Rose Gold (25 page)

“Mary Donovan?”

The smile went away. I was sad to see it go.

“I’m out of it,” she said, raising her hands in a halfhearted surrender.

“I’m sure you want to be and I’m not here for that anyway.”

“Then what?”

“I’m here because Melvin Suggs doesn’t have the common sense of an alley cat.”

That got her to smile again. She even showed some teeth.

“What’s your first name, Mr. Rawlins?” she asked.

“Easy.” I could have lied but this was the kind of woman that you wanted to speak your name.

“Come on in, Easy.”

The inside of the trailer was reminiscent of a dollhouse. The furniture was small but still too large for the one-room movable home.

“Sit,” she said, and I perched on the violet-colored love seat.

She sat opposite me on a stuffed red chair, placing her right foot under a bare left thigh.

“Well?” she asked.

“Mel’s been suspended.”

“Oh.” She seemed really upset. “Because of me?”

I nodded.

“Is there something I can do for him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you could but he doesn’t seem to care about losin’ his job. They’re tryin’ to send him to jail but he’s not concerned about that either.”

“Did he send you?”

“I’m a private detective. Mel agreed to help me on another case if I found you and told you that he wants you back.”

She winced slightly and frowned a little harder.

“You know about us?” she asked.

“You were spending hundred-dollar bills where Ben Franklin had a runny nose. He busted you but …”

She nodded and said, “When he arrested me I pretended to be afraid, just an innocent girl in bad circumstances. I don’t think he ever believed it. I was expecting him to ask for sex after he let me go but he didn’t. I guess that kind of surprised me. I’m not used to men not making the effort. I guess that kept him on my mind. I called him at his precinct station. We got together three times before I could get him to take me home. We started seeing each other and I was thinking that maybe I could get off the grift but then the man I worked for—”

“Light Lambert,” I interjected. I think I was trying to impress her.

“Yes,” she said with a questioning smile. “Light. He called me and said that he didn’t approve. He’s got this guy looks like a gorilla who works for him. They kill people. Light would have destroyed both me and Melvin, so I left.”

“I don’t think Light and Elvis will be a problem.”

“Why not?”

“Because Melvin all by himself is a dangerous man and he’s got friends too.”

“Friends like you?”

“And some worse than Elvis,” I said.

She gave a short laugh, snorting prettily.

“Can we find you here most times?” I asked.

“Here or at my job.”

“Where’s that?”

“I have the morning and lunch shifts at Dino’s Diner on Main.”

“Melvin’s a bit undernourished.”

“Have him come by. I’ll make the burgers myself.”

Just then the aluminum door slammed open. A scruffy-looking little white guy with a baseball bat in hand rushed in. He was younger than Mary/Clarissa but desiccated like Madeline Thrusher, the person who had probably called him at whatever bar he was haunting.

I put a hand on the gun in my pocket. Mary/Clarissa noticed this and jumped to her feet.

“What’s wrong, Sterling?” she asked with just the right amount of manufactured concern in her voice.

The desert rat looked confused. He expected to find us in the bed and naked but instead we were sitting across from each other like civilized human beings.

“What the fuck is he doin’ in here?” Sterling shouted, spittle leaping from his sparsely whiskered maw.

I took that moment to stand up, dwarfing the little man. I would have taken him to task for giving Melvin’s girlfriend a black eye, but I couldn’t see where that would help the situation.

“Eddie Long,” I said.

“What?”

“Eddie Long,” I repeated. “He owes Clarissa some money. He knew I was on my way out to Palm Springs for a poker game and asked me if I could drop it off.”

“I don’t know no Eddie Long,” Sterling assured me.

“Eddie’s an old friend,” Mary/Clarissa said. “I knew him in L.A.”

“How much?” Sterling asked, sounding triumphant, as if this question would catch us in our lie.

Sterling wore faded blue jeans and a bright red T-shirt that was probably brand-new. The bold color made his sun-worn skin look all the worse.

“Three hundred dollars,” I said.

The little man lowered his bat. His mouth came open.

I reached into my pocket and came out with the cash.

“You don’t mind if I give this to your man, do you, Claire?”

