Cinnamon Kiss

“I don’t care if you put vinegar in it. I need this. I left my house with only forty dollars in my purse. It’s all gone now.”

She didn’t speak again until the cup was drained and the sandwich was gone.

“What’s in the other bag?” she asked. I believe she was hoping for another sandwich.

“Two dresses, some panties, and tennis shoes.”

She came to sit on the other side of the bag, taking out the clothes and examining them with an expert feminine eye.

“The dress is perfect,” she said. “And the shoes’ll do. Where’d you get these?”

“My son’s girlfriend left them. She’s a skinny thing too.”

When Cinnamon smiled at me I understood the danger she represented. She was more than pretty or lovely or even beautiful. There was something regal about her. I almost felt like bowing to show her how much I appreciated the largesse of her smile.

“They say that Hitler was a vegetarian too,” I said and the smile shriveled on her lips.

“So what?”

“Why don’t you tell me, Philomena?”

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After regarding me for a moment she said, “Why should I trust you?”

“Because I’m on your side,” I said. “I don’t want any harm coming to you and I’ll work to see that no one else hurts you either.”

“I don’t know any of that.”

“Sure you do,” I said. “You talked to Lena about me. She gave you my number. She told you that I’ve traded tough favors down around here for nearly twenty years.”

“She also said that she’s heard that people you’ve helped have wound up hurt and even dead sometimes.”

“That might be, but any girl bein’ followed by a snakeskin killer got to expect some danger,” I countered. “I’d be a fool if I told you everything’ll work out fine and you’d be a fool to believe it. But if you all mixed up with murder then you need somebody like me. It don’t matter that you got a business degree from UC

Berkeley and a boyfriend got Paul Klee paintings hangin’ on his walls. If somethin’ goes wrong you the first one they gonna look at. An’ if a white killer wanna kill somebody a black woman will be the first on his list. ’Cause you know the cops will ask if you had a boyfriend they could pin it on, an’ if you don’t they’ll call you a whore and close the book.”

Philomena listened very carefully to my speech. Her royal visage made me feel like some kind of minister to the crown.

“What do want from me?” she asked.

“What papers did Axel steal?”

“He didn’t steal anything. He found those papers in a safe-deposit box his father had. He kept them with memorabilia he had from Germany. When Mr. Bowers died, he left the key to Axel.”

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“If that’s so then why did Haffernon tell the man who hired me that Axel stole the papers from him?”

“Who hired you?”

I told her about Robert Lee and his Amazon assistant. She had never heard of either one.

“Haffernon and Mr. Bowers and another man were partners before the war. They worked in chemicals,” Philomena said.

“Who was their partner?”

“A man named Tourneau, Rega Tourneau. They did some bad things, illegal things during the war.”

“What kind of things?”

“Treason.”

“No.” I was still a good American back in those days. It was almost impossible for me to believe that American businessmen would betray the country that had made them rich.

“The papers are Swiss bearer bonds issued in 1943 for work done by the Karnak Chemical Company in Cairo,” Philomena said. “And even though the bonds themselves are only endorsed by the banks there’s a letter from top Nazi officials that details the expectations that the Nazis had of Karnak.”

“Whoa. And Axel wanted to cash the bonds?”

“No. He didn’t know what he wanted exactly, but he knew that something should be done to make amends for his father’s sins.”

“But Haffernon doesn’t want to pay the price,” I said. “What about this Tourneau guy?”

“I don’t know about him. Axel just said that he’s out of it.”

“Dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did his father’s company do for the Nazis?” I asked.

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“They developed special kinds of explosives that the Germans used for construction in a few of their slave labor camps.”

“And what do you get outta all’a this?” I asked.

“Me? I was just helping him.”

“No. I don’t hardly know you at all, girl, but I do know that you look out for number one. What’s Axel gonna do for you?”

Cinnamon let her left shoulder rise, ceding a point that was hardly worth the effort.

“He had friends in business. He was going to set me in a job somewhere. But he would have done that even if I hadn’t tried to help.”

I was suddenly aware of a slight dizziness.

“But it didn’t hurt,” I said. “You could work all you wanted.”

“What?” she asked.

I realized that the last part of what I said didn’t make sense.

I blinked, finding it hard to open my eyes again.

I shook my head but the cobwebs went nowhere.

“Philomena.”

“Yes?”

“Would you mind if I just laid out here a minute? I haven’t got much sleep lookin’ for you and I’m tired. Real tired.”

Her smile was a thing to behold.

“Maybe I could rest too,” she said. “I’ve been so scared alone in this room.”

“Let’s get a short nap and then we can finish talkin’ in a while.” I lay back on the bed as I spoke.

She said something. It seemed like a really long sentence but I couldn’t make out the words. I closed my eyes.

“Uh-huh,” I said out of courtesy and then I was asleep.

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26

In the dream I was kissing Bonnie. She whispered something sweet and kissed my forehead, then my lips. I tried to hold myself back, to tell her how angry I was. But every time her lips touched mine my mouth opened and her tongue washed away all my angry words.

“I need you,” she told me and I had to strain to hold back the tears.

She pressed her body against mine. I held her so tight that she pulled away for a moment, but then she was kissing me again.

“Thank God,” I whispered. “Thank God.”

I reached down into her panties and she moaned.

But when I felt her cold hand on my erection I realized that it wasn’t Bonnie. It wasn’t Bonnie because it wasn’t a dream and Bonnie was in Switzerland.

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Who was in my bed? Nobody. Another deeply felt kiss. I was in a motel room . . . with Cinnamon Cargill.

I raised up, pushing her away as I did so. Her T-shirt was up to her midriff. My erection was standing straighter than it had in some while. She reached out and stroked it lightly with two fingers. The groan came from my lips against my will.

I stood up, pushed the urgent cock back behind the zipper.

Cinnamon sat up and smiled.

“I was scared,” she explained. “I just lay down next to you and went to sleep.”

What could I say?

“I guess you must have kissed me in your sleep,” she said. “It was nice.”

“Yeah.” I wondered if it was me who cast the first kiss. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. It’s natural. I have protection.”

Even her sexy nonchalance was imperial.

“Where’d you get that?” I asked her. “You left with nothing.”

“I always have a backup in my wallet,” she said, sounding decidedly like a man.

“Let’s go get some breakfast,” I said.

A shadow of disappointment darkened her features for a moment and then she pulled on her pants, which she’d dropped on the floor next to my bed.

i w a n t e d b r e a k f a s t even though it was two in the afternoon. Philomena and I had slept for almost eight hours before we started making out.

Brenda’s Burgers had everything I needed: an all-day breakfast menu and a booth at the back of her tiny diner where you could talk without being overheard. It was a small restaurant 1 6 7

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with pitted floors and mismatched furniture. The cook and waiter was a dark-skinned mustachioed man with mistrustful eyes.

I ordered fried ham and buttermilk biscuits. Philomena wanted a steak with collard greens, mashed potatoes, and salad.

“I thought you were vegetarian?” I asked.

“Need to keep up my strength,” she replied.

I was a little off because the erection hadn’t gone all the way down. My heart was thrumming and every time she smiled I wanted to suggest going back to her room and finishing off what we had started.

“What’s wrong?” she asked me.

“Nuthin’. Why you ask?”

“You seem kind of nervous.”

“This is just the way I am,” I said.

“Okay.”

“Tell me about the man in the snakeskin jacket,” I said, watching the cook eye us from behind the kitchen window.

“He came to Axel’s house one day last week. I was in the hallway that led to the bedroom but I could see them through a crack in the double doors.”

“They didn’t know you were there?”

“Axel knew but the other guy didn’t. He told Axel that he needed the papers his father left. Axel told him that they’d been given to a third party who would make them public upon his death.”

Watching her, listening to her story made me sweat. Maybe it was the heat from the kitchen but I didn’t think so. Neither did I feel my temperature came from anything having to do with sex.

“Did he threaten Axel?”

“Yes. He said, ‘A man can get hurt if he doesn’t know when to fold.’ ”

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“He’s right about that,” I said, wanting to stave off the details of Axel’s murder.

“He was a frightening man. Axel was scared but he stood up to him.”

“What happened then?”

“The man left.”

“He didn’t . . . hurt Axel?”

“No. But he put the fear of God into him. He told me to get out of there, not even to go home. He gave me the money he had in his pocket and said to go down to L.A. until he figured out what to do.”

“Why you?” I asked. “He wasn’t after you.”

“Axel and I were close.” There was a brazen look on Cinnamon’s face, as if she were daring me to question her choice of lovers.

“So you have the papers,” I said.

She didn’t deny it.

“Those papers can get you killed,” I said.

“I’ve been trying to call Axel for days,” she said, agreeing with me in her tone. “I called his cousin but Harmon hadn’t heard from him and there’s no answer at his house.”

“How about his office?”

“He never tells them anything.”

“How many people know where you are now?” I asked.

“No one.”

“What about Lena?”

“I call her every other day or so but I don’t tell her where I am.”

“And Raphael?”

That was the first time I’d surprised her.

“How did you . . . ?”

“I’m a real live detective, honey. Finding out things is what I do.”

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“No. I mean I’ve talked to Rafe but I didn’t tell him where I was staying.”

“Have you seen anybody you know or have they seen you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you willing to trade those papers for your life?” I asked.

“Axel made me promise to turn them in if anything happened,” she said.

“Axel’s dead,” I said.

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes I do and you know it too,” I told her. “This is big money here. You learn more outta this than five PhDs at Harvard could ever tell ya. Axel messed with some big men’s money and now he’s dead. If you wanna live you had better think straight.”

“I . . . I have to think about this. I should at least try to find Axel once more.”

I didn’t want to implicate myself in the particulars of Axel’s demise. So I reached into my pocket and peeled off five of Mouse’s twenties. I palmed the wad and handed it to her under the table. At first she thought I was trying to hold her hand. She clutched at my fingers and then felt the bills.

“What’s this?”

“Money. Pay for your room and some food. But don’t go out much. Try to hide your face if you do. You got my office number too?”

She nodded.

“I’ll call you tonight or at the latest tomorrow morning. You got to decide though, honey.”

She nodded. “You want to come back to the room with me?”

“I’ll walk you but then I got to get goin’. Got to get a bead on how we get you outta this jam.”

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Her shoulder heaved again, saying that a roll in the hay would have been nice but okay.

I knew she was just afraid to be alone.

i m a d e i t to my office a little bit before four.

There were three messages on the machine. The first was from Feather.

