“What’s that supposed to mean?” Conrad wouldn’t have been happy with anything I said.
“It means that she’s a mother and she’s worried over her son. For all she knows, he’s with a gang. So I told her that I’d find him and ask him to give her a call.”
Sometimes the truth is just as good as a lie.
“You’re not welcome among us, Mr. Rawlins,” Strong said at last. “There’s no time for Good Samaritans and mother’s tears while the police brutalize our souls and break our bodies.”
“That’s okay with me, man. You know, I don’t want my body broken, neither. But could you take me back to Hambones? My ride is out in front’a there.” I didn’t lie but I talked in a way that hid the nature of my mind.
“No,” Conrad said. “Get out here and find your own way back.”
Xavier and Tina wouldn’t meet my gaze.
“I think I must agree,” Strong said.
“Okay. All right then.” I opened the door and got out. As soon as I was on the curb the lime Caddy took off.
There I was, at least three miles from my car, but I wasn’t unhappy. I walked four blocks to a small diner and called the Ajax Cab Company. They sent a red and white car straight off to pick me up. A friendly driver named Arnold Beard from North Carolina took me to my car.
He didn’t ask me why I was out and so far away from my car, and I felt no need to explain.
I WAS AT MY HOUSE by eight-thirty. The volume on the TV was turned up high; I could hear it from the front porch. I knew what I would find when I got inside. Feather would be sitting almost on top of our console TV while Jesus slept behind her, sprawled out on the couch.
Frenchie, the little yellow dog, growled at me from under the TV set. I was so happy to be home that even that foul mutt’s snarling felt like a welcome.
“Shhh, Daddy. Juice sleepin’.” She wore her pale blue pajamas with decals of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans pasted all over them.
“Hey there, cowgirl.”
“Shhh,” she said, and then she giggled as I picked her up.
“Are you baby-sitting for Juice?”
“Uh-huh.”
Feather put her soft arms around my neck and laid her head just below my chin. She always fell asleep in my arms at night when I came home late. She would try her best to stay awake until I got there, but the moment I picked her up she was on her way to dreamland.
By the time I had her under the covers she was in a deep sleep.
I left Jesus on the couch. It was hard to wake him up, and it had been years since I could carry him to bed. After all, he was almost seventeen years old. He’d wake up at some point and look in to check on Feather and then me before going to bed.
I put away the dishes that Jesus and Feather had washed and left in the rack to dry. Then I went to my bedroom. Frenchie followed me, snarling and crouching as if he were about to pounce. But he was no larger than a big rat. He knew that he couldn’t do the kind of damage he wanted.
I stripped off my T-shirt and looked at him in the doorway.
“What you want?”
Confusion replaced hatred for a moment and then he snarled again. I threw my T-shirt on his head, causing him to yelp and run from the room.
It gave me a kind of perverse pleasure to know that there was someone close to me who was always planning my demise. Frenchie hated me, that much was sure. He blamed me for the death of his mistress, and forgiveness was not a part of his nature. Every time I saw him he reminded me that there’s always somebody out to get you, that you better keep your guard up because there’s no such a thing as safe.
I WENT TO BED feeling lonely. That’s what Bonnie had brought into my life — loneliness. Before her, my company was the best company. I loved my kids but they were children; they were going to grow up and go away, and I felt that I could let them. But now my bed felt as though it were missing something when Bonnie was gone. When she was off on her flights to Europe and Africa, I never got a satisfying sleep. And when she was home, even though I was miserable over the death of Raymond, I found an island in my dreams that was the closest thing to home that I had ever known.
No one had ever really been there for me before. I never talked to my first wife. Back then I thought that a man was supposed to be strong and silent; he was supposed to make her safe and warm while paying the bills and siring children.
But Bonnie changed all that. She was on my wavelength. And she was an independent thinker. She could take an action for herself without anybody else’s approval. I knew that because she’d once killed a man who attacked her and then went on with her life. Sometimes I’d wake up at night and look at her, knowing that she had crossed the same line I had. But I was never afraid. I felt like some ancient nomad who could depend on his woman to fight at his side, tooth and nail, against the wild.
That night had me wide-eyed but it wasn’t just missing Bonnie. Neither was my insomnia due to the police raid or the pistol in my face. All that was just a small part of the obstacle course that had been my life. I was an orphan at eight years old in the Deep South. I had fought, and won, against men when I didn’t even have hair in my armpits.
No, neither the Urban Revolutionary Party nor their cop enemies bothered me. But dead men were different.
In the cool darkness of my room I wondered about the dead man and Alva’s plea to find her son. It would have been easy enough for me to go to John and tell him that murder was more than I had signed up for. I didn’t even have to tell him, because it was bound to get around about the death in Alva’s cousin’s home. John would know that I couldn’t get involved with that kind of trouble. He knew what trying to make a normal life meant.
I decided to call him and say that I’d gone to the First Men, that I saw Brawly and he looked fine. He would have heard about the murder by then. He’d understand.
