Rose Gold by Walter Mosley

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 shewanted 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 inmy 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