Rose Gold Read online

  I climbed into my Barracuda, my emotional gauge set somewhere between elation and panic. My breathing was heavy and uneven.

  For maybe five minutes I sat there.

  I thought of Tout Manning assuring me that I was safe because I would be a black man among black men. The fact that I took Tout’s words as truth made me laugh; a white man telling a black one that he was safe because of his skin. For a minute or so I luxuriated in the solace that I’d avoided a beating. Then my windshield shattered. The explosion and shower of glass were accompanied by three almost festive pops of gunfire.

  9

  “Uhuru Nolicé!” someone shouted as I was being showered by a hailstorm of sandlike shattered glass.

  Uhuru Nolicé. That’s what the man yelled before the tires on the street squealed and a gold Ford Fairlane fishtailed away. Uhuru Nolicé. I know the words now but right then they were an unintelligible cry of anger and retribution.

  Immediately I patted my chest, shoulders, and arms looking for the bullet wounds that I wouldn’t have felt for a minute or two.

  No blood.

  No blood but there was a license plate: California yellow with black characters. I didn’t get all six numbers but the first four were AXI 2.

  Not bad under fire.

  I got out of the car to inspect the damage. My legs were a little wobbly.

  The windshield had been made from safety glass. Primo put it on all his cars because his beautiful young cousin, Rafaelita Marquez, had been in a minor accident but she was scarred for life because of shards of broken glass.

  Across the street Tommy Latour, Buster, and half a dozen other boxers were standing on the curb, watching me.

  A siren wailed in the distance.

  I knew I wouldn’t get far with a busted-out windshield, so I leaned back against the hood intending to wait for the predatory howl to reach me.

  “Mistah?” An elderly woman was approaching me. She had a white handkerchief in her left hand.

  “What can I do for you, ma’am?” My tone was mild, seemingly unconcerned.

  “You bleedin’.”

  “No.” I really didn’t believe it.

  “From your face.”

  She touched her left-side cheekbone with the handkerchief hand. I did the same with my fingers.

  There was blood. Not too much but more than a razor cut you get shaving. I took the handkerchief and pressed it to my face. Only two months before, a gangster named Keith Handel had shot me in the same place. That too was a grazing wound. I wondered if this gash was due to a bullet or a sliver of flying glass.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said.

  She nodded but at the same time glanced up the street. The siren was getting closer. My benefactor started moving away.

  “Your handkerchief,” I said.

  “You keep it, honey,” she told me. Then she turned and walked as the police pulled up to the curb behind my car.

  Other sirens could be heard in the distance. I stood up straight, pressing the cloth to my cheek with one hand and holding the other where it could be seen.

  The cops were both men as was the custom back in those days; white men—that was standard practice too. One was older and graying while the other was black-haired, young, and athletic. Both men had their pistols drawn.

  The older cop’s eyes were as gray as his hair. I wondered idly if his eyes might have been darker like his partner’s when he was young and hale.

  “What happened here?” the older cop asked me.

  “What happened? Somebody shot out my damn windshield!” I wasn’t really angry but a cool head in a situation like that only raised suspicion.

  “Why?”

  “I have no fucking idea.”

  “Watch your language, son.”

  Son. Forty-seven years of age, thirty-nine of them on my own, and the policeman I paid my taxes for called me son.

  “You mean ‘sir’?” I said.

  “What?” he wanted to know.

  “Sergeant,” the younger cop cried. He had gone into the gym bag next to my seat and found the .22-caliber pistol within.

  “Put your hands on your head,” the sergeant commanded.

  “I’m bleedin’,” I said.

  “I said put your goddamned hands on your head!”

  “Watch your language, son,” I reminded.

  He grabbed the wrist of my bandage-bearing hand and twisted it down behind my back. The other cop ran to us with his handcuffs out. He pulled the other hand behind my back and clapped on the cuffs.

  Other police cars were coming. That was better for me. If I didn’t resist and there were lots of cops around, there was actually less chance of a severe beating.

  I shouldn’t have mouthed off to the officer, I knew that much. But I was making all kinds of mistakes out there on the street, and on the job too. It was like I didn’t want to be me anymore.

  A crowd was gathering as two more cruisers converged on my car. Looking among the faces in the throng, I saw the woman that had told me I was bleeding. I was still bleeding. I could see it in her eyes. And then it dawned on me.… I had been thinking that her coloring was a delicate rose-gold blend; that was the name of my quarry—Rosemary Goldsmith, Rose Gold. This free-floating association told me that I was in a minor state of shock.

  “Sit down!” the older cop ordered. He pushed me against the department store wall and I squatted to keep from getting knocked over.

  “What you doin’ to that man?” a male voice shouted.

  There was rumbling from the crowd but by then there were four more cops on the scene.

  “Get his ID,” the gray-haired cop told his young counterpart.

  “Stand up,” the young man said as his partner talked to another cop. He was holding the pistol his partner had found in my bag.

  The young cop patted my hips but found nothing because I was still wearing sweatpants.

  “Where’s your wallet?”

  “In the bag you took my gun from.”

  “Sit down.”

