Bad Boy Brawly Brown

by Walter Mosley

  Of course, musicians bring their own crowd: men who want to play like them and women who want to be played. These men and women come in all colors. And once you have a few whites down there, they start coming down in droves. Because as fancy as the Brown Derby might have been, it wasn’t going to give you the kind of freedom that a black club offered. Black people know how to be free. People who had been denied for as many centuries as we had knew how to let their hair down and dance like there was no tomorrow.

  MOUSE WAS THE FIRST PERSON to take me to Hambones. He hadn’t been in L.A. three months when he nosed it out.

  “Yeah, Ease,” he said to me. “The women down there make you cry, they so fine. They don’t have no liquor but you know it’s cheaper in a paper bag anyways.”

  It was the early fifties and I was unattached. One thing good about Mouse being so dangerous was that women just loved being around him. You knew that if you were around Raymond, something unexpected was bound to happen.

  We went down there looking for a woman named Millie. Millie Perette from East St. Louis. She always wore a string of real pink pearls and carried a nacre-handled pistol in a handbag hardly big enough for a cigarette case.

  “Millie do you so bad that you wanna cry when you wake up in the mornin’,” Mouse told me. “Because the next night is so far away.”

  We got there at about midnight. When all the white clubs were winding down, Sam’s place was just getting a second wind. I remember a trumpet player blowing at his table, surrounded by women. People were dancing to the music, drinking and kissing to it, too. When we walked in everybody greeted Mouse as if he were the mayor of Watts rather than a recent transplant from the Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas.

  He had a fifth of rye whiskey in his left hand and a terrible .41-caliber pistol under his zoot suit jacket. Mouse loved that pistol more than any woman. He once told me that the barrel could be un-screwed from the chamber and that he had twelve barrels so that if he killed somebody, he could switch. That way they couldn’t ever prove that it was his gun used in the crime.

  MILLIE WAS AT THE BAR with a big bruiser, a dusky bronze-colored man with gold-capped teeth, a diamond ring, and a pistol tucked in the belt of his woolen suit pants. His hand was half the way down Millie’s blouse and she was laughing happily, drinking from a hammered silver shot glass.

  When Raymond and I walked up to the pair, I was less than pleased. The most you could hope for in Mouse’s company was a bloodless evening — and you could never bank on that if there was love or money involved. The people sitting near the couple moved away as we approached. The conversation died down but the bruiser might not have noticed, because the horn still blew.

  “Millie,” Raymond said.

  She opened up her lips in a loose fashion, showing her teeth and smiling but with an edge that said she knew the stakes had just been raised.

  “I thought you said that you was gonna be up north, Ray baby,” she said. And even though I was girding for fatal violence, I saw the attraction of a woman so brazen.

  “Thought I’d stick around and see if you wanted to dance,” Raymond said pleasantly.

  “Delmont Williams,” the bruiser said to Mouse, holding out his hand.

  Ray looked at the hand but he didn’t take it.

  I fought the urge to back out the way I’d come.

  “Where you from, Del?” Mouse asked.

  “Chi-town’s my home,” he said proudly. “Three generation outta Mississippi but I still eat hog maws and call my mother ‘ma’am.’”

  “How long you been in town?” Mouse asked.

  “What’s it to ya, little man?”

  “Oh. I just wondered.”

  Millie was beginning to understand the seriousness of the conversation. But she was more amused than she was worried. Men fighting over her charms was like a box of chocolate creams to her.

  “’Bout a week or two,” Delmont said. “Long enough to meet the most beautiful woman in Los Angeles.”

  He let his big hand rub over Millie’s breast. She didn’t even feel it, though, entranced as she was by the spectacle promising to unfold.

  “I see,” Raymond said politely. “It’s Delmont — right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Delmont, would you step outside with me?”

  “What for?”

  “’Cause I don’t wanna get no blood on my woman.”

  A little sound came out of Millie’s throat then. Whether it was fear or humor, surprise or just a burp, I did not know.

  Delmont looked at Millie and asked, “Are you his woman?”

  “What do you think?” was her reply.

  Delmont turned back to Mouse and said, “Get away from here ’fore I hurt you, boy.”

  “Come on outside,” Mouse said. “And we’ll see just what kinda man yo’ ma’am made.”

  Delmont was high on liquor and he was intoxicated by the wild and beautiful Millie Perette, but I think at the last minute there he got an inkling of the iron core of my friend. It wasn’t enough to stop him from getting to his feet, though. It wasn’t enough to keep him from going out the door.

  Nobody followed them out there, because no one wanted to be witness to Mouse’s rage. Less than a minute after they’d gone outside, a shot was heard. Two minutes after that, Raymond returned to the restaurant. The horn had stopped playing by then.

  Mouse walked up to Millie and whispered a few words into her ear. She hopped off her stool and walked out with him. I remember that she kept her thighs close together as she walked, making her posterior sway in the most intoxicating way.

  Silence trailed in their wake.

  A minute or two later a few of us went out to see what remained of the big man from Chicago. He wasn’t in the street, so we went down two doorways and turned into the alley there. Under a weak lamp I saw Delmont, a small puddle of blood next to his head.

