Cinnamon Kiss (9 page)

“Collect call to anyone from Easy,” the operator said quickly as if she feared that I might slip a message past her and hang up.

“I’ll accept, operator. Easy?”

I tried to speak but couldn’t manage to raise the volume in my lungs.

“Easy, is that you?”

“Yeah,” I said, just a whisper.

“What’s wrong?”

“Tired,” I said. “Just tired. How’s Feather?”

“She sat up for a while and watched
Gigantor
this afternoon,” Bonnie said hopefully, her voice full of love. “She’s been trying to stay awake until you called.”

I had to exert extraordinary self-control not to put my fist through the wall.

“Did you get the job?” she asked.

“Yeah, yeah. I got it all right. There’s a few snags but I think I can work ’em if I try.”

“I’m so happy,” she said. It sounded as if she really meant it. “When you went out to meet with Raymond I was afraid that you’d do something you’d regret.”

I laughed. I was filled with regrets.

“What’s wrong, Easy?”

I couldn’t tell her. My whole life I’d walked softly around difficulties when I knew my best defense was to keep quiet. I needed Bonnie to save my little girl. Nothing I felt could get in the way of that. I had to maintain a civil bearing. I had to keep her on my side.

“I’m just tired, baby,” I said. “This case is gonna be a ball-breaker. Nobody I can trust out here.”

“You can trust me, Easy.”

“I know, baby,” I lied. “I know. Is Feather still awake?”

“You bet,” Bonnie said.

I had installed a long cord on the telephone so that the receiver could reach into Feather’s room. I heard the shushing sounds of Bonnie moving through the rooms and then her voice gently talking to Feather.

“Daddy?” she whispered into the line.

“Hi, babygirl. How you doin’?”

“Fine. When you comin’ home, Daddy?”

“Tomorrow sometime, honey. Probably just before you go to sleep.”

“I dreamed that I was lookin’ for you, Daddy, but you was gone and so was Juice. I was all alone in a tiny little house and there wasn’t a TV or phone or nothing.”

“That was just a dream, baby. Just a dream. You got a big house and lots of people who love you. Love you.” I had to say the words twice.

“I know,” she said. “But the dream scared me and I thought that you might really be gone.”

“I’m right here, honey. I’m comin’ home tomorrow. You can count on that.”

The phone made a weightless noise and Bonnie was on the line again.

“She’s tired, Easy. Almost asleep now that she’s talked to you.”

“I better be goin’,” I said.

“Did you want to talk about the job?” Bonnie asked.

“I’m beat. I better get to bed,” I said.

Just before I took the receiver from my ear I heard Bonnie say, “Oh.”

T
he Haight, as it came to be called, was teeming with hippie life. But this wasn’t like Derby. Most of the people on that Berkeley block still had one foot in real life at a job or the university. But the majority of the people down along Haight had completely dropped out. There was more dirt here, but that’s not what made things different. Here you could distinguish different kinds of hippies. There were the clean-cut ones who washed their hair and ironed their hippie frocks. There were the dirty bearded ones on Harley-Davidson motorcycles. There were the drug users, the angry ones. There were the young (very young) runaways who had come here to blend in behind the free love philosophy. Bright colors and all that hair is what I remember mainly.

A young man wearing only a loincloth stood in the middle of a busy intersection holding up a sign that read END THE WAR. Nobody paid much attention to him. Cars drove around him.

“Hey, mister, you got some spare change?” a lovely young raven-haired girl asked me. She wore a purple dress that barely made it to her thighs.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m strapped.”

“That’s cool,” she replied and walked on.

Psychedelic posters for concerts were plastered to walls. Here and there brave knots of tourists walked through, marveling at the counterculture they’d discovered.

I was reminded of a day when a mortar shell in the ammunition hut of our base camp in northern Italy exploded for no apparent reason. No one was killed but a shock ran through the whole company. All of a sudden whatever we had been doing or thinking, wherever we had been going, was forgotten. One man started laughing uncontrollably, another went to the mess tent and wrote a letter to his mother. I kept noticing things that I’d never seen before. For instance, the hand-painted sign above the infirmary read HOSPItAL, all in capital letters except for the
t
. That one character was in lower case. I had seen that sign a thousand times but only after the explosion did I really look at it.

