I was thinking that white America also had an army of young fools like Brawly, that all the young men in all the history of the world were like him. Young men fighting and dying for ideas they barely understood, for rights they never possessed, for beliefs based on lies.
“I was in the army,” I said. “I know what it’s like to fight a war. So believe me when I tell you that I know what you’re talking about.”
A buzzer went off and Lakeland picked up his phone. It flashed through my mind that the colonel was just talking to fill up the time, that he was having his people do some kind of check on me and now I was about to be arrested. I resisted the sudden urge to jump across the table and strangle the patriot.
“Yes? What?” he said. “No.” Then he looked up at me and asked, “What do you know about Henry Strong?”
The room turned cold, which meant that I had begun to sweat.
“Only what I heard that night at the meeting,” I answered honestly. “Never even heard of him before that night.”
“Did you know him?”
I thought of the pictures that Knorr had of me at the First Men’s storefront. Were there pictures of Strong and me at the late-night diner?
“Not really.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I don’t know anything about Strong.”
Lakeland was suspicious of me. But he was suspicious of everybody right then.
“I have an emergency meeting to attend, Rawlins. Mona will give you the addresses you need.”
I stood up, a little surprised that I had managed to maintain my freedom.
“But don’t fuck with me,” Lakeland said.
That was a long time ago, 1964, when most white men in suits didn’t use the ghetto’s slang.
“Don’t fuck with me,” he repeated. “Or I will burn your ass down.”
23
MERCURY HALL LIVED on Caliburn Drive. It was an ideal street for L.A. living, a road that went nowhere — a short street that ran in a kind of zigzag semicircle that both entered and exited on Eighty-eighth Place. All you ever saw were your neighbors and the occasional motorist who’d lost his way. Any suspicious character caused a flurry of phone calls because everyone was on their guard for trouble.
Blesta Ridgeway-Hall and Mercury had made a beautiful home. Lemon trees on either side of the front door and rosebushes at the curb. The grass was shaggy and just watered. It was a small house with a green roof and white walls. The front door was oak with a double wall. The outer surface had a tree and a crescent moon cut out of it.
A curtain on a window to my left fluttered.
“Mommy, it’s a man,” a child yelled from somewhere behind the closed door.
I had knocked on the door, just above the moon. The sound was a resonant tenor drumbeat.
I waited, counting the seconds of hesitation until the door opened.
Blesta was about five-five with light brown curly hair, light brown skin, and dark brown eyes. She was the beauty and the brains of the sisters that Mercury and Chapman married.
“Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “Mercury ain’t here.”
“No? When’s he comin’ home?”
“Um, I don’t know.”
“Listen, B, I got to talk to him. But I understand if you don’t want a man waitin’ in the house alone with you. I could sit out in the car, no problem.”
“I really don’t know when he gonna be home, Mr. Rawlins. You know, two or three times a week him and Kenny go out for a drink and a game’a snooker after work.” Blesta was almost pleading with me.
“I’ll wait out in the car,” I said.
“No. No, come on in. If you sit out there, all the neighbors gonna be yackin’ back an’ forth till one of ’em call the police and then Mercury get mad at me for gettin’ you arrested.” Blesta backed away from the door and I entered the small and perfectly ordered home.
The Halls’ front door led right into the living room. Blesta had two yellow chairs with a matching sofa. The plush chairs had turquoise hassocks with walnut legs. The carpet was formed out of concentric ovals of dark blue and light green. A six-foot avocado sapling filled one corner and a big console TV sat in front of the couch.
The picture window beside the door looked out upon my green Pontiac. The room managed to be both peaceful and festive.
“Boo!” little Artemus Hall shouted at me.
The four-year-old jumped out from a doorway, yelled his scary word, and then fell down laughing.
I laughed, too. It was the funniest thing I’d seen in the past few days, days that seemed like months. I caught myself before the laughter turned hysterical.
“Go get your coloring book, Arty,” Blesta said.
“No,” he told her. And then to me, “Will you gimme a piggyback ride?”
“My back is a little sore today, partner,” I said. “But why don’t you come over here and make a picture for me?”
“Okay,” Arty chirped, and then he ran full speed out of the room.
I sat on the couch.
“Can I get you something, Mr. Rawlins?”
“Could you see your way to callin’ me Easy?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You guess what?”
“Easy.” Blesta’s smile was the axe that brought Mercury low. Her whole face seemed to ignite behind that grin.
Artemus came thundering back from his trove of toys with at least six coloring books under his arm. There was one of circus performers and animals and one filled with cowboys and Indians. He even had a coloring book of different kinds of houses throughout history.
I asked for a sad clown and he looked until he found one.
Blesta had to do work elsewhere in the house, so I sat with Arty while he carefully rubbed the Crayolas onto the newsprint outlines.
“Look at this, Mr. Raw-wins,” he’d say, showing me the tangle of yellow lines he’d used to fill in the clown’s upturned hands.
And… “Look at this” for the red eyes or the green mouth.
I sat there as peacefully as I had been at work earlier that morning.
I needed peace. There were two dead men on my mind: Aldridge Brown and Henry Strong.
