Bad Boy Brawly Brown

by Walter Mosley

  I poured our coffees into powder blue mugs with red roses stenciled on them. Feather had picked them out at a small shop we visited on a day trip to the little Swedish town of Solvang, just inland from Santa Barbara.

  Knorr sat across from me, smiling through the rising steam. He reached into his breast pocket and came out with a small stack of photographs. He handed them to me.

  They were grainy black-and-white shots, slightly blurred because the subjects were unaware of the photographer and so moved unexpectedly at times. There were many different people in the snapshots, but the constant was me: me talking to Handsome Conrad and skinny Xavier Bodan, me standing outside of the Urban Revolutionary Party’s front door, me running out the back, pulling Tina by the arm and rushing toward a Cadillac that I knew was green.

  The fever I’d felt two days earlier returned as a chill. For a moment a dark part of my mind wanted to strangle Officer Knorr and then make a run for the state line.

  “I showed those pictures around and came up with your name, Mr. Rawlins.”

  “Why you wanna single me out?”

  “I know everybody else’s name. Christina Montes, Jasper Xavier Bodan, and Anton Breland, who also goes by the name Conrad. I could lay a name and a few aliases on everybody at that meeting. Everybody but you.”

  I was memorizing the names I didn’t already know while trying to keep my breath from driving me to violence.

  “What’s the problem, Officer? Is it against some law to go to a political meeting?”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Why?”

  “It could have some bearing on a case that I’ve been assigned to.”

  “What case?”

  “We have reason to believe that these political activists are planning some kind of violent protest. Maybe even an armed attack of some kind. I mean to keep that from happening.”

  It was impossible to read behind that cool expression or Knorr’s soft words. Did he believe what he was asking me? Or was this some complex ploy to trip me up or to somehow vilify those children?

  “I went there looking for a young man named Brawly Brown,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because his mother was worried about him and wanted me to make sure that he was healthy and safe.”

  Knorr winked at me. I didn’t know if it was a nervous tic or a sign that he was happy with my answer.

  “Did you find him?”

  “I saw him at the opposite end of room. Then your armored guard came through the windows and started breaking heads.”

  “That wasn’t me. That was Captain Lorne. He thinks you can beat the Negroes by dispersing them. I know better.”

  Slowly a picture of the internal man was coming clear.

  “So you just take pictures while he abuses our rights?” I said.

  “Rights,” Knorr said. “Those people don’t respect what America has given them. They don’t deserve rights.”

  “That’s not for you to decide, Officer. Rights are guaranteed by the Constitution, not judged by some messenger boy from city hall.”

  If it was possible Knorr’s green eyes got even cooler.

  “This boy Brown,” he said, “is at the center of the trouble I’m working on. He’s been in contact with the people who are planning an insurrection.”

  I wondered if what Knorr was saying was true. On top of that, I wondered if he believed what he said.

  “Why you gonna come in here and tell me all this, Officer? You don’t know me. I might be Khrushchev’s man in L.A., for all you know. I could be lookin’ for Brawly to sign up for the war.”

  “I’ve talked to a few people about you, Mr. Rawlins. Easy — that’s what they call you, isn’t it? You have a rap sheet but not for this kind of stuff. You work one-on-one. Sometimes you’re on the wrong side, but you’re a loyal American. I know your war record.”

  “The war is over,” I said. “You won and I didn’t.”

  “You don’t believe that shit,” Knorr said. “If you did, you wouldn’t have Jesus and Feather.…”

  When he mentioned my children’s names a chilly nausea invaded my intestines.

  “You wouldn’t have that job at Sojourner Truth Junior High School. I heard that you even intervened when there was gang violence at your school; you called in the cops and gave them the information they needed to keep a gang war from happening.”

  “What do you want from me, Officer?”

  Knorr took a dirty white card from his pocket and placed it on the table.

  “That’s my number,” he said. “Call me when you got something. As an informant we can come up with probably a thousand dollars’ reward. And as an American you’ll be helping your people and mine.”

  I didn’t touch the card, nor did I look at it directly.

  “Is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why don’t you leave?”

  He gave me a one-eighth nod and frigid grin, then got to his feet and moved toward the door. As I watched him go, my mind went back to Mouse.

  “Kill him,” my friend whispered from the grave.

  16

  THAT AFTERNOON FOUND ME on Grand Avenue, just north of Sunset. The address that Jackson had given me was a big brick edifice that looked more like a factory than an apartment building. The entrance was small, but the bell board had more than three dozen tenants listed. I went up and down the list until settling on the name b. terrell. I thought about the letters for a minute and then remembered Brawly’s high school girlfriend.

  B. Terrell’s apartment was on the sixth floor. I was breathing hard by the time I was through the third flight of stairs. By the time I reached her door, I had to stop and catch my breath.

  I knocked four times. The hall was empty and the lock was susceptible to the three playing cards that I carried in my wallet.