The Haight was another kind of explosion, a stunning surge of intuition that broke down all the ways you thought life had to be. In other circumstances I might have stayed around for a while and talked to the people, trying to figure out how they got there.

But I didn’t have the time to wander and explore.

I’d gotten the address of the People’s Legal Aid Center from the information operator. It had been a storefront at one time where a family named Gnocci sold fresh vegetables. There wasn’t even a door, just a heavy canvas curtain that the grocer raised when he was open for business.

The store was open and three desks sat there in the recess. Two professional women and one man talked to their clients. The man, who was white with short hair, wore a dark suit with a white shirt and a slate-blue tie. He was talking to a fat hippie mama who had a babe in arms and a small boy and girl clutching the hem of her Indian printed dress.

“They’re evicting me,” the woman was saying in a white Texan drawl I knew and feared. “What they expect me to do with these kids? Live in the street?”

“What is the landlord’s name, Miss Braxton?” the street lawyer asked.

“Shit,” she said and the little girl giggled.

At that moment the boy decided to run across the sidewalk, headed for the street.

“Aldous!” the hippie mama yelled, reaching out unsuccessfully for the boy.

I bent down on reflex, scooping the child up in my arms as I had done hundreds of times with Feather when she was smaller, and with Jesus before that.

“Thank you, mister. Thank you,” the mother was saying. She had lifted her bulk from the lawyer’s folding chair and was now taking the grinning boy from my arms. I could see in his face that he wasn’t what other Texans would call a white child.

The woman smiled at me and patted my forearm.

“Thank you,” she said again.

Her looking into my eyes with such deep gratitude was to be the defining moment in my hippie experience. Her gaze held no fear or condescension, even though her accent meant that she had to have been raised among a people who held themselves apart from mine. She didn’t want to give me a tip but only to touch me.

I knew that if I had been twenty years younger, I would have been a hippie too.

“May I help you?” a woman’s voice asked.

She was of medium height with a more or less normal frame, but somewhere in the mix there must have been a Teutonic Valkyrie because she had the figure of a Norse fertility goddess. Her eyes were a deep ocean blue and though her face was not particularly attractive there was something otherworldly about it. As far as clothes were concerned she was conservatively dressed in a cranberry dress that went down below her knees and wore a cream-colored woolen jacket over that. There was a silver strand around her neck from which hung a largish pearl with a dark nacre hue. Her glasses were framed in white.

All in all she was a Poindexter built like Jayne Mansfield.

“Hi. My name is Ezekiel P. Rawlins.” I held out a hand.

A big grin came across her stern face but somehow the mirth didn’t make it to her eyes. She shook my hand.

“How can I help you?”

“I’m a private detective from down in L.A.,” I said. “I’ve been hired to find a woman named Philomena Cargill …by her family.”

“Cinnamon,” the woman said without hesitation. “Axel’s friend.”

“That’s Axel Bowers?”

“Yes. He’s my partner here.”

She looked around the storefront. I did too.

“Not a very lucrative business,” I speculated.

The woman laughed. It was a real laugh.

“That depends on what you see as profit, Mr. Rawlins. Axel and I are committed to helping the poor people of this society get a fair shake from the legal system.”

“You’re both lawyers?”

“Yes,” she said. “I got my degree from UCLA and Axel got his across the Bay in Berkeley. I worked for the state for a while but I didn’t feel very good about that. When Axel asked me to join him I jumped at the chance.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Oh. Excuse my manners. My name is Cynthia Aubec.”

“French?”

“I was born in Canada,” she said. “Montreal.”

“Have you seen your partner lately?” I asked.

“Come on in,” she replied.

She turned to go through another canvas flap, this one standing as a door to the back room of the defunct grocery.

There were two desks at opposite ends of the long room we entered. It was gloomy in there, and the floors had sawdust on them as if it were still a vegetable stand.

