“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 but 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.”