Rose Gold (29 page)

“Hell, no.”

“I’m Sergeant Chris with the LAPD.”

“Good. I hope you arrest his ass and put him in jail,” the man said, and then he hung up.

No answers came from Humps’s or Beady’s numbers.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice said for Nelda’s line.

“May I speak to Youri Kidd?”

“He’s not here. Who’s this?”

“Sergeant Chris of the LAPD.”

“Oh. Is Youri in trouble?”

“He’s dead.” A real cop wouldn’t have been so generous with information, but most civilians didn’t know that and I needed to cause consternation in my less-than-sly interrogation.

“No. Oh, my God. What happened?”

“He was beaten and stabbed to death.”

“Oh, God. Oh, no. Oh.”

“I’m calling numbers from his phone book to try to find out if he had any enemies or if someone was after him.”

“If it’s anybody it’s that Rosemary Goldsmith and MG.”

“Rosemary? I don’t see her name anywhere. There’s an R. Goldsmith.”

“That’s her. That bitch. He saved her life and she just left him. You know he was really in love with her but she just used him. She moved up to Santa Barbara and then came back with some black guy and took up with Most Grand and his people. Youri had left all that behind him.”

“There’s no Most Grand here. Does he have another name?”

“He does but I never knew it.”

“Why do you think that Rosemary and this guy Grand would hurt Mr. Kidd?”

“Most was always talking about armed revolution and killing the pigs and the traitors. He thought Youri was a traitor because they said that he sold drugs. But Youri was trying to get his life together. He was a good guy.”

“What is your last name? All I have in the book is Nelda.”

There was a click in my ear. Nelda had gotten suspicious and hung up.

Redbird was standing at the shaded window, looking out for anyone coming our way.

The phone began to ring. I was pretty sure that it was Nelda. I figured
that the first thing she’d do was call Youri to see if maybe it was a prank call. I let the phone bleat eight times while thumbing through the little diary. At the very back there was an entry for an
MG
.

When the ringing stopped I picked up the receiver and dialed again.

“Yes?” a young woman answered.

“Hi, my name is Chris Johnson. I’m a driver for National Delivery Service.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m supposed to be delivering a package to a guy but I only have his initials, MG. The address I had is up on Buena Vista Court in Laurel Canyon. But they said he wasn’t there and gave me this number.”

“I don’t know how you got that address. Most—I mean MG lives on Theodore in Studio City.”

“Can I have that address?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, but this is a time-sensitive cashier’s check.”

“Can he call you?”

“No. I’m in my truck.”

It was a short drive up Doheny, across Sunset, through the pass, and down into Studio City; barely enough time to prepare a meal or take a bath.

“You work for yourself,” Redbird said once we were well on our way.

I wasn’t sure if this was a question but I said, “Most of the time.”

“You ever work for a white detective?”

“No. Never.”

I could feel him staring at me.

“You don’t need them?”

“They need me. It used to be in the old days that if a crime happened in the black community nobody really cared. Either they arrested somebody or they didn’t and if they did that man might be guilty and he might not; either way he was likely to go to jail. But when there’s somebody white involved or something that might affect white people, they might find that they have to get to the real truth. That’s when they call on me.”

“So you still work for them,” he said, turning away.

“Not usually. Most’a the time it’s black people looking for help come to me. I trade this for that and do what I can. You the one askin’ about me and the Man.”

“So I am,” he said, looking away and into himself, as if I had imparted some intriguing bit of information.

Theodore Lane was a secluded street and Most Grand’s address was on a brown and yellow placard in front of a huge hedge of oleander. You
couldn’t see the house but there was a driveway. I parked the car a block away and turned to my companion.

“What do you think?” I said.

“Nobody’s on the street. We could go through the hedge and use it to see them.”

“We could also call the police.”

“Lenore wants us to find out how her daughter is involved before turning to the law.”

“How she’s involved? She got her fuckin’ finger chopped off—that’s how she’s involved.”

“They won’t see us if we’re careful.”

There was a gardener’s lane cut into the north side of the poisonous oleander hedgerow. The opening was only four feet high and half that in width, so the copper-colored man and I crouched down and made our way to a place that overlooked the house. From that vantage point we surveyed the lot through a thin scrim of bright green leaves.

It was a one-story ranch-style house, small for such an impressive hedge. There were no cars in the driveway or the open garage. There was no sign of life whatsoever.

“Give it an hour?” I suggested.

“Two,” Redbird said with certainty.

“You got a gun on you?”

“No.”

He squatted down and I remained standing. I wanted a cigarette but knew that we were too close to the house for that.

“Tell me something,” I said after five minutes of silence.

He stood, turning his attention from the house to me.

“Why are two departments of the federal government involved here?”

He gauged me for ten very long seconds, then looked down, considering the question.

“Rosemary was working with an aid organization in South America year before last,” he said. “Volunteer work.”

“What country?”

“That’s better not to say. She was working in a small village when the president of the country, a real dictator, sent a platoon of soldiers to bring her and her friends to the presidential palace. They thought they’d be put in prison but instead the president held a feast for them.

“Rosemary had worked all summer with people who suffered from poverty in the rural countryside and she hoped to convince the president to help them, to allow them a greater say in the government. He told her that if the peasants had their way that they would bring in a communist slate. She said that if people are allowed to choose, then that choice would always be the product of democracy.

“He was surprised that she thought this and told her so. When she asked him why he was confused by an American wanting democracy, he told her that Goldsmith Armaments International had their regional headquarters not two miles from his palace. When she wondered why this should affect her allegiance to the poor, he said that the Goldsmith compound was where America trained its anticommunist rebels. He said that the men that killed the previous, socialist-leaning president were technically in the employ of Goldsmith International.”

“I guess she didn’t like that,” I surmised.

