Simon laughed but Miriam had a grim look on her face. She was getting older and understood that something was wrong.
“Saul said that he’d be at the meeting place by nine tonight,”
Doreen told me. “He’s in San Diego but he said that he’d drive straight there.”
“What meeting place? He just gave me a number.”
“Call it and they will tell you where to go.”
“Is Daddy okay, Mommy?” Miriam asked.
“He’s fine, sweetie. Tonight he’s going to meet with Mr. Rawlins and then he’s coming up to the cabin where we can go fish-ing and swimming.”
2 1 8
C i n n a m o n K i s s
“But I have my clarinet lesson tomorrow,” Miriam said.
“You’ll have to take a makeup,” Doreen explained.
The two boys were capering around, celebrating the holiday that had befallen their family.
i l e f t d o r e e n
packing suitcases and keeping the children on track.
On the way down to the Pixie Inn I tried not to get too far ahead of myself. Saul’s reaction to just a name increased my fears. I decided that Cinnamon had to be moved to a place where I knew that she’d be safe.
I parked down the block this time, just being cautious. There was a Mercedes-Benz parked on the motel lot. I didn’t like that.
I liked it even less when I saw the words
The door of Cinnamon’s room was ajar. I nudged it open with my toe.
He was lying facedown, the six-hundred-dollar suit now just a shroud. I turned him over with my foot. Leonard Haffernon, Es-quire, was quite dead. The bullet had entered somewhere at the base of the skull and exited through the top of his head.
The exit wound was the size of a silver dollar.
A wave of prickles went down my left arm. Sweat sprouted from my palms.
His valise was on the bed. Its contents had been turned out.
There was some change and a toenail clipper, a visitor’s pass to a San Francisco bank, and a silver flask. Any papers had been taken.
The only potential perpetrator in evidence, once more, was me.
For a brief moment I was frozen there like a bug in a sudden frost. I was trying to glean from Haffernon’s face what had occurred. Did Cinnamon kill him and run?
2 1 9
W a lt e r M o s l e y
Probably.
But why? And why had he been there?
A horn honked out on the street. That brought me back to my senses. I walked out of that room and into the parking lot, then down the street to my loud car and drove away.
2 2 0
34
Idrove for fifteen minutes, looking in the rearview mirror every ten seconds, before stopping at a gas station on a block of otherwise burned-out buildings. There was a phone booth next to the men’s toilet at the back.
“Etta, is that you?” I asked when she answered on the ninth ring.
“Is it my number you dialed?”
“Have you heard from Raymond?”
“And how are you this evenin’, Mr. Rawlins? I’m fine. I was layin’ up in the bed watchin’
“I just stumbled on a dead white man never saw it comin’.”
“Oh,” Etta said. “No, Ray haven’t called.”
“Shit.”
“Primo did though.”
“When?”
2 2 1
W a lt e r M o s l e y
“ ’Bout a hour. He said to tell you that a guy came by an’ left sumpin’ for ya.”
“What guy?”
“He didn’t say.”
