Cinnamon Kiss (16 page)

“You can’t kill me,” she said. “I’m better than you are. I’m still alive.”

The phone rang again.

I returned to the brass elephant to tell Axel something but he was back in his hole, crushed and debased.

“My hips were my downfall,” he said.

“You can make it,” I told him. “Lots of people live in wheelchairs.”

“I will not be a cripple.”

The phone rang and he disappeared.

I opened my eyes.
The Mummy,
with Boris Karloff, was playing on TV. Coltrane had not been replaced, and every light in the house was still on.

I wondered about the coincidence of a movie about a corpse rising from the dead in Egypt and Axel’s trips to that country.

The phone rang.

“Somebody must really wanna talk,” I said to myself, thinking that the phone must have rung nearly a dozen times.

I went to the podium and picked up the receiver.

“Hello.”

“Why are you looking for me?” a woman’s voice asked.

“Philomena? Is that you?”

“I asked you a question.”

My lips felt numb. Coltrane hit a discordant note.

“I thought you were dead,” I said. “You didn’t even take any underwear as far as I could tell. What woman leaves without a change of underwear?”

“I am alive,” she said. “So you can stop looking for me.”

“I’m not lookin’ for you, honey. It’s your boyfriend Axel an’ them papers he stole.”

“Axel’s gone.”

“Dead?”

“Who said anything about dead? He’s gone. Left the country.”

“Just up and left his house without tellin’ anybody? Not even Dream Dog?”

“Who are you working for, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Call me Easy.”

“Who are you working for?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“A man I know came to me with fifteen hundred dollars and said that another man, up in Frisco, was willing to pay that and more for locating Axel Bowers. That man said he was working for somebody else but he didn’t tell me who. After I looked around I found out that you and Axel were friends, that you disappeared too. So here I am with you on the phone, just a breath away.”

“You weren’t that far wrong about me, Easy,” the woman called Cinnamon said.

“What exactly was I right about?”

“I think there is a man trying to kill me. A man who wants the papers that Axel has.”

“What’s this man’s name?” I asked, made brave by the anonymity of the phone lines.

“I don’t know his name. He’s a white man with dead eyes.”

“He wear a snakeskin jacket?” I asked on a hunch.

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“Hiding,” she said. “Safe.”

“I’ll come to you and we’ll try and work this thing out.”

“No. I don’t want your help. What I want is for you to stop looking for me.”

“Nothing would make me happier than to let this drop, but I’m in it now. All the way in it,” I said, thinking about Axel’s hip bones. “So either we get together or I talk to the man pays my salary.”

“He’s probably the one trying to have me killed.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Axel told me. He said that people would kill for those papers. Then that man …he…”

“He what?”

She hung up the phone.

I held on to the receiver for a full minute at least. Sitting there I thought again about my dream, about the corpse trying to resuscitate himself. Philomena had described a killer who had been at my doorstep. All of a sudden the prospect of robbing an armored car delivery didn’t seem so dangerous.

I had a good laugh then. There I was all alone in the night with killers and thieves milling outside in the darkness.

I rooted my .38 out of the closet and made sure that it was loaded. The Luger was a fine gun but I had no idea how old its ammo was. I went around the house turning off lights.

In bed I was overcome by a feeling of giddiness. I felt as if I had just missed a fatal accident by a few inches. In a little while Bonnie’s infidelity and Feather’s dire illness would return to disturb my rest, but right then I was at peace in my bed, all alone and safe.

Then the phone rang.

I had to answer it. It might be Bonnie. It might be my little girl wanting me to tell her that things would be fine. It could be Mouse or Saul or Maya Adamant. But I knew that it wasn’t any of them.

“Hello.”

“I’m at the Pixie Inn on Slauson,” she said. “But I’m very tired. Can you come in the morning?”

“What’s the room number?”

“Six.”

“What size dress you wear?” I asked.

“Two,” she said. “Why?”

“I’ll see you at seven.”

I hung up and wondered at the mathematics of my mind. Why had I agreed to go to her when I’d just been thankful for a peaceful heist?

