Cinnamon Kiss

“Yes. He’s my partner here.”

She looked around the storefront. I did too.

“Not a very lucrative business,” I speculated.

The woman laughed. It was a real laugh.

“That depends on what you see as profit, Mr. Rawlins. Axel and I are committed to helping the poor people of this society get a fair shake from the legal system.”

“You’re both lawyers?”

“Yes,” she said. “I got my degree from UCLA and Axel got his across the Bay in Berkeley. I worked for the state for a while but 8 7

W a lt e r M o s l e y

I didn’t feel very good about that. When Axel asked me to join him I jumped at the chance.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Oh. Excuse my manners. My name is Cynthia Aubec.”

“French?”

“I was born in Canada,” she said. “Montreal.”

“Have you seen your partner lately?” I asked.

“Come on in,” she replied.

She turned to go through another canvas flap, this one standing as a door to the back room of the defunct grocery.

There were two desks at opposite ends of the long room we entered. It was gloomy in there, and the floors had sawdust on them as if it were still a vegetable stand.

“We keep sawdust on the floor because the garage next door sometimes uses too much water and it seeps under the wall on our floor,” she said, noticing my inspection.

“I see.”

“Have a seat.”

She switched on a desk lamp and I was gone from the hippie world of Haight Street. I wasn’t in modern America at all. Cynthia Aubec, who was French Canadian but had no accent, lived earlier in the century, walking on sawdust and working for the poor.

“I haven’t seen Axel for over a week,” she said, looking directly into my gaze.

“Where is he?”

“He said that he was going to Algeria but I can never be sure.”

“Algeria? I met a guy who told me that Axel was all over the world. Egypt, Paris, Berlin . . . Now you tell me he’s in Algeria.

There’s got to be some money somewhere.”

“Axel’s family supports this office. They’re quite wealthy. Ac-8 8

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

tually his parents are dead. Now I guess it’s Axel’s money that runs our firm. But it was his father who gave us our start.” She was still looking at me. In this light she was more Mansfield than Poindexter.

“Do you know when he might be back?”

“No. Why? I thought you were looking for Cinnamon.”

“Well . . . the way I hear it Philomena and Axel had a thing going on. Actually that’s why I’m here.”

“I don’t understand,” she said with a smile that was far away from Axel and Philomena.

“Philomena’s parents are racists,” I explained, “not like you and me. They don’t think that blacks and whites should be mix-ing. Well . . . they told Philomena that she was out of the family because of the relationship she had with your partner, but now that she hasn’t called in over two months they’re having second thoughts. She won’t talk to them and so they hired me to come make their case.”

“And you’re really a private detective?” she asked, cocking one eyebrow.

I took out my wallet and handed her the license. I hadn’t shown it to Lee out of spite. She glanced at it but I could see that she stopped to read the name and identify the photo.

“Why don’t you just go to Cinnamon’s apartment?” Cynthia suggested.

“I was told that she was living with Axel on Derby. I went there but no one was around.”

“I have an address for her,” Cynthia told me. Then she hesitated. “You aren’t lying to me are you?”

“What would I have to lie about?”

“I wouldn’t know.” Her smile was suggestive but her eyes had not yet decided upon the nature of the proposal.

8 9

W a lt e r M o s l e y

“No ma’am,” I said. “I just need to find Philomena and tell her that her parents are willing to accept her as she is.”

Cynthia took out a sheet of paper and scrawled an address in very large characters, taking up the whole page.

“This is her address,” she said, handing me the leaf. “I live in Daly City. Do you know the Bay Area, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Not very well.”

“I’ll put my number on the back. Maybe if you’re free for dinner I could show you around. I mean — as long as you’re in town.”

Yes sir. Twenty years younger and I’d have bushy hair down to my knees.

9 0

14

Philomena’s apartment was on Avery Street, at Post, in the Fillmore District, on the fourth floor of an old brick building that had been christened The Opal Shrine. A sign above the front door told me that there were apartments available and that I could inquire at apartment 1a. There was no elevator so I climbed to the fourth floor to knock at the door of apartment 4e, the number given me by Cynthia Aubec.

There was no answer so I went back down to the first floor and tried the super’s door.

He was a coffee-brown man with hair that might have been dyed cotton. He was smiling when he opened the door, a cloud of marijuana smoke attending him.

“Yes sir?” he said with a sly grin. “What can I do for you?”

“Apartment four-e.”

“Fo’ty fi’e a mont’, gas an’ ’lectric not included. Got to clean it 9 1

W a lt e r M o s l e y

out yo’ own self an’ it’s a extra ten for dogs. You can have a cat for free.” He smiled again and I couldn’t help but like him.

“I think I used to know a girl lived there. Cindy, Cinnamon . . . somethin’.”

“Cinnamon,” he said, still grinning like a coyote. “That girl had a butt on her. An’ from what I hear she knew how to use it too.”

“She move?”

“Gone’s more like it,” he said. “First’a the mont’ came and the rent wasn’t in my box. She ain’t come back. I’ont know where she is.”

“You call the cops?”

“Are you crazy? Cops? The on’y reason you call a cop is if you white or already behind bars.”

I did like him.

“Can I see it?” I asked.

He reached over to his left, next to the door, and produced a brass key tethered to a multicolored flat string.

I took the key and grinned in thanks. He grinned you’re welcome. The door closed and I was on my way back upstairs.

p h i l o m e n a c a r g i l l

had left the apartment fully fur-

nished, though I was sure that the super had emptied it of all loose change, jewelry, and other valuables. Most of the posses-sions I was interested in were still there. She had a bookcase filled with books and papers and a pile of Wall Street Journal s on the floor next to the two-burner stove. There was a small diary tacked up on the wall next to the phone and a stack of bills and some other mail on the kitchen table.

I pulled a chair up to the table and looked out of the window onto Post Street. San Francisco was much more of a city than 9 2

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

L.A. was back in ’66. It had tall buildings and people who walked when they could and who talked to each other.

There was a ceramic bear on the table. He was half filled with crystallized honey. There was a teacup that had been left out. In it were the dried dregs of jasmine tea — nothing like the flavor left on Axel’s dressing table.

There were also two dog-eared books out, The Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital. On the first page of Marx’s opus she had written, Marx seems to be at odds with himself over the effect that capitalism has on human nature. On the one hand he says that it is the dialectical force of history that forms the economic system, but on the other he seems to feel that certain human beings (capitalists) are evil by nature. But if we are pressed forward by empirical forces, then aren’t we all innocent? Or at least equally guilty? I was impressed by her argument. I had had similar thoughts when reading about the Mr. Moneybags capitalist in Marx’s major work.

She had a big pine bed and all her plates, saucers, and cups were made from red glass. The floor was clean and her clothes, at least a lot of them, still hung in the closet. That bothered me. It was as if she just didn’t come home one day rather than moved out.

The trash can was empty.

The bathroom cabinet was filled with condoms and the same lubricant used by Bowers.

He’d died instantly, between lighting a cigarette and the first drag. She had seemingly disappeared in the same way.

I decided to search the entire apartment from top to bottom.

The super, I figured, was downstairs with his joint. I didn’t have to worry about him worrying about me.

The more I explored the more I feared for the bright young woman’s safety. I found a drawer filled with makeup and soaps.

9 3

W a lt e r M o s l e y

She had a dozen panties and four bras in her underwear drawer.

There were sewing kits and cheap fountain pens, sanitary nap-kins and sunglasses — all left behind.

Luckily there was no brass elephant grinning at me from the closet, no trunk filled with pornography and the accoutrements of war.

After about an hour I was convinced that Philomena Cargill was dead. It was only then that I began to sift through her mail.

There were bills from various clothing stores and utilities, a bank statement that said she had two hundred ninety-six dollars and forty-two cents to her name. And there was a homemade postcard with the photograph of a smiling black woman on it. I knew the woman — Lena Macalister. She was standing in front of the long-closed Rose of Texas, a restaurant that had had some vogue in L.A. in the forties and fifties.

Dear Phil,

Your life sounds so exciting. New man. New job. And maybe a little something that every woman who’s really a woman wants. My hopes and prayers are with you darling. God knows the both of us could use a break.

Tommy had to leave. He was good from about nine at night to day-break. But when the sun came up all he could do was sleep. And you know I don’t need no man resting on my rent. Don’t worry about me though. You just keep on doing what you’re doing.

Love,

L

It was certainly a friendly card. That gave me an idea. I went through Philomena’s phone bill picking out telephone numbers with 213 area codes. I found three. The first number had been disconnected.

9 4

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

The second was answered by a woman.

“Westerly Nursing Home,” she said. “How may we be of service?”

“Hi,” I said, stalling for inspiration. “I’m calling on behalf of Philomena Cargill. She had a sudden case of appendicitis —”

“Oh that’s terrible,” the operator said.

“Yes. Yes, but we got it in time. I’m a PN here and the doctor told me to call because Miss Cargill was supposed to visit her aunt at Westerly but of course now you see . . .”

“Of course. What did you say was her aunt’s name?”

“I just know her name,” I said. “Philomena Cargill.”

“There’s no Cargill here, Mr. . . .”

“Avery,” I said.

“Well, Mr. Avery, there’s no Cargill, and I’m unaware of any Philomena Cargill who comes to visit. You know we have a very select clientele.”

“Maybe it was her husband’s relative,” I conjectured. “Mr.

Axel Bowers.”

“No. No. No Bowers either. Are you sure you have the right place?”

“I thought so,” I said. “But I’ll go back to the doctor. Thank you very much for your help.”

“ y e e e e e s ? ” the male voice of the last number crooned.

“Philomena please,” I said in a clipped, sure tone.

“Who’s this?” the voice asked, no longer playful.

“Miller,” I said. “Miller Jones. I’m an employee of Bowers up here and he wanted me to get in touch with Cinnamon. He gave me this number.”

“I don’t know you,” the voice said. “And even if I did, I haven’t seen Philomena in months. She’s in Berkeley.”

9 5

W a lt e r M o s l e y

“She was,” I said. “To whom am I speaking?”

The click of the phone in my ear made me grimace. I should have taken another tack. Maybe claimed to have found some lost article from her apartment.

I sat in the college student’s kitchen chair and stared at the street. This was an ugly job and it was likely to get uglier. But that was okay. I was feeling ugly, ugly as a sore on a dead man’s forehead.

I left the apartment, taking the two books she’d been reading and Lena’s postcard. I took them out to my rented Ford and then went back to return the key. I knocked, knocked again, called out for the super, and then gave up. He was either unconscious, otherwise engaged, or out. I slipped the key under the door wrapped in a two-dollar bill.

