Cinnamon Kiss (8 page)

“What plan?”

“He didn’t say,” Dream Dog said, shaking his head and smiling. “But he was happy and we all went to sleep. We slept for twenty-four hours and when we woke up Axel was all calm and sure. That was when he started doin’ all’a that travelin’ and stuff.”

“How long ago was that?” I asked.

“A year maybe. A little more.”

“Around the time his father died?” I asked.

“Now that you say it …yeah. His father died two weeks before—that’s why we did acid.”

“And where is this Polly or Molly?”

“Her? I dunno, man. She was goin’ from door to door sellin’ brownies. Axel an’ me were ready to trip and we asked her if she wanted to join in. Axel told her that if she did he’d buy all’a her brownies.”

“But I thought you said that you were at this other place. Asham?”

“Ashram,” Dream Dog said. “That’s the prayer temple that Axel built out behind the trees in his backyard. That’s his holy place.”

“Where do you live?” I asked Dream Dog.

“On this block mainly.”

“Which house?”

“There’s about five or six let me crash now and then. You know it depends on how they’re feelin’ and if I got some money to throw in for the soup.”

“If I need to find you is there somebody around here that might know how to get in touch?” I asked.

“Sadie down in the purple place at the end of the block. They call her place the Roller Derby ’cause of the street and because so many people crash there. She knows where I am usually. Yeah, Sadie.”

Dream Dog’s gaze wandered down the street, fastening upon a young woman wearing a red wraparound dress and a crimson scarf. She was barefoot.

“Hey, Ruby!” Dream Dog called. “Wait up.”

The girl smiled and waved.

“One more thing,” I said before he could sprint away.

“What’s that, Dupree?”

“Do you know where Axel’s San Francisco office is?”

“The People’s Legal Aid Center. Just go on down to Haight-Ashbury and ask anyone.”

I handed Dream Dog a twenty-dollar bill and proffered my hand. He smiled and pulled me into a fragrant hug. Then he ran off to join the red-clad Ruby.

The idea of karma was still buzzing around my head. I was thinking that maybe if I was nice to Dream Dog, someone somewhere would be kind to my little girl.

I WALKED AROUND the block after Dream Dog was gone. I didn’t want him or anybody else to see me investigate the ashram, so I came in through one of the neighbors’ driveways and into the backyard of Axel Bowers.

It was a garden house set behind two weeping willows. You might not have seen it even looking straight at it because the walls and doors were painted green like the leaves and lawn.

The door was unlocked.

Axel’s holy place was a single room with bare and unfinished pine floors and a niche in one of the walls where there sat a large brass elephant that had six arms. Its beard sprouted many half-burned sticks of incense. Their sweet odor filled the room but there was a stink under that.

A five-foot-square bamboo mat marked the exact center of the floor but beyond that there was no other furniture.

All of the smells, both good and bad, seemed to emanate from the brass elephant. It was five feet high and the same in width. At its feet lay a traveling trunk with the decals of many nations glued to it.

Somebody had already snapped off the padlock, and so all I had to do was throw the trunk open. Because of the foul odor that cowered underneath the sweet incense I thought that I’d find a body in the trunk. It was too small for a man but maybe, I thought, there would be some animal sacrificed in the holy ashram.

Failing an animal corpse, I thought I might find some other fine art like the pieces that graced the house.

The last thing I expected was a trove of Nazi memorabilia.

And not just the run-of-the-mill pictures of Adolf Hitler and Nazi flags. There was a dagger that had a garnet-encrusted swastika on its hilt, and the leather-bound copy of
Mein Kampf
was signed by Hitler himself. The contents of the trunk were all jumbled, which added to the theory that someone had already searched it. Bobby Lee said that he’d sent people to look for Philomena—maybe this was their work.

There was a pair of leather motorcycle gloves in the trunk. I accepted this providence and donned the gloves. I’d made sure to touch as few surfaces as possible in the house but gloves were even better.

