Cinnamon Kiss (18 page)

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

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

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

ETTAMAE AND MOUSE had a nice little house in Compton. The yard sloped upward toward the porch, where they had a padded bench and a redwood table. In the evenings they sat outside eating ham hocks and greeting their neighbors.

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

When I was a young man that was my sorrow.

“Hi, Easy.”

“Etta.”

“Come on in.”

The entrance to their small house was also the dining room. There were stacks of paper on the table and clothes hung on the backs of chairs.

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

“Where’s Mouse, Etta?”

“I don’t know.”

“When you expect him?”

“No time soon.”

“He left for Texas?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey, Pete. How’s it goin’?”

He sighed and shook his head.

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

“I got a friend livin’ in a house I own on One-sixteen,” I said. “Primo. He’s a mechanic. If I ask him I’m sure he’ll show you the ropes.”

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

“Don’t take my boy away from me so quick, Easy,” Etta said. “You know he earns his keep just workin’ round the house here.”

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

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

“No,” Etta said.

Peter shook his head.

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

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

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

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

“Etta, how you expect somebody like me to be a threat to him?” I asked even though I had once nearly gotten her man killed.

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

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

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

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

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

“Marcel,” I said in greeting.

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

“Lookin’ for Mouse,” I said.

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

“Not here.”

“He needs to be found.”

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

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

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

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

“Lookin’ for Mouse.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes I am,” I said.

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

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

Hennie was sitting at a small round table against the far wall. There was a brandy snifter in front of him, also the
Los Angeles Examiner,
opened to the sports page. He had a half-smoked cigar smoldering in a cut crystal ashtray.

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

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

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

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

“The message is for him,” I said.

He finally looked up.

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

“It’s for Mouse,” I said.

Hennie stared at me for a few seconds and then called out, “Melba!”

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

She came into a doorway about ten feet away.

“Bring me the phone.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

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

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

She offered the phone to Hennie.

He declined, saying, “Dial Raymond.”

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

The moments lagged by.

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

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

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

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

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

“Powell’s?”

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

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

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

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

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

I DROVE from Hennie’s to Powell’s funeral parlor. I marched down the driveway to the garage next door. But there I stopped. The door was ajar and those stairs were daring me to come on. It was twilight and the world around me was slowly blending into gray. Going to Mouse over this problem would, I knew, create problems of its own. With no exaggeration Mouse was one of the most dangerous individuals on the face of the earth.

And so I stopped to consider.

But I didn’t have a choice.

Still, I took the stairs one at a time.

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

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

“Raymond?” I said.

“Come on in, Easy.”

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

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

“Gettin’ into trouble,” I said.

Mouse grinned.

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

She stood up and stuck out her hand.

“Hi, Easy. Pleased to meet you.”

She was tall for a woman, five eight or so, the color of tree bark. She hadn’t made twenty-five, which was why the weight she carried seemed to defy the pull of gravity. For all her size her waist was slender, but that wasn’t her most arresting feature. Georgette gave off the most amazing odor. It was like the smell of a whole acre of tomato plants—earthy and pungent. I took the hand and raised it to my lips so that I could get my nose up next to her skin.

She giggled and I remembered that I was single.

“And this here is Pinky,” Mouse said.

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

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

“How you all doin’?” I asked.

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

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

“What you up to, Easy?” Mouse asked.

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

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

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

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

“Why we gotta go way ovah there?” Pinky complained. “There’s a package sto’ right down the street.”

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

When she walked past me Georgette held her hand out—palm upward. I kissed that palm as if it were my mother’s hand reaching out to me from long ago. She shuddered. I did too.

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

After the women were gone I turned to Raymond.

He was smiling at me.

“You dog,” he said.

S
orry ’bout the job, Ray.” I moved over to the couch. He slid to the side to give me room.

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