Rose Gold Read Online Free

This time he pulled out a small leatherbound notebook with two photographs between its leaves. One was a reduced mug shot of Bob Mantle. He was holding a number card in front of his chest and sneering at the camera. Bob wasn’t a handsome man but even through that frown and broken nose he looked friendly. Dark-skinned like me, with a buzz cut and generous lips, he might have been twenty-eight, twenty-nine at the time of the arrest.
    The girl’s picture was more pedestrian. Smiling and pretty, she was not yet twenty, sitting at a restaurant table among friends. Through the window behind her was a fleet of docked yachts at some marina where the rich congregated. Her hair was brown and her skin pale and clear. She was attractive in a sexless way. Her hazel eyes had intelligence and depth. I imagined that she questioned everything those eyes lit upon.
    There was something odd about the photograph: It was printed, not developed. Maybe, I thought, it had been cut out of a yearbook and pasted to a stiff paper backing.
    “An odd couple,” I said.
    “Find him quickly, Easy, and that’ll lead to her. That’s the best scenario we can hope for.”
    The special assistant’s men had put a deep dent in the moving truck’s cargo. Two of them had doffed their jackets, one even loosened his tie. I brought the bag of sandwiches to the back of the van and called everybody out. They seemed to like the food. Feather took hers, along with an order of the plantains and one serving of beans and rice, to the kitchenette. The table and chairs were already set up there and she was a proper child.
    The cops were grateful but quiet. Using plastic dinnerware that Manny provided, they ate quickly and went back to work. Frisk, for his part, went to the car and sat alone thinking official thoughts and planning his future.
    After lunch we all, with the exception of Frisk, threw ourselves into the move. Percy Bidwell stopped trying to pressure me and even Jackson did a halfway decent job. By two o’clock everything was out of the van and in the house or the garage out back. Feather had organized the process so that every box and piece of furniture was in the room where it belonged.
    The cops left. Frisk didn’t talk to me again. I was a soldier and he a passing general. I hoped his elite planning included the money I’d asked for.
    I found Jesus in the backyard studying the high redwood fence that separated me from my neighbors.
    I walked up behind my son and put a hand on his shoulder.
    “A lot bigger than what we’re used to,” I said.
    “Not as big as that house Auntie Jewelle had us in.”
    “But we didn’t own that.”
    “It’s real nice, Dad.”
    My son. When I found him he was the pet of a child molester who believed he was untouchable. The pedophile was long dead and Jesus had become a man that any nation would have been proud to call citizen.
    “Benita still wants to go back to school?” I asked of his common-law wife and mother of his child.
    “She says that if she’s a registered nurse we could make enough that we could buy our own place.”
    “What school?”
    “SMCC has most of the courses she needs. She just has to bring in enough to help pay for Essie and the rent.”
    Essie, my de facto granddaughter, was still a baby.
    “I think I can give you enough to pay for the first year,” I said. “After that … we’ll see.”
    Jesus wasn’t a big talker. He smiled and nodded. We’d be on the same page ten years after my death.
    “Hey, Jackson,” I said to one of my oldest friends in the master bedroom on the second floor.
    He was sitting on a padded walnut chair, sifting through a box of books.
    “You read all’a these, Ease?”
    “Most of ’em. Why?”
    “No reason,” the little black man said. He sat up and crossed his legs.
    Jackson was wearing stained canvas painter’s pants. His white T-shirt was torn in three places and even though it was a size small, it hung loose from his shoulders. He was the