C i n n a m o n K i s s
A L S O
B Y
W A LT E R
M O S L E Y
E A S Y R A W L I N S N O V E L S
Devil in a Blue Dress
A Red Death
White Butterfly
Black Betty
A Little Yellow Dog
Gone Fishin’
Bad Boy Brawly Brown
Six Easy Pieces
Little Scarlet
O T H E R F I C T I O N
R. L.’s Dream
Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned Blue Light
Walkin’ the Dog
Fearless Jones
Futureland
Fear Itself
The Man in My Basement
47
N O N F I C T I O N
Workin’ on the Chain Gang
What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace Wa lt e r
M o s l e y
C i n n a m o n K i s s
L i t t l e , B r o w n a n d C o m p a n y N e w Y o r k
B o s t o n
Copyright © 2005 by Walter Mosley
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Little, Brown and Company
Time Warner Book Group
1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Visit our Web site at www.twbookmark.com First eBook Edition: September 2005
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 0-7595-1434-8
For Ossie Davis,
our shining king
C i n n a m o n K i s s
1
So it’s real simple,” Mouse was saying. When he grinned the diamond set in his front tooth sparkled in the gloom.
Cox Bar was always dark, even on a sunny April afternoon.
The dim light and empty chairs made it a perfect place for our kind of business.
“. . . We just be there at about four-thirty in the mornin’ an’
wait,” Mouse continued. “When the mothahfuckahs show up you put a pistol to the back of the neck of the one come in last.
He the one wit’ the shotgun. Tell ’im to drop it —”
“What if he gets brave?” I asked.
“He won’t.”
“What if he flinches and the gun goes off?”
“It won’t.”
“How the fuck you know that, Raymond?” I asked my lifelong 3
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friend. “How do you know what a finger in Palestine, Texas, gonna do three weeks from now?”
“You boys need sumpin’ for your tongues?” Ginny Wright asked. There was a leer in the bar owner’s voice.
It was a surprise to see such a large woman appear out of the darkness of the empty saloon.
Ginny was dark-skinned, wearing a wig of gold-colored hair.
Not blond, gold like the metal.
She was asking if we needed something to drink but Ginny could make a sexual innuendo out of garlic salt if she was talking to men.
“Coke,” I said softly, wondering if she had overheard Mouse’s plan.
“An’ rye whiskey in a frozen glass for Mr. Alexander,” Ginny added, knowing her best customer’s usual. She kept five squat liquor glasses in her freezer at all times — ready for his pleasure.
“Thanks, Gin,” Mouse said, letting his one-carat filling ignite for her.
“Maybe we should talk about this someplace else,” I suggested as Ginny moved off to fix our drinks.
“Shit,” he uttered. “This my office jes’ like the one you got on Central, Easy. You ain’t got to worry ’bout Ginny. She don’t hear nuttin’ an’ she don’t say nuttin’.”
Ginny Wright was past sixty. When she was a young woman she’d been a prostitute in Houston. Raymond and I both knew her back then. She had a soft spot for the younger Mouse all those years. Now he was her closest friend. You got the feeling, when she looked at him, that she wanted more. But Ginny satisfied herself by making room in her nest for Raymond to do his business.
On this afternoon she’d put up her special sign on the front 4
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door: closed for a private function. That sign would stay up until my soul was sold for a bagful of stolen money.
Ginny brought our drinks and then went back to the high table that she used as a bar.
Mouse was still grinning. His light skin and gray eyes made him appear wraithlike in the darkness.
“Don’t worry, Ease,” he said. “We got this suckah flat-footed an’ blind.”
“All I’m sayin’ is that you don’t know how a man holding a shotgun’s gonna react when you sneak up behind him and put a cold gun barrel to his neck.”
“To begin wit’,” Mouse said, “Rayford will not have any buck-shot in his shooter that day an’ the on’y thing he gonna be thinkin’ ’bout is you comin’ up behind him. ’Cause he know that the minute you get the drop on ’im that Jack Minor, his partner, gonna swivel t’ see what’s what. An’ jest when he do that, I’ma bop old Jackie good an’ then you an’ me got some heavy totin’ to do. They gonna have a two hunnert fi’ty thousand minimum in that armored car — half of it ours.”
“You might think it’s all good and well that you know these guys’ names,” I said, raising my voice more than I wanted. “But if you know them then they know you.”
“They don’t know me, Easy,” Mouse said. He looped his arm around the back of his chair. “An’ even if they did, they don’t know you.”
“You know me.”
That took the smug smile off of Raymond’s lips. He leaned forward and clasped his hands. Many men who knew my murder-ous friend would have quailed at that gesture. But I wasn’t afraid.
It’s not that I’m such a courageous man that I can’t know fear in the face of certain death. And Raymond “Mouse” Alexander was 5
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certainly death personified. But right then I had problems that went far beyond me and my mortality.
“I ain’t sayin’ that you’d turn me in, Ray,” I said. “But the cops know we run together. If I go down to Texas and rob this armored car with you an’ Rayford sings, then they gonna know to come after me. That’s all I’m sayin’.”
I remember his eyebrows rising, maybe a quarter of an inch.
When you’re facing that kind of peril you notice small gestures. I had seen Raymond in action. He could kill a man and then go take a catnap without the slightest concern.
The eyebrows meant that his feelings were assuaged, that he wouldn’t have to lose his temper.
“Rayford never met me,” he said, sitting back again. “He don’t know my name or where I’m from or where I’ll be goin’ after takin’ the money.”
“And so why he trust you?” I asked, noticing that I was talking the way I did when I was a young tough in Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas. Maybe in my heart I felt that the bravado would see me through.
“Remembah when I was in the can ovah that manslaughter thing?” he asked.
He’d spent five years in maximum security.
“That was hard time, man,” he said. “You know I never wanna be back there again. I mean the cops would have to kill me before I go back there. But even though it was bad some good come out of it.”
Mouse slugged back the triple shot of chilled rye and held up his glass. I could hear Ginny hustling about for his next free drink.
“You know I found out about a very special group when I was up in there. It was what you call a syndicate.”
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“You mean like the Mafia?” I asked.
“Naw, man. That’s just a club. This here is straight business.
There’s a brother in Chicago that has men goin’ around the country scopin’ out possibilities. Banks, armored cars, private poker games — anything that’s got to do wit’ large amounts of cash, two hunnert fi’ty thousand or more. This dude sends his boys in to make the contacts and then he give the job to somebody he could trust.” Mouse smiled again. It was said that that diamond was given to him by a rich white movie star that he helped out of a jam.
“Here you go, baby,” Ginny said, placing his frosty glass on the pitted round table between us. “You need anything else, Easy?”
“No thanks,” I said and she moved away. Her footfalls were silent. All you could hear was the rustle of her black cotton trousers.
“So this guy knows you?” I asked.
“Easy,” Mouse said in an exasperated whine. “You the one come to me an’ said that you might need up t’ fi’ty thousand, right? Well — here it is, prob’ly more. After I lay out Jack Minor, Rayford gonna let you hit him in the head. We take the money an’ that’s that. I give you your share that very afternoon.”
My tongue went dry at that moment. I drank the entire glass of cola in one swig but it didn’t touch that dryness. I took an ice cube into my mouth but it was like I was licking it with a leather strip instead of living flesh.
“How does Rayford get paid?” I asked, the words warbling around the ice.
“What you care about him?”
“I wanna know why we trust him.”
Mouse shook his head and then laughed. It was a real laugh, friendly and amused. For a moment he looked like a normal 7
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person instead of the supercool ghetto bad man who came off so hard that he rarely seemed ruffled or human at all.
“The man in Chi always pick somebody got somethin’ t’ hide.
He gets shit on ’em and then he pay ’em for their part up front.
An’ he let ’em know that if they turn rat they be dead.”
It was a perfect puzzle. Every piece fit. Mouse had all the bases covered, any question I had he had the answer. And why not? He was the perfect criminal. A killer without a conscience, a warrior without fear — his IQ might have been off the charts for all I knew, but even if it wasn’t, his whole mind paid such close attention to his profession that there were few who could outthink him when it came to breaking the law.
“I don’t want anybody gettin’ killed behind this, Raymond.”
“Nobody gonna die, Ease. Just a couple’a headaches, that’s all.”
“What if Rayford’s a fool and starts spendin’ money like water?” I asked. “What if the cops think he’s in on it?”
“What if the Russians drop the A-bomb on L.A.?” he asked back. “What if you drive your car on the Pacific Coast Highway, get a heart attack, and go flyin’ off a cliff? Shit, Easy. I could
‘what if ’ you into the grave but you got to have faith, brother. An’
if Rayford’s a fool an’ wanna do hisself in, that ain’t got nuthin’ to do with what you got to do.”
Of course he was right. What I had to do was why I was there.
I didn’t want to get caught and I didn’t want anybody to get killed, but those were the chances I had to take.
“Lemme think about it, Ray,” I said. “I’ll call you first thing in the morning.”
8
2
Iwalked down the small alleyway from Cox Bar and then turned left on Hooper. My car was parked three blocks away because of the nature of that meeting. This wasn’t grocery shopping or parking in the lot of the school I worked at. This was serious business, business that gets you put in prison for a child’s lifetime.
The sun was bright but there was a slight breeze that cut the heat. The day was beautiful if you didn’t look right at the burned-out businesses and boarded-up shops — victims of the Watts riots not yet a year old. The few people walking down the avenue were somber and sour looking. They were mostly poor, either unemployed or married to someone who was, and realizing that California and Mississippi were sister states in the same union, members of the same clan.
I knew how they felt because I had been one of them for more 9
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than four and a half decades. Maybe I had done a little more with my life. I didn’t live in Watts anymore and I had a regular job. My live-in girlfriend was a stewardess for Air France and my boy owned his own boat. I had been a major success in light of my upbringing but that was all over. I was no more than a specter haunting the streets that were once my home.
I felt as if I had died and that the steps I was taking were the final unerring, unalterable footfalls toward hell. And even though I was a black man, in a country that seemed to be teeter-ing on the edge of a race war, my color and race had nothing to do with my pain.
Every man’s hell is a private club, my father used to tell me when I was small. That’s why when I look at these white people sneerin’ at me I always smile an’ say, “Sure thing, boss.”
He knew that the hammer would fall on them too. He forgot to say that it would also get me one day.
I drove a zigzag side street path back toward the west side of town. At every intersection I remembered people that I’d known in Los Angeles. Many of those same folks I had known in Texas.
We’d moved, en masse it seemed, from the Deep South to the haven of California. Joppy the bartender, dead all these years, and Jackson the liar; EttaMae, my first serious love, and Mouse, her man and my best friend. We came here looking for a better life — the reason most people move — and many of us believed that we had found it.
. . . You put a pistol to the back of the neck of the one come in last . . .
I could see myself, unseen by anyone else, with a pistol in my hand, planning to rob a big oil concern of its monthly payroll.
Nearly twenty years of trying to be an upright citizen making an 1 0
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honest wage and it all disappears because of a bucketful of bad blood.
With this thought I looked up and realized that a woman pushing a baby carriage, with two small kids at her side, was in the middle of the street not ten feet in front of my bumper. I hit the brake and swerved to the left, in front of a ’48 wood-paneled station wagon. He hit his brakes too. Horns were blaring.
The woman screamed, “Oh Lord!” and I pictured one of her babies crushed under the wheel of my Ford.
I jumped out the door, almost before the car came to a stop, and ran around to where the dead child lay in my fears.
But I found the small woman on her knees, hugging her children to her breast. They were crying while she screamed for the Lord.
An older man got out of the station wagon. He was black with silver hair and broad shoulders. He had a limp and wore metal-rimmed glasses. I remember being calmed by the concern in his eyes.
“Mothahfuckah!” the small, walnut-shell-colored woman shouted. “What the fuck is the mattah wit’ you? Cain’t you see I got babies here?”
The older man, who was at first coming toward me, veered toward the woman. He got down on one knee even though it was difficult because of his bum leg.
“They okay, baby,” he said. “Your kids is fine. They fine. But let’s get ’em out the street. Out the street before somebody else comes and hits ’em.”
The man led the kids and their mother to the curb at Florence and San Pedro. I stood there watching them, unable to move.
Cars were backed up on all sides. Some people were getting out 1 1
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to see what had happened. Nobody was honking yet because they thought that maybe someone had been killed.
The silver-haired man walked back to me with a stern look in his eye. I expected to be scolded for my careless behavior. I’m sure I saw the reprimand in his eyes. But when he got close up he saw something in me.
