Cinnamon Kiss (30 page)

With my eyes only I glanced to the sides. There was no sign of the man who had sapped me the night before.

Beyond the young woman’s corpse was a small coffee table upon which sat two teacups. She’d served him tea before he shot her. The thought was grotesque but I knew I wouldn’t have long to contemplate it.

“Lee is going to put the cops on you for the Bowers killing and for Haffernon,” I said, hoping somehow to stave off my own death.

“I didn’t kill them. She did,” he said, waving his pistol at her.

“But you were at Bowers’s house,” I said. “You threatened him.”

“You know about that, huh? She hired me to get the bonds from Bowers. When I told her what he’d said she took it in her own hands.” He coughed and I glanced at the teacups. A tremor of hope thrummed in the center of my chest.

“Haffernon too?”

He nodded. There was something off about the movement of his head, as if he weren’t in full control.

“Why?” I asked, playing for time.

“He was getting weak. Didn’t want to do what they had to do to keep their nasty little secret. That’s why I had to kill her. I knew that”—he coughed again—“sooner or later she’d have to come after me. Nobody could know or the whole house of cards would fall. That’s why I work for a living. A rich family will take your soul.”

“Why not?” I asked, as bland as could be. “Why couldn’t anybody know?”

“Money,” he said with a knowing, crooked nod. “Sometimes it was just that she wanted her inheritance. Sometimes she was angry at the kid for taking all that wealth for granted when she and her mother had been living hand to mouth.”

He straightened his shooting arm.

“And she knew you from your trial about the torture?”

“You do your homework, nigger,” he said and then coughed. Blood spattered out onto his lips, but because he had no free hand he couldn’t rub it off to see.

I leaped to the left and he fired. He was good. He was a right-hander and dying but he still hit me in the shoulder. I used the momentum to fall through a doorway to my left. Screaming from the pain, I made it to my feet. I was halfway down the hall when I heard him behind me. He fired again but I didn’t feel anything.

I fell anyway.

As I looked back I saw him staggering forward, shooting once, and then he fell. He didn’t move again.

I was on the floor next to a bathroom. I went in, trying not to touch any surface. I got a towel from the rack next to the tub and used it to staunch the bleeding from my shoulder.

When the blood was merely seeping I checked Cicero. He was dead. In his jacket pocket was an envelope containing twenty-five thousand dollars. In a folder on the coffee table I found the bonds and the letter.

There were many photographs on the shelves and windowsills. Some were of Cynthia and her mother, Nina Tourneau. One was Cynthia as a child on the lap of her beloved grandfather—pornographer, child molester, and Nazi traitor.

I took the bonds, leaving the letter for the cops to mull over. The teacups had the same strong smell that the cup had at Axel’s house. Only one had been drunk from.

I
drove my rental car for hours, but it seemed like several days, bleeding on the steering wheel and down my chest. I drove one-handed half the time, using the stiffening fingers of my right hand to press the towel against the shoulder wound.

It was a minor miracle that I made it to Christmas Black’s Riverside home. I don’t remember getting out of the car or ringing the bell. Maybe they found me there, passed out over the wheel.

I came to three days later. Easter Dawn was sitting in a big chair next to my bed, reading from a picture book. I don’t know if she knew how to read or if she was just interpreting the pictures into stories. When I opened my eyes she jumped up and ran from the room.

“Daddy! Daddy! Mr. Rawlins is awake!”

Christmas came into the room wearing black jeans and a drab green T-shirt. His boots were definitely army issue.

“How you doin’, soldier?” he asked.

“Ready for my discharge,” I said in a voice so weak that even I didn’t hear it.

Christmas held up my head and trickled water into my mouth. I wanted to get up and call Switzerland but I couldn’t even lift a hand.

“You bled a lot,” Christmas said. “Almost died. Lucky I got some friends in the hospital down in Oxnard. I got you medicine and a few pints of red.”

“Call Mouse,” I said as loudly as I could.

Then I passed out.

The next time I woke up, Mama Jo was sitting next to me. She had just taken some foul-smelling substance away from my nose.

“Uh!” I grunted. “What was that?”

“I can see you gonna be okay, Easy Rawlins,” big, black, handsome Mama Jo said.

“I feel better. How long have I been here?”

“Six days.”

“Six? Did anybody call Bonnie?”

“She called Etta. Feather’s doin’ good, the doctors said. They won’t know nuthin’ for eight weeks more though. Etta said that you and Raymond were doing some business down in Texas.”

Mouse sauntered in with his glittering smile.

“Hey, Easy,” he said. “Christmas got all yo’ money an’ bonds and shit in the draw next to yo’ bed.”

“Give the bonds to Jackson,” I told him. “Let him cash ’em and we’ll split ’em three ways.”

Mouse smiled. He liked a good deal.

“I’ll let you boys talk business,” Jo said. She rose from the chair and I watched in awe, as always impressed by her size and bearing.

Mouse pulled up a chair and told me what he knew.

Joe Cicero made the TV news with his murder of Cynthia Aubec and her poisoning of him.

