Rose Gold

by Walter Mosley

  “Rosemary Goldsmith,” I said, looking over Redbird’s shoulder into Vandal’s daunting gaze.

  “She betrayed us.”

  “I don’t care about that shit,” I said. “I need to find her and so I’m here asking.”

  There was a slight waver in Vandal’s arrogant stare that lasted maybe a second and a half.

  “Leave,” he said, holding up his left hand with all the fingers extended.

  That’s when Redbird pounced. In my many years of struggle, from street fights to military battles, I had never seen a man move faster. The Taaqtam warrior knocked the cult leader on his back and, from nowhere it seemed, produced a large, gleaming hunter’s knife. This he held to Vandal’s throat.

  “Where is she?” I heard the Indian say.

  His prey coughed and stuttered but couldn’t manage to speak.

  “Tell me or I’ll cut your throat right here.”

  The penitents were awake and rising to their feet but none of them approached Redbird and Vandal, so I left the pistol in my pocket.

  Redbird slapped Vandal.

  “Please don’t kill me!”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!”

  The ensuing silence was probably the closest thing to a religious revelation that had occurred in the Newman backyard. Vandal had turned two shades lighter and Redbird was hunched over him like a huntsman about to gut his not-quite-dead kill.

  For his part Vandal had been reduced to pure fear; there was nothing else in him.

  “Brother,” I said. I don’t know why I didn’t use his name. I didn’t touch him because that would have certainly ended in violence. “Let him go. You kill him and we won’t ever find her.”

  Slowly, Redbird rose up from Vandal.

  “How about a man named Minx?” I asked the dethroned religious leader.

  “He left when Rosemary and Dawn did,” he stammered. “That was more than eleven months ago.”

  Moving on his back, using his elbows and heels, Vandal scuttled away from Redbird, who turned quickly away, walking past me and into the house.

  Terry and I followed as the hubbub started up among the devotees.

  Outside, next to Terry’s Jaguar, I shook the young hippie’s hand.

  “Sorry about that, man,” I said. “I didn’t expect a war.”

  “Some people only understand the misuse of power,” he said. “In my civics class they talk about how despots and dictators are often overthrown and killed.”

  There I was, talking to a high-school senior. He wasn’t yet eighteen but there was a man behind that ugly mug.

  “Terry.” It was Lev. He hurried up to us, looking over his shoulder now and then.

  “Hey, Lev. Where’s Anna-Maria?”

  “She got out of here. Last month she went off shopping with one of Vandal’s girls, DeeDee. Anna gave the girl a thousand-dollar watch and she let her go.”

  “He’s keeping you prisoner?” I asked.

  “He spent all our money on his people. We’re deep in debt and he wants the sewing factory. Anna’s parents own the deeds and he wants to get them signed over so he can build his commune.”

  “You should come with me, Lev,” Terry said. “Come on down to my house. I’m sure Easy here can talk to some people and get those freeloaders out of there.”

  “Do you know a guy named Minx?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that his real name?”

  Glancing over his shoulder toward the house, the fat man said, “Youri Kidd. His name is Youri Kidd.”

  “You know where I can find him?”

  There were a few big guys standing out on the lawn of Lev’s house.

  “No,” he said miserably.

  The men started walking toward us.

  That seemed like a good time to take out my pistol.

  Noting my gun, they stopped and conferred. Then they headed back for the house.

  “Terry, you better take Lev down to your place. Me and Redbird’ll meet you there.”

  I don’t know if Vandal’s men were going in the house to get guns of their own, because sixty seconds later we were gone.

  44

  Driving down the curvy mountain roads, I gripped the wheel tightly because my heart was beating so fast I worried that I might lose control. It is in tense moments like these, after the threat has passed, that thoughts flit through my head of their own accord, like flying leaves in a strong wind.

  Alana Atman, her missing son Alton, came to mind. Time was running out for that business.

  Then I considered lecturing Redbird about pulling out his knife, but my angry heart wasn’t in it.