“’Cause you the son of a fool and the father of nothing,” the voice that had abandoned me for so many years said.

I
couldn’t sleep anymore that night. At four I got up and started cooking. First I fried three strips of bacon. I cracked two eggs and dropped them into the bacon fat, then I covered one slice of whole wheat bread with yellow mustard and another one with mayonnaise. I grated orange cheddar on the eggs after I flipped them, put the lid on the frying pan, and turned off the gas flame. I made a strong brew of coffee, which I poured into a two-quart thermos. Then I made the eggs and bacon into a sandwich that I wrapped in wax paper.

Riding down Slauson at five-fifteen with the brown paper bag next to me and Johnnie Walker in the backseat, I tried to come up with some kind of plan. I considered Maya and Lee, dead Axel and scared Cinnamon—and the man in the snakeskin jacket. There was no sense to it; no goal to work toward except making enough money to pay for Feather’s hospital bill.

I parked across the street from the motel. It was of a modern design, three stories high, with doors that opened to unenclosed platforms. Number 6 was on the ground floor. Its door opened onto the parking lot. I supposed that Philomena wanted to be able to jump out the back window if need be.

I sat in my car wondering what I should ask the girl.

What should I tell her? Should it be truth?

When my Timex read six-eighteen the door of number 6 opened. A tall woman wearing dark slacks and a long white T-shirt came out. Even from that distance I could see that she was braless and barefoot. Her skin had a reddish hue and her hair was long and straightened.

She walked to the soda machine near the motel office, put in her coins, and then bent down to get the soda that fell out. The streets were so quiet that I heard the jumbling glass.

She walked back to the door, looked around, then went inside.

A minute later I was walking toward her door.

I listened for a moment. There was no sound. I knocked. Still no sound. I knocked again. Then I heard a shushing sound like the slide of a window.

“It’s me, Philomena,” I said loudly. “Easy Rawlins.”

It only took her half a minute to come to the door and open it.

Five nine with chiseled features and big, dramatic eyes, that was Philomena Cargill. Her skin was indeed cinnamon red. Lena’s photograph of her had faithfully recorded the face but it hadn’t given even a hint of her beauty.

I held out the paper bag.

“What’s this?”

“An egg sandwich an’ coffee,” I said.

While she didn’t actually grab the bag she did take it with eager hands.

She went to one of the two single beds and sat with the sack on her lap. After closing the door I put the cloth bag I’d brought on the bed across from her and sat next to it.

There were three lamps in the room. They were all on but the light was dim at best.

Philomena tore open the sandwich and took a big bite out of it.

“I’m a vegetarian usually,” she said with her mouth full, “but this bacon is good.”

While she ate I poured her a plastic cup full of coffee.

“I put milk in it,” I said as she took the cup from me.

“I don’t care if you put vinegar in it. I need this. I left my house with only forty dollars in my purse. It’s all gone now.”

She didn’t speak again until the cup was drained and the sandwich was gone.

“What’s in the other bag?” she asked. I believe she was hoping for another sandwich.

“Two dresses, some panties, and tennis shoes.”

She came to sit on the other side of the bag, taking out the clothes and examining them with an expert feminine eye.

“The dress is perfect,” she said. “And the shoes’ll do. Where’d you get these?”

“My son’s girlfriend left them. She’s a skinny thing too.”

When Cinnamon smiled at me I understood the danger she represented. She was more than pretty or lovely or even beautiful. There was something regal about her. I almost felt like bowing to show her how much I appreciated the largesse of her smile.

“They say that Hitler was a vegetarian too,” I said and the smile shriveled on her lips.

“So what?”

“Why don’t you tell me, Philomena?”

After regarding me for a moment she said, “Why should I trust you?”

“Because I’m on your side,” I said. “I don’t want any harm coming to you and I’ll work to see that no one else hurts you either.”

“I don’t know any of that.”

“Sure you do,” I said. “You talked to Lena about me. She gave you my number. She told you that I’ve traded tough favors down around here for nearly twenty years.”