“They say anything about a letter they found?” I asked.

“No. No letter, just mutual murder, that’s what they called it.”

That night Saul Lynx arrived in a rented ambulance and drove me home.

Benita Flag and Jesus were there to nurse me.

Two weeks after it was all over I was still convalescing. Mouse came over and sat with me under the big tree in the backyard.

“You don’t have to worry about them people no more, Ease,” he said after we’d been gossiping for a while.

“What people?”

“The Romans.”

For a moment I was confused, and then I remembered the accident and the lawsuit.

“Yeah,” he said. “Benita showed me the papers an’ I went ovah to talk to ’em. I told ’em about Feather and about you bein’ so tore up. I gave ’em five thousand off the top’a what Jackson cleared and told ’em that you was a good detective and if they ever needed help that you would be there for ’em. After that they decided to drop that suit.”

There weren’t many people in Watts who wouldn’t do what Ray asked. No one wanted to be on his bad side.

THEY FOUND AXEL Bowers in his ashram and tied Aubec to that crime too. The papers made it an incestuous sex scandal. Who knows, maybe it was. Dream Dog was even interviewed. He told the reporters about the sex and drug parties. In 1966 that was reason enough, in the public mind, for murder.

A few days later I received a card from Maya and Bobby Lee. They were on their honeymoon in Monaco. Lee had connections with the royal family there. He said that I should call him if I ever needed employment—or advice. That was the closest Lee would ever come to an offer of friendship.

I sent the twenty-five thousand on to Switzerland. Feather called me once a week. Bonnie called two times but I always found an excuse to get off the line. I didn’t tell them about my getting shot. There was no use in worrying Feather or making Bonnie feel bad either.

I lived off of the money Jackson got from the bonds and wondered who at Haffernon’s firm bought off the letter. But I didn’t worry too much about it. I was alive and Feather was on her way to recovery. Even if the moral spirit of my country was rotten to the core at least I had played a part in her salvation—my beautiful child.

IT WAS A MONTH after the shooting that I got a letter from New York. With it was a tiny clipping saying that an inquiry had opened concerning the American-owned Karnak Chemical Company and their dealings with Germany during the war. Information had come to light about the sale of munitions directly to Germany from Karnak. If the allegations turned out to be true a full investigation would be launched.

The letter read:

Dear Mr. Rawlins:
Thank you for whatever you did. I read about our reptilian friend in the Bay Area. I just wanted you to see that Axel had an ace up his sleeve. He probably gathered the information in Egypt and Germany and sent it to the government before he told anybody about the Swiss bonds. I think he wanted me to have them if anything happened to him. He couldn’t know how slow the government would work.
It was nice meeting you. I have a low-level job at an investment firm here in New York. I’m sure that I will get promoted soon.
If you’re ever out here come by and see me.
“love”
Cinnamon

There was a dark red lipstick kiss at the bottom of the letter.

I sent her the two books I had taken from her apartment and a brief note thanking her for being so unusual.

FIVE WEEKS LATER Bonnie and Feather came home.

Feather had been a little butterball before the illness. She was just a wraith when she got on that plane to Switzerland. But now she was at least four inches taller and dressed like a woman. She was even taller than Jesus.

After kissing me and hugging my neck she regained her composure and said, “Bonjour, Papa. Comment ça va?”

“Bien, ma fille,” I replied, remembering the words I learned while killing men across France.

WE ALL STAYED UP late into the night talking. Jesus was even animated. He had learned some French from Bonnie over time and so now he and Feather conversed in a foreign language. Her recovery and return made him almost giddy with joy.

Finally there was just Bonnie and me sitting next to each other on the couch.

“Easy?”

“Yeah, honey?”

“Can we talk about it now?”

There was fever in my blood and a tidal wave in my mind but I said, “Talk about what?”

“I only called Joguye because Feather was sick and I knew that he had connections,” she began.

I was thinking about Robert E. Lee and Maya Adamant.

“When I saw him I remembered how we’d felt about each other, and …and we did spend a lot of time together in Montreux. I know you must have been hurt but I also spent the time making up my mind —”

I put up my hand to stop her. I must have done it with some emphasis, because she flinched.

“I’m gonna stop you right there, honey,” I said. “I’m gonna stop you, because I don’t wanna hear it.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not either me or him,” I told the love of my life. “It’s either me or not me. That’s what I’ve come to in this time you were gone. When we talked at the airport you should’a said right then that it was always me, would always be. I don’t care if you slept with him or not, not really. But the truth is he got a footprint in your heart. That kinda mark don’t wash out.”

“What are you saying, Easy?” She reached out for me. She touched me but I wasn’t there.

“You can take your stuff whenever you want. I love you but I got to let you go.”

JESUS AND BENITA moved her the next day. I didn’t know where she went. The kids did. I think they saw her sometimes, but they never talked to me about it.

WALTER MOSLEY
is the author of the acclaimed Easy Rawlins series of mysteries and numerous other works of fiction and nonfiction. He has received a Grammy Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, among other honors. He was born in Los Angeles and lives in New York.