I wondered about the coincidence of a movie about a corpse rising from the dead in Egypt and Axel’s trips to that country.
The phone rang.
“Somebody must really wanna talk,” I said to myself, thinking that the phone must have rung nearly a dozen times.
I went to the podium and picked up the receiver.
“Hello.”
“Why are you looking for me?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Philomena? Is that you?”
“I asked you a question.”
My lips felt numb. Coltrane hit a discordant note.
“I thought you were dead,” I said. “You didn’t even take any underwear as far as I could tell. What woman leaves without a change of underwear?”
“I am alive,” she said. “So you can stop looking for me.”
“I’m not lookin’ for you, honey. It’s your boyfriend Axel an’
them papers he stole.”
“Axel’s gone.”
1 5 6
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“Dead?”
“Who said anything about dead? He’s gone. Left the country.”
“Just up and left his house without tellin’ anybody? Not even Dream Dog?”
“Who are you working for, Mr. Rawlins?”
“Call me Easy.”
“Who are you working for?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“A man I know came to me with fifteen hundred dollars and said that another man, up in Frisco, was willing to pay that and more for locating Axel Bowers. That man said he was working for somebody else but he didn’t tell me who. After I looked around I found out that you and Axel were friends, that you disappeared too. So here I am with you on the phone, just a breath away.”
“You weren’t that far wrong about me, Easy,” the woman called Cinnamon said.
“What exactly was I right about?”
“I think there is a man trying to kill me. A man who wants the papers that Axel has.”
“What’s this man’s name?” I asked, made brave by the ano-nymity of the phone lines.
“I don’t know his name. He’s a white man with dead eyes.”
“He wear a snakeskin jacket?” I asked on a hunch.
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“Hiding,” she said. “Safe.”
“I’ll come to you and we’ll try and work this thing out.”
“No. I don’t want your help. What I want is for you to stop looking for me.”
“Nothing would make me happier than to let this drop, but 1 5 7
W a lt e r M o s l e y
I’m in it now. All the way in it,” I said, thinking about Axel’s hip bones. “So either we get together or I talk to the man pays my salary.”
“He’s probably the one trying to have me killed.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Axel told me. He said that people would kill for those papers.
Then that man . . . he . . .”
“He what?”
She hung up the phone.
I held on to the receiver for a full minute at least. Sitting there I thought again about my dream, about the corpse trying to re-suscitate himself. Philomena had described a killer who had been at my doorstep. All of a sudden the prospect of robbing an armored car delivery didn’t seem so dangerous.
