“And you moved up past me in grade in two years.”
“I don’t have no job on the side to distract me,” she said.
I nodded, submitting to her logic.
“You know I ain’t s’posed t’ give the public information on students or faculty.”
“I know that.”
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W a lt e r M o s l e y
She laughed then. “I guess we all do things we ain’t s’posed to do sometimes.”
“Can’t help it,” I agreed.
“Wait here,” she said, patting the table with her knife hand.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
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22
Itold Raphael’s mother—a small, dark woman with big, brown, hopeful eyes — that I was Philomena Cargill’s uncle and that I needed to talk to her son about a pie-baking business that my niece and I were starting up in Oakland. All I hoped for was a phone number, but Althea was so happy about the chance for a job for her son that she gave me his address too.
This brought me to a three-story wooden apartment building on Santa Barbara Boulevard. It was a wide building that had be-gun to sag in the middle. Maybe that’s why the landlord painted it bright turquoise, to make it seem young and sprightly.
I walked up the sighing stairs to 2a. The door was painted with black and turquoise zebra stripes and the letters RR RR
were carved into the center.
The young man who answered my knock wore only black jeans. His body was slender and strong. His hair was long (but 1 4 5
W a lt e r M o s l e y
not hippie long) and straightened — then curled. He wasn’t very tall, and the sneer on his lips was almost comical.
“Yeeees?” he asked in such a way that he seemed to be suggesting something obscene.
I knew right then that this was the young man who’d hung up on me, the one I’d called from Philomena’s apartment.
“Raphael Reed?”
“And who are you?”
“Easy Rawlins,” I said.
“What can I do for you, Easy Rawlins?” he asked while ap-praising my stature and style.
“I think that a friend of yours may have been the victim of foul play.”
“What friend?”
“Cinnamon.”
It was all in the young man’s eyes. Suddenly the brash flirta-tion and sneering facade disappeared. Now there was a man standing before me, a man who was ready to take serious action depending on what I said next.
“Come in.”
It was a studio apartment. A Murphy bed had been pulled down from the wall. It was unmade and jumbled with dirty clothes and dishes. A black-and-white portable T V with bent-up rabbit-ear antennas sat on a maple chair at the foot of the bed.
There was no sofa, but three big chairs, upholstered with green carpeting, were set in a circle facing each other at the center of the room.
The room smelled strongly of perfumes and body odors. This scent of sex and sensuality was off-putting on a Saturday afternoon.
“Come on out, Roget,” Raphael said.
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C i n n a m o n K i s s
A door opened and another young man, nearly a carbon copy of the first, emerged. They were the same height and had the same hairstyle. Roget also wore black jeans, no shirt, and a sneer. But where Raphael had the dark skin of his mother, Roget was the color of light brown sugar and had freckles on his nose and shoulders.
“Sit,” Raphael said to me.
We all went to the chairs in a circle. I liked the configuration but it still felt odd somehow.
“What about Philomena?” Raphael asked.
“Her boss disappeared,” I said. “A man named Adams hired me to find him. He also told me that Philomena had disappeared a couple of days later. I went to her apartment and found that she’d moved out without even taking her clothes.”
Raphael glanced at his friend, but Roget was inspecting his nails.
“So what?”
