Cinnamon Kiss by Walter Mosley

gave her a quick nod. She smiled at me and let her head drift to the side, letting me know that the counterculture had infiltrated every pore of the city.
     
     
    HAFFERNON HAD A BIG DESK under a picture window but he took me into a corner where he had a rose-colored couch with a matching stuffed chair. He took the chair and waved me onto the sofa.
    “What is your business with me, Mr. Rawlins?” he asked.
    I hesitated, relishing the fact that I had this man by the short hairs. I knew this because he had told Dina not to bother him for anything but the blood of blood. When powerful white men like that make time for you there’s something serious going on.
    “What problem did Axel Bowers come to you with?” I asked.
    “Who are you, Mr. Rawlins?”
    “Private detective from down in L.A.,” I said, feeling somehow like a fraud but knowing I was not.
    “And what do Axel’s …problems, as you call them, have to do with your client?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m looking for Axel and your name popped up. Have you seen Mr. Bowers lately?”
    “Who are you working for?”
    “Confidential,” I said with the apology in my face.
    “You walk in here, ask me about the son of one of my best friends and business associates, and refuse to tell me who wants to know?”
    “I’m looking for a woman named Philomena Cargill,” I said. “She’s a black woman, lover of your friend’s son. He’s gone. She’s gone. It came to my attention that you and he were in negotiations about something that had to do with his father. I figured that if he was off looking into that problem that you might know where he was. He, in turn, might know about Philomena.”
    Haffernon sat back in his chair and clasped his hands. His stare was a spectacle to behold. He had cornflower-blue eyes and black brows that arced like descending birds of prey.
    This was a white man whom other white men feared. He was wealthy and powerful. He was used to getting his way. Maybe if I hadn’t been fighting for my daughter’s life I would have felt the weight of that stare. But as it was I felt safe from any threat he could make. My greatest fear flowed in a little girl’s veins.
    “You have no idea who you’re messing with,” he said, believing the threatening gaze had worked.
    “Do you know Philomena?” I asked.
    “What information do you have about me and Axel?”
    “All I know is that a hippie I met said that Axel has been spending time in Cairo. That same man said that Axel had asked you about his father and Egypt.”
    His right eye twitched. I was sure that there were Supreme Court justices who couldn’t have had that effect on Leonard Haffernon. I lost control of myself and smirked.
    “Who do you work for, Mr. Rawlins?” he asked again.
    “Are you a collector, Mr. Haffernon?”
    “What?”
    “That hippie told me that Axel collected Nazi memorabilia. Daggers, photographs. Do you collect anything like that?”
    Haffernon stood then.
    “Please leave.”
    I stood also. “Sure.”
    I sauntered toward the door not sure of why I was being so tough on this powerful white man. I had baited him out of instinct. I wondered if I was being a fool.
     
     
    OUTSIDE HIS OFFICE I asked Dina for a pencil and paper.
    I wrote down my name and the phone of my motel and handed it to her. She looked up at me in wonder, a small smile on her lips.
    “I wish it was for you,” I said. “But give it to your boss. When he calms down he might want to give me a call.”
     
     
     

• 16 •
     
     
    I ate a very late lunch at a stand-up fried clam booth on Fisherman’s Wharf. It was beautiful there. The smell of the ocean and the fish market reminded me of Galveston when I was a boy. At any other time in my life those few scraps of fried flour over chewy clam flesh would have been soothing. But I didn’t want to feel good until I knew that Feather was going to be okay. She and Jesus were all I had left.
    I went to a pay phone and made the collect