9 6

15

Haffernon, Schmidt, Tourneau and Bowers occupied the penthouse of a modern office building on California Street. There was a special elevator car dedicated solely to their floors.

“May I help you?” a white-haired matron, who had no such intention, asked me. Her nameplate read theresa ponte.

She was very white. There was a ring with a large garnet stone on her right hand. The gem looked like a knot of blood that had congealed upon her finger. A cup of coffee steamed next to her telephone. She was wearing a gray jacket over a yellow blouse, seated behind a magnificent mahogany desk. Behind her was a mountain of fog that was perpetually descending upon but rarely managing to reach the city.

“Leonard Haffernon,” I said.

“Are you delivering?”

9 7

W a lt e r M o s l e y

I was wearing the same jacket and pants that I’d had on for two days. But I’d made use of the iron in my motel room and I didn’t smell. I wore a tie and I’d even dragged a razor over my chin. I held no packages or envelopes.

“No ma’am,” I said patiently. “I have business with him.”

“Business?”

“Yes. Business.”

She moved her head in a birdlike manner, indicating that she needed more of an explanation.

“May I see him?” I asked.

“What is your business?”

From a door to my left emerged a large strawberry blond man.

His chest was bulky with muscles under a tan jacket. Maybe one of those sinews was a gun. I had Axel’s Luger in my belt. I thought of reaching for it and then I thought of Feather.

A moment of silence accompanied all that thinking.

“Tell him that I’ve come about Axel Bowers,” I said. “My name is Easy Rawlins and I’m looking for someone named Cargill.”

“Cargill who?” the receptionist asked.

“This is not the moment at which you should test your authority, Theresa,” I said.

The combination of vocabulary, grammar, and intimacy disconcerted the woman.

“There a problem?” the Aryan asked.

“Not with me,” I said to him while looking at her.

She picked up the phone, pressed a button, waited a beat, and then said, “Let me speak to him.” Another beat and she said,

“A man called Rawlins is here about Axel and someone named Cargill.” She listened then looked up at me and said, “Please have a seat.”

The big boy came to stand next to my chair.

9 8

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

My heart was thundering. My mind was at an intersection of many possible paths. I wanted to ask that woman what she was thinking when she asked me if I was a delivery boy when obviously I was not. Was she trying to be rude or did my skin color rob her of reason? I wanted to ask the bodyguard why he felt it necessary to stand over me as if I were a prisoner or a criminal when I hadn’t done anything but ask to see his boss. I wanted to yell and pull out my gun and start shooting.

But all I did was sit there staring up at the white ceiling.

I thought about that coat of paint upon the plaster. It meant that at one time a man in a white jumpsuit had stood on a ladder in the middle of that room running a roller or maybe waving a brush above his head. That was another room but the same, at another time when there was no tension but only labor. That man probably had children at home, I decided. His hard work turned into food and clothing for them.

That white ceiling made me happy. After a moment I forgot about my bodyguard and the woman who couldn’t see the man standing in front of her but only the man she had been trained to see.

“Mr. Rawlins?” a man said.

He was tall, slender, and very erect. The dark blue suit he wore would have made the down payment on my car. His scarlet tie was a thing of beauty and the gray at his temples would remind anyone of their father — even me.

“Mr. Haffernon?” I rose.

The bodyguard stiffened.

“That will be all, Robert,” Haffernon said, not even deigning to look at his serf.

Robert turned away without complaint and disappeared behind the door that had spawned him.

9 9

W a lt e r M o s l e y

“Follow me,” Haffernon said.

He led me back past the elevator and through a double door.

Here we entered into a wide hallway. The floors were bright ash and the doors along the way were too. These doors opened into anterooms where men and women assistants talked and typed and wrote. Beyond each assistant was a closed door behind which, I imagined, lawyers talked and typed and wrote.

At the end of the hall were large glass doors that we went through.

Haffernon had three female assistants. One, a buxom forty-year-old with horn-rimmed glasses and a flouncy full-length dress, came up to him reading from a clipboard.

“The Clarks had to reschedule for Friday, sir. He’s had an emergency dental problem. He says that he’ll need to rest after that.”

“Fine,” Haffernon said. “Call my wife and tell her that I will be coming to the opera after all.”

“Yes sir,” the woman said. “Mr. Phillipo decided to leave the country. His company will settle.”

“Good, Dina. I can’t be interrupted for anything except family.”

“Yes sir.”

She opened a door behind the three desks and Haffernon stepped in. In passing I caught the assistant’s eye and gave her a quick nod. She smiled at me and let her head drift to the side, letting me know that the counterculture had infiltrated every pore of the city.

h a f f e r n o n h a d a b i g d e s k under a picture window but he took me into a corner where he had a rose-colored couch with a matching stuffed chair. He took the chair and waved me onto the sofa.

“What is your business with me, Mr. Rawlins?” he asked.

1 0 0

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

I hesitated, relishing the fact that I had this man by the short hairs. I knew this because he had told Dina not to bother him for anything but the blood of blood. When powerful white men like that make time for you there’s something serious going on.

“What problem did Axel Bowers come to you with?” I asked.

“Who are you, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Private detective from down in L.A.,” I said, feeling somehow like a fraud but knowing I was not.

“And what do Axel’s . . . problems, as you call them, have to do with your client?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m looking for Axel and your name popped up. Have you seen Mr. Bowers lately?”

“Who are you working for?”

“Confidential,” I said with the apology in my face.

“You walk in here, ask me about the son of one of my best friends and business associates, and refuse to tell me who wants to know?”

“I’m looking for a woman named Philomena Cargill,” I said.

“She’s a black woman, lover of your friend’s son. He’s gone. She’s gone. It came to my attention that you and he were in negotia-tions about something that had to do with his father. I figured that if he was off looking into that problem that you might know where he was. He, in turn, might know about Philomena.”

Haffernon sat back in his chair and clasped his hands. His stare was a spectacle to behold. He had cornflower-blue eyes and black brows that arced like descending birds of prey.

This was a white man whom other white men feared. He was wealthy and powerful. He was used to getting his way. Maybe if I hadn’t been fighting for my daughter’s life I would have felt the weight of that stare. But as it was I felt safe from any threat he could make. My greatest fear flowed in a little girl’s veins.

1 0 1

W a lt e r M o s l e y

“You have no idea who you’re messing with,” he said, believing the threatening gaze had worked.

“Do you know Philomena?” I asked.

“What information do you have about me and Axel?”

“All I know is that a hippie I met said that Axel has been spending time in Cairo. That same man said that Axel had asked you about his father and Egypt.”

His right eye twitched. I was sure that there were Supreme Court justices who couldn’t have had that effect on Leonard Haffernon. I lost control of myself and smirked.

“Who do you work for, Mr. Rawlins?” he asked again.

“Are you a collector, Mr. Haffernon?”

“What?”

“That hippie told me that Axel collected Nazi memorabilia.

Daggers, photographs. Do you collect anything like that?”

Haffernon stood then.

“Please leave.”

I stood also. “Sure.”

I sauntered toward the door not sure of why I was being so tough on this powerful white man. I had baited him out of instinct. I wondered if I was being a fool.

o u t s i d e h i s o f f i c e I asked Dina for a pencil and paper.

I wrote down my name and the phone of my motel and handed it to her. She looked up at me in wonder, a small smile on her lips.

“I wish it was for you,” I said. “But give it to your boss. When he calms down he might want to give me a call.”

1 0 2

16

Iate a very late lunch at a stand-up fried clam booth on Fish-erman’s Wharf. It was beautiful there. The smell of the ocean and the fish market reminded me of Galveston when I was a boy. At any other time in my life those few scraps of fried flour over chewy clam flesh would have been soothing. But I didn’t want to feel good until I knew that Feather was going to be okay. She and Jesus were all I had left.

I went to a pay phone and made the collect call.

Benny answered and accepted.

“Hi, Mr. Rawlins,” she said, a little breathless.

“Where’s Bonnie, Benita?”

“She went out shoppin’ for a wheelchair to take Feather with.

Me an’ Juice just hangin’ out here an’ makin’ sure Feather okay.

She sleep. You want me to wake her up?”

“No, honey. Let her sleep.”

1 0 3

W a lt e r M o s l e y

“You wanna talk to Juice?”

“You know, Benita, I really like you,” I said.

“I like you too, Mr. Rawlins.”

“And I know how messed up you were when Mouse did you like he did.”

She didn’t say anything to that.

“And I care very deeply about my children . . .” I let the words trail off.

For a few moments there was silence on the line. And then in a whisper Benita Flag said, “I love ’im, Mr. Rawlins. I do. He’s just a boy, I know, but he better than any man I ever met. He sweet an’

he know how to treat me. I didn’t mean to do nuthin’ wrong.”

“That’s okay, girl,” I said. “I know what it is to fall.”

“So you not mad?”

“Let him down easy if you have to,” I said. “That’s all I can ask.”

“Okay.”

“And tell Feather I had to stay another day but that I will bring her back a big present because I had to be late.”

We said our good-byes and I went to my car.

o n t h e w a y b a c k

to the motel I picked up a couple of newspapers to keep my mind occupied.

Vietnam was half of the newspaper. The army had ordered the evacuation of the Vietnamese city of Hue, where they were on the edge of revolt. Da Nang was threatening revolution and the Buddhists were demonstrating against Ky in Saigon.

Jimmy Hoffa was on the truck manufacturers for the unions and some poor schnook in Detroit had been arrested for bank robbery when the tellers mistook his car for the robber’s getaway car. He was a white guy on crutches.

I found that I couldn’t concentrate on the stories so I put the 1 0 4

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

paper down. I could feel the fear about Feather rising in my chest.

In order to distract myself I tried to focus on Lee’s case. The man he wanted to talk to was dead. The papers the dead man had were gone — I had no idea where to. Cinnamon Cargill was probably dead also. Or maybe she was the killer. Maybe they were tripping together and he died, by accident, and she pressed him into the space below the brass elephant.

I had the telephone numbers of an old folks’ home for rich people and a secretive man whose voice was effeminate, and I had a postcard.

All in all that was a lot, but there was nothing I could do about it until the morning. That is unless Haffernon called. Haffernon knew about the trouble Axel was in. He might even have known about the young man’s death.

I took out the Nazi Luger I’d stolen from the dead man’s treasure chest and placed it on the night table next to the bed.

Then I sat back thinking about the few good years that I’d had with Bonnie and the kids. We had family picnics and long tearful nights helping the kids through the pain of growing up. But all of that was done. A specter had come over us and the life we’d known was gone.

I tried to think about other things, other times. I tried to feel fear over the payroll robbery that Mouse wanted me to join in on. But all I could think about was the loss in my heart.

