Here we entered into a wide hallway. The floors were bright ash and the doors along the way were too. These doors opened into anterooms where men and women assistants talked and typed and wrote. Beyond each assistant was a closed door behind which, I imagined, lawyers talked and typed and wrote.
At the end of the hall were large glass doors that we went through.
Haffernon had three female assistants. One, a buxom forty-year-old with horn-rimmed glasses and a flouncy full-length dress, came up to him reading from a clipboard.
“The Clarks had to reschedule for Friday, sir. He’s had an emergency dental problem. He says that he’ll need to rest after that.”
“Fine,” Haffernon said. “Call my wife and tell her that I will be coming to the opera after all.”
“Yes sir,” the woman said. “Mr. Phillipo decided to leave the country. His company will settle.”
“Good, Dina. I can’t be interrupted for anything except family.”
“Yes sir.”
She opened a door behind the three desks and Haffernon stepped in. In passing I caught the assistant’s eye and gave her a quick nod. She smiled at me and let her head drift to the side, letting me know that the counterculture had infiltrated every pore of the city.
h a f f e r n o n h a d a b i g d e s k under a picture window but he took me into a corner where he had a rose-colored couch with a matching stuffed chair. He took the chair and waved me onto the sofa.
“What is your business with me, Mr. Rawlins?” he asked.
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I hesitated, relishing the fact that I had this man by the short hairs. I knew this because he had told Dina not to bother him for anything but the blood of blood. When powerful white men like that make time for you there’s something serious going on.
“What problem did Axel Bowers come to you with?” I asked.
“Who are you, Mr. Rawlins?”
“Private detective from down in L.A.,” I said, feeling somehow like a fraud but knowing I was not.
“And what do Axel’s . . . problems, as you call them, have to do with your client?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m looking for Axel and your name popped up. Have you seen Mr. Bowers lately?”
“Who are you working for?”
“Confidential,” I said with the apology in my face.
“You walk in here, ask me about the son of one of my best friends and business associates, and refuse to tell me who wants to know?”
“I’m looking for a woman named Philomena Cargill,” I said.
“She’s a black woman, lover of your friend’s son. He’s gone. She’s gone. It came to my attention that you and he were in negotia-tions about something that had to do with his father. I figured that if he was off looking into that problem that you might know where he was. He, in turn, might know about Philomena.”
Haffernon sat back in his chair and clasped his hands. His stare was a spectacle to behold. He had cornflower-blue eyes and black brows that arced like descending birds of prey.
This was a white man whom other white men feared. He was wealthy and powerful. He was used to getting his way. Maybe if I hadn’t been fighting for my daughter’s life I would have felt the weight of that stare. But as it was I felt safe from any threat he could make. My greatest fear flowed in a little girl’s veins.
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“You have no idea who you’re messing with,” he said, believing the threatening gaze had worked.
“Do you know Philomena?” I asked.
“What information do you have about me and Axel?”
“All I know is that a hippie I met said that Axel has been spending time in Cairo. That same man said that Axel had asked you about his father and Egypt.”
His right eye twitched. I was sure that there were Supreme Court justices who couldn’t have had that effect on Leonard Haffernon. I lost control of myself and smirked.
“Who do you work for, Mr. Rawlins?” he asked again.
“Are you a collector, Mr. Haffernon?”
“What?”
“That hippie told me that Axel collected Nazi memorabilia.
Daggers, photographs. Do you collect anything like that?”
Haffernon stood then.
“Please leave.”
I stood also. “Sure.”
I sauntered toward the door not sure of why I was being so tough on this powerful white man. I had baited him out of instinct. I wondered if I was being a fool.
o u t s i d e h i s o f f i c e I asked Dina for a pencil and paper.
I wrote down my name and the phone of my motel and handed it to her. She looked up at me in wonder, a small smile on her lips.
“I wish it was for you,” I said. “But give it to your boss. When he calms down he might want to give me a call.”
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16
Iate a very late lunch at a stand-up fried clam booth on Fish-erman’s Wharf. It was beautiful there. The smell of the ocean and the fish market reminded me of Galveston when I was a boy. At any other time in my life those few scraps of fried flour over chewy clam flesh would have been soothing. But I didn’t want to feel good until I knew that Feather was going to be okay. She and Jesus were all I had left.
I went to a pay phone and made the collect call.
Benny answered and accepted.
“Hi, Mr. Rawlins,” she said, a little breathless.
“Where’s Bonnie, Benita?”
“She went out shoppin’ for a wheelchair to take Feather with.
Me an’ Juice just hangin’ out here an’ makin’ sure Feather okay.
She sleep. You want me to wake her up?”
“No, honey. Let her sleep.”
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“You wanna talk to Juice?”
“You know, Benita, I really like you,” I said.
“I like you too, Mr. Rawlins.”
“And I know how messed up you were when Mouse did you like he did.”
She didn’t say anything to that.
“And I care very deeply about my children . . .” I let the words trail off.
For a few moments there was silence on the line. And then in a whisper Benita Flag said, “I love ’im, Mr. Rawlins. I do. He’s just a boy, I know, but he better than any man I ever met. He sweet an’
he know how to treat me. I didn’t mean to do nuthin’ wrong.”
“That’s okay, girl,” I said. “I know what it is to fall.”
“So you not mad?”
“Let him down easy if you have to,” I said. “That’s all I can ask.”
“Okay.”
“And tell Feather I had to stay another day but that I will bring her back a big present because I had to be late.”
We said our good-byes and I went to my car.
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to the motel I picked up a couple of newspapers to keep my mind occupied.
Vietnam was half of the newspaper. The army had ordered the evacuation of the Vietnamese city of Hue, where they were on the edge of revolt. Da Nang was threatening revolution and the Buddhists were demonstrating against Ky in Saigon.
Jimmy Hoffa was on the truck manufacturers for the unions and some poor schnook in Detroit had been arrested for bank robbery when the tellers mistook his car for the robber’s getaway car. He was a white guy on crutches.
I found that I couldn’t concentrate on the stories so I put the 1 0 4
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paper down. I could feel the fear about Feather rising in my chest.
In order to distract myself I tried to focus on Lee’s case. The man he wanted to talk to was dead. The papers the dead man had were gone — I had no idea where to. Cinnamon Cargill was probably dead also. Or maybe she was the killer. Maybe they were tripping together and he died, by accident, and she pressed him into the space below the brass elephant.
I had the telephone numbers of an old folks’ home for rich people and a secretive man whose voice was effeminate, and I had a postcard.
All in all that was a lot, but there was nothing I could do about it until the morning. That is unless Haffernon called. Haffernon knew about the trouble Axel was in. He might even have known about the young man’s death.