A box for a deck of cards held instead a stack of pocket photographs of a man I did not recognize posing with Mussolini and Hitler, Göring and Hess. The man had an ugly-looking scar around his left eye. That orb looked out in stunned blindness. For a moment I remembered the boy I killed in Germany after he had slaughtered the white Americans who’d made fun of me. I also remembered the concentration camp we’d liberated and the starved, skeletal bodies of the few survivors.

The putrid odor was worse inside the trunk but there was no evidence of even a dead rat. There were a Nazi captain’s uniform and various weapons, including a well-oiled Luger with three clips of ammo. There was also, hidden inside a package that looked like it contained soap, a thick stack of homemade pornographic postcards. They were photographs of the same heavyset man who had posed with the Nazi leaders. Now he was in various sexual positions with young women and girls. He had a very large erection and all of the pictures were of him penetrating women from in front or behind. One photo centered on a teenage girl’s face—she was screaming in pain as he lowered on her from overhead.

I took the Luger and the clips of ammo, then I tried to move the trunk but I could see that it was anchored to the floor somehow. I got down on my knees and sniffed around the base of the trunk—the smell was definitely coming from underneath.

After looking around the base I decided to pull away the carpet that surrounded the trunk. There I saw a brass latch. I lifted this and the trunk flipped backward, revealing the corpse of a man crushed into an almost perfect rectangle—the size of the space beneath the trunk.

The man’s head was facing upward, framed by his forearms.

It was the face of the young man hugging his mother—Axel Bowers.

I
had seen my share of dead bodies. Many of them had died under violent circumstances. But I had never seen anything like Axel Bowers. His killer treated the body like just another thing that needed to be hidden, not like a human being at all. The bones were broken and his forehead was crushed by the trunk coming down on it.

The smell was overwhelming. Soon the neighbors would begin to detect it. I wondered if the person who had searched the trunk had found Axel. Not necessarily; if they’d been there a few days before, there might not have been a smell yet, so they’d have had no reason to suspect there was a secret compartment.

It was a gruesome sight. But even then, in the presence of such awful violence and evil intent, I thought about Feather lying in her bed. I felt like running from there as fast as I could. But instead I forced myself to wait and think about how even this horror might help her.

The knife was worth nothing and I didn’t think that I had the kind of contacts to sell Hitler’s signature. For that matter the signature might have been a fake.

I considered taking a couple of the Klee paintings from the house, but again I didn’t know where to sell them. And if I got caught trying to fence stolen paintings I could end up in jail before getting the money I needed.

For a while I thought about burning down the ashram. I wanted to get rid of the evidence of the murder so that I wouldn’t be implicated by Dream Dog or some other hippie on the block.

I even went so far as to get a can of gasoline from the garage. I also took tapered candles from the house to use as a kind of slow-burning fuse. But then I decided that fire would call attention to the murder instead of away from it. And what if the flames spread and killed someone in a nearby house?

The stench made my eyes tear and my gorge rise. I had wiped off the places I had touched in the ashram and the house. Dream Dog would think twice before giving information about breaking into Axel’s place. Besides, he didn’t know my name.

At some point I realized that I was finding it hard to leave. There was something in me that wanted to help Axel find some peace. The humiliation of his interment made me uncomfortable. Maybe it was the memory of the German boy I killed or the fragility of my adopted daughter’s life. Maybe it was something deeper that had been instilled in me when I was a child among the superstitious country people of Louisiana.

Finally I decided that the only thing I could do for Axel was to make him a promise.

“I can’t give you a proper burial, Mr. Bowers,” I said. “But I swear that if I find out who did this to you I will do my best to make sure that they pay for their crime. Rest easy and go with the faith you lived with.”

Those words spoken, I lowered the trunk and stole away from the white man’s home, luckier to be a poor black man in America than Axel Bowers had been with his white skin and all his wealth.

I DROVE DOWN Telegraph into Oakland and the black part of town. There I found a motel called Sleepy Time Inn. It was set on a hillside, with the small stucco rooms stacked like box stairs for some giant leading up toward the sky.