At eleven o’clock I picked up the phone and dialed a number.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hi.”

“Mr. Rawlins? Is that you?”

“You’re a lawyer, right, Miss Aubec?”

“You know I am. You were at my office this morning.”

1 0 5

W a lt e r M o s l e y

“I know that’s what you said.”

“I am a lawyer,” she said. There was no sleep in her voice or annoyance at my late-night call.

“How does the law look on a man who commits a crime when he’s under great strain?”

“That depends,” she said.

“On what?”

“Well . . . what is the crime?”

“A bad one,” I said. “Armed robbery or maybe murder.”

“Murder would be simpler,” she said. “You can murder someone in the heat of the moment, but a robbery is quite another thing. Unless the property you stole just fell into your lap the law would look upon it as a premeditated crime.”

“Let’s say that it’s a man who’s about to lose everything, that if he didn’t rob that bank someone he loved might die.”

“The courts are not all that sympathetic when it comes to crimes against property,” Cynthia said. “But you might have a case.”

“In what situation?”

“Well,” she said. “Your level of legal representation means a lot. A court-appointed attorney won’t do very much for you.”

I already knew about the courts and their leanings toward the rich, but her honesty still was a comfort.

“Then of course there’s race,” she said.

“Black man’s not gonna get an even break, huh?”

“No. Not really.”

“I didn’t think so,” I said. And yet somehow hearing it said out loud made me feel better. “How does a young white girl like you know all this stuff?”

“I’ve sent my share of innocent men to prison,” she said. “I worked in the prosecutor’s office before going into business with Axel.”

“I guess you got to be a sinner to know a sin when you see it.”

1 0 6

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

“Why don’t you come over,” she suggested.

“I wouldn’t be very good company.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “You sound lonely. I’m here alone, wide awake.”

“You know a man named Haffernon?” I asked then.

“He was Axel’s father’s business partner. The families have been friends since the eighteen hundreds.”

“Was?”

“Axel’s father died eighteen months ago.”

“What do you think of Haffernon?”

“Leonard? He was born with a silver spoon up his ass. Always wears a suit, even when he’s at the beach, and the only time he ever laughs is when he’s with old school friends from Yale. I can’t stand him.”

“What did Axel think of him?”

“Did?”

“Yeah,” I said coolly even though I could feel the sweat spread over my forehead. “Before today, right?”

“Axel has a thing about his family,” Cynthia said, her voice clear and trusting still. “He thinks that they’re all like enlight-ened royalty. They did put money into our little law office.”

“But Haffernon’s not family,” I said. “He didn’t put any money into your office did he?”

“No.”

“No what?”

“He didn’t give us any money. He doesn’t have much sympathy for poor people. He’s not related to Axel either — by blood anyway.

But the families are so close that Axel treats him like an uncle.”

“I see.” Calm was returning to my breath and the sweat had subsided.

“So?” Cynthia Aubec asked.

1 0 7

W a lt e r M o s l e y

“So what?”

“Are you coming over?”

I felt the question as if it were a fist in my gut.

“Really, Cynthia, I don’t think it’s a good idea for me tonight.”

“I understand. I’m not your type, right?”

“Honey, you’re the type. A figure like you got on you belongs in the art museum and up on the movie screen. It’s not that I don’t want to come, it’s just a bad time for me.”

“So who is this man who might commit a crime under pressure?” she asked, switching tack as easily as Jesus would the single sail of his homemade boat.

“Friend’a mine. A guy who’s got a lot on his mind.”

“Maybe he needs a vacation,” Cynthia suggested. “Time away with a girl. Maybe on a beach.”

“Yeah. In a few months that would be great.”

“I’ll be here.”

“You don’t even know my friend,” I said.

“Would I like him?”

“How would I know what you’d like?”

“From talking to me do you think I’d like him?”

That got me to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Cynthia asked.

“You.”

“Come over.”

I began to think that it might be a good idea. It was late and there was nothing to hold me back.

There came a knock at the door. A loud knock.

“What’s that?” Cynthia asked.

“Somebody at the door,” I said, reaching for the German auto-matic.

“Who?”

1 0 8

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

“I gotta call you back, Cindy,” I said, making the contraction on her name naturally.

“I live on Elm Street in Daly City,” she said and then she told me the numbers. “Come over anytime tonight.”

There was another knock.

“I’ll call,” I said and then I hung up.

“Who is it?” I shouted at the door.

“The Fuller Brush man,” a sensual voice replied.

I opened the door and there stood Maya Adamant wrapped in a fake white fur coat.

“Come on in,” I said.

I had made all the connections before the door was closed.

“So the Nazis brought you out of Mr. Lee’s den.”

She moved to the bed, then turned to regard me. The way she sat down could not have been learned in finishing school.

“Haffernon called Lee,” she said. “He was very upset and now Lee is too. I was out on a date when he called my answering service and they called the club. You’re supposed to be in Los Angeles looking for Miss Cargill.”

I perched on the edge of the loungelike orange chair that came with my room. I couldn’t help leering. Maya’s coat opened a bit, exposing her short skirt and long legs. My talk with Cynthia had prepared me to appreciate a sight like that.

“There was no reason for me to think that Philomena had left the Bay Area,” I said. “And even if she did she needn’t have gone down south. There’s Portland and Seattle. Hell, she could be in Mexico City.”

“We didn’t ask you about Mexico City.”

“If you know where she is why do you need me?” I asked.

I forced my eyes up to hers. She smiled, appreciating my will power with a little pout.

1 0 9

W a lt e r M o s l e y

“What is this about Nazi memorabilia?” she asked.

“I met a guy who told me that Axel collected the stuff. I just figured that Haffernon might know about it.”

“So you’ve guessed that Leonard Haffernon is our client?”

“I don’t guess, Miss Adamant. I just ask questions and go where they lead me.”

“Who have you been talking to?” Her nostrils flared.

“Hippies.”

She sighed and shifted on the bed. “Have you found Philomena?”

“Not yet,” I said. “She left her apartment in an awful hurry though. I doubt she took a change of underwear.”

“It would have been nice to meet you under other circumstances, Mr. Rawlins.”

“You’re right about that.”

She stood up and smiled at my gaze.

“Are you ready to go back to L.A.?”

“First thing in the morning.”

“Good.”

She walked out the door. I watched her move on the stairs. It was a pleasurable sight.

There was a car waiting for her on the street. She got into the passenger’s side. I wondered who her companion was as the dark sedan glided off.

i w e n t t o b e d consciously not calling Bonnie or Cynthia or Maya. I pulled up the covers to my chin and stared at the window until the dawn light illuminated the dirty glass.

1 1 0

17

That morning I headed out toward the San Francisco airport. Just at the mouth of the freeway on-ramp, with the entire sky at their backs, two young hippies stood with their thumbs out. I pulled to the side of the road and cranked down the window.

“Hey man,” a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old red-bearded youth said with a grin. “Where you headed?”

“Airport.”

“Could you take us that far?”

“Sure,” I said. “Hop in.”

The boy got in the front seat and the girl, younger than he was, a very blond slip of a thing, got in the back with their backpacks.

She was the reason I had stopped. She wasn’t that much older 1 1 1

W a lt e r M o s l e y

than Feather. Just a child and here she was on the road with her man. I couldn’t pass them by.

When I drove up the on-ramp a blue Chevy honked at me and then sped past. I didn’t think that I’d cut him off so I figured he was making a statement about drivers who picked up hitch-hikers.

“Thanks, man,” the hippie boy said. “We been out there for an hour an’ all the straights just passed us by.”

“Where you headed?” I asked.

“Shasta,” the girl said. She leaned up against the seat between me and her boyfriend. I could see her grinning into my eyes through the rearview mirror.

“That’s where you live?”

“We heard about this commune up there,” the boy said. He smelled of patchouli oil and sweat.

“What’s that?”

“What’s what?” he asked.

“Commune. What’s that?”

“You never heard of a commune, man?” the boy asked.

“My name’s Easy,” I said. “Easy Rawlins.”

“Cool,” the girl crooned.

I suppose she meant my name.

“Eric,” the boy said.

“Like the Viking,” I said. “You got the red hair for it.”

He took this as a compliment.

“I’m Star,” the girl said. “An’ a commune is where everybody lives and works together without anybody owning shit or tellin’

anybody else how to live.”

“Kinda like the kibbutz or the Russian farms,” I said.

“Hey man,” Eric said, “don’t put that shit on us.”

“I’m not puttin’ anything on you,” I replied. “I’m just trying to 1 1 2

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

understand what you’re saying by comparing it with other places that sound like your commune.”

“There’s never been anything like us, man,” Eric said, filled with the glory of his own dreams. “We’re not gonna live like you people did. We’re gettin’ away from that nine-to-five bullshit.

People don’t have to own everything. The wild lands are free.”

“Yeah,” Star said. Her tone was filled with Eric’s love for himself. “At Cresta everybody gets their own tepee and a share in what everybody else has.”

“Cresta is the name for your commune?”

“That’s right,” Eric said with such certainty that I almost laughed.

“Why don’t you come with us?” Star asked from the backseat.

I looked up and into her eyes through the rearview mirror.

There was a yearning there but I couldn’t tell if it was hers or mine. Her simple offer shocked me. I could have kept on driving north with those children, to their hippie farm in the middle of nowhere. I knew how to raise a garden and build a fire. I knew how to be poor and in love.

“Watch it!” Eric shouted.

I had drifted into the left lane. A car’s horn blared. I jerked my rented car back just in time. When I looked up into the mirror, Star was still there looking into my eyes.

“That was close, man,” Eric said. Now his voice also contained the pride of saving us. I was once an arrogant boy like him.

“I can’t,” I said into the mirror.

“Why not?” she asked.

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen . . . almost.”

“I got a daughter just a few years younger than you. She’s real 1 1 3

W a lt e r M o s l e y

sick. Real sick. I got to get her to a doctor in Switzerland or she’ll die. So no woods for me quite yet.”

“Where is your daughter?” Star asked.

“Los Angeles.”

“Maybe it’s the smog killin’ her,” Eric said. “Maybe if you got her out of there she’d be okay.”

Eric would never know how close he’d come to getting his nose broken in a moving car. It was only Star’s steady gaze that saved him.

“I had a friend once,” I said. “Him and me were something like you guys. We used to ride the rails down in Texas and Louisiana.”

“Ride the rails?” Eric said.

“Jumping into empty boxcars, trains,” I said.

“Like hitchin’,” Eric said.

“Yeah. One night in Galveston we went out on a tear —”

“What’s that?” Star asked.