  When he moved and moaned I jumped. Then I leaned closer and saw that he’d only been wounded in the ear.

  NAW, MAN,” Mouse said to me a few days later, when we’d finally caught up with each other. “I didn’t intend to kill ’im. He was from Chi, didn’t know shit. I wouldn’ta even shot ’im but he had to go callin’ me names in there like I was some kinda chile. But you know, baby, Millie really liked that shit. She give it up all night long. I just touch her and she start to call on the Holy Spirit.”

  SITTING OUT THERE in front of Hambones, I found myself smiling. Ray had a short life but just one day out of it was a year or more to most other men. I could never feel sorry for him — only guilty that in the final moments I had let him down.

  13

  CLARISSA WALKED OUT of Hambones at about eleven-thirty. It was a Sunday night and Hambones wasn’t the hot spot that it had once been. She turned left and walked down the street. I let her go about a block or so before turning the engine over. I drove a block past her and then pulled over to the curb on the opposite side of the street.

  When she walked past me again, I turned off the engine. After she was a block away I got out. She was walking swiftly, clacking her wooden heels. My shoes were rubber soled, however, so I could keep up without being heard.

  She wasn’t nervous, but like any woman with some sense she cast a glance backward now and then. I avoided detection by keeping to the shadows across the street. We went like that for six or seven blocks. Then Clarissa turned right on Byron. She went a block and a half before coming to a squat three-story building that looked like an oversized incinerator. It was covered with kumquat-colored plaster and seemed to sag under its own weight. Clarissa went into a door on the ground floor. A light came on in a tiny window.

  I went over to her door and strained to listen. The building was so cheap that I could hear her footsteps. She opened a door, put down something metal, probably a pot. Something like a chair or couch sagged and then a radio went on in the middle of the song “The Duke of Earl.”

  She was cooking or brewing tea and listening to music. I figured that I’d wait
around until she decided to go to bed.

  Clarissa’s building had a sister structure across the street. On its north side was a small entryway where the garbage cans were stored until trash day. I climbed in behind the lidded metal cans, lit up a Chesterfield, and breathed through my mouth.

  The desert quiet of southern California nights was always a pleasure to me. In the South around Texas and Louisiana there were loud bugs and night birds, wind in the trees, and less identifiable noises from the wetlands and its inhabitants. But in L.A. the night was wrapped in silence as if there were always a predator near, waiting to pounce on some hushed victim.

  That night, I suppose, the predator was me.

  ALMOST NOTHING HAPPENED for the next hour or so. A family of spiders had set up a system of webs above my head, so even the rare moth didn’t stay around long.

  The entrance to Clarissa’s apartment was illuminated by a concrete lamp that was set in the lawn in front of her door. The light in her window stayed on, so I kept to my post.

  My copper-faced Gruen watch said 12:48 when a lime green Cadillac drove up and stopped in front of Clarissa’s building. I could see the damage done by the wooden fence he’d hit broadside the night before. Handsome Conrad was still in the driver’s seat. He was still edgy, looking around nervously. He even glanced in my direction, but I was too deep in shadow to be seen.

  Brawly hopped out of the passenger’s side and said something into the back window. Conrad squealed off down the street, as if he thought the police were still chasing him. Maybe they were.

  Brawly knocked on Clarissa’s door. She answered with a kiss and an embrace. Brawly was a bulky kid, but Clarissa managed to get her arms around him. She was whispering something in his ear, holding on hard.

  They retreated into the house, leaving me to wonder about my next move.

  It didn’t take me long. I crossed the street and walked up to her door. There was some kind of argument going on.

  “You didn’t answer my question!” Clarissa was saying in a loud tone.

  I rapped on the hollow door much harder than was necessary. What followed was a sudden silence. I knocked again.

  “Who is it?” came the voice that had sounded the alarm at the revolutionary headquarters the night before.

  “Easy Rawlins,” I said out loud. “Open up.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Open up, Brawly, Clarissa.”

  That did the trick. Brawly pulled the door wide so he could see the man who knew his name.

  As the door was coming open, I felt the flush of victory. But when I saw his size up close, and the anger knit into his brow, I feared that my triumph could turn into defeat.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he asked.

  “A man who’s been to Isolda’s front doorway,” I said.

  The words didn’t seem to cause him any discomfort or fear.

  “What she got to do with you?” he asked.

  “Let me in, Brawly. We shouldn’t be talkin’ murder out where any ear could hear.”

  “Let him in, honey,” Clarissa said. She was standing at his shoulder.

  He backed up and I entered the apartment.

  It was even smaller than John and Alva’s place, more like a playhouse than an adult’s home. If I had laid down and stretched out my arms, I could have touched one wall with the flat of my feet and the opposite one with my fingertips.

  “Who is he?” Brawly asked his girlfriend.

  “He’s a friend’a Sam’s,” Clarissa said. “Easy Rawlins, like he said.”

  “Your mama sent me,” I said.

  There was a big yellow chair in a corner of the sad little room. I’d been on my feet for over an hour, so I took the opportunity to sit.