“You okay, mister?” he asked.
I opened my mouth to reply but the words did not come. I looked over at the mother, she was kissing the young girl. I noticed that all of them — the mother, her toddler son, and the six-or seven-year-old girl — were wearing the same color brown pants.
“You bettah watch out, mister,” the older man was saying. “It can get to ya sometimes but don’t let it get ya.”
I nodded and maybe even mumbled something. Then I stumbled back to my car.
The engine was still running. It was in neutral but I hadn’t engaged the parking brake.
I was an accident waiting to happen.
For the rest of the ride home I was preoccupied with the image of that woman holding her little girl. When Feather was five and we were at a beach near Redondo she had taken a tumble down a small hill that was full of thorny weeds. She cried as Jesus held her, kissing her brow. When I came up and lifted her into my arms she said, “Don’t be mad at Juice, Daddy. He didn’t make me fall.”
I pulled to the curb so as not to have another accident. I sat there with the admonition in my ears. It can get to ya sometimes but don’t let it get ya.
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3
When I came in the front door I found my adopted son, Jesus, and Benita Flag sitting on the couch in the front room. They looked up at me, both with odd looks on their faces.
“Is she all right?” I asked, feeling my heart do a flip-flop.
“Bonnie’s with her,” Jesus said.
Benita just nodded and I hurried toward Feather’s room, down the small hallway, and through my little girl’s door.
Bonnie was sitting there dabbing the light-skinned child’s brow with isopropyl alcohol. The evaporation on her skin was meant to cool the fever.
“Daddy,” Feather called weakly.
I was reminded of earlier times, when she’d shout my name and then run into me like a small Sherman tank. She was a daddy’s girl. She’d been rough and full of guffaws and squeals.
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But now she lay back with a blood infection that no one on the North American continent knew how to cure.
“The prognosis is not good,” Dr. Beihn had said. “Make her comfortable and make sure she drinks lots of liquid . . .”
I would have drained Hoover Dam to save her life.
Bonnie had that strange look in her eye too. She was tall and dark skinned, Caribbean and lovely. She moved like the ocean, surging up out of that chair and into my arms. Her skin felt hot, as if somehow she was trying to draw the fever out of the girl and into her own body.
“I’ll go get the aspirin,” Bonnie whispered.
I released her and took her place in the folding chair next to my Feather’s pink bed. With my right hand I held the sponge against her forehead. She took my left hand in both of hers and squeezed my point finger and baby finger as hard as she could.
“Why am I so sick, Daddy?” she whined.
“It’s just a little infection, honey,” I said. “You got to wait until it works its way outta your system.”
“But it’s been so long.”
It had been twenty-three days since the diagnosis, a week longer than the doctor thought she’d survive.
“Did anybody come and visit you today?” I asked.
That got her to smile.
“Billy Chipkin did,” she said.
The flaxen-haired, bucktoothed white boy was the fifth and final child of a family that had migrated from Iowa after the war.
Billy’s devotion to my foundling daughter sometimes made my heart swell to the point that it hurt. He was two inches shorter than Feather and came to sit at her side every day after school.
He brought her homework and gossip from the playground.
Sometimes, when they thought that no one was looking, 1 4
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they’d hold hands while discussing some teacher’s unfair punish-ments of their unruly friends.
“What did Billy have to say?”
“He got long division homework and I showed him how to do it,” she said proudly. “He don’t know it too good, but if you show him he remembers until tomorrow.”
I touched Feather’s brow with the backs of three fingers. She seemed to be cool at that moment.
“Can I have some of Mama Jo’s black tar?” Feather asked.
Even the witch-woman, Mama Jo, had not been able to cure her. But Jo had given us a dozen black gummy balls, each wrapped up in its own eucalyptus leaf.
“If her fevah gets up past one-oh-three give her one’a these here to chew,” the tall black witch had said. “But nevah more than one in a day an’ aftah these twelve you cain’t give her no mo’.”
There were only three balls left.
“No, honey,” I said. “The fever’s down now.”
“What you do today, Daddy?” Feather asked.
“I saw Raymond.”
“Uncle Mouse?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you do with him?”
“We just talked about old times.”
I told her about the time, twenty-seven years earlier, when Mouse and I had gone out looking for orange monarch butterflies that he intended to give his girlfriend instead of flowers.
We’d gone to a marsh that was full of those regal bugs, but we didn’t have a proper net and Raymond brought along some moonshine that Mama Jo made. We got so drunk that both of us had fallen into the muddy water more than once. By the end of the day Mouse had caught only one butterfly. And that night 1 5
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when we got to Mabel’s house, all dirty from our antics, she took one look at the orange-and-black monarch in the glass jar and set him free.
“He just too beautiful to be kept locked up in this bottle,” she told us.
Mouse was so angry that he stormed out of Mabel’s house and didn’t talk to her again for a week.
Feather usually laughed at this story, but that afternoon she fell asleep before I got halfway through.
I hated it when she fell asleep because I didn’t know if she’d wake up again.
w h e n i g o t b a c k to the living room Jesus and Benita were at the door.
“Where you two goin’?” I asked.
“Uh,” Juice grunted, “to the store for dinner.”
“How you doin’, Benita?” I asked the young woman.
She looked at me as if she didn’t understand English or as if I’d asked some extremely personal question that no gentleman should ask a lady.
Benny was in her mid-twenties. She’d had an affair with Mouse which broke her heart and led to an attempted suicide. Bonnie and I took her in for a while but now she had her own apartment.
She still came by to have a home-cooked meal now and then.
Bonnie and she had become friends. And she loved the kids.
Lately it had been good to have Benny around because when Bonnie and I needed to be away she’d stay at Feather’s side.
Jesus would have done it if we asked him to, but he was eighteen and loved being out on his homemade sailboat, cruising up and down the Southern California coast. We hadn’t told him 1 6
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how sick his sister actually was. They were so close we didn’t want to worry him.
“Fine, Mr. Rawlins,” she said in a too-high voice. “I got a job in a clothes store on Slauson. Miss Hilda designs everything she sells. She said she was gonna teach me.”
“Okay,” I said, not really wanting to hear about the young woman’s hopeful life. I wanted Feather to be telling me about her adventures and dreams.
When Benny and Jesus were gone Bonnie came out of the kitchen with a bowl full of spicy beef soup.
“Eat this,” she said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“I didn’t ask if you were hungry.”
Our living room was so small that we only had space for a love seat instead of a proper couch. I slumped down there and she sat on my lap shoving the first spoonful into my mouth.
It was good.
She fed me for a while, looking into my eyes. I could tell that she was thinking something very serious.
“What?” I asked at last.
“I spoke to the man in Switzerland today,” she said.
She waited for me to ask what he said but I didn’t. I couldn’t hear one more piece of bad news about Feather.
I turned away from her gaze. She touched my neck with four fingertips.
“He tested the blood sample that Vicki brought over,” she said. “He thinks that she’s a good candidate for the process.”
I heard the words but my mind refused to understand them.
What if they meant that Feather was going to die? I couldn’t take the chance of knowing that.
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“He thinks that he can cure her, baby,” Bonnie added, understanding the course of my grief. “He has agreed to let her apply to the Bonatelle Clinic.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“In Montreux?”
“Yes.”
“But why would they take a little colored girl in there? Didn’t you say that the Rockefellers and Kennedys go there?”
“I already told you,” Bonnie explained. “I met the doctor on an eight-hour flight from Ghana. I talked to him the whole time about Feather. I guess he felt he had to say yes. I don’t know.”
“What do we have to do next?”
“It’s not free, honey,” she said, but I already knew that. The reason I’d met with Mouse was to raise the cash we might need if the doctors agreed to see my little girl.
“They’ll need thirty-five thousand dollars before the treat-ments can start and at least fifteen thousand just to be admitted.
It’s a hundred and fifty dollars a day to keep her in the hospital, and then the medicines are all unique, made to order based upon her blood, sex, age, body type, and over fifteen other cate-gories. There are five doctors and a nurse for each patient. And the process may take up to four months.”
We’d covered it all before but Bonnie found solace in details.
She felt that if she dotted every i and crossed every t then everything would turn out fine.
“How do you know that you can trust them?” I asked. “This could just be some scam.”
“I’ve been there, Easy. I visited the hospital. I told you that, baby.”
“But maybe they fooled you,” I said.
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I was afraid to hope. Every day I prayed for a miracle for Feather. But I had lived a life where miracles never happened.
In my experience a death sentence was just that.
“I’m no fool, Easy Rawlins.”
The certainty of her voice and her stare were the only chances I had.
“Money’s no problem,” I said, resolute in my conviction to go down to Texas and rob that armored car. I didn’t want Rayford or his partner to die. I didn’t want to spend a dozen years behind bars. But I’d do that and more to save my little girl.
I went out the back door and into the garage. From the back shelf I pulled down four paint cans labeled Latex Blue. Each was sealed tight and a quarter filled with oiled steel ball bearings to give them the heft of full cans of paint. On top of those pel-lets, wrapped in plastic, lay four piles of tax-free money I’d come across over the years. It was my children’s college fund. Twelve thousand dollars. I brought the money to Bonnie and laid it on her lap.
“What now?” I asked.
“In a few days I’ll take a flight with Vicki to Paris and then transfer to Switzerland. I’ll take Feather and bring her to Dr.
Renee.”
I took a deep breath but still felt the suffocation of fear.
“How will you get the rest?” she asked me.
“I’ll get it.”
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4
Jesus, Feather, and I were in a small park in Santa Monica we liked to go to when they were younger. I was holding Feather in my arms while she laughed and played catch with Jesus. Her laughter got louder and louder until it turned to screams and I realized that I was holding her too tightly. I laid her out on the grass but she had passed out.
“You killed her, Dad,” Jesus was saying. It wasn’t an indict-ment but merely a statement of fact.
“I know,” I said as the grasses surged upward and began swallowing Feather, blending her with their blades into the soil underneath.
I bent down but the grasses worked so quickly that by the time my lips got there, there was only the turf left to kiss.
I felt a buzzing vibration against my lips and jumped back, trying to avoid being stung by a hornet in the grass.
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Halfway out of bed I realized that the buzzing was my alarm clock.
It felt as if there was a crease in my heart. I took deep breaths, thinking in my groggy state that the intake of air would somehow inflate the veins and arteries.
“Easy.”
“Yeah, baby?”
“What time is it?”
I glanced at the clock with the luminescent turquoise hands.
“Four-twenty. Go back to sleep.”
“No,” Bonnie said, rising up next to me. “I’ll go check on Feather.”
She knew that I was hesitant to go into Feather’s room first thing in the morning. I was afraid to find her dead in there. I hated her sleep and mine. When I was a child I fell asleep once and awoke to find that my mother had passed in the night.
I went to the kitchen counter and plugged in the percolator. I didn’t have to check to see if there was water and coffee inside.
Bonnie and I had a set pattern by then. She got the coffee urn ready the night before and I turned it on in the morning.
I sat down heavily on a chrome and yellow vinyl dinette chair.
The vibrations of the hornet still tickled my lips. I started thinking of what would happen if a bee stung the human tongue.
Would it swell up and suffocate the victim? Is that all it would take to end a life?
Bonnie’s hand caressed the back of my neck.
“She’s sleeping and cool,” she whispered.
The first bubble of water jumped up into the glass knob at the top of the percolator. I took in a deep breath and my heart smoothed out.
Bonnie pulled a chair up beside me. She was wearing a white 2 1
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lace slip that came down to the middle of her dark brown thighs.
I wore only briefs.
“I was thinking,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I love you and I want to be with you and only you.”
When she didn’t say anything I put my hand on hers.
“Let’s get Feather well first, Easy. You don’t want to make these big decisions when you’re so upset. You don’t have to worry — I’m here.”
“But it’s not that,” I argued.
When she leaned over to nuzzle my neck the coffee urn started its staccato beat in earnest. I got up to make toast and we ate in silence, holding hands.
After we’d eaten I went in and kissed Feather’s sleeping face and made it out to my car before the sun was up.
i p u l l e d i n t o the parking lot at five-nineteen, by my watch.
There was an orangish-yellow light under a pile of dark clouds rising behind the eastern mountains. I used my key to unlock the pedestrian gate and then relocked it after I’d entered.
