Cinnamon Kiss (26 page)

“And so you told Cicero where I was?”

“I didn’t know. But when Mr. Lee said that he was coming down to meet Saul I called Cicero. I had been trying to get in touch with Mr. Lynx but he didn’t answer his phones. I told Cicero where Saul would be, thinking that he might help him find you.”

“And what would you get out of that?”

“Cicero has a reputation,” she replied.

“Yeah,” I said. “Assassin. Torturer.”

“That may be. But he is always known to meet his side of a bargain. I told him what I wanted for the information and he agreed.”

“You wanted the bonds,” I said.

“Yes.”

I didn’t say anything, just stared at her.

“That little bastard pays me seven dollars an hour with no benefits. He makes more than a quarter million a year,” she said in defense from my gaze, “and I do almost everything. I’m on duty twenty-four hours a day. He calls me home from vacations. He makes me talk to everybody, do the books, do all the business. I make all of the major decisions while he sits behind his desk and plays with his toy soldiers.”

“Sounds like a good enough reason to kill him,” I said.

“No. If I got the bonds I could cash them in and set up a retirement fund. That’s all I wanted.”

“Is that why you and Lee were feuding when Saul and I were there?”

“Yes. Mr. Lee didn’t want to take the case but …but I hoped to be able to get hold of the bonds, and so I had talked him into it. He was looking for a way out of it, he didn’t like the smell of Haffernon. When you demanded to meet him he almost let it go.”

“So why would Cicero want to kill Lee?”

“I don’t know but I would suspect that whatever job he was working on, Lee’s death had to be part of it.”

“Maybe yours too,” I suggested.

She blanched at the notion.

A
fter our chat I asked Maya to come up with me to the nurses’ station. There I introduced her to the pointy-nosed doctor and to Mrs. Bernard, the bespectacled head nurse.

“This is Miss Maya Adamant,” I said. “She’ll tell you that she’s a friend of Mr. Lee’s, but the police suspect her in his shooting. They don’t have proof, but you probably shouldn’t let her run around here unsupervised.”

The stunned look on their faces was worth it.

Maya smiled at them and said, “It’s a misunderstanding. I work for Mr. Lee. At any rate I’ll wait until he’s conscious and then you can ask him if he wants to talk to me.”

THE MORNING WAS CHILLY but I didn’t feel so bad.

I missed having Bonnie to call. For the past few years I’d been able to talk to her about anything. That had been a new experience for me. Never before could I fully trust another human being. If it was five in the morning and I’d been out all night I could call her and she’d be there as fast as she could. She never asked why but I always explained. Being with her made me understand how lonely I’d been for all my wandering years. But being alone again made me feel that I was back in the company of an old friend.

I was worried about Feather’s survival but she had sounded good on the phone and there was already new blood flowing in her veins.

Blood and money were the currencies I dealt in. They were inseparable. This thought made me feel even more comfortable. I figured that if I knew where I stood then I had a chance of getting where I was going.

I PARKED ACROSS THE STREET from Raphael Reed’s apartment building a little after seven. I had coffee in a paper cup. The brew was both bitter and weak but I drank it to stay awake. Maybe Cinnamon was with the young men. I could hope.

Sitting there I went over the details I had. I knew more about Lee’s case than anyone, but still there were big holes. Cicero was definitely the killer, but who held his reins? He couldn’t have been a player in the business. He could have worked for anybody: Cinnamon, Maya, even Lee, or maybe Haffernon. Maybe Bowers hired him back in the beginning. It would be good to know the answers if the police came to see me.

Near nine Raphael’s friend Roget came out the front door of the turquoise building. He carried a medium-sized suitcase. He could have had a change of underwear in there, could have been going to visit his mother, but I was intrigued. And so when the high-yellow freckled boy climbed into a light blue Datsun I turned over my own engine.

He led me all the way to Hollywood before parking in front of a boxy four-story house on Delgado. He walked up the driveway and into the backyard. After a moment I followed.

