He clapped my shoulder, letting me know that he’d take the ride.
2 7 8
C i n n a m o n K i s s
“But first we gotta go tell Jewelle,” he said. “You know babygirl gotta know where daddy gonna be.”
We walked back to his door and Jackson used three keys on the locks. The crow’s nest entrance of his apartment looked down into a giant room. It was like staring down into a well made up to be some fairy-tale creature’s home.
“Easy here, baby,” Jackson announced.
She was standing at the window, looking out into a flower garden that they worked on in their spare time. She wore a pink housecoat with hair curlers in her hair like tiny, precariously perched oil drums.
Jackson and I were in our mid-forties, old men compared to Jewelle, who was still shy of thirty. Her brown skin and long face were attractive enough, but what made her a beauty was the power in her eyes. Jewelle was a real estate genius. She’d taken my old manager’s property and turned it into nearly an empire. The riots had slowed her growth some but soon she’d be a millionaire and she and Jackson would live with the rich people up in Bel Air.
Jewelle smiled as we descended the ladderlike stairs to their home. The walls were twenty-five feet high and every inch was covered in bookcases crammed with Jackson’s lifelong collection of books.
He had eight encyclopedias and dictionaries in everything from Greek to Mandarin. He was better read than any professor but even with all that knowledge at his disposal he’d rather lie than tell the truth.
“Hi, Easy,” Jewelle said. She loved older men. And she loved me particularly because I always helped when I could. I might have been the only man (or woman for that matter) in her life who gave her more than he took.
2 7 9
W a lt e r M o s l e y
“Hey, J.J. What’s up?”
“Thinkin’ about buying up property in a neighborhood in L.A.
proper,” she said. “Lotta Koreans movin’ in there. The value’s bound to rise.”
“Me an’ Easy gonna take a personal day,” Jackson said.
“What kinda personal day?” Jewelle asked suspiciously.
“Nobody dangerous, nothing illegal,” I said.
Jewelle loved Jackson because he was the only man she’d ever met who could outthink her. Anything she’d ask — he had the answer. It’s said that some women are attracted to men’s minds.
She was the only one I ever knew personally.
“What about your job, baby?” she asked.
“Easy want some company, J.J.,” Jackson told her. “When the last time you hear him say sumpin’ like that to me?”
I could see that they’d talked about me quite a bit. I could almost make out the echoes of those conversations in that cavernous room.
Jewelle nodded and Jackson took off his tie. When he went to the phone to make a call Jewelle sidled up next to me.
“You in trouble, Easy?” she asked.
“So bad that you can’t even imagine it, J.J.”
“I don’t want Jackson in there with you.”
“It’s not like that, honey,” I told her. “Really . . . he just gonna ride with me. Maybe give me an idea or two.”
Jackson came back to us then.
“I called the president at his house,” the whiz kid said proudly.
“He told me to take all the time I needed. Now all you got to do is feed me some breakfast and I’m ret-to- go.”
2 8 0
43
Jackson made us go to a little diner that looked over the beach.
The problem was that the place he chose, the Sea Cove Inn, was where Bonnie and I used to go in the mornings sometimes.
But I made it through. I had waffles and bacon. Jackson gobbled French toast and sausages, fried eggs and a whole quart of orange juice. He had both the body and the appetite of a boy.
The waitress, an older white woman, knew Jackson and they talked about dogs — she was the owner of some rare breed.
While they gabbed I went to the pay phone and called EttaMae.
“Yes? Who is it?”
“Easy, Etta.”
“Hold on.”
2 8 1
W a lt e r M o s l e y
