Rose Gold: An Easy Rawlins Mystery Read online

  Also by Walter Mosley:

  Leonid McGill Mysteries

  All I Did Was Shoot My Man

  When the Thrill Is Gone

  Known to Evil

  The Long Fall

  Easy Rawlins Mysteries

  Little Green

  Blonde Faith

  Cinnamon Kiss

  Little Scarlet

  Six Easy Pieces

  Bad Boy Brawly Brown

  Gone Fishin’

  A Little Yellow Dog

  Black Betty

  White Butterfly

  A Red Death

  Devil in a Blue Dress

  Other Fiction

  Love Machine / Stepping Stone

  Merge / Disciple

  The Gift of Fire/On the Head of a Pin

  The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

  The Tempest Tales

  The Right Mistake

  Diablerie

  Killing Johnny Fry

  Fear of the Dark

  Fortunate Son

  The Wave

  47

  The Man in My Basement

  Fear Itself

  Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World

  Fearless Jones

  Walkin’ the Dog

  Blue Light

  Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

  RL’s Dream

  Original eBooks

  Parishioner

  Odyssey

  Nonfiction

  Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation

  This Year You Write Your Novel

  Life Out of Context

  What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace

  Workin’ on the Chain Gang

  Plays

  The Fall of Heaven

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Thing Itself, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor

  Jacket photographs: woman © Jandrie Lombard; fist © serazetdinov; flowers © Ela Kwasniewski

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mosley, Walter.

  Rose Gold : an Easy Rawlins mystery / by Walter Mosley.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-53597-7 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-385-53600-4 (ebook)

  1. Rawlins, Easy (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—California—Los Angeles—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.O88456R68 2014

  813′.54—dc23

  2014012936

  v3.1

  For Amiri Baraka

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  About the Author

  1

  Back then, Moving Day in L.A. was a phantom holiday that occurred, for many Angelenos, every other month or so. In the 1950s and ’60s, when the rent was dirt cheap, people moved to be closer to a new job, away from an old lover, or when it seemed that a fundamental change of life was in order. Sometimes the person moving would not only change the numbers on his or her door but also the name on the mailbox, the used car in the driveway, and even the style of clothes they donned to walk out and meet the day.

  Now and then the move was not merely aesthetic or convenient but necessary; like when a bill collector, lawyer, or the law itself was hot on the temporary tenant’s trail. At a time like this the migrant leaseholder would make sure that the new domicile was inside the border of a different unincorporated town or municipality of L.A. County. That way the law offered few systems to track his whereabouts. A man could actually avoid dunning or even arrest by merely moving across the street.

  In the case of a necessary move, the rental émigré would load up a truck in the middle of the night and go with no fanfare, or notice to the landlord.

  This was not the case with my midmorning migration.

  My daughter and I were moving, that Sunday, from Genesee at Pico to Point View just a few houses north of Airdrome; not more than eleven blocks. This was a necessary move that was not due to any legal or monetary bureaucracy.

  Five months or so earlier I had almost died. At that time I had been involved in a case that put my home in jeopardy, and so I had sent my daughter to stay with her brother at a friend’s place, temporarily. I resolved the case but then drove my car off the side of a coastal mountain. Whether this accident was due to a subconscious death wish or just bad luck is uncertain, but I was in what the doctors called a semicoma for the better part of two months.

  During that time a squatter named Jeffrey had taken possession of the empty house on Genesee. With the help of my friend Raymond Alexander, Jeff was put out. This was not a gentle eviction and I worried that Feather, my adopted daughter, might one day be home alone when the squatter returned for revenge.

  And so I sold the Genesee house and bought a new, larger place on Point View. I might have ranged farther but that September, Feather was going to enter the seventh grade at Louis Pasteur Junior High and the new address was just a block away from there.

  And so some friends—LaMarque Alexander (Raymond’s son), Jesus (my adopted boy, now a young man), Jackson Blue and his wife’s associate Percy Bidwell—helped Feather and me load our belongings into a rented truck and drive it over to the new door.

