Rose Gold

by Walter Mosley

  “That’s okay. She had this shopping list for me anyway. I can get somebody to give me a ride.”

  “You got to help me, girl,” Bob said. “This man’s gonna kill me.”

  “No,” Coco said in a surprisingly sympathetic tone. “He will help you. That’s the kind of man he is.”

  Half an hour later we were on the Pacific Coast Highway cruising southward. Bob grunted now and then. Coco and I had nothing to say. She didn’t ask about what had happened with Petrie. Her deep trust, I felt, came from that four- or five-sentence exchange with Mama Jo.

  When we saw the five-mile sign for an all-night gas station I had Coco put tape over Bob’s mouth again.

  “Hold him down,” I said as I sidled up to the self-service pump.

  “How?”

  “He’s weak from loss of blood. Sit on his wounded leg if he moves.”

  I got fifteen-point-three gallons for just under seven-fifty. After filling up and then paying the attendant, who was locked in a booth at the center of the station, I drove to the edge of the lot, where there stood a solitary phone booth.

  “Hello?” a woman answered sleepily.

  “Mrs. Simpson,” I said. “Is your husband in?”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “All too well, ma’am, all too well.”

  I believe that it was the gravity of my tone rather than the words that moved her.

  “Who should I say is calling?”

  “Easy Rawlins.”

  She went away and a minute or so later a man said, “Mr. Rawlins?”

  “It’s that time, Eddie.”

  “What do you need?”

  “A little while from now, not more than a few hours, a man will come to your door. He’s going to say that he’s from me and that you should go with him. Bring your bag and whatever you might need to treat a wound.”

  “What kind of wound?”

  “The kind with the bullet still inside.”

  There was a moment of silent hesitation but then he said, “I’ll be ready.”

  “Who the hell is this?” Melvin Suggs said, answering his line.

  “Me.”

  “Rawlins?”

  “You sober, Melvin?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Enough to drive?”

  “As long as it ain’t the Indy Five Hundred.”

  I gave him instructions and directions. He asked three questions about routes and then said, “See ya in the morning.”

  “How’s the bleeding?” I asked Coco when we were getting near Terry’s mansion.

  “Stopped. But he needs to see a doctor.”

  “He will.”

  I stopped the car and she got out the passenger’s side. Coming around to my window, she kissed me, once again on the lips, and said, “Be careful, Easy.”

  “So, Bob,” I called out when we were well on the way to the desert. “You awake?”

  “Why you doin’ this to me, man?”

  “I know it’s hard to believe, brother, but I’m tryin’ to save your ass. The federal government wants you from two different sides and the LAPD will shoot first—but you already know that.”

  “Why you wanna help me?”

  “There’s the man I’m workin’ for, like I said, and then there’s Belle.”

  “Mama?”

  “I kind of made a promise to her that I’d keep you alive—at least. I have also been hired, by parties unknown, to rescue Rosemary Goldsmith from you.”

  “From me?”

  “They say that you kidnapped her and then demanded a ransom?”

  “No, I didn’t.” He could have been an eight-year-old denying pulling his sister’s hair.

  “Did she have somebody else do it?”

  “I, I don’t think so. I mean I guess I don’t know. Last time I talked to her she said that she was gonna go get help like I told you.”

  “Help from where?”

  “She just told me that she was gonna get help to get us both out of the country.”

  “You didn’t ask how or from who?”

  “I was shot, man. I just told her to hurry up.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Right after we got away from those cops shootin’ at me. Maybe two days, maybe not even. She was supposed to be back by last night.”

  “And how did you,” I said, “an L.A. student from Metro Junior College, meet a coed at UCSB?”

  “It’s like this, man,” he said in such a way that I knew I was in for a story. “I got this thing about costumes, have ever since I was a kid. Cowboys, clowns, cops, or criminals; if I dressed up like something it’s like I became that person, that thing. When I was a kid I always knew in the back of my mind that I was really Bobby Mantle. When my father gave me my boxin’ gloves I let it go so far that after a while I really was a boxer. But then when they banned me from the ring and I went to college I started gettin’ high. At first it was only grass and hash. I’d get high and put on one’a my outfits and it was like I was changed for real.

