Then, when she safe, you can have that bottle all night long.”
The phone rang at that moment. It was a weak jingle, almost not there. I struggled to my feet, staggering as if Feather were already healed and I was drunk on the celebration. My pants were wet from the grass.
The weak bleating of the phone grew loud when I opened the door.
“Hello.”
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“So what’s it gonna be, Ease?” Mouse asked.
It made me laugh.
“I got to move on this, brother,” he continued. “Opportunity don’t wait around.”
“I’ll call you in the mornin’, Ray,” I said.
“What time?”
“After I wake up.”
“This is serious, man,” he told me.
Those words from his lips had been the prelude to many a man’s death but I didn’t care.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “In the mornin’.” And then I hung up.
I turned on the radio. There was a jazz station from USC that was playing twenty-four hours of John Coltrane. I liked the new jazz but my heart was still with Fats Waller and Duke Elling-ton — that big band sound.
I turned on the T V. Some detective show was on. I don’t know what it was about, just a lot of shouting and cars screech-ing, a shot now and then, and a woman who screamed when she got scared.
I’d been rereading Native Son by Richard Wright lately so I hefted it off the shelf and opened to a dog-eared page. The words scrambled and the radio hummed. Every now and then I’d look up to see that a new show was on the boob tube. By midnight every light in the house was burning. I’d switched them on one at a time as I got up now and then to check out various parts of the house.
I was reading about a group of boys masturbating in a movie theater when the phone rang again. For a moment I resisted answering. If Mouse had gotten mad I didn’t know if I could pla-cate him. If it was Bonnie telling me that Feather was dead I didn’t know that I could survive.
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“Hello.”
“Mr. Rawlins?” It was Maya Adamant.
“How’d you get my home number?”
“Saul Lynx gave it to me.”
“What do you want, Miss Adamant?”
“There has been a resolution to the Bowers case,” she said.
“You found the briefcase?”
“All I can tell you is that we have reached a determination about the disposition of the papers and of Mr. Bowers.”
“You don’t even want me to report on what I’ve found?” I asked.
This caused a momentary pause in my dismissal.
“What information?” she asked.
“I found Axel,” I said.
“Really?”
“Yes, really. He came down to L.A. to get away from Haffernon. Also to be nearer to Miss Cargill.”
“She’s down there? You’ve seen her?”
“Sure have,” I lied.
Another silence. In that time I tried to figure Maya’s response to my talking to Cinnamon. Her surprise might have been a clue that she knew Philomena was dead. Then again . . . maybe she’d been given contradictory information . . .
“What did Bowers say?” she asked.
“Am I fired, Miss Adamant?”
“You’ve been paid fifteen hundred dollars.”
“Against ten thousand,” I added.
“Does that mean you are withholding intelligence from Mr.
Lee?”
“I’m not talking to Mr. Lee.”
“I carry his authority.”
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“I spent a summer unloading cargo ships down in Galveston back in the thirties,” I said. “Smelled like tar and fish, and you know I was only fifteen — with a sensitive nose. My back hurt carryin’ them cartons of clothes and fine china and whatever else the man said I should carry for thirty-five cents a day. I had his authority but I was just a day laborer still and all.”
“What did Axel say?”
“Am I fired?”
“No,” she said after a very long pause.
“Let Lee call me back and say that.”
“Robert E. Lee is not a man to fool with, Mr. Rawlins.”
“I like it when you call me mister,” I said. “It shows that you respect me. So listen up — if I’m fired then I’m through. If Lee wants me to be a consultant based on what I know then let him call me himself.”
“You’re making a big mistake, Easy.”
“Mistake was made before I was even born, honey. I came into it cryin’ and I’ll go out hollerin’ too.”
She hung up without another word. I couldn’t blame her. But neither could I walk away without trying to make my daughter’s money.
i s a u t é e d chopped garlic, minced fresh jalapeño, green pep-per, and a diced shallot in ghee that I’d rendered myself. I added some ground beef and, after the meat had browned, I put in some cooked rice from a pot in the refrigerator. That was my meal for the night.
