Rose Gold

by Walter Mosley

  If he felt any of it you couldn’t tell by his actions.

  Arms out wide, he moved to put me in a bear hug but I pushed against his shoulders trying to shove him away. He was too powerful to be moved but I was thrown back and out of reach.

  Unafraid that I might hurt him, I kicked Bidwell in the midsection. He buckled six inches, no more, so I hit him twice in the nose.

  I felt something snap and blood gushed forth from the fop’s nostrils.

  Percy brought his hand to his nose and then looked at it—his fingers were dripping with blood. Rage and childish fear came over his face. He was a powerhouse but untrained in the ways of battle and the self-control needed to overcome pain. So I picked up my least favorite visitor’s chair and hit him for all I was worth.

  The chair shattered. Percy finally went down; not all the way but to one knee. I used the wooden leg left in my hand to hit him on the head, then I hit him again. He was sitting by then but still trying to rise.

  That’s when common sense took hold and I went around the desk to take the pistol from its nest.

  When Percy saw the gun he put up his hands. There was blood coming from his nose and also from the two places I had hit his skull.

  “You got a hard head, Percy Bidwell,” I said. “I hope it’s not dense too. Because I wanna tell you that the only way you gonna live to enjoy that college degree is to leave Jewelle and Jackson alone. If I evah hear that you did anything to make them unhappy I will kill you. And if I don’t get to you I’ll make sure my friend Raymond Alexander does.”

  “I just—” he said.

  “Don’t talk, man. Don’t say a mothahfuckin’ thing. Just get your ass up and outta here. Don’t go back to Jewelle’s office and don’t talk to her. Change your phone number and forget you ever heard about any’a us.”

  I pulled back the hammer of the .45-caliber pistol.

  Percy rose up on his feet weightlessly, as if a higher force had reached down and grabbed him by the shoulders. He stumbled out of the door trying to stanch the bleeding with his hands.

  Three or four minutes after he was gone, still standing there with the cocked pistol in my hand, I exhaled and realized that the rage I’d felt had evaporated.

  52

  Sitting on a pine bench at the edge of Belvedere Park in East Los Angeles, I considered the unexpected blessing of Percy Bidwell. If he hadn’t come to me when he did I might have gone off into the world blinded by anger at things I would never control.

  I had picked a fight with a man who could have easily killed me with his bare hands. I fought that man and, impossibly, I won. As a youth I might have felt victorious, but nearing fifty I knew that it was just dumb luck that saved my life.

  I had been sitting in the park for nearly two hours; long enough for the feeling to return to my left arm—that and the dull ache of wisdom.

  The common was filled with brownish people, most of whom had hailed from Mexico or were born to parents that came from there. They spoke Spanish and English with deep accents. From little children to old men, the park was lively. There was the smell of chlorine in the air from the public pool. Young mothers and their babies, silent men and their hefty wives, meandered through the barrio common. They were every color from red to bronze to brown; Indian and Negro mixtures of ancestors who had been raped and plundered by Spanish conquistadors and then left to work the land; the legacy of ancient empires.

  I was eating a novelty ice-cream sugar cone that was first dipped in chocolate and then in crushed peanuts. Across from me was a fancy merry-go-round with yellow and brown and red horses prancing in a circle to the upbeat tune of canned calliope music. It was the only carousel of its type in L.A. that I knew of.

  I was armed but didn’t need to be. After Percy, I had no intention of getting into another battle. It was late afternoon and I was happy watching the groups of pretty young girls and the boys who pretended not to be watching them.

  The barrio was a good place for a crook to hide. Your color hardly mattered there and no one wanted to have undue contact with the authorities. Just pay your rent in cash, speak a few words in Spanish, and remember to keep your head down, and you could go unnoticed for years.

  I saw her bandaged hand first. The dressing was white but there was a spot of red on the outside edge of the left palm. She wore a blue-gray shift that hid what little figure she had. Her shoes were yellow rubber flip-flops. Next to her was a tall sand-colored man wearing dark sunglasses and a sleek straw hat. His square-cut shirt was dark navy, his trousers black. There was a big straw purse hanging from her right shoulder and her blond hair was limp and greasy.

  Rose had lost a few pounds since the photograph in my pocket was taken. But it was her. She was no longer smiling. Rose’s somber gaze seemed to be turned inward while the man next to her kept looking from side to side.

  When they were half the way across the two-block-wide green I got up and wandered in their general direction. They seemed to be alone but I wasn’t taking any chances.

  On the other side of the park they were accosted by a rotund honey-colored man carrying a fanciful box draped with Mexican flags and filled with pink and blue cotton candy in clear plastic pouches. He smiled and said something in Spanish. Rose suddenly came to life, chattering with the man and buying one of his flags.

  I walked past the couple, considering for a moment a confrontation.

  I had a gun and the element of surprise. I could have ended the whole problem with a few quick movements. I might have tried, if not for the blessing of Percy Bidwell. Delbert and Rose probably had guns too. And they were desperate, both of them dialed directly into survival mode.

