couldn’t even lift a hand.
“You bled a lot,” Christmas said. “Almost died. Lucky I got some friends in the hospital down in Oxnard. I got you medicine and a few pints of red.”
“Call Mouse,” I said as loudly as I could.
Then I passed out.
The next time I woke up, Mama Jo was sitting next to me. She had just taken some foul-smelling substance away from my nose.
“Uh!” I grunted. “What was that?”
“I can see you gonna be okay, Easy Rawlins,” big, black, handsome Mama Jo said.
“I feel better. How long have I been here?”
“Six days.”
“Six? Did anybody call Bonnie?”
“She called Etta. Feather’s doin’ good, the doctors said. They won’t know nuthin’ for eight weeks more though. Etta said that you and Raymond were doing some business down in Texas.”
Mouse sauntered in with his glittering smile.
“Hey, Easy,” he said. “Christmas got all yo’ money an’ bonds and shit in the draw next to yo’ bed.”
“Give the bonds to Jackson,” I told him. “Let him cash ’em and we’ll split ’em three ways.”
Mouse smiled. He liked a good deal.
“I’ll let you boys talk business,” Jo said. She rose from the chair and I watched in awe, as always impressed by her size and bearing.
3 0 8
C i n n a m o n K i s s
Mouse pulled up a chair and told me what he knew.
Joe Cicero made the T V news with his murder of Cynthia Aubec and her poisoning of him.
“They say anything about a letter they found?” I asked.
“No. No letter, just mutual murder, that’s what they called it.”
That night Saul Lynx arrived in a rented ambulance and drove me home.
Benita Flag and Jesus were there to nurse me.
Two weeks after it was all over I was still convalescing. Mouse came over and sat with me under the big tree in the backyard.
“You don’t have to worry about them people no more, Ease,”
he said after we’d been gossiping for a while.
“What people?”
“The Romans.”
For a moment I was confused, and then I remembered the accident and the lawsuit.
“Yeah,” he said. “Benita showed me the papers an’ I went ovah to talk to ’em. I told ’em about Feather and about you bein’ so tore up. I gave ’em five thousand off the top’a what Jackson cleared and told ’em that you was a good detective and if they ever needed help that you would be there for ’em. After that they decided to drop that suit.”
There weren’t many people in Watts who wouldn’t do what Ray asked. No one wanted to be on his bad side.
t h e y f o u n d a x e l Bowers in his ashram and tied Aubec to that crime too. The papers made it an incestuous sex scandal.
Who knows, maybe it was. Dream Dog was even interviewed.
He told the reporters about the sex and drug parties. In 1966 that was reason enough, in the public mind, for murder.
A few days later I received a card from Maya and Bobby Lee.
3 0 9
W a lt e r M o s l e y
They were on their honeymoon in Monaco. Lee had connections with the royal family there. He said that I should call him if I ever needed employment — or advice. That was the closest Lee would ever come to an offer of friendship.
I sent the twenty-five thousand on to Switzerland. Feather called me once a week. Bonnie called two times but I always found an excuse to get off the line. I didn’t tell them about my getting shot. There was no use in worrying Feather or making Bonnie feel bad either.
I lived off of the money Jackson got from the bonds and wondered who at Haffernon’s firm bought off the letter. But I didn’t worry too much about it. I was alive and Feather was on her way to recovery. Even if the moral spirit of my country was rotten to the core at least I had played a part in her salvation — my beautiful child.
i t w a s a m o n t h
after the shooting that I got a letter from New York. With it was a tiny clipping saying that an inquiry had opened concerning the American-owned Karnak Chemical Company and their dealings with Germany during the war.