  “Then I met this white dude named Youri, Youri Kidd. He was like a dealer. Mostly he just sold grass to college kids. We would get high together and I’d play around with hats and such. Then one time him and me ate mushrooms and I found these tap-dancer shoes. The whole night I was a fool tap dancin’ and you know I believed I was the real thing. Youri liked that shit and he would bring me mushrooms or mescaline or even LSD sometimes and we’d go out lookin’ for some kinda costume. When he brought me them African robes it hit me like some kinda magic. In my mind that meant I was some kinda political revolutionary. I started givin’ talks and eatin’ mushrooms. I didn’t go to class or nuthin’. I was Uhuru Nolicé. I was a leader of the revolution. I gave talks and people listened. And I guess I got a little lost.

  “I called the papers about Mr. Emerson because I knew that he was a dog. But I never said nuthin’ when them cops was killed. I swear I didn’t.”

  “Maybe you don’t remember,” I suggested.

  “It ain’t like that, man. I see what I’m doin’, I remember it but it’s like I cain’t help it. But I know I never said nuthin’ ’bout those cops. I know it.

  “Anyway, the police started comin’ around lookin’ for me and Youri said he had a friend that lived in this house up in Isla Vista. That was Rose. One time he helped her somehow.”

  “Helped her do what?” I asked, just to stay in the conversation.

  “I don’t know. But he said that she was real political like and you know in my mind I was Uhuru Nolicé runnin’ from the Man. I went up there with a baggie full’a mushrooms and gave speeches and they loved me; especially Rose. We hit it off the second night. She said she was in love with me. One time when Meredith tried to get with me Rose beat that girl with a stick. Shit. After that we came back down to L.A. I had run outta mushrooms and had to take off the robes so nobody would recognize me.

  “That’s when Rose realized that I wasn’t what I acted like, that I was just playin’ a part. She didn’t leave me but it was like she took over. We met up with Youri again. He got us hooked up with this guy I knew about from the old neighborhood. Then after Rose took out that sawed-off shotgun and robbed that store I made up my mind to get away. I was gonna go down Mississippi where my mama’s people is from but then the cops started shootin’ at us and I was wounded and Rose brought me back up to Isla Vista.”

  “Who was this man you knew?” I asked.

  “What man?”

  “The one from your old neighborhood.”

  “He used to be named Delbert but now he calls himself MG. He didn’t know me but I knew him from when I was a kid. Rose knew about him from her political shit.”

  It was quiet for a while after that.

  “So do you know where Rosemary is now?” I asked.

  No answer.

  We were way out in the desert by then; no cars in front or behind us.

  I got out and checked on Bob. He wasn’t bleeding and he wasn’t dead. The ex-boxer had
fallen asleep on the floor of my anonymous Dodge.

  37

  We got to the Waltons’ desert cabin a little after six in the morning. It was even smaller than their city home. The outer walls were tar paper tacked down under a frame of pine timbers. The slanted roof was made from cascading sheets of aluminum and tin. The structure was raised two feet or more above the desert floor, standing on a dozen four-by-four stumpy timber legs.

  First I took off the padlock from the front door using the key that Davis Walton gave me. Then I unhooked Uhuru-Bob from the backseat. He opened his eyes for a moment but didn’t say anything.

  He only moaned a little when I lifted him up in my arms and carried him into the shack.

  I put him on a wide bed that doubled for a sofa, thinking that I’d have to get Davis’s bedclothes laundered and bleached. I shackled Bob’s left wrist to the steel bar at the head of the bed.

  “Ow,” my prisoner complained. “That shit hurts.”

  “It didn’t hurt you when you were bangin’ on that girl.”

