Free Rose Gold by Walter Mosley

I’m sorry I don’t have anything to offer you.”
    “That’s okay, Easy. Alana and me already et and drank. At least I did. She haven’t been too hungry lately.”
    I smiled, waiting.
    “We got us a little problem,” Etta said after an appropriate wait. “Raymond told me that you came down here pretty regular so I was gonna leave you a note. We called your home number but the answering machine wasn’t on.”
    “I just moved,” I said. “But you know that. Haven’t attached the recorder yet.”
    “Alana here was married to a man named Fred Post.”
    “The plumber?” I asked.
    Just the question brought a trembling smile to the white woman’s thin lips.
    “Yeah.”
    “I’m so sorry,” I said to Alana. Fred had died of a coronary not long before I drove off that coastal cliff.
    “Thank you.”
    “He was only forty years old, Easy,” Etta continued. “You know they ain’t no guarantees in this life.”
    “That’s for sure.”
    “Fred was our plumber,” Etta said by way of explanation. “That’s why I know the family. He never charged us and sometimes I’d babysit for their child.”
    “Uh-huh,” I said.
    “Anyway, Alana and Fred have a son name of Alton. He’s five years old, and the other day a black woman calling herself his auntie picked him up from kindergarten and took him away. His mother haven’t seen him since.”
    “No idea who took him?” I asked Alana.
    She tried to answer but only managed to shake her head and cry.
    “We need you to find him,” Etta said. “Alana went to the police but they hardly even listened. You know the only thing worse in their books than a black mother is the white mother of a Negro child.”
    “Etta,” I said, “I’m kinda jammed up right now.”
    Instead of insisting she said, “LaMarque told me that you wanted me to say hey to Raymond.”
    There was a whole persuasive speech squashed down into that solitary sentence—and no room for argument. In my business I traded in favors. If I wanted her to talk to Mouse I’d have to find a missing child.
    “Do you know Fred’s family?” I asked Alana.
    “Not too much,” the sad woman said. “Fred was estranged from his people.”
    “Because of you?”
    The arc of her nod was maybe a quarter inch.
    “Have you asked them about Alton?”
    “I spoke to his mother,” Etta said, “Mathilda. She says they don’t have him, that she don’t have no idea who coulda took him.”
    “You believe her?”
    “I don’t know. She sounded upset.”
    “Did she ask you about the police?”
    “No.”
    “You have a picture of your son, Mrs. Post?”
    From a scuffed, blue vinyl purse Alana produced a felt-lined yellow wallet. From this she took a small Kodak snapshot of a smiling caramel-colored boy wearing a cowboy hat and a light blue T-shirt.
    “Alton,” she said as she handed the picture across my desk.
    “Handsome young man.”
    “I loved his father, Mr. Rawlins.” It was then that I discerned the twang of the South in her words. “I’m from Tennessee. My people would take us in but they don’t understand Alton. They’d treat him like he was different, you know?”
    I could see the sleepless nights in the dark circles under her eyes.
    I stood up and said, “Why don’t you lie down on the sofa a minute, Mrs. Post. Lie down and close your eyes. Etta can tell me what I need to know.”
    Maybe it was because it was a mature black man who reminded her of her dead husband that Alana relented and allowed me to lead her over to the couch. She lay down and I believe she was asleep before her head touched the cushion.
    “That’s a woman do anything for her man,” Etta said. “She’s a man’s woman.”
    “You close with the family?” I asked.
    “Raymond liked Fred. They used to gamble together from time to time.”
    “What was Fred’s life like before Alana?”
    “He lived with his mother after his first wife died. That’s Mathilda, the mother. His first wife was named Nora. Mathilda didn’t