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women from in front or behind. One photo centered on a teenage girl’s face — she was screaming in pain as he lowered on her from overhead.
I took the Luger and the clips of ammo, then I tried to move the trunk but I could see that it was anchored to the floor somehow. I got down on my knees and sniffed around the base of the trunk — the smell was definitely coming from underneath.
After looking around the base I decided to pull away the carpet that surrounded the trunk. There I saw a brass latch. I lifted this and the trunk flipped backward, revealing the corpse of a man crushed into an almost perfect rectangle — the size of the space beneath the trunk.
The man’s head was facing upward, framed by his forearms.
It was the face of the young man hugging his mother — Axel Bowers.
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Ihad seen my share of dead bodies. Many of them had died under violent circumstances. But I had never seen anything like Axel Bowers. His killer treated the body like just another thing that needed to be hidden, not like a human being at all.
The bones were broken and his forehead was crushed by the trunk coming down on it.
The smell was overwhelming. Soon the neighbors would begin to detect it. I wondered if the person who had searched the trunk had found Axel. Not necessarily; if they’d been there a few days before, there might not have been a smell yet, so they’d have had no reason to suspect there was a secret compartment.
It was a gruesome sight. But even then, in the presence of such awful violence and evil intent, I thought about Feather lying in her bed. I felt like running from there as fast as I could.
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But instead I forced myself to wait and think about how even this horror might help her.
The knife was worth nothing and I didn’t think that I had the kind of contacts to sell Hitler’s signature. For that matter the signature might have been a fake.
I considered taking a couple of the Klee paintings from the house, but again I didn’t know where to sell them. And if I got caught trying to fence stolen paintings I could end up in jail before getting the money I needed.
For a while I thought about burning down the ashram. I wanted to get rid of the evidence of the murder so that I wouldn’t be implicated by Dream Dog or some other hippie on the block.
I even went so far as to get a can of gasoline from the garage. I also took tapered candles from the house to use as a kind of slow-burning fuse. But then I decided that fire would call attention to the murder instead of away from it. And what if the flames spread and killed someone in a nearby house?
The stench made my eyes tear and my gorge rise. I had wiped off the places I had touched in the ashram and the house.
Dream Dog would think twice before giving information about breaking into Axel’s place. Besides, he didn’t know my name.
At some point I realized that I was finding it hard to leave.
There was something in me that wanted to help Axel find some peace. The humiliation of his interment made me uncomfortable. Maybe it was the memory of the German boy I killed or the fragility of my adopted daughter’s life. Maybe it was something deeper that had been instilled in me when I was a child among the superstitious country people of Louisiana.
Finally I decided that the only thing I could do for Axel was to make him a promise.
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“I can’t give you a proper burial, Mr. Bowers,” I said. “But I swear that if I find out who did this to you I will do my best to make sure that they pay for their crime. Rest easy and go with the faith you lived with.”
Those words spoken, I lowered the trunk and stole away from the white man’s home, luckier to be a poor black man in America than Axel Bowers had been with his white skin and all his wealth.
i d r o v e d o w n Telegraph into Oakland and the black part of town. There I found a motel called Sleepy Time Inn. It was set on a hillside, with the small stucco rooms stacked like box stairs for some giant leading up toward the sky.
Melba, the night clerk, gave me the top room for eighteen dollars in cash. They didn’t take credit cards at Sleepy Time.
When I looked at the cash I remembered that enameled pin in Bonnie’s purse. For a moment I couldn’t hear what Melba was saying. I could see her mouth moving. She was a short woman with skin that was actually black. But the rest of her features were more Caucasian than Negroid. Thin lips and round eyes, hair that had been straightened and a Roman nose.
“. . . parties in the rooms,” she was saying.
“What?”
“We don’t want any carousing or parties in the rooms,” she repeated. “You can have a guest but these rooms are residential.
We don’t want any loud crowds.”
“Only noise I make is snoring,” I said.
She smiled, indicating that she believed me. That simple gesture almost brought me to tears.
t h e t e l e v i s i o n had a coin slot attached to it. It cost a quarter per hour to watch. If Feather was there with me she’d be beg-7 8
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ging for quarters to see her shows and to get grape soda from the machine down below. I put in a coin and switched channels until I came across Gigantor, her favorite afternoon cartoon. Letting the cartoon play, it felt a little like she was there with me.
That calmed me down enough to think about the mess I’d fallen into.
The man Robert E. Lee was looking for had been murdered.
The initials on the empty briefcase in his room might have belonged to him or to somebody related to him. But then again, maybe he’d switched briefcases after removing the papers from the one Lee said he’d stolen.
At any other time I would have taken the fifteen hundred and gone home to Bonnie. But there was no more going home for me, and even if there was, Feather needed nearer to thirty-five thousand than fifteen hundred.
