Rose Gold

by Walter Mosley

  “Alone?”

  “He said that they wouldn’t even see a brown man on the street around here.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Anatole is watching which way they go. He’ll meet us downstairs and we can follow.”

  Moving down East First we’d made it about a block and a half before encountering Redbird, who was on his way back.

  “They went to a locked one-car garage,” Redbird told us right there on the street. “Then they came out in an old blue Buick.”

  “Let’s go check it out,” Melvin said.

  It was a solidly built concrete bunker of a building, freestanding with a heavy oak door. There were four thick padlocks securing the entry port. On the right side there wasn’t enough space for a dog to traverse but on the left there was a constricted concrete pathway that we managed to negotiate.

  There was a door at the back of the building that was solid and also locked.

  But a strong lock didn’t mean much to Anatole McCourt’s impressive shoulders. He slammed into the green door five times and it flew open.

  I found myself wondering how many blows it would have taken Percy Bidwell to achieve the same end.

  Redbird found the light and Melvin located a small armory in a large wooden locker on a sidewall. While Anatole looked around I stood in the center of the car-sized empty space imagining myself transforming into another kind of man with a slightly different life.

  “Two of us should wait here for the man and woman to return, and one should keep watch on the house,” I said.

  “What about the fourth?” Melvin asked.

  “You remember where the desert cabin was?” I asked Redbird.

  He nodded.

  “You go out there and bring back Bob.”

  “What you want with him?” Melvin wanted to know.

  “Trust me, Mel,” I said. “I got this shit covered.”

  54

  It was decided that Anatole should head back to the Roosevelt because he was the only official lawman among us. We agreed that if the man and woman in the blue Buick came back to the hideout rather than the garage, and Delbert and his merry band decided to move, McCourt could call in the riot squad. Redbird didn’t like that wrinkle but he finally agreed.

  I wasn’t worried, because there wasn’t enough room for all of them in the one car, and even if they did try to leave, the cops could get the drop on them outside their fortress.

  Melvin and I moved to the opposite corners next to the port door. That way, if the extortionists returned, we could come up behind them as they exited the automobile.

  We turned out the lights and hunkered down. Anatole levered the back door into place from outside, and so the garage was in almost perfect darkness.

  “You get much sleep lately?” I asked my unseen confederate.

  “In the desert I did,” he said. “You know when the sun goes down out there it’s just like you got to close your eyes. But since Mary’s been back I’ve hardly even blinked.”

  “You need me to goose you every now and then so you don’t doze off?”

  “I won’t,” he said. “And even if I did, a car driving in here would wake me.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “But before we go silent tell me something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How did you tumble to the hideout?”

  I told him most of the story of the dead bodies and the clue innocently given up by Bob Mantle’s son.

  “Did you call Emergency when you found the bodies?” Melvin asked when I was through.

  “They were already dead, Mel. There didn’t seem to be any emergency.”

  After that we were quiet.

  I sat in the darkness with no real thoughts in mind. I was a Neolithic hunter, maybe one of Redbird’s ancestors, waiting by a watering hole for some big dumb creature to raise its woolly head.

  I might have heard the engine idling on the other side of the garage door, or maybe it was the padlocks clacking open and banging against their brass hinges. Whatever it was, I was fully awake by the time the dark sedan with its headlights blazing pulled past me into the space. I wondered if Melvin had fallen asleep too.

  I couldn’t worry about that. My only choice was to scuttle forward toward the passenger’s door and hope that Melvin was doing the same on his side.

  My target door was only halfway open when I heard Melvin shout, “Hold it right there, sister—police!”

  That meant the woman was driving and that the man was in a position to shoot through the window at my partner. I leaped toward the car door, swung it open, and slammed the side of my pistol into the back of the white man’s head. He staggered in his seat and I hit him a second time, remembering again the blessing of Percy Bidwell.

  “Easy!” Melvin shouted.

  I stood up and he threw me a pair of official handcuffs. I then pulled the skinny white guy out of the car and he tumbled onto the concrete floor like a half-empty bag of laundry.

  While I was securing his wrists behind his back the woman screamed—or, more accurately, she began a scream that was cut short by a hard slap.

  I went to the garage door and pulled it down before anyone could come investigate. I was still a little disoriented by sleep but it seemed to be very late. The little I saw of the street was empty, even desolate. The car’s headlights were still on but I flipped the switch for the overhead light anyway.

  Melvin was putting the cuffs on the stunned woman. I never liked hitting women but in this case I understood. Melvin was acting on his own while under suspension. If we were caught the whole game would go south. But my indifference toward the extortionists had other origins also; first among these was the hanging corpse in the Studio City hideout, the woman who tried and failed to save herself from strangling with one big toe.

  There was a tool cabinet at the back of the garage next to the cache of arms; in there Melvin found a roll of black electrical tape. He used this to cover the woman’s mouth, then he threw the roll to me. I did the same to my captive.

  “We should use the tape to bind their legs,” I said. “And then we could put them in the backseat of the car and tape their hands and ankles to the handles on the doors.”