“Hi, Daddy. Me an’ Bonnie got here after a loooong time on three airplanes. Now I’m in a house on a lake but tomorrow they’re gonna take me to the clinic. I met the doctor and he was real nice but he talks funny. I miss you, Daddy, and I wish you would come and see me soon. . . . Oh yeah, an’ Bonnie says that she misses you too.”

I turned off the machine for a while after that. In my mind every phrase she used turned over and over. Bonnie saying that she missed me, the doctor’s accent. She sounded happy, not like a dying girl at all.

I was so distracted by these thoughts that I didn’t hear him open the door. I looked up on instinct and he was standing there, not six feet from where I sat head in hands.

He was a white man, slender and tall, wearing dark green slacks and a jacket of tan and brown scales. His hat was also dark green, with a small brim. His skin was olive-colored and his pale eyes seemed to have no color at all.

“Ezekiel Rawlins?”

“Who’re you?”

“Are you Ezekiel Rawlins?”

“Who the fuck are you?”

There was a moment there for us to fight. He was peeved at me not answering his question. I was mad at myself for not 1 7 1

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hearing him open the door. Or maybe I hadn’t closed it behind me. Either way I was an idiot.

But then Snakeskin smiled.

“Joe Cicero,” he said. “I’m a private operative too.”

“Detective?”

“Not exactly.” His smile had no humor in it.

“What do you want?”

“Are you Ezekiel Rawlins?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I’m looking for a girl.”

“Try down on Avalon near Florence. There’s a cathouse behind the Laundromat.”

“Philomena Cargill.”

“Never heard of her.”

“Oh yeah. You have. You talked to her and now I need to do the same thing.”

I remembered the first day I opened the office two years earlier. I’d had a little party to celebrate the opening. All of my friends, the ones who were still alive, had come. Mouse was there drinking and eating onion dip that Bonnie’d made. He waited until everyone else had gone before handing me a paper bag that held a pistol, some chicken wire, and a few U-shaped tacks.

“Let’s put this suckah in,” he said.

“In what?”

“Under the desk, fool. You know you cain’t be workin’ wit’

these niggahs down here without havin’ a edge. Shit, some mothahfuckah come in here all mad or vengeful an’ there you are without a pot to piss in. No, brothah, we gotta put this here gun undah yo’ desk so that when the shit hit the fan at least you got a even chance.”

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I slid my hand around the smooth butt of the .25 caliber gift.

“I don’t know no Cargill,” I said. “Who says that I do?”

Cicero made an easy move with his hand and I came out with my gun. I pointed it at his head just in case he was wearing something bulletproof on his chassis.

The threat just made him smile.

“Nervous aren’t you, son?” he said. “Well . . . you should be.”

“Who said I know this woman?”

“You have twenty-four hours, Mr. Rawlins,” he replied.

“Twenty-four or things will get bad.”

“Do you see this gun?” I asked him.

He grinned and said, “Family man like you has to think about his liabilities. Me, I’m just a soldier. Knock one down and two take his place. But you — you have Feather and Jesus and whats-hername, Bonnie, yeah Bonnie, to think about.”

With that he turned and walked out the door.

I’d met men with eyes like his before — killers, every one of them. I knew that his threats were serious. I would have shot him if I could have gotten away with it. But my floor had five other tenants and not one of them would have lied to save my ass.

Two minutes after Joe Cicero walked out the door I went to the hall to make sure that he was gone. I checked both stairwells and then made sure to lock my own door behind me.

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27

The second phone message was from Mouse.

“I called it off, Easy,” he said in a subdued voice. “I figure you don’t want it bad enough an’ I already got a business t’

run. Call me when you get a chance.”

The last message was from Maya Adamant.

“Mr. Rawlins, Mr. Lee is willing to come to an agreement about your information. And where he cannot see paying you the full amount, he’s willing to compromise. Call me at my home number.”

Instead I called the harbormaster at the Catalina marina and left a message for my son. Then the international operator connected me with a number Bonnie had left.

“Hello?” a man said. His voice was very sophisticated and European.

“Bonnie Shay,” I uttered in the same muted tones that Mouse had used.

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“Miss Shay is not in at the moment. Is there a message?”

I almost hung up the phone. If I were a younger man I would have.

“Could you write this down please?” I asked Joguye Cham.

“Hold a minute,” he said. Then, after a moment, he said,

“Go on.”

“Tell her that there’s a problem at the house. It could be dangerous. Tell her not to go there before calling EttaMae. And say that this has nothing to do with our talk before she left. It’s business and it’s serious.”

“I have it,” he said and then he read it back to me. He got every word. His voice had taken on an element of concern.

I disconnected the line and took a deep breath. That was all the energy I could expend on Bonnie and Joguye. I didn’t have time to act the fool.

I dialed another number.

“Saul Lynx investigations,” a woman’s voice answered.

It was Saul’s business line in his home.

“Doreen?”

“Hi, Easy. How’re you?”

“If blessings were pennies I wouldn’t even be able to buy one stick of gum.”

Doreen had a beautiful laugh. I could imagine her soft brown features raising into that smile of hers.

“Saul’s in San Diego, Easy,” she said, and then, more seriously,

“He told me about Feather. How is she?”

“We got her into a clinic in Switzerland. All we can do now is hope.”

“And pray,” she reminded me.

“I need you to give Saul a message, Doreen. It’s very important.”

“What is it?”

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“You got a pencil and paper?”

“Right here.”

“Tell him that the Bowers case has gone sour, rancid, that I had a visit from Adamant and a man came here that, uh . . . Just tell Saul that I need to talk to him soon.”

“I’ll tell him when he calls, Easy. I hope everything’s okay.”

“Me too.”

I pressed the button down with my thumb and the phone rang under my hand. Actually it vibrated first and then rang. I remember because it got me thinking about the mechanism of my phone.

“Yeah?”

“Dad, what’s wrong?” Jesus asked. “Is Feather okay?”

“She’s fine,” I said, glad to be giving at least one piece of good news. “But I need you to leave Catalina right now and go down to that place you dock near San Diego.”

“Okay. But why?”

“I crossed a bad guy and he knows where we live. Bonnie and Feather are safe in Europe but I don’t know if he got into the house and read Benny’s note. So go to San Diego and don’t come home until I tell you to. And don’t tell anybody, anybody, where you’re going.”

“Do you need help, Dad?”

“No. I just need time. And you stayin’ down there will give it to me.”

“I’ll call EttaMae if I need to talk to you?”

“You know the drill.”

i e r a s e d a l l t h e m e s s a g e s and then disconnected the answering machine so that Cicero wouldn’t be able to break in and listen to my news. I left the building by a little-used side en-1 7 6

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trance and walked around the block to get to my car. I drove straight from there over to Cox Bar.

Ginny told me that Mouse hadn’t been around yet that day and so he’d probably be there soon. I took a seat in the darkest corner nursing a Pepsi.

The denizens of Cox Bar drifted in and out. Grave men and now and then a wretched woman or two. They came in quietly, drank, then left again. They hunched over tables murmuring empty secrets and recalling times that were not at all what they remembered.

At other occasions I had felt superior to them. I’d had a job, a house in West L.A., a beautiful girlfriend who loved me, two wonderful children, and an office. But now I was one step away from losing all of that. All of it. At least most of the people at Cox Bar had a bed to sleep in and someone to hold them.

After an hour I gave up waiting and drove off in my souped-up Pontiac.

e t t a m a e a n d m o u s e

had a nice little house in Compton.

The yard sloped upward toward the porch, where they had a padded bench and a redwood table. In the evenings they sat outside eating ham hocks and greeting their neighbors.

Etta’s sepia hue and large frame, her lovely face and iron-willed gaze, would always be my standard for beauty. She came to the screen door when I knocked. She smiled in such a way that I knew Mouse wasn’t home. That’s because she knew, and I did too, that if there had been no Raymond Alexander we would have been married with a half-dozen grown kids. I had always been her second choice.

When I was a young man that was my sorrow.

“Hi, Easy.”

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“Etta.”

“Come on in.”

The entrance to their small house was also the dining room.

There were stacks of paper on the table and clothes hung on the backs of chairs.

“ ’Scuse the mess, honey. I’m jes’ doin’ my spring cleanin’.”

“Where’s Mouse, Etta?”

“I don’t know.”

“When you expect him?”

“No time soon.”

“He left for Texas?”

“I don’t know where he went . . . after I kicked his butt out.”

I wasn’t ready for that. Every once in a while Etta would kick Mouse out of the house. I had never figured out why. It wasn’t for anything he’d done or even anything that she suspected. It was almost as if spring cleaning included getting rid of a man.

The problem was I needed Raymond, and with him being gone from the house he could be anywhere.

“Hello, Mr. Rawlins,” a man said from the inner door to the dining room.

The white man was tall, and even though he was in his mid-thirties his face belonged on a boy nearer to twenty. Blue eyes, blond hair, and the fairest of fair skin — that was Peter Rhone, a man I’d cleared of murder charges after the riots that decimated Watts. He’d met Etta at a funeral I gave for the young black woman, Nola Payne, who had been his lover. Gruff EttaMae was so moved by the pain this white man felt over the loss of a black woman that she offered to take him in.

His wife had left him. He had no one else.

He wore jeans and a T-shirt and the saddest face a man can have.

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“Hey, Pete. How’s it goin’?”

He sighed and shook his head.

“I’m trying to get on my feet,” he said. “I’ll probably go back to school to learn auto mechanics or something like that.”

“I got a friend livin’ in a house I own on One-sixteen,” I said.

“Primo. He’s a mechanic. If I ask him I’m sure he’ll show you the ropes.”

Rhone had been a salesman brokering advertising deals with companies that didn’t have offices in Los Angeles. But he had a new life now, or at least the old life was over and he was waiting on Etta’s porch for the new one to kick in.

“Don’t take my boy away from me so quick, Easy,” Etta said.

“You know he earns his keep just workin’ round the house here.”

Peter flashed a smile. I could see that he liked being kept on the back porch by EttaMae.

“You know where I can find Mouse?” I asked.

“No,” Etta said.

Peter shook his head.

“Well okay then,” I said. “I got to find him, so if he calls tell him that. And if Bonnie or Jesus call just tell ’em to stay away until I say they can come back.”

“What’s goin’ on, Easy?” Etta asked, suddenly suspicious.

“I just need a little help on somethin’.”

“Be careful now,” she said. “I kicked him out but that don’t mean I want him in a casket.”

“Etta, how you expect somebody like me to be a threat to him?”

I asked even though I had once nearly gotten her man killed.

“You the most dangerous man in any room you in, Easy,” she said.

I didn’t argue with her assessment because I suspected that she might be right.