  I would have hired a moving company but recently, within the last week, the city had seen fit to inspect all five of the rental properties I owned and demanded I fix structural problems, perform a termite extermination, and in one place they even required that I install a new heating system. It would take every cent I had, and then some, to pay for t
he improvements, so I rented a truck from my old pal Primo and called on my friends to lend a hand with the move.

  Feather set herself up in the entranceway of the rare two-story residence and directed the men where to deposit the bureaus, tables, beds, boxes, and chairs. My daughter had light brown hair and skin. She was tall for twelve and lean, not to say thin. She was becoming an accomplished long-distance runner as her brother, Jesus, had been, and was fluent in three languages already. Neither she nor her brother had one drop of blood in common with me, or each other, but they were my kids and we were family.

  “Uncle Jackson,” Feather said from the front hall, “that little table goes in Daddy’s room upstairs. He uses it for his desk.”

  “Upstairs?” Jackson exclaimed. He was around my age, mid-forties, short, jet black, and skinny as a sapling tree. “Girl, this table might look little but the wood is dense, and heavy.”

  “I’ll help, Uncle J,” Jesus said. My boy was pure Mexican Indian. He was no taller than Jackson Blue but his years of working his own small fishing boat had made him strong.

  Jesus got behind the table, taking most of the weight, and Jackson groaned piteously as he guided it up the stairs.

  “This is a really nice house you got here, Mr. Rawlins,” Percy Bidwell said.

  He was almost my height, a brassy brown, and good-looking. His hair had been processed into tight curls. I always distrusted men who processed their hair. This was a prejudice that I realized was not necessarily justified.

  “Thank you, Percy. I like it.”

  “Jewelle said that you haven’t moved in years. I guess this house was just too good to pass up. Must’ve cost quite a bit for a place this big in this neighborhood.”

  I also didn’t like people asking about my business. Percy was racking up the negative points on my friendship register.

  “Do you work for Jewelle?” I asked.

  “No.” He seemed almost insulted by the question.

  Jewelle MacDonald had come from a real estate family and on her own had amassed an empire of apartment buildings and commercial properties. She was even part owner of a major international hotel that was being constructed in downtown L.A. Jewelle was barely out of her twenties and married to the onetime roustabout, now computer expert Jackson Blue. It was no insult to ask if Bidwell worked for her. She had sent him to help Jackson, after all.

  “Jewelle told me that if I wanted to get in contact with Jason Middleton,” Percy said, “that you were the one who would do that for me.”

  His sentence structure told me that he thought that I was somehow under the direction of Jewelle; that all he had to do was mention that she had asked for something and I would make that something happen.

  I turned away from him and called, “LaMarque!”

  “Yes, Mr. Rawlins?”

  The lanky twenty-two-year-old loped from the truck to my side.

  “Where’s your father?”

  “He had to go back east on business.”

  Business for Raymond, more commonly known as Mouse, was high-end heists with the strong possibility of brutality and bloodshed.

  “So he sent you to take his place?” I asked. I could feel Percy Bidwell starring daggers at my back.

  “Mama did. When you called to ask for Dad to help, she send me.”

  “How long you been back from Texas?”

  “Nine days.”

  “You outta all that trouble now?”

  “I ain’t in no gang no more,” he said, looking down a little sheepishly.

  EttaMae, LaMarque’s mother and Raymond’s wife, had sent the young man down to Texas to work on her brother’s farm for a while. She did that to save the lives of the gang members who had tried to claim him as one of their own. Raymond would have killed them all if she hadn’t interfered.

  A car pulled up to the curb just then. It was a dark Ford with four male passengers. Most cars in Southern California transported a solitary driver, a couple, a double date, or a family. Four men in a car most likely spelled trouble if there wasn’t a construction site somewhere in the vicinity.

  “Well,” I said to LaMarque while watching the men confer, “you get back to work and I’ll give you twenty dollars to go home with.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. Etta had taught the boy his manners.

  LaMarque ducked his head and ran back to the truck.

  “Mr. Rawlins,” Percy Bidwell said.

  “Yeah, Percy?” I was watching the men as they prepared to disembark.

  “About Mr. Middleton.”

  “What is it you want with Jason?”

  “That’s private,” the young man said.

  “Then you better just call him up yourself and leave me out of it.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “And I don’t know you.”