“We keep sawdust on the floor because the garage next door sometimes uses too much water and it seeps under the wall on our floor,” she said, noticing my inspection.

“I see.”

“Have a seat.”

She switched on a desk lamp and I was gone from the hippie world of Haight Street. I wasn’t in modern America at all. Cynthia Aubec, who was French Canadian but had no accent, lived earlier in the century, walking on sawdust and working for the poor.

“I haven’t seen Axel for over a week,” she said, looking directly into my gaze.

“Where is he?”

“He said that he was going to Algeria but I can never be sure.”

“Algeria? I met a guy who told me that Axel was all over the world. Egypt, Paris, Berlin …Now you tell me he’s in Algeria. There’s got to be some money somewhere.”

“Axel’s family supports this office. They’re quite wealthy. Actually his parents are dead. Now I guess it’s Axel’s money that runs our firm. But it was his father who gave us our start.” She was still looking at me. In this light she was more Mansfield than Poindexter.

“Do you know when he might be back?”

“No. Why? I thought you were looking for Cinnamon.”

“Well …the way I hear it Philomena and Axel had a thing going on. Actually that’s why I’m here.”

“I don’t understand,” she said with a smile that was far away from Axel and Philomena.

“Philomena’s parents are racists,” I explained, “not like you and me. They don’t think that blacks and whites should be mixing. Well …they told Philomena that she was out of the family because of the relationship she had with your partner, but now that she hasn’t called in over two months they’re having second thoughts. She won’t talk to them and so they hired me to come make their case.”

“And you’re really a private detective?” she asked, cocking one eyebrow.

I took out my wallet and handed her the license. I hadn’t shown it to Lee out of spite. She glanced at it but I could see that she stopped to read the name and identify the photo.

“Why don’t you just go to Cinnamon’s apartment?” Cynthia suggested.

“I was told that she was living with Axel on Derby. I went there but no one was around.”

“I have an address for her,” Cynthia told me. Then she hesitated. “You aren’t lying to me are you?”

“What would I have to lie about?”

“I wouldn’t know.” Her smile was suggestive but her eyes had not yet decided upon the nature of the proposal.

“No ma’am,” I said. “I just need to find Philomena and tell her that her parents are willing to accept her as she is.”

Cynthia took out a sheet of paper and scrawled an address in very large characters, taking up the whole page.

“This is her address,” she said, handing me the leaf. “I live in Daly City. Do you know the Bay Area, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Not very well.”

“I’ll put my number on the back. Maybe if you’re free for dinner I could show you around. I mean—as long as you’re in town.”

Yes sir. Twenty years younger and I’d have bushy hair down to my knees.

P
hilomena’s apartment was on Avery Street, at Post, in the Fillmore District, on the fourth floor of an old brick building that had been christened The Opal Shrine. A sign above the front door told me that there were apartments available and that I could inquire at apartment 1a. There was no elevator so I climbed to the fourth floor to knock at the door of apartment 4e, the number given me by Cynthia Aubec.

There was no answer so I went back down to the first floor and tried the super’s door.

He was a coffee-brown man with hair that might have been dyed cotton. He was smiling when he opened the door, a cloud of marijuana smoke attending him.

“Yes sir?” he said with a sly grin. “What can I do for you?”

“Apartment four-e.”

“Fo’ty fi’e a mont’, gas an’ ’lectric not included. Got to clean it out yo’ own self an’ it’s a extra ten for dogs. You can have a cat for free.” He smiled again and I couldn’t help but like him.

“I think I used to know a girl lived there. Cindy, Cinnamon …somethin’.”

“Cinnamon,” he said, still grinning like a coyote. “That girl had a butt on her. An’ from what I hear she knew how to use it too.”

“She move?”

“Gone’s more like it,” he said. “First’a the mont’ came and the rent wasn’t in my box. She ain’t come back. I’ont know where she is.”

“You call the cops?”

“Are you crazy? Cops? The on’y reason you call a cop is if you white or already behind bars.”

I did like him.

“Can I see it?” I asked.

He reached over to his left, next to the door, and produced a brass key tethered to a multicolored flat string.