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28

There was a place called Hennie’s on Alameda. It took up the third floor of a building that occupied an entire block.

That building once housed a furniture store before the riots depleted its stock. Hennie’s wasn’t a bar or a restaurant; it wasn’t a club or private fraternity either — but it was any one of those things and more at different times of the week. It had a kitchen in the back and round folding tables in the hall. One evening Hennie’s would host a recital for some church diva from a local choir; later that same night there might be a high-stakes poker game for gangsters in from St. Louis. There had been retirement parties for aldermen and numbers runners there. It was an all-purpose room for a select few.

You never went to Hennie’s unless you’d been invited. At least I never did. For some people the door was always open. Mouse was one of them.

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Marcel John stood at the downstairs alley door that led up to Hennie’s. Marcel was a big man with a heavyweight’s physique and an old woman’s face. He had a countenance of sad kind-liness but I knew that he’d killed half a dozen men for money before coming to work for Hennie. He wore an old-fashioned brown woolen suit with a gold watch chain in evidence. A purple flower drooped in his lapel.

“Marcel,” I said in greeting.

He raised his head in a half-inch salutation, watching me with those watery grandmother eyes.

“Lookin’ for Mouse,” I said.

I’d said those words so many times in my forty-six years that they might have been an incantation.

“Not here.”

“He needs to be found.”

Marcel’s wide nostrils flared even further as he tried to get the scent of my purpose. He took in a deep breath and then nodded. I walked past him into the narrow stairway that went upward without a turn, to the third-floor entrance on the other side of the building.

When I neared the top the ebony wood door swung open and Bob the Baptist came out to meet me.

Bob the Baptist’s skin was toasted gold. His features were neither Caucasian nor Negroid. Maybe his grandmother had been an Eskimo or a Hindu deity. Bob was always grinning. And I knew that if he hadn’t gotten the signal from Marcel he would have been ready to shoot me in the forehead.

“Easy,” Bob said. “What’s your business, brother?”

“Lookin’ for Mouse.”

“Not here.” Bob, who was wearing loose white trousers and a blue box-cut shirt, twisted his perfect lips to add, Oh well, see you later.

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“He needs finding,” I said, knowing that even the self-important employees of Hennie’s wouldn’t want to cross Raymond Alexander.

He had to let me in but he didn’t have to like it.

“You armed?” he asked, the godlike grin wan on his lips.

“Yes I am,” I said.

He sniffed, considering if I was a threat, decided I was not, and moved aside.

Hennie’s was mostly one big room that took up nearly the entire floor. It was empty that day. As I walked from Bob’s post to the other side my footfalls echoed, announcing my approach.

Hennie was sitting at a small round table against the far wall.

There was a brandy snifter in front of him, also the Los Angeles Examiner, opened to the sports page. He had a half-smoked cigar smoldering in a cut crystal ashtray.

He was a dapper soul, wearing a dark blue suit, an off-white satin shirt, and a red tie held down by a pearl tack. The shirt was so bright that it seemed to flare from his breast. His hair was close-cropped and his skin was black as an undertaker’s shoes.

“I’m readin’ the paper,” he said, not inviting me to sit. He didn’t even look up to meet my eye.

“You see Mouse in there?” I took out my pack of Parliaments and produced a cigarette, which I proceeded to light.

“Raymond didn’t leave me any messages for you, Easy Rawlins.”

“The message is for him,” I said.

He finally looked up.

“What is it?” Hennie’s eyes had no sparkle to them whatsoever, giving the impression that he had seen such bad times that all of his hope had died.

“It’s for Mouse,” I said.

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Hennie stared at me for a few seconds and then called out,

“Melba!”

“Yes, Daddy,” a high-toned woman’s voice called back.

She came into a doorway about ten feet away.

“Bring me the phone.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

Melba belonged with that crew. Her skin was the color of a reddish-brown plantain. Her breasts were small but her butt was quite large. She balanced precariously on high heels that were on their way to becoming stilts. The black dress was midthigh and she walked with a circular movement which made even that pedestrian activity seem like dancing.

She brought a black phone on an extremely long cord. If she’d wanted to she could have dragged it all the way to Bob the Baptist’s chair.

She offered the phone to Hennie.

He declined, saying, “Dial Raymond.”

She did so, though she seemed to have some difficulty maintaining her balance and dialing at the same time.

The moments lagged by.

“Mr. Alexander?” she asked in her child’s voice. “Hold on, I got Daddy on the line.”

She handed the receiver to Hennie. He took it while staring at my forehead.

“Raymond? . . . I got Easy Rawlins here sayin’ that you need findin’. . . . Uh-huh . . . uh-huh. . . . You got that thing covered for Julius? . . . All right then. Talk to you.”

He handed the receiver back to Melba and she sashayed away.

“You know the funeral parlor down on Denker?” Hennie asked me.

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“Powell’s?”

“Yeah. There’s a red house next door that got a garage behind it. Raymond’s in the apartment above that.”

“Thank you,” I said taking in a deep draft of smoke.

“And don’t come here no more if I don’t ask ya,” he added.

“So you sayin’ that if I’m lookin’ for Raymond don’t ask you?” I asked innocently.

And Hennie winced. I liked that. I liked it a lot.

i d r o v e

from Hennie’s to Powell’s funeral parlor. I marched down the driveway to the garage next door. But there I stopped.

The door was ajar and those stairs were daring me to come on. It was twilight and the world around me was slowly blending into gray. Going to Mouse over this problem would, I knew, create problems of its own. With no exaggeration Mouse was one of the most dangerous individuals on the face of the earth.

And so I stopped to consider.

But I didn’t have a choice.

Still, I took the stairs one at a time.

The apartment door was also partly open. That was a bad sign.

I heard women’s voices inside. They were laughing and cooing.

“Raymond?” I said.

“Come on in, Easy.”

The sitting room was the size of a tourist-class cabin on an ocean liner. The only place to sit comfortably was a plush red couch. Mouse had the middle cushion and two large, shapely women took up the sides.

“Well, well, well. There you are at last. Where you been?”

“Gettin’ into trouble,” I said.

Mouse grinned.

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“This is Georgette,” he said, waving a hand at the woman on his right. “Georgette, this Easy Rawlins.”

She stood up and stuck out her hand.

“Hi, Easy. Pleased to meet you.”

She was tall for a woman, five eight or so, the color of tree bark. She hadn’t made twenty-five, which was why the weight she carried seemed to defy the pull of gravity. For all her size her waist was slender, but that wasn’t her most arresting feature.

Georgette gave off the most amazing odor. It was like the smell of a whole acre of tomato plants — earthy and pungent. I took the hand and raised it to my lips so that I could get my nose up next to her skin.

She giggled and I remembered that I was single.

“And this here is Pinky,” Mouse said.

Pinky’s body was similar to her friend’s but she was lighter skinned. She didn’t stand up but only waved her hand and gave me a half smile.

I hunkered down on the coffee table that sat before the couch.

“How you all doin’?” I asked.

“We ready to party tonight — right, girls?” Mouse said.

They both laughed. Pinky leaned over and gave Raymond a deep soul kiss. Georgette smiled at me and moved her butt around on the cushion.

“What you up to, Easy?” Mouse asked.

He planned to have a party with just him and the two women.

At any other time I would have given some excuse and beaten a hasty retreat. But I didn’t have the time to waste. And I knew that I had to explain to Mouse why I didn’t go on the heist with him before I could ask for help.

“I need to talk to you, Ray,” I said, expecting him to tell me I had to wait till tomorrow.

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“Okay,” he said. “Girls, we should have some good liquor for this party. Why’ont you two go to Victory Liquors over on Santa Barbara and get us some champagne?”

He reached into his pocket and came out with two hundred-dollar bills.

“Why we gotta go way ovah there?” Pinky complained.

“There’s a package sto’ right down the street.”

“C’mon, Pinky,” Georgette said as she rose again. “These men gotta do some business before we party.”

When she walked past me Georgette held her hand out —

palm upward. I kissed that palm as if it were my mother’s hand reaching out to me from long ago. She shuddered. I did too.

Mouse had killed men for lesser offenses but I was in the frame of mind where danger was a foregone conclusion.

After the women were gone I turned to Raymond.

He was smiling at me.

“You dog,” he said.

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29

Sorry ’bout the job, Ray.”

I moved over to the couch. He slid to the side to give me room.

“That’s okay, Ease. I knew it wasn’t your thing. But you wanted money an’ that Chicago syndicate’s been my cash cow.”

“Did I cause you a problem with them?”

“They ain’t gonna fuck wit’ me,” Mouse said with a sneer.

He sat back and blew a cloud of smoke at the ceiling. He wore a burgundy satin shirt and yellow trousers.

“What’s wrong then?” I asked.

“What you mean?”

“I don’t know. Why you send those girls off?”

“I was tired anyway. You wanna get outta here?”

“What about Pinky and Georgette?”

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“I’ont know. Shit . . . all they wanna do is laugh an’ drink up my liquor.”

“An’ you wanna talk?”

“I ain’t got nuthin’ t’ laugh about.”

Living my life I’ve come to realize that everybody has different jobs to do. There’s your wage job, your responsibility to your children, your sexual urges, and then there are the special duties that every man and woman takes on. Some people are artists or have political interests, some are obsessed with collecting sea-shells or pictures of movie stars. One of my special duties was to keep Raymond Alexander from falling into a dark humor. Because whenever he lost interest in having a good time someone, somewhere, was likely to die. And even though I had pressing business of my own, I asked a question.

“What’s goin’ on, Ray?”

“You have dreams, Easy?”

I laughed partly because of the dreams I did have and partly to put him at ease.

“Sure I do. Matter’a fact dreams been kickin’ my butt this last week.”

“Yeah? Me too.” He shook his head and reached for a fifth of scotch that sat at the side of the red sofa.

“What kinda dreams?”

“I was glass,” he said after taking a deep draft.

He looked up at me. I would have thought that wide-eyed vul-nerability was fear in another man’s face.

“Glass?”

“Yeah. People would walk past me an’ look back because they saw sumpin’ but they didn’t know what it was. An’ then, then I bumped inta this wall an’ my arm broke off.”

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“Broke off?” I said as a parishioner might repeat a minister’s phrase — for emphasis.

“Yeah. Broke right off. I tried to catch it but my other hand was glass too an’ slippery. The broke arm fell to the ground an’

shattered in a million pieces. An’ the people was just walkin’ by not even seein’ me.”

“Damn,” I said.

I was amazed not by the content but by the sophistication of Mouse’s dream. I had always thought of the diminutive killer as a brute who was free from complex thoughts or imagination.