I was the supervising senior head custodian of Sojourner Truth Junior High School, an employee in good standing with the LAUSD. I had over a dozen people who reported directly to me and I was also the manager of all the plumbers, painters, car-penters, electricians, locksmiths, and glaziers who came to service our plant. I was the highest-ranking black person on the campus of a school that was eighty percent black. I had read the study plans for almost every class and often played tutor to the boys and girls who would come to me before they’d dream of asking their white teachers for help. If a big boy decided to see if he could intimidate a small woman teacher I dragged him down to 2 2
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the main office, where the custodians congregated, and let him know, in no uncertain terms, what would happen to him if I were to lose my temper.
I was on excellent terms with Ada Masters, the diminutive and wealthy principal. Between us we had the school running smooth as satin.
I entered the main building and started my rounds, going down the hallways looking for problems.
A trash can had not been emptied by the night custodian, Miss Arnold, and there were two lights out in the third-floor hallway. The first floor needed mopping. I made meaningless mental notes of the chores and then headed down to the lower campus.
After checking out the yards and bungalows down there I went to the custodians’ building to sit and think. I loved that job.
It might have seemed like a lowly position to many people, both black and white, but it was a good job and I did many good things while I was there. Often, when parents were having trouble with their kids or the school, I was the first one they went to. Because I came from the South I could translate the rules and expectations of the institution that many southern Negroes just didn’t understand. And if the vice principals or teachers overstepped their bounds I could always put in a word with Miss Masters. She listened to me because she knew that I knew what was what among the population of Watts.
“Ain’t is a valid negative if you use it correctly and have never been told that it isn’t proper language,” I once said to her when an English teacher, Miss Patterson, dropped a student two whole letter grades just for using ain’t one time in a report paper.
Miss Masters looked at me as if I had come from some other planet and yet still spoke her tongue.
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“You’re right,” she said in an amazed tone. “Mr. Rawlins, you’re right.”
“And you’re white,” I replied, captive to the rhyme and the irony.
We laughed, and from that day on we had weekly meetings where she queried me about what she called my ghetto pedagogy.
They paid me nine thousand dollars a year to do that service.
Not nearly enough to float a loan for the thirty-five-plus thousand I needed to maybe save my daughter.
I owned two apartment buildings and a small house with a big yard, all in and around Watts. But after the riots, property values in the black neighborhoods had plummeted. I owed more on the mortgages than the places were worth.
In the past few days I had called John and Jackson and Jewelle and the bank. No one but Mouse had come through with an idea. I wondered if at my trial they would take into account all of my good deeds at Truth.
a t a b o u t a q u a r t e r to seven I went out to finish my
rounds. My morning man, Ace, would have been there by then, unlocking the gates and doors for the students, teachers, and staff.
Halfway up the stairs to the upper campus I passed the mid-way lunch court. I thought I saw a motion in there and took the detour out of habit. A boy and girl were kissing on one of the benches. Their faces were plastered together, his hand was on her knee and her hand was on his. I couldn’t tell if she was urging him on or pushing him off. Maybe she didn’t know either.
“Good morning,” I said cheerily.
Those two kids jumped back from each other as if a powerful spring had been released between them. She was wearing a 2 4
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short plaid skirt and a white blouse under a green sweater. He had the jeans and T-shirt that almost every boy wore. They both looked at me speechlessly — exactly the same way Jesus and Benita had looked.
My shock was almost as great as those kids’. Eighteen-year-old Jesus and Benita in her mid-twenties . . . But my surprise subsided quickly.
“Go on up to your lockers or somethin’,” I said to the children.
As they scuttled off I thought about the Mexican boy I had adopted. He’d been a man since the age of ten, taking care of me and Feather like a fierce and silent mama bear. Benita was a lost child and here my boy had a good job at a supermarket and a sailboat he’d made with his own hands.
Thinking of Feather dying in her bed, I couldn’t get angry with them for hurrying after love.
The rest of the campus was still empty. I recognized myself in the barren yards and halls and classrooms. Every step I took or door I closed was an exit and a farewell.
“ g o o d m o r n i n g ,
Mr. Rawlins,” Ada Masters said when I appeared at her door. “Come in. Come in.”
She was sitting on top of her desk, shoes off, rubbing her left foot.
“These damn new shoes hurt just on the walk from my car to the office.”
We never stood on ceremony or false manners. Though white and very wealthy, she was like many down-to-earth black women I’d known.
“I’m taking a leave of absence,” I said and the crease twisted my heart again.
“For how long?”
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“It might be a week or a month,” I said. But I was thinking that it might be ten years with good behavior.
“When?”
“Effective right now.”
I knew that Ada was hurt by my pronouncement. But she and I respected each other and we came from a generation that did not pry.
“I’ll get the paperwork,” she said. “And I’ll have Kathy send you whatever you have to sign.”
“Thanks.” I turned to leave.
“Can I be of any help, Mr. Rawlins?” she asked my profile.
She was a rich woman. A very rich woman if I knew my clothes and jewelry. Maybe if I was a different man I could have stayed there by borrowing from her. But at that time in my life I was unable to ask for help. I convinced myself that Ada wouldn’t be able to float me that kind of loan. And one more refusal would have sunk me.
“Thanks anyway,” I said. “This is somethin’ I got to take care of for myself.”
Life is such a knotty tangle that I don’t know even today whether I made the right decision turning away from her offer.
2 6
5
Ihad changed the sign on my office door from easy rawlins — research and delivery
to simply investiga-
tions. I made the switch after the Los Angeles Police Department had granted me a private detective’s license for my part in keeping the Watts riots from flaring up again by squelching the ugly rumor that a white man had murdered a black woman in the dark heart of our boiler-pot city.
I went to my fourth-floor office on Central and Eighty-sixth to check the answering machine that Jackson Blue had given me.
But I found little hope there. Bonnie had left a message saying that she’d called the clinic in Montreux and they would allow Feather’s admission with the understanding that the rest of the money would be forthcoming.
Forthcoming. The people in that neighborhood had heart disease and high blood pressure, cancer of every type, and deep 2 7
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self-loathing for being forced to their knees on a daily basis.
There was a war waging overseas, being fought in great part by young black men who had no quarrel with the Vietnamese people. All of that was happening but I didn’t have the time to worry about it. I was thinking about a lucky streak in Vegas or that maybe I should go out and rob a bank all on my own.
Forthcoming. The money would be forthcoming all right. Rayford would have a gun at the back of his neck and I’d be sure to have a fully loaded .44 in my sweating hand.
There was one hang-up on the tape. Back then, in 1966, most folks weren’t used to answering machines. Few people knew that Jackson Blue had invented that device to compete with the downtown mob’s control of the numbers business. The under-world still had a bounty on his head.
The row of buildings across the street were all boarded up —
every one of them. The riots had shut down SouthCentral L.A.
like a coffin. White businesses had fled and black-owned stores flickered in and out of existence on a weekly basis. All we had left were liquor stores for solace and check-cashing storefronts in place of banks. The few stores that had survived were gated with steel bars that protected armed clerks.
At least here the view matched my inner desolation. The economy of Watts was like Feather’s blood infection. Both futures seemed devoid of hope.
I couldn’t seem to pull myself from the window. That’s because I knew that the next thing I had to do was call Raymond and tell him that I was ready to take a drive down south.
The knock on the door startled me. I suppose that in my grief I felt alone and invisible. But when I looked at the frosted glass I knew who belonged to that silhouette. The big shapeless nose and the slight frame were a dead giveaway.
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“Come on in, Saul,” I called.
He hesitated. Saul Lynx was a cautious man. But that made sense. He was a Jewish private detective married to a black woman. They had three brown children and the enmity of at least one out of every two people they met.
But we were friends and so he opened the door.
Saul’s greatest professional asset was his face — it was almost totally nondescript even with his large nose. He squinted a lot but if he ever opened his eyes wide in surprise or appreciation you got a shot of emerald that can only be described as beautiful.
But Saul was rarely surprised.
“Hey, Easy,” he said, giving a quick grin and looking around for anything out of place.
“Saul.”
“How’s Feather?”
“Pretty bad. But there’s this clinic in Switzerland that’s had very good results with cases like hers.”
Saul made his way to my client’s chair. I went behind the desk, realizing as I sat that I could feel my heart beating.
Saul scratched the side of his mouth and moved his shoulder like a stretching cat.
“What is it, Saul?”
“You said that you needed work, right?”
“Yeah. I need it if it pays.”
Saul was wearing a dark brown jacket and light brown pants.
Brown was his color. He reached into the breast pocket and came out with a tan envelope. This he dropped on the desk.
“Fifteen hundred dollars.”
“For what?” I asked, not reaching for the money.
“I put out the word after you called me. Talked to anybody who might need somebody like you on a job.”
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Like you meant a black man. At one time it might have angered me to be referred to like that but I knew Saul, he was just trying to help.
“At first no one had anything worth your while but then I heard from this cat up in Frisco. He’s a strange guy but . . .” Saul hunched his shoulders to finish the sentence. “This fifteen hundred is a down payment on a possible ten grand.”
“I’ll take it.”
“I don’t even know what the job is, Easy.”
“And I don’t need to know,” I said. “Ten thousand dollars will put me in shootin’ range of what I need. I might even be able to borrow the rest if it comes down to it.”
“Might.”
“That’s all I got, Saul — might.”
Saul winced and nodded. He was a good guy.
“His name is Lee,” he said. “Robert E. Lee.”
“Like the Civil War general?”
Saul nodded. “His parents were Virginia patriots.”
“That’s okay. I’d meet with the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan if this is how he says hello.” I picked up the envelope and fanned my face with it.
“I’ll be on the job too, Easy. He wants to do it with you answering to me. It’s no problem. I won’t get in your way.”
I put the envelope down and extended that hand. For a moment Saul didn’t realize that I wanted to shake with him.
“You can ride on my back if you want to, Saul. All I care about is Feather.”
i w e n t h o m e late that afternoon. While Bonnie made dinner I sat by Feather’s side. She was dozing on and off and I wanted 3 0
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to be there whenever she opened her eyes. When she did come awake she always smiled for me.
Jesus and Benny came over and had dinner with Bonnie. I didn’t eat. I wasn’t hungry. All I thought about was doing a good job for the man named after one of my enemies by descendants of my enemies in the land of my people’s enslavement. But none of that mattered. I didn’t care if he hated me and my kind. I didn’t care if I made him a million dollars by working for him.
And if he wanted a black operative to undermine black people, well . . . I’d do that too — if I had to.
a t t h r e e i n t h e m o r n i n g I was still at Feather’s side. I sat there all night because Saul was coming at four to drive with me up the coast. I didn’t want to leave my little girl. I was afraid she might die in the time I was gone. The only thing I could do was sit there, hoping that my will would keep her breathing.
And it was lucky that I did stay because she started moaning and twisting around in her sleep. Her forehead was burning up. I hurried to the medicine cabinet to get one of Mama Jo’s tar balls.
When I got back Feather was sitting up and breathing hard.
“Daddy, you were gone,” she whimpered.
I sat beside her and put the tar ball in her mouth.
“Chew, baby,” I said. “You got fever.”
She hugged my arm and began to chew. She cried and chewed and tried to tell about the dream where I had disappeared. Remembering my own dream I kept from holding her too tightly.
In less than five minutes her fever was down and she was asleep again.
*
*
*
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a t f o u r
Bonnie came into the room and said, “It’s time, honey.”
Just when she said these words there was a knock at the front door. Feather sighed but did not awaken. Bonnie put her hand on my shoulder.
I felt as if every move and gesture had terrible importance. As things turned out I was right.
“I gave her some of Mama Jo’s tar,” I said. “There’s only two left.”
“It’s okay,” Bonnie assured me. “In three days we’ll be in Switzerland and Feather will be under a doctor’s care twenty-four hours a day.”
“She’s been sweating,” I said as if I had not heard Bonnie’s promise. “I haven’t changed the sheets because I didn’t want to leave her.”
Saul knocked again.
I went to the door and let him in. He was wearing brown pants and a russet sweater with a yellow shirt underneath. He had on a green cap made of sewn leather strips.
“You ready?” he asked me.
“Come on in.”
We went into the kitchen, where Saul and Bonnie kissed each other’s cheeks. Bonnie handed me my coat, a brown shopping bag filled with sandwiches, and a thermos full of coffee.
“I got some fruit in the car,” Saul said.
I looked around the house, not wanting to leave.
“Do you have any money, Easy?” Bonnie asked me.
I had given her the fifteen-hundred-dollar invitation.
“I could use a few bucks I guess.”
Bonnie took her purse from the back of the chair. She rum-maged around for a minute, but she had so much stuff in there 3 2
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that she couldn’t locate the cash. So she spilled out the contents on our dinette table.