  I reached the pavement and turned right to walk down the crowded sidewalk. Seven steps away there was a man with a Polaroid camera offering to take photographs of babies and lovers for a dollar a shot. A smiling mustachioed man holding a crying infant was posing for the lay photographer. I stopped to watch the spectacle and saw through the corner of my eye Rose and Delbert walk across the street and up the stairs of a big wooden house that was flush up against the opposite sidewalk.

  “Smile!” was the only English word the photographer spoke.

  I looked up to set in my mind the house that the couple was entering.

  At just that moment Most Grand took off his dark glasses and swiveled his gaze in my direction.

  Our eyes met for only a moment but that was enough for him, maybe, to have marked me. I turned away and by the time I looked back the revolutionaries were walking through the door of the two-story house.

  I went down to the end of the block. From there I could watch the front of the rebel hideout and make a call from a corner phone booth.

  Because Delbert might have seen and suspected me I couldn’t leave the scene. If they were paranoid they might pack up and leave. If that happened, either I would have to try to stop them or, more likely, search their place for clues to their next destination.

  I thought about calling the police, the FBI, and the State Department in turns. But not one of them was worried about the outcome for Bob. And Bob, after all, was the only one I really cared about.

  “Goldsmith residence,” a young woman said after the Dumbarton operator connected me to the presidential suite.

  “Redbird please.”

  “Mr. Rawlins?” he said, coming onto the line a minute or two later.

  “You got a car don’t stand out like a sore thumb?”

  For the next hour or so I moved around the park and up and down 1st Street, keeping an eye on the hideout. In that time I marked eight people coming in and out, including Rose and Delbert. There were two black men, one Asian woman, and three white men all thirty years old or younger except for high-yellow Delbert. He was nearer forty but hale.

  Only two, the Asian woman and one of the white guys, actually left the premises. The others sat out on the porch smoking and talking—there was no drinking that I saw.

  Redbird and I had made our rendezvous point the corner
phone booth at six. He wore faded jeans and a red and black shirt that was long-sleeved wool.

  Walking through the park I pointed out the house and related the intelligence I’d gathered.

  “We can’t tell the police,” Redbird said after I laid out the situation. “They’d probably just come in with guns blazing. Rosemary might get killed.”

  “And you care about her?” I asked.

  “I owe her mother.”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking about Bob. “I guess we all owe somebody something.”

  “The ransom payoff is tonight.”

  “Where?”

  “Crispin couldn’t get the details,” Redbird said. “Goldsmith is making the drop personally. This is our best bet right here.”

  “Eight armed and dangerous revolutionaries and us,” I said.

  Redbird’s grin had no humor to it.

  “Among my people,” he said, “before the Spanish came, if a young man wanted to be a chief he had to hunt and kill a bear armed only with two stones and a flint knife.”

  “That ain’t nuthin’. In my neighborhood we got to get through worse than that just walkin’ down the street in the mornin’.”

  53

  Redbird and I argued strategies on a park bench not far from the carousel. The sun had set but the sky was still light and there was a mariachi band playing somewhere close by. The park was even more alive and, if I closed my eyes, I had the feeling that I’d left white, European, and English America behind.

  “We can take them by ourselves,” Redbird said after ten minutes and no détente in sight.

  “That’s not the question, Teh-ha,” I said.

  “No? Then what?”

  “The question is, can you take them by yourself?”

  Redbird was a country unto himself; an independent nation that would fight to the death for the sanctity of its sovereignty. He would have let me walk away if he wasn’t in a war to save the daughter of a woman, a vestige of his prior colonization, who had to be appeased for an obscure article in some ancient treaty, written in a dead language.

  “Can you trust these friends of yours?” Redbird asked me, his necessary ally.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Two men could do this,” he said, trying one last time to convert me.

  “Not without some serious violence.”

  The aboriginal American hunched his shoulders maybe a quarter inch. The downturn of his lips could be measured only in millimeters.

  “You got kids, man?” I asked him.

  “Three.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In Berkeley with their mother.”

  “My girl’s on a plane right now but when she comes home she expects me to be there. It’s only me that she’s got.”

  Redbird made a small gesture with his left hand, conceding with a flick of fingers.

  “What now, Easy?” Melvin Suggs said on the line.

  Mary/Clarissa had answered the phone. When I told her who it was she was delighted to go and get her man.

  I was calling from a pay phone in the tiny lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel, a four-story ramshackle inn, two buildings down from Scorched Earth’s HQ. The Roosevelt was the kind of establishment that rented rooms by the week or the night, or by the hour if that’s all you needed. Redbird was up on the roof watching the front door, side windows, and backyard of the hideout.

  “Officer McCourt find anything yet?” I said into the phone.

  The short span of Suggs’s hesitation told me more than words.

  “Melvin,” I prompted.

  “There was an investigation of Leonard Scores.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The senior officer killed in the shootout. They thought that he was doin’ work in the drug trade.”

  “Somebody actually told him this?”

