Rose Gold

by Walter Mosley

  “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.

  46

  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.

  I loved my father something fierce.

  “Hello,” he answered on the sixth ring. It was maybe three in the morning.

  “Mr. Manning,” I said.

  “What do you want?”

  “The truth might be good.”

  “You mean like when you told Captain Reynolds that you weren’t hired to find the Goldsmith girl?”

  “The only one you and Frisk ever been interested in was Bob,” I said. “You sent me to that gym, only wanted to know about him.”

  “What do you want, Rawlins?”

  “You got my letter?”

  “You can forget that. The LAPD doesn’t employ private detectives.”

  “No? Then where did the money you gave me come from?”

  “All American dollars come from the U.S. mint.”

  “Did Foster Goldsmith give it to you?”

  “The only Goldsmith I’m interested in is Rosemary. And the only thing I said about her was that she had disappeared and that her father is an important man.”

  “Bob did not kill those policemen.”

  “You couldn’t possibly know that for a fact.”

  “The night those men were shot he was in police custody,” I said. “I have proof of it.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  “You know what I think, Mr. Manning?” He didn’t reply and so I went on, “I think that you or maybe somebody else wants to prove that Bob did something wrong, probably that he killed those policemen. I think that they were happy sitting back and waiting for him to get shot down in the street but then he got mixed up with Rosemary and the game got taken to a whole nother level. That’s why I got brought in so long after he was supposed to have committed the first crimes.”

  There passed maybe fifteen seconds of silence and then the phone on the other end of the line broke connection. I waited, listening to the vast emptiness of the phone’s dimension and then there came another
click. I cradled the receiver and went out on the front lawn to smoke.

  Out there I went over the short, one-sided conversation a few times. For the little he said, Manning was talking like an actor in front of an audience. He suspected that the phone was bugged; maybe by me or by parties unknown. His knowledge and his guilt were one and the same.

  47

  I was outside smoking when the Silver Shadow pulled way up into the driveway of my new house. That was five twenty-nine a.m.

  Redbird and I didn’t speak, didn’t even nod. We got into my car, which was parked on the street, and I headed east. I tuned to a classical music station that was playing a long succession of uninterrupted piano concertos. Redbird didn’t ask me where we were going. He, like those sailors of old, was the kind of man that let the wind take him.

  It was midmorning by the time we got there. Melvin must have seen us coming. He was waiting out in front of the Walton cabin. He wore the same shorts and shirt and sported thick facial hair after only a couple of days without shaving. It was the beginning of a black beard, graying around the jowls.

  “Easy,” he said.

  “Melvin. This is Redbird. He works for Rosemary Goldsmith’s mother.”

  The men nodded at each other.

  “How’s our prisoner?” I asked.

  “He just sits there. Every now and then I walk him to the outhouse out back. I had to go into town for provisions. He didn’t even try and break his cuffs.”

  Melvin led the way into the cabin. The bloodstains on Uhuru-Bob’s white dress shirt had turned black and rust. He looked up with big fearful eyes when we came into the room.

  “There’s water and beer in the cooler,” Melvin said, pointing at a big white Styrofoam box in a corner.

  “Hey, Bob,” I greeted.

  He just stared.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said tentatively.

  “You know why we got you out here right, brother?”

  “I ain’t done nuthin’, man. Not a damn thing. I didn’t even know Rose was gonna rob that liquor store.”

  “You knew she had a sawed-off shotgun,” Melvin said.

  “The pig was after us, man. He was gonna kill us and be done with it.”

  “Pig?” the cop said.

  “Mel,” I said, to short-circuit the possible confrontation.

  “What?”

  “I need you to wash up and shave.”

  “Why? So the kangaroo mice won’t smell my stink?”

  “We got to go meet somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “Somebody that’s kinda helpin’ me.”

  “Where?”

  “Down in Twentynine Palms.”

  Suggs stared at me a moment or two and then went out to the little tin shack designed for showering. Davis had a two-hundred-gallon water tank propped up on a red boulder that hovered behind the little hut. A water service from town filled the tank whenever he called them.

  Redbird lifted the lid off the cooler and took out a glass pitcher full of water. He got a tin cup from a shelf, poured himself a draught, then sat at the table staring straight ahead at a blank wall as if it were a window onto the world—he was a man apart.

  “So, Bob,” I said, now that he and I were virtually alone.

  “Yeah?”

  “You said you knew a man calling himself MG?”

  “I met him with Rose but I already knew who he was, if you know what I mean.”

  “How’s that work?”

  “You see,” ex-Uhuru Bob Mantle said as the story took him over, “like I said, Rose knew my friend Youri Kidd. Youri helped save her from this cultlike thing up in Laurel Canyon last year. After that he started doin’ robbery and burglary and stuff with these people called themselves Scorched Earth. That was like a commune run by the guy you talkin’ ’bout. He called himself Most Grand, MG. Really his name was Delbert Underhill but nobody but me knew that.”

  “So you knew that Youri was hooked up with this Delbert?” I asked.

