Cinnamon Kiss (15 page)

“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.”

I
told 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 begun 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 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 appraising 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 flirtation 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 TV 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.

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.

“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, snakelike—but he didn’t say a word.

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

I
drove 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 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.”

“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 Ellington—that big band sound.

I turned on the TV. Some detective show was on. I don’t know what it was about, just a lot of shouting and cars screeching, 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 placate him. If it was Bonnie telling me that Feather was dead I didn’t know that I could survive.

“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.”

“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 SAUTÉED chopped garlic, minced fresh jalapeño, green pepper, 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.

I
moved 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 cocoon, 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.

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.