“She felt that she was the cause of the suffering and death of the people she’d been trying to help.”

“That’s what might have made her turn into a radical?”

“That and
el presidente
’s fortune-telling witch.”

“What about her?”

“This woman had a leather bag of little bones that she threw and read. Through this method of divination she would give the leader advice.”

“So?”

“These bones were taken from the fingers of leaders tried and executed for rebellion.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking about that detached finger in a whole new light.

Maybe an hour after that exchange I said, “Either there’s nobody down there, they’re asleep, or they’re dead.”

Hidden by the bushes, we circled around to one side of the house, then made our way down to the south side. The windows there were shaded, and so it was unlikely that anyone could see our approach.

The windows at the back were also shaded, with curtains drawn.

The back door led out onto a wooden platform maybe three feet above the lawn. The only thing on the deck was a big tin trash can.

“You get around the side,” I said to the Taaqtam.

“Why?”

“I’m gonna knock.”

Once again donning my gloves, I sidled up to the back porch and gently pushed against the side of the can—testing it. It was empty, or mostly so. I shoved it hard enough to knock it down the pine stairs, throwing off its tin top and making a loud clatter.

Before the can had stopped rolling I was with Redbird peering around the corner and glancing now and then at the other side and at the windows to see if someone was looking out.

Nothing. No thumping of fast footsteps, furtive movements of window dressing, no sound or cracked door—nothing.

Five minutes went by, ten. Then Redbird picked up a palm-sized stone and threw it through a closed window on the side of the house. The glass shattered. We waited.

Nothing.

“I guess we should try knocking again,” I said.

Redbird gave one of his rare grins and walked toward the steps of the back porch.

As he mounted the stairs I moved off to the right about eight feet back, got down on one knee, and aimed my pistol at the phantom enemy in the doorframe.

Redbird crouched down, tried the knob, which failed to turn, and then used his bright knife to slip in behind the latch bolt. He pushed the door open and jumped to the side, off and away from the potentially dangerous portal.

Even while going through these motions I could see how deft and how stupid we were. We worked together so smoothly that we said hardly a thing. It was like we’d been soldiers together, relying on each other for months in enemy territory. But that address could have been a fake and the police now called to arrest the burglars. Or, worse, the house could have been full of armed radicals ready to shoot it out with the law.

I understood that my whole life had been like this; that I and many of my friends and comrades played fast and loose with our lives. It was something I had always known and yet had never taken to heart. My life up until that moment had been like an unremarkable poker chip that, by chance, stayed in some trickster god’s stack through all of his wins and losses.

Luck held. It was the right address and there were no armed anarchists lying in wait. The house was empty of life. There were only mementos of the souls that had stopped there: ashtrays filled with cigarette butts, the kitchen sink and table cluttered with dirty dishes, paper plates, and glasses; the living room had bedding and sleeping bags across the floor. And then there was the master bedroom, where a half-naked woman hung by her neck from the light fixture set in a nine-foot ceiling.

She was young, brown-haired, and dressed only in a white T-shirt that rode up above her waist. Her hands were bound behind her back and there was a piece of notepaper pinned through her shirt and into her flesh that read
TRAITOR
. She was white except for her face, which had bloated and turned a dark blue. The brass fitting had come out from its mooring a bit and so the big toe of her left foot touched the floor. She had been trying to reduce the pressure on her neck by pushing against the floor with that toe.

“We should cut her down,” I said to the man with the knife.

“She’s dead,” he told me. “Let’s leave the scene as much as we can the way we found it. Maybe the police will get something from her.”

I wanted to be objective about the corpse, as my partner was, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was the cause of her death. The body was still warm to the touch. She was, I believed, the woman who had
answered the phone and foolishly given their address. She told the leader, Most Grand, and he made an example out of her.

An hour later we had found almost nothing that might tell us where the killers and their captive had gone. On a wall of the back porch there was a calendar with every other Monday marked with an
X
.

We left through the hedge again and walked down to my car, hoping that no one saw us.

After agreeing that he would return in the early hours of the next morning, Redbird took the Silver Shadow from my driveway and went off to whatever place extinct tribesmen go.

I wandered the house thinking about forces beyond my control.

When I was a child, no more than six, when my mother and father were still alive and everything in the world was right, I asked my father on the front porch of our shanty shack who he thought were the bravest men in the world.

“Sailors,” he said without hesitation. “The ones in those old ships that used the wind to blow their canvas sails.”

“Why them, Daddy?” I asked. I was snuggled up next to him on the big soft chair because it was cold outside. It must have been winter.

“Because, Ezekiel, a sailor would set out on a voyage that lasted for months at a time. Him and his friends were on a ocean so big that nobody could even see ’em and they rode on waves taller than mountains, fought storms that was big as God. It was like the entire world was against them and they was no more than ants tryin’ to make their way through the mud and dung of the elephants’ playground.

“It’s brave to shoot a gun when you fightin’ against another man with a gun, or to hunt a bear with your buddies armed with some spears and such, but to go out over the blue sea on a boat like a leaf with nothing but the wind at your back and emptiness that go on forever in front’a you—that’s more than brave, more than foolhardy; that’s courage, son.”

This was the gist of his answer, though over the years I’ve begun to doubt the exact wording. But I remember faithfully what I felt like: the chill in the Louisiana air and the rumble of my father’s voice all around
me like a vast ocean itself; the smell of smoke from the woodstove and burnt kerosene from lanterns.

It felt to me that night while I tromped back and forth, up and down through the new house, that my father’s words were like prophecy over the forty years that separated me from him and my mother’s love. I was little more than an ant up against the assembled forces of a world that could, that probably would crush me and never even notice the loss. I skipped the windmill completely and went wielding my sword against the wind itself.