“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.
21
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.”
“Can I look in his chest?”
“I guess you can. The other police already looked in there and didn’t find nuthin’. My son don’t have nuthin’ to hide.”
The balled-up socks and T-shirts were jumbled. I figured this was because of the police, or maybe it was an FBI search.
There was a black photo album with Kodak snapshots and, more recently, Polaroid shots of Mantle in various costumes going all the way back to when he was a child. Some of those costumes were in the chest.
His bookkeeping workbook was there. When I opened it a pink slip of paper fell out. It was a property receipt from the Beverly Hills Police Department issued to a Beaumont Lewis. The date stamped on it was the morning of August fifth.
“Who’s Beaumont Lewis?” I asked.
“That’s Bobby’s cousin,” she said, “my sister’s son. She live in Houston and he’s in the navy.”
“He been here recently?”
“No, sir. He’s over off the coast of Vietnam.”
I looked a little further and took a few notes but there was nothing incriminating in the room.
“Did the other policemen take anything from this trunk?” I asked the fretful mother.
“Not that I noticed, sir. They didn’t even write nuthin’ down.”
“Did you tell them anything that you haven’t told me?”
“They just aksed me where he was at. They aksed that six times and I always answered the same: I don’t know.”
“Did you tell them about Youri?”
“They didn’t ask.”
“Do you know Youri’s last name?”
“No, sir.”
At the front door of the dark home Belle asked, “Can you help my son, Detective Rawlins?”
“I can try
to keep him from getting killed,” I said. “Maybe he hasn’t done anything wrong. If he hasn’t I’ll try to get the police to understand that.”
It wasn’t much, but people like Belle and I had learned long ago to live with not quite enough and then to make do with somewhat less than that.
“Mr. Rawlins,” a man said.
I was standing at the door of my nearly nondescript Dodge. The white man who called my name and the white man he was with walked toward me from a dark sedan parked two cars up ahead.
They were alike inasmuch as they both wore light-colored suits and out-of-style broad-rimmed fedoras. But that’s where the similarities ended. The man who called me was pink-skinned and fat, not over five foot six. He was the elder, maybe fifty. His partner was tall and string-bean thin. He was a thirty-something white man with olive skin, dark eyes, and the thinnest lips I had ever seen on a human being.
“Yes?” I said.
“Andrew Hastings,” the elder said. He didn’t hold out a hand. “This is Ted Brown. We’re with the State Department.”
“Don’t tell me. You’re looking for Rosemary Goldsmith and Robert Mantle.”
Hastings was breathing hard after the short walk from his black sedan to my maroon one. He wasn’t happy with my tone.
“There is a national security aspect to the Goldsmith case, Mr. Rawlins,” the fat man said as the thin one stared.
“I had no idea. Neither the police nor the FBI informed me of that fact.”
“Neither the local police or the Bureau has any authority in this situation. Certainly no ordinary citizen, no”—he paused a moment for dramatic effect—“no Negro in white man’s clothes has any authority whatsoever.”
I have always considered myself a reasonable and intelligent man, familiar with the ways of the world I lived in. I know enough to know that if three different governmental law enforcement agencies seek me out, I am being told to back down, back off, and back away from a line chiseled in stone.
“What is it that I can do for you, Mr. Hastings?” I could have asked him for identification but by then I was sure that every official agency operating in Southern California was on the trail of Rose Gold and Bob Mantle.
“Where is Bob Mantle?” His lips were fat, having the blubbery quality of the wattles on the rooster that stalked Mona Martin’s picket fence.
“I have no idea. I asked his mother but she didn’t know. I asked at the boxing gym he teaches at but they didn’t say.”
“What did Foster Goldsmith tell you?”
“I told him that the police told me that his daughter had been kidnapped, but he did not corroborate that claim.” I ratcheted up my language in an attempt to keep my head above water with the government men.
“What did the police say?”
“That she had been.”
“What did they want you to do?”
“The police?”
“Yes.”
“Find Bob Mantle so that they could ask him if he knew where Rosemary was.”
Hastings had robin’s-egg-blue eyes. The predatory attitude of those pretty orbs was contradictory and made him seem all the more dangerous.
Ted Brown made his hands into two fists and stacked them one on top of the other as if he were holding a baseball bat.
“You are going to stop any inquiries into the Goldsmith case,” Hastings informed me. He took a wallet from his back pocket and a white card from there. “This is my phone number. If any question you have asked so far yields an answer you are going to call me and give that information. You will only call me. Do you understand?”
It was, I believe, the last three words that obliterated my common sense. Sure, give me a gold-embossed card, tell me that you’re the boss-man, tell me not to earn the only living I know how to make, but don’t call me stupid on top of all that. Don’t steal my money and then take my woman out to dinner with it.
No.
“I understand completely, Mr. Hastings, Mr. Brown,” I said. “I am a patriotic American. I served in the war and learned to respect the chain of command. I’m sorry if I caused any trouble. You know I believed that the police were trying to do what was right.”
