“Who is it?” a sweet voice laced with Houston asked.
“Easy Rawlins, Lena.”
A chain rattled, three locks snapped back. The door came open and the broad-faced restaurateur smiled her welcome as I had seen her do many times at the Texas Rose.
“Come in. Come in.”
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She was leaning on a gnarled cane and her glasses had lenses with two different thicknesses. But there was still something stately about her presence.
The house smelled of vitamins.
“Sit. Sit.”
The carpet was blue and red with a floral pattern woven in.
The furniture belonged in a better neighborhood and a larger room. On the wall hung oil paintings of her West Indian parents, her deceased Tennessee husband, and her son, also dead. The low coffee table was well oiled and everything was drenched in sunlight from the window.
When I set the groceries down on the table I realized that I’d forgotten the scotch in the backseat of my car.
“What’s this?” she asked, pointing at the bag.
“Your name came up recently and I realized that I had to ask you a couple’a questions. So I thought, as long as I was comin’, you might need some things.”
“Aren’t you sweet.”
She backed up to the stuffed chair, made sure of where she was standing, and let herself fall.
“Let’s put them away later,” she said with a deep sigh.
“You know it takes a lot outta me these days just to answer the door.”
“You sick?”
“If you call getting old sick, then I sure am that.” She smiled anyway and I let the subject drop.
“How long has it been since you closed the Rose?”
“Eight years,” she said, smiling. “Those were some days. Hu-bert and Brendon were both alive and working in the kitchen.
We had every important black person in the country, in the world, coming to us for dinner.”
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She spoke as if I were a reporter or a biographer coming to get down her life story.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was somethin’ else.”
Lena smiled and sighed. “The Lord only lets you have breath for a short time. You got to take it in while you can.”
I nodded, thinking about Feather and then about Jesus out on some beach with Benita.
“Alva called. Why are you coming to see me, Mr. Rawlins?”
While inhaling I considered lying. I held the breath for a beat and then let it go.
“I think Philomena Cargill is in trouble. Some people hired me to find her up in Frisco, and even though I didn’t, what I did find makes me think that she might need some help.”
“Why are these people looking for Cindy?” Lena asked.
“Her boss walked off with something that didn’t belong to him. At least that’s what they told me. He disappeared and then, a little while later, she did too.”
“And why are you coming to me?”
“I found a postcard from you in Philomena’s apartment.”
“You broke into her place?”
“No. As a matter of fact that’s one of the reasons I’m worried about her. They had her place up for rent. She’d left everything behind.”
I let these words sink in. Lena lifted her gaze above the glasses as if to get a better view of my heart. I have no idea what her nearly blind eyes saw.
“I don’t know where she is, Easy,” Lena said. “The last I heard she was in San Francisco working for a man named Bowers.”
“Are her parents here?”
“When her father died her mother moved to Chicago to live with a sister.”
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“Brothers? Sisters?”
“Her brothers are both in the service, Vietnam. Her sister married a Chinese man and they moved to Jamaica.”
There was something Lena wasn’t telling me.
“What’s she like — Cinnamon?”
“Reach over in that drawer in the end table,” she said, waving in that general direction.
The drawer was filled with papers, ballpoint pens, and pencils.
“Under all that,” she said. “It’s a frame.”
The small gilded frame held a three-by-five photo of a pretty young woman in a graduation cap and gown. She was smiling like I would have liked my daughter to do on her graduation day.
The photograph was black-and-white but you could almost see the reddish hue to her skin through the shading. There was a certainty in her eyes. She knew what she was seeing.
“She’s the kind of woman that men hate because she’s not afraid to be out there in a man’s world. Broke all’a the records at Jordan High School. Made it to the top of her class at University of California at Berkeley. Ready to fly, that child is . . .”
“She honest?”
“Let me tell you something, young man,” Lena said. “The reason I know her is that she worked in my restaurant in the last two years. She was just a girl but sharp and true. She loved to work and learn. I wished my own son had her wits. After the restaurant closed she came to see me every week to learn from what I knew. She was no crook.”
“Did she have any close friends down here?”
“I didn’t know her friends. She saw boys but they were never serious. The young men around here don’t value a woman with brains and talent.”
“Do you know how I can find her?” I asked, giving up subtlety.
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“No.”
Maybe I thought she was lying because all I could see was the opaque reflective surface of her glasses.
“If you hear from her will you tell her that I’m looking for the documents Bowers took?”
“What documents?”
“All I know is that he took some papers that have red seals on them. But I’m not worried about them as much as I’m worried about Miss Cargill’s safety.”
Lena nodded. If she did know where Philomena was she’d be sure to give her the message. I wrote down my home and office numbers. And then I helped Lena put away the groceries.
