Cinnamon Kiss by Walter Mosley

face-to-face. You know what’ll happen if the cops come breakin’ down my door and I can’t even say that I ever talked to the man.”
    “I brought you there, Easy. I wouldn’t put you in jeopardy like that.”
    “
You
wouldn’t. I know that because I know you. But hear me, man, that black son’a yours will be out on his own one day. And when he is he will tell you that every other white man he meets will sell an innocent black man down the river before he will turn on a white crook.”
    That silenced my friend for a moment. I had waited years to be able to slip that piece of intelligence into his ear.
    “Well what did you think about Lee?” he asked.
    “I don’t trust him.”
    “You think he’s bent?”
    “I don’t know about that but he seems like the kinda fool get you down a dark alley and then forget to send your backup.”
    “Forget? Bobby Lee doesn’t forget a thing. He’s one of the smartest men in the world.”
    “That might be,” I replied, “but he thinks he’s even smarter than what he is. And you and I both know that if a man is too proud then he’s gonna fall. And if I’m right under him…”
    Saul respected me. I could see in his eye that he was halfway convinced by my argument. Now that he’d met Lee he had reservations of his own.
    “Well,” he said, “I guess you got to do it anyway, right? I mean that’s your little girl.”
    I nodded and gazed southward at a huge bank of fog descending on the city.
    “I guess we better be getting back,” Saul said.
    “You go on. I’m gonna stick around town and see about these people here.”
    “But all they need you to do is find Philomena Cargill.”
    “I don’t know that she’s in L.A. Neither does Lee.”
     
     
    SAUL HAD TO GET BACK home. He was due to meet with a client the next morning. I had him drop me off at a Hertz rental car lot.
    It only took them an hour and a half to call Los Angeles to validate my BankAmericard.
    “You always call the bank to check out a credit card?” I asked the blue-suited and white salesman.
    “Certainly,” he replied. He had a fat face, thinning hair, and a slender frame.
    “Seems to defeat the purpose of a credit card.”
    “You can never be too careful,” he told me.
    “I look at it the other way around,” I said. “The way I see it you can never be careful enough.”
    The salesman squinted at me then. He understood that I was making fun of him—he just didn’t get the joke.
     
     
    AN OAKLAND PHONE BOOK at the Hertz office told me that Axel Bowers lived on Berkeley’s Derby Street. The Bay Area street map in my glove compartment put it a block or so up from Telegraph. I drove my rented Ford across the Bay Bridge and parked a block away from the alleged thief’s house.
    Derby was a major education for me. Everything about that block was in transition. But not the way neighborhoods usually change. It wasn’t black folks moving in and whites moving out or a downward turn in the local economy so that homes once filled with middle-class families were turning into rooming houses for the working poor.
    This neighborhood was transforming as if under a magic spell.
    The houses had gone from the standard white and green, blue, and yellow to a wide range of pastels. Pinks, aquas, violets, and fiery oranges. Even the cars were painted like rainbows or with rude images or long speeches etched by madmen. Music of every kind poured from open windows. Some women wore long tie-dyed gowns like fairy princesses and others wore nearly nothing at all. Half of the men were shirtless and almost all of them had long hair like women. Their beards went untrimmed. American flags were plastered into windows and tacked to walls in a decidedly unpatriotic manner. Many of the young women carried babies.
    It was the most integrated neighborhood I had ever seen. There were whites and blacks and browns and even one or two Asian faces.
    It seemed to me that I had wandered into a country where war had come and all