  “I didn’t know it was that bad.”

  “Go to sleep, Bob. You need the rest.”

  He closed his eyes and I believe that he actually went to sleep. I wondered if being chained and in tatters made the chameleon-man think that he was a convict or slave; bound to take orders from a reluctant overmaster like me.

  Carrying a plain pine chair from the kitchen table, I went outside to sit and smoke.

  Prehistoric-looking Joshua trees stood out in the desert morning like ancient sentries watching over me and my prisoner. It was flat out there, the air clear and silent. You could see for miles across the dun-colored rock and sand. Here and there stood great piles of pale crimson boulders that had resisted the erosion of millennia while the soil around them had washed away. There was a chill in the morning air but soon that would give way to hundred-degree heat.

  In a little shed next to the small house, Walton had a gasoline-operated generator. With that he could run a small air conditioner. I’d fire that up later. But in the meantime I sat outside watching the dew dry and the world turn.

  I was a soldier again, my mind empty as I waited for the next challenge.

  I saw the car coming down the country road from five miles off; a small puff of dust on the horizon. It was pleasant to see something coming; it gave me the illusion that I was in control.

  Eight or nine minutes later the pale green 1956 Pontiac rolled up next to my dark car. Melvin Suggs was the first man out. He was wearing khaki Bermuda shorts, a blue and white Hawaiian shirt, and a wide-brimmed rather floppy Panama hat. Carrying a small straw suitcase, he waved as the passenger’s-side door came open.

  Dr. Edwin Simpson was the opposite of his squat and powerful driver. Not yet forty, Edwin was tall and almost as dark-skinned as I. He was lean and wore horn-rimmed glasses, the lenses of which glinted in the sun. He had on a short-sleeved white dress shirt and dark slacks. His shoes were dark leather. And he carried a medical bag like the one I used to transport my pistol, various handcuffs, and bags of change.

  “Mr. Rawlins,” he said, walking up to me.

  I stood and shook his hand.

  “Your patient is inside, Doctor,” I said.

  “What patient is that?”

  “Like I told you on the phone—a man that’s been shot in the leg.”

  “I’m not a gangster’s doctor.”

  “Good,” I said, “because he’s not a gangster.”

  “How did he get shot?”

  “It was, I believe, a misunderstanding.”

  “Why not take him to the hospital?” Edwin asked. “Why not call the police?”

  “As I remember it, Doctor, the last time you thought about calling the police you ended up coming to me.”

  Edwin had an identical twin brother, named Tamber for their maternal grandfather.

  Since childhood Tamber Simpson liked to play games of skill and chance while Edwin enjoyed reading and math.

  Edwin went to Howard University medical school.

  His brother moved to Reno. When Reno got too small, Tamber settled in Las Vegas. That was all good and well but Tamber was something a black man should never be—lucky; not only with cards but with women too. It was bad enough that he won $17,568 from an Oklahoma oilman named Joseph Hardman, but that same night he bedded Joe’s mistress. The betrayal of his girlfriend somehow convinced Hardman that Tamber was cheating at cards too and so he hired a man named Tiberius Adderly to kill the gambler.

  Tamber got wind of Tiberius from the mistress and ran to Edwin. Edwin went to the police. The police told the good doctor that maybe Tamber could go to Africa, where he could see Tiberius coming from a mile away.

  That’s when Edwin talked to some of his patients and came up with my name.

  I told the good doctor that I could probably save Tamber this time but that a man like his brother was destined to die—violently.

  “The good thing about it,” I added, “is that he’ll live life to the fullest every minute up to the moment of his death.”

  But Edwin loved his brother and felt guilty, as only a sibling can, about his good life compared to Tamber’s world of trouble.

  I gathered some information that I typed out on a clean white sheet of typing paper. After that, through gambling friends of my own, I let it be known that Tamber Simpson was residing in a flophouse near Skid Row in downtown L.A.

  I rented a room in Tamber’s name and then took another room across the hall. I only had to wait thirty-seven hours.