Melba, the night clerk, gave me the top room for eighteen dollars in cash. They didn’t take credit cards at Sleepy Time. When I looked at the cash I remembered that enameled pin in Bonnie’s purse. For a moment I couldn’t hear what Melba was saying. I could see her mouth moving. She was a short woman with skin that was actually black. But the rest of her features were more Caucasian than Negroid. Thin lips and round eyes, hair that had been straightened and a Roman nose.

“…parties in the rooms,” she was saying.

“What?”

“We don’t want any carousing or parties in the rooms,” she repeated. “You can have a guest but these rooms are residential. We don’t want any loud crowds.”

“Only noise I make is snoring,” I said.

She smiled, indicating that she believed me. That simple gesture almost brought me to tears.

THE TELEVISION had a coin slot attached to it. It cost a quarter per hour to watch. If Feather was there with me she’d be begging for quarters to see her shows and to get grape soda from the machine down below. I put in a coin and switched channels until I came across
Gigantor,
her favorite afternoon cartoon. Letting the cartoon play, it felt a little like she was there with me.

That calmed me down enough to think about the mess I’d fallen into.

The man Robert E. Lee was looking for had been murdered. The initials on the empty briefcase in his room might have belonged to him or to somebody related to him. But then again, maybe he’d switched briefcases after removing the papers from the one Lee said he’d stolen.

At any other time I would have taken the fifteen hundred and gone home to Bonnie. But there was no more going home for me, and even if there was, Feather needed nearer to thirty-five thousand than fifteen hundred.

I couldn’t call Lee. He might pull me off the case if he knew Axel was dead. And there was still Cinnamon—Philomena—to find. Maybe she knew where the papers were. I had to have those papers, because ten thousand dollars was a hard nut to crack.

I read one of the letters I’d taken from Axel’s bureau. It was typewritten under the business heading of Haffernon, Schmidt, Tourneau and Bowers—a legal firm in San Francisco.

Dear Axel:
I have read your letter of February 12 and I must say that I find it intriguing. As far as I know, your father had no business dealings in Cairo during the period you indicated and this firm certainly has not. Of course, I’m not aware of all your father’s personal business dealings. Each of the partners had his own portfolio from before the formation of our investment group. But I must say that your fears seem far-fetched, and even if they weren’t, Arthur is dead. How can an inquiry of this sort have any productive outcome? Only your family, it seems, will have a price to pay.
At any rate, I have no information to bring to bear on the matter of the briefcase you got from his safe-deposit box. Call me if you have any further questions, and please consider your actions before rushing into anything.
Yours truly,
Leonard Haffernon, Esq.

Something happened with Axel’s father, something that could still cause grief for the son and maybe others. Maybe Haffernon knew something about it. Maybe he killed Axel because of it.

Lee had told me that Axel had stolen a briefcase, but this letter indicated that he received it legally. It could have been another case…

The handwritten letter was a different temperature. There was no heading.

Really, Axel. I can see no reason for you to follow this line of questioning. Your father is dead. Anyone that had anything to do with this matter is either dead or so old that it doesn’t make any difference. You cannot judge them. You don’t know how it was back then. Think of your law offices in San Francisco. Think of the good you have done, will be able to do. Don’t throw it all away over something that’s done and gone. Think of your own generation. I’m begging you. Please do not bring these ugly matters to light.
N.

Whoever N was, he or she had something to hide. And that something was about to be exposed to the world by Axel Bowers.

If I had had a good feeling about Bobby Lee I would have taken the letters and reconnaissance to him. But we didn’t like each other and I couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t take what I gave him and cut me out of my bonus. My second choice was to tell Saul but he would have been torn in allegiance between me and the Civil War buff. No. I had to go this one alone for a while longer.

Later that evening I was asking the operator to make a collect call to a Webster exchange in West Los Angeles.

“Hello?” Bonnie said into my ear.