“She also said that she’s heard that people you’ve helped have wound up hurt and even dead sometimes.”

“That might be, but any girl bein’ followed by a snakeskin killer got to expect some danger,” I countered. “I’d be a fool if I told you everything’ll work out fine and you’d be a fool to believe it. But if you all mixed up with murder then you need somebody like me. It don’t matter that you got a business degree from UC Berkeley and a boyfriend got Paul Klee paintings hangin’ on his walls. If somethin’ goes wrong you the first one they gonna look at. An’ if a white killer wanna kill somebody a black woman will be the first on his list. ’Cause you know the cops will ask if you had a boyfriend they could pin it on, an’ if you don’t they’ll call you a whore and close the book.”

Philomena listened very carefully to my speech. Her royal visage made me feel like some kind of minister to the crown.

“What do want from me?” she asked.

“What papers did Axel steal?”

“He didn’t steal anything. He found those papers in a safe-deposit box his father had. He kept them with memorabilia he had from Germany. When Mr. Bowers died, he left the key to Axel.”

“If that’s so then why did Haffernon tell the man who hired me that Axel stole the papers from him?”

“Who hired you?”

I told her about Robert Lee and his Amazon assistant. She had never heard of either one.

“Haffernon and Mr. Bowers and another man were partners before the war. They worked in chemicals,” Philomena said.

“Who was their partner?”

“A man named Tourneau, Rega Tourneau. They did some bad things, illegal things during the war.”

“What kind of things?”

“Treason.”

“No.” I was still a good American back in those days. It was almost impossible for me to believe that American businessmen would betray the country that had made them rich.

“The papers are Swiss bearer bonds issued in 1943 for work done by the Karnak Chemical Company in Cairo,” Philomena said. “And even though the bonds themselves are only endorsed by the banks there’s a letter from top Nazi officials that details the expectations that the Nazis had of Karnak.”

“Whoa. And Axel wanted to cash the bonds?”

“No. He didn’t know what he wanted exactly, but he knew that something should be done to make amends for his father’s sins.”

“But Haffernon doesn’t want to pay the price,” I said. “What about this Tourneau guy?”

“I don’t know about him. Axel just said that he’s out of it.”

“Dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did his father’s company do for the Nazis?” I asked.

“They developed special kinds of explosives that the Germans used for construction in a few of their slave labor camps.”

“And what do you get outta all’a this?” I asked.

“Me? I was just helping him.”

“No. I don’t hardly know you at all, girl, but I do know that you look out for number one. What’s Axel gonna do for you?”

Cinnamon let her left shoulder rise, ceding a point that was hardly worth the effort.

“He had friends in business. He was going to set me in a job somewhere. But he would have done that even if I hadn’t tried to help.”

I was suddenly aware of a slight dizziness.

“But it didn’t hurt,” I said. “You could work all you wanted.”

“What?” she asked.

I realized that the last part of what I said didn’t make sense.

I blinked, finding it hard to open my eyes again.

I shook my head but the cobwebs went nowhere.

“Philomena.”

“Yes?”

“Would you mind if I just laid out here a minute? I haven’t got much sleep lookin’ for you and I’m tired. Real tired.”

Her smile was a thing to behold.

“Maybe I could rest too,” she said. “I’ve been so scared alone in this room.”

“Let’s get a short nap and then we can finish talkin’ in a while.” I lay back on the bed as I spoke.

She said something. It seemed like a really long sentence but I couldn’t make out the words. I closed my eyes.

“Uh-huh,” I said out of courtesy and then I was asleep.

I
n the dream I was kissing Bonnie. She whispered something sweet and kissed my forehead, then my lips. I tried to hold myself back, to tell her how angry I was. But every time her lips touched mine my mouth opened and her tongue washed away all my angry words.

“I need you,” she told me and I had to strain to hold back the tears.

She pressed her body against mine. I held her so tight that she pulled away for a moment, but then she was kissing me again.

“Thank God,” I whispered. “Thank God.”