I tried to think of what the two men might have in common other than Brawly — but nothing came to mind. Then I tried to figure why the boy would want to kill either man. Again I came up blank.
“Mr. Raw-wins, you like blue?”
“Yes, sirree,” I said. “Blue is the color of music.”
“Music don’t hab no color,” Arty said.
“Not when you’re a boy,” I replied. “But when you grow up it will be blue that you see when the music makes you cry.”
Artemus gazed up at me with wondering, amazed eyes. Somehow my words made him think something that stopped everything else.
A car door slammed outside and Arty screamed, “Daddy!”
He jumped up and ran for the door. Blesta came in from the kitchen. I stood up. A few moments later the front door opened.
“Blesta, baby, somebody’s car parked out f —” he said before catching sight of me.
Artemus grabbed onto his leg chanting, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy…”
Blesta turned on that smile.
“Hey, Merc,” I hailed, stretching out my hand.
He shook with me but there was suspicion in his eye.
Mercury was a shade darker and six inches shorter than I. He was truly big-boned, not fat or even chubby. He had the kind of build that professional boxers are trained to stay away from — powerful and low to the ground.
“Mr. Rawlins,” he said.
“I just finished gettin’ your wife to call me Easy, Merc. Don’t mess it up now.”
“He said he had to talk with you, honey,” Blesta said, kissing him on the cheek. “I told him to wait in here ’cause old Mrs. Horner would sure call the cops if he stayed out in his car.”
“Sit in the car?” Mercury said. “Easy Rawlins don’t have to sit in no car in front’a
my house. You want somethin’ to drink?”
“No thanks, Merc.”
“What you come by for?” he asked, all smiles and openness.
“I need to ask you a few questions,” I said.
“Come on, Arty,” Blesta said. “Come help Mama make dinner.”
“I wanna stay wit’ Daddy.”
“I’m makin’ frostin’.”
Without another word Arty picked up his coloring book and ran from the room, his mother right behind him.
I returned to the yellow sofa while Mercury perched on a turquoise hassock.
“What you need, Easy?” he asked. “More about Brawly?”
“In a roundabout way,” I said. “What you know about the houses they buildin’ down a couple of blocks from where John’s lots are?”
“Down where they got the pink flags hangin’ from the eaves?”
“Yeah,” I said. “How’d you know?”
“A man got shot down there last night.”
“Who?” I asked.
Mercury shook his head. “All I know is that the cops come down and closed up any construction on that block. They didn’t say who it was.”
“Who’s buildin’ those houses?”
“I don’t know exactly. It’s another black investment group, though. I’m pretty sure it’s one’a Jewelle’s.”
“She got them, too, huh?”
“Yes, sir. But I don’t know their names. We all keep pretty separate out around there.”
“So you never been over to that site?” I asked.
“No.”
“How about Brawly?”
“Maybe, yeah. If John wasn’t around, Brawly’d take him some long walks, if you know what I mean. He’d ramble around lookin’ for someone to talk to. You know I don’t have much patience for talkin’ on the job. Brawly got along better with Chapman than he did with me.”
“Chapman ever tell you what Brawly was talkin’ ’bout?”
“Just shit, man. Brawly got an opinion on everything under the sun. Boy’d talk a blue streak and not say one goddamned thing.”
“So you didn’t like workin’ with ’im too much then?”
“Man, I don’t like workin’ construction — period,” Mercury said. “Matter of fact, I’m thinkin’ that I’m gonna leave this whole thing.”
“You quittin’?”
“Quittin’, pullin’ up stakes, an’ headin’ back down to where people talk like I talk.”
“Back to Arkansas?”
“Maybe Texas,” Mercury said. “There’s gettin’ to be some jobs down there. They havin’ what you call a oil boom.”
“Chapman leavin’, too?”
“What am I?” he asked. “Chapman’s keeper? Niggah can take care of his own business.”
“You ever hear about a man named Henry Strong?” I asked in ambush.
“Yeah,” he admitted, unperturbed.
“Where from?”
“A couple’a months ago. Brawly came by with him. They took me an’ Chapman to Blackbird’s for a shot or two.”
“What he have to say?”
“Just all that black shit. You know, how we all should have what the white man have. He wanted us to come down to his meetin’-house. I told him no.”
“What did Chapman say?”
“Why don’t you ask Chapman?”
“I’m askin’ you, Mercury. I figure you owe me one thing, at least.”
“You have my gratitude, Mr. Rawlins. But I ain’t tellin’ you nuthin’ ’bout my friends. No, sir.”
Of course he’d told me volumes by refusing to talk.
“Why you askin’ ’bout Strong and them places down the way?” Mercury asked.
“No reason really,” I said. “I saw him down at the place where Brawly’s been hangin’ out. I tell ya, tryin’ to get a handle on Brawly is givin’ me more trouble than I figured.”
“Yeah,” Mercury said. “That Brawly’s a mess.”
“Well,” I said. “I better be goin’.”
I stood up.
“Okay,” Mercury replied. “Honey, Mr. Rawlins’s leavin’.”
Blesta came out wearing a white apron over her housedress. There was a chocolate smudge under her left breast.