  “Not before Youri took us out there. He had just told me about the group and called the leader Most Grand. I didn’t know nobody by that name. But even after I saw him I pretended that he was new to me. Delbert had moved from the old neighborhood to a new part’a town, changed his name, and lived a whole other kind of life. When I saw him again I could tell by how crazy he was that if you even called him Del he’d probably kill you.”

  “You two weren’t friends before?”

  “No. We was kids in the same neighborhood. We went to the same schools sometimes but I didn’t hang out with him. He was three years older and really bad.”

  “Rose knew him from before?”

  “No. She had just heard about him, about how he was this revolutionary, but that was just a lie. He’s a crook is all.”

  “And when she heard about him from Youri she wanted a meet?”

  “That’s right. I recognized Delbert but I didn’t say nuthin’ about it. And Youri brought us there but he didn’t do robberies anymore. He just dealt dope and mushrooms mainly. He took me and Rose out to see Delbert in the Valley somewhere but he didn’t get along with Delbert no more.

  “When Del and Rose met it was like they was lookin’ for each other they whole lives. She just forgot about me and they talked all night long.”

  “And what’s Del’s story?” I asked.

  “The people in his political commune were scared’a him but they loved him too, really loved him. And so when he was with Rose, which was a lot, they let some things drop because he was all they thought about. MG this and MG that. That’s how I found out that he was on parole. His PO think he’s workin’ as a plumber but really he got this girlfriend in the master plumber’s office fakes his work papers. He still has to go in every other week to the parole office but that’s all.”

  I remembered the X’s on the calendar in the house of the hanged woman.

  “What was he in for?”

  “They busted him for larceny but his main thing was pullin’ cons and plannin’ heists. At least that’s what his people bragged about. They said that he graduated from bein’ a criminal to a revolutionary. He dropped outta school in the ninth grade after they held him back the second time but he’s smart, real smart.

  “Rose knew who he was because Youri would talk about the Scorched Earth and how they planned to overthrow the whole government, but as far as I could see really it was just a gang robbin’ places and talkin’ all big.”

  “So you and Rose came down to L.A.,” I said, trying to map out the series of events in my mind, “got in touch with Youri, and he brought you to Delbert.”

  “That’s how it was, man. Rose kept sayin’ that she knew how to make it so that Delbert and his people could bring down her father’s whole weapons company and embarrass the government too.”

  “But if Youri had broken from them then why would he help?”

  “He didn’t want to be part of it but Youri had a hard-on for Rose too. He didn’t wanna take us out there but when she aksed he just had to give in.”

  “And that’s how the three of you hooked up?”

  “Delbert wasn’t too happy to see Youri. He said that he told him that he never wanted to see him again. He said that Youri had betrayed him by leavin’ Scorched Earth. He kicked that boy’s ass sumpin’ terrible and threw him out the house. Rose didn’t like that but she still wanted sumpin’ from Del.”

  “I don’t understand, Bob,” I said. “How can you tell me that you already knew this Delbert Most Grand man but it’s Youri takes you there?”

  “Delbert was famous in my neighborhood, brother. He stole from the student store at junior high and kicked the shit outta the woodshop teacher, Mr. Melview. Everybody for miles around knew Del.”

  “Did he kill Youri Kidd?”

  Bob looked at me and for a moment or two he was himself: Belle Mantle’s son in the small house concentrating on jigsaw puzzles and watching reruns of Sgt. Bilko.

  “Him and this
white dude named Rex went out for a drive one night. They said that they was on a mission. When they got back early in the morning MG woke Rose up in our sleepin’ bag and told her that he had to talk with her in his room. That was the day after we got there. I was mad that Rose left and so I went to the kitchen. Rex was in there with this oriental chick. When I was walkin’ in I heard him say, ‘… kicked his ass and cut his throat like you got to do to any traitor.’ ”

  “Is Delbert the one killed those three cops?” I asked.

  “Naw, man, he didn’t have nuthin’ to do with that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because like I said his people was always braggin’ ’bout all the things he did. That’s how they made like they believed in him.”

  Like you putting on costumes, I thought.

  “So why would Rose be with Delbert now?” I asked.

  “I already told you, man. It was like they fell in love the minute they met. He wanted her but he was paranoid-like and told us both that he didn’t know if he could trust us. He had heard about my speeches when I was Uhuru Nolicé but that wasn’t enough for him. He told Rose that he had to test her. I didn’t know it at the time but that’s why she robbed that liquor store; to prove to Del that he could trust her. She even took the teller’s wallet so that he could check her out in the newspaper.”

  “When did you find this out?” I asked.

  “After I got shot and she was drivin’ me up to Isla Vista.”

  “Why did she take you back up north and not to Delbert?”

  “I begged her not to take me to him. I was scared after what he did to Youri. I tried to warn Rose but she just thought I was jealous. She wasn’t mad though. She said that she knew how to get us enough money to leave the country.”

  “How?”

  “Blackmail her father,” Bob said. “Get his money and make him admit to payin’ for terrorists and dictators and shit.”

  “You told me before that you never heard about any kidnapping.”

  “Yeah. I lied, man. I didn’t even really believe it but I lied because I thought just knowin’ it might get me in trouble.”