“Of course not, Skip.”

I had to concentrate to keep from smiling. I handed Sterling the cash.

He stared vacantly at the three hundred-dollar bills between his fingers. Maybe he had never seen denominations like this before.

I was hemorrhaging money but that didn’t matter. My only goal was to get to the end of whatever road I was on without killing someone—or getting killed.

When I got to Bonnie’s house the veil was already lifted.

I rang the bell and she opened the door. Not saying a word, I advanced on her. She leaned into me and we were kissing. I picked her up and then we were in the bed making love to each other’s body with skill, wonder, and deep hunger. I remember that our orgasms were surprises, coming at odd times and not at all in sync. What might have been a disconnect for others only served to bring us closer. We could luxuriate in the other’s loss of control and see how powerful our impact was.

We were both sated after the initial encounter but couldn’t stop kissing and caressing. Soon we were at it again.

After some hours I rolled on my back and stared at her bedroom ceiling. I relished the cool feeling of the sweat evaporating from my chest.

“Easy.” It was the first word between us.

“Yeah?”

“What happened?”

I knew that it was Mary/Clarissa who’d wrought the change in my libido. Her life was both feral and passionate. She lived from moment to moment like Tamber Simpson. The world around her was a fuzzy black-and-white while she was in Technicolor, the only live person in sight.

On Bonnie’s bed I realized that I was grateful for the confusing case of Rosemary Goldsmith and Bob Mantle. Mary/Clarissa’s unrepentant and vulnerable passion had been the final moment of the resurrection that had been growing in me ever since flying off that coastal mountain and living when I should have died.

“I was out in the desert,” I said in answer to Bonnie’s question. “I was
thinking that life out there is noble because the elements are so harsh and still those plants and creatures survive.”

“You survived,” she said.

“And now I’m alive.”

We were in her sunny sitting room, surrounded by African artifacts and shelves lined with books both in French and in English. Bonnie had prepared a platter of cheeses, dried meats, fresh fruit, and a baguette cut into sections. She had white wine with the afternoon meal and I had apple juice.

“Do you think you can take Feather for a few days?” I asked after updating her on the case.

“You’re worried about your safety?” Reaching out to touch my face, she ran a finger along the scab over my cheekbone.

“No, not really, but I might have to be out of the house too long. I don’t want her being alone that much. I would ask Jackson and Jewelle to take her but they got problems of their own right now.”

“The airline called last night,” she said. “They want me to take Simone’s flight to Fiji. It’s a seven-day junket with layovers in Jakarta, Sydney, and Tokyo.”

“Oh.”

“But she can come with me. She already has a passport and she loves languages.”

“She’s been learning a few words in Japanese.”

“Oh.”

“When would you be leaving?” I asked.

“Tonight.”

“She’ll worry about not having the right clothes.”

“That’s just a good excuse to go shopping.”

I picked up Feather at Jewelle’s office. She was elated at the prospect of the trip. I made her dinner while she ran across the street to the Nishios’ to tell them that she couldn’t work for them the next week.

While she was there Bonnie drove over in her car.

“It would be great if you could come, Daddy,” Feather said as she packed in her bedroom upstairs.

“That would be nice but I got to work.”

“But will you come one day? On a vacation, I mean.”

“Yes he will,” Bonnie said. She had come up to the door. “I’ll make him.”

Feather laughed. She could tell that whatever trouble there had been between us had been settled—or at least quenched and quelled.

It was a little after six when Bonnie and Feather left for the airport. I kissed them both good-bye and waved for a while after they were out of sight. Then I went to the garage and rooted around through the boxes until I found the one with the word
Hose
scrawled on its side.

One of the reasons I decided on the new house was because it didn’t have a sprinkler system for the lawn. I liked connecting the long black garden hose to an outside spigot then turning the nozzle to get that jet-powered spray.

While watering, I began to feel the calm of purpose. Feather was safe, Uhuru-Bob was in my custody, and Suggs would probably be given a second chance to crash his life on the exquisite coral reef of Mary/Clarissa Donovan/Anthony.