There was a calfskin clasp-purse but she never kept money there. She had cosmetic cases and a jewelry bag, two paperback books, and a big key ring with almost as many keys as I carried at Truth. Then came a few small cloth bags and an enameled pin or stud. The pin was the size of a quarter, decorated with the image of a white-and-red bird in flight against a bronze background.
If I wasn’t already used to the pain I might have broken down and died right then.
“Easy,” Bonnie was saying.
She proffered a fold of twenties.
I took the money and headed for the door.
“Easy,” Bonnie said again. “Aren’t you going to kiss me good-bye?”
I turned back and kissed her, my lips tingling as they had in the dream where the hornet was hiding in Feather’s grassy grave.
3 3
6
Athin coating of freshly fallen snow hid the ruts in the road and softened the bombed-out buildings on the out-skirts of Düsseldorf. The M1 rifle cradled in my arms was fully loaded and my frozen finger was on the trigger. At my right marched Jeremy Wills and Terry Bogaman, two white men that I’d only met that morning.
“Don’t get ahead, son,” Bogaman said.
Son.
“Yeah, Boots,” Wills added. “Try and keep up.”
Boots.
General Charles Bitterman had ordered forty-one small groups of men out that morning. Among them were thirteen Negroes.
Bitterman didn’t want black men forming into groups together.
He’d said that we didn’t have enough experience, but we all 3 4
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thought that he didn’t trust us among the German women we might come across.
“I’m a sergeant, Corporal,” I said to Wills.
“Sergeant Boots,” he said with a grin.
Jeremy Wills was a fair-looking lad. He had corn-fed features and blond hair, amber-colored eyes, and big white teeth. To some lucky farm girl he might have been a good catch but to me he was repulsive, uglier than the corpses we ran across on the road to America’s victory. My numb finger tightened and I gauged my chances of killing both soldiers before Bogaman, who was silently laughing at his friend’s joke, could turn and fire.
I hadn’t quite decided to let them live when a bullet lifted Wills’s helmet and split his skull in two. I saw into his brain before he hit the ground. It was only then that I became aware of the machine-gun reports. When I started firing back Bogaman screamed. He had been hit in the shoulder, chest, and stomach.
I fell to the ground and rolled off the road into a ditch. Then I was scuttling on all fours, like a lizard, into the meager shelter of the leafless woods.
Machine-gun fire ripped the bark and the frozen turf around me. I had gone more than fifty yards before I realized that somewhere along the way I’d dropped my rifle. In my mind at the time (and in the dream I was having) I imagined that my hatred for those white men had brought on the German attack.
The rattling roar of their fire proved to me that the Germans were desperate. I didn’t think they could see me but they kept firing anyway.
Kids, I thought.
I took out my government-issue .45 and crawled around to the place where I had seen the flashes from their gun. I moved 3 5
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through the sound-softening snow hardly feeling the cold along my belly. I had no hatred for the Germans who tried to kill me out there on the road. I didn’t feel that I had to avenge the deaths of the men who had so recently despised and disrespected me. But I knew that if I let the machine gunners live, sooner or later they might get the drop on me.
The Nazis wanted to kill me. That’s because the Nazis knew that I was an American even if Bogaman and Wills did not.
I went maybe four hundred yards more through the woods and then I slithered across the road, making it back to the clump of branches that camouflaged the nest. I jumped up without thinking and began firing my pistol, holding it with both hands. I hit the first man in the eye and the second in the gut. They were completely surprised by the attack. I noticed, even in the two short seconds it took me to kill them, that their uniforms were makeshift and their hands were wrapped in rags.
The third soldier in the nest leaped at me with a bayonet in his hand. The impact of his attack knocked the pistol from my grasp. We fell to the ground, each committed to the other’s death. I grabbed his wrist with one hand and pressed with all my might. The milky-skinned, gray-eyed youth grimaced and used all of his Aryan strength in an attempt to overwhelm me. But I was a few years older and that much more used to the logic of senseless violence. I grabbed the haft of his bayonet with my other hand while he wasted time hitting me with his free fist. By the time he realized that the tide was turning against him it was too late. He now used both hands to keep the blade from his chest but still it moved unerringly downward. As the seconds crept by, real fear appeared in the teenage soldier’s eyes. I wanted to stop but there was no stopping. There we were, two men who had never known each other, working toward that 3 6
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young man’s death. He spoke no English, could not beg in words I might understand. After maybe a quarter of a minute the blade passed through his coat and into his flesh, but then it got caught on one of his breastbones. I almost lost heart then but what could I do? It was him or me. I leaned forward with all my weight and the German steel broke the German’s bone and plunged deep into his heart.
The most terrible thing was his last gasp, a sudden hot gust of breath into my face. His eyes opened wide as if to see some way out of the finality in his body — and then he was dead.
I jumped up from my sleep in Saul’s Rambler. A sign at the side of the road read the artichoke capital of the world.
“Bad dream?” Saul asked me.
It was a dream, but everything in it had happened more than twenty years before. It was real. That German boy had died and there wasn’t a thing either one of us could do to stop it.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just a dream.”
“I guess I should tell you a little about this guy Lee,” Saul said. “He’s not known to the public at large but in certain circles he’s the most renowned private detective in the world.”
“The world?”
“Yes sir. He does work in Europe and South America and Asia too.”
I noticed that he didn’t mention Africa. People rarely did when talking about the world in those days.
“Yes sir,” Saul Lynx said again. “He has entrée to every law en-forcement facility and many government offices. He’s a connois-seur of fine wines, women, and food. Speaks Chinese, both Mandarin and Cantonese, Spanish, French, and English, which means that he can converse with at least one person in almost every town, village, or hamlet in the world. He’s extremely well 3 7
W a lt e r M o s l e y
read. He thinks that he is the better of every, and any, man regardless of race or rank. And that means that his racism includes the whole human race.”
“Sounds like a doozy,” I said. “What’s he look like?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? I thought that you’d done work for him before.”
“I have. But I never met him face-to-face. You see, Bobby Lee doesn’t like to sully himself with operatives. He has this woman named Maya Adamant who represents him to most clients and to almost all the PIs that do his legwork. She’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. He spends most of his time hidden away in his mansion on Nob Hill.”
“Have you ever talked to him, in Chinese or otherwise?” I asked.
Saul shook his head.
“Have you seen his picture?”
“No.”
“How do you even know that this man exists?”
“I’ve met people who’ve met him — clients mainly. Some of them liked to talk about his talents and eccentricities.”
“You should meet with a man you work for,” I said.
“People work for Heinz Foods and Ford Motor Company and never meet them,” Saul argued.
“But they employ thousands. This dude is a small shop. He needs to at least say hello.”
“What difference would that make, Easy?” Saul asked.
“How can you work for a man don’t even have the courtesy to come out from his office and nod at you?”
“I received an envelope yesterday morning with twenty-five hundred dollars in it,” he said. “I get a thousand dollars just to 3 8
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deliver you your money and take a drive up to Frisco. Sometimes I work two weeks and don’t make half that.”
“Money isn’t everything, Saul.”
“It is when your daughter is at death’s door and only money can buy her back.”
I could see that Saul regretted his words as soon as they came out of his mouth. But I didn’t say anything. He was right. I didn’t have the luxury of criticizing that white man. Who cared if I ever met him? All I needed was his long green.
3 9
7
Abeautiful day in San Francisco is the most beautiful day on earth. The sky is blue and white, Michelangelo at his best, and the air is so crystal clear it makes you feel that you can see more detail than you ever have before. The houses are wooden and white with bay windows. There was no trash in the street and the people, at least back then, were as friendly as the citizens of some country town.
If I hadn’t had Feather, and that enameled pin, on my mind I would have enjoyed our trip through the city.
On Lower Lombard we passed a peculiar couple walking down the street. The man wore faded red velvet pants with an open sheepskin vest that only partially covered his naked chest.
His long brown hair cascaded down upon broad, thin shoulders.
The woman next to him wore a loose, floral-patterned dress with nothing underneath. She had light brown hair with a dozen yel-4 0
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low flowers twined into her irregular braids. The two were walking, barefoot and slow, as if they had nowhere to be on that Thursday afternoon.
“Hippies,” Saul said.
“Is that what they look like?” I asked, amazed. “What do they do?”
“As little as possible. They smoke marijuana and live a dozen to a room, they call ’em crash pads. And they move around from place to place saying that owning property is wrong.”
“Like communists?” I asked. I had just finished reading Das Kapital when Feather got weak. I wanted to get at the truth about our enemies from the horse’s mouth but I didn’t have enough history to really understand.
“No,” Saul said, “not communists. They’re more like dropouts from life. They say they believe in free love.”
“Free love? Is that like they say, ‘That ain’t my baby, baby’?”
Saul laughed and we began the ascent to Nob Hill.
Near the top of that exclusive mount is a street called Cush-man. Saul took a right turn there, drove one block, and parked in front of a four-story mansion that rose up on a slope behind the sidewalk.
The walls were so white that it made me squint just looking at them. The windows seemed larger than others on the block and the conical turrets at the top were painted metallic gold. The first floor of the manor was a good fifteen feet above street level — the entrance was barred by a wrought iron gate.
Saul pushed a button and waited.
I looked out toward the city and appreciated the view. Then I felt the pang of guilt, knowing that Feather lay dying four hundred miles to the south.
“Yes?” a sultry woman’s voice asked over an invisible intercom.
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“It’s Saul and Mr. Rawlins.”
A buzzer sounded. Saul pulled open the gate and we entered onto an iron platform. The elevator vestibule was carved into the rock beneath the house. As soon as Saul closed the gate the platform began to move upward toward an opening at the first-floor level of the imposing structure. As we moved into the aperture a panel above us slid aside and we ascended into a large, well-appointed room.
The walls were mahogany bookshelves from floor to ceiling —
and the ceiling was at least sixteen feet high. Beautifully bound books took up every space. I was reminded of Jackson Blue’s beach house, which had cheap shelves everywhere. His books for the most part were ratty and soiled, but they were well read and his library was probably larger.
Appearing before us as we rose was a white woman with tanned skin and copper hair. She wore a Chinese-style dress made of royal blue silk. It fitted her form and had no sleeves.
Her eyes were somewhere between defiant and taunting and her bare arms had the strength of a woman who did things for herself. Her face was full and she had a black woman’s lips. The bones of her face made her features point downward like a lovely, earthward-bound arrowhead. Her eyes were light brown and a smile flitted around her lips as she regarded me regarding her beauty.
She would have been tall even if she were a man — nearly six feet. But unlike most tall women of that day, she didn’t let her shoulders slump and her backbone was erect. I made up my mind then and there that I would get on naked terms with her if it was at all possible.
She nodded and smiled and I believe she read the intentions in my gaze.
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“Maya Adamant,” Saul Lynx said, “this is Ezekiel Rawlins.”
“Easy,” I said, extending a hand.
She held my hand a moment longer than necessary and then moved back so that we could step off of the platform.
“Saul,” she said. “Come in. Would you like a drink?”
“No, Maya. We’re in kind of a hurry. Easy’s daughter is sick and we need to get back as soon as possible.”
“Oh,” she said with a frown. “I hope it’s not serious.”
“It’s a blood condition,” I said, not intending to be so honest.
“Not quite an infection but it really isn’t a virus either. The doctors in L.A. don’t know what to do.”
“There’s a clinic in Switzerland . . . ,” she said, searching for the name.
“The Bonatelle,” I added.
Her smile broadened, as if I had just passed some kind of test.
“Yes. That’s it. Have you spoken to them?”
“That’s why I’m here, Miss Adamant. The clinic needs cash and so I need to work.”
Her chest expanded then and an expression of delight came over her face.
“Come with me,” she said.
She led us toward a wide, carpeted staircase that stood at the far end of the library.
Saul looked at me and hunched his shoulders.
“I’ve never been above this floor before,” he whispered.
t h e r o o m a b o v e
was just as large as the one we had left.
But where the library was dark with no windows, this room had a nearly white pine floor and three bay windows along each wall.
There were maybe a dozen large tables in this sun-drenched space. On each was a battle scene from the Civil War. In each 4 3
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tableau there were scores of small, hand-carved wooden figurines engaged in battle. The individual soldiers — tending cannon, engaged in hand-to-hand combat, down and wounded, down and dead — were compelling. The figurines had been carved for maximum emotional effect. On one table there was a platoon of Negro Union soldiers engaging a Confederate band.