He went to the front door of a small house back there. He knocked and was admitted by someone I couldn’t see. I went back to the car. When I sat down exhaustion washed over me. I lay back on the seat for just a moment.

Two hours later the sun on my face woke me up.

The blue Datsun was gone.

SHE WAS WEARING a T-shirt, that’s all. The soft outline of her nipples pressed against the white cotton. The dark color pressed against it too.

After answering my knock she didn’t know whether to smile or to run.

“What do you want from me now?” she asked. “I gave you the bonds.”

“Can I come in?”

She backed away and I entered. It was yet another cramped cabinlike room. The normal-sized furniture crowded the small space. There was a couch and a round table upon which sat a portable TV. A radio on the window shelf played Mozart. Her musical taste shouldn’t have surprised me but it did.

On the table was an empty glass jar that once held nine Vienna sausages, a half-drunk tumbler of orange juice, and a depleted bag of barbecue potato chips.

“You want something to drink?” she asked me.

“Water be great,” I said.

She went through a tiny doorway. I heard the tap turn on and off and she returned with an aqua-colored plastic juice tumbler filled with water.

I drank it down in one gulp.

“You want more?”

“Let’s talk,” I said.

She sat down on one end of the golden sofa. I took the other end.

“What do you want to know?”

“First—who knows you’re here?”

“Just Raphael and Roget. Now you.”

“Do they gossip?”

“Not about this. Raphael knows someone’s after me and Roget does whatever Raphael says.”

“Why’d you kill Haffernon?” It was an abrupt and brutal switch calculated to knock her off track. But it didn’t work.

“I didn’t,” she said evenly. “I found him there and ran but I didn’t kill him. No. Not me.”

What else could she say?

“How does that work?” I asked. “You find a dead man in your own room but don’t know how he got killed?”

“It’s the truth.”

I shook my head.

“You look tired,” she said, sympathy blending in with her words.

“How’d Haffernon get to your room?”

“I called him.”

“When?”

“Right after I met you. I called him and told him that I wanted to get rid of the bonds. I asked him would he buy them off me for face value.”

“And what about the letter?”

“He’d get that too.”

“When was this meeting supposed to happen?”

“Today. This afternoon.”

“So how does he show up dead on your floor yesterday?”

“After the last time I talked to you I realized that Haffernon could just send that man in the snakeskin jacket to kill me and take the bonds, so I went to Raphael and asked him to take the bonds to your friend.”

“Why?”

“Because even though I hardly know you, you seem to be the most trustworthy person I’ve met, and anyway…” Her words trailed off as better judgment took the wheel.

“Anyway what?”

“I figured that you wouldn’t know what to do with the bonds and so I didn’t have to worry about you cashing them.”

That made me laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

I told her about Jackson Blue, that he was willing at that moment to cash them in. I could see the surprise on her face.

“My Uncle Thor once told me that for every one thing you learn you forget something else,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That while they were teaching you all’a that smart white world knowledge at Berkeley you were forgetting where you came from and how we survived all these years. We might’a acted stupid but you know you moved so far away that you startin’ to think the act is true.”

Cinnamon smiled. The smile became a grin.

“Tell me exactly what happened with Haffernon,” I said.

“It’s like I said. I called him and made an appointment for him to meet me at the motel —”

“At what time?”

“Today at four,” she said. “Then I got nervous and went to give the bonds to Raphael to give to your friend —”

“What time was that?”

“Right after I talked to you. I got back by about five. That’s when I saw him on the floor. He’d been early, real early.”

“But who could have killed him if you didn’t?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It wasn’t me. But when I talked to him he said that he wasn’t the only interested party, that what Axel planned to do would sink many innocent people.”

I thought about the bullet that killed Haffernon. It had entered at the base of the skull and gone out through the top. He was a tall man. In all probability either a very short man or a woman had done him in.

