Read Online Cinnamon Kiss by Walter Mosley - Free Book Online Page B

said, shaking his head and smiling. “But he was happy and we all went to sleep. We slept for twenty-four hours and when we woke up Axel was all calm and sure. That was when he started doin’ all’a that travelin’ and stuff.”
    “How long ago was that?” I asked.
    “A year maybe. A little more.”
    “Around the time his father died?” I asked.
    “Now that you say it …yeah. His father died two weeks before—that’s why we did acid.”
    “And where is this Polly or Molly?”
    “Her? I dunno, man. She was goin’ from door to door sellin’ brownies. Axel an’ me were ready to trip and we asked her if she wanted to join in. Axel told her that if she did he’d buy all’a her brownies.”
    “But I thought you said that you were at this other place. Asham?”
    “Ashram,” Dream Dog said. “That’s the prayer temple that Axel built out behind the trees in his backyard. That’s his holy place.”
    “Where do you live?” I asked Dream Dog.
    “On this block mainly.”
    “Which house?”
    “There’s about five or six let me crash now and then. You know it depends on how they’re feelin’ and if I got some money to throw in for the soup.”
    “If I need to find you is there somebody around here that might know how to get in touch?” I asked.
    “Sadie down in the purple place at the end of the block. They call her place the Roller Derby ’cause of the street and because so many people crash there. She knows where I am usually. Yeah, Sadie.”
    Dream Dog’s gaze wandered down the street, fastening upon a young woman wearing a red wraparound dress and a crimson scarf. She was barefoot.
    “Hey, Ruby!” Dream Dog called. “Wait up.”
    The girl smiled and waved.
    “One more thing,” I said before he could sprint away.
    “What’s that, Dupree?”
    “Do you know where Axel’s San Francisco office is?”
    “The People’s Legal Aid Center. Just go on down to Haight-Ashbury and ask anyone.”
    I handed Dream Dog a twenty-dollar bill and proffered my hand. He smiled and pulled me into a fragrant hug. Then he ran off to join the red-clad Ruby.
    The idea of karma was still buzzing around my head. I was thinking that maybe if I was nice to Dream Dog, someone somewhere would be kind to my little girl.
     
     
    I WALKED AROUND the block after Dream Dog was gone. I didn’t want him or anybody else to see me investigate the ashram, so I came in through one of the neighbors’ driveways and into the backyard of Axel Bowers.
    It was a garden house set behind two weeping willows. You might not have seen it even looking straight at it because the walls and doors were painted green like the leaves and lawn.
    The door was unlocked.
    Axel’s holy place was a single room with bare and unfinished pine floors and a niche in one of the walls where there sat a large brass elephant that had six arms. Its beard sprouted many half-burned sticks of incense. Their sweet odor filled the room but there was a stink under that.
    A five-foot-square bamboo mat marked the exact center of the floor but beyond that there was no other furniture.
    All of the smells, both good and bad, seemed to emanate from the brass elephant. It was five feet high and the same in width. At its feet lay a traveling trunk with the decals of many nations glued to it.
    Somebody had already snapped off the padlock, and so all I had to do was throw the trunk open. Because of the foul odor that cowered underneath the sweet incense I thought that I’d find a body in the trunk. It was too small for a man but maybe, I thought, there would be some animal sacrificed in the holy ashram.
    Failing an animal corpse, I thought I might find some other fine art like the pieces that graced the house.
    The last thing I expected was a trove of Nazi memorabilia.
    And not just the run-of-the-mill pictures of Adolf Hitler and Nazi flags. There was a dagger that had a garnet-encrusted swastika on its hilt, and the leather-bound copy of
Mein Kampf
was signed by Hitler