“A drinking binge. Anyway the next day I woke up and Hollister was nowhere to be seen. He was completely gone. I waited a day or two but then I had to move on before the local authorities arrested me for vagrancy and put me on the chain gang.”

I could see that Eric was now seeing me in a new light. But I didn’t care about that young fool.

“What happened to your friend?” Star asked.

“Twenty years later I was driving down in Compton and I saw him walking down the street. He’d gotten fat and his hair was thinning but it was Hollister all right.”

“Did you ask him what happened?” Eric asked.

“He’d met a girl after I’d passed out that night. They spent the night together and the next couple’a days. They drank the whole time. One day Holly woke up and realized that at some point they’d gotten married — he didn’t even remember saying I do.”

1 1 4

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

“Whoa,” Eric said in a low tone.

“Did they stay together?” Star wanted to know.

“I went back with Hollister to his house and met her there.

They had four kids. He was a plumber for the county and she baked pies for a restaurant down the street. You know what she told me?”

“What?” both children asked at once.

“That on the evening she’d met Holly I had picked her up at the local juke joint. We’d hit it off pretty good but I drank too much and passed out. When Holly came into the lean-to where we were stayin’, Sherry, that was his wife’s name, asked him if he would walk her home. That was when they got together.”

“He took your woman?” Eric said indignantly.

“Not mine, brother,” I said. “That lean-to was our own private little commune. What was mine was me, and Sherry had her own thing to give.”

Eric frowned at that, and I believed that I was the first shadow on his bright notions of communal life. That made me smile.

I let them out at the foot of the off-ramp I had to take to get to the airport.

While Eric was wrestling the backpacks out of the backseat Star put her skinny arms around my neck and kissed me on the lips.

“Thanks,” she said. “You’re really great.”

I gave her ten dollars and told her to stay safe.

“God’s looking after me,” she said.

Eric handed her a backpack then and they crossed the road.

1 1 5

18

After leaving my Hertz car at their airport lot I went to the ticket counter. The flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Western Airlines was $24.95.

They took my credit card with no problem.

While waiting for my flight I called home and got Jesus. I gave him the flight number and told him to be there to pick me up.

He didn’t ask any questions. Jesus would have crossed the Pacific for me and never asked why.

In a small airport store — where they sold candy bars, newspapers, and cigarettes — I bought a large brown teddy bear for $6.95.

I sat in the bulkhead aisle seat next to a young white woman who wore a rainbow-print dress that came to about midthigh.

She was a beauty but I wasn’t thinking about her.

I buckled my seat belt and unfolded the morning paper.

1 1 6

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

Ky had given in to Buddhist pressure and agreed to have free elections in South Vietnam. The bastion of democracy, the United States, however, said publicly that it still backed the dictator.

A couple who were going to lose a baby they were trying to adopt had attempted suicide. They didn’t die but their baby did.

I put that paper away.

The captain told us to fasten our seat belts and the stewardess showed us how it was done. The engine on the big 707 began to roar and whine.

“Hello,” the young woman said.

“Hi.” I gave her just a glance.

“My name is Candice.” She held out a hand.

It would have been impolite for me to ignore her gesture of friendship.

“Easy Rawlins.”

“Do you fly often, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Every now and then. My girlfriend’s a stewardess for Air France.”

“I don’t. This is only my second flight and I’m scared to death.”

She wouldn’t let go of my hand. I squeezed and said, “We’ll make it through this one together.”

We held hands through the takeoff and for five minutes into the ascent. Every now and then she increased the pressure. I matched the force of her grip. By the time we were at full alti-tude she had calmed down.

“Thank you,” she said.

“No problem.”

I picked up the paper again but the words scrambled away from my line of vision. I was thinking about Dream Dog and 1 1 7

W a lt e r M o s l e y

karma, then about Axel Bowers and the humiliating treatment he’d received after his death. I thought about that white girl who just needed somebody to hold on to regardless of his color.

Maybe the hippies were right, I thought. Maybe we should all go outside in our underwear and protest the way of the world.

t h e y o u n g w o m a n and I didn’t speak another word to each other. There was no need to.

When I got out of the gate in L.A., Jesus was there waiting for me.

“Hi, Dad,” he said and shook my hand.

He’d driven my car to the airport and I let him drive going back home. He took La Cienega where I would have taken the freeway but that was okay by me.

“Feather had fever again this morning,” he said. “Bonnie gave her Mama Jo’s medicine and it came down.”

“Good,” I said, trying to hide my fear.

“Is she gonna die, Dad?”

“Why you say that?”

“Bonnie told Benny why she had to stay and look after Feather and Benny told me. Is she gonna die?”

There never was a brother and sister closer than Jesus and Feather. I had taken him out of a bad situation when he was an infant, and when I brought Feather into our home he took to her like a mother hen.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

“But if Bonnie takes her to Switzerland they might save her?”

“Yeah. They saved other people with infections like hers.”

“Do you want me to go with them?”

“No. The doctors can help. What I need is the money to pay those doctors.”

1 1 8

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

“I could sell my boat.”

That boat was everything to Jesus.

“No, son. I think I got a line on a moneymaker. It’s gonna be okay.”

I had planned to talk to him about Benita and the difference in their ages. But when he offered to give his boat up for Feather I couldn’t imagine what there was I had to tell him.

b o n n i e h a d p a c k e d

a large traveling suitcase for Feather.

It seemed as if she’d taken every toy, doll, dress, and book that Feather owned. When I got there they were ready to go to the airport.

There was a bright chrome and red canvas wheelchair in the living room.

Bonnie came out and kissed me, and even though I tried to put some tenderness into the caress she leaned away and gave me an odd stare.

“What’s wrong?”

“If I was to tell you the things I’d seen in the last two days you wouldn’t be asking me that,” I said truthfully.

Bonnie nodded, still frowning.

“Could you put the suitcase into the trunk?” she asked. “The wheelchair folds up and can go on top.”

I knew that they had to get to the airport soon and so I got to work. Jesus helped me figure out that the wheelchair had to go in the backseat.

When I got back in the house Feather was screaming. I ran into her room to find her struggling with Bonnie.

“I want you to carry me, Daddy,” she pleaded.

“It’s okay,” I said and I took her up in my arms.

*

*

*

1 1 9

W a lt e r M o s l e y

b o n n i e d r o v e , Feather slept on my lap, and I stared out the window, wondering how long it would take to drive down to Palestine, Texas. I knew that my work for Lee would be a dead end. Axel was dead. Philomena was probably dead. The papers were long gone. I had gotten a Luger and fifteen hundred dollars in the deal. I could use the German pistol to press against Rayford’s willing neck.

f e a t h e r w o k e u p

when we pulled into the employees’ lot at the airport. She was happy to have a wheelchair and she raced ahead of us at the special employee entrance to TWA. They had to go to San Francisco first and then transfer to the polar flight to Paris. I saw them to the special entrance for the crew.

A woman I recognized met us there — Giselle Martin.

“Aunt Giselle,” Feather cried.

Giselle was a friend of Bonnie’s. She was tall and thin, a brunette with a delicate porcelain beauty that you’d miss if you didn’t take time with it. They worked together for Air France.

She was there to help with Feather.

“Allo, ma chérie,” the French flight attendant said to my little girl. “These big strong men are going to carry you up into the plane.”

Two brawny white men were coming toward us from a doorway to the terminal building.

“I want Daddy to take me,” Feather said.

“It is the rules, ma chérie,” Giselle said.

“That’s okay, honey,” I said to Feather. “They’ll carry you up and then I’ll come buckle you in.”

“You promise?”

“I swear.”

The workmen took hold of the chair from the front and back.

1 2 0

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

Feather grabbed on to the armrests, looking scared. I was scared too. I watched them go all the way up the ramp.

I was about to follow when Bonnie touched my arm and asked, “What’s wrong, Easy?”

I had planned for that moment. I thought that if we found ourselves alone and Bonnie wondered at my behavior, I’d tell her all the grisly details of Axel Bowers’s death. I turned to her, but when she looked into my eyes, as so many women had in the past few days, I couldn’t bring myself to lie.

“I read a lot, you know,” I said.

“I know that.” Her dark skin and almond eyes were the most beautiful I had ever seen. Two days ago I had wanted to marry her.

“I read the papers and all about anything I have an interest in.

I read about a group of African dignitaries getting the Senegalese award of service that was symbolized by a bronze pin with a little design enameled on it — a bird in red and white . . .”

There was no panic on Bonnie’s face. The fact that I knew that she had recently received such an important gift from a suitor only served to sadden her.

“He was the only one who could get Feather into that hospital, Easy . . .”

“So there’s nothing between you?”

Bonnie opened her mouth but it was her turn not to lie.

“Thank him for me . . . when you see him,” I said.

I walked past her and up into the plane.

“ w i l l y o u c o m e

and see me in the Alps, Daddy?” Feather asked as I buckled her seat belt.

The plane was still empty.

“I’ll try. But you know Bonnie’ll be there to look after you. And before you know it you’ll be all better and back home again.”

1 2 1

W a lt e r M o s l e y

“But you’ll try and come?”

“I will, honey.”

I walked past Bonnie as she came up the aisle.

Neither of us spoke.

What was there to say?

1 2 2

19

From the terminal building I could make out the white bow in Feather’s hair through a porthole in the plane. And even though she looked out now and then she never saw me waving. Her skin had been warm when I buckled her in but her eyes weren’t feverish. Bonnie had Mama Jo’s last ball of medicine, I’d made sure of that. Bonnie wouldn’t let Feather die no matter who her heart belonged to.

The passengers filed on. Final boarding was announced. The jet taxied away and finally, after a long delay, it nosed its way above the amber layer of smog that covered the city.

I stayed at the window watching as a dozen jets lined up and took off.

“Mister?”

She was past sixty with blue-gray hair and a big red coat made 1 2 3

W a lt e r M o s l e y

from cotton — the Southern California answer to the eastern overcoat. There was concern on her lined white face.

“Yes?” My voice cracked.

“Are you all right?”

That’s when I realized that tears were running from my eyes. I tried to speak but my throat closed. I nodded and touched the woman’s shoulder. Then I staggered away amid the stares of dozens of travelers.

i d i d n ’ t t u r n the ignition key right away.

“Snap out of it, Easy,” a voice, only partly my own, said. “You know once a man break down the wreck ain’t far off. You don’t have no time to wallow. You don’t have it like some rich boy can feel sorry for hisself.”

I drove on surface streets with no destination in mind. Even the next day I couldn’t have recalled the route I’d taken. But my instinct was to head in the direction of my office.

I was on Avalon, crossing Manchester, when I heard two horns. I looked up just as my car slammed into a white Chrysler.