I couldn’t call Lee. He might pull me off the case if he knew Axel was dead. And there was still Cinnamon — Philomena —
to find. Maybe she knew where the papers were. I had to have those papers, because ten thousand dollars was a hard nut to crack.
I read one of the letters I’d taken from Axel’s bureau. It was typewritten under the business heading of Haffernon, Schmidt, Tourneau and Bowers — a legal firm in San Francisco.
Dear Axel:
I have read your letter of February 12 and I must say that I find it intriguing. As far as I know, your father had no business dealings in Cairo during the period you indicated and this firm certainly has not. Of course, I’m not aware of all your father’s personal business dealings. Each of the partners had 7 9
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his own portfolio from before the formation of our investment group. But I must say that your fears seem far-fetched, and even if they weren’t, Arthur is dead. How can an inquiry of this sort have any productive outcome?
Only your family, it seems, will have a price to pay.
At any rate, I have no information to bring to bear on the matter of the briefcase you got from his safe-deposit box. Call me if you have any further questions, and please consider your actions before rushing into anything.
Yours truly,
Leonard Haffernon, Esq.
Something happened with Axel’s father, something that could still cause grief for the son and maybe others. Maybe Haffernon knew something about it. Maybe he killed Axel because of it.
Lee had told me that Axel had stolen a briefcase, but this letter indicated that he received it legally. It could have been another case . . .
The handwritten letter was a different temperature. There was no heading.
Really, Axel. I can see no reason for you to follow this line of questioning. Your father is dead. Anyone that had anything to do with this matter is either dead or so old that it doesn’t make any difference. You cannot judge th
em. You don’t know how it was back then. Think of your law offices in San Francisco. Think of the good you have done, will be able to do. Don’t throw it all 8 0
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away over something that’s done and gone. Think of your own generation. I’m begging you. Please do not bring these ugly matters to light.
N.
Whoever N was, he or she had something to hide. And that something was about to be exposed to the world by Axel Bowers.
If I had had a good feeling about Bobby Lee I would have taken the letters and reconnaissance to him. But we didn’t like each other and I couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t take what I gave him and cut me out of my bonus. My second choice was to tell Saul but he would have been torn in allegiance between me and the Civil War buff. No. I had to go this one alone for a while longer.
Later that evening I was asking the operator to make a collect call to a Webster exchange in West Los Angeles.
“Hello?” Bonnie said into my ear.
“Collect call to anyone from Easy,” the operator said quickly as if she feared that I might slip a message past her and hang up.
“I’ll accept, operator. Easy?”
I tried to speak but couldn’t manage to raise the volume in my lungs.
“Easy, is that you?”
“Yeah,” I said, just a whisper.
“What’s wrong?”
“Tired,” I said. “Just tired. How’s Feather?”
“She sat up for a while and watched Gigantor this afternoon,”
Bonnie said hopefully, her voice full of love. “She’s been trying to stay awake until you called.”
I had to exert extraordinary self-control not to put my fist through the wall.
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“Did you get the job?” she asked.
“Yeah, yeah. I got it all right. There’s a few snags but I think I can work ’em if I try.”
“I’m so happy,” she said. It sounded as if she really meant it.
“When you went out to meet with Raymond I was afraid that you’d do something you’d regret.”
I laughed. I was filled with regrets.
“What’s wrong, Easy?”
I couldn’t tell her. My whole life I’d walked softly around difficulties when I knew my best defense was to keep quiet. I needed Bonnie to save my little girl. Nothing I felt could get in the way of that. I had to maintain a civil bearing. I had to keep her on my side.
“I’m just tired, baby,” I said. “This case is gonna be a ball-breaker. Nobody I can trust out here.”
“You can trust me, Easy.”
“I know, baby,” I lied. “I know. Is Feather still awake?”
“You bet,” Bonnie said.
I had installed a long cord on the telephone so that the receiver could reach into Feather’s room. I heard the shushing sounds of Bonnie moving through the rooms and then her voice gently talking to Feather.
“Daddy?” she whispered into the line.
“Hi, babygirl. How you doin’?”
“Fine. When you comin’ home, Daddy?”
“Tomorrow sometime, honey. Probably just before you go to sleep.”
“I dreamed that I was lookin’ for you, Daddy, but you was gone and so was Juice. I was all alone in a tiny little house and there wasn’t a T V or phone or nothing.”
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“That was just a dream, baby. Just a dream. You got a big house and lots of people who love you. Love you.” I had to say the words twice.
“I know,” she said. “But the dream scared me and I thought that you might really be gone.”
“I’m right here, honey. I’m comin’ home tomorrow. You can count on that.”
The phone made a weightless noise and Bonnie was on the line again.