I was looking for Rosemary Goldsmith but I wasn’t really hired for that job. Roger Frisk and Tout Manning had engaged me to find Bob Mantle. They had said this was to help them find Rosemary but the police obviously had a
shoot on sight
order out on the ex-boxer. Maybe, I thought, maybe the only object was to find Bob.

I wondered if there was some purpose beyond revenge. Who would pay that much money unless more was in the balance?

As I was having this thought four cars converged on my home: a police cruiser, two dark sedans, and a cranberry-colored Volkswagen Bug—a caravan of police and various G-men.

The gangs of government, I thought as I twisted the nozzle of my garden hose, strangling the lawn’s fountain of life.

They all got out of their cars quickly and headed in my direction. I wondered how my new neighbors would think of me after witnessing this debacle.

“Mr. Rawlins,” the short, fat State Department man Andrew Hastings said.

“Mr. Hastings.”

The cruiser held a low-rank patrolman and a captain in full-dress uniform.

The FBI fraternal twins Sorkin and Bruce were in different-colored suits but they were of the same cut.

Tout Manning stayed on the periphery as the others came in for the kill.

“Excuse me,” the police captain said to Hastings, “but I’m in charge of this interrogation.”

“This is a federal matter,” thin-lipped Ted Brown countered.

“What interrogation?” I asked the men.

All the sour faces turned to me as if I were some kind of annoyance. As if I had no part in the drama they were enacting.

“I am Captain Ira Reynolds,” the police boss told me. He was thickset with skin naturally tan in hue. When he was younger that heft was probably indicative of strength but now it looked like a little too much pastrami at lunchtime. “Can we come in?”

I wanted to say no. Maybe if I hadn’t had the lifetime experience of a black man in America I might have refused the request. If it were just Captain Reynolds it was possible that I might have turned my hose back on and told him that I’d drop by his office tomorrow. But I knew that I couldn’t hold off so many self-important officers of the laws.

“Sure,” I said. “I don’t know if I have enough chairs in any one room but I guess your man here could help ferry some in from the dinette.”

Ten minutes later everyone, except for the unnamed patrolman and Tout Manning, was seated in my nearly empty living room. Captain Reynolds and Andrew Hastings occupied the couch, I had the cushioned chair, and the rest sat in wooden seats from the dinette.

It was all very civilized, considering what interrogations were sometimes like.

Reynolds let his eye move among the players. He stopped to gaze at Manning the longest.

Finally the captain said to me, “Stony Goldsmith got a ransom note in the mail this morning. Special Delivery.” He paused after sharing this intelligence. I suppose he was looking to see if I would somehow incriminate myself.

“And?” I said.

“It was a demand for one million dollars in cash and the public release of certain documents that the kidnapper says Stony has.” Another pause.

“Yeah?”

“That doesn’t surprise you?” the captain wanted to know.

“Somebody kidnaps a millionaire’s daughter and then asks for a million dollars. Makes sense to me.”

“This isn’t a joke, Rawlins.”

“What happened to
Mister
Rawlins?”

“You should show some respect,” the uniformed patrolman warned.

He was tall and fit, white like the fruit of an unripened banana, and blue-eyed—not more than twenty-five.

“In my house, Officer,” I replied, “people call me mister. Just like Sidney Poitier in that movie.”

“The people that sent the note call themselves Scorched Earth,” Captain Reynolds said. He was looking for something, anything, in my eyes.

“Okay,” I said.

Everyone was staring at me then. I wondered if I was implicated somehow in intelligence gathered from the ransom request.

“There was a woman’s baby finger wrapped in the note,” Reynolds said.

“Rosemary’s?”

“It’s her fingerprint. Her father had all the members of his family fingerprinted in case they ever had to be identified.”

“That’s terrible, Captain,” I said when he paused again. “I have a daughter myself but what do I have to do with it?”

“Manning tells me that Roger Frisk asked you to look for the Goldsmith girl. Is that true?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, Rawlins?” Tout said, raising his voice. “It was right here in this room.”

“You and your boss asked me to find Bob Mantle,” I said in a modulated tone. “You said that the girl was missing and you suspected Mantle.”