I breathed a deep sigh, relieved that my insanity was only a twelve-hour bug. But when I dozed off I found myself in the middle of a very real dream. I walked into a room where Mouse was seated at a small round table. He was wearing a dark suit and a short-brimmed hat. I remained on my feet and told him the story of my day. He was looking down while I spoke, listening to my words with gravity. When I finished he looked up with his gray eyes glittering. He shrugged as if to say, Hey, man, what’s to worry?
I felt that giddiness in my gut again. I woke up in the middle of the night realizing that I was trying to stifle a laugh.
9
“MOUSE! HEY, RAYMOND, wait up!”
He was walking down the street a block ahead of me. I increased my pace but couldn’t manage to gain on him.
“Wait up, man!” I cried.
And then, suddenly, he turned around. His pistol was in his hand and he opened fire. I froze in place, knowing the deadly accuracy of his marksmanship. He let off five or six rounds and I was still standing. I looked around behind me and saw three dead men on the ground. When I looked back in Mouse’s direction he smiled and tipped his hat to me. Then he turned and walked away quickly. I wanted to follow but was so frightened that I couldn’t make my legs move.
“Daddy.”
I felt a slight nudge at my arm.
“Daddy, wake up,” Jesus said. He was kneeling over me.
I was on the floor next to the bed, partly wrapped in sheets and covers. I wondered how I got there. I didn’t think I could have fallen. Maybe I was trying to hide from those killers under the bed.
“Uncle John’s here,” the boy said.
“What time is it?”
“About eight o’clock.”
“Go out and tell him I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER I strode on cramped feet into our small living room. John was standing there looking like a fish out of water in his overalls and work boots.
“Easy.”
“What can I do for you, John?”
“I need your help.”
“Didn’t we already have this talk yesterday?” I asked.
“You want some coffee or something to eat?” I asked him.
“I got to get down to the lots.”
“Come on in the kitchen anyway. I just woke up.”
“I ain’t got time to fool around, Easy. I need your help and I need it now.”
I turned my back on him and went into the kitchen.
I always liked the kitchen in the morning because that’s when the sun flooded the windows. While I was filling the percolator with tap water, John walked in.
“Hey, man,” he said. “I’m sorry. I know you just woke up, but things got worse overnight.”
He slumped down on one of the kitchen chairs as I measured out four level tablespoons of MJB.
“What happened?”
“It’s Brawly. I think he might’a killed somebody.”
“Who?”
“You remember Alva told you about her ex-husband?”
“Yeah.”
“He was killed yesterday at her cousin Isolda’s house.”
“How you know that Brawly did it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s Isolda. She called Alva last night, only Alva wouldn’t talk to her, so instead I got on the line.”
“Yeah?”
“She said that Brawly and his father had had a big fight and that she was tryin’ to keep ’em apart but she had to go away and she thinks that they run into each other at her house.”
“So she didn’t actually see Brawly kill Aldridge,” I said.
“I don’t know,” John said. “I don’t know what that woman saw and what she didn’t. All I know is that Alva’s takin’ it bad and I’m worried about her. I’m real worried.”
“About what exactly?”
A shadow moved over John’s already dark visage. I got the feeling that he was about to say something and then decided against it.
“Easy, just go talk to Isolda. Okay? She’s holed up in a place down off Alameda. Just go talk to her. And if you can shake Brawly loose someplace, call me and tell me where he is. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“All right. Gimme the address and I’ll see what she has to say.” When it came down to it, I couldn’t send John away. I’d been in a few tight spots in my time and he had never turned his back on me.
“You want me to go with you?”
“No. You go back to your lots. Put up some timber for me. I’ll talk to Isolda and I’ll find Brawly, too.”
There was a powerful emotion on John’s strong face. If I hadn’t known him better, I would have thought that he wanted to kill me. That’s how hard love was for all black men at one time.
HELLO?” HE SAID, answering the phone on the seventeenth ring.
“Jackson?”
“Easy?” I could hear his fear through the line. “Easy, how’d you get my number?”
“I always got your number, Jackson. I always got it.”
He was looking around, I was sure, worried that I might be at some window or at his front door.
“Don’t worry, Jackson. I ain’t hidin’ outside your front door.” I paused. “I ain’t at the back door, neither.”
“I was lookin’ out the window, man,” he said. “You cain’t fool me.”
“Where’s Jesus’s money, Jackson?”
“Say what?”
“You heard me, man. Where’s the two hundred forty-two dollars you took out from under his bed?”
“Wasn’t no two hundred dollars up under there,” Jackson whined. “Shit. Not even one-forty.”
Jackson Blue was by far the most intelligent person I had ever known but if he was rattled, he could be fooled by a child.
“I want the boy’s money,” I said.
Jackson had been our houseguest for a few days when he was on the run from some Westside gangsters. He was playing a numbers game in their territory and they wanted a few ounces of flesh. I thought I was doing him a favor until he disappeared with Jesus’s savings can.
“All right. Okay, man,” Jackson said. “I just borrowed it, anyway. You know them men was out after me. They still are.”
“I could come by and pick it up,” I said.
