Cinnamon Kiss (28 page)

The gallery was on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. I put my pistols in the trunk and my PI license in my shirt pocket. Even dressed fine as we were Jackson and I were still driving a hot rod car in the morning, and even though he had a corporate look I was a little too sporty to be going to a respectable job.

I parked in front of the gallery, Merton’s Fine Art.

There was the sound of faraway chimes when we entered. A white woman wearing a deep green suit came through a doorway at the far end of the long room. When she saw us a perplexity invaded her features. She said something into the room behind her and then marched forward with an insincere smile plastered on her lips.

“May I help you?” she asked, doubtful that she could.

“Are you Nina Tourneau?”

“Yes?”

“My name’s Easy Rawlins, ma’am,” I said, holding out my city-issued identification. “I’m representing a man named Lee from up in San Francisco. He’s trying to locate a relative of yours.”

Nothing I said, nor my ID, managed to erase the doubt from her face.

“And who would that be?” she asked.

Nina Tourneau was somewhere in her late fifties, though cosmetics and spas made her look about mid-forty. Her elegant face had most definitely been beautiful in her youth. But now the cobwebs of age were gathering beneath the skin.

“A Mr. Rega Tourneau,” I said.

The name took its toll on the art dealer’s reserve.

Jackson in the meanwhile had been looking at the pale oil paintings along the wall. The colors were more like pastels than oils really and the details were vague, as if the paintings were yet to be finished.

“These paintin’s here, they like uh,” Jackson said, snapping his fingers. “What you call it? Um …derivative, that’s it. These paintin’s derivative of Puvis de Chavannes.”

“What did you say?” she asked him.

“Chavannes,” he repeated. “The man Van Gogh loved so damn much. I never liked the paintin’s myself. An’ I sure don’t see why some modern-day painter would want to do like him.”

“You know art?” she asked, amazed.

At that moment the chimes sounded again. I didn’t have to look to know that the police were coming in. When Nina whispered into the back room I was sure that it was to tell her secretary to call the police. After the riots people called the police if two black men stopped on a street corner to say hello—much less if they walked into a Beverly Hills gallery with paintings based on old European culture.

“Stay where you are,” one of the cops said. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

“Oh yeah,” Jackson said to Nina. “I read all about them things. You know it’s El Greco, the Greek, that I love though. That suckah paint like he was suckled with Picasso but he older than the hills.”

“Shut up,” one of the two young cops said.

They both had guns out. One of them grabbed Jackson by his arm.

“I’m sorry, Officers,” Nina Tourneau said then. “But there’s been a mistake. I didn’t recognize Mr. Rawlins and his associate when they came in. I told Carlyle to watch out. He must have thought I wanted him to call you. There’s nothing wrong.”

The cops didn’t believe her at first. I don’t blame them. She seemed nervous, upset. They put cuffs on both Jackson and me and one of them took Nina in the back room to assure her that she was safe. But she kept to her story and finally they set us free. They told us that we’d be under surveillance and then left to sit in their cruiser across the street.

“Why are you looking for my father?” Nina asked after they’d gone.

“I’m not,” I said. “It’s Robert Lee, detective extraordinaire from Frisco, lookin’ for him. He gave me some money and I’m just puttin’ in the time.”

Miss Tourneau looked at us for a while and then shook her head.

“My father’s an old man, Mr. Rawlins. He’s in a rest home. If your client wishes to speak to me you can give him the number of this gallery and I will be happy to talk with him.”

She stared me in the eye while saying this.

“He disowned you, didn’t he?”

“I don’t see where that’s any of your business,” she said.

I smiled and gave her a slight nod.

“Come on, Jackson,” I said.

He shrugged like a child and turned toward the door.

“Excuse me, sir,” Nina Tourneau said to Jackson. “Do you collect?”

You could see the question was a novel thought to my friend. His face lit up and he said, “Lemme have your card. Maybe I’ll buy somethin’ one day.”

THE POLICE were still parked across the street when we came out.

“Why you didn’t push her, Easy?” Jackson asked. “You could see that she was wantin’ to know what you knew.”

“She told me where he was already, Mr. Art Collector.”