Her refrigerator was empty except for two hard-boiled eggs.
“With my legs the way they are it’s hard for me to get out shopping very much,” she said, apologizing for her meager fare.
I nodded and smiled.
“I come down to my office at least twice a week, Lena. I can always make a supermarket run for you.”
She patted my forearm and said, “Bless you.”
There are all kinds of freedom in America — free speech, the right to bear arms — but when the years have piled up so high on their back that they can’t stand up straight anymore, many Americans find out they also have the freedom to starve.
a t a p h o n e b o o t h
down the street from Lena’s house I looked up a number and then made a call.
“Hello?” a man answered.
“Billy?”
“Hey, Easy. She ain’t here.”
“You know when she’ll be in?”
“She at work, man.”
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“On Saturday?”
“They pay her to sit down in her office when the band comes in for practice. She opens up the music building at nine and then closes it at three. Not bad for time and a half.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go over and see her there.”
“Bye, Easy. Take care.”
Jordan High School had a sprawling campus. There were over three thousand students enrolled. I came in through the athletic gate and made my way toward the boiler room. That’s where Helen McCoy made her private office. She was the building supervisor of the school, a position two grades above the one I’d just left.
Helen was short and redheaded, smart as they come, and tougher than most men. I had seen her kill a man in
Third Ward one night. He’d slapped her face and then balled up a fist. When she pressed five inches of a Texas jackknife into his chest he sat down on the floor — dying as he did so.
“Hi, Easy,” she said with a smile.
She was sitting at a long table next to the boiler, writing on a small white card. There was a large stack of blank cards on her left and a smaller stack on the right. The right-side cards had already been written on.
“Party?” I asked.
“My daughter Vanessa’s gettin’ married. These the invitations.
You gettin’ one.”
I sat down and waited.
When Helen finished writing the card she sat back and smiled, indicating that I had her attention.
“Philomena ‘Cinnamon’ Cargill,” I said. “I hear she was a student here some years ago.”
“Li’l young,” Helen suggested.
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“It’s my other job,” I said. “I’m lookin’ for her for somebody.”
“Grapevine says you quit the board.”
“Sabbatical.”
“Don’t shit me, Easy. You quit.”
I didn’t argue.
“Smart girl, that Philomena,” Helen said. “Lettered in track and archery. Gave the big speech at her graduation. She was wild too.”
“Wild how?”
“She wasn’t shy of boys, that one. One time I found her in the boys’ locker room after hours with Maurice Johnson. Her drawers was down and her hands was busy.” Helen grinned. She’d been wild herself.
“I was told that her father died and her mother left for Chicago,”
I said. “You know anybody else she might be in touch with?”
“She had a school friend named Raphael Reed. He was funny, if you know what I mean, so he never got jealous of her runnin’
around.”
“That all?”
“All I can think of.”
“You think you could go down and pull Reed’s records for me?”
Helen considered my request.
“We known each other a long time haven’t we, Easy?”
“Sure have.”
“You the one got me this job.”
“And you moved up past me in grade in two years.”
“I don’t have no job on the side to distract me,” she said.
I nodded, submitting to her logic.
“You know I ain’t s’posed t’ give the public information on students or faculty.”
“I know that.”
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She laughed then. “I guess we all do things we ain’t s’posed to do sometimes.”
“Can’t help it,” I agreed.
“Wait here,” she said, patting the table with her knife hand.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
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Itold Raphael’s mother—a small, dark woman with big, brown, hopeful eyes — that I was Philomena Cargill’s uncle and that I needed to talk to her son about a pie-baking business that my niece and I were starting up in Oakland. All I hoped for was a phone number, but Althea was so happy about the chance for a job for her son that she gave me his address too.
This brought me to a three-story wooden apartment building on Santa Barbara Boulevard. It was a wide building that had be-gun to sag in the middle. Maybe that’s why the landlord painted it bright turquoise, to make it seem young and sprightly.
I walked up the sighing stairs to 2a. The door was painted with black and turquoise zebra stripes and the letters RR RR
were carved into the center.
The young man who answered my knock wore only black jeans. His body was slender and strong. His hair was long (but 1 4 5
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not hippie long) and straightened — then curled. He wasn’t very tall, and the sneer on his lips was almost comical.
“Yeeees?” he asked in such a way that he seemed to be suggesting something obscene.
I knew right then that this was the young man who’d hung up on me, the one I’d called from Philomena’s apartment.
“Raphael Reed?”
“And who are you?”
“Easy Rawlins,” I said.
“What can I do for you, Easy Rawlins?” he asked while ap-praising my stature and style.