Here we’d known each other since our teens and I was just now seeing a whole other side of him.

“Yeah,” Mouse warbled. “I took a step an’ my foot broke off. I fell to the ground an’ broke all to pieces. An’ the people jes’

walked on me breakin’ me down inta sand.”

“That’s sumpin’ else, man,” I said just to keep him in the conversation.

“That ain’t all,” he declared. “Then, when I was crushed inta dust the wind come an’ all I am is dust blowin’ in the air. I’m everywhere. I see everything. You’n Etta’s married an’ LaMarque is callin’ you Daddy. People is wearin’ my jewelry an’ drivin’ my car. An’ I’m still there but cain’t nobody see me or hear me. Ain’t nobody care.”

In a moment of sudden intuition I realized then the logic behind Etta’s periodic banishment of Mouse. She knew how much he needed her, but he was unaware, and so she’d send him away to have these dreams and then, when he came back again, he’d be pleasant and appreciative of her worth — never knowing exactly why.

“You know, Easy,” he said. “I been wit’ two women every night 1 8 9

W a lt e r M o s l e y

since I walked out on Etta. An’ I can still go all night long.

Got them girls callin’ in languages they didn’t know they could talk. But even if I sleep on a bed full’a women I still have them dreams.”

“Maybe you should give Etta another chance,” I suggested. “I know she misses you.”

“She do?” he asked me with all of the innocence of the child he never was.

“Yes sir,” I said. “I saw her just today.”

“Well,” Mouse said then. “Maybe I’ll make her wait a couple’a days an’ then give her a break.”

I doubted if Mouse connected the dream with Etta even though she came into the conversation so easily. But I could see that he was getting better by the moment. The prospect of a homecoming lifted his dark mood.

For a while he regaled me with stories of his sexual prowess. I didn’t mind. Mouse knew how to tell a story and I had to wait to ask for my favor.

Half an hour later the door downstairs banged against the wall and the loud women started their raucous climb up the stairs.

“I better be goin’, Ray,” I said. “But I need your help in the mornin’.”

I stood up.

“Stay, Easy,” he said. “Georgette likes you an’ Pinky gets all jealous when she got to share. Stay, brothah. An’ then in the mornin’ we take care’a this trouble you in.”

Before I could say no the women came in the door.

“Hi, Ray,” Pinky said. She had two champagne bottles under each arm. “We got a bottle for everybody.”

Georgette lit up when she saw that I was still there. She perched on the table in front of me and put her hands on my knees.

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Raymond smiled and I shook my head.

“I got to be goin’,” I said.

b u t t h e e v e n i n g

wore on and I was still there. I had nowhere to go. Mouse popped three corks and the ladies laughed. He was a great storyteller. And I rarely heard him tell the same story twice.

After midnight Pinky started kissing Ray in earnest. Georgette and I were on the couch with them, sitting very close. We were talking to each other, whispering really, when Georgette looked over and gave a little gasp.

I turned and saw that Pinky had worked Ray’s erection out of his pants and was pulling on it vigorously. He was leaning back with closed eyes and a big smile on his lips.

“Let’s go in the other room and give ’em some privacy,” Georgette whispered in my ear.

The bedroom was small too, only large enough to accommo-date a king-size bed and a single stack of maple drawers.

I closed the door and when I turned to face Georgette she kissed me. It was as passionate an embrace as I had ever known.

Our tongues were speaking to each other. Hers telling me that I had her full attention and everything within her power to give.

And mine telling her that I was desperately in need of someone to give me life and hope.

I put my hand under her coral blouse and laid the hot palm at the base of her neck. She groaned and so did Pinky in the next room.

Georgette reached for the lamp and turned it off.

“Turn it back on,” I said.

She did.

I sat on the bed and stood her between my knees. Then I 1 9 1

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started on the buttons of her blouse. She stood still, breathing lightly as I drew the silky top down and dropped it to the floor.

She moved then, attempting to sit next to me, but I grabbed onto her forearms, making it clear that she was to stay where she was. I moved close to get my arms around to unhook the black bra she wore.

Her nipples were long, hard things. I licked them very lightly and she held my head, moving it the way she wanted my tongue to move.

The black miniskirt was tight around her butt, and taking it off while kissing her hard nipples I pulled the pink panties down too. Her pubic hair was broad and dense. I buried my face in it to get the full scent of that field of tomatoes. If I had any notion of stopping, it evaporated then.

Georgette was a large woman. And even though she was slim of waist her belly protruded a bit. Her navel was a deep hole, dark against even her dark skin. Tentatively I poked my tongue inside.

She gasped and jumped back, holding both hands in front of her stomach.

“Come back here,” I said.

Georgette shook her head with a pleading look on her face.

Pinky started yelping in the next room.

“Come back here,” I said again.

“It’s too sensitive,” she said.

I held out a hand and she allowed me to draw her near. I positioned her between my knees again and moved slowly toward the belly button.

This time I stuck my tongue all the way in so I could feel the rough skin at the bottom. I moved the tip of my tongue around and she shuddered, holding my head for support.

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After a few seconds she cried, “Stop!”

I moved my head back and looked up into her eyes.

“This is like food to me, Georgette,” I said. “Do you understand? Food for me.”

She replied by pressing my face against her stomach. My tongue lanced out again and she screamed.

After another minute she moved my face back.

“Can I lay down now, baby?” she asked.

I moved to the side and she got down on her back.

We did things that night that I had never done with any woman. She did things to me that even now make me tremble with fervor and humiliation.

We fell asleep in each other’s arms, still kissing, still rubbing.

But when I jolted awake, I found myself alone.

I stumbled to the toilet and then back into the living room.

Mouse was laid out naked on the couch with his hands crossed over his chest like a dead king on display for the public to mourn.

Pinky was gone.

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30

Sensing me, Mouse roused from his slumber. He opened his eyes and frowned. Then he sat up and moved his head in a circle. His neck bones cracked loudly.

“Mornin’, Easy.”

“Ray.”

“The girls gone?”

“I guess so.”

“Good. Now we can take care’a business an’ not have to mess with them.”

He stood up and stomped into the bedroom toward the toilet.

I sat down and fell asleep in that position.

The flush of the toilet jolted me awake.

When Raymond came back in he’d put on black slacks and a black T-shirt — his work clothes.

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“Place ain’t got no kitchen,” he said. “If you want coffee we gotta go to Jelly’s down the street.”

“What time they open?” I asked.

“What time you got?”

“Twenty past five.”

“Let’s go.”

w e w a l k e d

the few blocks down Denker. The sun was a crimson promise behind the San Bernardino Mountains.

“What you got, Easy?” Mouse asked when we were halfway to the doughnut shop.

“Man up in Frisco hired me to find a black girl named Cinnamon. I went to her boyfriend’s house and found him dead —”

“Damn,” Mouse said. “Dead?”

“Yeah. Then I came back down to L.A. I found the girl but she told me about a dude in a snakeskin jacket she thinks killed him.

That day a man in a snakeskin jacket come around askin’ at my house for me.”

“He find Bonnie an’ the kids?”

“She and Feather are in Switzerland and Jesus is out on his boat.” I decided not to mention that Ray’s ex-girlfriend was with my son.

“Good.”

“So the guy shows up at my office. Says his name is Joe Cicero. He’s a stone killer, I could see it in his eyes. He threatened my family.”

“You fight him?”

“I took out the gun you gave me and he left.”

“Why’idn’t you shoot him?”

“There was other people around. I didn’t think they’d lie for me.”

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Mouse shrugged at my excuse, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the logic I offered. We’d arrived at the doughnut place.

He pushed the glass door open and I followed him in.

Jelly’s seating arrangement was a long counter in front of which stood a dozen stools anchored in a concrete shelf. Behind the counter were eight long slanted shelves lit by fluorescent lights. These shelves were crowded with every kind of doughnut.

A brown woman stood at the edge of the counter smoking a cigarette and staring off into space.

“Millie,” Mouse said in greeting.

“Mr. Alexander,” she replied.

“Coffee for me an’ my friend.” He took a seat nearest the door and I sat next to him. “What you eatin’, Ease?”

“I’ll take lemon filled.”

“Two lemon an’ two buttermilk,” Mouse said to Millie.

She was already pouring our coffees into large paper cups.

I needed the caffeine. The way I figured it Georgette and I hadn’t gotten to sleep until past three.

Our doughnuts came. We fired up cigarettes and drank coffee. Millie refilled our cups and then moved to the far end of the counter. I could tell that she was used to giving my friend his privacy.

“Thanks for talkin’ to me last night, Easy,” Mouse said.

“Sure.” I wasn’t used to gratitude from him.

“How you spell that guy’s name?”

“The Roman is c-i-c-e-r-o but he didn’t spell it for me.”

“I’ma use a pay phone in back to ask around,” he said. “Sit tight.”

“Early to be callin’ people isn’t it?”

“Early for a man workin’ for somebody else. But a self-employed man gotta get up when the cock crow.” With that 1 9 6

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he walked toward the back of the shop and through a green doorway.

I sat there smoking and thinking about Joe Cicero. It didn’t really make sense that he worked for Lee, because why would Lee fire me and then put a man on my tail? But there seemed to be a divide between Lee and his assistant. Maybe she had put Cicero on me. But again, why not just let me work for Lee and bring them what information I got? She was my only contact with the man.

A cool breeze blew on my back. I turned to see an older black man come in. His clothes were rumpled as if he had slept in them and he gave off an odor of dust as he went past. He sat two seats down from me and gestured to Millie (who never smiled) and murmured his order.

I put out my cigarette and thought about Haffernon. Maybe he hired Cicero. That could be. He was a powerful man. Then there was Philomena. But she had said that she was afraid of the snakeskin killer. That made me grin. The day I started believing what people told me would probably be the day I died.

The man next to me said something to the waitress. Nice day, I think.

And didn’t Philomena say something about a cousin? And of course there was Saul. Maybe he knew more than he was letting on. Maybe he stumbled across something and was trying to get around me. No. Not Saul. At least not yet.

“They havin’ a festival down Watts,” I overheard the man saying to Millie. She didn’t answer or maybe she whispered a reply or nodded.

Of course anyone who was involved in the business deal in Egypt might have hired Cicero. Anyone interested in those bearer bonds.

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“So you too lofty to talk to me, huh?” the man was saying to Millie.

His anger caught my attention and so I glanced in his direction. Millie was at the far end of the counter and the rumpled man was staring at me.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“You too lofty to speak?” he asked.

“I didn’t know you were talkin’ to me, man,” I said. “I thought you were speaking to the woman.”