Jackson sputtered. His fearfulness made me laugh. He was always in trouble, always around the hardest of hard men. But still, he was afraid of his own shadow.
“Where you get my number, Easy?”
Jackson was a brilliant thinker and as well read as many a university professor, but when it came to reading people, he hadn’t made it through the first grade.
He had a girl who he bragged on, name of Charlene Lorraine. Charlene liked the cowardly Jackson for some crazy reason and let him share her bed now and then. She liked him but didn’t respect or fear or care about him in any way. I gave her twenty dollars only two weeks after the day Raymond Alexander and John F. Kennedy were shot. She gave me Jackson’s number without even asking why.
“I ain’t seen him but one time, Easy,” the buxom Miss Lorraine told me. “I think he must have some other girlfriend somewhere.”
“So you’re jealous?” I asked her.
“Jealous?” she exclaimed. “That’d be like bein’ jealous if somebody else petted your little dog. He’s cute and all, but it ain’t like he no real man or nuthin’.”
Charlene let her arms hang back making her bosom protrude even farther. She looked me up and down but I didn’t bite. Not that I wouldn’t have minded being reeled up into her bed, but I had Bonnie by that time and other women were not a main concern on my mind.
“John gimme your number,” I lied.
“Where he get it?”
“I didn’t need to know that, Jackson. What I need is a line on a few people you might have come across in your petty crimes.”
“What people?”
“I want you to ask around about Aldridge Brown, Brawly Brown, and dude name of Strong run with a group called the Urban Revolutionary Party or the First Men.”
“Which one?” Jackson asked. “Urban Party or First Men?”
“They go by both names.”
“If I do that, you gonna let me slide on the piggy-bank money?”
“If you do that, I’ll connect you with an honest job so you can pay Jesus back from your first month’s salary.”
“What was them names again?” he asked.
I told him.
“Okay. I could do that. Yeah. Why’ont you call me tomorrow afternoon. I should have whatever I can get by then.”
“Why don’t you call me, Blue?”
“Well, you know…”
“No. What?”
“Jesus might answer.”
That was Jackson. He lived his whole life among murderers, muggers, and thieves but he was afraid of a sixteen-year-old boy who was even smaller than him.
“All right, Jackson. I’ll call you tomorrow at two. You better be there.”
“I ain’t got nowhere else to be, Easy,” he said. “Nowhere at all.”
10
THE TENEMENT ISOLDA MOORE was staying in was nothing like her house. The unpainted wooden stairs that led to her third-floor hideaway felt soggy under my weight. The hallway was misshapen. The floor was warped and sagging, the ceiling slumped. The hallway started out wide but it narrowed as I neared Isolda’s door.
The photographs of her on the bureau mirror, even the secret ones of her in the bikini, had not done Miss Moore justice. She was lovely at first sight even though she was off balance from having yanked the wedged door free. She was a light brown woman in a polka-dot blue and white dress. The hemline reached just below her knees, revealing shapely legs. Isolda wore no bra and didn’t seem to be missing it. Her big eyes were close together and almond shaped. Her lips were poised in the permanent expectation of a kiss.
“Yes?” she asked nervously.
“Isolda Moore?” I said. She hesitated, so I went on. “My name is Easy Rawlins. John and Alva wanted me to come over and ask you a few things about Brawly.”
While
I spoke, my eyes cataloged her attributes.
The worry in her face melted away when she saw the way I looked at her.
“Come on in.”
The room could have been a hotel flop in a frontier town in the Old West. The walls had never felt a coat of paint and a splinter from that rough floor could have sent you to the hospital with lockjaw. But Isolda had moved whatever furniture there was next to the window and covered it all with white and pastel-colored sheets. There were fresh-picked flowering weeds in a milk bottle on the sill. The arrangement would have put a downtown florist to shame.
“Do you drink tea, Mr. Rawlins?” she asked.
“Whatever you got,” I said.
She smiled and led me toward the cloth-covered furniture.
It was a medium-sized room and mostly unfinished, as I said. But Isolda’s design had created a small island of style there by the window. The tea she poured was ice-cold even though there was no evidence of a refrigerator in the room.
“I keep the pitcher in a bucket full’a ice I got from the liquor store,” she said, seeing the question on my face.
“You should be an interior designer,” I said.
“Thank you.”
Isolda swiveled on the chair she was in, and I felt my heart catch. She had all the skill and beauty of a woman who hooks up with a big-time minister or gangster, the kind of woman who needs a powerful man for her own skills to flower.
She had positioned herself so that the sun came down on her head, making her eyes glisten. I must have been staring a little too hard because she shifted again and asked, “Alva and John send you to find Brawly?”
“That they did. But really I think Alva wants me to find him.”
I mentioned Alva to see if Isolda had hard feelings about her cousin.
“She must be worried sick,” Isolda said, leaving me with no clue.
“John told me that Alva’s ex-husband was found murdered at your house.”
Isolda nodded, looking down at my hands.
“Who killed him?” I asked, again trying to shake her up.
“I really wouldn’t know, Mr. Rawlins.”
Bad Boy Brawly Brown Page 5
