Belle stood in the hallway while I went through her son’s things. The room wasn’t large enough for the both of us. It was the size of a janitor’s hopper room. There were box springs under a single mattress for a bed, with a drab green army-surplus trunk next to it. The trunk worked as both his night table and his closet. The window that looked out on the backyard wasn’t wide enough for a man to squeeze through, giving his bedroom the feel of a jail cell.
Nailed to the wall over the bed was a cork bulletin board, four feet wide and three high. Upon the board were tacked pictures cut from magazines, newspapers, books, and comic books; photographs and drawings of men in all kinds of uniform. There were soldiers of differing rank from private to general, a policeman, a football player, Green Lantern, a head chef, an Eskimo, a Catholic priest, a rodeo rider, and many others.
The bed was made and the oak floor swept.
“You clean up in here, ma’am?” I asked.
“Not really, Detective. Bob has always been very neat and orderly. I only made up his bed again after the police pulled it apart.”
“Interesting bulletin board.”
“He don’t have no girls up there but he likes girls. It’s just that he looks at clothes and thinks that’s what it takes to be somethin’. He always told me that clothes make the man.”
“Can I look in his chest?”
“I guess you can. The other police already looked in there and didn’t find nuthin’. My son don’t have nuthin’ to hide.”
The balled-up socks and T-shirts were jumbled. I figured this was because of the police, or maybe it was an FBI search.
There was a black photo album with Kodak snapshots and, more recently, Polaroid shots of Mantle in various costumes going all the way back to when he was a child. Some of those costumes were in the chest.
His bookkeeping workbook was there. When I opened it a pink slip of paper fell out. It was a property receipt from the Beverly Hills Police Department issued to a Beaumont Lewis. The date stamped on it was the morning of August fifth.
“Who’s Beaumont Lewis?” I asked.
“That’s Bobby’s cousin,” she said, “my sister’s son. She live in Houston and he’s in the navy.”
“He been here recently?”
“No, sir. He’s over off the coast of Vietnam.”
I looked a little further and took a few notes but there was nothing incriminating in the room.
“Did the other policemen take anything from this trunk?” I asked the fretful mother.
“Not that I noticed, sir. They didn’t even write nuthin’ down.”
“Did you tell them anything that you haven’t told me?”
“They just aksed me where he was at. They aksed that six times and I always answered the same: I don’t know.”
“Did you tell them about Youri?”
“They didn’t ask.”
“Do you know Youri’s last name?”
“No, sir.”
At the front door of the dark home Belle asked, “Can you help my son, Detective Rawlins?”
“I can try to keep him from getting killed,” I said. “Maybe he hasn’t done anything wrong. If he hasn’t I’ll try to get the police to understand that.”
It wasn’t much, but people like Belle and I had learned long ago to live with not quite enough and then to make do with somewhat less than that.
I was standing at the door of my nearly nondescript Dodge. The white man who called my name and the white man he was with walked toward me from a dark sedan parked two cars up ahead.
They were alike inasmuch as they both wore light-colored suits and out-of-style broad-rimmed fedoras. But that’s where the similarities ended. The man who called me was pink-skinned and fat, not over five foot six. He was the elder, maybe fifty. His partner was tall and string-bean thin. He was a thirty-something white man with olive skin, dark eyes, and the thinnest lips I had ever seen on a human being.
“Yes?” I said.
“Andrew Hastings,” the elder said. He didn’t hold out a hand. “This is Ted Brown. We’re with the State Department.”
“Don’t tell me. You’re looking for Rosemary Goldsmith and Robert Mantle.”
Hastings was breathing hard after the short walk from his black sedan to my maroon one. He wasn’t happy with my tone.
“There is a national security aspect to the Goldsmith case, Mr. Rawlins,” the fat man said as the thin one stared.
“I had no idea. Neither the police nor the FBI informed me of that fact.”
“Neither the local police or the Bureau has any authority in this situation. Certainly no ordinary citizen, no”—he paused a moment for dramatic effect—“no Negro in white man’s clothes has any authority whatsoever.”
I have always considered myself a reasonable and intelligent man, familiar with the ways of the world I lived in. I know enough to know that if three different governmental law enforcement agencies seek me out, I am being told to back down, back off, and back away from a line chiseled in stone.
“What is it that I can do for you, Mr. Hastings?” I could have asked him for identification but by then I was sure that every official agency operating in Southern California was on the trail of Rose Gold and Bob Mantle.
“Where is Bob Mantle?” His lips were fat, having the blubbery quality of the wattles on the rooster that stalked Mona Martin’s picket fence.
“I have no idea. I asked his mother but she didn’t know. I asked at the boxing gym he teaches at but they didn’t say.”
“What did Foster Goldsmith tell you?”
“I told him that the police told me that his daughter had been kidnapped, but he did not corroborate that claim.” I ratcheted up my language in an attempt to keep my head above water with the government men.
“What did the police say?”
“That she had been.”
“What did they want you to do?”
“The police?”
“Yes.”
“Find Bob Mantle so that they could ask him if he knew where Rosemary was.”
Hastings had robin’s-egg-blue eyes. The predatory attitude of those pretty orbs was contradictory and made him seem all the more dangerous.
Ted Brown made his hands into two fists and stacked them one on top of the other as if he were holding a baseball bat.
“You are going to stop any inquiries into the Goldsmith case,” Hastings informed me. He took a wallet from his back pocket and a white card from there. “This is my phone number. If any question you have asked so far yields an answer you are going to call me and give that information. You will only call me. Do you understand?”
It was, I believe, the last three words that obliterated my common sense. Sure, give me a gold-embossed card, tell me that you’re the boss-man, tell me not to earn the only living I know how to make, but don’t call me stupid on top of all that. Don’t steal my money and then take my woman out to dinner with it.
No.
“I understand completely, Mr. Hastings, Mr. Brown,” I said. “I am a patriotic American. I served in the war and learned to respect the chain of command. I’m sorry if I caused any trouble. You know I believed that the police were trying to do what was right.”
“That’s understandable,” Hastings said. He clapped my shoulder and even grinned, but the smile came too late.