I saw them off at the door and then watched through the living room window until they were all gone. I expected Tout Manning to drive around the block and return for a special briefing. I hadn’t mentioned that he and Frisk had paid me on behalf of parties unknown to take the case.
Manning did not return, however.
After ten minutes or so I went back to the stuffed chair and sat down among the empty seats that the captain and international and national agents had so recently occupied. There was little consensus among the different tribes of government. Even Reynolds and Manning seemed to have different goals in the case.
And then there was the case itself.
I hadn’t believed that Rosemary had been kidnapped.
Bob Mantle probably had not committed a crime.
And yet still there were dead bodies, stolen monies, and now a detached finger of a debutante armed robbery suspect.
It was only when the doorbell rang that I remembered the Silver Shadow.
“I turned off the hose,” Redbird said when I opened the front door. “Come on in. Can I get you anything to drink?”
“No, thank you.”
I made my way back to the living room and the rich woman’s representative followed.
I sat once again in the stuffed chair while Redbird settled on a straight-backed cherrywood number. We looked at each other a moment or two.
“Mrs. Goldsmith wanted me to come talk to you,” he said at last.
“Talk.”
“Who were those men?”
I told him, in detail. “They informed me that Foster got a million-dollar ransom note with one of Rosemary’s fingers wrapped up in it.”
“They’re sure?”
“Seems that Stony keeps the fingerprints of all his family members.”
Redbird nodded and scowled.
“Do they think she’s dead?”
“No one knows.”
“Was it the boxer?”
“Absolutely not. He was wounded and a hundred miles away.”
“How do you know that?” If there was any stress or urgency behind the Indian’s questions he didn’t show it.
“I found him up in the mountains above Santa Barbara. He’d been shot in the leg a day or so earlier.”
“You turn him over to the law?”
I shook my head. Maybe I shouldn’t have trusted Redbird, but even if he took what I gave him to the cops there was no proof, no leads that would bring them to the cabin in the desert outside Indio.
“The FBI is watching Lenore,” I said. “They knew that I had been to the hotel.”
“I’d like to talk to the boxer,” Redbird said.
“Maybe later. But I think it’s more important to look for your girl.”
I told Redbird about how Rosemary had brought Bob up to the mountain cabin and then left promising to find help in L.A.
“I think that she came down here looking for confederates,” I said. “Bob told me about a man named Delbert and nicknamed MG. You ever hear of somebody like that?”
“No,” Redbird said. “But she’s been involved with radicals since she was fifteen. There’s a long list.”
“You want to look into it on your own?” I offered. I had enough to do.
“Mrs. Goldsmith told me to work with you.”
“I won’t tell her if you strike out on your own.”
The younger man looked at me with intensity. After a long moment he smiled.
“Those men could have put you in jail,” he said.
“Yes they could.”
“But you aren’t afraid. You didn’t give them the boxer.”
“No.”
“So I’ll stay with you awhile. I know most of the people and you know the rest.”
Like Melvin Suggs before him, Redbird slept on my couch that night. All he wanted was a glass of tap water and a thin blanket.
In the morning he accepted English Breakfast, scrambled eggs, and sliced ham.
We moved his Rolls into my driveway, pulling it far enough up that it couldn’t be seen from the street, and drove my Dodge to our first destination.
Dawn Purdy had been friends with Rosemary since the ninth grade. They lied to the Goldsmiths and joined the Venceremos Brigade summer program two years in a row, going down to Cuba to work with the socialist peasants on farms and in factories.
Dawn’s parents had inherited wealth and were dyed-in-the-wool communists. Foster never really knew about them. It was Lenore that got in the way of the friendship.
“How long has it been since they talked to each other?” I asked.
“I don’t know much about that since Rose went to college,” Redbird said. “But they had regular phone conversations through high school.”
The Purdys lived way up in Bel-Air. Up where there were no sidewalks and street signs were rare.
There was no foot traffic whatsoever.
The turnoff to the residence was more like a country road than a driveway.
The house was akin to a royal residence.
I pulled onto a cobblestone parking area in front of the house and went with my companion to the front door. I pressed a button and from very far off came the sound of chimes—real chimes, not an electronic recording.
A few minutes later the extra-wide door came open. I expected a butler in a tuxedo or at least a maid in classic black and white, but the woman standing before us wore faded blue jeans and a silk shirt the pink color of coral that had washed ashore and dried. Her shoulder-length hair was black with a goodly amount of gray strands, and her face was long and handsome; at one time she’d probably been the old-time American ideal of beauty.
“Redbird,” she said in a tone that was not necessarily welcoming.
“Mrs. Purdy,” my temporary partner replied.
That was when she turned her full attention to me.
At first it was just a glance, a taking-in of my features, gender, and, of course, color. I expected mild surprise and maybe a little of the antipathy she felt toward my partner. But instead there was a moment of wonder and then an actual smile.
“Rawlins?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Um, uh, don’t tell me,” she said. “Easy, yes, Easy Rawlins. Johnson! Johnson!”
A very tall man came up behind the woman. He was at least six-seven, with black hair, no mustache, and a salt and pepper goatee.
“What is it, Virginia?” he asked, looking at us.
“It’s Lenore Goldsmith’s man Redbird with Easy Rawlins.”
“Easy Rawlins,” he said with real pleasure. He held out a hand. “Welcome to our home.”
When we shook he said, “Come in. Come in.”
The Purdy house was simple and elegant. The rooms weren’t overcrowded with possessions, useless furniture, or, as a rule, ostentatious works of art. The foyer was three times the size of my new living room with much higher ceilings. The floors were tiled with roughhewn cream-colored stone that might have been semiprecious. The walls were finished oak.
From this room we came into a library or maybe a sitting room with bookshelves. There was a huge ebony-wood table that dominated this space. As a centerpiece there was a big, maybe five-hundred-pound, dark stone festooned with dozens of blazing orange crystals.
The far wall of the room was a big window looking out on a lawn that ended at a cliff. In the distance I could see the Pacific Ocean. There were three white sofas formed into a three-sided square that was open to the window.
“Sit, sit,” Johnson Purdy bade us. “Virginia, get our guests some fruit juice.”
I sat on the left-side sofa, placed perpendicular to the window. Redbird decided to stand behind me as Art Sugar’s man had done for him. Johnson Purdy sat across from us.
“I saw you looking at the big rock, Mr. Rawlins,” Johnson noted.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “What are the stones?”
“Fire opals from Brazil,” he said. “It was a gift from a small village down there where we built a hospital and a school. Virginia polished the gems herself.”
Mrs. Purdy returned carrying four frosted tumblers on a tarnished silver tray.
“Lemon, pomegranate, and blueberry juices combined,” she said as she handed me a glass.
She served Redbird and then her husband, finally settling on the central sofa.
“The police have already been here,” Johnson said to kick off the business of our conversation.
I sipped my juice. It was delicious.
“About what?” I asked.
“Rosemary, of course.”
“They thought she was here?”
“They thought our daughter might know where she was. When they asked us how they could get in touch with Dawn we sent them to an old address in the Mission District of San Francisco.”
“Your daughter’s not there anymore?”
“We’d never put the pigs on our own, Mr. Rawlins,” Virginia assured me.
“Excuse me,” I said. “But did the police mention my name?”
“No,” Virginia said.
“Then how do we know each other?”
“You don’t know us but we know Athena Wharton. She showed us a photograph of you and her adopted son Fennell.”
“Virginia never forgets a face,” Johnson said proudly, “not even from a photograph.”