  “Why not put them in the trunk?”

  When Melvin asked this the woman jumped and tried to run. Melvin caught her by the arm and pulled her back. She kicked him in the leg and he pushed her hard enough that she lost her balance and fell to the floor.

  “Throw me that tape,” he grunted.

  I did as he requested.

  My captive had his eyes open but I don’t think he was seeing anything.

  He was a featherweight with acne scars on his face. He, and the Asian woman, wore dark pants and shirts. It was like they were playing at crime. Just wearing those clothes at night could have gotten them arrested. At the very least their attire might have brought cops snooping around.

  Melvin whistled and I looked up to see the tape flying at my head. I caught it and bound the man’s ankles. Then I dragged him onto the floor of the backseat and bound him to the handles of both doors in the way I’d suggested. His hands were behind his back and so I twisted the tape, making it like a rope pulling his arms up so that movement was almost impossible.

  Melvin had much more trouble with the woman on the backseat cushions. She wriggled and bucked, would have bitten and scratched if she could have. But he finally managed to bind her.

  When they were lying facedown and bound, ankles and wrists, to the chrome door handles, Melvin and I turned our attention to other matters.

  Suggs took the keys from the ignition and opened the trunk. Therein we found two dark green trunklike suitcases that were large enough to need wheels and handles on both the long and short sides.

  We each pulled out a bag.

  “You think Daddy might have laid a booby trap?” Melvin asked.

  “No,” I said. “I mean he could have. He’s got the right tools at that research factory. Bu
t there would be no way for him to plan who was going to get killed.”

  “You really believe that?” Melvin asked.

  I nodded.

  “Then you open one,” he said.

  Both bags had three latches along the side. I snapped mine open and lifted the lid.

  “Shit.” That was Melvin but it could have just as well been me.

  The traveling trunk was filled with cash—filled. Mostly tens and twenties that had been in circulation, in wrappers that had amounts scrawled upon them.

  Melvin opened the other case. It was the same thing there.

  “A goddamned million,” Melvin whispered. “A goddamned million dollars.”

  The silence in that hangar was akin to the hush of a church.

  We were both thinking the same thing: about Moving Day. This was a once-in-a-lifetime moment. We could take the money and leave the radicals to be found by Delbert later that day. I’d fly off to Liberia or Brazil. Later I’d call Bonnie and she could bring Feather.

  It wasn’t stolen money.

  We were Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn falling into a cave and landing on a fortune. And in this story Becky was one of the bad guys and Injun Joe was on our side.

  “You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?” Melvin asked. He sounded like a child.

  “Uh-huh” was all I could manage.

  “We could just take this money right now.”

  “Too many loose ends, Melvin. Anyway, we got to leave some money for your brothers in blue to find.”

  We drove the car sixteen blocks to a brick house with an attached garage. This was the LAPD safe house for that neighborhood. It was where they secluded themselves when planning one of their larger operations or when a senior officer needed some private time with his mistress.

  The keys were in a false brick on the right side of the stronghold.

  We unlocked the door of the garage and parked inside. After that Melvin and I lugged the bags inside, leaving our squirming prisoners in the backseat.

  Officer McCourt had paid off the right people to have the house for the night. He told the district supervisor that he was giving a bachelor party for some fellow officer and promised the requisite three hundred and fifty dollars.

  The house’s walls were thick and the few windows bulletproof. The front, back, and side doors were solid steel. There wasn’t much wood and so fire wasn’t a concern. It was a fortress and we were defending sentinels.

  Sitting in the kitchen, Melvin was drinking a beer while I satisfied my thirst with a glass of tap water. I knew what was to come next.

  “So, Easy,” he said. “Which one?”

  “Either you or me.”

  “We could both go.”

  “You wanna leave a million dollars and two murderers with no supervision. There ain’t a bank vault outside’a Fort Knox that secure.”

  “You can trust me,” he said.

  When I hesitated he said, “We could flip a coin.”

  “Why not a simple math problem?” I suggested. “An equation.”

  “What kind of equation?”

  “Which is greater,” I said, “the possibility of me running off with a million dollars or the woman back home in your bed?”

  Reminding Melvin of Mary/Clarissa was all I had to do. In a week or maybe two he would no longer feel indebted to me, but after long weeks of pining for his lost love he couldn’t turn me down.

  “You know I’m gonna be quick,” he warned.

  “Take the keys to our friends’ car,” I offered. “Take off the distributor cap and flatten all the tires. I will be right here when you get back.”

  Maybe ten minutes after he left I went out to the garage to check on our captives. They were secure but all the tires were flat. Mel didn’t have time to let out the air. He came through with a knife and punctured each one.

  55

  Half an hour later I was sitting in the kitchen reading the only book I could find, Atlas Shrugged, a work I’d heard lots about but never read. I knew that Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, was the talisman of free thinkers and capitalists around the world but in the few pages I got through I couldn’t make out her argument.

  Of course I wasn’t so much thinking about abstract ideas of laissez-faire capitalism with a million dollars in the hall closet.