“Yeah,” he said, not really replying, “I gots all kindsa time at sea with men from every station. Just ’cause my clothes is old don’t mean I’m dirt.”

“I didn’t mean to say that . . . I was just thinkin’.”

“In the merchant marines I seen it all,” he said. “War, mutiny, an’ so much money you choke a fuckin’ elephant wit’ it. I got chirren all over the world. In Guinea and New Zealand. I got a wife in Norway so china white an’ beautiful she’d make you cry.”

My mind was primed to wonder. I just moved it over to think about this man and all of his children and all of his women.

“Easy Rawlins,” I said. I held out my hand.

“Briny Thomas.” He took my hand and held on to it while peering into my eyes. “But you know the most important thing I ever learned in all my travels?”

“What’s that?”

“The only law that matters is yo’ own troof. You stick to what you think is right and when the day is done you will be satisfied.”

Mouse was coming out from the green doorway.

I pulled my hand away from Briny.

Raymond stopped between us.

“Move on down the row, man,” he said to the merchant marine. “Go on.”

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The old man had a good sense of character. He didn’t even think twice, just picked up his coffee and moved four seats down.

“You should’a kilt that mothahfuckah, Easy. You should’a kilt him.”

“Cicero?”

“My people tell me he’s a bad man — a very bad man. Called him a assassin. Did work for the government, they said, an’ then went out on his own.”

Mouse had been frowning while telling me about Cicero but then, suddenly, he smiled.

“This gonna be goooood. Man like that let you know what you made of.”

“Flesh and blood,” I said.

“That ain’t good enough, brother. You need some iron an’ gun-powder an’ maybe a little luck to get ya past a mothahfuckah like this here.”

Raymond was happy. The challenge of Joe Cicero made him feel alive. And I have to say that I wasn’t too worried either. It’s not that I took a government-trained assassin lightly. But I had other work to do and my survival wasn’t the most important thing on the list. If I died saving Feather then it was a good trade. So I smiled along with my friend.

Over his shoulder I saw Briny lift his coffee in a toast.

This gesture also gave me confidence.

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31

After six cups of coffee, four doughnuts apiece, and half a pack of cigarettes, we made our way back to Mouse’s pied-à-terre. He took the bedroom this time and I stretched out on the couch. That was a little shy of seven.

I didn’t get up again until almost eleven.

It was a great sleep. To begin with there was no light in the cabinlike living room, and the couch was both soft and firm, filled as it was with foam rubber. No one knew where I was and I had Mouse to ride with me when I finally had to go out in the world. I had to believe that Feather’s doctors would keep her alive and Bonnie didn’t enter my thoughts at all. It’s not that I was over her, but there’s only so much turmoil that a heart can keep focused on.

Bonnie was a problem that had to come later.

While I was getting dressed I heard the toilet flush. Mouse 2 0 0

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slept more lightly than a pride of lions. He once told me that he could hear a leaf thinking about falling from a tree.

He came out wearing a blue dress shirt under a herringbone jacket. His slacks were black. I went through to the restroom.

There I shaved and washed the stink from my body with a washrag because Mouse’s hideaway didn’t have a shower or a tub.

At the door, on the way out, he asked me, “You armed?”

“I got a thirty-eight in my pocket, a Luger in my belt, and that twenty-five you gave me in the band of my sock.”

He gave me an approving nod and led the way down the stairs.

i n 1 9 6 6 , L.A.’s downtown was mostly brick and mortar, plaster and stone. There were a few new towers of steel and glass but mostly squat red and brown buildings made up the business community.

I needed to gather some financial information and the best way to do that, I knew, was at the foot of the cowardly genius —

Jackson Blue.

Jackson had left his job at Tyler after going out on a mainte-nance call to Proxy Nine Insurance Group, a consortium of international bank insurers. Jackson had come in to fix their computer’s card reader and then (almost as an afterthought, to hear him tell it) he revamped the way they conducted their daily business. Their president, Federico Bignardi, was so impressed that he offered to double Jackson’s salary and put him in charge of their new data processing department.

I drove down to about a block from Jackson’s office and went to a phone booth. I was looking up the number in the white pages while Mouse leaned up against the door.

“Easy,” he said in warning.

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I looked up in time to see the police car rolling up to the curb.

I had found Jackson’s company’s number but I only had one coin. I didn’t drop the dime, reasoning that I might have to make the call later on, from jail.

The other reason I held back was because I had to pay very close attention to events as they unfolded. There was always the potential for gunplay when you mixed Raymond Alexander and the police in the same bowl. He saw them as his enemy. They saw him as their enemy. And neither side would hesitate to take the other one down.

As the two six-foot white cops (who might have been brothers) stalked up to us, each with a hand on the butt of his pistol, I couldn’t help but think about the cold war going on inside the borders of the United States. The police were on one side and Raymond and his breed were on the other.

I came out of the phone booth with my hands in clear sight.

Raymond grinned.

“Good morning,” one of the white men said. To my eyes only his mustache distinguished him from his partner.

“Officer,” Mouse allowed.

“What are you doing here?”

“Calling a Mr. Blue,” I said.

“Mr. Blue?” the policeman countered.

“He’s a friend’a ours,” I replied to his partial question. “He’s a computer expert but we’re here to ask him about bearer bonds.”

“Bonds?” the cop with the hairless lip said.

“Yeah,” Mouse said. “Bonds.”

The way he said the word made me think of chains, not mon-etary instruments.

“And what do you need to know about bonds for?” one of the cops, I can’t remember which one, asked.

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My job was to make those cops feel that Raymond and I had a legitimate reason to be there at that phone booth on that street corner. Most Americans wouldn’t understand why two well-dressed men would have to explain why they were standing on a public street. But most Americans cannot comprehend the scrutiny that black people have been under since the days we were dragged here in bondage. Those two cops felt fully authorized to stop us with no reason and no warrant. They felt that they could question us and search us and cart us off to jail if there was the slightest flaw in how we explained our business.

Even with all the urgency I felt at that moment I had a small space to hate what those policemen represented in my life.

But I could hate as much as I wanted: I still didn’t have the luxury to defy their authority.

“I’m a private detective, Officer,” I said. “Working for a man named Saul Lynx. He’s got an office on La Brea.”

“Detective?” No Mustache said. He was a king of the one-word question.

I took the license from my shirt pocket. Seeing this state-issue authorization so disconcerted them that they went back to their car to natter on their two-way radio.

“Bonds?” Mouse asked.

“Yeah. The man I told you about had gotten some Swiss bonds. Maybe it was Nazi money. I don’t know.”

“How much money?” he asked.

Why hadn’t I asked that question of Cinnamon? The only answer that came to me was Cinnamon’s kiss.

The cops came back and handed me my license.

“Checks out,” one of them said.

“So may we continue?” I asked.

“Who are you investigating?”

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“It’s a private investigation. I can’t talk about it.”

And even though I don’t remember which cop I was talking to, I do remember his eyes. There was hatred in them. Real hate.

It’s a continual revelation when you come to understand that the only thing you can expect in return for your own dignity is hatred in the eyes of others.

“blue,” Jackson answered when the Proxy Nine operator trans-ferred my call.

“I’m down here with Mouse, Jackson,” I said. “We need to talk.”

I could feel his hesitation in the silence on the line. That was often the way with poor people who had finally crawled out of hardship and privation. The only thing one of your old friends could do would be to pull you back down or bleed you dry. If it was anybody but me he would have made up some excuse. But Jackson was too deeply indebted to me for even his ungrateful nature to turn a deaf ear to my call.

“McGuire’s Steak House down on Grant,” he said in clipped words. “Meet you there at one-fifteen.”

It was twelve fifty-five. Raymond and I walked to McGuire’s at a leisurely pace. He was in a good mood, looking forward to getting back with Etta.

“You don’t mind that white boy stayin’ there while you gone?”

I asked near the time of our meeting.

“Naw, man. I look at him like he the pet Etta never had. You know — a white dog.”

There was something very ugly in the words and the way he said them. But ugly was the life we lived.

*

*

*

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t h e m a î t r e d ’

frowned when we entered the second-floor restaurant but he changed his attitude when I mentioned Jackson Blue.

“Oh, Mr. Blue,” he said in a slight French accent. “Yes, he is waiting for you.”

With a snap of his fingers he caught the attention of a lovely young white woman wearing a black miniskirt and T-shirt top.

“These are Mr. Blue’s guests,” he said and she smiled at us like we were distant cousins that she was meeting for the first time.

The door she led us to opened on a private dining room dominated by a round table that could seat eight people comfortably.

Jackson stood up nervously when we walked in. He wore an elegant gray suit and sported the prescriptionless glasses that he claimed made him seem less threatening to white folks.

I didn’t see how anyone could be intimidated by Jackson in the first place. He was short and thin with almost jet skin. His mouth was always ready to grin and he’d jump at the sound of a door slamming. But from the moment he put on those glasses white people all over L.A. started offering him jobs. I often thought that when he donned those frames he became another mild-mannered person. But what did I know?

“Jackson,” Mouse hailed.

Jackson forced a grin and shook the killer’s hand.

“Mouse, Easy, how you boys doin’?”

“Hungry as a mothahfuckah,” Mouse said.

“I ordered already,” Jackson told him. “Porterhouse steaks and Beaujolais wine.”

“All right, boy. Shit, that bank treatin’ you fine.”

“Insurance company,” Jackson corrected.

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“They insure banks, right?” Mouse asked.

“Yeah. So, Easy, what’s up?”

“Can I sit down first, Jackson?”

“Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sit, sit, sit.”

The room was round too, with pastoral paintings on the wall.

Real oil paintings and a vase with silk roses on a podium next to the door.

“How’s life treatin’ you, Jackson?”

“All right, I guess.”

“Seems better than that. This is a fine place and they know your name at the door.”

“Yeah . . . I guess.”

I realized then that Jackson had been holding in tension. His face let go and there were traces of grief around his eyes and mouth.

“What’s wrong, man?” I asked.

“Nuthin’.”

“Is it Jewelle?”

“Naw, she fine. She managin’ a motel down in Malibu.”

“So what is it?”

“Nuthin’.”

“Come on, Jackson,” Mouse said then. “Easy an’ me got serious business, so get on wit’ it here. You look like the doctor just give you six months.”

For a moment I thought the bespectacled genius was going to break down and cry.

“Well,” he said, “if you have to know, it’s a computer tape.”

“You messed it up or somethin’?”

“Naw. I mean it’s messed up all right. It’s the TXT tape they drop on my desk ev’ry mornin’ at three twenty-five.”