“Did you give your real name at the motel?”

“No. I didn’t. I called myself Mary Lornen. That’s the names of two people I knew up north.”

Proof is a funny thing. For policemen and for lawyers it depends on tangible evidence: fingerprints, eyewitnesses, irrefutable logic, or self-incrimination. But for me evidence is like morning mist over a complex terrain. You see the landscape and then it’s gone. And all you can do is try to remember and watch your step.

The fact that Philomena had delivered those bonds to Primo meant something. It gave me doubts about her guilt. While I was having these thoughts Philomena moved across the couch.

“Kiss me,” she commanded.

C
innamon’s kiss was a spiritual thing. It was like the sudden and unexpected appeasement between the east and west. A barrier fell away, forgiveness flooded my heart, and somewhere I was granted redemption for all my transgressions.

“I need this,” she whispered. “It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

She pressed her breasts against me, positioning me so that I was leaning back on the arm of the sofa. Then she grabbed my ankles and pulled hard so that, with my help, she got me flat on my back.

She lifted the white T-shirt to straddle me. When she did so I caught a glimpse of her protruding pubic hair. I felt like a child seeing something that had been kept from him for what seemed like an eternity.

“Wh-what do you need?” I said, embarrassed by my stutter.

She moved down to my shins and reached up to catch the waist of my pants. With a quick tug she had both my pants and boxers down to my knees. Then she came up again.

Just before settling back down she said, “I need your warmth.”

The feel of her hot sex sitting down on mine gave the hiss of her words a deeper meaning.

“Pull up your shirt,” she said.

She began rocking gently back and forth and to the sides, doing things with my erection, which lay flat against my belly, that I would never have thought of on my own. I watched closely, looking for passion. But she was in control. The feeling was inside and she was keeping it there. She laid her hands upon my chest. I could see a finger against my erect nipple but I couldn’t feel it.

“Was he your lover?” I asked. It was the last thing on my mind.

“Axel?”

“Sure.”

“Sure,” she repeated.

“What were you guys doing?”

“You mean how did we do it?”

“No. Those bonds. That letter.”

“He loved me,” she said. “He wanted to help me cross over from where everybody else was.”

I understood every word, every inflection. She moved side to side and I felt her excitement down between my thighs even if it didn’t show on her face.

“You love him?”

“If I tell you about him will you tell me something?”

I nodded and gulped.

“What do you want to know?” she asked.

“Do you love him?” I asked even though there was another question in my mind.

“It’s more than that,” she whispered with a sneer and an evil twist of her hips. “He reached out and saved my life. He took me in his house and then left me there with all those treasures. He introduced me to friends and family and never walked into a room where I couldn’t go with him. And he never gave me a dime I didn’t work for and he did what I told him to do.”

The idea of a man obeying this woman brought a sound from my chest that I’d not heard before, not even from some infant that was all feelings and desire.

“He let me help him,” she said. “He recognized that I was smart and educated and that I could understand him better than all those old white men and women that made him ashamed.”

“Were you helping him with those bonds?” I asked, again a question I didn’t care to ask.

“That was him. That was his devil.”

She lifted off of me and cold concern rose in my face. She smiled and came back down.

“My turn,” she said with a swivel.

“What?”

“What’s making you so sad?” she asked.

In a flood of words I told her about Feather and about Bonnie, who was saving her while in the arms of an African prince in the Alps. It sounded like a bad movie but the words kept coming. It was almost as if I couldn’t inhale before finishing the tale.

Her fingernail got caught on my nipple. A shock made me jump and press hard against her sex.

“Oh!” she said and then snagged the nipple again.

She’d found another way to pleasure us both. My breath was coming harder.

In between her rocking and snagging she said, “All men feel that women do them wrong. They feel like that all the time. But that’s just silly. Here you got a woman givin’ up everything to save your little girl and all you can think about is a passing fancy or even maybe another lover. What do you think they’re doin’ right now?”