  After the cops got me settled they had a powwow. One called in on his radio while the others discussed, with implied sagacity, the crime scene of my car. This conversation went on so long that Hardcase Latour and his boxing cronies got bored and went back into the gym, leaving only the bespectacled Buster to report on the progress of the arrest.

  “You’re in deep shit,” the older officer said.

  “Language,” I reminded him.

  “Stand up,” he ordered.

  I complied.

  “You’re going to prison over this gun,” he said with a grin.

  I just stared at him.

  One of the cruisers had gone off, possibly looking for the shooter. The extra two cops left were searching my lolling tongue of a car.

  “Who tried to kill you?” the older cop asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was he on foot?”

  “It was probably two of ’em,” I said. “One driving and the other to shoot.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “I didn’t see.”

  “Where’d you get this gun?”

  “Pete’s Gun and Ammo on Sixth downtown. Cost eighty-nine fifty.”

  “Don’t get smart with me, son.”

  “You looked in my wallet, man. You’ve seen my driver’s license, my investigator’s license, and my carry permit. The gun hasn’t been fired and there’s no other weapon in my car. What else do you need?”

  “The driver’s license and the gun permit have two different addresses on them,” he said like an ex-convict at a South Park picnic bench claiming checkmate in a pickup chess match.

  “Roger Frisk,” I said. I should have waited until they brought me to the station but I wanted to rub my connections in the gray cop’s face.

  “What?”

  “Call Roger Frisk in Chief Parker’s office. Call him and he’ll tell you where I live at.”

  “Fuck you.”

  I just smiled. If we were in
a back alley I would have lost a tooth or two but on a busy street on a Monday morning in 1967 he showed a little restraint.

  “What about Frisk?” he asked.

  “Nuthin’ else in the car,” one of the other cops called.

  “Ask Frisk about me and he’ll set you straight, young man,” I added.

  “Sit down!” He needed to exert some control.

  I squatted again and waited. The four cops that remained talked and took turns glancing in my direction.

  My rose-gold savior had moved on with much of the crowd. Buster had abandoned his post. Finally one of the cops got on the radio.

  Forty-five minutes later I was a free man. They even returned my gun.

  10

  Tout Manning had told me to contact only him, but I hadn’t committed his number to memory and the slip of paper with his digits was in my wallet. Nothing I could do about that.

  Eighteen blocks away, still on Crenshaw, there was a used-car lot called Foley’s. It consisted of a tiny bungalow constructed from aluminum and glass surrounded by a parking lot the dimensions of a city block that was crowded with junkers from the last fifteen years or so.

  “What happened to your face?” the forty-something bottle-blond saleswoman asked when I approached her.

  “I was drivin’ down the street not two miles from here just past the May Company and a Bekins movin’ truck changed lanes in front’a me. The next thing I know my damn windshield shatters.” I was seething but not because of what I was saying. “I don’t know. Must’a kicked up a big rock from its back tire or somethin’.”

  “That’s terrible,” she said, but I picked up another message.

  “I know it is but I don’t have time to waste on that. I got a job interview in San Bernardino at two. I gotta get a new one.”

  “Job?” she asked, frowning at the wound.

  “A new car,” I said, “so I can get the hell out there and get the new job.”

  The woman, I didn’t catch her name, was once beautiful, very much so. She was still quite handsome. Her cheekbones were high and her eyes were cornflower blue. She might have, at one time, been a model or an aspiring actress. I imagined that men had, when she was in her twenties, sought her out, offering things that turned her head enough to break some women’s necks. This parking lot was the last place she wanted to be. In her eyes the cut on my cheek was more interesting than all the used cars in the world.

  “Do you need a first-aid kit?” she asked.

  It sounded like the first line of the second paragraph in a cheap romance novel.

  My nostrils flared and once again I wondered at my state of mind.

  Southern California was, and still is, like a drug. It is both mind-altering and addictive. You could walk outside twenty days out of twenty-one into balmy air where no one noticed you or cared what you did. In a place like that a middle-aged black man and white woman—he from the Jim Crow South and she who was once sought after by millionaires—could shack up and get naked, shedding their histories, even their ages. They could be young again, skin on skin in each other’s arms, and no one would give them a second thought.

  Her lips parted. I glanced at the bungalow, wondering if the ceiling-to-floor windows had blinds.

  “No thanks,” I said, answering her offer of first aid. “I got to get out there.”

  Her disappointment was palpable but she knew about making money, that’s why she worked on this car lot.

  “This Dodge here,” she said, gesturing lazily, “is the best we have on the lot for cheap.”

  It was a 1961 Super D-500, dark maroon in color. There were no dents but the paint had dulled in spots. It was a perfect car for a man in my profession. I figured that even if I lost the tempo of being a detective I should at least drive the right car.

  “Even trade?” I said to the woman who might have been the love of my life for a week or so.

  Her grimace turned into a grin.

  “Why the hell not?” she said.

  When I got to Motor and Pico I pulled to the curb and took in a deep breath. At some point, I wasn’t sure exactly when, I had lost the thread of my chosen profession. I was off-kilter. Hardcase Latour heard it in my words, saw it in my gestures. It had marked me as the target for an unknown assassin on a city street.

