“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.”
“Is that true?” Captain Reynolds asked Tout.
“Technically,” Manning admitted. “But it goes without saying that if he found the girl then that would be our main priority. I told him about the kidnapping.”
“I asked around about Mantle,” I said to the captain. “Somebody shot at me and then the State Department and the FBI told me to mind my own business.”
“The State Department is involved with some very delicate intelligence here,” fat Hastings said.
“Something about the war?” Captain Reynolds asked.
“These are state secrets,” Ted Brown answered.
The lanky diplomat said more but I didn’t listen because just then I looked out of the window and saw, half a block down Point View, a Silver Shadow Rolls-Royce parked at the curb.
“What about you two?” the captain was asking the FBI brothers.
“Kidnapping is under federal jurisdiction,” Agent Sorkin replied. “A white woman has been abducted and so it falls to us.”
“What if she were a black woman?” I asked, turning my gaze from the window.
“But there’s the armored car robbery and the killing of three policemen,” Tout Manning said in answer to the FBI man.
I realized that my question, and its meaning, had no place in my own home.
“What is Roger Frisk’s interest in this case?” Captain Reynolds asked Manning.
“The chief wants to be kept abreast of the investigation to make sure that we know what’s what before giving it to the press.”
There was something lame about Tout’s reply. I knew it and Reynolds did too. But even he couldn’t question Chief Parker’s office.
For a while there they all argued. I had enough time to smoke two or three cigarettes, if I still smoked in the house. They argued about jurisdiction, state secrets, even the war. The blustering and posturing went around and around until Reynolds finally said, “The federal government is welcome to involve itself in this case. We certainly don’t want to hamper the war effort or to embarrass anyone. But the LAPD is in charge of keeping the peace. We have had assassinations, robberies, and the murder of three of our police officers. The FBI and the State Department are here because we recognize your part but we will be the primary force in this investigation.
“Now, Mr. Rawlins,” he said, turning to me. “What information do you have about Mantle and Rosemary Goldsmith?”
I told them everything they already knew. I talked about how Belle Mantle said her son was innocent and that the boxers at the gym didn’t know anything but rumor.
“When I went to talk to Stony Goldsmith he didn’t seem too concerned about his daughter,” I said.
“What about the mother?” Agent Bruce asked.
He really shouldn’t have let that card show. He had someone watching the mother. Maybe her husband was suspicious of his estranged wife.
“That’s kind of embarrassing,” I said, allowing a brief insincere grin to take form. “I was hoping to get a little more money out of the family for work I had already done. She was too smart for that, though.”
“Did she know anything about the girl?” Ted Brown asked.
“Only that she’s been trouble all her life and now she’s in trouble for real.”
“How did you know where to find her?” Manning asked.
“I know a guy at Proxy Nine. He’s a vice president. I asked him for an introduction to Foster Goldsmith and, when I found out that they were separated, for the lady’s phone number. I called and she sent her man Redbird to show me the way.”
I fed them pabulum for another forty minutes or so. The fact that no one even responded to my question about a black woman getting kidnapped convinced me that I couldn’t trust those men. I knew that this decision was unjustified. I knew that we weren’t there to talk about the racial inequities of the justice system. But sometimes you just have to follow your heart—and its hatred.
In the middle of the interrogation the doorbell rang. The patrolman answered, letting in four of his uniformed brothers.
“These men are going to search your house,” Reynolds told me.
I could have asked for a warrant.
The sun was completely gone from the sky by the time the search and the grilling were over. My visitors left, telling me, as a group and individually, that I was to stop investigating any part of the case and that I should turn any and all information that might come later to each and every one of them.
“Yes, sir,” I said at least fifteen times.
40
I saw them off at the door and then watched through the living room window until they were all gone. I expected Tout Manning to drive around the block and return for a special briefing. I hadn’t mentioned that he and Frisk had paid me on behalf of parties unknown to take the case.
Manning did not return, however.
After ten minutes or so I went back to the stuffed chair and sat down among the empty seats that the captain and international and national agents had so recently occupied. There was little consensus among the different tribes of government. Even Reynolds and Manning seemed to have different goals in the case.
And then there was the case itself.
I hadn’t believed that Rosemary had been kidnapped.
Bob Mantle probably had not committed a crime.
And yet still there were dead bodies, stolen monies, and now a detached finger of a debutante armed robbery suspect.
It was only when the doorbell rang that I remembered the Silver Shadow.
“I turned off the hose,” Redbird said when I opened the front door. “Come on in. Can I get you anything to drink?”
