“May I help you?” a woman’s voice asked.
She was of medium height with a more or less normal frame, but somewhere in the mix there must have been a Teutonic Valkyrie because she had the figure of a Norse fertility goddess.
Her eyes were a deep ocean blue and though her face was not particularly attractive there was something otherworldly about it.
As far as clothes were concerned she was conservatively dressed in a cranberry dress that went down below her knees and wore a cream-colored woolen jacket over that. There was a silver strand around her neck from which hung a largish pearl with a dark nacre hue. Her glasses were framed in white.
All in all she was a Poindexter built like Jayne Mansfield.
“Hi. My name is Ezekiel P. Rawlins.” I held out a hand.
A big grin came across her stern face but somehow the mirth didn’t make it to her eyes. She shook my hand.
“How can I help you?”
“I’m a private detective from down in L.A.,” I said. “I’ve been hired to find a woman named Philomena Cargill . . . by her family.”
“Cinnamon,” the woman said without hesitation. “Axel’s friend.”
“That’s Axel Bowers?”
“Yes. He’s my partner here.”
She looked around the storefront. I did too.
“Not a very lucrative business,” I speculated.
The woman laughed. It was a real laugh.
“That depends on what you see as profit, Mr. Rawlins. Axel and I are committed to helping the poor people of this society get a fair shake from the legal system.”
“You’re both lawyers?”
“Yes,” she said. “I got my degree from UCLA and Axel got his across the Bay in Berkeley. I worked for the state for a while but 8 7
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I didn’t feel very good about that. When Axel asked me to join him I jumped at the chance.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Oh. Excuse my manners. My name is Cynthia Aubec.”
“French?”
“I was born in Canada,” she said. “Montreal.”
“Have you seen your partner lately?” I asked.
“Come on in,” she replied.
She turned to go through another canvas flap, this one standing as a door to the back room of the defunct grocery.
There were two desks at opposite ends of the long room we entered. It was gloomy in there, and the floors had sawdust on them as if it were still a vegetable stand.
“We keep sawdust on the floor because the garage next door sometimes uses too much water and it seeps under the wall on our floor,” she said, noticing my inspection.
“I see.”
“Have a seat.”
She switched on a desk lamp and I was gone from the hippie world of Haight Street. I wasn’t in modern America at all. Cynthia Aubec, who was French Canadian but had no accent, lived earlier in the century, walking on sawdust and working for the poor.
“I haven’t seen Axel for over a week,” she said, looking directly into my gaze.
“Where is he?”
“He said that he was going to Algeria but I can never be sure.”
“Algeria? I met a guy who told me that Axel was all over the world. Egypt, Paris, Berlin . . . Now you tell me he’s in Algeria.
There’s got to be some money somewhere.”
“Axel’s family supports this office. They’re quite wealthy. Ac-8 8
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tually his parents are dead. Now I guess it’s Axel’s money that runs our firm. But it was his father who gave us our start.” She was still looking at me. In this light she was more Mansfield than Poindexter.
“Do you know when he might be back?”
“No. Why? I thought you were looking for Cinnamon.”