“When she do that?”

“While we were talkin’.”

“An’ where did she say to go?”

“The Westerly Nursing Home.”

“And where is that?”

“Somewhere not too far from here I bet.”

“Easy,” Jackson said. “You know you a mothahfuckah, man. I mean you like magic an’ shit.”

Jackson might not have known that a compliment from him was probably the highest accolade that I was ever likely to receive.

I smiled and leaned over to wave at the policemen in their prowler.

Then we drove a block south and I stopped at a phone booth, where I looked up Westerly.

W
hy you drivin’ west, Easy?” Jackson asked me. We were on Santa Monica Boulevard.

“Goin’ back to Ozone to pick up your car, man.”

“Why?”

“Because the cops all over Beverly Hills got the description of this here hot rod.”

“Oh yeah. Right.”

ON THE WAY to the nursing home Jackson stopped so that he could buy a potted white orchid.

“For Jewelle?” I asked him.

“For a old white man,” Jackson said with a grin.

He was embarrassed that he didn’t pick up on why we needed to switch cars and so he came up with the trick to get us in the nursing home.

We decided to send Jackson in with the flowers and to see how far he could get. The ideal notion would be for Jackson to tell the old man that we had pictures of him in Germany humping young women and girls. Failing that he might find a way to get us in on the sly. Every mansion we’d ever known had a back door and some poor soul held a key.

I wasn’t sure that Rega Tourneau was mastermind of the problems I was trying to solve, but he was the centerpiece. And if he knew anything, I was going to do my best to find out what it was.

Westerly was a big estate a few long blocks above Sunset. There was a twelve-foot brick wall around the green grounds and an equally tall wrought iron gate for an entrance. We drove past it once and then I parked a few woodsy blocks away.

For a disguise Jackson buttoned the top button of his shirt, turned the lapels of his jacket up, and put on his glasses.

“Jackson, you really think this is gonna work? I mean here you wearin’ a two-hundred-dollar suit. They gonna know somethin’s up.”

“They gonna see my skin before they see anything, Easy. Then the flowers, then the glasses. By the time they get to the suit they minds be made up.”

After he left I lay down across the backseat.

There was an ache behind my eyes and my testicles felt swollen. Back when I was younger that pain would have been a point of pride. I would have worked it into street conversation. But I was too old to mask pain with bluster.

After a few moments I fell into a deep slumber.

Haffernon was standing there next to me. We were locked in a bitter argument. He told me that if he hadn’t done business with the Nazis then someone else would have.

“That’s how money works, fool,” he said.

“But you’re an American,” I argued.

“How could you of all people say something like that?” he asked with real wonder. “Your grandparents were the property of a white man. You can’t ever walk in my shoes. But still you believe in the ground I stand on?”

I felt a rage growing in my chest. I would have smashed his face if a gun muzzle hadn’t pressed up against the base of his skull. Haffernon felt the pressure but before he could respond the gun fired. The top of his head erupted with blood and brain and bone.

The killer turned and ran. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman, only that he (or she) was of slight stature. I ran after the assassin but somebody grabbed my arm.

“Let me go!” I shouted.

“Easy! Easy, wake up!”

Jackson was shaking my arm, waking me just before I caught the killer. I wanted to slap Jackson’s grinning face. It took me a moment to realize that it was a dream and that I’d never find a killer that way.

But still…

“What you got, Jackson?”

“Rega Tourneau is dead.”

“Dead?”

“Died in his sleep last night. Heart failure, they said. They thought that I was bringing the flowers for the funeral.”

“Dead?”

“The lady at the front desk told me that he’d been doin’ just fine. He’d had a lot of visitors lately. The doctors felt that maybe it was too much excitement.”

“What visitors?”

“You got a couple’a hunnert dollars, Easy?”

“What?” Now awake, I was thinking about Rega Tourneau dying so conveniently. It had to be murder. And there I was again, scoping out the scene of the crime.

“Two hunnert dollars,” Jackson said again.

“Why?”

“Terrance Tippitoe.”

“Who?”

“He’s one’a the attendants up in there. While I was waitin’ to see the receptionist we talked. Afterwards I told him I thought I knew how he could make some scratch. He be off at three.”