I fell asleep on the loveseat with every light in the house on, the television flashing, and John Coltrane bleating about his favorite things.
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Imoved the trunk in front of the big brass elephant. Underneath was the crushed, cubical body of Axel Bowers. I watched him, worrying once again about the degradation of his carcass. I told him that I was sorry and he moved his head in a little semicircle as if trying to work out a kink in his neck. With his hands he lifted his head, raising it up from the hole. It took him a long while to crawl out of the makeshift grave — and longer still to straighten out all of the bloody, cracked, and shattered limbs. He looked to me like a butterfly just out of the co-coon, unfolding its wet wings.
All of that work he did without noticing me. Pulling on his left arm, turning his foot around until the ankle snapped into place, pressing his temples until his forehead was once more round and hard.
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He was putting his fingers back into alignment when he happened to look up and notice me.
“I’m going to need a new hip,” he said.
“What?”
“The hip bones don’t reform like other bones,” he said. “They need to be replaced or I won’t be able to walk very far.”
“Where you got to go?” I asked.
“There’s a Nazi hiding in Egypt. He’s going to assassinate the president.”
“The president was assassinated three years ago,” I said.
“There’s a new president,” Axel assured me. “And if this one goes we’ll be in deep shit.”
The phone rang.
“You going to get that?” Axel asked.
“I should stay with you.”
“Don’t worry, I can’t go anywhere. I’m stuck right here on my broken hips.”
The phone rang.
I wandered back through the house. In the kitchen Dizzy Gillespie had taken Coltrane’s place. He was standing in front of the sink with his cheeks puffed out like a bullfrog’s, blowing on that trumpet. The front door was open and The Mummy was playing outside. The movie was now somehow like a play being enacted in the street. On the sidewalks all the way up to the corners, extras and actors with small roles were smoking cigarettes and talking, waiting to come onstage to do their parts.
Egypt, I thought and the phone rang.
I came back in the house but the phone wasn’t on its little table. Above, on the bookshelf, Bigger Thomas was strangling a woman who was laughing at him.
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“You can’t kill me,” she said. “I’m better than you are. I’m still alive.”
The phone rang again.
I returned to the brass elephant to tell Axel something but he was back in his hole, crushed and debased.
“My hips were my downfall,” he said.
“I will not be a cripple.”
The phone rang and he disappeared.
I opened my eyes. The Mummy, with Boris Karloff, was playing on T V. Coltrane had not been replaced, and every light in the house was still on.
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.”
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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
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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.
I had a good laugh then. There I was all alone in the night with killers and thieves milling outside in the darkness.
I rooted my .38 out of the closet and made sure that it was loaded. The Luger was a fine gun but I had no idea how old its ammo was. I went around the house turning off lights.
In bed I was overcome by a feeling of giddiness. I felt as if I had just missed a fatal accident by a few inches. In a little while Bonnie’s infidelity and Feather’s dire illness would return to dis-turb my rest, but right then I was at peace in my bed, all alone and safe.
Then the phone rang.
I had to answer it. It might be Bonnie. It might be my little girl wanting me to tell her that things would be fine. It could be Mouse or Saul or Maya Adamant. But I knew that it wasn’t any of them.
“Hello.”
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“I’m at the Pixie Inn on Slauson,” she said. “But I’m very tired.
Can you come in the morning?”
“What’s the room number?”
“Six.”
“What size dress you wear?” I asked.
“Two,” she said. “Why?”
“I’ll see you at seven.”
I hung up and wondered at the mathematics of my mind.
Why had I agreed to go to her when I’d just been thankful for a peaceful heist?
“ ’Cause you the son of a fool and the father of nothing,” the voice that had abandoned me for so many years said.
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25
Icouldn’t sleep anymore that night.