  B. Terrell’s apartment was of a monotonous, almost penal design. It was made up of four rooms that were all of equal size. Living room, kitchen, toilet, and bedroom. Each chamber was cube-shaped, and together they formed a bigger square. Each room had two doors that led to two other rooms. The living room was too small and the bathroom too large. The kitchen would have been hard to move around in. Only the bedroom really worked as it was supposed to.

  The front door led into the living room. On a small coffee table was a framed photograph of a younger Brawly arm-in-arm with a blond-haired white girl. She had the healthy look of a Scandinavian, not pretty but handsome enough. They were smiling and obviously in love, at least at that moment. There was mail on the kitchen table addressed to BobbiAnne Terrell. In the bathroom medicine cabinet there were four boxes of Trojan condoms and a jar of petroleum jelly.

  Under the bed there was a heavy metal box painted drab green. In it I found three carbines, six .45-caliber pistols, and two M-1 rifles. The top shelf of the closet had stacks of ammunition for those guns and some others.

  I took one of the pistols, loaded it, and put it in my windbreaker pocket. I was halfway through the living room, on my way to the door, when the lock jiggled and the front door opened.

  She was surprised to see a big black man in the middle of the room, but not enough to scream or run. I was surprised, too.

  “Hello,” she said, sounding more curious than afraid.

  She looked just as she did in the photograph. The dress was even the same, a coral-colored one-piece that buttoned down the front. She had a nice figure, if you liked your women on the beefy side. Her face was wide and freckled in the center.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Who are you?”

  “Easy,” I said. “Easy Rawlins.”

  “What are you doing in my apartment?”

  “Looking for Brawly Brown. The door was unlocked and I didn’t have anywhere else to be, so I walked in and called his name. I was just about to leave when you came in.”

  “Why are you looking for Brawly?”

  “Lotta people looking for him,” I said. “But I’m representing
Alva, his mother.”

  BobbiAnne checked the doorknob but there was no way to tell if it had been unlocked when I got there.

  “I’ve looked everywhere,” I said, intending to calm her with conversation. “The First Men, at his cousin Isolda’s —”

  “You here for her?” BobbiAnne said with a flash of anger.

  “No. I just looked in at her. She’s the one who gave me your name.”

  “That bitch,” BobbiAnne said.

  “Why you say that?” I asked.

  “Not a bitch but just sick,” the Nordic girl amended. She moved into the room, put at ease, I guess, because I stayed stationary.

  “Sick how?”

  “She used Brawly.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What are you going to do when you find Brawly?” she asked, changing the flow of the conversation.

  I moved to a straight-backed wooden chair, indicating that I wanted to extend our conversation.

  “The boy’s in trouble,” I said. “The police think he’s going to go ballistic with politics, Isolda thinks he might have killed his father, and Alva just thinks that he’s runnin’ with the wrong crowd. For all I know, they might all be right.”

  Something I said got to the girl. A worried look invaded her optimistic features, and she took to the small sofa opposite me.

  “Are you here to turn him over to the police?”

  “I told you already that I’m here for his mother,” I said. “Mothers don’t turn their babies over to the cops.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “That’s the second time you changed the subject,” I said. “Not polite, but I’ll tell you that I wasn’t looking for you. I asked around about Brawly and heard that he had a girlfriend lived in this building. Once I saw your name, I knew it had to be you because Isolda told me that you were Brawly’s friend in high school. Now can you help me find the younger Mr. Brown?”

  BobbiAnne had big, upstanding breasts and broad shoulders, crystal blue eyes and a stomach that protruded just slightly. All of this worked to make her more attractive as the moments went by. She was the kind of girl who would turn beautiful on you overnight.

  Her face was worried, but still she didn’t seem fragile or vulnerable. I liked that.

  “I don’t know where Brawly is,” she said. “But he’s not in any trouble that I know of. Nothing except that his mother doesn’t understand him.”

  “Have you talked to him in the last day or so?”

  “He called. He said that he was going to come by but first he had to see a… a friend.”

  “Anton Breland?” I said, remembering the alias Conrad sometimes used.

  “How do you know him?” For the first time Miss Terrell’s face showed real concern.

  “Met him. He pulled out a pistol on me and left me stranded three miles away from my car.”

  “Oh. I didn’t like him when I first met him,” she said. “But him and Brawly have gotten pretty close. For the past six months he’s really been getting into the black thing. He said that he realized that black people had to get the white man off their backs.”

  “Is that when he left you?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” I said, “I didn’t see his name downstairs.”

  “We never lived together.”

  “So Brawly isn’t in any kind of trouble?” I asked.

  “No,” she said in an uncertain tone.

  “I can’t help him if you don’t tell me.”

  “I don’t even know you.”

  “The question is,” I said, “do you know Brawly?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that if the police come in here and find those guns up under your bed, they’re gonna drag you off to jail. Especially when they find those army-issue M-ones.”

  “You searched my house?”

  “Listen to me, girl,” I said. “I don’t care about you or those guns. I ain’t a cop and I don’t concern myself with politics. All I want is to figure out how Brawly is doing and get him outta trouble if I can. If you want to sleep with a thirty-year jail sentence up under your bed, it’s okay with me. But if you know what’s good for you, you’ll tell me how I can get to Brawly and talk some sense to him.”