“That’s understandable,” Hastings said. He clapped my shoulder and even grinned, but the smile came too late.
22
My next stop was a dirty brown-brick office building on Wilshire Boulevard, downtown. It was one of the older structures, eight stories high and without any kind of architectural personality. The blueprints for the boxlike edifice had been used in the fabrication of ten thousand of its kind throughout the country between world wars.
There was no doorman or front desk, no security guard or concierge to show you which way to go. Next to the elevator, under a glass pane held in place by a corroded chrome frame was a typed list of the residents and their office numbers.
Suite 5C was once occupied by Nifty Notebooks and Office Supplies, but that name was crossed out with blue ink and the name L Lambert and Associates had been scribbled in in pencil. The use of ink and then lead told me that some time had elapsed between Nifty Notebooks’ departure and L Lambert’s arrival on the scene.
An Out of Service sign had been attached to the elevator doors many months before. The cellophane tape that held up the handwritten sign had yellowed in that time.
And so I went through a doorway to my right that had a stenciled sign above it announcing STAIRS.
On the way up I thought about Belle Mantle calling me Detective Rawlins. She knew that I wasn’t a real officer of the law. The use of the title was her attempt to show me respect and deference in hopes that I would help her boy. She was well aware that Bob was in trouble. Ever since he was a child pretending to be every kind of hero, she had known that he was going to get into hot water. Mothers and fathers of our heritage nurtured hopes of our children fading into the background like that uninspired building and its brethren. If they went unnoticed they had a shot at living fruitful lives, unmolested by the predators that picked off our heroes, and villains, every time one of them reared their head.
The door to Suite 5C was the color of a blood orange. It was ajar. I pushed it open and came into a sun-drenched room that had yellow walls and a forest green tiled floor. The blond desk opposite the door was big and solid. The windows through which the sunlight poured were thick and laced with metal wire. The door beyond the ash desk was made from unpainted metal.
But it was the man behind the desk that dominated the room. He was apelike and white with a thatch of medium brown hair and the slumped shoulders of a blacksmith. He had one foot up on the blond desk.
“Who’re you?” he said, peering over his own big toe. He wore tan pants, a grass green sports jacket, black T-shirt, and polka-dotted yellow and purple socks under shoes the same color as his hair.
“I’m looking for a man called Light Lambert,” I said.
The ape took his foot down and stood. He was of medium height with a chest that was truly barrel-shaped. I fought down the urge to pull the pistol from my pocket.
“I asked you who you were,” the brutal man said. Even the way he talked sounded like fighting.
“Rawlins is my name.”
“Get the fuck outta here before I kick your ass.”
“That,” I advised, “would be an uphill climb.”
“The fuck?” he said.
He came half the way around the desk. I knew my words would set him off. I knew it but I was angry. I had been accosted by three different branches of government, shot at, cursed out, and insulted over and over again—and it was only Tuesday. I wanted to strike back. I intended to strike. But before the sham of a receptionist could get to me the door behind him swung inward and a tall man walked out.
“Elvis,” the man said.
My opponent pulled up short, almost as if someone had grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and yanked.
The tall man smiled. He was wearing a coal-colored three-button suit with a light blue dress shirt and a lime and
cranberry tie. He was well built, on the slender side, and pale-skinned.
“This guy just busted in here, Light,” Elvis the ape said.
“This is Mr. Rawlins,” the elegant counterfeiter replied. “Mr. Rawlins is a guest.”
Elvis cocked his head, adjusting to this new view of me. He nodded once and went back around to sit in his chair. There he waited a moment and then put his foot back up where it was before I entered.
“Come into my office, Mr. Rawlins,” Light Lambert said to me. “I’ve been expecting you.”
He stepped to the side and gestured for me to go through.
Lambert’s fifth-floor office had a ceiling that went to the top of the sixth floor, maybe twenty-two feet high. I thought at the time that this must have been a storage room for the previous tenants. The clear windows went all the way up and looked down on Los Angeles with its asphalt streets and palm trees, its blue sky over a dingy brown, smoggy horizon. The floor was laid with square black and white tiles, giving it the feel of a fancy Creole restaurant down on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. The walls were painted enamel white like a high-school toilet.
The furnishings of this office were incongruous for a business. Under the window there sat a fancy cream-colored couch that had dark wood legs and a corrugated arching back like the collar of an Elizabethan noblewoman. There were matching chairs at either end of the divan and a low coffee table where sat three telephones—white, black, and red. This plethora of phones reminded me of Stony Goldsmith’s subterranean lair. In the far corner to my left was a folding card table surrounded by four folding pine chairs. There were poker chips and cards on the fabric-covered tabletop.
I looked around like Belle Mantle looking for a puzzle piece.
“Something wrong?” Light Lambert asked.
“Where’s your desk?”
“Don’t need one,” he said. “I never write anything down.”
“Not even a letter?”
“Not even a phone number.”
“But you have phones.”
“Have a seat, Mr. Rawlins.”
I took one of the chairs because it was set at such an angle that I could look southward at my adopted city.
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