  “Score’s precinct captain’s secretary. Women like Anatole.”

  “You said, there was an investigation. They called it off after the killings?”

  “Before.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Roger Frisk, after delegating the investigation to Tout Manning, said that there was no foundation to the accusations.”

  “Oh.”

  A paunchy and middle-aged white man wearing a polyester green suit came in with his arm around the waist of a reed-slender, teenaged Mexican girl. Impossibly, she seemed to be holding him up. They went to the podium that stood for the front desk. A tall and slender woman appeared from behind a red curtain. She was a dark-skinned Hispanic woman with suspicious eyes and an incongruous smile on her lips.

  The desk clerk and girl had a short conversation in rapid Spanish.

  At the end of the exchange the girl turned to the man and said, “She wants fifteen dollars.”

  “That’s too much,” the man slurred.

  “It’s the honeymoon suite,” the woman said through her false smile.

  “Easy,” Melvin Suggs said in my ear.

  “Yeah?”

  “Frisk must be putting a frame on Mantle to hide his involvement with Scores. If they can prove that he was part of the Goldsmith kidnapping nobody’ll even question the shootout.”

  “And Art Sugar goes away smelling like a rose.”

  “Sugar killed them?”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “From who?”

  “Why don’t you grab Officer McCourt and come down to the Roosevelt Hotel on East First?”

  “I asked you a question, Easy.”

  “Ask me again when you’re reinstated.”

  “And you’ll tell me then?”

  “Probably not.”

  The paunchy man paid the desk clerk from a crushed-up wad of one-dollar bills, then he, with the help of the girl, climbed the narrow and rickety staircase. I wondered, while watching them, if someone were looking at the way I conducted my life, would they see what I was seeing in the desultory climb of that man and that girl?

  Melvin was muttering something.

  I cut him off, saying, “I’ll see ya when you get here. We’ll probably be up on the roof.”

  Redbird was watching the extortionists’ front and back doors from the top of the hotel.

  “Are they coming?” he asked.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “They won’t act like fools?”

  “They won’t call in their brothers in blue until we’re sure how to get done what we need.”

  I lit a cigarette. Redbird snorted once then left it alone.

  The roof was layered with tar paper, and there was a ledge against a defunct brick chimney that we propped ourselves against.

  Scorched Earth’s backyard was completely paved in pale asphalt and surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. There was a long clothesline stretched from one corner of the fence to the other. At twilight a man came out and started hanging shirts and pants along the line.

  “We might be able to get in through the back,” Redbird suggested.

  “We were lucky once, man. Why push it?”

  Forty minutes later Melvin and Anatole joined us. They were dressed in black jeans and medium-colored shirts—McCourt in blue and Suggs in dark red.

  After introducing McCourt and Redbird I told the cops what we were looking at.

  “We should just get a riot squad and break down the doors,” McCourt said.

  “What if they’re barricaded?” I asked. “And what about Frisk?”

  “What about him?”

  “He wants to hang this thing on Bob Mantle but in order to do that he needs to take out these guys too.”

  “Then we just won’t tell Frisk.”

  “You can bet that he’s told every precinct chief and desk sergeant to report any news about Mantle or Rosemary.”

  “We don’t have to mention them either,” Anatole argued.

  “So we just point the riot squad at a house full of armed radicals and let the bullets fly,” I said.

  “How do you want to handle it, Easy?” Suggs said, intervening.
<
br />   “Watch and wait. If anyone leaves we let them go but grab ’em before they come back.”

  “Why not pick ’em up as soon as they’re out of sight of the house?”

  “Tonight they’re picking up the ransom.”

  “Then the law is already on it,” Anatole put in.

  “Mr. Goldsmith didn’t tell the police,” Redbird said. I was a little surprised that he said anything to the white men.

  “That’s against the law.”

  Teh-ha went to the edge of the roof and squatted down. With this movement he effectively turned his back on the younger cop’s stupidity.

  “They’ll probably only send two or three of their people to pick up the money,” I said to Suggs. “If so, I think I might have a plan.”

  “What kinda plan?”

  “Cops got one’a them safe houses around here?” I asked.

  “Not too far,” Anatole said.

  “Can we get it?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” I had the feeling that the Irish cop was good at working the system in ways that his mentor couldn’t even imagine.

  I laid out a far-reaching plan that included everything from stalking and abduction to health insurance and retirement benefits. By the time I was through I had converted all three men to my religion.

  After that, things moved slowly for a while. Redbird and Suggs watched the clothes dry in the backyard while Anatole went off to secure the safe house. I went down to the room we’d rented, sat in a chair next to a window, and watched as the mostly Mexican population moved around on foot and in cars, on bikes and in baby carriages, even in wheelchairs and with the help of canes and crutches just like other people did in other parts of town and all over the world.

  At a little after nine the door to the small room came open and Melvin Suggs rushed in.

  “White guy and a Chinese chick just left the house,” he said. “Your boy climbed down the fire escape and followed them.”