  Brawly remained upright while Clarissa hovered close to him, fearful, I imagined, that he might lose control.

  “What you doin’ bangin’ on my woman’s door in the middle’a the night?”

  “Lookin’ for you,” I said.

  That was a good time to light up a cigarette. It made me feel confident while relaxing my nerves in the presence of the behemoth John asked me not to harm.

  “Don’t fuck with me, niggah,” he said. But the words didn’t sound genuine. He was big but he was still playacting, not yet a man in his own right.

  “Are you the one slaughtered Aldridge Brown?” I asked him.

  “What?…”

  “Aldridge Brown,” I said. “Was it you who killed him?”

  Brawly grabbed me by my arms and picked me up out of the chair. He lifted me high enough that the ceiling was no more than an inch from my head.

  The sense of weightlessness reminded me of when I was a defenseless child in the grip of some rough adult, yearning for the ground beneath my feet.

  “What the fuck you talkin’ ’bout?” he said, his voice a full octave higher.

  “Put me down,” I said without tripping over a single syllable.

  “Put him down, baby!” Clarissa yelled.

  “He was killed at Isolda’s house,” I said. “Beat to death at the front door yesterday morning. Ain’t you read the papers?”

  Brawly let me down gently enough but when he slumped onto that cotton brown couch, it felt as if the floor might collapse. As it was, the whole house shook. I imagined that people were jumping out of their beds, worried that another L.A. earthquake was shaking down the building.

  “Beat to death?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And when I went to talk to Isolda the only story she had was that you and Aldridge had a fight and you left sayin’ that you’d kill him if he ever said your mother’s name again.”

  “That bitch,” Clarissa hissed.

  “It’s not true,” Brawly said. “I was with… I wasn’t even in town yesterday morning.”

  He shot a guilty glance at Clarissa, but she was too upset to notice.

  “You didn’t see Aldridge at Isolda’s house?”

  “Not yesterday.”

  “Did you two get drunk and argue a couple’a weeks ago at her house?” I asked.

  “Couple’a months, yeah. We had a drink or two. The conversation got a little hot but we ain’t had no fight. If we did, he’d be…” Brawly didn’t need to finish that sentence. “I didn’t kill ’im, man. I swear.”

  “Somebody did,” I said.

  Brawly sat back, looking more than ever like the child in his mother’s photograph.

  “He’s dead?” Brawly asked again. “Dead?”

  “That’s right.”

  “My father?” he asked of no one in particular.

  Clarissa perched herself on the armrest of the sofa. She put her arm around his head.

  “My father, my dad…”

  It was a moving performance. It might have even been real remorse, but I had seen people cry over loved ones they had murdered just hours before. The feelings of pain were there whether or not their hand had delivered the final stroke.

  I lit up another cigarette.

  “You don’t know anything about it?” I asked when the tears had passed. “I mean, you didn’t even read about it or hear it on the news?”

  “Brawly’s been busy,” Clarissa told me.

  “Shut your mouth,” Brawly warned.

  I wouldn’t have been suspicious if he followed his own advice.

  “Busy doin’ what?”

  “Who are you, man?” Brawly asked me.

  “Friend’a Alva Torres doin’ a good deed by her boy.”

  “I ain’t got nuthin’ to do with her,” Brawly told me.

  “That’s your mother, honey,” Clarissa said. “That’s blood.”

  “And just about the only drop left,” I added. “She’s concerned about you. When she asked me to find you, I told her she probably didn’t need to worry. But now that I seen the mess your life is in, I understand why she wants you to come home.”

  “I don’t have no home. They kicked me out.”

  “I don’t believe that for one second, son. Your mama loves you
even if you don’t care for yourself.”

  “He’s right, baby,” Clarissa said.

  “You don’t know shit, Clarissa. So don’t be tryin’ to tell me nuthin’.”

  “The cops gonna look hard at you if they think you were fighting with him,” I said.

  “That was almost two months ago,” Brawly said. “We made up since then.”

  “Where were you Saturday morning?” I asked.

  “Up north,” Brawly said. “I left Friday night.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  A guilty look flashed on the boy’s face. He seemed to hold himself back from looking at Clarissa.

  “People saw me,” he said evasively.

  “Who?”

  “Why I got to answer to you? Who the fuck are you to come in here in the middle’a the night and question me?” Brawly said.

  When he rose up from the couch my heart did a double thump to get enough blood into action in case I needed to fight.

  “I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “I’m just tryin’ to help you, boy,” I said.

  I made the mistake of putting my hand on his shoulder.

  Brawly shoved both arms out at me and I went backward. My feet actually left the ground. I felt the wall hit my back and my left ankle twist as my foot touched down.

  Clarissa said, “Baby.”

  The front door slammed open.

  When I looked up I saw Brawly storming out into the street, leaving his girlfriend with a strange man in the middle of the night.

  14

  CLARISSA RAN TO THE DOOR but she didn’t try to stop Brawly. She must have gone through this with him before, his childish anger overruling his common sense, even his common decency.

  I considered going after the boy but doubted that either my words or my fists would have made much of an impression. I could have shot him but didn’t think that John or Alva would have taken kindly to that.