At four I got up and started cooking. First I fried three strips of bacon. I cracked two eggs and dropped them into the bacon fat, then I covered one slice of whole wheat bread with yellow mustard and another one with mayonnaise. I grated orange cheddar on the eggs after I flipped them, put the lid on the frying pan, and turned off the gas flame. I made a strong brew of coffee, which I poured into a two-quart thermos. Then I made the eggs and bacon into a sandwich that I wrapped in wax paper.
Riding down Slauson at five-fifteen with the brown paper bag next to me and Johnnie Walker in the backseat, I tried to come up with some kind of plan. I considered Maya and Lee, dead Axel and scared Cinnamon — and the man in the snakeskin jacket. There was no sense to it; no goal to work toward except making enough money to pay for Feather’s hospital bill.
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I parked across the street from the motel. It was of a modern design, three stories high, with doors that opened to unenclosed platforms. Number 6 was on the ground floor. Its door opened onto the parking lot. I supposed that Philomena wanted to be able to jump out the back window if need be.
I sat in my car wondering what I should ask the girl.
What should I tell her? Should it be truth?
When my Timex read six-eighteen the door of number 6
opened. A tall woman wearing dark slacks and a long white T-shirt came out. Even from that distance I could see that she was braless and barefoot. Her skin had a reddish hue and her hair was long and straightened.
She walked to the soda machine near the motel office, put in her coins, and then bent down to get the soda that fell out. The streets were so quiet that I heard the jumbling glass.
She walked back to the door, looked around, then went inside.
A minute later I was walking toward her door.
I listened for a moment. There was no sound. I knocked. Still no sound. I knocked again. Then I heard a shushing sound like the slide of a window.
“It’s me, Philomena,” I said loudly. “Easy Rawlins.”
It only took her half a minute to come to the door and open it.
Five nine with chiseled features and big, dramatic eyes, that was Philomena Cargill. Her skin was indeed cinnamon red.
Lena’s photograph of her had faithfully recorded the face but it hadn’t given even a hint of her beauty.
I held out the paper bag.
“What’s this?”
“An egg sandwich an’ coffee,” I said.
While she didn’t actually grab the bag she did take it with eager hands.
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She went to one of
the two single beds and sat with the sack on her lap. After closing the door I put the cloth bag I’d brought on the bed across from her and sat next to it.
There were three lamps in the room. They were all on but the light was dim at best.
Philomena tore open the sandwich and took a big bite out of it.
“I’m a vegetarian usually,” she said with her mouth full, “but this bacon is good.”
While she ate I poured her a plastic cup full of coffee.
“I put milk in it,” I said as she took the cup from me.
“I don’t care if you put vinegar in it. I need this. I left my house with only forty dollars in my purse. It’s all gone now.”
She didn’t speak again until the cup was drained and the sandwich was gone.
“What’s in the other bag?” she asked. I believe she was hoping for another sandwich.
“Two dresses, some panties, and tennis shoes.”
She came to sit on the other side of the bag, taking out the clothes and examining them with an expert feminine eye.
“The dress is perfect,” she said. “And the shoes’ll do. Where’d you get these?”
“My son’s girlfriend left them. She’s a skinny thing too.”
When Cinnamon smiled at me I understood the danger she represented. She was more than pretty or lovely or even beautiful. There was something regal about her. I almost felt like bowing to show her how much I appreciated the largesse of her smile.
“They say that Hitler was a vegetarian too,” I said and the smile shriveled on her lips.
“So what?”
“Why don’t you tell me, Philomena?”
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After regarding me for a moment she said, “Why should I trust you?”
“Because I’m on your side,” I said. “I don’t want any harm coming to you and I’ll work to see that no one else hurts you either.”
“I don’t know any of that.”
“Sure you do,” I said. “You talked to Lena about me. She gave you my number. She told you that I’ve traded tough favors down around here for nearly twenty years.”
“She also said that she’s heard that people you’ve helped have wound up hurt and even dead sometimes.”
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