“Amazing, aren’t they?” Maya asked from behind me. “Mr.
Lee carves each one in a workroom in the attic. He has studied every aspect of the Civil War and has written a dozen mono-graphs on the subject. He owns thousands of original documents from that period.”
“One wonders when he has time to be a detective with all that,” I said.
For a moment there was a deadness in Maya’s expression. I felt that I had hit a nerve, that maybe Bobby Lee really was a fig-ment of someone’s imagination.
“Come into the office, Mr. Rawlins. Saul.”
We followed her past the miniature scenes of murder and mayhem made mythic. I wondered if anyone would ever make a carving of me slaughtering that young German soldier in the snow in suburban Düsseldorf.
m a y a l e d u s
through a hand-carved yellow door that was painted with images of a naked island woman.
“Gauguin,” I said as she pushed the gaudy door open. “Your boss does paintings too?”
“This door is an original,” she said.
“Whoa” came unbidden from my lips.
The office was a nearly empty, windowless room with cherry floors. Along the white walls were a dozen tall lamps with frosted glass globes around the bulbs. These lamps were set before as 4 4
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many floor-to-ceiling cherry beams imbedded in the plaster walls. All the lights were on.
In the center of the room was an antique red lacquered Chinese desk that had four broad-bottomed chairs facing it, with one behind for our absentee host.
“Sit,” Maya Adamant said.
She settled in one of the visitors’ chairs and Saul and I followed suit.
“We’re looking for a woman,” she began, all business now.
“Who’s we?” I asked.
This brought on a disapproving frown.
“Mr. Lee.”
“That’s a he not a we, ” I said.
“All right,” she acquiesced. “Mr. Lee wants —”
“Do you own this house, Miss Adamant?”
Another frown. “No.”
“Easy,” Saul warned.
I held up my hand for his silence.
“You know, my mother, before she died, told me that I should never enter a man’s house without paying my respects.”
“I’ll be sure to tell Mr. Lee that you said hello,” she told me.
“It was a double thing with my mother,” I said, continuing with my train of thought. “On the one hand you didn’t want a man thinking that you were in his domicile doing mischief with his property or his wife —”
“Mr. Lee is not married,” Maya put in.
“And on the other hand,” I went on, “being of the darker per-suasion, you wouldn’t want to be treated like a nigger or a slave.”
“Mr. Lee doesn’t meet with anyone who works for him,” she informed me.
“Come on, Easy,” Saul added. “I told you that.”
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Ignoring my friend, I said, “And I don’t work for anyone I don’t meet with.”
“You’ve taken his money,” Maya reminded me.
“And I drove four hundred miles to tell him thank you.”
“I really don’t see the problem, Mr. Rawlins. I can brief you on the job at hand.”
“I could sit with you on a southern beach until the earth does a full circle, Miss Adamant. And I’m sure that I’d rather speak to you than to a man named after the number one Rebel general.
But you have your orders from him and I got my mother’s demands. My mother is dead and so she can’t change her mind.”
In my peripheral vision I could see Saul throw his hands up in the air.
“I can’t take you to him,” Maya said with finality.
I stood up from my fine Chinese chair saying, “And I can’t raise the dead.”
I made ready to leave, knowing that I was being a fool. I needed that money and I knew how powerful white men could act. But still I couldn’t help myself. Hell, there was an armored car waiting for me in the state of Texas.
Thinking about the robbery, everything that could go wrong came back to me. So, standing there before my chair, I was torn between walking out and apologizing.
“Hold up there,” a man’s voice commanded.
I turned to see that a panel in the wall behind the lacquered desk had become a doorway.
A man emerged from the darkness, a very short man.
“I am Robert E. Lee,” the little man said.
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8
He wasn’t over five feet tall. He might not have made the full sixty inches. He wore navy blue pants and a black coat cut in the fashion of a nineteenth-century general’s jacket.
He had short black hair and wispy sideburns, a completely round head, and the large dark eyes of a baby who had wisdom past its years.
He marched up to the chair behind the desk and sat with an air that could only be described as pompous.
It was obvious that he had been watching us since we entered the office. I suspected that he had probably been monitoring our conversation from the moment we entered the house. But the little general wasn’t embarrassed by this exposure. He touched something on his desk and the portal behind him slid shut.
“It’s like the house of the future at Disneyland,” I said.
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“I’ve never been,” he said with an insincere smile plastered to his lips.
“You should go sometime. Might give you some tips.”
“You’ve met me, Mr. Rawlins,” Robert E. Lee said. “We’ve had mindless banter. Is that enough for your mother?”
An instant rage rose up in my heart. I had never loved anyone in life as much as I did my mother — at least not until the birth of my blood daughter and then when Jesus and Feather found their way into my home. The idea that this arrogant little man would refer to my mother in that tone made me want to slap him. But I held myself in check. After all, I had mentioned my mother’s admonition and Feather needed my best effort if she was going to live.
“So why am I here?” I asked.
“You’d need a practicing existentialist to answer a question like that,” he said. “All I can do is explain the job at hand. Mr.
Lynx . . .”
“Yes sir,” Saul said. “May I say that it’s an honor to meet you.”
“Thank you. Do you vouch for Mr. Rawlins?”
“He’s among the best, sir. And he is the best in certain parts of town, especially if that town is Los Angeles.”
“You realize that you will be held accountable for his actions?”
Lee referred to me as if I weren’t there. A moment before, that would have angered me, but now I was amused. His effort was petty. I turned to Maya Adamant and winked.
“I’d trust Ezekiel Rawlins with my life,” Saul replied. There was deep certainty in his voice.
“I’m my own man, Mr. Lee,” I said. “If you want to work with me, then fine. If not I have things to do in L.A.”
“Or in Montreux,” he added, proving my suspicions about the eavesdropping devices throughout the house.
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“The job,” I prodded.
Lee pressed his lips outward and then pulled them in. He looked at me with those infant orbs and came to a decision.
“I have been retained by a wealthy man living outside Danville to discover the whereabouts of a business associate who went missing five days ago. This associate has absconded with a briefcase that contains certain documents that must be returned as soon as possible. If I can locate this man and return the contents of that briefcase before midnight of next Friday I will receive a handsome fee and you, if you are instrumental in the acquisition of that property, will receive ten thousand dollars on top of the monies you’ve already been paid.”
“Who’s the client?” I asked.
“His name is unimportant,” Lee replied.
I knew from the way he lifted his chin that my potential employer meant to show me who was boss. This was nothing new to me. I had tussled with almost every boss I’d ever had over the state of my employment and the disposition of my dignity.
And almost every boss I’d ever had had been a white man.
“What’s in the briefcase?”
“White papers, printed in ink and sealed with red wax.”
I turned my head to regard Saul. Beyond him, on the far wall, next to a lamp, was a small framed photograph. I couldn’t make out the details from that distance. It was the only decoration on the walls and it was in an odd place.
“Is your client the original owner of these white papers, printed in ink and sealed with red wax?”
“As far as I know my client is the owner of the briefcase in question and its contents.”
Lee was biding his time, waiting for something. In my opinion he was acting like a buffoon but those eyes made me wary.
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“What is the name of the man who stole the briefcase?”
Lee balked then. He brought his fingers together, forming a triangle.
“I’d like to know a little bit more about you before divulging that information,” he said.
I sat back and turned my palms upward. “Shoot.”
“Where are you from?”
“A deep dark humanity down in Louisiana, a place where we never knew there was a depression because we never had the jobs to lose.”
“Education?”
“I read Mann’s Magic Mountain last month. The month before that I read Invisible Man.”
That got a smile.
“H. G. Wells?”
“Ellison,” I countered.
“You fought in the war?”
“On both fronts.”
Lee frowned and cocked his head. “The European and Japanese theaters?” he asked.
I shook my head and smiled.
“White people took their shots at me,” I said. “Most of them were German but there was an American or two in the mix.”
“Married?”
“No,” I said with maybe a little too much emphasis.
“I see. Are you a licensed PI, Mr. Rawlins?”
“Yes sir, I am.”
Holding out a child’s hand, he asked, “May I see it?”
“Don’t have it with me,” I said. “It’s in a frame on the wall in my office.”
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Lee nodded, stopped to consider, and then nodded again —
listening to an unseen angel on his right shoulder. Then he rose, barely taller standing than he was seated.
“Good day,” he said, making a paltry attempt at a bow.
Now I understood. From the moment I flushed him out of hiding he intended to dismiss my services. What I couldn’t understand was why he didn’t let me leave when I wanted to the first time.
“Fine with me.” I stood up too.
“Mr. Lee,” Maya said then. She also rose from her chair.
“Please, sir.”
Please. The conflict wasn’t between me and Lee — it was a fight between him and his assistant.
“He’s unlicensed,” Lee said, making a gesture like he was tossing something into the trash.
“He’s fully licensed,” she said. “I spoke with Mayor Yorty himself this morning. He told me that Mr. Rawlins has the complete support of the LAPD.”
I sat down.
There was too much information to sift through on my feet.
This woman could get the mayor of Los Angeles on the phone, the mayor knew my name, and the Los Angeles cops were willing to say that they trusted me. Not one of those facts did I feel comfortable with.
Lee sighed.
“Mr. Lynx has always been our best operative in Los Angeles,”
Maya said, “and he brought Mr. Rawlins to us.”
“How long ago did you first come to us, Mr. Lynx?” Lee asked.
“Six years ago, I guess.”
“And you never tried to extort your way into my presence?”
Saul didn’t say anything.
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“And why should I put a man I don’t know on a case of this much importance?” Lee asked Maya.
“Because he’s the only man for the job and therefore he’s the best,” she said confidently.
“Why don’t you call Chief Parker and get him to find the girl?”
Lee said.
“To begin with, he’s a public official and this is a private matter.” I felt that her words carried hidden meaning. “And you know as well as I do that white policemen in white socks and black shoes are never going to find Cargill.”
Lee stared at his employee for a moment and then sat down.
Maya let out a deep breath and lowered, catlike, into her chair.
Saul was looking at us with his emerald eyes evident. For a deadpan like Saul this was an expression of bewilderment.
Lee was regarding his own clasped hands on the red lacquered desk. I got the feeling that he didn’t lose many argu-ments with the people he deigned to meet. It would take a few moments for him to swallow his pride.
“The man we’re looking for is named Axel Bowers,” Lee said at last. “He’s a liberal lawyer living in Berkeley, from a wealthy family. He has a storefront practice in San Francisco, where he and an associate attempt to help miscreants evade the law. He’s the one who stole from my client.”
“What’s the catch?” I asked.
“Bowers had a colored servant named Philomena Cargill, generally known as Cinnamon — because of the hue of her skin, I am told. This Cinnamon worked for Bowers as a housekeeper at first, but she had some education and started doing secretarial and assistant work also.
“When my client realized that Bowers had stolen from him he 5 2
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called his home to demand the return of his property. Miss Cargill answered and said that Bowers had left the country.
“The client came to me but by the time my people got there Miss Cargill had fled also. It is known that she came to Berkeley from Los Angeles, that she was raised near Watts. It is also known that she and Axel were very close, unprofessionally so.
“What I need for you to do is find Miss Cargill and locate Bowers and the contents of the briefcase.”
“So you want Bowers too?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Why? Doesn’t sound like you’re planning to prosecute.”
“Do you accept the task as I have presented it?” he asked in return.
“I’d like to know where these people live in San Francisco and Berkeley,” I said.
“Neither of them is in the Bay Area, I can assure you of that,”
the little Napoleon said. “Bowers is out of the country and Cargill is in Los Angeles. We’ve tried to contact her family but all attempts have failed.”
“She might have friends here who know where she went,” I suggested.
“We are pursuing that avenue, Mr. Rawlins. You are to go to L.A. and search for the girl there.”
“Girl,” I repeated. “How old is she?”
Lee glanced at Maya.
“Early twenties,” the knockout replied.
“Anything else?” Lee asked.
“Family?” I said. “Previous address, photograph, distinguish-ing habits or features?”
“You’re the best in Los Angeles,” Lee said. “Mr. Lynx assures 5 3
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us of that. Maya will give you any information she deems necessary. Other than that, I’m sure you will find the answers to all of your questions and ours. Do you accept?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not? Philomena Cargill also known as Cinnamon, somewhere on the streets of L.A.”
Robert E. Lee rose from his chair. He turned his back on us and made his way through the hole in the wall. The panel closed behind him.
I turned to Maya Adamant and said, “That’s one helluva boss you got there.”
“Shall we go?” was her reply.
