t h e m o r n i n g w a s c h i l l y but I didn’t feel so bad.
I missed having Bonnie to call. For the past few years I’d been able to talk to her about anything. That had been a new experience 2 6 4
C i n n a m o n K i s s
for me. Never before could I fully trust another human being. If it was five in the morning and I’d been out all night I could call her and she’d be there as fast as she could. She never asked why but I always explained. Being with her made me understand how lonely I’d been for all my wandering years. But being alone again made me feel that I was back in the company of an old friend.
I was worried about Feather’s survival but she had sounded good on the phone and there was already new blood flowing in her veins.
Blood and money were the currencies I dealt in. They were inseparable. This thought made me feel even more comfortable.
I figured that if I knew where I stood then I had a chance of getting where I was going.
i p a r k e d a c r o s s t h e s t r e e t from Raphael Reed’s
apartment building a little after seven. I had coffee in a paper cup. The brew was both bitter and weak but I drank it to stay awake. Maybe Cinnamon was with the young men. I could hope.
Sitting there I went over the details I had. I knew more about Lee’s case than anyone, but still there were big holes. Cicero was definitely the killer, but who held his reins? He couldn’t have been a player in the business. He could have worked for anybody: Cinnamon, Maya, even Lee, or maybe Haffernon.
Maybe Bowers hired him back in the beginning. It would be good to know the answers if the police came to see me.
Near nine Raphael’s friend Roget came out the front door of the turquoise building. He carried a medium-sized suitcase. He could have had a change of underwear in there, could have been going to visit his mother, but I was intrigued. And so when the high-yellow freckled boy climbed into a light blue Datsun I turned over my own engine.
2 6 5
W a lt e r M o s l e y
He led me all the way to Hollywood before parking in front of a boxy four-story house on Delgado. He walked up the driveway and into the backyard. After a moment I followed.
He went to the front door of a small house back there. He knocked and was admitted by someone I couldn’t see. I went back to the car. When I sat down exhaustion washed over me. I lay back on the seat for just a moment.
Two hours later the sun on my face woke me up.
The blue Datsun was gone.
s h e w a s w e a r i n g
a T-shirt, that’s all. The soft outline of her nipples pressed against the white cotton. The dark color pressed against it too.
After answering my knock she didn’t know whether to smile or to run.
“What do you want from me now?” she asked. “I gave you the bonds.”
“Can I come in?”
She backed away and I entered. It was yet another cramped cabinlike room. The normal-sized furniture crowded the small space. There was a couch and a round table upon which sat a portable T V. A radio on the window shelf played Mozart. Her musical taste shouldn’t have surprised me but it did.
On the table was an empty glass jar that once held nine Vienna sausages, a half-drunk tumbler of orange juice, and a depleted bag of barbecue potato chips.
“You want something to drink?” she asked me.
“Water be great,” I said.
She went through a tiny doorway. I heard the tap turn on and off and she returned with an aqua-colored plastic juice tumbler filled with water.
2 6 6
C i n n a m o n K i s s
I drank it down in one gulp.
“You want more?”
“Let’s talk,” I said.
She sat down on one end of the golden sofa. I took the other end.
“What do you want to know?”
“First — who knows you’re here?”
“Just Raphael and Roget. Now you.”
“Do they gossip?”
“Not about this. Raphael knows someone’s after me and Roget does whatever Raphael says.”
“Why’d you kill Haffernon?” It was an abrupt and brutal switch calculated to knock her off track. But it didn’t work.
“I didn’t,” she said evenly. “I found him there and ran but I didn’t kill him. No. Not me.”
What else could she say?
“How does that work?” I asked. “You find a dead man in your own room but don’t know how he got killed?”
“It’s the truth.”
I shook my head.
“You look tired,” she said, sympathy blending in with her words.
“How’d Haffernon get to your room?”
“I called him.”
“When?”
“Right after I met you. I called him and told him that I wanted to get rid of the bonds. I asked him would he buy them off me for face value.”
“And what about the letter?”
“He’d get that too.”
“When was this meeting supposed to happen?”
2 6 7
W a lt e r M o s l e y
“Today. This afternoon.”
“So how does he show up dead on your floor yesterday?”
“After the last time I talked to you I realized that Haffernon could just send that man in the snakeskin jacket to kill me and take the bonds, so I went to Raphael and asked him to take the bonds to your friend.”
“Why?”
“Because even though I hardly know you, you seem to be the most trustworthy person I’ve met, and anyway . . .” Her words trailed off as better judgment took the wheel.
“Anyway what?”
“I figured that you wouldn’t know what to do with the bonds and so I didn’t have to worry about you cashing them.”
That made me laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
I told her about Jackson Blue, that he was willing at that moment to cash them in. I could see the surprise on her face.
“My Uncle Thor once told me that for every one thing you learn you forget something else,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That while they were teaching you all’a that smart white world knowledge at Berkeley you were forgetting where you came from and how we survived all these years. We might’a acted stupid but you know you moved so far away that you startin’ to think the act is true.”
Cinnamon smiled. The smile became a grin.
“Tell me exactly what happened with Haffernon,” I said.
“It’s like I said. I called him and made an appointment for him to meet me at the motel —”
“At what time?”
2 6 8
C i n n a m o n K i s s
“Today at four,” she said. “Then I got nervous and went to give the bonds to Raphael to give to your friend —”
“What time was that?”
“Right after I talked to you. I got back by about five. That’s when I saw him on the floor. He’d been early, real early.”
“But who could have killed him if you didn’t?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It wasn’t me. But when I talked to him he said that he wasn’t the only interested party, that what Axel planned to do would sink many innocent people.”
I thought about the bullet that killed Haffernon. It had entered at the base of the skull and gone out through the top. He was a tall man. In all probability either a very short man or a woman had done him in.
“Did you give your real name at the motel?”
“No. I didn’t. I called myself Mary Lornen. That’s the names of two people I knew up north.”
Proof is a funny thing. For policemen and for lawyers it depends on tangible evidence: fingerprints, eyewitnesses, irrefut-able logic, or self-incrimination. But for me evidence is like morning mist over a complex terrain. You see the landscape and then it’s gone. And all you can do is try to remember and watch your step.
The fact that Philomena had delivered those bonds to Primo meant something. It gave me doubts about her guilt. While I was having these thoughts Philomena moved across the couch.
“Kiss me,” she commanded.
2 6 9