Read Online Cinnamon Kiss by Walter Mosley - Free Book Online

photograph of a man, his arms around an older woman, with them both looking at the camera.
    “Who’s this?” I asked my companion.
    “That’s Axel and his mom. She died three years ago,” Dream Dog said. “His father passed away from grief a year and a half later.”
    The younger Bowers couldn’t have been over twenty-five, maybe younger. He had light brown hair and a handsome smile. You could tell by his clothes and his mother’s jewelry that there was money there. But there was also sorrow in both their smiles and I thought that maybe a poor childhood in southern Louisiana wasn’t the worst place that a man could come from.
    “I told him that he should open the drapes too,” Dream Dog was saying. “I mean God gives sunlight to warm you and to let you see.”
    “Where’s the bedroom?” I asked.
    “Axel’s cool though,” my new friend said as he led me through a double-wide door on the other side of the room. “He comes from money and stuff, but he knows that people are worth more than money and that we got to share the wealth, that a ship made outta gold will sink…”
    He flipped a wall switch and we found ourselves in a wide, wood-paneled hallway. Down one side of the hall were Japanese woodprints framed in simple cherrywood. Each of these prints (which looked original) had the moon in one aspect or another as part of the subject. There were warriors and poets, fishermen and fine ladies. Down the other side were smaller paintings. I recognized one that I’d seen in an art book at Paris Minton’s Florence Avenue Bookshop. It was the work of Paul Klee. Upon closer examination I saw that all of the paintings on that side of the wall were done by him.
    “I paint some too,” Dream Dog said when I stopped to examine the signature. “Animals mostly. Dogs and cats and ducks. I told Axel that he could have some of my drawings when he got tired’a this stuff.”
    It was a large bedroom. The oversized bed seemed like a raft on a wide river of blue carpet. The sheets and covers were a jaundiced yellow and the windows looked out under a broad redwood that dominated the backyard.
    A newspaper, the
Chronicle,
was folded at the foot of the bed. The date was March 29.
    There were whiskey glasses at the side of the unmade bed. They also had the sheen of dried liquor. The pillows smelled sweetly, of a powerful perfume. I had the feeling that vigorous sex had transpired there before the end, but that might have been some leftover feeling I had about Maya Adamant.
    The room was so large that it had its own dressing nook. I thought that this was a very feminine touch for a man, but then maybe the previous owners had been a couple and this was the woman’s corner.
    There was an empty briefcase next to the cushioned brown hassock that sat there between three mirrors. Next to the handle was a shiny brass nameplate that had the initials ANB stamped on it.
    There was a bottle of cologne on the little dressing table; it smelled nothing like those pillows.
    “Axel entertain a lot?” I asked my hippie guide.
    “Oh man,” Dream Dog said. “I seen three, four women in here at the same time. Axel gets down. And he shares the wealth too. Sometimes he calls me in and we all get so high that nobody knows who’s doin’ what to who—if you know what I mean.”
    I did not really know and felt no need for clarification.
    The dressing table had three drawers. One contained two plastic bags of dried leaves, marijuana by the smell of them. Another drawer held condoms and various lubricants. The bottom drawer held a typed letter, with an official heading, from a man named Haffernon. There was also a handwritten envelope with Axel’s name scrawled on it. There was no stamp or address or postmark on that letter.
    “I’m going to take these letters,” I said to my escort. “Maybe I can get to Axel or Cinnamon through somebody here.”
    “But you’re gonna leave the dope?” Dream Dog sounded almost disappointed.
    “I’m not a