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First I want to check something out,” I said.
I crossed the room, approaching the small out-of-the-way frame. It was a partially faded daguerreotype-like photograph, imprinted on a pane of glass. It looked to be the detective’s namesake. The general was in full uniform. He had, at some point during the exposure, looked down, maybe at a piece of lint on his magnificent coat. The result was the image of a two-headed man. The more tangible face stared with grim conviction at the lens while the other was peering downward, unaware of history.
I was intrigued by the antique photograph because of its vul-nerability. It was as if the detective wanted to honor the past general in both victory and defeat.
“Shall we go, Mr. Rawlins?” Maya Adamant said again.
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I realized that she was worried about Lee getting mad if he saw me getting too intimate with his sanctorum.
“Sure.”
i n t h e l i b r a r y Maya gave me a business card.
“These are my numbers,” she said, “both at home and at work.”
Saul had been forgotten. He’d merely been their, or was it her, pipeline to a Watts connection.
“What’s the disagreement between you and your boss?” I asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do. He went through that whole song and dance about getting rid of me because he wanted you to beg him.
What’s that all about?”
“You would be better served, Mr. Rawlins, by using your detecting skills to find Philomena Cargill.”
There was an almost physical connection between us. It was like we’d known each other in a most fundamental way — so much so that I nearly leaned forward to kiss her. She saw this and moved her head back half an inch. But even then she smiled.
We went down to the library. I gave her my office phone number.
“When will you be there?” she asked me.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“You have a secretary?”
“Electronic,” I said, more for her master than for her.
“I don’t understand.”
“I got a tape recorder attached to my phone. It records a message and plays it back when I get in.”
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*
*
*
o u t s i d e t h e s u n
was dazzling. A cool breeze blew over Nob Hill.
“What the hell was that all about?” Saul said as soon as we were back at his car.
“What?”
“I don’t know. You choose. Making Lee come out to talk to you. Looking at Maya like that.”
“You got to admit that Miss Adamant is a good-looker.”
“I have to admit that you need this job.”
“Listen, Saul. I won’t work for a guy that refuses to meet me face-to-face. You know what’ll happen if the cops come breakin’
down my door and I can’t even say that I ever talked to the man.”
“I brought you there, Easy. I wouldn’t put you in jeopardy like that.”
“You wouldn’t. I know that because I know you. But hear me, man, that black son’a yours will be out on his own one day. And when he is he will tell you that every other white man he meets will sell an innocent black man down the river before he will turn on a white crook.”
That silenced my friend for a moment. I had waited years to be able to slip that piece of intelligence into his ear.
“Well what did you think about Lee?” he asked.
“I don’t trust him.”
“You think he’s bent?”
“I don’t know about that but he seems like the kinda fool get you down a dark alley and then forget to send your backup.”
“Forget? Bobby Lee doesn’t forget a thing. He’s one of the smartest men in the world.”
“That might be,” I replied, “but he thinks he’s even smarter 5 7
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than what he is. And you and I both know that if a man is too proud then he’s gonna fall. And if I’m right under him . . .”
Saul respected me. I could see in his eye that he was halfway convinced by my argument. Now that he’d met Lee he had reservations of his own.
“Well,” he said, “I guess you got to do it anyway, right? I mean that’s your little girl.”
I nodded and gazed southward at a huge bank of fog descending on the city.
“I guess we better be getting back,” Saul said.
“You go on. I’m gonna stick around town and see about these people here.”
“But all they need you to do is find Philomena Cargill.”
“I don’t know that she’s in L.A. Neither does Lee.”
s a u l h a d t o g e t b a c k home. He was due to meet with a client the next morning. I had him drop me off at a Hertz rental car lot.
It only took them an hour and a half to call Los Angeles to val-idate my BankAmericard.
“You always call the bank to check out a credit card?” I asked the blue-suited and white salesman.
“Certainly,” he replied. He had a fat face, thinning hair, and a slender frame.
“Seems to defeat the purpose of a credit card.”
“You can never be too careful,” he told me.
“I look at it the other way around,” I said. “The way I see it you can never be careful enough.”
The salesman squinted at me then. He understood that I was making fun of him — he just didn’t get the joke.
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*
*
*
a n o a k l a n d p h o n e b o o k at the Hertz office told me that Axel Bowers lived on Berkeley’s Derby Street. The Bay Area street map in my glove compartment put it a block or so up from Telegraph. I drove my rented Ford across the Bay Bridge and parked a block away from the alleged thief ’s house.
Derby was a major education for me. Everything about that block was in transition. But not the way neighborhoods usually change. It wasn’t black folks moving in and whites moving out or a downward turn in the local economy so that homes once filled with middle-class families were turning into rooming houses for the working poor.
This neighborhood was transforming as if under a magic spell.
The houses had gone from the standard white and green, blue, and yellow to a wide range of pastels. Pinks, aquas, violets, and fiery oranges. Even the cars were painted like rainbows or with rude images or long speeches etched by madmen. Music of every kind poured from open windows. Some women wore long tie-dyed gowns like fairy princesses and others wore nearly nothing at all.
Half of the men were shirtless and almost all of them had long hair like women. Their beards went untrimmed. American flags were plastered into windows and tacked to walls in a decidedly unpatriotic manner. Many of the young women carried babies.
It was the most integrated neighborhood I had ever seen.
There were whites and blacks and browns and even one or two Asian faces.
It seemed to me that I had wandered into a country where war had come and all the stores and public services had been shut down; a land where the population was being forced into a more primitive state.
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I stopped in front of one big lavender house because I heard something and someone that I recognized. “Show Me Baby,” the signature blues song of my old friend Alabama Slim, was blasting from the front door. ’Bama was crooning from the speakers.
’Bama. I didn’t think that there were ten white people in the United States who knew his work. But there he was, singing for a street filled with hairy men and women of all races in a country that was no longer the land of his birth.
b o w e r s ’ s h o u s e ,
a single-story wood box, was the most normal-looking one on the block. Its plank walls were still white, but the trim was a fire-engine red and the front door was decorated with a plaster mosaic set with broken tiles, shards of glass, marbles, trinkets, and various semiprecious stones: rough garnets, pink quartz, and turquoise.
I rang the bell and used the brass skull knocker but no one answered. Then I went down the side of the house, toward the back. There I came across a normal-looking green door that had a pane of glass set in it. Through this window I could see a small room that had a broom leaning in a corner and rubber boots on the floor. A floral-pattern apron hung from a peg on the wall.
I knocked. No answer. I knocked again. When nobody came I took off my left shoe, balled my fist in it, and broke the window.
“Hey, man! What you doin’?” a raspy voice called from up toward the street.
I was unarmed, which was either a good or a bad thing, and caught red-handed. The strange character of the neighborhood had made me feel I could go unnoticed, doing whatever I needed to get the job done. That was a mistake a black man could never afford to make.
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I turned to see the man who caught me. He walked the slender, ivy-covered corridor with confidence — as if he were the owner of the house.
He was short, five six or so, with greasy black hair down to his shoulders. Most of his face was covered by short, bristly black hairs. He had on a blood-red shirt that was too large for his thin frame and black jeans. He wore no shoes but his feet were dirty enough to be mistaken for leather. His dark eyes glittered in their sockets. Golden earrings dangled from his ears in a feminine way that made me slightly uncomfortable.
“Yes?” I asked pleasantly, as if addressing an officer of the law.
“What you doin’ breakin’ into Axel’s house?” the sandpaper-toned hippie asked.
“A guy named Manly hired me to find Mr. Bowers,” I said. “He called on me because my cousin, Cinnamon, works for him.”
“You Philomena’s cousin?” the crazy-looking white man asked.
“Yeah. Second cousin. We were raised not six blocks from each other down in L.A.”
“So why you breakin’ in?” the man asked again. He looked de-ranged but his question was clear and persistent.
“Like I said. This guy Manly, over in Frisco, asked me to find Bowers. Cinnamon is missing too. I decided to take his money and to see if anything was wrong.”
The small man looked me up and down.
“You could be Philomena’s blood,” he said. “But you know Axel’s a friend’a mine and I can’t just let you walk in his house like this.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Dream Dog,” he replied without embarrassment or inflection. It was just as if he had said Joe or Frank.
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“I’m Dupree,” I said and we shook hands. “I’ll tell you what, Dream Dog. Why don’t you come in with me? That way you can see that I’m just looking to find out where they are.”
When the man smiled I could see that he was missing two or three teeth. But instead of making him ugly the spaces reminded me of a child playing pirate with pasted-on whiskers and a cos-tume that his mother made from scraps.
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You know about karma, brother?” Dream Dog asked as I snaked my hand down to turn the lock on the doorknob.
“Hindu religion,” I said, remembering a talk I’d had with Jackson Blue in which he explained how much he disagreed with the Indian system of the moral interpretation of responsibility.
You know, the undersized genius had said, ain’t no way in the world that black folks could’a done enough bad to call all them centuries’a pain down on our heads.
Dream Dog smiled. “Yeah. Hindu. All about what you do an’
how it comes back to you.”
“Is this apron Cinnamon’s?” I asked.
We were in the door.
“Sure is. But you know she wasn’t really a maid or nuthin’ like that. She had a business degree from Berkeley and wanted to get on Wall Street. Oh yeah, that Philomena got her some spunk.”
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“I knew she was in school,” I said. “The whole family is very proud of her. That’s why they’re so worried. Did she tell you where she was going?”
“Uh-uh,” Dream Dog said while he gauged my words.
The utility room led into a long kitchen that had a lengthy butcher block counter with a copper sink on one side and a six-burner stove-oven on the other. It was a well-appointed kitchen with copper pots hanging from the walls and glass cabinets filled with all kinds of canned goods, spices, and fine china. It was very neat and ordered, even the teacup set tidily in the copper sink spoke to the owner’s sense of order.
Dream Dog opened a cabinet and pulled down a box of Oreo cookies. He took out three and then placed the box back on the shelf.
“Axel keeps ’em for me,” he said. “My mom can’t eat ’em on account’a she’s got an allergy to coconut oil and sometimes they use coconut oil in these here. But you know I love ’em. An’ Axel keeps ’em for me on this shelf right here.”
There was a reverence and pride in Dream Dog’s words —
and something else too.
t h e l i v i n g r o o m
had three plush chaise lounges set in a square with one side missing. The backless sofas stood upon at least a dozen Persian rugs. The carpets had been thrown with no particular design one on top of the other and gave the room a definitely Arabian flavor. The smell of incense helped the mood as did the stone mosaics hung upon the walls. These tiled images were obviously old, probably original, coming from Rome and maybe the Middle East. One was of a snarling, long-tongued wolf harrying a naked brown maiden; another one was a scene of 6 4
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a bacchanal with men, women, children, and dogs drinking, dancing, kissing, fornicating, and leaping for joy.
In each of the four corners was a five-foot-high Grecian urn glazed in black and brown-red and festooned with the images of naked men in various competitions.
“I love these couches, man,” Dream Dog said to me. He had stretched out on the middle lounger. “They’re worth a lotta money. I told Axel that somebody might come in and steal his furniture while he was outta town, and that’s when he asked me to look out for him.”
“He outta town a lot?”
“Yeah. For the past year he been goin’ to Germany and Switzerland and Cairo. You know Cairo’s in Egypt and Egypt is part of Africa. I learned that from a brother talks down on the campus before they have the Congo drum line.”
“You think he’s in Cairo now?” I asked.
“Nah, he’s always down at the campus on Sunday talkin’ history before the drum line.”
“Not the guy at school,” I said patiently, “Axel.”
Dream Dog bounced off the couch and held an Oreo out to me.
“Cookie?”
I’m not much for sweets but even if I had a sugar tooth the size of Texas I wouldn’t have eaten from his filthy claws.
“Watchin’ my weight,” I said.
On a side table, set at the nexus where two of the loungers met, were two squat liquor glasses. Both had been filled with brandy but the drinks had evaporated, leaving a golden film at the bottom of each glass. Next to the glasses was an ashtray in which a lit cigarette had been set and left to burn down to its 6 5
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filter. There was also a photograph of a man, his arms around an older woman, with them both looking at the camera.
“Who’s this?” I asked my companion.
“That’s Axel and his mom. She died three years ago,” Dream Dog said. “His father passed away from grief a year and a half later.”
The younger Bowers couldn’t have been over twenty-five, maybe younger. He had light brown hair and a handsome smile.