The next thing I did was to check out the traffic light — it was against me. I had been distracted and a fool for the past few days, but something told me to take that German pistol out of my pocket and hide it under my seat before I did anything else.

I jumped out of my car and ran to the boatlike Chrysler.

There was a middle-aged black couple in the front seat. The man, who wore a brown suit, was clutching his arm and the woman, who was easily twice the man’s size, was bleeding freely from a cut over her left eye.

“Nate,” she was saying. “Nate, are you okay?”

The man held his left arm between the elbow and shoulder.

I opened the door.

1 2 4

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

“Let’s get you outta there, man,” I said.

“Thank you,” he mouthed, his face twisted with the pain.

When I got him set up against the hood of his car I went around to the passenger’s side. It was then that I heard the first siren, a distant cry.

“Is my husband okay?” the woman asked.

She and Nate both had very dark skin and large facial features. Her mouth was wide and so were her nostrils. The blood was coming down but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Just a hurt arm,” I said. “He’s standing up on the other side.”

I took off my shirt and tore it in half, then I pressed the mate-rial against her wound.

“Why you pushin’ on my head?”

“You’re bleeding.”

“I am?” she said, the growing panic crowding her words.

When she looked down at her hands her eyes, nostrils, and mouth all grew to extraordinary proportions.

She screamed.

“Alicia!” Nate called. He was shambling around the front of the car.

A lanky woman came up to steady him.

There were people all around but most of them stayed back.

Three sirens wailed not far away.

“It’s okay, ma’am,” I was saying. “I stopped the bleeding now.”

“Am I bleedin’?” she asked. “Am I bleedin’?”

“No,” I said. “I stopped it with this bandage.”

“All right now, back away!” a voice said.

Two white men dressed all in white except for their shoes ran up.

“Two, Joseph,” one man said. “A stretch for each.”

“Got it,” the other man said.

1 2 5

W a lt e r M o s l e y

The nearest ambulance attendant took the torn shirt from my hands and began speaking to the woman.

“What’s your name, lady?” he asked.

“Alicia Roman.”

“I need you to lie down, Alicia, so that I can get you into the ambulance and stop this cut from bleeding.”

There was authority in the white man’s voice. Alicia allowed him to lower her onto the asphalt. The other attendant, Joseph, came up with a stretcher. This he put down beside her.

The lanky woman was helping Nate to the back of the ambulance. She was plain looking and high brown, like a polished pecan. There was no expression on her face. She was just doing her part.

I looked down at my hands. Alicia’s blood had trailed over my palms and down my forearms. The blood had splattered onto my T-shirt too.

“Are you hurt?” a man asked me.

It was a policeman who came up from the crowd. I saw three other policemen directing traffic and keeping pedestrians out of the street.

“No,” I said. “This is her blood.”

“Were you in their car?” The cop was blond but he had what white people call swarthy skin. The racial blend hadn’t worked too well on him. I remember thinking that the top of his head was in Sweden but his face reflected the Maghreb.

“No,” I said. “I ran into them.”

“They ran the light?”

“No. I did.”

A surprised look came into his face.

“Come over here,” he said, leading me to the curb.

1 2 6

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

He made me touch my nose then walk a straight line, turn around, and come back again.

“You seem sober,” he told me.

The ambulance was taking off.

“Are they gonna be okay?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Put your hands behind your back.”

t h e y t o o k a w a y my belt, which was a good thing. I was so miserable in that cell that I might have done myself in. Jesus wasn’t home. Neither was Raymond or Jackson, Etta or Saul Lynx. If I stayed in jail until the trial Feather might be kicked out of the clinic and die. I wondered if Joguye Cham, Bonnie’s African prince, would help my little girl. I’d be the best man at their wedding if he did that for me.

I finally got Theodore Steinman at his shoe shop down the street from my house. I told him to keep calling EttaMae.

“I’ll come down and get you, Ezekiel,” Steinman said.

“Wait for Etta,” I told him. “She does this shit with Mouse at least once every few months.”

“ c i g a r e t t e ? ” my cellmate asked.

I didn’t know if he was offering or wanting one but I didn’t reply. I hadn’t uttered more than three sentences since the arrest.

The police were surprisingly gentle with me. No slaps or insults.

They even called me mister and corrected me with respect when I turned the wrong way or didn’t understand their commands.

The officer who arrested me, Patrolman Briggs, even dropped by the cell to inform me that Nate and Alicia Roman were doing just fine and were both expected to be released from the hospital that day.

1 2 7

W a lt e r M o s l e y

“Here you go,” my cellmate said.

He was holding out a hand-rolled cigarette. I took it and he lit it. The smoke in my lungs brought my mind back into the cell.

My benefactor was a white man about ten years my junior, thirty-five or -six. He had stringy black hair that came down to his armpits and sparse facial hair. His shirt was made from various bright-colored scraps. His eyes were different colors too.

“Reefer Bob,” he said.

“Easy Rawlins.”

“What they got you for, Easy?”

“I ran into two people in their car. Ran a red light. You?”

“They found me with a burlap sack in a field of marijuana up in the hills.”

“Really? In the middle of the day?”

“It was midnight. I guess I should’a kept the flashlight off.”

I chuckled and then felt a tidal wave of hysterical laughter in my chest. I took a deep draw on the cigarette to stem the surge.

“Yeah,” Reefer Bob was saying. “I was stupid but they can’t keep me.”

“Why not?”

“Because the bag was empty. My lawyer’ll tell ’em that I was just looking for my way outta the woods, that I’m a naturalist and was looking for mushrooms.”

He grinned and I thought about Dream Dog.

“Good for you,” I said.

“You wanna get high, Easy?”

“No thanks.”

“I got some reefer in a couple’a these cigarettes here.”

“You know, Bob,” I said. “The cops put spies in these cells.

And they’d love nothing more than to catch you with contraband in here.”

1 2 8

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

“You a spy, Easy?” he asked.

“No. A spy would never let you know.”

“You blowin’ my mind, man,” he said. “You blowin’ my mind.”

He crawled into the lower bunk in our eight-by-six cell. I laid on my stomach in the upper bed and stared out of the criss-crossed bars of steel. I thought back to midday, when I’d buckled Feather into her seat.

Axel Bowers was far off in my mind.

I felt that somehow I’d been defeated by my own lack of heart.

g u a r d s c a m e d o w n

the hallway at midnight exactly. The jail was dark but they had flashlights to show them the way.

When they came into the cell Reefer Bob yelled, “He killed Axel.

He told me when he thought I wasn’t listening. He killed him and then stuffed him up in a elephant’s ass.”

They told me to get up and I obeyed. They asked me if I needed handcuffs and I shook my head.

We walked down the long aisle toward a faraway light.

When we reached the room I realized that this was the day of my execution. They strapped me into the gas chamber chair. On the wall there was the stopwatch that Jesus used to have to time his races when he was in high school.

I had one minute left to live when they closed the door to the chamber.

A hornet was buzzing at the portal of the door. It flew right at my eyes. I shook my head around trying to get the stinger away from my face. When it finally flew off I looked back at the stopwatch: I only had three seconds left to live.

1 2 9

20

Rawlins!” The guard’s shout jarred me awake.

I’d dozed off for only a few moments.

“Yo!” I hopped down to the concrete floor.

Bob was huddled into a ball in the back corner of his bunk. I wondered if he really thought I was a spy. If so he’d flush the dope into our corroded tin toilet. I might have saved him three years of hard time.

e t t a m a e h a r r i s was in the transit room when they got me there.

She was a big woman but no larger that day than she had been back when we were coming up in the late thirties in Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas. Back then she was everything I ever wanted in a woman except for the fact that she was Mouse’s wife.

1 3 0

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

She hugged me and kissed my forehead while I was buckling my belt.

Etta didn’t utter more than three words in the jailhouse. She didn’t talk around cops. That was an old habit that never died with her. In her eyes the police were the enemy.

She wasn’t wrong.

Out in front of the precinct building LaMarque Alexander, Raymond and Etta’s boy, sat behind the wheel of his father’s red El Dorado. He was a willowy boy with his father’s eyes. But where Mouse had supremely confident bravado in his mien his son was petulant and somewhat petty. Even though he was pushing twenty he was still just a kid.

By the time Raymond was his son’s age he had already killed three men — that I knew of.

I tumbled into the backseat. Etta climbed in the front and turned around to regard me.

“Your office?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

It was only a few blocks from the precinct. LaMarque pulled away from the curb.

“How’s college, LaMarque?” I asked the taciturn boy.

“Okay.”

“What you studyin’?”

“Nuthin’.”

“He’s learnin’ about electronics and computers, Easy,” Etta said.

“If he wants to know about computers he should talk to Jackson Blue. Jackson knows everything about computers.”

“You hear that, LaMarque?”

“Yeah.”

1 3 1

W a lt e r M o s l e y

When he pulled up in front of my office building at Eighty-sixth and Central, Etta said, “Wait here till I come back down.”

“But I was goin’ down to Craig’s, Mom,” he complained.

EttaMae didn’t even answer him. She just grunted and opened her door. I jumped out and helped her. Then together we walked up the stairs to the fourth floor.

I ushered her into my office and held my client’s chair for her.

Only when we were both settled did Etta feel it was time to talk.

“How’s your baby doin’?” she asked.

“Bonnie took her to Europe. They got doctors over there worked with these kinds of blood diseases.”

Etta heard more in my tone and squinted at me. For my part I felt like I was floating on a tidal wave of panic. I stayed very still while the world seemed to move around me.

Etta stared for half a minute or so and then she broke out with a smile. The smile turned into a grin.

“What you smirkin’ ’bout?” I asked.

“You,” she said with emphasis.

“Ain’t nuthin’ funny ’bout me.”

“Oh yes there is.”

“How do you see that?”

“Easy Rawlins,” she said, “if you wandered into a minefield you’d make it through whole. You could sleep with a girl named Typhoid an’ wake up with just sniffles. If you fell out a windah you could be sure that there’d be a bush down on the ground t’ break yo’ fall. Now it might be a thorn bush but what’s a few scratches up next to death?”

I had to laugh. Seeing myself through Etta’s eyes gave me hope out there in the void. I guess I was lucky compared to all those I’d known who’d died of disease, gunshot wounds, lynch-1 3 2

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

ing, and alcohol poisoning. Maybe I did have a lucky star.

Dim — but lucky still and all.

“How’s that boy Peter?” I asked.

Peter Rhone was a white man whom I’d saved from the LAPD

when they needed to pin a murder on somebody his color. His only crime was that he loved a black woman. That love had killed her. And when it was all over Peter had a breakdown and Etta took him in.