  By then it was early in the morning, a little after five. The reason I fell asleep was that the man and woman, Willy Buckingham and Sheila Yamagata, had taken five hours to retrieve the ransom. It was much later I found out that Sheila and Willy were secret lovers. Delbert considered all the women of Scorched Earth to be his private domain and so they took part of the time to satisfy their lust.

  Who knows? Maybe Mel and I saved their lives by grabbing them, because if they had come in so late Delbert might have suspected their purpose and hung them both from the clothesline in the backyard.

  On page twelve of Atlas the front door to the police house banged open. Melvin came in followed by the motley crew of Anatole, Redbird, and Bermuda shorts–wearing Uhuru-Bob Mantle. Bob walked with a pronounced limp and Redbird seemed like a nervous patriot, unhappy to be in the consulate of an enemy nation. Officer McCourt didn’t like their company but was exercising toleration. Mel went right to the closet where we stashed the trunks. After a few minutes he came out again.

  “What?” I said. “Don’t you trust me, Mel?”

  His wry grin was strong enough that I could almost smell it.

  “So what’s the plan?” Anatole McCourt asked.

  “Are they still in the house?” was my answer.

  “They were when we left.”

  “Then we need to call them if they have a phone.”

  “I got the number,” Officer McCourt said.

  “How?”

  “I thought we might need it so I called a friend at the phone company and he looked it up.”

  “A friend?”

  “What good is it being Irish if you can’t be friendly?” he said.

  This sounded like some kind of self-deprecation but I couldn’t fathom it; and neither did I care.

  “Is it connected?” I asked.

  “Only one way to find out.”

  “Bob,” I said to my actual client.

  “Yeah?”

  “I need you to do something for me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you know who Raymond Alexander is?”

  “Sure I do. That’s Mouse you talkin’ ’bout right there. Everybody know Mouse. He the man give bad a good name.”

  “I want you to pretend to be Mouse and to call Delbert.”

  “But Delbert knows me.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But what I want is for you to feel like Mouse in your heart and then tell him that you got his money and if he wants it he has to give you back your woman.”

  He gave me a questioning scowl and I said, “Rose.”

  “Uh, um,” he mumbled. “I don’t know, Mr. Rawlins. I mean I could call him and say that but maybe not the way you want. I mean I don’t know how to do anything like that.… I mean not on purpose.”

  That moment was the only true experience of revelation that I had on the Rose Gold case, outside of the Blessing of Percy Bidwell. Bob didn’t know what he was capable of; he just did things and only believed in what he was doing while he was doing it.

  I took the totem ring from my pocket and handed it to him.

  “This here is a present I got from Ray some years ago. I told him that I liked it and he just gave it to me.”

  Bob took the ring gingerly, cradling it in his left palm and stroking it lightly with the fingers of his right hand.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  “I want you to have it.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “If you just try and talk to Delbert you will have earned it.”

  The chameleon-man looked up at me, his eyes filled with surprise and wonder. He slipped the ring on the pinky of his left hand and said, “What is it exactly that yo
u want me to say?”

  I went over what we needed a few times with Bob. He fiddled with the ring on his finger and looked everywhere but in my eyes.

  His attention seemed to be wandering and so I asked, “Do you need me to write it down?”

  “Naw, man,” a different Bob said. “I’ont need that. I know what I’m gonna say.”

  We set him up at the phone in the kitchen. I hurried upstairs and lifted the receiver on an extension line while keeping my hand on the button. At a prearranged moment Anatole handed Bob the number. After he dialed the seven digits, Anatole motioned to Melvin at the foot of the stairs, Melvin signed to Redbird, who was stationed outside my room, and Redbird waved at me. When I let go of the button there was a phone ringing in my ear.

  After six rings someone answered, “Yes?”

  “Delbert there?” new Bob said.

  “Wrong number.”

  “I call him Delbert but you say Most Grand.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Get Delbert, man. That is unless you wanna lose all yo’ money.”

  “Hello?” another voice said.

  “Hey, Del, I need you to do sumpin’ for me, man.”

  “How you know my name?”

  “Delbert Underhill, right?”

  “Is that you, Uhuru?”

  “Who is Uhuru? Some kinda punk? You know who I am, Del, at least you should. For a few years there you lived just a couple’a blocks from my mama’s house.”

  “I’on’t know you, niggah.”

  “Maybe not but I’m ovah here sittin’ on two trunks full’a money, mothahfuckah, and you ovah there messin’ wit’ my woman. I want Rose and you want yo’ money. That’s grounds for a trade right there.”

  “Fuck you, man! You ain’t got shit.”

  “I got yo’ numbah. I got Willy and Sheila. I got a million dollars in two big bags. What the fuck you got, niggah?”

  “I’ll kill you,” Most Grand warned. “Gimme my money or you a dead man.”

  “You don’t wanna get me mad, Del, ’cause when I hang up this phone that’s it. I’ma be on a plane headed somewhere outside the country and here you is some loser ex-con cain’t even get no passport.”