Bad Boy Brawly Brown

by Walter Mosley

  Sam stalked off toward the door while the patrons began gabbing. I stayed two full steps behind him, taking a glance back at the kitchen as I went. Clarissa was nowhere in sight.

  Once outside, Sam turned around quickly and I took one step to my right. He took a little hop and fired off a right hook that missed my head by less than an inch. I let the fist go by, then shoved his shoulder lightly. The force of the push, added to the momentum of his swing, picked Sam up off the ground and dropped him on the pavement.

  When he thrust his right hand up under his apron, I put my hands in the air and said, “I’m not here to fight with you, man.”

  He was breathing hard.

  “Then why we out here in the street then?” He stopped fumbling.

  I offered my hand and he took it. “I didn’t want nobody to listen to what we had to say,” I said while helping him to his feet.

  “Why not?”

  “Do you like Clarissa?”

  “Hell yeah,” he said. He was slapping imaginary dust from his arms and chest. “That’s why I’m mad at you sneakin’ around, talkin’ ’bout one thing but then stalkin’ my girl.”

  “Your girlfriend?” I asked.

  “No. Clarissa’s my cousin. Everybody work for me is family, you know that.”

  “Listen, Sam,” I said. “I don’t know what you been told, but I didn’t lie to you. I was lookin’ for Brawly and I found him — with her.”

  “What you mean, ‘with her’?”

  “He’s her boyfriend. Didn’t you know that?”

  That shut Sam’s mouth for a good five seconds. It might have been the best comeback I’d ever had with him. Even though I was involved in a life-and-death situation, I took a moment to savor his confusion.

  “That ain’t right,” he said at last. “She said that you followed her and tried to get over on her at her apartment. She said that she cain’t be comin’ in to work ’cause she scared you gonna be on her here.”

  “I did go to her place but I was followin’ Brawly, not her.” The lie was not really so bad. I had seen her with Brawly at the Urban Party’s gathering. When I followed her, it was only to get to him.

  “You lyin’ to me, Easy Rawlins?”

  “Come on, Sam, you know better’n that.”

  “Not when it come to pussy I don’t,” he said. “Niggah work a eight-hour day six days a week and pray to God on Sunday, but when pussy walk by he might just lose his mind.”

  As I said, the maddening thing about Sam Houston was that he was almost always on target. He had a good mind, just no real direction to point it in.

  “I am not after Clarissa,” I said. “Least not the way you say. I got me a woman and I don’t need to go skulkin’ around after some girl-child.”

  There was the ring of truth in my words. Sam squinted so that his eyes were hardly larger than a horse’s orb.

  “Then why she wanna lie?” he asked.

  “You tell me, Sam. Would you have been upset to see her with Brawly? Would you have done something about that?”

  “No. I mean, I might’a given her grief. I might’a said a thing or two.”

  “But,” I said, “if you knew she was with him and I came to you and said that the boy was trouble, you might have been willin’ to help me get a line on her.”

  “What you sayin’, Easy?”

  “I’m sayin’ that since I last talked to you, two men have been murdered and Brawly’s in it somewhere. I don’t know where exactly, but I do know that it’s bad.”

  “Murder?”

  “Murder. Two men. Dead as doornails.”

  “Who?”

  “Henry Strong, the mentor of the First Men”— Sam spit at the mention of the radical organization —“and Aldridge Brown.” I continued: “Brawly’s father.”

  “Who killed ’em?” Sam asked.

  “Hard to say. The cops think it was the First Men. The First Men think it was the cops. Brawly’s cousin has nominated him for at least one of the killings. It’s all up in the air. I’m just lookin’ for some shelter before it come back down to earth.”

  Sam pulled at the collar of his gray T-shirt and moved his chin around as if he couldn’t get enough air. He wasn’t used to being on the short end of the conversation.

  “So what you want?” he asked. “Brawly Brown,” I said for the hundredth time, it seemed.

  Sam put his left hand on top of his head and his right hand on his chin.