“No, thank you.”
I made my way back to the living room and the rich woman’s representative followed.
I sat once again in the stuffed chair while Redbird settled on a straight-backed cherrywood number. We looked at each other a moment or two.
“Mrs. Goldsmith wanted me to come talk to you,” he said at last.
“Talk.”
“Who were those men?”
I told him, in detail. “They informed me that Foster got a million-dollar ransom note with one of Rosemary’s fingers wrapped up in it.”
“They’re sure?”
“Seems that Stony keeps the fingerprints of all
his family members.”
Redbird nodded and scowled.
“Do they think she’s dead?”
“No one knows.”
“Was it the boxer?”
“Absolutely not. He was wounded and a hundred miles away.”
“How do you know that?” If there was any stress or urgency behind the Indian’s questions he didn’t show it.
“I found him up in the mountains above Santa Barbara. He’d been shot in the leg a day or so earlier.”
“You turn him over to the law?”
I shook my head. Maybe I shouldn’t have trusted Redbird, but even if he took what I gave him to the cops there was no proof, no leads that would bring them to the cabin in the desert outside Indio.
“The FBI is watching Lenore,” I said. “They knew that I had been to the hotel.”
“I’d like to talk to the boxer,” Redbird said.
“Maybe later. But I think it’s more important to look for your girl.”
I told Redbird about how Rosemary had brought Bob up to the mountain cabin and then left promising to find help in L.A.
“I think that she came down here looking for confederates,” I said. “Bob told me about a man named Delbert and nicknamed MG. You ever hear of somebody like that?”
“No,” Redbird said. “But she’s been involved with radicals since she was fifteen. There’s a long list.”
“You want to look into it on your own?” I offered. I had enough to do.
“Mrs. Goldsmith told me to work with you.”
“I won’t tell her if you strike out on your own.”
The younger man looked at me with intensity. After a long moment he smiled.
“Those men could have put you in jail,” he said.
“Yes they could.”
“But you aren’t afraid. You didn’t give them the boxer.”
“No.”
“So I’ll stay with you awhile. I know most of the people and you know the rest.”
Like Melvin Suggs before him, Redbird slept on my couch that night. All he wanted was a glass of tap water and a thin blanket.
In the morning he accepted English Breakfast, scrambled eggs, and sliced ham.
We moved his Rolls into my driveway, pulling it far enough up that it couldn’t be seen from the street, and drove my Dodge to our first destination.
Dawn Purdy had been friends with Rosemary since the ninth grade. They lied to the Goldsmiths and joined the Venceremos Brigade summer program two years in a row, going down to Cuba to work with the socialist peasants on farms and in factories.
Dawn’s parents had inherited wealth and were dyed-in-the-wool communists. Foster never really knew about them. It was Lenore that got in the way of the friendship.
“How long has it been since they talked to each other?” I asked.
“I don’t know much about that since Rose went to college,” Redbird said. “But they had regular phone conversations through high school.”
The Purdys lived way up in Bel-Air. Up where there were no sidewalks and street signs were rare.
There was no foot traffic whatsoever.
The turnoff to the residence was more like a country road than a driveway.
The house was akin to a royal residence.
I pulled onto a cobblestone parking area in front of the house and went with my companion to the front door. I pressed a button and from very far off came the sound of chimes—real chimes, not an electronic recording.
A few minutes later the extra-wide door came open. I expected a butler in a tuxedo or at least a maid in classic black and white, but the woman standing before us wore faded blue jeans and a silk shirt the pink color of coral that had washed ashore and dried. Her shoulder-length hair was black with a goodly amount of gray strands, and her face was long and handsome; at one time she’d probably been the old-time American ideal of beauty.
“Redbird,” she said in a tone that was not necessarily welcoming.
“Mrs. Purdy,” my temporary partner replied.
That was when she turned her full attention to me.
At first it was just a glance, a taking-in of my features, gender, and, of course, color. I expected mild surprise and maybe a little of the antipathy she felt toward my partner. But instead there was a moment of wonder and then an actual smile.
“Rawlins?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Um, uh, don’t tell me,” she said. “Easy, yes, Easy Rawlins. Johnson! Johnson!”
A very tall man came up behind the woman. He was at least six-seven, with black hair, no mustache, and a salt and pepper goatee.
“What is it, Virginia?” he asked, looking at us.
“It’s Lenore Goldsmith’s man Redbird with Easy Rawlins.”