“He bettah,” she said, the trace of a grin still on her lips. “I got him livin’ out on the back porch. He do the shoppin’ an’ any odd jobs I might need.”

“An’ Mouse doesn’t mind?”

“Naw. The first day I brought him home he called Raymond Mr. Alexander. You know Ray always been a sucker for a white boy with manners.”

We both laughed.

Etta reached into her purse and pulled out the Luger that had been under the seat of my Ford. She put it on the desk.

“Primo got your car out the pound. He left his Pontiac parked out back.” She brought out a silver key and placed it next to the pistol. “He said that he’ll have your Ford ready in two weeks.”

I had friends in the world. For a moment there I had more than an inkling that things would turn out okay.

Etta stood up.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Here.”

She reached into her purse and came out with a roll of twenty-dollar bills.

“Raymond told me to give you this.”

I took the money even though I knew he’d see it as a down payment on the heist he wanted me to join him in.

*

*

*

1 3 3

W a lt e r M o s l e y

t h e ’ 5 6 p o n t i a c p r i m o left for me was aqua-colored with red flames painted down the passenger’s side and across the hood. It wasn’t the kind of car I could shadow with but at least it had wheels.

Sitting upright in the passenger’s seat was the teddy bear I’d bought in San Francisco. It had been forgotten in our rush to the airport. Primo must have found it along with the pistol.

When I got home there was a note from Benny on the kitchen table. She and Jesus were going to Catalina Island for two days.

They were going to camp on the beach but there was a number for the harbormaster of the dock where they were staying. I could call him if there was an emergency.

I showered and shaved, shined my shoes, and made a pan of scrambled eggs and diced andouille sausages. After eating and a good scrubbing I felt ready to try to find any trail that Cinnamon Cargill might have left. I dressed in black slacks and a peach-colored Hawaiian shirt and sat down to the phone.

“ h e l l o ? ” She answered the phone after three rings.

“Alva?” I said.

“Oh.” There was a brief pause.

I knew what her hesitation meant. I had saved her son from being killed in a police ambush a few years before. At that time she had been married to John, one of my oldest and closest friends.

In order to save Brawly I’d had to shoot him in the leg. The doctors said that he’d have that limp for the rest of his life.

“Hello, Mr. Rawlins.” I’d given up getting her to call me Easy.

“I need to speak to Lena Macalister. She’s a friend of yours isn’t she?”

More silence on the line. And then: “I don’t usually give out my friends’ numbers without their permission, Mr. Rawlins.”

1 3 4

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

“I need her address, Alva. This is serious.”

We both knew that she couldn’t refuse me. Her boy had survived to shuffle in the sun because of me.

She hemmed and hawed a few minutes more but then came across with the address.

“Thanks,” I said when she finally relented. “Say hi to Brawly for me.”

She hung up the phone in my ear.

I was going toward my East L.A. hot rod when the next-door neighbor, Nathaniel Pulley, hailed me.

“Mr. Rawlins.”

He was a short white man with a potbelly and no muscle whatsoever. His blond hair had kept its color but was thinning just the same. Nathaniel was the assistant manager of the Bank of Palms in Santa Monica. It was a small position at a minuscule financial institution but Pulley saw himself as a lion of finance.

He was a liberal and in his largesse he treated me as an equal.

I’m sure he bragged to his wife and children about how wonderful he was to consider a janitor among his friends.

“Afternoon, Nathaniel,” I said.

“There was a guy here asking for you a few hours ago. He was scary looking.”

“Black guy?”

“No. White. He wore a jacket made out of snakeskin I think.

And his eyes . . . I don’t know. They looked mean.”

“What did he say?”

“Just if I knew when you were coming back. I asked him if he had a message. He didn’t even answer. Just walked off like I wasn’t even there.”

Pulley was afraid of a car backfiring. He once told me that he couldn’t watch westerns because the violence gave him 1 3 5

W a lt e r M o s l e y

nightmares. Whoever scared him might have been an insurance agent or a door-to-door salesman.

I was taken by his words, though, Like I wasn’t even there. Pulley was a new neighbor. He’d only been in that house for a year or so. I’d been there more than six years — settled by L.A. standards. But I was still a nomad because everybody around me was always moving in or moving out. Even if I stayed in the same place my neighborhood was always changing.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll look out for him.”

We shook hands and I drove off, thinking that nothing in the southland ever stayed the same.

1 3 6

21

My first destination was the Safeway down on Pico. I got ground round, pork chops, calf ’s liver, broccoli, cauliflower, a head of lettuce, two bottles of milk, and stewed tomatoes in cans. Then I stopped at the liquor store and bought a fifth of Johnnie Walker Black.

After shopping I drove back down to South L.A.

Lena Macalister lived in a dirty pink tenement house three blocks off Hooper. I climbed the stairs and knocked on her door.

“Who is it?” a sweet voice laced with Houston asked.

“Easy Rawlins, Lena.”

A chain rattled, three locks snapped back. The door came open and the broad-faced restaurateur smiled her welcome as I had seen her do many times at the Texas Rose.

“Come in. Come in.”

1 3 7

W a lt e r M o s l e y

She was leaning on a gnarled cane and her glasses had lenses with two different thicknesses. But there was still something stately about her presence.

The house smelled of vitamins.

“Sit. Sit.”

The carpet was blue and red with a floral pattern woven in.

The furniture belonged in a better neighborhood and a larger room. On the wall hung oil paintings of her West Indian parents, her deceased Tennessee husband, and her son, also dead. The low coffee table was well oiled and everything was drenched in sunlight from the window.

When I set the groceries down on the table I realized that I’d forgotten the scotch in the backseat of my car.

“What’s this?” she asked, pointing at the bag.

“Your name came up recently and I realized that I had to ask you a couple’a questions. So I thought, as long as I was comin’, you might need some things.”

“Aren’t you sweet.”

She backed up to the stuffed chair, made sure of where she was standing, and let herself fall.

“Let’s put them away later,” she said with a deep sigh.

“You know it takes a lot outta me these days just to answer the door.”

“You sick?”

“If you call getting old sick, then I sure am that.” She smiled anyway and I let the subject drop.

“How long has it been since you closed the Rose?”

“Eight years,” she said, smiling. “Those were some days. Hu-bert and Brendon were both alive and working in the kitchen.

We had every important black person in the country, in the world, coming to us for dinner.”

1 3 8

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

She spoke as if I were a reporter or a biographer coming to get down her life story.

“Yeah,” I said. “That was somethin’ else.”

Lena smiled and sighed. “The Lord only lets you have breath for a short time. You got to take it in while you can.”

I nodded, thinking about Feather and then about Jesus out on some beach with Benita.

“Alva called. Why are you coming to see me, Mr. Rawlins?”

While inhaling I considered lying. I held the breath for a beat and then let it go.

“I think Philomena Cargill is in trouble. Some people hired me to find her up in Frisco, and even though I didn’t, what I did find makes me think that she might need some help.”

“Why are these people looking for Cindy?” Lena asked.

“Her boss walked off with something that didn’t belong to him. At least that’s what they told me. He disappeared and then, a little while later, she did too.”

“And why are you coming to me?”

“I found a postcard from you in Philomena’s apartment.”

“You broke into her place?”

“No. As a matter of fact that’s one of the reasons I’m worried about her. They had her place up for rent. She’d left everything behind.”

I let these words sink in. Lena lifted her gaze above the glasses as if to get a better view of my heart. I have no idea what her nearly blind eyes saw.

“I don’t know where she is, Easy,” Lena said. “The last I heard she was in San Francisco working for a man named Bowers.”

“Are her parents here?”

“When her father died her mother moved to Chicago to live with a sister.”

1 3 9

W a lt e r M o s l e y

“Brothers? Sisters?”

“Her brothers are both in the service, Vietnam. Her sister married a Chinese man and they moved to Jamaica.”

There was something Lena wasn’t telling me.

“What’s she like — Cinnamon?”

“Reach over in that drawer in the end table,” she said, waving in that general direction.

The drawer was filled with papers, ballpoint pens, and pencils.

“Under all that,” she said. “It’s a frame.”

The small gilded frame held a three-by-five photo of a pretty young woman in a graduation cap and gown. She was smiling like I would have liked my daughter to do on her graduation day.

The photograph was black-and-white but you could almost see the reddish hue to her skin through the shading. There was a certainty in her eyes. She knew what she was seeing.

“She’s the kind of woman that men hate because she’s not afraid to be out there in a man’s world. Broke all’a the records at Jordan High School. Made it to the top of her class at University of California at Berkeley. Ready to fly, that child is . . .”

“She honest?”

“Let me tell you something, young man,” Lena said. “The reason I know her is that she worked in my restaurant in the last two years. She was just a girl but sharp and true. She loved to work and learn. I wished my own son had her wits. After the restaurant closed she came to see me every week to learn from what I knew. She was no crook.”

“Did she have any close friends down here?”

“I didn’t know her friends. She saw boys but they were never serious. The young men around here don’t value a woman with brains and talent.”

“Do you know how I can find her?” I asked, giving up subtlety.

1 4 0

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

“No.”

Maybe I thought she was lying because all I could see was the opaque reflective surface of her glasses.

“If you hear from her will you tell her that I’m looking for the documents Bowers took?”

“What documents?”

“All I know is that he took some papers that have red seals on them. But I’m not worried about them as much as I’m worried about Miss Cargill’s safety.”

Lena nodded. If she did know where Philomena was she’d be sure to give her the message. I wrote down my home and office numbers. And then I helped Lena put away the groceries.

Her refrigerator was empty except for two hard-boiled eggs.

“With my legs the way they are it’s hard for me to get out shopping very much,” she said, apologizing for her meager fare.

I nodded and smiled.

“I come down to my office at least twice a week, Lena. I can always make a supermarket run for you.”

She patted my forearm and said, “Bless you.”

There are all kinds of freedom in America — free speech, the right to bear arms — but when the years have piled up so high on their back that they can’t stand up straight anymore, many Americans find out they also have the freedom to starve.

a t a p h o n e b o o t h

down the street from Lena’s house I looked up a number and then made a call.

“Hello?” a man answered.

“Billy?”

“Hey, Easy. She ain’t here.”

“You know when she’ll be in?”

“She at work, man.”

1 4 1

W a lt e r M o s l e y

“On Saturday?”

“They pay her to sit down in her office when the band comes in for practice. She opens up the music building at nine and then closes it at three. Not bad for time and a half.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go over and see her there.”

“Bye, Easy. Take care.”

Jordan High School had a sprawling campus. There were over three thousand students enrolled. I came in through the athletic gate and made my way toward the boiler room. That’s where Helen McCoy made her private office. She was the building supervisor of the school, a position two grades above the one I’d just left.