  I rubbed the middle finger of my right hand across the scab that had formed on my cheek. For some reason I sniffed the tip of that finger. There was no odor but I was reminded of the strong scent of garlic.

  My mother kept a garlic patch behind our shanty shack in New Iberia, Louisiana, when I was a child. Sometimes I’d go out there in the afternoon while my mother was cooking. I’d pull out a bulb, break off a section, and bite into it. The garlic was so strong that it would burn my mouth. Tears came from my closed eyes but I didn’t cry out. My father said that garlic was too strong to eat raw. He couldn’t do it but I could.

  I’d bring the rest of the clove to my mother because she was always using garlic in whatever meal she was cooking.

  “I got this for ya, Mama,” I’d say, gleefully aware that I had bested my old man and no one even knew it.

  That memory was all I needed. I took another deep breath and I was back in alignment. Like the junker I was driving, I was both new and seasoned.

  I came to a cube-shaped apartment building, slathered in violet-tinted plaster, on Sutter Street toward the southern border of Culver City.

  Three stories high, the building housed five apartments, one unit covering the first floor and four smaller living spaces making up floors two and three.

  Melvin Suggs lived in the bottom unit. Next to his front door was a staircase that led to the other apartments.

  Melvin’s door had an official eviction notice nailed to it.

  I knocked.

  It was a lovely August morning. The jays and robins, sparrows, and a few pigeons flitted and waddled, sang and searched for food.

  I knocked again.

  A large cockroach was staggering around the white concrete path that led to Melvin’s door. A young sparrow swooped down and grabbed one of the insect’s hind legs. The tug-of-war between them was a drama of the highest order. This was life and death in its rawest, most naked form.

  After half a minute of struggle the sparrow let go of the roach’s foot, hopped over the bug, and pecked at its head. The roach scuttled halfway into the overgrown lawn, where its nemesis clamped its beak on his leg again. They seemed to be of equal strength, but the sparrow had youth on its side where the huge cockroach gave the impression of old age.

  The fight made me nervous. I wanted to protect the roach.

  The roach made it a few more millimeters into the brush. The sparrow was flapping its wings furiously.

  I might have moved to scare the bird off but I heard the door coming open behind me.

  “Rawlins?” a familiar gruff voice said.

  I didn’t want to turn away from the drama but I had my own struggles to be concerned with.

  Melvin was maybe five-nine, four inches shorter than I, but we weighed the same. He wasn’t so much fat as bulky, with a squashed face, lovely doe-brown eyes, and powerful hands. He was wearing blue-striped boxer shorts and a gray T-shirt with a dozen tiny tears across the front. His basic brown hair had a few more strands of gray than at our last encounter. The unruly mop was getting longer and he hadn’t brushed it yet that day. The only concession he had made to civility was to step into a pair of dilapidated brown slippers.

  “Mornin’, Melvin.”

  “How’d you know where I lived?” he asked.

  “Guy named Gilly used to make bottled water deliveries in this neighborhood. He’s a friend of a friend who knew I knew you. You’re famous among the brothers, Mr. Suggs. The only white cop we know of that would never call us a nigger.”

  He glowered at me. “Why are you here?”

  “I heard you were in some kind of trouble.”

  “What the hell does that have to do with you?”

  “
My source told me that you were facing jail time if you didn’t resign.”

  “Who said that?” Suggs asked the question as if the notion was ridiculous.

  “Roger Frisk.”

  Suggs’s shoulders dropped half an inch and his mouth went slack.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “I never lie to you, Melvin. You’re my favorite cop.”

  “So? What do you want?”

  “I was thinkin’ maybe we could help each other out.”

  “How can you help me?”

  “My father told me when I was a boy,” I said, “ ‘Ezekiel, when you’re in trouble the first thing you look for is somebody that wants to help you. Because that want alone is half the way home.’ ”

  Suggs was built like an oaf but that rough exterior was blessed with a razor-sharp mind. He knew that I represented at least a chance at hope.

  He grunted and snorted like that old cockroach might have done while rooting through the garbage. There was a predator yanking at his leg and he needed a miracle no matter where it came from.

  “Come on in, Easy,” he said. “You know the doctors are saying that too much sunlight might give you cancer.”

  11

  Suggs’s living room was in shambles. It consisted of a blue sofa, a dark red stuffed chair, and a four-foot-square coffee table that was light brown and frosted, like a maple-glazed cake doughnut. There were half a dozen white boxes from Chinese takeout on that table. On the other side of the room, across from the blue sofa, was a portable TV on a folding pine chair just like the temporary setup my daughter and I had the night before. There were socks and shoes, T-shirts and underwear, newspapers, books, and even a .45 revolver strewn upon the tan carpet.

  A thin layer of dust covered everything and there was a sour tang on the air.

  “Have a seat, Easy,” Suggs said.

  Walking to the red chair, I heard the carpet crunch under my feet.

  “You want me to make you some instant?” the gruff cop offered.

  “No thanks, Melvin, I already had my jolt this morning.”

  I sat down and put my hands on my knees.

  He stared at me for a few seconds. I imagined that I was his first guest in many days. He was trying to recall how to be a host in his own home.