“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.”
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“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 ano-nymity 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 1 5 7
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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 re-suscitate 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 dis-turb 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.”
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“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.
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25
Icouldn’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.
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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.
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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.”