  “She’s just a child,” he said. “Him, too.”

  “They’re all children, Sam. All of ’em. But you know in the Stone Age most’a your people only lived long enough to see twenty. They were old men and women by twenty-five.”

  I knew the scientific explanation for the problem facing us would hearten Sam.

  He smiled and said, “Yeah, Easy. You right about that. You sure are.”

  They were words I never expected to hear come out of Sam’s mouth.

  “So what you doin’ here?” he asked me.

  “I got to find Brawly again. Clarissa’s my best bet,” I said. “I went to her house, but she was gone. Do you know where she is?”

  “She told me that she was scared’a you, Easy. She went into hiding.”

  “I told you why I’m lookin’ for her.”

  Sam’s face contorted so that it looked like a wizened brown fruit ready to drop from the tree. At first I thought he was having a heart attack but then I realized that that was the way he must have looked when he was thinking. His mouth twisted with distaste and his shoulders rose, making him look like a comical scavenger bird. Finally he shuddered like the great vulture he resembled, shaking dust from its feathery frame.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I can see it in my mind. Brawly comin’ in, sittin’ near the kitchen, comin’ on through to go to the bathroom out back. And Clarissa always hoverin’ somewhere nearby. Uh-huh. Uhhuh. She used to stay late every night, talkin’ to her first cousin Doris, helpin’ out with the cleanup even though she didn’t have to. But after Brawly started comin’ around, she always left right on time. Yeah. You right, Easy. Clarissa been seein’ that sour boy for three months at least.”

  “You know where she is?” I asked.

  “No. No, I don’t but I know who does. Doris. She’s been Clarissa’s partner in hidin’ this from me the whole time.”

  I realized that Sam was angry because he had been fooled by his employee, that the whole time he was being superior with his knowledge, reading, and reasoning ability, they had a secret right out in plain sight.

  “You wait here, Easy,” he said, and then he strode back into the restaurant.

  I lit up a cigarette and remembered again how good a smoke could feel when you had been denied. Then I remembered running with my lungs aching and then Henry Strong getting a bullet in the head. The silhouette of the assassin had some heft to it. It could have been Brawly, but I wasn’t sure.

  I thought about Mouse. He would have tagged along with me on this adventure, laughing the whole time.

  “What you doin’ messin’ with this boy, Easy? He just sowin’ his wild oats.”

  “But he’s in trouble, Raymond,” I’d say.

  “We all in trouble, Ease” would have been his reply. “Shit. If it wasn’t for trouble, life wouldn’t be no fun at all.”

  I stubbed out the ember of my cigarette and returned it to the pack. A few minutes later Sam came out.

  “I know where she is,” he told me.

  “Where?”

  “Hold on now, Easy. I believe you and everything, but you cain’t go see Clarissa without me comin’ with you.”

  “This ain’t restaurant work, Sam,” I said. “People gettin’ killed out here.”

  “Clarissa’s my family,” Sam said. “Doris is, too. When I asked Doris how I could get to Clarissa, I told her not to worry, because it was me goin’ to her.”

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s your funeral.”

  35

  “YOU KNOW, EASY,” Sam Houston said. “I w
as surprised to see you when you walked in the other day.”

  “Yeah?” I asked. “How come?”

  We were on Highway 101, on our way to Riverside, already outside of L.A., traveling through the rolling green hills of the southern California countryside. Oak trees appeared here and there on the landscape. I like the oak because it’s a brooding, solitary tree. It grows within sight of its brethren, but rarely do you see one sidled up to a mate.

  “’Cause I thought you’d be dead by now,” Sam said.

  “Dead? Why dead?”

  “Because the only reason a lotta mothahfuckahs out there didn’t come after you was because’a Raymond,” Sam said. “They hated you but they were more scared of Mouse. Some’a the peoples come in my place called you all kindsa dog, but they knew better than to even say sumpin’ to you. Shit. Easy Rawlins got a guardian angel from hell, that’s what they said.”

