“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.”
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“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.
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“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.
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In 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.”
I reached down into her panties and she moaned.
But when I felt her cold hand on my erection I realized that it wasn’t Bonnie. It wasn’t Bonnie because it wasn’t a dream and Bonnie was in Switzerland.
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Who was in my bed? Nobody. Another deeply felt kiss. I was in a motel room . . . with Cinnamon Cargill.
I raised up, pushing her away as I did so. Her T-shirt was up to her midriff. My erection was standing straighter than it had in some while. She reached out and stroked it lightly with two fingers. The groan came from my lips against my will.
I stood up, pushed the urgent cock back behind the zipper.
Cinnamon sat up and smiled.
“I was scared,” she explained. “I just lay down next to you and went to sleep.”
What could I say?
“I guess you must have kissed me in your sleep,” she said. “It was nice.”
“Yeah.” I wondered if it was me who cast the first kiss. “I’m sorry about that.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. It’s natural. I have protection.”
Even her sexy nonchalance was imperial.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked her. “You left with nothing.”
“I always have a backup in my wallet,” she said, sounding decidedly like a man.
“Let’s go get some breakfast,” I said.
A shadow of disappointment darkened her features for a moment and then she pulled on her pants, which she’d dropped on the floor next to my bed.
i w a n t e d b r e a k f a s t even though it was two in the afternoon. Philomena and I had slept for almost eight hours before we started making out.
Brenda’s Burgers had everything I needed: an all-day breakfast menu and a booth at the back of her tiny diner where you could talk without being overheard. It was a small restaurant 1 6 7
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with pitted floors and mismatched furniture. The cook and waiter was a dark-skinned mustachioed man with mistrustful eyes.
I ordered fried ham and buttermilk biscuits. Philomena wanted a steak with collard greens, mashed potatoes, and salad.
“I thought you were vegetarian?” I asked.
“Need to keep up my strength,” she replied.
I was a little off because the erection hadn’t gone all the way down. My heart was thrumming and every time she smiled I wanted to suggest going back to her room and finishing off what we had started.
“What’s wrong?” she asked me.
“Nuthin’. Why you ask?”
“You seem kind of nervous.”
“This is just the way I am,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Tell me about the man in the snakeskin jacket,” I said, watching the cook eye us from behind the kitchen window.
“He came to Axel’s house one day last week. I was in the hallway that led to the bedroom but I could see them through a crack in the double doors.”
“They didn’t know you were there?”
“Axel knew b
ut the other guy didn’t. He told Axel that he needed the papers his father left. Axel told him that they’d been given to a third party who would make them public upon his death.”
Watching her, listening to her story made me sweat. Maybe it was the heat from the kitchen but I didn’t think so. Neither did I feel my temperature came from anything having to do with sex.
“Did he threaten Axel?”
“Yes. He said, ‘A man can get hurt if he doesn’t know when to fold.’ ”
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“He’s right about that,” I said, wanting to stave off the details of Axel’s murder.
“He was a frightening man. Axel was scared but he stood up to him.”
“What happened then?”
“The man left.”
“He didn’t . . . hurt Axel?”
“No. But he put the fear of God into him. He told me to get out of there, not even to go home. He gave me the money he had in his pocket and said to go down to L.A. until he figured out what to do.”
“Why you?” I asked. “He wasn’t after you.”
“Axel and I were close.” There was a brazen look on Cinnamon’s face, as if she were daring me to question her choice of lovers.
“So you have the papers,” I said.
She didn’t deny it.
“Those papers can get you killed,” I said.
“I’ve been trying to call Axel for days,” she said, agreeing with me in her tone. “I called his cousin but Harmon hadn’t heard from him and there’s no answer at his house.”
“How about his office?”
“He never tells them anything.”
“How many people know where you are now?” I asked.
“No one.”
“What about Lena?”
“I call her every other day or so but I don’t tell her where I am.”
“And Raphael?”
That was the first time I’d surprised her.
“How did you . . . ?”
“I’m a real live detective, honey. Finding out things is what I do.”
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“No. I mean I’ve talked to Rafe but I didn’t tell him where I was staying.”
“Have you seen anybody you know or have they seen you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you willing to trade those papers for your life?” I asked.
“Axel made me promise to turn them in if anything happened,” she said.
“Axel’s dead,” I said.
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes I do and you know it too,” I told her. “This is big money here. You learn more outta this than five PhDs at Harvard could ever tell ya. Axel messed with some big men’s money and now he’s dead. If you wanna live you had better think straight.”
“I . . . I have to think about this. I should at least try to find Axel once more.”
I didn’t want to implicate myself in the particulars of Axel’s demise. So I reached into my pocket and peeled off five of Mouse’s twenties. I palmed the wad and handed it to her under the table. At first she thought I was trying to hold her hand. She clutched at my fingers and then felt the bills.
“What’s this?”
“Money. Pay for your room and some food. But don’t go out much. Try to hide your face if you do. You got my office number too?”
She nodded.
“I’ll call you tonight or at the latest tomorrow morning. You got to decide though, honey.”
She nodded. “You want to come back to the room with me?”
“I’ll walk you but then I got to get goin’. Got to get a bead on how we get you outta this jam.”