Helen was short and redheaded, smart as they come, and tougher than most men. I had seen her kill a man in Third Ward one night. He’d slapped her face and then balled up a fist. When she pressed five inches of a Texas jackknife into his chest he sat down on the floor — dying as he did so.

“Hi, Easy,” she said with a smile.

She was sitting at a long table next to the boiler, writing on a small white card. There was a large stack of blank cards on her left and a smaller stack on the right. The right-side cards had already been written on.

“Party?” I asked.

“My daughter Vanessa’s gettin’ married. These the invitations.

You gettin’ one.”

I sat down and waited.

When Helen finished writing the card she sat back and smiled, indicating that I had her attention.

“Philomena ‘Cinnamon’ Cargill,” I said. “I hear she was a student here some years ago.”

“Li’l young,” Helen suggested.

1 4 2

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

“It’s my other job,” I said. “I’m lookin’ for her for somebody.”

“Grapevine says you quit the board.”

“Sabbatical.”

“Don’t shit me, Easy. You quit.”

I didn’t argue.

“Smart girl, that Philomena,” Helen said. “Lettered in track and archery. Gave the big speech at her graduation. She was wild too.”

“Wild how?”

“She wasn’t shy of boys, that one. One time I found her in the boys’ locker room after hours with Maurice Johnson. Her drawers was down and her hands was busy.” Helen grinned. She’d been wild herself.

“I was told that her father died and her mother left for Chicago,”

I said. “You know anybody else she might be in touch with?”

“She had a school friend named Raphael Reed. He was funny, if you know what I mean, so he never got jealous of her runnin’

around.”

“That all?”

“All I can think of.”

“You think you could go down and pull Reed’s records for me?”

Helen considered my request.

“We known each other a long time haven’t we, Easy?”

“Sure have.”

“You the one got me this job.”

“And you moved up past me in grade in two years.”

“I don’t have no job on the side to distract me,” she said.

I nodded, submitting to her logic.

“You know I ain’t s’posed t’ give the public information on students or faculty.”

“I know that.”

1 4 3

W a lt e r M o s l e y

She laughed then. “I guess we all do things we ain’t s’posed to do sometimes.”

“Can’t help it,” I agreed.

“Wait here,” she said, patting the table with her knife hand.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

1 4 4

22

Itold Raphael’s mother—a small, dark woman with big, brown, hopeful eyes — that I was Philomena Cargill’s uncle and that I needed to talk to her son about a pie-baking business that my niece and I were starting up in Oakland. All I hoped for was a phone number, but Althea was so happy about the chance for a job for her son that she gave me his address too.

This brought me to a three-story wooden apartment building on Santa Barbara Boulevard. It was a wide building that had be-gun to sag in the middle. Maybe that’s why the landlord painted it bright turquoise, to make it seem young and sprightly.

I walked up the sighing stairs to 2a. The door was painted with black and turquoise zebra stripes and the letters RR RR

were carved into the center.

The young man who answered my knock wore only black jeans. His body was slender and strong. His hair was long (but 1 4 5

W a lt e r M o s l e y

not hippie long) and straightened — then curled. He wasn’t very tall, and the sneer on his lips was almost comical.

“Yeeees?” he asked in such a way that he seemed to be suggesting something obscene.

I knew right then that this was the young man who’d hung up on me, the one I’d called from Philomena’s apartment.

“Raphael Reed?”

“And who are you?”

“Easy Rawlins,” I said.

“What can I do for you, Easy Rawlins?” he asked while ap-praising my stature and style.

“I think that a friend of yours may have been the victim of foul play.”

“What friend?”

“Cinnamon.”

It was all in the young man’s eyes. Suddenly the brash flirta-tion and sneering façade disappeared. Now there was a man standing before me, a man who was ready to take serious action depending on what I said next.

“Come in.”

It was a studio apartment. A Murphy bed had been pulled down from the wall. It was unmade and jumbled with dirty clothes and dishes. A black-and-white portable T V with bent-up rabbit-ear antennas sat on a maple chair at the foot of the bed.

There was no sofa, but three big chairs, upholstered with green carpeting, were set in a circle facing each other at the center of the room.

The room smelled strongly of perfumes and body odors. This scent of sex and sensuality was off-putting on a Saturday afternoon.

“Come on out, Roget,” Raphael said.

1 4 6

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

A door opened and another young man, nearly a carbon copy of the first, emerged. They were the same height and had the same hairstyle. Roget also wore black jeans, no shirt, and a sneer. But where Raphael had the dark skin of his mother, Roget was the color of light brown sugar and had freckles on his nose and shoulders.

“Sit,” Raphael said to me.

We all went to the chairs in a circle. I liked the configuration but it still felt odd somehow.

“What about Philomena?” Raphael asked.

“Her boss disappeared,” I said. “A man named Adams hired me to find him. He also told me that Philomena had disappeared a couple of days later. I went to her apartment and found that she’d moved out without even taking her clothes.”

Raphael glanced at his friend, but Roget was inspecting his nails.

“So what?”

“You’re her friend,” I said. “Aren’t you worried?”

“Who says I’m her friend?”

“At Jordan you two shared notes on boys.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?” he asked.

I realized that I had gone too far, that no matter how much it seemed that these young men were homosexuals, I was not allowed to talk about it.

“Just that she had a lot of boyfriends,” I said.

Roget made a catty little grunt. It was the closest he came to speaking.

“Well,” Raphael said, “I haven’t even spoken to her since the day she graduated.”

“Valedictorian wasn’t she?”

“She sure was,” Raphael said with some pride in his tone.

1 4 7

W a lt e r M o s l e y

“Is Roget here a friend’a hers?”

“What?”

“She did call here didn’t she?” I asked.

“You the niggah called the other day,” Raphael said. “I thought I knew your voice.”

“Look, man. I’m not tryin’ to mess with you or your friends. I don’t care about anything but finding Bowers for the man hired me. I think that Philomena is in trouble, because why else would she leave her place without taking her clothes and personal things? If you know where she is tell her that I’m looking for her.”

“I don’t know where she is.”

“Take my number. If she calls give it to her.”

“I don’t need your number.”

I wondered if my daughter could die because of this petulant boy. The thought made me want to slap him. But I held my temper.

“You’re makin’ a mistake,” I said. “Your friend could get hurt — bad.”

Raphael’s lips formed a snarl and his head reared back, snake-like — but he didn’t say a word.

I got up and walked out, glad that I’d left my new stolen Luger at home.

1 4 8

23

Idrove home carefully, making sure to check every traffic light — twice.

Once in my house I gave in to a kind of weariness. It’s not that I was tired, but there was nothing I could do. I’d done all I could about Philomena Cargill. And even though I’d chummed the waters for her I doubted that she was alive to take the bait.

Bonnie was off, probably with Joguye Cham, her prince.

And Feather would die unless I made thirty-five thousand dollars quickly. She might die anyway. She might already be dead.

I hadn’t had a drink in many years.

Liquor took a toll on me. But Johnnie Walker was still in the backseat of the car and I went to my front door more than once, intent on retrieving him.

And why not take up the bottle again? There was no one to disapprove. Oblivion called to me. I could navigate the tidal 1 4 9

W a lt e r M o s l e y

wave of my life on a full tank; I’d be a black Ulysses singing with the stars.

It was early evening when I went out the front door and to my borrowed car. I looked in the window at the slender brown bag on the backseat. I wanted to open the door but I couldn’t. Because even though there was no trace of Feather she still was there. Looking at the backseat I thought about her riding in the backseat of my Ford. She was laughing, leaning up against the seat as the young hippie Star had done, telling me and Jesus about her wild adventures on the playground and in the classroom. Sometimes she made up stories about her and Billy Chipkin crossing Olympic and going up to the County Art Museum.

There, she’d say, they had seen pictures of naked ladies and kings.

I remembered her sitting by my side in the front seat reading Little Women, snarling whenever I interrupted her with questions about what she wanted for dinner or when she was going to pick up her room.

Dozens of memories came between me and that door handle.

I got dizzy and sat down on the lawn. I put my head in my hands and pressed all ten fingers hard against my scalp.

“Go back in the house,” the voice that was me and not me said. “Go back an’ do it until she’s in her room dreamin’ again.

Then, when she safe, you can have that bottle all night long.”

The phone rang at that moment. It was a weak jingle, almost not there. I struggled to my feet, staggering as if Feather were already healed and I was drunk on the celebration. My pants were wet from the grass.

The weak bleating of the phone grew loud when I opened the door.

“Hello.”

1 5 0

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

“So what’s it gonna be, Ease?” Mouse asked.

It made me laugh.

“I got to move on this, brother,” he continued. “Opportunity don’t wait around.”

“I’ll call you in the mornin’, Ray,” I said.

“What time?”

“After I wake up.”

“This is serious, man,” he told me.

Those words from his lips had been the prelude to many a man’s death but I didn’t care.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “In the mornin’.” And then I hung up.

I turned on the radio. There was a jazz station from USC that was playing twenty-four hours of John Coltrane. I liked the new jazz but my heart was still with Fats Waller and Duke Elling-ton — that big band sound.

I turned on the T V. Some detective show was on. I don’t know what it was about, just a lot of shouting and cars screech-ing, a shot now and then, and a woman who screamed when she got scared.

I’d been rereading Native Son by Richard Wright lately so I hefted it off the shelf and opened to a dog-eared page. The words scrambled and the radio hummed. Every now and then I’d look up to see that a new show was on the boob tube. By midnight every light in the house was burning. I’d switched them on one at a time as I got up now and then to check out various parts of the house.

I was reading about a group of boys masturbating in a movie theater when the phone rang again. For a moment I resisted answering. If Mouse had gotten mad I didn’t know if I could pla-cate him. If it was Bonnie telling me that Feather was dead I didn’t know that I could survive.

1 5 1

W a lt e r M o s l e y

“Hello.”

“Mr. Rawlins?” It was Maya Adamant.

“How’d you get my home number?”

“Saul Lynx gave it to me.”

“What do you want, Miss Adamant?”

“There has been a resolution to the Bowers case,” she said.

“You found the briefcase?”

“All I can tell you is that we have reached a determination about the disposition of the papers and of Mr. Bowers.”

“You don’t even want me to report on what I’ve found?” I asked.

This caused a momentary pause in my dismissal.

“What information?” she asked.

“I found Axel,” I said.

“Really?”

“Yes, really. He came down to L.A. to get away from Haffernon. Also to be nearer to Miss Cargill.”

“She’s down there? You’ve seen her?”

“Sure have,” I lied.

