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Authors: Walter Mosley

Rose Gold

BOOK: Rose Gold
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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
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 the 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.

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