“What’s a TXT tape?” I asked.

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“Transaction transmissions from all around the world . . .

financial transactions.”

“What about it?”

“Proxy got a hunnert banks for clients in the United States alone an’ twice that in European banks. They transfer stock investments for special customers for less than a broker do.”

“So what?” I asked.

“It’s anywhere from three hunnert thousand to four million dollars in transactions every day.”

That got a long whistle from Mouse.

Jackson began to sweat.

“Yeah,” Jackson said. “Every time I look at that thing my heart starts to thunderin’. It’s like if some fine-assed girl took off her clothes and jump in yo’ bed an’ then say, ‘I know you won’t take advantage’a me, now will you?’ ”

Mouse laughed. I did too.

“Listen, Jackson,” I said. “I need to know about Swiss bearer bonds.”

“What kind?”

I told him all that I learned from Cinnamon.

“Yeah,” he said in a way that I knew he was still thinking about that tape. “Yeah, if you bring me one I should be able to work up a pedigree. The people I work with use bonds like that all the time. I got access to everything they do. If a bearer bond got a special origin I could prob’ly sniff it out.”

Our steaks came soon after that. Mouse ate like two men.

Jackson didn’t even touch his food. After the meal was over Jackson took the check. I had known him nearly thirty years and that was the first time he ever willingly paid for a meal.

We made small talk for a while. Mouse caught Jackson up on what our mutual friends were doing. Who was up, who was 2 0 7

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dead. After forty-five minutes or so Jackson looked at his watch and said that he had to get back to work.

At the door Mouse took him by the arm.

“You like that little girl Jewelle?” he asked.

“Love her,” Jackson said.

“How ’bout yo’ car an’ clothes an’ this here job?”

“Great. I never been so happy. Shit, I do stuff most people don’t even know that they don’t know about.”

“Then why you so hot and bothered over a few dollars on a tape? Fuck that tape, man. That money ain’t gonna suck yo’ dick.

Shit, if you happy then keep on doin’ what you doin’ an’ don’t let the niggah in you run riot.”

Raymond’s words transformed Jackson as he heard them. He gave a little nod and the hopelessness in his eyes faded a little.

“Yeah, you right,” he said. “You right.”

“Damn straight,” Mouse said. “We ain’t dogs, man. We ain’t have to sniff after them. Shit. You an’ me an’ Easy here do things our mamas an’ papas never even dreamed they could do.”

I appreciated being included in the group but I realized that Mouse and Jackson were living on a higher plane. One was a master criminal and the other just a genius, but both of them saw the world beyond a paycheck and the rent. They were beyond the workaday world. I wondered at what moment they had left me behind.

2 0 8

32

Idropped Mouse off at his apartment on Denker. He told me that he was going to look into Cicero, his habits and friends.

“If you lucky, Ease,” he told me, “the mothahfuckah be dead by the time you see me again.”

Most other times I would have tried to calm Mouse down.

But I had looked into Joe Cicero’s eyes deeply enough to know, all other things being equal, that he was the killer and I was the prey.

s a u l l y n x a n d d o r e e n lived on Vista Loma in View Park at that time. Their kids had a yard to play in and colored neighbors who, on the whole, didn’t mind the interracial marriage.

Doreen came to the door with a toddler crying in her arms.

“Hi, Easy,” she said.

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We had a pretty good relationship. I respected her husband and didn’t have any problem with their union.

“Saul call yet, honey?”

“No. I mean . . . he called once but George answered it and he didn’t call me. I was hanging clothes on the line out back.”

I could see my disappointment register on her face.

“I’m sure that he’ll call soon though,” she said. “He calls every evening about six.”

It was just past three.

“Do you mind if I come back at about five-thirty or so? I really have to talk to Saul.”

“Sure, Easy. Can I help you?”

“I don’t think so, honey.”

“How’s it going with Feather?”

“I’ll catch you in a couple’a hours,” I said. I didn’t have the heart to talk about Feather one more time.

w h e n c i n n a m o n d i d n ’ t a n s w e r my knock I figured

that either she was dead or out eating. If she’d been killed, there wouldn’t be anything to learn from her body. If she’d had the bonds they’d be gone, and so the only thing I could gain by breaking in would be another possible murder charge. So I decided to sit at a bus stop bench across the street and wait until she returned or it was time for me to go talk to Saul.

While waiting I thought about my plan of action. Survival was the priority. I had to believe that Joe Cicero wanted to kill Cinnamon and anyone else that got in his way. Therefore he had to go — one way or another. The police wouldn’t help me. I had no evidence against him. Axel Bowers was dead but I couldn’t prove who had killed him. All I could do would be to tell the cops where his body was hidden — and that would point a finger at me.

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Money was the next thing on my mind. I needed to pay for Feather. It was then that I remembered Maya Adamant’s last call.

There was a phone booth down the street from the Pixie Inn.

I called my old friend the long-distance operator and asked for another collect call.

“Lee investigations,” Maya answered.

“I have a collect call for anyone from Easy Rawlins. Do you accept the charges?”

“Yes, operator,” she said a little nervously.

“How much?” I asked.

“You were supposed to call me yesterday — at my house.”

“I’m callin’ you now.” I wondered if Bobby Lee had his phones bugged too. Maya was probably thinking the same.

“Where are you?”

“Down the street from the apartment where Cinnamon Cargill is staying.”

“What’s that address?”

“How much?” I asked again.

“Three thousand dollars for the addresses of Cargill and Bowers.”

“It’s the same address,” I said.

“Okay.”

I couldn’t tell if she knew about Bowers’s death so I decided to try another approach.

“Tell me about Joe Cicero,” I said.

“What about him?” she asked at about half the volume of her regular voice.

“Did you put him on me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Rawlins. I know the name and the reputation of the man Joe Cicero but I have never had any dealings with him.”

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“No? Then what was Joe Cicero doin’ at my office askin’ about Cinnamon Cargill?”

“I have no idea. But you’d be smart to look out for a man like that. He’s a killer, Mr. Rawlins. The best thing you could do would be to give Mr. Lee the information he wants, take the money, and then leave town for a while.”

I had to smile. Usually when I was working I was the one who did the manipulating of people’s fears. But here Maya was trying to maneuver me.

“Thirty thousand dollars,” I said.

“What?”

“Thirty grand and I give you everything you want. But it gots to be thirty and it gots to be today. Tomorrow it goes up to thirty-five.”

“A dead man has no use for money, Ezekiel.”

“You’d be surprised, Maya.”

“Why would you think that Mr. Lee would be willing to pay such an outrageous figure?”

“First, I don’t think Mr. Lee knows a thing about this conversation. Second, I don’t know the exact amount on those bearer bonds —”

“What bearer bonds?”

“Don’t try an’ mess wit’ me, girl. I know about the bonds because I’ve talked to Philomena. So like I was sayin’ . . . I don’t know exactly how much they’re worth but I’m willing to wager that even after the thirty grand you and Joe Cicero will have enough left over to make me look like a bum.”

“I have no business with Cicero,” she said.

“But you know about the bonds.”

“Call me this evening on my home phone,” she said. “Call me then and we’ll talk.”

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*

*

*

t w e n t y m i n u t e s l a t e r Cinnamon walked up to her motel door. She was carrying a brown supermarket bag. It made me like her more to see that she was conserving her money, buying groceries instead of restaurant meals.

“Miss Cargill,” I called from across the street.

She turned and waved to me as if I were an old friend.

She used her key on the lock and walked in, leaving the door open for me. She was taking a box of chocolate-covered doughnuts from the bag when I came in.

“Have you heard anything about Axel?” were the first words she said.

“Not yet. I had a visit from your friend in the snakeskin jacket though.”

There was fear in her eyes, no mistaking that. But that didn’t make her innocent, just sensible.

“What did he say?”

“He wanted to know where you were.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“I pointed a gun at his eyeball and all he did was shrug. It’s a bad man who’s not even afraid of a gun in his face.”

“Did you shoot him?” she whispered.

“Somebody else asked me that,” I replied. “I sure hope that you’re not like him.”

“Did you shoot him?”

“No.”

The fear crept over her face like night over a broad plain.

“What are you gonna do, Philomena?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nobody is interested in you. It’s those bonds they want, and that letter.”

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“I promised Axel that I’d hold them for him.”

“Have you been calling him?” I asked.

“Yes. But he’s nowhere to be found.”

“Does he know how to get in touch with you?”

“Yes. Yes, he has Lena’s number.”

“What does that tell you, Philomena?” I asked, knowing that her boyfriend was long dead.

“But how can I be sure?”

“Those bonds are like a bull’s-eye on you, girl,” I said. “You need to use them to deal yourself out of danger.”

I didn’t feel guilty that getting those bonds might also net me thirty thousand dollars. I was trying to save Philomena’s life too.

You couldn’t put a price tag on that.

“I don’t know,” she said sadly, hanging her head. She sat down on the bed. “I promised Axel to make sure the world knew about those bonds if he failed.”

“What for?”

“Because they were wrong to do that work. Axel felt that it was a blight on him to live knowing that his father dealt with the Nazis.”

“But his father’s dead and he is too, probably. What good will it do you to join them?”

She clasped her hands together and began rocking back and forth.

Something about this motion made me think about her San Francisco apartment. That reminded me of something else.

“Who do you know in the Westerly Nursing Home?”

She looked up at me. There was no knowledge behind her eyes. She shook her head and stopped rocking.

“You called there from your home phone.”

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“I didn’t. Maybe Axel did. He stayed over sometimes. If he used my phone he’d pay for it later.”

I stared into those lovely eyes a moment longer.

“I don’t know anyone in a nursing home,” she said.

Whether she did or didn’t, I couldn’t tell. I moved on.

“Listen,” I said. “Think about how much those bonds will be worth to you dead. Think it over. Talk with whoever you trust.

I’m gonna write a number down on this paper here on the desk.”

“What is it?”

“It’s the phone number and address of a friend of mine —

Primo. He lives in a house down on One-sixteen. Call him, go to him if you’re scared. I’ll be back later on tonight. But remember, if you want to get on with your life you got to work this thing out.”

2 1 5

33

Igot to Saul’s at a quarter to six. Doreen and I sat in the living room surrounded by their three kids. Their eight-year-old daughter, Miriam, was listening to a pink transistor radio that hung from her neck on a string necklace, also pink. She had brown hair that drooped down in ringlets and green eyes, a gift from her father. George, the five-year-old, had the T V on and he was jumping around on a threadbare patch of carpet, acting out some swashbuckling derring-do. Simon, the toddler, was wandering back and forth between his sister and brother, making sounds that wouldn’t be understood for another six months or so.