  “I don’t know anything, Mr. Rawlins,” she said.

  “Are those his guns under your bed?”

  She didn’t answer that question.

  “What are they for?” I tried again

  “Just… just for self-defense, just in case.”

  “Have you touched them?” I asked.

  “Touched what?”

  “Those guns.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t,” I said, and then stood up.

  BobbiAnne’s whole body jerked at my sudden movement. It was the first real evidence I had that she was afraid of me.

  “Brawly’s in trouble,” I said. “And if you aren’t careful, he’ll drag you down with him.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong,” she said.

  “If you can get a judge to believe that, you might only get fifteen years.”

  17

  ANTON BRELAND was in the directory. I looked him up in a phone booth at the back of a Thrifty’s Drug Store. It was about two in the afternoon on a Monday. There could be no better evidence that I was losing my grip on the straight and narrow. As I sat there looking at the name in the white pages, I tried to convince myself that I had done my duty by John and it was time to go back to work. There was no reason for me to follow revolutionaries and murderers. Bonnie would be home in thirty-six hours. My life could be sweet once again.

  But then I realized that in the past few days my waking hours had not been tinged with remorse about the death of my friend. Only my dreams revealed these feelings. As long as I moved forward trying to unravel the trail of Brawly Brown, I was in a kind of safety zone where guilt couldn’t touch me.

  I lit up a cigarette and tore out the page.

  ANTON LIVED ON SHENANDOAH, a small tributary off of Slauson, in a house that looked like a brick bunker. The lawn was neat but dead. The four-inch-high grass was straw colored. I imagined that Anton first lost interest in the lawn about fourteen or fifteen months before, but it continued to grow because it was the middle of the rainy season. With the coming of summer, the lawn died, leaving what looked like a pygmy wheat field.

  The driveway was empty and there was no green Caddy to be seen anywhere, so I decided to wait in my car awhile.

  The house in that field of dead grass looked to me like many abandoned structures I had come across on the outskirts of Berlin at the end of the war. Not important enough to bomb or burn but too dangerous to live in.

  I lit up another cigarette and waited.

  It was winter in Los Angeles, the only time of year that the smog let up. Winds came in from the desert and cleared the skies. That same wind made the clouds a panorama of ever changing sculptures suspended in a brilliant blue background. One moment there’d be a one-eyed lion, prowling out toward the mountains, then it would transform into a multi-armed anteater rearing up on its hind legs to display clawed limbs.

  Those drifting giants made me smile. I was too small for them to notice, just a black dot beneath their domain. It gave me the illusion of safety.

  When I saw Anton/Conrad’s green Cadillac drive up and him get out so nonchalantly, I realized that all safety is an illusion.

  Conrad walked into the yard as if he were minor royalty living as well as could be expected among the poor. While he strolled toward his front door I considered my next move. Conrad had a gun and was reckless with it. He made decisions without regard for the security of his friends, bystanders, or even himself. I couldn’t just ring the bell; he might shoot me through the door. On the other hand, walking up to him also caused problems. He was fool enough to pull out a gun in broad daylight. I might have been able to disarm him, but then his neighbors might see our struggle and intervene.

&nb
sp; While I was wondering what my next move should be, a white man emerged from a brand-new Ford parked halfway up the block. I had noted the car but not the man in it. He was obviously waiting for Conrad, too. The man wore a comic-book green suit and moved stealthily at first and then very quickly.

  Conrad had just opened his door when he sensed or maybe heard the white man moving behind him. Before he could turn around fully, the white man hit Conrad in the temple and the arrogant young man fell into his house. The door closed quickly behind them, and I was left to consider the new situation.

  My first thought was to drive down to the corner, call the police from some phone booth, and drive away. Even in the days when I was a fixture of the shadier side of Watts, I knew better than to get involved with the business of the streets.

  And this was definitely street business. The white man in the green suit wasn’t a cop or a revolutionary, nor was he a member of the Klan or a jealous husband. He was there to perform a sort of criminal bookkeeping that used rope instead of ledger paper and brass knuckles instead of an adding machine.

  I should have left but I had another kind of business at hand. There was my friend John and his need. There was the fever burning like a funeral pyre over Mouse’s death in my mind.

  I waited for fifteen seconds or so and then went to the house next door to Anton’s. I pushed the buzzer but no one answered. I knocked loudly, just in case.

  This house was a ranch-style wooden building. Freshly painted with a beautiful and delicate lawn surrounding it. The backyard had a large vegetable plot but most of the plants were dead. Only one hardy tomato bush still held about half of its green leaves — one medium-sized deep red fruit hanging heavily from an upper branch. There was a nervous hunger gnawing at my gut, so I plucked the tomato. California supermarkets never had tomatoes that tasted so sweet. They were all grown in hothouses without the benefit of nature.

  While still swallowing the sweet flesh, I picked up a terra-cotta pot from the back porch of the ranch house and leapt over the waist-high wire fence that separated Conrad’s lot. I went silently to his back door and pressed my ear against it.