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C i n n a m o n K i s s
She hugged me and kissed my forehead while I was buckling my belt.
Etta didn’t utter more than three words in the jailhouse. She didn’t talk around cops. That was an old habit that never died with her. In her eyes the police were the enemy.
She wasn’t wrong.
Out in front of the precinct building LaMarque Alexander, Raymond and Etta’s boy, sat behind the wheel of his father’s red El Dorado. He was a willowy boy with his father’s eyes. But where Mouse had supremely confident bravado in his mien his son was petulant and somewhat petty. Even though he was pushing twenty he was still just a kid.
By the time Raymond was his son’s age he had already killed three men — that I knew of.
I tumbled into the backseat. Etta climbed in the front and turned around to regard me.
“Your office?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
It was only a few blocks from the precinct. LaMarque pulled away from the curb.
“How’s college, LaMarque?” I asked the taciturn boy.
“Okay.”
“What you studyin’?”
“Nuthin’.”
“He’s learnin’ about electronics and computers, Easy,” Etta said.
“If he wants to know about computers he should talk to Jackson Blue. Jackson knows everything about computers.”
“You hear that, LaMarque?”
“Yeah.”
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W a lt e r M o s l e y
When he pulled up in front of my office building at Eighty-sixth and Central, Etta said, “Wait here till I come back down.”
“But I was goin’ down to Craig’s, Mom,” he complained.
EttaMae didn’t even answer him. She just grunted and opened her door. I jumped out and helped her. Then together we walked up the stairs to the fourth floor.
I ushered her into my office and held my client’s chair for her.
Only when we were both settled did Etta feel it was time to talk.
“How’s your baby doin’?” she asked.
“Bonnie took her to Europe. They got doctors over there worked with these kinds of blood diseases.”
Etta heard more in my tone and squinted at me. For my part I felt like I was floating on a tidal wave of panic. I stayed very still while the world seemed to move around me.
Etta stared for half a minute or so and then she broke out with a smile. The smile turned into a grin.
“What you smirkin’ ’bout?” I asked.
“You,” she said with emphasis.
“Ain’t nuthin’ funny ’bout me.”
“Oh yes there is.”
“How do you see that?”
“Easy Rawlins,” she said, “if you wandered into a minefield you’d make it through whole. You could sleep with a girl named Typhoid an’ wake up with just sniffles. If you fell out a windah you could be sure that there’d be a bush down on the ground t’ break yo’ fall. Now it might be a thorn bush but what’s a few scratches up next to death?”
I had to laugh. Seeing myself through Etta’s eyes gave me hope out there in the void. I guess I was lucky compared to all those I’d known who’d died of disease, gunshot wounds, lynch-1 3 2
C i n n a m o n K i s s
ing, and alcohol poisoning. Maybe I did have a lucky star.
Dim — but lucky still and all.
“How’s that boy Peter?” I asked.
Peter Rhone was a white man whom I’d saved from the LAPD
when they needed to pin a murder on somebody his color. His only crime was that he loved a black woman. That love had killed her. And when it was all over Peter had a breakdown and Etta took him in.
“He bettah,” she said, the trace of a grin still on her lips. “I got him livin’ out on the back porch. He do the shoppin’ an’ any odd jobs I might need.”
“An’ Mouse doesn’t mind?”
