they should have called it the White Cunt.”

I was beginning to think that a double murder was my only way out of that jam.

“What’s this?” Harley said, holding up the leather bag.

“The license is right in there with it,” I said, partly relieved that Henderson was distracted from his insults. “California license. Permit to carry but I like to be careful and so I keep it in the trunk.”

“Whoa,” Henderson said when his partner approached us and pulled the pistol from the bag.

“Has it been fired recently?” Harley asked.

“No.”

“Smells like it.”

“No, sir. I clean my pistols once a month. You know a dirty gun can blow up in your hand.”

My words made Harley’s eyes tighten. The fact that I shared some kind of point of view with him caused me to come more into focus than he would have liked.

“Why do you need a gun to give a girl a ride?” he asked. “What she need a detective for anyway?”

“Terry’s a friend. And I have the gun because when I get back down to L.A. I’ll be on the job for Roger Frisk, special assistant to Chief Parker. Call down there and they will confirm that.”

“You have a number?”

“LAPD,” I said. “Chief Parker’s office.”

“Go make the call, Sammy,” Harley said to Henderson.

“But, Harl, I was talkin’ to the girl. I think she likes me.”

“Make the call, Sammy.”

Fifteen minutes later we were on our cushions again.

Frisk, or maybe Tout, had told Henderson that he didn’t know why I was up there but I was doing a job for him. They let us go but, as had always been the case, I could have spent the next five years incarcerated for real and imagined crimes.

“Did you hear what that fat bastard was saying to me?” Coco said as soon as we were on our way.

“Yes I did.”

“I could have killed him.”

“If I killed every man who had insulted me and mine I’d be shoulder-deep in corpses from here to Nugent Farm.”

“How can you live with people treating you like that?”

“You know, Coco, some questions just don’t have answers.”

We parked in front of an Isla Vista branch of the Bank of America. There I consulted my atlas.

“So we’re going to this girl’s house?” Coco asked while I perused.

“Yeah.”

“But she’s missing, right?”

“The police think that she’s been missing from her dorm for two weeks or more, but really she’s been staying at this house in town. It’s a house full’a students and other young people not in school. Her mother told me that she used to have a friend there name of Willa Muldoon. Willa’s doing a year abroad. All you have to do is mention that you went to boarding school with Willa at Thurgood Academy for Young Women, and that should get your foot in the door.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Look, Coco, I don’t think this is at all dangerous. I’d just like to find out what they know about Rose, her friends call her that, and maybe Bob Mantle if you can. He’s a black man in his early thirties who used to be a boxer and now talks all radical. They might be calling him Uhuru Nolicé.”

When I figured out how to get to the address on Rancho Terrace, I put the Dodge into drive and rolled on. We drove no more than a mile in the winding sub-suburban landscape.

I cruised down Rosemary’s block, pointing out the house to Coco as we went by.

It was a boxy two-story place that had once been white with green trim. Now the colors were turning gray. The lawn was bare in some places and overgrown in others. There was a brown couch out on the
porch, and the front door looked as if it might have always been open wide.

When we’d parked, a block away, Coco looked up and down the street to see if anyone was coming, and, when she was sure that we were alone, she pulled the cushion out from under her and put it in her lap.

“Give me yours,” she said.

While I lifted up to get my flat pillow, Coco cut along the seam of hers with a very small, very sharp pocketknife and pulled out a tightly wadded plastic bag of dried, dark green leaves.

“Dope?” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“You said you didn’t have any.”

“You asked if I had any on me.”

“What you need that for?”

“I told Terry that I was going to ask some college students questions for you. He likes you and so he gave me these cushions that he always uses to keep his private stash on trips and stuff. He said I’d make a lotta friends with this.”

While she was talking she cut open my pad and pulled out two more packets. These she put into her purple cloth purse/shoulder bag.

“You got that phone number I gave you?” I asked.

“Memorized and written down.”

“I might throw these things away now that they’re sliced open,” I said. “You know if I get stopped again they’re bound to ask what was inside.”

“Okay.” She leaned over and kissed me on the lips.

I took this kiss as a thank-you from a woman who had problems with men. Maybe she saw how I noticed her figure and refrained from making a move.

I drove down to a deserted beach, parked my car in a lot that had a phone booth, took a small bag of change from the doctor’s bag in the
trunk, and walked halfway to the water, where I plunked down on the packed sand and started rereading, for the sixth or seventh time,
The Grapes of Wrath
.

“Readin’ good books is like meetin’ a girl you wanna get to know bettah,” Jackson Blue once told me. “You don’t just have one talk and think you know her. If that was true there wouldn’t be no need to get to know more; it wouldn’t be worf it. Naw, man, you wanna talk to that girl again and again. You remember her phone number and every time you talk you find out somethin’ else. Same thing with a good book. You got to read that suckah again and again and still you findin’ out sumpin’ new every time.”

I liked the way Steinbeck understood the plight of a man displaced by nature and society, men like my ancestors, their friends, and heirs. I enjoyed the preacher best of all because he took that whole struggle up to a metaphysical level. It was the same with my people.

Every hour or so I’d call down to an answering service I maintained in L.A.

“What name?” the female operator would answer.

“Rawlins, Ezekiel.”

“Password?”

“Porterhouse.” That was my middle name.

“No messages,” she said at four, five, six, and seven o’clock.

I paid the premium price for the service so I could have called every five minutes if I wanted.

At five fifteen I got a chill and moved up to the car. I could have kept reading about the Joads and their familiar predicament but there was an unlikely soul station on the radio up there and so instead I listened to James Brown, Little Anthony, Aretha Franklin, and the Supremes while closing my eyes, trying to imagine making some kind of headway on the mostly unwanted case.

I felt like a Bum of the Month throwing his name in the hat for a showdown with the Brown Bomber; a black man in Mississippi hoping for a rendezvous with some crazy white girl; the father of a son called off to fight and die in Vietnam.…

At eight o’clock the operator said, “A Miss Helen Ray just called.
She said that you could pick her up where you dropped her off in half an hour.”

“At eight thirty?” I asked.

“That’s what she said.”

“Thank you very much,” I said, and then added out of civility, “You must be gettin’ near to quittin’ time.”

“Don’t I wish,” she said. “Lana got laryngitis and I have to pull a double shift. But at least there’s time and a half I can look forward to.”

“Maybe you could take a day off,” I suggested.

“Maybe I could pay the rent on time for once.”

I parked at the very spot where I left Coco off. I sat there for fifteen minutes imagining all kinds of trouble. Maybe she wouldn’t come and I’d have to get my pistol and go to the house to pry her loose. Maybe the cops would grab me for suspicious behavior and she’d have nowhere to go. Maybe, maybe she’d get to the car and the cops would find the dope in her purse.

When the knock came on my window I almost jumped; maybe I did a little.

There was Coco in her tie-dyed splendor smiling.

I motioned for her to go around and get in.