You could tell by his clothes and his mother’s jewelry that there was money there. But there was also sorrow in both their smiles and I thought that maybe a poor childhood in southern Louisiana wasn’t the worst place that a man could come from.
“I told him that he should open the drapes too,” Dream Dog was saying. “I mean God gives sunlight to warm you and to let you see.”
“Where’s the bedroom?” I asked.
“Axel’s cool though,” my new friend said as he led me through a double-wide door on the other side of the room. “He comes from money and stuff, but he knows that people are worth more than money and that we got to share the wealth, that a ship made outta gold will sink . . .”
He flipped a wall switch and we found ourselves in a wide, wood-paneled hallway. Down one side of the hall were Japanese woodprints framed in simple cherrywood. Each of these prints (which looked original) had the moon in one aspect or another as part of the subject. There were warriors and poets, fishermen and fine ladies. Down the other side were smaller paintings. I recognized one that I’d seen in an art book at Paris Minton’s Florence Avenue Bookshop. It was the work of Paul Klee. Upon closer examination I saw that all of the paintings on that side of the wall were done by him.
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“I paint some too,” Dream Dog said when I stopped to exam-ine the signature. “Animals mostly. Dogs and cats and ducks. I told Axel that he could have some of my drawings when he got tired’a this stuff.”
It was a large bedroom. The oversized bed seemed like a raft on a wide river of blue carpet. The sheets and covers were a jaundiced yellow and the windows looked out under a broad redwood that dominated the backyard.
A newspaper, the Chronicle, was folded at the foot of the bed.
The date was March 29.
There were whiskey glasses at the side of the unmade bed.
They also had the sheen of dried liquor. The pillows smelled sweetly, of a powerful perfume. I had the feeling that vigorous sex had transpired there before the end, but that might have been some leftover feeling I had about Maya Adamant.
The room was so large that it had its own dressing nook. I thought that this was a very feminine touch for a man, but then maybe the previous owners had been a couple and this was the woman’s corner.
There was an empty briefcase next to the cushioned brown hassock that sat there between three mirrors. Next to the handle was a shiny brass nameplate that had the initials ANB stamped on it.
There was a bottle of cologne on the little dressing table; it smelled nothing like those pillows.
“Axel entertain a lot?” I asked my hippie guide.
“Oh man,” Dream Dog said. “I seen three, four women in here at the same time. Axel gets down. And he shares the wealth too. Sometimes he calls me in and we all get so high that nobody knows who’s doin’ what to who — if you know what I mean.”
I did not really know and felt no need for clarification.
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The dressing table had three drawers. One contained two plastic bags of dried leaves, marijuana by the smell of them. Another drawer held condoms and various lubricants. The bottom drawer held a typed letter, with an official heading, from a man named Haffernon. There was also a handwritten envelope with Axel’s name scrawled on it. There was no stamp or address or postmark on that letter.
“I’m going to take these letters,” I said to my escort. “Maybe I can get to Axel or Cinnamon through somebody here.”
“But you’re gonna leave the dope?” Dream Dog sounded almost disappointed.
“I’m not a thief, brother.”
The little white man smiled and I realized that his attitude toward me was different from that of most whites. He was protect-ing his friend from invasion, but this had nothing to do with my being black. That was a rare experience for me at that time.
There was an empty teacup on the dressing table too. It was also dried up. From the smell I knew that it had been a very strong brew.
6 8
11
When we were back out on the sidewalk I felt as if a weight had been taken off of me. Something about the house, how it seemed as if it were frozen into a snapshot, made me feel that something sudden and violent had occurred.
“You spend a lot of time with Bowers?” I asked the hippie.
“He gives these big old dinners and your cousin’s always there with some other straights from over in Frisco. Axel buys real good wine in big bottles and has Hannah’s Kitchen make a vegetarian feast.”
Dream Dog was around thirty, but he looked older because of the facial hair and skin weathered by many days and nights outside.
I was smoking Parliaments at that time. I offered him one and he took it. I lit us both up and we stood there on Derby surrounded by all kinds of hippies and music and multicolored cars.
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“We trip a lot,” Dream Dog said.
“What’s that?”
“Drop acid.”
“What kind of acid?” I asked.
“LSD. Where you from? We drop acid. We trip.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see. You do drugs together.”
“Not drugs, man,” Dream Dog said with disdain. “Acid. Drugs close down your mind. They put you to sleep. Acid opens your crown chakra. It lets God leak in — or the devil.”
I didn’t know very much about psychedelics back then. I’d heard about the “acid test” that they gave at certain clubs up on Sunset Strip but that wasn’t my hangout. I knew my share of heroin addicts, glue sniffers, and potheads. But this sounded like something else.
“What happens when you drop?” I asked.
“Trip,” he said, correcting my usage.
“Okay. What happens?”
“This one time it was really weird. He played an album by Yusef Lateef. Rite of Spring but in a jazz mode. And there was this chick there named Polly or Molly . . . somethin’ like that.
And we all made love and ate some brownies that she was sellin’
door-to-door. I remember this one moment when me and Axel were each suckin’ on a nipple and I felt like I was a baby and she was as big as the moon. I started laughin’ and I wanted to go off in the corner but I had to crawl because I was a baby and I didn’t know how to walk yet.”
Dream Dog was back in the hallucination. His snaggletoothed grin was beatific.
“What did Axel do?” I asked.
“That’s when his bad trip started,” Dream Dog said. His smile faded. “He remembered something about his dad and that made 7 0
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him mad. It was his dad and two of his dad’s friends. He called them vulture-men feeding off of carrion. He ran around the ashram swinging this stick. He knocked out this tooth’a mines right here.” Dream Dog flipped up his lip and pointed at the gap.
“Why was he so mad?” I asked.
“It’s always somethin’ inside’a you,” the hippie explained. “I mean it’s always there but you never look at it, or maybe on the trip you see what you always knew in a new way.
“After he knocked me down Polly put her arms around him and kissed his head. She kept tellin’ him that things were gonna be fine, that he could chase the vultures away and bury the dead . . .”
“And he calmed down?”
“He went into a birth trip, man. All the way back to the fetus in the womb. He went through the whole trip just like as if he was being born again. He came out and started cryin’ and me and Polly held him. But then she an’ me were holdin’ each other and before you know it we’re makin’ love again. But by then Axel was sitting up and smiling. He told us that he had been given a plan.”
“What plan?”
“He didn’t say,” Dream Dog said, shaking his head and smiling. “But he was happy and we all went to sleep. We slept for twenty-four hours and when we woke up Axel was all calm and sure. That was when he started doin’ all’a that travelin’ and stuff.”
“How long ago was that?” I asked.
“A year maybe. A little more.”
“Around the time his father died?” I asked.
“Now that you say it . . . yeah. His father died two weeks before — that’s why we did acid.”
“And where is this Polly or Molly?”
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“Her? I dunno, man. She was goin’ from door to door sellin’
brownies. Axel an’ me were ready to trip and we asked her if she wanted to join in. Axel told her that if she did he’d buy all’a her brownies.”
“But I thought you said that you were at this other place.
Asham?”
“Ashram,” Dream Dog said. “That’s the prayer temple that Axel built out behind the trees in his backyard. That’s his holy place.”
“Where do you live?” I asked Dream Dog.
“On this block mainly.”
“Which house?”
“There’s about five or six let me crash now and then. You know it depends on how they’re feelin’ and if I got some money to throw in for the soup.”
“If I need to find you is there somebody around here that might know how to get in touch?” I asked.
“Sadie down in the purple place at the end of the block. They call her place the Roller Derby ’cause of the street and because so many people crash there. She knows where I am usually.
Yeah, Sadie.”
Dream Dog’s gaze wandered down the street, fastening upon a young woman wearing a red wraparound dress and a crimson scarf. She was barefoot.
“Hey, Ruby!” Dream Dog called. “Wait up.”
The girl smiled and waved.
“One more thing,” I said before he could sprint away.
“What’s that, Dupree?”
“Do you know where Axel’s San Francisco office is?”
“The People’s Legal Aid Center. Just go on down to Haight-Ashbury and ask anyone.”
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I handed Dream Dog a twenty-dollar bill and proffered my hand. He smiled and pulled me into a fragrant hug. Then he ran off to join the red-clad Ruby.
The idea of karma was still buzzing around my head. I was thinking that maybe if I was nice to Dream Dog, someone somewhere would be kind to my little girl.
i w a l k e d a r o u n d
the block after Dream Dog was gone. I didn’t want him or anybody else to see me investigate the ashram, so I came in through one of the neighbors’ driveways and into the backyard of Axel Bowers.
It was a garden house set behind two weeping willows. You might not have seen it even looking straight at it because the walls and doors were painted green like the leaves and lawn.
The door was unlocked.
Axel’s holy place was a single room with bare and unfinished pine floors and a niche in one of the walls where there sat a large brass elephant that had six arms. Its beard sprouted many half-burned sticks of incense. Their sweet odor filled the room but there was a stink under that.
A five-foot-square bamboo mat marked the exact center of the floor but beyond that there was no other furniture.
All of the smells, both good and bad, seemed to emanate from the brass elephant. It was five feet high and the same in width.
At its feet lay a traveling trunk with the decals of many nations glued to it.
Somebody had already snapped off the padlock, and so all I had to do was throw the trunk open. Because of the foul odor that cow-ered underneath the sweet incense I thought that I’d find a body in the trunk. It was too small for a man but maybe, I thought, there would be some animal sacrificed in the holy ashram.
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Failing an animal corpse, I thought I might find some other fine art like the pieces that graced the house.
The last thing I expected was a trove of Nazi memorabilia.
And not just the run-of-the-mill pictures of Adolf Hitler and Nazi flags. There was a dagger that had a garnet-encrusted swastika on its hilt, and the leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf was signed by Hitler himself. The contents of the trunk were all jumbled, which added to the theory that someone had already searched it. Bobby Lee said that he’d sent people to look for Philomena — maybe this was their work.
There was a pair of leather motorcycle gloves in the trunk. I accepted this providence and donned the gloves. I’d made sure to touch as few surfaces as possible in the house but gloves were even better.
A box for a deck of cards held instead a stack of pocket photographs of a man I did not recognize posing with Mussolini and Hitler, Göring and Hess. The man had an ugly-looking scar around his left eye. That orb looked out in stunned blindness.
For a moment I remembered the boy I killed in Germany after he had slaughtered the white Americans who’d made fun of me.
I also remembered the concentration camp we’d liberated and the starved, skeletal bodies of the few survivors.
The putrid odor was worse inside the trunk but there was no evidence of even a dead rat. There were a Nazi captain’s uniform and various weapons, including a well-oiled Luger with three clips of ammo. There was also, hidden inside a package that looked like it contained soap, a thick stack of homemade pornographic postcards. They were photographs of the same heavyset man who had posed with the Nazi leaders. Now he was in various sexual positions with young women and girls. He had a very large erection and all of the pictures were of him penetrating 7 4
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women from in front or behind. One photo centered on a teenage girl’s face — she was screaming in pain as he lowered on her from overhead.
I took the Luger and the clips of ammo, then I tried to move the trunk but I could see that it was anchored to the floor somehow. I got down on my knees and sniffed around the base of the trunk — the smell was definitely coming from underneath.
After looking around the base I decided to pull away the carpet that surrounded the trunk. There I saw a brass latch. I lifted this and the trunk flipped backward, revealing the corpse of a man crushed into an almost perfect rectangle — the size of the space beneath the trunk.
The man’s head was facing upward, framed by his forearms.
It was the face of the young man hugging his mother — Axel Bowers.
7 5
12
Ihad seen my share of dead bodies. Many of them had died under violent circumstances. But I had never seen anything like Axel Bowers. His killer treated the body like just another thing that needed to be hidden, not like a human being at all.
The bones were broken and his forehead was crushed by the trunk coming down on it.
The smell was overwhelming. Soon the neighbors would begin to detect it. I wondered if the person who had searched the trunk had found Axel. Not necessarily; if they’d been there a few days before, there might not have been a smell yet, so they’d have had no reason to suspect there was a secret compartment.
It was a gruesome sight. But even then, in the presence of such awful violence and evil intent, I thought about Feather lying in her bed. I felt like running from there as fast as I could.
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But instead I forced myself to wait and think about how even this horror might help her.
The knife was worth nothing and I didn’t think that I had the kind of contacts to sell Hitler’s signature. For that matter the signature might have been a fake.
I considered taking a couple of the Klee paintings from the house, but again I didn’t know where to sell them. And if I got caught trying to fence stolen paintings I could end up in jail before getting the money I needed.