“Cain’t you stay for dinner… Easy?”
“Got to go.” I shook hands with her.
“This is for you,” little Artemus Hall said, holding up the clown torn from his coloring book.
I took the leaf and stared at it. The clown’s head was tilted slightly to the side. Artemus had made the face white and brown with big red tears coming out of the sad eyes.
“Thank you very much, Arty. I’m gonna put this one up in my kitchen. I gotta corkboard in there and I’m gonna put this one up on a tack.”
I could see Mercury in the boy’s smile.
24
THE NEXT PERSON on my list was Tina Montes. She’d been kind to me the night the police broke in on the First Men and I pulled her out of there before they could crack her skull.
She lived in a rooming house on Thirty-first Street. The woman who owned it, Liselle Latour, was a pal of mine from the old days in Houston, Texas. Liselle had been born Thaddie Brown but changed her name when she ran away from home at thirteen. She’d turned to prostitution and had become a madam by the time she was twenty-five. She left Houston in ’44 with her partner/bodyguard/boyfriend Franklin Nettars. Frank had been pestering Liselle to leave Houston for years. He told her that the black folks up in L.A. made real money and that a small whorehouse around there would make them rich.
Liselle would have never left but for a fight that had come to pass in her house of ill repute. A white man — I never got his name — had a disagreement with one of the whores and wound up with a knife in his throat. The woman was arrested. Liselle managed to stay out of jail but she knew her name had been placed on the police list. And once you went on the police list in Houston, you either died, went to jail, or left town.
They took a sleeper cabin in a special colored car on the Sunset Express from Houston to L.A. The whole way Franklin was telling Liselle how great it would be when they got to California.
“He’d be sayin’,” Liselle told me, “that you could live pickin’ fruit off’a the trees while you was walkin’ down the street.” She always smiled when she mentioned his name.
The porter dropped by their cabin to tell them that they were just about to cross the California line.
“Ten seconds after that,” Liselle said, “he got a heart attack. Hit him so hard that he only felt it a few seconds before he was dead.”
I never thought about Liselle loving Franklin. I mean, they seemed more like business partners than soul mates. But when Franklin died, Liselle was a changed woman. She took her life savings and bought the place on Thirty-first. She made it a rooming house for single women and didn’t even let a male visitor past the ground floor. She never even dated another man and became very involved with the dealings of the church.
Liselle became virtuous and solitary but she didn’t forget her old friends. Neither did she pretend that she’d come from some up-standing moral background. Liselle told everyone what she had been because, as she’d say, “I don’t want you findin’ out someday and then gettin’ mad that I lied to ya.”
She was happy to see her old friends and even share a drop of spirits with them.
That’s why I felt no trepidations approaching her home.
There were two doors to the three-story wooden building, one up front and the other on the side. The front door was for the women and girls; the side was Liselle’s private entrance.
When I knocked, Liselle opened up almost immediately. Her front door was across the way from the inside door to the entrance hall of the rooming house. Liselle spent most of her day sitting in between the doors, sewing or reading her Bible. From there she’d greet her boarders and make sure that no man snuck upstairs.
“Easy Rawlins,” she cried. “Baby, how are you?”
�
�Just fine, Miss Latour. And you?”
“Workin’ off my sins one ounce at a time,” she said gladly.
The years had not been kind to Liselle. Her face had crossed over into middle age, and for every ounce of sin she’d lost she put on an ounce of fat. I hardly recognized the beautiful young woman that the men in the Fifth Ward used to throw their money at.
“What you doin’ here?” she asked. Her eyes narrowed.
“Why? Cain’t I come by and shout at an old friend some evenin’?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“What you want, Easy?”
“I want to sit down.”
Reminded of her manners, Liselle gestured toward the chair across from hers. She closed the hall door and slapped her hands down on her knees.
“Well?” she asked.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why you think I’m’a be here for some kinda business?”
“Because trouble follows you, Easy Rawlins. It always has, and it always will.”
“You talkin’ like I’m some kinda gangster,” I said. “But you know I’m not like that. I got a job at Sojourner Truth Junior High School and I’ve raised two kids on my own. What kinda gangster does that?”
“You the one said ‘gangster,’ not me. I just said that trouble follows you. Whenever I hear about you, I hear about somebody outta jail or back in, somebody gettin’ killed or robbed or beat up by the cops. Even them kids you got come outta worlds where adults would be hard-pressed to survive — that’s what I heard.
“But most of all, I know you married to trouble because of Raymond Alexander. Everybody who ever been anywhere around Mouse know that there’s some kinda mess on to brew. Young women cain’t help it. They see a man like Raymond an’ their tongues start to waggin’ an’ their panties get wet. But men who ran with Mouse are either fools or magnets for trouble their own selfs.”
“Mouse is dead,” I said.
“And if the stories I hear is right, you the one dropped the body off on EttaMae’s front grass.”
I had forgotten how thorough the grapevine was.
“Many a day,” Liselle continued, “I had to shoo Mr. Alexander away from my girls’ door. He come up at me all blustery, but I shook my broom at him. An’ you know evil as he was, he always backed down.
Bad Boy Brawly Brown Page 13