  The man who worked the front desk had fifty of my client’s dollars in his pocket. He knew that if he called me when somebody asked for Tamber he’d receive fifty more.

  The white man came to the door and knocked; I saw that through my peephole. When nobody answered he tried the knob. It was unlocked and so the man took out a pistol and, ever so slowly, pushed the door open.

  That was my cue. I stepped out quickly and hit the hit man in the head with a long-barreled .41-caliber pistol. He fell headfirst into the room and I rushed in, hit him again, and then kicked his fallen pistol into a far corner. After closing the door I sat backward on a maple chair, aiming my gun barrel at the battered man’s head.

  He wasn’t completely out of it, just stunned.

  When he rolled his eyes in my direction I said, “Hello, Tiberius.”

  “What the fuck?” He moved as if he was going to rise and so I pushed the muzzle of the gun a little closer.

  “I will kill you,” I promised, and I meant it too. We were both killers. There was no wiggle room to that.

  “You’re not Simpson.”

  “No,” I said, and then I handed him the sheet of paper that I had so neatly typed.

  On the page was Tiberius’s full name, the name and address of his ex-wife, the name of the Vegas casino in which he worked security, the license plate numbers on all three of his cars, and the address of his mother, who lived in Austin. Between my fellow detective Saul Lynx and myself, we gathered that information. Saul only charged three hundred for the phone calls. I knew some black gamblers here and there but Saul had connections in Vegas that I couldn’t even dream of.

  “What the fuck is this?”

  “Did you know that the Roman emperor Tiberius was the stepson of the great Octavian and that Octavian was adopted by Julius Caesar himself?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m just proving to you that I know you and you have no idea of who I am. The next time you get a lead on Tamber it might be him and it might be me or one of my friends waiting. If Tamber dies I will go looking for you and if I can’t find you I will ask somebody on that list. And believe me, Tiberius, I have all kinds of help. I know white men and women and Chinese and Mexican too. You will never see the knife coming.”

  I knew I was having an impact because he didn’t respond.

  “It would be best if I killed you but that shit is messy so instead I’ll make you an offer.”

  “What’s that?”
<
br />   “I can promise you that Tamber will never again go to Vegas and so you can tell Hardman that he’s dead and buried. If he does go there it’ll be open season.”

  “And if I don’t take the offer?”

  I smiled and let my head loll to the left.

  “What if Hardman finds out?” Tiberius asked.

  “Will he come up on you with a big gun like this here?”

  “Why didn’t you just shoot me then?”

  “Because I’m tryin’ to save Tamber’s ass. If you tell Hardman that he’s dead then the problem is solved. If I kill you he could just hire somebody else.”

  That was a tense moment. Maybe Tamber would have to move to Liberia. But after a long moment Tiberius nodded.

  “But if you fuck with my family I’ll kill you,” he said.

  “Man, you don’t even know who I am.”

  Tamber was poisoned by a jealous woman two years later. He died under his brother’s care. In spite of that, Edwin owed me a debt.

  I told him and Suggs not to give their names to Bob.

  We went in and tied and held down the ex-boxer while Dr. Simpson extracted the bullet. Bob screamed and struggled but the restraints were enough. Edwin got the bullet and shot him up with antibiotics, penicillin I think.

  “You need to keep him stationary for at least a week,” he told us. “I’ll give you a week’s supply of morphine if he experiences too much pain.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” I said. “Now if you’ll wait here for a few minutes, I need to talk to my friend outside.”

  “That’s the guy killed the cops?” Melvin asked when we were outside smoking next to his car.

  “I’m ninety-nine percent sure he didn’t do it, Mel.”

  “Then turn him in with your evidence.”

  “I do that and he’ll die in his cell.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Just give me a few days to get my ducks in a row,” I said. “I can promise you twenty-five hundred at the end, whether he’s guilty or not, and in less time than that I will be able to tell you where Mary went.”