For a while I thought about burning down the ashram. I wanted to get rid of the evidence of the murder so that I wouldn’t be implicated by Dream Dog or some other hippie on the block.
I even went so far as to get a can of gasoline from the garage. I also took tapered candles from the house to use as a kind of slow-burning fuse. But then I decided that fire would call attention to the murder instead of away from it. And what if the flames spread and killed someone in a nearby house?
The stench made my eyes tear and my gorge rise. I had wiped off the places I had touched in the ashram and the house.
Dream Dog would think twice before giving information about breaking into Axel’s place. Besides, he didn’t know my name.
At some point I realized that I was finding it hard to leave.
There was something in me that wanted to help Axel find some peace. The humiliation of his interment made me uncomfortable. Maybe it was the memory of the German boy I killed or the fragility of my adopted daughter’s life. Maybe it was something deeper that had been instilled in me when I was a child among the superstitious country people of Louisiana.
Finally I decided that the only thing I could do for Axel was to make him a promise.
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“I can’t give you a proper burial, Mr. Bowers,” I said. “But I swear that if I find out who did this to you I will do my best to make sure that they pay for their crime. Rest easy and go with the faith you lived with.”
Those words spoken, I lowered the trunk and stole away from the white man’s home, luckier to be a poor black man in America than Axel Bowers had been with his white skin and all his wealth.
i d r o v e d o w n Telegraph into Oakland and the black part of town. There I found a motel called Sleepy Time Inn. It was set on a hillside, with the small stucco rooms stacked like box stairs for some giant leading up toward the sky.
Melba, the night clerk, gave me the top room for eighteen dollars in cash. They didn’t take credit cards at Sleepy Time.
When I looked at the cash I remembered that enameled pin in Bonnie’s purse. For a moment I couldn’t hear what Melba was saying. I could see her mouth moving. She was a short woman with skin that was actually black. But the rest of her features were more Caucasian than Negroid. Thin lips and round eyes, hair that had been straightened and a Roman nose.
“. . . parties in the rooms,” she was saying.
“What?”
“We don’t want any carousing or parties in the rooms,” she repeated. “You can have a guest but these rooms are residential.
We don’t want any loud crowds.”
“Only noise I make is snoring,” I said.
She smiled, indicating that she believed me. That simple gesture almost brought me to tears.
t h e t e l e v i s i o n had a coin slot attached to it. It cost a quarter per hour to watch. If Feather was there with me she’d be beg-7 8
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ging for quarters to see her shows and to get grape soda from the machine down below. I put in a coin and switched channels until I came across Gigantor, her favorite afternoon cartoon. Letting the cartoon play, it felt a little like she was there with me.
That calmed me down enough to think about the mess I’d fallen into.
The man Robert E. Lee was looking for had been murdered.
The initials on the empty briefcase in his room might have belonged to him or to somebody related to him. But then again, maybe he’d switched briefcases after removing the papers from the one Lee said he’d stolen.
At any other time I would have taken the fifteen hundred and gone home to Bonnie. But there was no more going home for me, and even if there was, Feather needed nearer to thirty-five thousand than fifteen hundred.
I couldn’t call Lee. He might pull me off the case if he knew Axel was dead. And there was still Cinnamon — Philomena —
to find. Maybe she knew where the papers were. I had to have those papers, because ten thousand dollars was a hard nut to crack.
I read one of the letters I’d taken from Axel’s bureau. It was typewritten under the business heading of Haffernon, Schmidt, Tourneau and Bowers — a legal firm in San Francisco.
Dear Axel:
I have read your letter of February 12 and I must say that I find it intriguing. As far as I know, your father had no business dealings in Cairo during the period you indicated and this firm certainly has not. Of course, I’m not aware of all your father’s personal business dealings. Each of the partners had 7 9
W a lt e r M o s l e y
his own portfolio from before the formation of our investment group. But I must say that your fears seem far-fetched, and even if they weren’t, Arthur is dead. How can an inquiry of this sort have any productive outcome?
Only your family, it seems, will have a price to pay.
At any rate, I have no information to bring to bear on the matter of the briefcase you got from his safe-deposit box. Call me if you have any further questions, and please consider your actions before rushing into anything.
Yours truly,
Leonard Haffernon, Esq.
Something happened with Axel’s father, something that could still cause grief for the son and maybe others. Maybe Haffernon knew something about it. Maybe he killed Axel because of it.
Lee had told me that Axel had stolen a briefcase, but this letter indicated that he received it legally. It could have been another case . . .
The handwritten letter was a different temperature. There was no heading.
Really, Axel. I can see no reason for you to follow this line of questioning. Your father is dead. Anyone that had anything to do with this matter is either dead or so old that it doesn’t make any difference. You cannot judge them. You don’t know how it was back then. Think of your law offices in San Francisco. Think of the good you have done, will be able to do. Don’t throw it all 8 0
C i n n a m o n K i s s
away over something that’s done and gone. Think of your own generation. I’m begging you. Please do not bring these ugly matters to light.
N.
Whoever N was, he or she had something to hide. And that something was about to be exposed to the world by Axel Bowers.
If I had had a good feeling about Bobby Lee I would have taken the letters and reconnaissance to him. But we didn’t like each other and I couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t take what I gave him and cut me out of my bonus. My second choice was to tell Saul but he would have been torn in allegiance between me and the Civil War buff. No. I had to go this one alone for a while longer.
Later that evening I was asking the operator to make a collect call to a Webster exchange in West Los Angeles.
“Hello?” Bonnie said into my ear.
“Collect call to anyone from Easy,” the operator said quickly as if she feared that I might slip a message past her and hang up.
“I’ll accept, operator. Easy?”
I tried to speak but couldn’t manage to raise the volume in my lungs.
“Easy, is that you?”
“Yeah,” I said, just a whisper.
“What’s wrong?”
“Tired,” I said. “Just tired. How’s Feather?”
“She sat up for a while and watched Gigantor this afternoon,”
Bonnie said hopefully, her voice full of love. “She’s been trying to stay awake until you called.”
I had to exert extraordinary self-control not to put my fist through the wall.
8 1
W a lt e r M o s l e y
“Did you get the job?” she asked.
“Yeah, yeah. I got it all right. There’s a few snags but I think I can work ’em if I try.”
“I’m so happy,” she said. It sounded as if she really meant it.
“When you went out to meet with Raymond I was afraid that you’d do something you’d regret.”
I laughed. I was filled with regrets.
“What’s wrong, Easy?”
I couldn’t tell her. My whole life I’d walked softly around difficulties when I knew my best defense was to keep quiet. I needed Bonnie to save my little girl. Nothing I felt could get in the way of that. I had to maintain a civil bearing. I had to keep her on my side.
“I’m just tired, baby,” I said. “This case is gonna be a ball-breaker. Nobody I can trust out here.”
“You can trust me, Easy.”
“I know, baby,” I lied. “I know. Is Feather still awake?”
“You bet,” Bonnie said.
I had installed a long cord on the telephone so that the receiver could reach into Feather’s room. I heard the shushing sounds of Bonnie moving through the rooms and then her voice gently talking to Feather.
“Daddy?” she whispered into the line.
“Hi, babygirl. How you doin’?”
“Fine. When you comin’ home, Daddy?”
“Tomorrow sometime, honey. Probably just before you go to sleep.”
“I dreamed that I was lookin’ for you, Daddy, but you was gone and so was Juice. I was all alone in a tiny little house and there wasn’t a T V or phone or nothing.”
8 2
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“That was just a dream, baby. Just a dream. You got a big house and lots of people who love you. Love you.” I had to say the words twice.
“I know,” she said. “But the dream scared me and I thought that you might really be gone.”
“I’m right here, honey. I’m comin’ home tomorrow. You can count on that.”
The phone made a weightless noise and Bonnie was on the line again.
“She’s tired, Easy. Almost asleep now that she’s talked to you.”
“I better be goin’,” I said.
“Did you want to talk about the job?” Bonnie asked.
“I’m beat. I better get to bed,” I said.
Just before I took the receiver from my ear I heard Bonnie say, “Oh.”
8 3
13
The Haight, as it came to be called, was teeming with hippie life. But this wasn’t like Derby. Most of the people on that Berkeley block still had one foot in real life at a job or the university. But the majority of the people down along Haight had completely dropped out. There was more dirt here, but that’s not what made things different. Here you could distinguish different kinds of hippies. There were the clean-cut ones who washed their hair and ironed their hippie frocks. There were the dirty bearded ones on Harley-Davidson motorcycles. There were the drug users, the angry ones. There were the young (very young) runaways who had come here to blend in behind the free love philosophy.
Bright colors and all that hair is what I remember mainly.
A young man wearing only a loincloth stood in the middle of a busy intersection holding up a sign that read end the war. Nobody paid much attention to him. Cars drove around him.
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“Hey, mister, you got some spare change?” a lovely young raven-haired girl asked me. She wore a purple dress that barely made it to her thighs.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m strapped.”
“That’s cool,” she replied and walked on.
Psychedelic posters for concerts were plastered to walls. Here and there brave knots of tourists walked through, marveling at the counterculture they’d discovered.
I was reminded of a day when a mortar shell in the ammuni-tion hut of our base camp in northern Italy exploded for no ap-parent reason. No one was killed but a shock ran through the whole company. All of a sudden whatever we had been doing or thinking, wherever we had been going, was forgotten. One man started laughing uncontrollably, another went to the mess tent and wrote a letter to his mother. I kept noticing things that I’d never seen before. For instance, the hand-painted sign above the infirmary read hospital, all in capital letters except for the t.
That one character was in lower case. I had seen that sign a thousand times but only after the explosion did I really look at it.
The Haight was another kind of explosion, a stunning surge of intuition that broke down all the ways you thought life had to be.
In other circumstances I might have stayed around for a while and talked to the people, trying to figure out how they got there.
But I didn’t have the time to wander and explore.
I’d gotten the address of the People’s Legal Aid Center from the information operator. It had been a storefront at one time where a family named Gnocci sold fresh vegetables. There wasn’t even a door, just a heavy canvas curtain that the grocer raised when he was open for business.
The store was open and three desks sat there in the recess.
Two professional women and one man talked to their clients.
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The man, who was white with short hair, wore a dark suit with a white shirt and a slate-blue tie. He was talking to a fat hippie mama who had a babe in arms and a small boy and girl clutching the hem of her Indian printed dress.
“They’re evicting me,” the woman was saying in a white Texan drawl I knew and feared. “What they expect me to do with these kids? Live in the street?”
“What is the landlord’s name, Miss Braxton?” the street lawyer asked.
“Shit,” she said and the little girl giggled.
At that moment the boy decided to run across the sidewalk, headed for the street.
“Aldous!” the hippie mama yelled, reaching out unsuccess-fully for the boy.
I bent down on reflex, scooping the child up in my arms as I had done hundreds of times with Feather when she was smaller, and with Jesus before that.
“Thank you, mister. Thank you,” the mother was saying. She had lifted her bulk from the lawyer’s folding chair and was now taking the grinning boy from my arms. I could see in his face that he wasn’t what other Texans would call a white child.
The woman smiled at me and patted my forearm.
“Thank you,” she said again.
Her looking into my eyes with such deep gratitude was to be the defining moment in my hippie experience. Her gaze held no fear or condescension, even though her accent meant that she had to have been raised among a people who held themselves apart from mine. She didn’t want to give me a tip but only to touch me.
I knew that if I had been twenty years younger, I would have been a hippie too.
8 6
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“May I help you?” a woman’s voice asked.
She was of medium height with a more or less normal frame, but somewhere in the mix there must have been a Teutonic Valkyrie because she had the figure of a Norse fertility goddess.
Her eyes were a deep ocean blue and though her face was not particularly attractive there was something otherworldly about it.
As far as clothes were concerned she was conservatively dressed in a cranberry dress that went down below her knees and wore a cream-colored woolen jacket over that. There was a silver strand around her neck from which hung a largish pearl with a dark nacre hue. Her glasses were framed in white.
All in all she was a Poindexter built like Jayne Mansfield.
“Hi. My name is Ezekiel P. Rawlins.” I held out a hand.
A big grin came across her stern face but somehow the mirth didn’t make it to her eyes. She shook my hand.
“How can I help you?”
“I’m a private detective from down in L.A.,” I said. “I’ve been hired to find a woman named Philomena Cargill . . . by her family.”
“Cinnamon,” the woman said without hesitation. “Axel’s friend.”
“That’s Axel Bowers?”
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