The weak bleating of the phone grew loud when I opened the door.
“Hello.”
1 5 0
C i n n a m o n K i s s
“So what’s it gonna be, Ease?” Mouse asked.
It made me laugh.
“I got to move on this, brother,” he continued. “Opportunity don’t wait around.”
“I’ll call you in the mornin’, Ray,” I said.
“What time?”
“After I wake up.”
“This is serious, man,” he told me.
Those words from his lips had been the prelude to many a man’s death but I didn’t care.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “In the mornin’.” And then I hung up.
I turned on the radio. There was a jazz station from USC that was playing twenty-four hours of John Coltrane. I liked the new jazz but my heart was still with Fats Waller and Duke Elling-ton — that big band sound.
I turned on the T V. Some detective show was on. I don’t know what it was about, just a lot of shouting and cars screech-ing, a shot now and then, and a woman who screamed when she got scared.
I’d been rereading
I was reading about a group of boys masturbating in a movie theater when the phone rang again. For a moment I resisted answering. If Mouse had gotten mad I didn’t know if I could pla-cate him. If it was Bonnie telling me that Feather was dead I didn’t know that I could survive.
1 5 1
W a lt e r M o s l e y
“Hello.”
“Mr. Rawlins?” It was Maya Adamant.
“How’d you get my home number?”
“Saul Lynx gave it to me.”
“What do you want, Miss Adamant?”
“There has been a resolution to the Bowers case,” she said.
“You found the briefcase?”
“All I can tell you is that we have reached a determination about the disposition of the papers and of Mr. Bowers.”
“You don’t even want me to report on what I’ve found?” I asked.
This caused a momentary pause in my dismissal.
“What information?” she asked.
“I found Axel,” I said.
“Really?”
“Yes, really. He came down to L.A. to get away from Haffernon. Also to be nearer to Miss Cargill.”
“She’s down there? You’ve seen her?”
“Sure have,” I lied.
Another silence. In that time I tried to figure Maya’s response to my talking to Cinnamon. Her surprise might have been a clue that she knew Philomena was dead. Then again . . . maybe she’d been given contradictory information . . .
“What did Bowers say?” she asked.
“Am I fired, Miss Adamant?”
“You’ve been paid fifteen hundred dollars.”
“Against ten thousand,” I added.
“Does that mean you are withholding intelligence from Mr.
Lee?”
“I’m not talking to Mr. Lee.”
“I carry his authority.”
1 5 2
C i n n a m o n K i s s
“I spent a summer unloading cargo ships down in Galveston back in the thirties,” I said. “Smelled like tar and fish, and you know I was only fifteen — with a sensitive nose. My back hurt carryin’ them cartons of clothes and fine china and whatever else the man said I should carry for thirty-five cents a day. I had his authority but I was just a
