Cinnamon Kiss (20 page)

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

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

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

“Excuse me?” I said.

“You too lofty to speak?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s that?”

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

Mouse was coming out from the green doorway.

I pulled my hand away from Briny.

Raymond stopped between us.

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

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

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

“Cicero?”

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

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

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

“Flesh and blood,” I said.

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

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

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

This gesture also gave me confidence.

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

I didn’t get up again until almost eleven.

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

Bonnie was a problem that had to come later.

While I was getting dressed I heard the toilet flush. Mouse slept more lightly than a pride of lions. He once told me that he could hear a leaf thinking about falling from a tree.

He came out wearing a blue dress shirt under a herringbone jacket. His slacks were black. I went through to the restroom. There I shaved and washed the stink from my body with a washrag because Mouse’s hideaway didn’t have a shower or a tub.

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

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

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

IN 1966, L.A.’s downtown was mostly brick and mortar, plaster and stone. There were a few new towers of steel and glass but mostly squat red and brown buildings made up the business community.

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

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

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

“Easy,” he said in warning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Officer,” Mouse allowed.

“What are you doing here?”

“Calling a Mr. Blue,” I said.

“Mr. Blue?” the policeman countered.

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

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

“Yeah,” Mouse said. “Bonds.”

The way he said the word made me think of chains, not monetary instruments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bonds?” Mouse asked.

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

“How much money?” he asked.

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

The cops came back and handed me my license.

“Checks out,” one of them said.

“So may we continue?” I asked.

“Who are you investigating?”

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

And even though I don’t remember which cop I was talking to, I do remember his eyes. There was hatred in them. Real hate. It’s a continual revelation when you come to understand that the only thing you can expect in return for your own dignity is hatred in the eyes of others.

“BLUE,” Jackson answered when the Proxy Nine operator transferred my call.

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

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

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

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

“You don’t mind that white boy stayin’ there while you gone?” I asked near the time of our meeting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jackson,” Mouse hailed.

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

“Mouse, Easy, how you boys doin’?”

“Hungry as a mothahfuckah,” Mouse said.

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

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

“Insurance company,” Jackson corrected.

“They insure banks, right?” Mouse asked.

“Yeah. So, Easy, what’s up?”

“Can I sit down first, Jackson?”

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

The room was round too, with pastoral paintings on the wall. Real oil paintings and a vase with silk roses on a podium next to the door.

“How’s life treatin’ you, Jackson?”

“All right, I guess.”

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

“Yeah …I guess.”

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

“What’s wrong, man?” I asked.

“Nuthin’.”

“Is it Jewelle?”

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

“So what is it?”

“Nuthin’.”

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

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

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

“You messed it up or somethin’?”

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

“What’s a TXT tape?” I asked.

“Transaction transmissions from all around the world …financial transactions.”

“What about it?”

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

“So what?” I asked.

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

That got a long whistle from Mouse.

Jackson began to sweat.

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

Mouse laughed. I did too.

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

“What kind?”

I told him all that I learned from Cinnamon.

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