“Easy Rawlins,” he said with real pleasure. He held out a hand. “Welcome to our home.”
When we shook he said, “Come in. Come in.”
The Purdy house was simple and elegant. The rooms weren’t overcrowded with possessions, useless furniture, or, as a rule, ostentatious works of art. The foyer was three times the size of my new living room with much higher ceilings. The floors were tiled with roughhewn cream-colored stone that might have been semiprecious. The walls were finished oak.
From this room we came into a library or maybe a sitting room with bookshelves. There was a huge ebony-wood table that dominated this space. As a centerpiece there was a big, maybe five-hundred-pound, dark stone festooned with dozens of blazing orange crystals.
The far wall of the room was a big window looking out on a lawn that ended at a cliff. In the distance I could see the Pacific Ocean. There were three white sofas formed into a three-sided square that was open to the window.
“Sit, sit,” Johnson Purdy bade us. “Virginia, get our guests some fruit juice.”
I sat on the left-side sofa, placed perpendicular to the window. Redbird decided to stand behind me as Art Sugar’s man had done for him. Johnson Purdy sat across from us.
“I saw you looking at the big rock, Mr. Rawlins,” Johnson noted.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “What are the stones?”
“Fire opals from Brazil,” he said. “It was a gift from a small village down there where we built a hospital and a school. Virginia polished the gems herself.”
Mrs. Purdy returned carrying four frosted tumblers on a tarnished silver tray.
“Lemon, pomegranate, and blueberry juices combined,” she said as she handed me a glass.
She served Redbird and then her husband, finally settling on the central sofa.
“The police have already been here,” Johnson said to kick off the business of our conversation.
I sipped my juice. It was delicious.
“About what?” I asked.
“Rosemary, of course.”
“They thought she was here?”
“They thought our daughter might know where she was. When they asked us how they could get in touch with Dawn we sent them to an old address in the Mission District of San Francisco.”
“Your daughter’s not there anymore?”
“We’d never put the pigs on our own, Mr. Rawlins,” Virginia assured me.
“Excuse me,” I said. “But did the police mention my name?”
“No,” Virginia said.
“Then how do we know each other?”
“You don’t know us but we know Athena Wharton. She showed us a photograph of you and her adopted son Fennell.”
“Virginia never forgets a face,” Johnson said proudly, “not even from a photograph.”
41
Some years before, while attempting to live the straight life, I spent a short stint as Supervising Custodian at George Washington Carver Junior High School. Athena Wharton, a ninety-five-pound dynamo, was the principal. She was a wealthy white woman from an old-money family who felt that it was every person’s job to roll up their sleeves and do what they could for the world they lived in. She once told me that her industrialist father did not believe i
n charity.
“If you need charity for your people,” she told me he’d said, “then your society has failed.”
She had taken a special interest in an orphaned boy named Fennell Bryson. Fennell had various problems in school, what they call learning disabilities today, but he was a superb artist. He spent every extra moment sketching portraits and landscapes in layers of penciled texture that made you actually feel something—like a vibration underlying the mundane life that most of us lived.
Athena used to tutor the boy after school, and then one day he didn’t show at the appointed hour; the next morning his uncle came to her office and told her that Fennell had run away from home.
The principal and I had coffee once a week and she knew something about my past and future life.
“His uncle Suleiman believes that he’s run off with his father, Oxell Prideworth,” Athena told me behind the closed door of her office.
“Not ‘Bryson’?” I asked.
“Oxell never married Suleiman’s poor sister. When she died she left her son only the family name. I want you to find him.”
“That’ll be kind of hard, A,” I said. “You know I work all day and I got kids at home.”
“I’ll give you an informal leave of absence. Mr. Reed can do your job. I’ll pay him extra out of my own pocket and you can spend every day looking for the child.”
“What do you know about this Oxell guy?”
Athena was a good principal, she did her homework. From Suleiman she’d gotten a photograph of the father, and she gave me her own picture of the thirteen-year-old boy. It seemed like a chore for the boy to manufacture a smile but he did the work for his beloved tutor.
“The father has been arrested for robbery and spent time in prison,” she told me. “He gets into fights and drinks. I want you to find Fennell and make sure that he’s all right. If his father really cares about him they should be together but I’m worried that this is not the case.”
My old friend from Houston, John the Bartender, had his own bar at the time. I dropped by that very afternoon.
“That’s Ox, all right,” the broad-shouldered Texan said when I showed him the photograph. “I’ll ask around.”
Rose Gold Page 21