“She’s tired, Easy. Almost asleep now that she’s talked to you.”
“I better be goin’,” I said.
“Did you want to talk about the job?” Bonnie asked.
“I’m beat. I better get to bed,” I said.
Just before I took the receiver from my ear I heard Bonnie say, “Oh.”
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The Haight, as it came to be called, was teeming with hippie life. But this wasn’t like Derby. Most of the people on that Berkeley block still had one foot in real life at a job or the university. But the majority of the people down along Haight had completely dropped out. There was more dirt here, but that’s not what made things different. Here you could distinguish different kinds of hippies. There were the clean-cut ones who washed their hair and ironed their hippie frocks. There were the dirty bearded ones on Harley-Davidson motorcycles. There were the drug users, the angry ones. There were the young (very young) runaways who had come here to blend in behind the free love philosophy.
Bright colors and all that hair is what I remember mainly.
A young man wearing only a loincloth stood in the middle of a busy intersection holding up a sign that read end the war. Nobody paid much attention to him. Cars drove around him.
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“Hey, mister, you got some spare change?” a lovely young raven-haired girl asked me. She wore a purple dress that barely made it to her thighs.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m strapped.”
“That’s cool,” she replied and walked on.
Psychedelic posters for concerts were plastered to walls. Here and there brave knots of tourists walked through, marveling at the counterculture they’d discovered.
I was reminded of a day when a mortar shell in the ammuni-tion hut of our base camp in northern Italy exploded for no ap-parent reason. No one was killed but a shock ran through the whole company. All of a sudden whatever we had been doing or thinking, wherever we had been going, was forgotten. One man started laughing uncontrollably, another went to the mess tent and wrote a letter to his mother. I kept noticing things that I’d never seen before. For instance, the hand-painted sign above the infirmary read hospital, all in capital letters except for the t.
That one character was in lower case. I had seen that sign a thousand times but only after the explosion did I really look at it.
The Haight was another kind of explosion, a stunning surge of intuition that broke down all the ways you thought life had to be.
In other circumstances I might have stayed around for a while and talked to the people, trying to figure out how they got there.
But I didn’t have the time to wander and explore.
I’d gotten the address of the People’s Legal Aid Center from the information operator. It had been a storefront at one time where a family named Gnocci sold fresh vegetables. There wasn’t even a door, just a heavy canvas curtain that the grocer raised when he was open for business.
The store was open and three desks sat there in the recess.
Two professional women and one man talked to their clients.
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The man, who was white with short hair, wore a dark suit with a white shirt and a slate-blue tie. He was talking to a fat hippie mama who had a babe in arms and a small boy and girl clutching the hem of her Indian printed dress.
“They’re evicting me,” the woman was saying in a white Texan drawl I knew and feared. “What they expect me to do with these kids? Live in the street?”
“What is the landlord’s name, Miss Braxton?” the street lawyer asked.
“Shit,” she said and the little girl giggled.
At that moment the boy decided to run across the sidewalk, headed for the street.
“Aldous!” the hippie mama yelled, reaching out unsuccess-fully for the boy.
I bent down on reflex, scooping the child up in my arms as I had done hundreds of times with Feather when she was smaller, and with Jesus before that.
“Thank you, mister. Thank you,” the mother was saying. She had lifted her bulk from the l
awyer’s folding chair and was now taking the grinning boy from my arms. I could see in his face that he wasn’t what other Texans would call a white child.
The woman smiled at me and patted my forearm.
“Thank you,” she said again.
Her looking into my eyes with such deep gratitude was to be the defining moment in my hippie experience. Her gaze held no fear or condescension, even though her accent meant that she had to have been raised among a people who held themselves apart from mine. She didn’t want to give me a tip but only to touch me.
I knew that if I had been twenty years younger, I would have been a hippie too.
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“May I help you?” a woman’s voice asked.
She was of medium height with a more or less normal frame, but somewhere in the mix there must have been a Teutonic Valkyrie because she had the figure of a Norse fertility goddess.
Her eyes were a deep ocean blue and though her face was not particularly attractive there was something otherworldly about it.
As far as clothes were concerned she was conservatively dressed in a cranberry dress that went down below her knees and wore a cream-colored woolen jacket over that. There was a silver strand around her neck from which hung a largish pearl with a dark nacre hue. Her glasses were framed in white.
All in all she was a Poindexter built like Jayne Mansfield.
“Hi. My name is Ezekiel P. Rawlins.” I held out a hand.
A big grin came across her stern face but somehow the mirth didn’t make it to her eyes. She shook my hand.
“How can I help you?”
“I’m a private detective from down in L.A.,” I said. “I’ve been hired to find a woman named Philomena Cargill . . . by her family.”
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