  Part of the reason Sam was riding me was that he was jealous of my friendship with Mouse — everybody was. Raymond Alexander was the most perfect human being a black man could imagine. He was a lover and a killer and one of the best storytellers you ever heard. He wasn’t afraid of white people in general or the police in particular. Women who went to church every week would skip out on Sunday school to take off their clean white panties for him.

  And I was his only friend. I was the one he called first. I was the only one who could tell him no. If Mouse was going to kill a man, I was that poor soul’s last court of appeal.

  But that wasn’t all that was eating Sam. He was a talker, a thinker, a man who read the newspaper every day — but Sam was not a man of action. He stayed behind his door-board and stared down the bad men who came into his place. In his restaurant he was the king. But on the street he was just another guy, a frightened black man in a world where being black put you below the lowest rung of white society.

  There were no black men in tuxedos playing the violin at the symphony or elected to the Senate or at the heads of corporations. There were no black men on the board of directors or representing our interests in Africa, and very few cruising up and down Central Avenue in police cars. Black men, as a rule, were not scientists or doctors or professors in college. There was not even one black philosopher in all the history of the world, as reported by our universities, libraries, and newspapers.

  If you wanted to be an important black man, you had to take a risk and go your own way. You had to challenge a man who outnumbered you ten to one. And every one of that ten was armed with the latest weapons while all you had was a slingshot. That’s why David was such a famous biblical character in the black community, because, against all odds, he brought down the giant.

  That’s what Sam Houston dreamt of doing, standing tall and making a difference. He saw himself as an important, intelligent man but he was afraid, with good reason, to stand out from the herd and be heard.

  “Well, you know, Sam,” I said, “I been through some pretty hard times without Raymond at my side. I mean, I made it through a whole world war and five years in L.A. when he was still down in Texas. And then there was that five years he did for manslaughter. Naw, man. Those people talkin’ to you have had their chance before now.”

  It wasn’t the words but the tone in my voice that kept Sam from one of his snappy replies.

  “What you want from Clarissa?” he asked.

  “Whatever it is she knows and I don’t.”

  That wrinkled look took over Sam’s face, and I knew that he was thinking again.

  “What?” I asked him.

  “This is what you used to do? Run around sniffin’ after what somebody might know? Drivin’ all over hell?”

  “Before I settled down to a job,” I said. “Yeah.”

  “But somebody like John cain’t pay you. I mean, John cain’t hardly cover the price for the materials he usin’ to build them houses.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “Sometimes I’d be out there findin’ somebody’s missin’ wife when all I was gettin’ out of it was a free tune-up for my car. But every now and then I’d open some door and somebody’d be on the other side offerin’ a thousand dollars just to close it again.”

  “That’s crazy,” Sam decreed.

  “Yeah, you better believe it. More than that,” I said. “Crazy ain’t even the word.”

  Sam brought me to a small house in Riverside, on a street called Del Sol. The lawn was unruly and the bushes that grew around the walls had become ragged. From the design of the house, I was sure that it was built by the people who had first lived in it. Arc-shaped and multileveled, it was two stories to the right of the entrance and only one to the left. When Clarissa opened the front door she fell back and I could see that there was another door behind her. The glass in that door revealed a green backyard. It was a home with its own personality. I broke out a cigarette to accent my pleasure at the unique design.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Doris called but she just said that you were comin’, Sam.”

  “It’s okay,” Sam said. “I know you been lyin’ to me, but Easy here done broke it down. I brought him to find out about Brawly, but he ain’t gonna do nuthin’ to hurt either one’a you.”

  Clarissa’s shoulders slumped and she led us into the living room, which was in the two-story part of the house. The room had been straightened up recently. I could tell that the once pristine white carpet had seen a spate of stains and cigarette holes, but all of that had been vacuumed and cleaned to show its best face. The rosewood furniture was old and well cared for, except at one time the spilled glasses had been set upon the surfaces with no coasters and the cigarettes that fell to the floor first were set on the corners, where they left bullet-shaped black smudges along the edge.