“Thanks, Mr. Blue. That’s just what I needed.”

“Let’s go get lunch,” he suggested.

“You just ate a little while ago.”

“I know this real good place,” he said.

I flopped back down and he started the car. I closed my eyes but sleep did not come.

“YEAH, EASY,” Jackson was saying.

I was stabbing at a green salad while he chowed down on a T-bone steak at Mulligan’s on Olympic. We had a booth in a corner. Jackson was drinking beer, proud of his work at the Westerly Nursing Home. But after the third beer his self-esteem turned sour.

“I used to be afraid,” he said. “All the time, day and night. I used to couldn’t go to sleep ’cause there was always some fear in my mind. Some man gonna find out how I cheated him or slept wit’ his wife or girlfriend. Some mothahfuckah hear I got ten bucks an’ he gonna stove my head in to get it.”

“But now you got a good job and it’s all fine.”

“Job ain’t shit, Easy. I mean, I like it. Shoot, I love it. But the job ain’t what calms my mind. That’s all Jewelle there.”

He snorted and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

“What’s the matter, Jackson?”

“I know it cain’t last, that’s what.”

“Why not? Jewelle love you more than she loved Mofass and she loved him more than anything before he died.”

“’Cause I’m bound to fuck it up, man. Bound to. Some woman gonna crawl up in my bed, some fool gonna let me hold onta his money. I been a niggah too long, Easy. Too long.”

I was worried about Feather, riding on a river of sorrow and rage named Bonnie Shay, scared to death of Joe Cicero, and faced with a puzzle that made no sense. Because of all that I appreciated Jackson’s sorrowful honesty. For the first time ever I felt a real kinship with him. We’d known each other for well over twenty-five years but that was the first time I felt true friendship for him.

“No, Jackson,” I said. “None’a that’s gonna happen.”

“Why not?”

“Because I won’t let it happen. I won’t let you fuck up. I won’t let you mess with Jewelle. All you got to do is call me and tell me if you’re feelin’ weak. That’s all you got to do.”

“You do that for me?”

“Damn straight. Call me anytime day or night. I will be there for you, Jackson.”

“What for? I mean …what I ever do for you?”

“We all need a brother,” I said. “It’s just my turn, that’s all.”

TERRANCE TIPPITOE was a small, dark-colored man who had small eyes that had witnessed fifty or more years of hard times. He had told Jackson to meet him at a bus stop on Sunset at three-oh-five. We were there waiting. Jackson made the introductions (my name was John Jefferson and his was George Paine). I set out what I needed. For his participation I’d give him two hundred dollars.

Terrance was pulling down a dollar thirty-five an hour at that time and since I hadn’t asked him to kill anyone he nodded and grinned and said, “Yes sir, Mr. Jefferson. I’m your man.”

A time was made for Jackson to meet Terrance a few hours later.

Before Jackson and I separated back in Santa Monica, he agreed to lend me the two hundred.

The world was a different place that afternoon.

I
went back to the hospital and got directions at the main desk to Bobby Lee’s new room. Sitting in a chair beside Lee’s door was an ugly white man with eyebrows, lips, and nose all at least three times too big for his doughy face. Even seated he was a big man. And despite his bulky woolen overcoat I could appreciate the strength of his limbs.

As I approached the door the Neanderthal sat up. His movements were graceful and fluid, as if he were some behemoth rising from a primordial swamp.

“Howdy,” I said in the friendly manner that many Texas hicks used. I didn’t want to fight this man at any time, for any reason.

He just looked at me.

“Easy Rawlins to see Robert E. Lee,” I said.

“Right this way,” the brute replied in a melodious baritone. He rose from the chair like Nemo’s
Nautilus
rising from the depths.

Opening the door he gestured for me to go through. He tagged along behind—an elephant following his brother’s tail.

Lee was sitting up in the bed wearing a nightshirt that wasn’t hospital issue. It had white-on-white brocade along the buttons and a stylish collar. Seated next to him was Maya Adamant. She wore tight-fitting coral pants and a red silk blouse. Her hair was tied back and her visage was nothing if not triumphant.