“Dada,” Simon echoed.
Miriam watched her mother’s eyes. So did I.
We both saw Mrs. Lynx’s expression change from attentive interest to fear. Instead of answering she kept nodding her head.
She reached for her pocketbook on the coffee table.
“I wanna talk to Daddy,” George complained.
Doreen gave him one stern look and he shut right up.
“Okay,” Doreen said. “All right. I will. Be careful, Saul.”
She hung up the phone and stood in one fluid movement.
“Holiday time,” she said in a forced happy voice. “We’re all going to Nana’s cabin in Mammoth.”
“Yah,” George cried.
Simon laughed but Miriam had a grim look on her face. She was getting older and understood that something was wrong.
“Saul said that he’d be at the meeting place by nine tonight,”
Doreen told me. “He’s in San Diego but he said that he’d drive straight there.”
“What meeting place? He just gave me a number.”
“Call it and they will tell you where to go.”
“Is Daddy okay, Mommy?” Miriam asked.
“He’s fine, sweetie. Tonight he’s going to meet with Mr. Rawlins and then he’s coming up to the cabin where we can go fish-ing and swimming.”
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C i n n a m o n K i s s
“But I have my clarinet lesson tomorrow,” Miriam said.
“You’ll have to take a makeup,” Doreen explained.
The two boys were capering around, celebrating the holiday that had befallen their family.
i l e f t d o r e e n
packing suitcases and keeping the children on track.
On the way down to the Pixie Inn I tried not to get too far ahead of myself. Saul’s reaction to just a name increased my fears. I decided that Cinnamon had to be moved to a place where I knew that she’d be safe.
I parked down the block this time, just being cautious. There was a Mercedes-Benz parked on the motel lot. I didn’t like that.
I liked it even less when I saw the words Fletcher’s Mercedes-Benz of San Francisco written on the license plate frame.
The door of Cinnamon’s room was ajar. I nudged it open with my toe.
He was lying facedown, the six-hundred-dollar suit now just a shroud. I turned him over with my foot. Leonard Haffernon, Es-quire, was quite dead. The bullet had entered somewhere at the base of the skull and exited through the top of his head.
The exit wound was the size of a silver dollar.
A wave of prickles went down my left arm. Sweat sprouted from my palms.
His valise was on the bed. Its contents had been turned out.
There was some change and a toenail clipper, a visitor’s pass to a San Francisco bank, and a silver flask. Any papers had been taken.
The only potential perpetrator in evidence, once more, was me.
For a brief moment I was frozen there like a bug in a sudden frost. I was trying to glean from Haffernon’s face what had occurred. Did Cinnamon kill him and run?
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W a lt e r M o s l e y
Probably.
But why? And why had he been there?
A horn honked out on the street. That brought me back to my senses. I walked out of that room and into the parking lot, then down the street to my loud car and drove away.
2 2 0
34
Idrove for fifteen minutes, looking in the rearview mirror every ten seconds, before stopping at a gas station on a block of otherwise burned-out buildings. There was a phone booth next to the men’s toilet at the back.
“Etta, is that you?” I asked when she answered on the ninth ring.
“Is it my number you dialed?”
“Have you heard from Raymond?”
“And how are you this evenin’, Mr. Rawlins? I’m fine. I was layin’ up in the bed watchin’ Doctor Kildare. How ’bout you?”
“I just stumbled on a dead white man never saw it comin’.”
“Oh,” Etta said. “No, Ray haven’t called.”
“Shit.”
“Primo did though.”
“When?”
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W a lt e r M o s l e y
“ ’Bout a hour. He said to tell you that a guy came by an’ left sumpin’ for ya.”
“What guy?”
“He didn’t say.”
“What did he leave?”
“He didn’t say that either. He just said to tell you. You in trouble, Easy?”
“Is the sky blue?”
“Not right now. It’s evenin’.”
“Then wait a bit. It’ll be there.”
Etta chuckled and so did I. She was no stranger to violent death. She’d once shot a white man, a killer, in the head because he was about to shoot me. If we couldn’t laugh in the face of death there’d be precious little humor for most black southerners.
“You take care, Easy.”
“Tell Mouse I need his advice.”
“When I see him.”
i s p e d o v e r to Primo’s place worried about having given his number to Philomena. Primo was a tough man, a Mexican by birth. He had spent his whole life traveling back and forth across the border and south of there. On one trip through Panama he’d met Flower, his wife. They lived in a house I owned and had more than a dozen kids. They took in stray children too, and animals of all kinds. Any grief I brought to them would cause pain for a thousand miles.
But Primo was sitting out in the large yard. He was laid back in a lawn chair, drinking a beer and watching six or seven grand-children play in the diminishing light. Flower was up on the porch with a baby in her arms. I wondered if it was her baby or just a grandchild.
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C i n n a m o n K i s s
As I approached, half a dozen dogs ran at me growling and crying, wagging their tails and baring their fangs.
“Hi-ya!” Primo shouted at the animals.
The children ran forward, grabbing the dogs and pulling them back. A pure-bred Dalmatian eluded his child handler and jumped on me, pressing my chest with his forepaws.
“That’s my guard dog,” Primo said.
He put out a hand, which I shook as the dog licked my forearm.
“Love thy neighbor,” I said.
Primo liked my sense of humor. He laughed out loud.
“Flower,” he called. “Your boyfriend is here.”
“Send him to my bedroom when you finish twisting his ears,”
she responded.
“I wish I had time to sit, man,” I said.
“But you want them papers.” Primo finished my sentence.
“Papers?”
All the children, dogs, and adults crowded through the front door and into the house. There was shouting and laughing and fur floating in the air.
While Primo went into the back room looking for my delivery, Flower came very close to me. She stared in my face without saying anything.
She was a very black, beautiful woman. Her features were stern, almost masculine, most of the time, but when she smiled she honored the name her father had blessed her with.
At that moment she had on her serious face.
“How is she, Easy?”
“Very sick,” I said. “Very sick.”
“She will live,” Flower told me. “She will live and you will have a beautiful granddaughter from her.”
I touched Flower’s face and she took my hand in hers.
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W a lt e r M o s l e y
The dogs stopped barking and the children hushed. I looked up and saw Primo standing there, smiling at me.
“Here it is,” he said, handing me a brown envelope large enough to contain unfolded pages of typing paper.
“Who left this?”
“A black boy. Funny, you know?”
Raphael.
“What did he say?”
“That this was what you wanted and he hopes you do what’s right.”
I stood there thinking with all the brown children and red-tongued dogs panting around me.
“Stay and eat,” Flower said.
“I got to go.”
“No. You are hungry. Sit. It will only take a few moments and then you will have the strength to do whatever it is you’re doing.”