  Everything that could be reached was dusted, but there were cobwebs along the ceiling and thick dust at the top of the drapes.

  Clarissa was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt with no bra underneath. She was a good-looking girl. Her skin was dark and her light eyes large and translucent. If I had to guess her thoughts, I would have said that she was hoping that she could close her eyes and when she opened them we would be gone.

  “Sit down, Clare,” Sam said.

  She did as she was told.

  The fluffy tan sofa and chairs had been vacuumed also. The suction hole had left neat lines across each fabric surface. I took to a chair while Sam sat down next to his cousin on the couch.

  “Mr. Rawlins has some questions to ask you,” Sam said.

  “I ain’t talkin’ to him,” she said.

  “Why not?” A sharp tone came into Sam’s voice.

  “’Cause I ain’t,” she declared, and I was reminded of Juice.

  “They killed Henry Strong,” I said. “You know that, right?” Clarissa looked up at me with hatred in her eyes.

  “I didn’t do it, sugar,” I told her. “But whoever did is still out there.”

  “What’s that got to do with me an’ Brawly?”

  “The first one killed was his father,” I said. “Somebody beat him to death at Isolda Moore’s house.”

  For an instant the bright-eyed girl froze.

  “Isolda Moore,” I repeated. “She’s Brawly’s cousin, used to live up here. You know her, don’t you, Clarissa?”

  “Bitch,” she uttered.

  “What kinda language is that?” Sam said.

  “Let her use any language she need to, Sam,” I said. “Is this her house?” I then asked Clarissa.

  “No.”

  “Then it must be BobbiAnne’s,” I said. “BobbiAnne Terrell’s house. What is it, the parents dead? Moved away for good? They can’t just be on vacation, not with the mess this place was in before you cleaned it up.”

  Clarissa was stunned by my simple deductions. Sam was, too.

  “How you know all that?” he said.

  “Did they bring the guns out here?” I asked Clarissa.

  She shook her head.

  “What guns?” Sam wanted to know.
/>   “How long was Conrad livin’ out here?” I asked.

  Clarissa started to cry.

  “I didn’t tell you,” she sobbed. “I wouldn’t.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t,” I said in a soothing tone. “You’d never betray your man. But you kids are in it deep. It doesn’t matter that he thinks he’s invisible, that he believe the cops and the government don’t know what he’s doin’. He thinks they don’t even know he’s out there, but he’s in plain sight, like a sittin’ duck, like a fish in a barrel, like —”

  “Stop it,” Clarissa cried. “What do you want from me?”

  “It’s like I told you from the start,” I said. “I’m workin’ for Brawly’s mother. She thinks he’s in trouble, and I think she’s right. What I need from you is to help me help him outta the mess he don’t even know he in.”

  “He told me not to talk to you.”

  Sam reared up and opened his mouth, but I put up a hand before he could holler.

  “I know,” I said. “I know. You love him and you think he loves you. And if you go behind his back, he might get so mad that he’ll just walk away — you might not never see him again. But that ain’t nuthin’. You’re a pretty girl and good in your heart. You’ll find another boyfriend and Brawly will still be breathin’.”

  “He said that you were the police” was her reply.

  “Honey,” Sam said. “You know that man I always talked about — Raymond Alexander?”

  “The one they called Mouse?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. You know all them stories I said about him. About when he faced down and killed three armed men in the Fifth Ward and all he had was a stick. About when the police heard that he was holed up in a house outside’a L.A. and said that they couldn’t go because it was across the county line.”

  “And when three of his girlfriends,” Clarissa added with a grin, “made his birthday party with bows in their hair.”

  “That’s him.”

  Clarissa smiled and said, “So?”

  “This here Easy Rawlins was Mouse’s best friend. They ran together for almost thirty years, since they were kids. If there’s anything I’m sure of, it’s that Mouse would never have run with a man that could turn another black man over to the cops.”