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Her shoulder heaved again, saying that a roll in the hay would have been nice but okay.
I knew she was just afraid to be alone.
i m a d e i t to my office a little bit before four.
There were three messages on the machine. The first was from Feather.
“Hi, Daddy. Me an’ Bonnie got here after a loooong time on three airplanes. Now I’m in a house on a lake but tomorrow they’re gonna take me to the clinic. I met the doctor and he was real nice but he talks funny. I miss you, Daddy, and I wish you would come and see me soon. . . . Oh yeah, an’ Bonnie says that she misses you too.”
I turned off the machine for a while after that. In my mind every phrase she used turned over and over. Bonnie saying that she missed me, the doctor’s accent. She sounded happy, not like a dying girl at all.
I was so distracted by these thoughts that I didn’t hear him open the door. I looked up on instinct and he was standing there, not six feet from where I sat head in hands.
He was a white man, slender and tall, wearing dark green slacks and a jacket of tan and brown scales. His hat was also dark green, with a small brim. His skin was olive-colored and his pale eyes seemed to have no color at all.
“Ezekiel Rawlins?”
“Who’re you?”
“Are you Ezekiel Rawlins?”
“Who the fuck are you?”
There was a moment there for us to fight. He was peeved at me not answering his question. I was mad at myself for not 1 7 1
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hearing him open the door. Or maybe I hadn’t closed it behind me. Either way I was an idiot.
But then Snakeskin smiled.
“Joe Cicero,” he said. “I’m a private operative too.”
“Detective?”
“Not exactly.” His smile had no humor in it.
“What do you want?”
“Are you Ezekiel Rawlins?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I’m looking for a girl.”
“Try down on Avalon near Florence. There’s a cathouse behind the Laundromat.”
“Philomena Cargill.”
“Never heard of her.”
“Oh yeah. You have. You talked to her and now I need to do the same thing.”
I remembered the first day I opened the office two years earlier. I’d had a little party to celebrate the opening. All of my friends, the ones who were still alive, had come. Mouse was there drinking and eating onion dip that Bonnie’d made. He waited until everyone else had gone before handing me a paper bag that held a pistol, some chicken wire, and a few U-shaped tacks.
“Let’s put this suckah in,” he said.
“In what?”
“Under the desk, fool. You know you cain’t be workin’ wit’
these niggahs down here without havin’ a edge. Shit, some mothahfuckah come in here all mad or vengeful an’ there you are without a pot to piss in. No, brothah, we gotta put this here gun undah yo’ desk so that when the shit hit the fan at least you got a even chance.”
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I slid my hand around the smooth butt of the .25 caliber gift.
“I don’t know no Cargill,” I said. “Who says that I do?”
Cicero made an easy move with his hand and I came out with my gun. I pointed it at his head just in case he was wearing something bulletproof on his chassis.
The threat just made him smile.
“Nervous aren’t you, son?” he said. “Well . . . you should be.”
“Who said I know this woman?”
“You have twenty-four hours, Mr. Rawlins,” he replied.
“Twenty-four or things will get bad.”
“Do you see this gun?” I asked him.
He grinned and said, “Family man like you has to think about his liabilities. Me, I’m just a soldier. Knock one down and two take his place. But you — you have Feather and Jesus and whats-hername, Bonnie, yeah Bonnie, to think about.”
With that he turned and walked out the door.
I’d met men with eyes like his before — killers, every one of them. I knew that his threats were serious. I would have shot him if I could have gotten away with it. But my floor ha
d five other tenants and not one of them would have lied to save my ass.
Two minutes after Joe Cicero walked out the door I went to the hall to make sure that he was gone. I checked both stairwells and then made sure to lock my own door behind me.
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The second phone message was from Mouse.
“I called it off, Easy,” he said in a subdued voice. “I figure you don’t want it bad enough an’ I already got a business t’
run. Call me when you get a chance.”
The last message was from Maya Adamant.
“Mr. Rawlins, Mr. Lee is willing to come to an agreement about your information. And where he cannot see paying you the full amount, he’s willing to compromise. Call me at my home number.”
Instead I called the harbormaster at the Catalina marina and left a message for my son. Then the international operator connected me with a number Bonnie had left.
“Hello?” a man said. His voice was very sophisticated and European.
“Bonnie Shay,” I uttered in the same muted tones that Mouse had used.
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“Miss Shay is not in at the moment. Is there a message?”
I almost hung up the phone. If I were a younger man I would have.
“Could you write this down please?” I asked Joguye Cham.
“Hold a minute,” he said. Then, after a moment, he said,
“Go on.”
“Tell her that there’s a problem at the house. It could be dangerous. Tell her not to go there before calling EttaMae. And say that this has nothing to do with our talk before she left. It’s business and it’s serious.”
“I have it,” he said and then he read it back to me. He got every word. His voice had taken on an element of concern.
I disconnected the line and took a deep breath. That was all the energy I could expend on Bonnie and Joguye. I didn’t have time to act the fool.
I dialed another number.
“Saul Lynx investigations,” a woman’s voice answered.
It was Saul’s business line in his home.
“Doreen?”
“Hi, Easy. How’re you?”
“If blessings were pennies I wouldn’t even be able to buy one stick of gum.”
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