“I think that a friend of yours may have been the victim of foul play.”
“What friend?”
“Cinnamon.”
It was all in the young man’s eyes. Suddenly the brash flirta-tion and sneering façade disappeared. Now there was a man standing before me, a man who was ready to take serious action depending on what I said next.
“Come in.”
It was a studio apartment. A Murphy bed had been pulled down from the wall. It was unmade and jumbled with dirty clothes and dishes. A black-and-white portable T V with bent-up rabbit-ear antennas sat on a maple chair at the foot of the bed.
There was no sofa, but three big chairs, upholstered with green carpeting, were set in a circle facing each other at the center of the room.
The room smelled strongly of perfumes and body odors. This scent of sex and sensuality was off-putting on a Saturday afternoon.
“Come on out, Roget,” Raphael said.
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A door opened and another young man, nearly a carbon copy of the first, emerged. They were the same height and had the same hairstyle. Roget also wore black jeans, no shirt, and a sneer. But where Raphael had the dark skin of his mother, Roget was the color of light brown sugar and had freckles on his nose and shoulders.
“Sit,” Raphael said to me.
We all went to the chairs in a circle. I liked the configuration but it still felt odd somehow.
“What about Philomena?” Raphael asked.
“Her boss disappeared,” I said. “A man named Adams hired me to find him. He also told me that Philomena had disappeared a couple of days later. I went to her apartment and found that she’d moved out without even taking her clothes.”
Raphael glanced at his friend, but Roget was inspecting his nails.
“So what?”
“You’re her friend,” I said. “Aren’t you worried?”
“Who says I’m her friend?”
“At Jordan you two shared notes on boys.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?” he asked.
I realized that I had gone too far, that no matter how much it seemed that these young men were homosexuals, I was not allowed to talk about it.
“Just that she had a lot of boyfriends,” I said.
Roget made a catty little grunt. It was the closest he came to speaking.
“Well,” Raphael said, “I haven’t even spoken to her since the day she graduated.”
“Valedictorian wasn’t she?”
“She sure was,” Raphael said with some pride in his tone.
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“Is Roget here a friend’a hers?”
“What?”
“She did call here didn’t she?” I asked.
“You the niggah called the other day,” Raphael said. “I thought I knew your voice.”
“Look, man. I’m not tryin’ to mess with you or your friends. I don’t care about anything but finding Bowers for the man hired me. I think that Philomena is in trouble, because why else would she leave her place without taking her clothes and personal things? If you know where she is tell her that I’m looking for her.”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“Take my number. If she calls give it to her.”
“I don’t need your number.”
I wondered if my daughter could die because of this petulant boy. The thought made me want to slap him. But I held my temper.
“You’re makin’ a mistake,” I said. “Your friend could get hurt — bad.”
Raphael’s lips formed
a snarl and his head reared back, snake-like — but he didn’t say a word.
I got up and walked out, glad that I’d left my new stolen Luger at home.
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Idrove home carefully, making sure to check every traffic light — twice.
Once in my house I gave in to a kind of weariness. It’s not that I was tired, but there was nothing I could do. I’d done all I could about Philomena Cargill. And even though I’d chummed the waters for her I doubted that she was alive to take the bait.
Bonnie was off, probably with Joguye Cham, her prince.
And Feather would die unless I made thirty-five thousand dollars quickly. She might die anyway. She might already be dead.
I hadn’t had a drink in many years.
Liquor took a toll on me. But Johnnie Walker was still in the backseat of the car and I went to my front door more than once, intent on retrieving him.
And why not take up the bottle again? There was no one to disapprove. Oblivion called to me. I could navigate the tidal 1 4 9
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wave of my life on a full tank; I’d be a black Ulysses singing with the stars.
It was early evening when I went out the front door and to my borrowed car. I looked in the window at the slender brown bag on the backseat. I wanted to open the door but I couldn’t. Because even though there was no trace of Feather she still was there. Looking at the backseat I thought about her riding in the backseat of my Ford. She was laughing, leaning up against the seat as the young hippie Star had done, telling me and Jesus about her wild adventures on the playground and in the classroom. Sometimes she made up stories about her and Billy Chipkin crossing Olympic and going up to the County Art Museum.
There, she’d say, they had seen pictures of naked ladies and kings.
I remembered her sitting by my side in the front seat reading Little Women, snarling whenever I interrupted her with questions about what she wanted for dinner or when she was going to pick up her room.
Dozens of memories came between me and that door handle.
I got dizzy and sat down on the lawn. I put my head in my hands and pressed all ten fingers hard against my scalp.
“Go back in the house,” the voice that was me and not me said. “Go back an’ do it until she’s in her room dreamin’ again.
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