  We arrived at Terry’s mansion on Ozeta Terrace maybe half an hour later. The young master and his paunchy middle-aged guest were sitting in the kitchen. Lev was drinking whiskey, Scotch by the smell of it, while Terry sucked on a joint.

  I lit a cigarette and Redbird opened the garden door, placed a chrome and green vinyl chair half in and half out, and sat.

  “I found it, Easy,” Terry said, his voice constricted by the smoke.

  “Found what?”

  “I know a dude named Millman who’s hooked in with some bikers down in Venice. Lev told me that Youri Kidd was a dealer and Millman knows something about all that. I called him and he told me that Youri lives less than a mile from here.”

  Terry handed me a slip of paper that had a San Vicente address scrawled on it.

  “Can you help me?” Lev asked while I studied the note.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You don’t understand what?” Lev asked.

  “Meditation is like prayer, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Then why were they smoking dope in the living room?”

  “Vandal says that the herb enhances perception, that it brings us to a higher revelation. Minx was his supplier for a while.”

  “And you believe that prayer and getting high go together?”

  “Not anymore,” he said, and then finished off the glass of whiskey.

  Terry was taking a long hissing toke off of his joint.

  “Is your friend safe here?” I asked the young hippie.

  “I can lock the doors,” Terry said after exhaling. “And my father gave me the number for some bouncer guys if I ever got in trouble. I guess I could call them if I had to.”

  “Okay,” I said to Lev. He was pouring himself another drink from a crystal decanter. “I’ll take care of it right after this business I’m in. But it’ll cost you one thousand dollars.”

  “Anything you say.”

  It was a strange moment in time. The scared businessman that had worked his way up by physical labor and hard sweat, the member of an extinct North American tribe sitting inside and in the sun at the same time, and the hippie inhaling his drug—it felt to me even then like a special moment that might never be repeated.

  Youri Kidd’s address was two blocks north of 3rd Street. It was a side-by-side single-story two-family house. It once had been a modest home but somebody got old and decided that their property could supplement their income, and so split the dwelling down the middle to assure their later years.

  I knocked on Youri’s door. When he didn’t answer I knocked again.

  Then I tried the door next to his. The mailbox told me that this half-home belonged to Miss Phyllis Landers. No answer there either.

  Now and then a car cruised down San Vicente but there was little to no pedestrian traffic. That was back when most people had jobs from nine to six or eight to five, or even seven to four. Leisure happened at night and on the weekends for most folks.

  “Maybe I should go around back,” Redbird said.

  “Maybe you should.”

  While standing out front I smoked a cigarette and wondered about Jackson Blue and Percy Bidwell. I find that it’s helpful to think about seemingly simple problems while waiting for the more complex jobs to gel.

  The door
to Youri’s apartment came open. Redbird was standing there. I remembered a time when I was the one who went around the back and came in through some window.

  While pushing the door closed Redbird said, “He’s in the bedroom.”

  An air conditioner was on full blast in the bedroom; that cut down on the odor and swelling. Pale, wearing only striped boxer shorts, the young man was quite thin and dead. He had been beaten before his throat was cut. His left leg was on a single mattress that had no frame or box springs. His penis poked out through the opening in the shorts.

  “He’s cold,” Redbird said.

  I saw no reason to check this claim. I noticed that my partner was wearing cloth gloves. I always had a pair in my back pocket when I was working. I took them out and donned them before going through the apartment looking for any sign of Rosemary.

  Redbird concentrated on the drawers and closets while I studied the floor and went through the trash.

  After forty-five minutes I had come up empty. The only thing Redbird found was a tiny phone diary that contained a couple of dozen numbers, not one of which was connected to a full name.

  “You want me to do it?” I asked my fellow burglar.

  He nodded once.

  In the living room of the six-hundred-square-foot apartment there was a tan couch that had its legs sawed off. Sitting down, you were right at the floor. I took the big black phone next to it and started making calls.

  “Hello?” a man answered for a number with the name Manny next to it.

  “Am I speaking to Youri Kidd?” I stated in an official tone.

  “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.”

  45

  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 dictato
r, 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.