  “Jewelle told me to tell you to call him.”

  “You don’t tell me what to do, son, and neither does Jewelle.”

  The four men were out of the car by then. They were all white men, tall, and burly. Three of them wore off-the-rack suits of various dark hues. The eldest, maybe fifty years of age, was dressed in a dark-colored, tailored ensemble that was possibly even silk.

  The leader began the stroll up the slight incline of my lawn.

  “Easy,” Jackson warned from an upstairs window.

  “I see ’em, Blue.”

  “Is it all right?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Mr. Rawlins,” Percy was saying, trying once again to impress his will upon me.

  “Either get back to work or go home, Percy,” I said. “I got other things on my mind right now.”

  2

  “Mr. Rawlins,” the headman said as he approached the front door of my new home.

  My new home. How did this stranger know where to find me on Moving Day?

  “Yes?” I said darkly.

  Percy was headed back toward the truck. Jesus put down a hassock he’d been carrying and gazed up at us.

  “Roger Frisk,” the white man said, holding out a hand.

  I say white but Frisk’s skin was actually ruddy pink in color, a mottled salmon.

  “Do I know you, Mr. Frisk?” I asked, refusing to take the proffered hand.

  When the slighted hand darted under the left-side breast of my visitor’s elegant jacket, I wondered if I should tackle him. After all, he looked like an upscale hood. But I couldn’t imagine some fool driving up in a car, walking to my front door, and then shooting me in broad daylight on a Sunday.

  The hand came out with a white business card between its fingers.

  I stared at the card like a NATO sentry watching his Russian counterpart handing a note through a chink in the Berlin Wall.

  “I’m the special assistant to the Chief of Police,” Frisk said.

  I took the card. It said the same thing.

  “So?”

  “I need to speak with you, Mr. Rawlins.”

  “A cop named Frisk?” I replied.

  He smiled and gave me a quarter nod over a shoulder roll.

  “It’s Sunday and I’m in the middle of a move,” I said. “I can come down to your office say Tuesday afternoon.”

  “Maxwell!” Frisk commanded while staring me in the eye. His eyes were green like those of a pet cat that my long-dead mother had, named Speckles.

  “Yes, sir,” one of the suits responded as he ran from the sedan up to his boss’s side.

  “You, Sturgeon, and Moorcock help Mr. Rawlins’s friends finish off the move.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The yes-man in the dark brown suit waved at his fellow cops, pointing toward my twenty-five-foot moving truck. Before I knew it, they were climbing into the back and pulling out furniture and boxes. I suppose I could have stopped them but there were over one hundred boxes of books alone left to move—and the heaviest furniture was yet to come.

  “That’s very nice of you, Special Assistant Frisk,” I said, “but it’s still Sunday and I don’t know you from
Adam.”

  “The police department needs your help, Mr. Rawlins.”

  “That may be,” I said, “but I feel no compunction to help them. You know my relationship with the constabulary is tenuous at best.”

  I used the upscale language to show Frisk that he couldn’t run roughshod over me, but he just smiled.

  “Be that as it may, Mr. Rawlins, I think you will find that it is in your own best interest to concern yourself with our needs.”

  “Look, man. I don’t know you. Send Melvin Suggs over here and I will discuss whatever concerns you have with him.”

  Suggs was the only Los Angeles cop that I trusted. He was white but he had always been fair with me.

  “Detective Suggs is on an extended leave of absence.”

  “Wounded?” I asked.

  Frisk shook his head in such a way as to let me know that my police contact was in trouble with his masters. This in itself was no surprise to me. Melvin was too smart, in a basic human sense, to last forever in the morally bankrupt LAPD. But the fact that he had been put on leave without me having any notion of it was the cause of a familiar pang.

  This distress was based on the fact that people in L.A. often disappear without anyone noticing. Months, sometimes years later you found yourself wondering, whatever happened to so-and-so? By that time there would be no sign of their passage even for the most seasoned investigator.

  But modern-day alienation wasn’t my problem right then.

  “Excuse me,” one of the cops-turned-mover said as he carried two heavy boxes of books marked Encyclopedia past me and his boss.