“So how long will Feather have to be in the clinic?” Doreen asked.

“Might be as long as six months.”

“Six months?” Miriam cried. “I could go visit her if she’s lonely.”

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“It’s in Switzerland,” I explained to the good girl.

“We could go to ’itzerland,” George said, bravely swinging his imaginary sword.

“It’s way far away in the Valley,” Miriam told her brother.

“I know that,” George said. “We could still go.”

“Can we go, Mom?” Miriam asked Doreen.

“We’ll see.”

It was then that the phone rang.

“Daddy!” George yelled.

“No, George,” Doreen said but the boy leaped for the phone on the coffee table.

Doreen put out her hand and George bounced backward, falling on his backside. As Doreen was saying hello, George began to howl. I saw her mouth Saul’s name but I couldn’t hear what she was saying because Simon was crying too and Miriam was shouting for them both to be quiet.

Doreen gestured toward the kitchen. I knew they had an extension in there and so I went on through, closing the door behind me.

“Hello!” I yelled. “I got it, Doreen!”

When she hung up the sound of the crying subsided somewhat.

“Easy,” Saul said. “What’s wrong?”

“I got a visit from a guy yesterday,” I said. “He knew that I was working on the Lee case. He told me to give him what I knew or he’d kill me and my family too.”

“What was this guy’s name?”

“Cicero.”

“Joe Cicero?”

“You know him?”

“Don’t go home, Easy. Don’t go to your office or your job. Call 2 1 7

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this number.” He gave me an area code and a number, which I wrote down on a notepad decorated with pink bunnies. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Put my wife back on the line.”

When I went back into the T V room the children had quieted down.

“Saul wants to talk to you, Doreen,” I said and she took up the phone.

“Daddy!” George cried.

“Dada,” Simon echoed.

Miriam watched her mother’s eyes. So did I.

We both saw Mrs. Lynx’s expression change from attentive interest to fear. Instead of answering she kept nodding her head.

She reached for her pocketbook on the coffee table.

“I wanna talk to Daddy,” George complained.

Doreen gave him one stern look and he shut right up.

“Okay,” Doreen said. “All right. I will. Be careful, Saul.”

She hung up the phone and stood in one fluid movement.

“Holiday time,” she said in a forced happy voice. “We’re all going to Nana’s cabin in Mammoth.”

“Yah,” George cried.

Simon laughed but Miriam had a grim look on her face. She was getting older and understood that something was wrong.

“Saul said that he’d be at the meeting place by nine tonight,”

Doreen told me. “He’s in San Diego but he said that he’d drive straight there.”

“What meeting place? He just gave me a number.”

“Call it and they will tell you where to go.”

“Is Daddy okay, Mommy?” Miriam asked.

“He’s fine, sweetie. Tonight he’s going to meet with Mr. Rawlins and then he’s coming up to the cabin where we can go fish-ing and swimming.”

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“But I have my clarinet lesson tomorrow,” Miriam said.

“You’ll have to take a makeup,” Doreen explained.

The two boys were capering around, celebrating the holiday that had befallen their family.

i l e f t d o r e e n

packing suitcases and keeping the children on track.

On the way down to the Pixie Inn I tried not to get too far ahead of myself. Saul’s reaction to just a name increased my fears. I decided that Cinnamon had to be moved to a place where I knew that she’d be safe.

I parked down the block this time, just being cautious. There was a Mercedes-Benz parked on the motel lot. I didn’t like that.

I liked it even less when I saw the words Fletcher’s Mercedes-Benz of San Francisco written on the license plate frame.

The door of Cinnamon’s room was ajar. I nudged it open with my toe.

He was lying facedown, the six-hundred-dollar suit now just a shroud. I turned him over with my foot. Leonard Haffernon, Es-quire, was quite dead. The bullet had entered somewhere at the base of the skull and exited through the top of his head.

The exit wound was the size of a silver dollar.

A wave of prickles went down my left arm. Sweat sprouted from my palms.

His valise was on the bed. Its contents had been turned out.

There was some change and a toenail clipper, a visitor’s pass to a San Francisco bank, and a silver flask. Any papers had been taken.

The only potential perpetrator in evidence, once more, was me.

For a brief moment I was frozen there like a bug in a sudden frost. I was trying to glean from Haffernon’s face what had occurred. Did Cinnamon kill him and run?

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Probably.

But why? And why had he been there?

A horn honked out on the street. That brought me back to my senses. I walked out of that room and into the parking lot, then down the street to my loud car and drove away.

2 2 0

34

Idrove for fifteen minutes, looking in the rearview mirror every ten seconds, before stopping at a gas station on a block of otherwise burned-out buildings. There was a phone booth next to the men’s toilet at the back.

“Etta, is that you?” I asked when she answered on the ninth ring.

“Is it my number you dialed?”

“Have you heard from Raymond?”

“And how are you this evenin’, Mr. Rawlins? I’m fine. I was layin’ up in the bed watchin’ Doctor Kildare. How ’bout you?”

“I just stumbled on a dead white man never saw it comin’.”

“Oh,” Etta said. “No, Ray haven’t called.”

“Shit.”

“Primo did though.”

“When?”

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“ ’Bout a hour. He said to tell you that a guy came by an’ left sumpin’ for ya.”

“What guy?”

“He didn’t say.”

“What did he leave?”

“He didn’t say that either. He just said to tell you. You in trouble, Easy?”

“Is the sky blue?”

“Not right now. It’s evenin’.”

“Then wait a bit. It’ll be there.”

Etta chuckled and so did I. She was no stranger to violent death. She’d once shot a white man, a killer, in the head because he was about to shoot me. If we couldn’t laugh in the face of death there’d be precious little humor for most black southerners.

“You take care, Easy.”

“Tell Mouse I need his advice.”

“When I see him.”

i s p e d o v e r to Primo’s place worried about having given his number to Philomena. Primo was a tough man, a Mexican by birth. He had spent his whole life traveling back and forth across the border and south of there. On one trip through Panama he’d met Flower, his wife. They lived in a house I owned and had more than a dozen kids. They took in stray children too, and animals of all kinds. Any grief I brought to them would cause pain for a thousand miles.

But Primo was sitting out in the large yard. He was laid back in a lawn chair, drinking a beer and watching six or seven grand-children play in the diminishing light. Flower was up on the porch with a baby in her arms. I wondered if it was her baby or just a grandchild.

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As I approached, half a dozen dogs ran at me growling and crying, wagging their tails and baring their fangs.

“Hi-ya!” Primo shouted at the animals.

The children ran forward, grabbing the dogs and pulling them back. A pure-bred Dalmatian eluded his child handler and jumped on me, pressing my chest with his forepaws.

“That’s my guard dog,” Primo said.

He put out a hand, which I shook as the dog licked my forearm.

“Love thy neighbor,” I said.

Primo liked my sense of humor. He laughed out loud.

“Flower,” he called. “Your boyfriend is here.”

“Send him to my bedroom when you finish twisting his ears,”

she responded.

“I wish I had time to sit, man,” I said.

“But you want them papers.” Primo finished my sentence.

“Papers?”

All the children, dogs, and adults crowded through the front door and into the house. There was shouting and laughing and fur floating in the air.

While Primo went into the back room looking for my delivery, Flower came very close to me. She stared in my face without saying anything.

She was a very black, beautiful woman. Her features were stern, almost masculine, most of the time, but when she smiled she honored the name her father had blessed her with.

At that moment she had on her serious face.

“How is she, Easy?”

“Very sick,” I said. “Very sick.”

“She will live,” Flower told me. “She will live and you will have a beautiful granddaughter from her.”

I touched Flower’s face and she took my hand in hers.

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The dogs stopped barking and the children hushed. I looked up and saw Primo standing there, smiling at me.

“Here it is,” he said, handing me a brown envelope large enough to contain unfolded pages of typing paper.

“Who left this?”

“A black boy. Funny, you know?”

Raphael.

“What did he say?”

“That this was what you wanted and he hopes you do what’s right.”

I stood there thinking with all the brown children and red-tongued dogs panting around me.

“Stay and eat,” Flower said.

“I got to go.”

“No. You are hungry. Sit. It will only take a few moments and then you will have the strength to do whatever it is you’re doing.”

t h a t w a s a t o u g h p e r i o d in my life. There’s no doubt

about it. I was on the run in my own city, homeless if I wanted to live. Feather’s well-being was never far from my heart, but the road to her salvation was being piled with the bodies of dead white men. And you have to understand the impact of the death of a white man on a black southerner like me. In the south if a black man killed a white man he was dead. If the police saw him on the street they shot first and asked questions . . . never. If he gave himself up he was killed in his cell. If the constable wasn’t a murdering man then a mob would come and lynch the poor son of a bitch. And failing all that, if a black man ever made it to trial and was convicted of killing a white man — even in self-defense, even if it was to save another white man — that convict would spend the rest of his days incarcerated. There would be 2 2 4

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no parole, no commutation of sentence, no extenuating circumstances, no time off for good behavior.

There was no room in my heart except for hope that Feather would live. Hovering above that hope was the retribution of the white race for my just seeing two of their dead sons.

But even with all of that trouble I have to take time to recall Flower’s simple meal.

She gave me a large bowl filled with chunks of pork loin sim-mered in a pasilla chili sauce. She’d boiled the chilies without removing the seeds so I began to sweat with the first bite. There was cumin and oregano in the sauce and pieces of avocado too.

On the side I had three homemade wheat flour tortillas and a large glass of lightly sweetened lemonade.

I felt like a condemned man but at least my last meal was a feast.

a f t e r i a t e I made noises about leaving, but Primo told me that I could use his den to take care of any business I needed to attend to.

In the little study I settled into his leather chair and opened the envelope left by Raphael.

There were twelve very official sheets of parchment imprinted with declarations in French, Italian, and German. Each page had a large sum printed on it and a red wax seal embossed at one corner or another. There was a very fancy signature at the bottom of each document. I couldn’t make out the name.

And there was a letter, a note really, written in German and signed H. W. Göring. In the text of the note the name H. Himm-ler appeared. The note was addressed to R. Tourneau. I didn’t need to know what the letter said. At any other time I would have burned it up and moved on with my life. But there was too much I didn’t understand to discard such an important document.

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I had what Lee wanted but I didn’t trust that Maya would pass on the information. I didn’t know how much the bonds were worth but I did know that they were said to be Swiss and that my daughter was in a Swiss hospital.

I called Jackson and gave him all the information I could about the bonds. He asked a few questions, directing me to codes and symbols that I would never have noticed on my own.