Another silence. In that time I tried to figure Maya’s response to my talking to Cinnamon. Her surprise might have been a clue that she knew Philomena was dead. Then again . . . maybe she’d been given contradictory information . . .

“What did Bowers say?” she asked.

“Am I fired, Miss Adamant?”

“You’ve been paid fifteen hundred dollars.”

“Against ten thousand,” I added.

“Does that mean you are withholding intelligence from Mr.

Lee?”

“I’m not talking to Mr. Lee.”

“I carry his authority.”

1 5 2

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

“I spent a summer unloading cargo ships down in Galveston back in the thirties,” I said. “Smelled like tar and fish, and you know I was only fifteen — with a sensitive nose. My back hurt carryin’ them cartons of clothes and fine china and whatever else the man said I should carry for thirty-five cents a day. I had his authority but I was just a day laborer still and all.”

“What did Axel say?”

“Am I fired?”

“No,” she said after a very long pause.

“Let Lee call me back and say that.”

“Robert E. Lee is not a man to fool with, Mr. Rawlins.”

“I like it when you call me mister,” I said. “It shows that you respect me. So listen up — if I’m fired then I’m through. If Lee wants me to be a consultant based on what I know then let him call me himself.”

“You’re making a big mistake, Easy.”

“Mistake was made before I was even born, honey. I came into it cryin’ and I’ll go out hollerin’ too.”

She hung up without another word. I couldn’t blame her. But neither could I walk away without trying to make my daughter’s money.

i s a u t é e d chopped garlic, minced fresh jalapeño, green pep-per, and a diced shallot in ghee that I’d rendered myself. I added some ground beef and, after the meat had browned, I put in some cooked rice from a pot in the refrigerator. That was my meal for the night.

I fell asleep on the loveseat with every light in the house on, the television flashing, and John Coltrane bleating about his favorite things.

1 5 3

24

Imoved the trunk in front of the big brass elephant. Underneath was the crushed, cubical body of Axel Bowers. I watched him, worrying once again about the degradation of his carcass. I told him that I was sorry and he moved his head in a little semicircle as if trying to work out a kink in his neck. With his hands he lifted his head, raising it up from the hole. It took him a long while to crawl out of the makeshift grave — and longer still to straighten out all of the bloody, cracked, and shattered limbs. He looked to me like a butterfly just out of the co-coon, unfolding its wet wings.

All of that work he did without noticing me. Pulling on his left arm, turning his foot around until the ankle snapped into place, pressing his temples until his forehead was once more round and hard.

1 5 4

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

He was putting his fingers back into alignment when he happened to look up and notice me.

“I’m going to need a new hip,” he said.

“What?”

“The hip bones don’t reform like other bones,” he said. “They need to be replaced or I won’t be able to walk very far.”

“Where you got to go?” I asked.

“There’s a Nazi hiding in Egypt. He’s going to assassinate the president.”

“The president was assassinated three years ago,” I said.

“There’s a new president,” Axel assured me. “And if this one goes we’ll be in deep shit.”

The phone rang.

“You going to get that?” Axel asked.

“I should stay with you.”

“Don’t worry, I can’t go anywhere. I’m stuck right here on my broken hips.”

The phone rang.

I wandered back through the house. In the kitchen Dizzy Gillespie had taken Coltrane’s place. He was standing in front of the sink with his cheeks puffed out like a bullfrog’s, blowing on that trumpet. The front door was open and The Mummy was playing outside. The movie was now somehow like a play being enacted in the street. On the sidewalks all the way up to the corners, extras and actors with small roles were smoking cigarettes and talking, waiting to come onstage to do their parts.

Egypt, I thought and the phone rang.

I came back in the house but the phone wasn’t on its little table. Above, on the bookshelf, Bigger Thomas was strangling a woman who was laughing at him.

1 5 5

W a lt e r M o s l e y

“You can’t kill me,” she said. “I’m better than you are. I’m still alive.”

The phone rang again.

I returned to the brass elephant to tell Axel something but he was back in his hole, crushed and debased.

“My hips were my downfall,” he said.

“You can make it,” I told him. “Lots of people live in wheelchairs.”

“I will not be a cripple.”

The phone rang and he disappeared.

I opened my eyes. The Mummy, with Boris Karloff, was playing on T V. Coltrane had not been replaced, and every light in the house was still on.

I wondered about the coincidence of a movie about a corpse rising from the dead in Egypt and Axel’s trips to that country.

The phone rang.

“Somebody must really wanna talk,” I said to myself, thinking that the phone must have rung nearly a dozen times.

I went to the podium and picked up the receiver.

“Hello.”

“Why are you looking for me?” a woman’s voice asked.

“Philomena? Is that you?”

“I asked you a question.”

My lips felt numb. Coltrane hit a discordant note.

“I thought you were dead,” I said. “You didn’t even take any underwear as far as I could tell. What woman leaves without a change of underwear?”

“I am alive,” she said. “So you can stop looking for me.”

“I’m not lookin’ for you, honey. It’s your boyfriend Axel an’

them papers he stole.”

“Axel’s gone.”

1 5 6

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

“Dead?”

“Who said anything about dead? He’s gone. Left the country.”

“Just up and left his house without tellin’ anybody? Not even Dream Dog?”

“Who are you working for, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Call me Easy.”

“Who are you working for?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“A man I know came to me with fifteen hundred dollars and said that another man, up in Frisco, was willing to pay that and more for locating Axel Bowers. That man said he was working for somebody else but he didn’t tell me who. After I looked around I found out that you and Axel were friends, that you disappeared too. So here I am with you on the phone, just a breath away.”

“You weren’t that far wrong about me, Easy,” the woman called Cinnamon said.

“What exactly was I right about?”

“I think there is a man trying to kill me. A man who wants the papers that Axel has.”

“What’s this man’s name?” I asked, made brave by the ano-nymity of the phone lines.

“I don’t know his name. He’s a white man with dead eyes.”

“He wear a snakeskin jacket?” I asked on a hunch.

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“Hiding,” she said. “Safe.”

“I’ll come to you and we’ll try and work this thing out.”

“No. I don’t want your help. What I want is for you to stop looking for me.”

“Nothing would make me happier than to let this drop, but 1 5 7

W a lt e r M o s l e y

I’m in it now. All the way in it,” I said, thinking about Axel’s hip bones. “So either we get together or I talk to the man pays my salary.”

“He’s probably the one trying to have me killed.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Axel told me. He said that people would kill for those papers.

Then that man . . . he . . .”

“He what?”

She hung up the phone.

I held on to the receiver for a full minute at least. Sitting there I thought again about my dream, about the corpse trying to re-suscitate himself. Philomena had described a killer who had been at my doorstep. All of a sudden the prospect of robbing an armored car delivery didn’t seem so dangerous.

I had a good laugh then. There I was all alone in the night with killers and thieves milling outside in the darkness.

I rooted my .38 out of the closet and made sure that it was loaded. The Luger was a fine gun but I had no idea how old its ammo was. I went around the house turning off lights.

In bed I was overcome by a feeling of giddiness. I felt as if I had just missed a fatal accident by a few inches. In a little while Bonnie’s infidelity and Feather’s dire illness would return to dis-turb my rest, but right then I was at peace in my bed, all alone and safe.

Then the phone rang.

I had to answer it. It might be Bonnie. It might be my little girl wanting me to tell her that things would be fine. It could be Mouse or Saul or Maya Adamant. But I knew that it wasn’t any of them.

“Hello.”

1 5 8

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

“I’m at the Pixie Inn on Slauson,” she said. “But I’m very tired.

Can you come in the morning?”

“What’s the room number?”

“Six.”

“What size dress you wear?” I asked.

“Two,” she said. “Why?”

“I’ll see you at seven.”

I hung up and wondered at the mathematics of my mind.

Why had I agreed to go to her when I’d just been thankful for a peaceful heist?

“ ’Cause you the son of a fool and the father of nothing,” the voice that had abandoned me for so many years said.

1 5 9

25

Icouldn’t sleep anymore that night.

At four I got up and started cooking. First I fried three strips of bacon. I cracked two eggs and dropped them into the bacon fat, then I covered one slice of whole wheat bread with yellow mustard and another one with mayonnaise. I grated orange cheddar on the eggs after I flipped them, put the lid on the frying pan, and turned off the gas flame. I made a strong brew of coffee, which I poured into a two-quart thermos. Then I made the eggs and bacon into a sandwich that I wrapped in wax paper.

Riding down Slauson at five-fifteen with the brown paper bag next to me and Johnnie Walker in the backseat, I tried to come up with some kind of plan. I considered Maya and Lee, dead Axel and scared Cinnamon — and the man in the snakeskin jacket. There was no sense to it; no goal to work toward except making enough money to pay for Feather’s hospital bill.

1 6 0

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

I parked across the street from the motel. It was of a modern design, three stories high, with doors that opened to unenclosed platforms. Number 6 was on the ground floor. Its door opened onto the parking lot. I supposed that Philomena wanted to be able to jump out the back window if need be.

I sat in my car wondering what I should ask the girl.

What should I tell her? Should it be truth?

When my Timex read six-eighteen the door of number 6

opened. A tall woman wearing dark slacks and a long white T-shirt came out. Even from that distance I could see that she was braless and barefoot. Her skin had a reddish hue and her hair was long and straightened.

She walked to the soda machine near the motel office, put in her coins, and then bent down to get the soda that fell out. The streets were so quiet that I heard the jumbling glass.

She walked back to the door, looked around, then went inside.

A minute later I was walking toward her door.

I listened for a moment. There was no sound. I knocked. Still no sound. I knocked again. Then I heard a shushing sound like the slide of a window.

“It’s me, Philomena,” I said loudly. “Easy Rawlins.”

It only took her half a minute to come to the door and open it.

Five nine with chiseled features and big, dramatic eyes, that was Philomena Cargill. Her skin was indeed cinnamon red.

Lena’s photograph of her had faithfully recorded the face but it hadn’t given even a hint of her beauty.

I held out the paper bag.

“What’s this?”

“An egg sandwich an’ coffee,” I said.

While she didn’t actually grab the bag she did take it with eager hands.

1 6 1

W a lt e r M o s l e y

She went to one of the two single beds and sat with the sack on her lap. After closing the door I put the cloth bag I’d brought on the bed across from her and sat next to it.

There were three lamps in the room. They were all on but the light was dim at best.

Philomena tore open the sandwich and took a big bite out of it.

“I’m a vegetarian usually,” she said with her mouth full, “but this bacon is good.”

While she ate I poured her a plastic cup full of coffee.

“I put milk in it,” I said as she took the cup from me.