“It’d be better if I could check ’em myself, Ease,” Jackson said at one point.

But remembering his quandary over the TXT tape on his desk, I said, “I better hold on to these here, Jackson. There’s some bloodthirsty people out there willing to do anything to get at ’em.”

Jackson backed down and I made my second call.

He answered the phone on the first ring.

“Easy?”

“Yeah. Who’s this?”

“Christmas Black,” the man said. I couldn’t tell one thing about him. Not his age or his race.

“I’m up in Riverside,” Black said, “on Wayfarer’s Road. You know it?”

“Can’t say that I do.”

He gave me precise instructions that I wrote down.

“What do you have to do with all this?” I asked.

“I’m just a layover,” he said. “A place to gather the troops and regroup.”

After talking to Christmas I called EttaMae and left the particulars with her.

“Tell Mouse to come up when he gets the chance,” I said.

“What makes you think I’ll be talkin’ to him anytime soon?”

“Is the sky blue?” I asked.

2 2 6

35

Itook Highway 101toward Riverside. The fact that I had a destination relaxed me some. The thousands of dollars in Swiss bonds on the seat beside me gave me heart. Haffernon’s body and Cinnamon’s involvement with his death were on my mind. And then there was the Nazi high command.

Like most Americans I hated Adolf Hitler and his crew of bloodthirsty killers. I hated their racism and their campaign to destroy any people not their own. In ’45 I was a concentration camp liberator. My friends and I killed a starving Jewish boy by feeding him a chocolate bar. We didn’t know that it would kill him. How could we?

Even as a black American I felt patriotic about the war and my role in it. That’s why I found it so hard to comprehend wealthy and white American businessmen trading with such villains.

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W a lt e r M o s l e y

Between Feather and Bonnie, Haffernon and Axel, Cinnamon and Joe Cicero, it was a wonder that I didn’t go crazy. Maybe I did, a little bit, lose control at the edges.

c h r i s t m a s b l a c k

had given me very good directions. I skirted downtown Riverside and took a series of side streets until I came to a graded dirt road that was still a city street. The houses were a little farther apart than in Los Angeles. The yards were larger and there were no fences between them. Unchained dogs snapped at my tires as I drove past.

After a third of a mile or so I came to the dead end of Wayfarer’s Road. Right where the road terminated stood a small white house with a yellow light shining over the doorway. It was the embodiment of peace and domesticity. You’d expect your aged, widowed grandmother to live behind that door. She’d have pies and a boiled ham to greet you.

I knocked and a child called out in some Asian language.

The door swung inward and a tall black man stood there.

“Welcome, Mr. Rawlins,” he said. “Come in.”

He was six foot four at least but his shoulders would have been a good fit for a man six inches taller. His skin was medium brown and there was a whitish scar beneath his left eye. The brown in his eyes was lighter than was common in most Negroes. And his hair was as close-cropped as you can get without being bald.

“Mr. Black?”

He nodded and stepped back for me to enter. A few steps away stood a small Asian girlchild dressed in a fancy red kimono.

She bowed respectfully. She couldn’t have been more than six years old but she held herself with the poise and attitude of the 2 2 8

C i n n a m o n K i s s

woman of the house. Just seeing her I knew that there was no wife or girlfriend in the black man’s life.

“Easy Rawlins, meet Easter Dawn Black,” Christmas said.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said to the child.

“It is an honor to have you in our home, Mr. Rawlins,” Easter Dawn said with solemnity.

To her right was a door open onto a bedroom, probably hers.

On the other side was a cavernous sitting room that had a very western, almost cowboy feel to it. The girl gestured toward the sitting room and I followed her direction.

Behind Easter was a bronze mirror. In the reflection I could see the satisfaction in Christmas’s face. He was proud of this little girl who could not possibly have been of his blood.

Feather came into my mind then and I tripped on the Indian blanket used as a throw rug. I would have fallen but Black was quick. He rushed forward and grabbed my arm.

“Thanks,” I said.

The sitting room had a fifteen-foot ceiling, something you would never have expected upon seeing the seemingly small house from the road. Beyond that room was a kitchen with a loft above it, neither room separated by walls.

“Sit,” Black said.

I sat down on one of the two wood-framed couches that he had facing each other.

He sat opposite me and flashed a brief smile.

“Tea?” Easter asked me.

“No thank you,” I said.

“Coffee?”

“Naw. I would never get to sleep then.”

“Ice water?”

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“Are you going to keep on offering me drinks till you find one I want?” I asked her.

That was the first time she smiled. The beauty of her beaming face hurt me more than Bonnie and a dozen African princes ever could.

“Beer?” she asked.

“I’ll take the water, honey.”

“Daddy?”

“Whiskey and lime, baby.”

The child walked away with perfect posture and regal bearing.

I had no idea where she could have come from or how she got there.

“Adopted daughter,” Black said. “I got her when she was a tiny thing.”

“She’s a beautiful princess,” I said. “I have a girl too. Nothing like this one but I’m sure they’d be the best of friends.”

“Easter Dawn doesn’t have many friends. I’m schooling her here at home. You can’t trust strangers with the people you love.”

This felt like a deeply held secret that Christmas was letting me in on. I began to think that his bright eyes might have the light of madness behind them.

“Where you from?” I asked because he had no southern accent.

“Massachusetts,” he said. “Newton, outside of Boston. You ever been there?”

“Boston once. I had a army buddy took me there after we were let go in Baltimore, after the war. Your family from there?”

“Crispus Attucks was one of my ancestors,” Black said, nodding but not in a prideful way. “He was the son of a prince and a runaway slave. But most importantly he was a soldier.”

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There was a finality to every sentence he spoke. It was as if he was also royalty and not used to ordinary conversation.

“Attucks, huh?” I said, trying to find my way to a conversation.

“That’s the Revolutionary War there.”

“My family’s menfolk have been in every American war,” he said, again with a remoteness that made him seem unstable.

“Eighteen-twelve, Spanish-American, of course the Civil War. I myself have fought in Europe, and against Japan, the Koreans, and the Vietnamese.”

“Here, Mr. Rawlins,” Easter Dawn said. She was standing at my elbow holding a glass of water in one hand and her father’s whiskey in the other.

Judging from her slender brown face and flat features I suspected that Easter had come from Black’s last campaign.

She carried her father’s whiskey over to him.

“Thanks, honey,” he said, suddenly human and present.

“Easter here come from Vietnam?” I asked.

“She’s my little girl,” he said. “That’s all we care about here.”

Okay.

“What was your rank?” I asked.

“After a while it didn’t matter,” he said. “I was a colonel in Nam. But we were working in groups of one. You have no rank if there’s nobody else there. Covered with mud and out for blood, we were just savages. Now how’s a savage rate a rank?”

He shone those mad orbs at me and I believe that I forgot all the problems I came to his door with. Easter Dawn went to his side and leaned against his knee.

He looked down at her, placing a gigantic hand on her head. I could tell that it was a light touch because she pressed back into the caress.

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“War has changed over my lifetime, Mr. Rawlins,” Christmas Black said. “At one time I knew who the enemy was. That was clear as the nose on your face. But now . . . now they send us out to kill men never did anything to us, never thought one way or the other about America or the American way of life. When I realized that I was slaughtering innocent men and women I knew that the soldiering line had to come to an end with me.”

Christmas Black could never hang out with the guys on a street corner. Every word he said was the last word on the subject. I liked the man and I knew he was crazy. The thing I didn’t know was why I was there.

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36

Iwas nursing my water, trying to think of some reply to a man who had just confessed to murder and gone on to his quest for redemption.

Lucky for me there came a knock at the door.

“It’s Uncle Saul,” Easter Dawn said. She didn’t exactly shout but you could hear the excitement in her voice. She didn’t exactly run either but rather rushed toward the front of the house.

“E.D.,” Christmas said with authority.

The girl stopped in her tracks.

“What did I tell you about answering that door?” her father asked.

“Never open the door without finding out who it is,” she said dutifully.

“Okay then.”

She hurried on, followed by her father. I trailed after them.

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“Who is it!” Easter Dawn shouted at the door.

“It’s the big bad wolf,” Saul Lynx replied in a playful voice he reserved for children.

The door flew open and Saul came in carrying a box wrapped in pink paper.

Easter Dawn put both hands behind her back and gripped them tightly to keep from jumping at him. He bent down and picked her up with one arm.

“How’s my girl?”

“Fine,” she said, obviously trying hard to restrain herself from asking what was in the box.

Christmas came up to them and put a hand on Saul’s shoulder.

“How you doin’?” the black philosopher-king asked.

“Been better,” Saul said.

By this time the girl had moved around until she had snagged the box.

“Is it for me?” she pleaded.

“You know it is,” Saul said and then he put her down. “Hey, Easy. I see you made it.”

“That reminds me,” I said. “I gave Ray this address too. He should be by a little bit later.”

“Who’s that?” our host asked.

“Friend’a mine. Good guy in a pinch.”

“Let’s go in,” Christmas said.

Easter ran before us, opening the present as she went.

s a u l s a t

next to the war veteran and I sat across from them with my water.

“Joe ‘Chickpea’ Cicero” were the first words out of Saul’s mouth.

“The most dangerous man that anybody can think of. He’s a killer for hire, an arsonist, a kidnapper, and he’s also a torturer —”

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“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“It’s widely known that if someone has a secret that you need to get at, all you have to do is hire Chickpea. He promises an answer to your question within seventy-two hours.”

I glanced at Christmas. If he was frightened it certainly didn’t show on his face.

“He’s bad,” Black agreed. “But not as bad as his rep. It’s like a lot of white men. They can only see excellence in one of their own.”

Excellence, I thought.

“That might be,” Saul said. “But he’s plenty dangerous enough for me.”

Easter Dawn brought in a beer, which she offered to her Uncle Saul.

“Thanks, honey,” Saul said.

“Easter, this is man talk,” Christmas told the girl.

“But I wanted to show Mr. Rawlins my new doll,” she said.

“Okay. But hurry up.”

Easter ran out and then back again with a tallish figurine of an Asian woman standing on a platform and stabilized by a metal rod.

“You see,” she said to me. “She has eyes like mine.”

“I see.”

The doll wore an elaborate black-and-gold robe that had a dragon stitched into it.

“That’s a dragon lady,” Saul told her, “the most important woman in the whole clan.”

The child’s eyes got bigger as she studied her treasure.

“You’re spoiling her with all those dolls,” Christmas said.

I was thinking about the assassin.

“No he’s not, Daddy,” Easter said.

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“How many do you have now?”