Bad Boy Brawly Brown

by Walter Mosley

  “I thought you said that Mouse was dead,” Clarissa said.

  “Nobody ever saw a body or went to a funeral,” Sam replied. “And even if they did, that wouldn’t turn Easy here into no rat.”

  Clarissa considered for a moment and so did I. I wondered at the strength of character and will of a man like Raymond who could reach out beyond the grave to help me in that Riverside hideout.

  36

  “NO,” CLARISSA WAS SAYING, “he didn’t ever tell me what he was doin’. All I know is that they started to work with Mr. Strong on somethin’. They were like a special group inside the Party, and only a few of them knew what was goin’ on.”

  “What were they doing?” I asked again.

  “I don’t know. Conrad would come over and pick Brawly up at all hours. They’d go off and meet with Mr. Strong —”

  “Did he meet with anybody else?” I asked.

  “I think so,” she said. “But I never knew who. I mean, I figured that they were in the group but it was all secret.”

  “Now why they wanna keep somethin’ like that a secret?” Sam asked his cousin.

  “Sam,” I said, “I let you come along but this is my party.”

  He didn’t like to hear it, but he sat back on the couch.

  “But you did know about the guns,” I said.

  She looked down at her knotted hands and nodded.

  “How’d you know?”

  “One day Brawly had Conrad’s Cadillac,” she whispered. “He had let Conrad off at somebody’s place and they didn’t want his car to be around there, so Brawly took it. He brought me out there and showed me in the trunk. It was six or seven rifles wrapped in army blankets.”

  “What he say they planned to do with them?”

  “He said that those rifles would take the first shots in the revolution.” She began to weep.

  I believe that as she spoke to me, the full meaning of Brawly’s words hit home. Sometimes you have to hear yourself saying something out loud before you understand it.

  “Did he say what they planned to do?”

  She shook her head.

  “Did he tell you what he did with those guns after they took them out from BobbiAnne’s place?”

  Again, no.

  “How did BobbiAnne and Conrad get together?” I asked, thinking that a change of tempo might get me closer to what I didn’t know.

  “Conrad got in trouble with some men who he had been gambling with,” Clarissa said. “They was gonna bust him up and so Brawly called his high school girlfriend and asked her to put him up. You were right; her parents both died last year. Him of a heart attack and then she just faded away.”

  “And after that is when BobbiAnne moved down to L.A.?”

  “Yeah,” Clarissa said. “She moved down to be near Conrad.”

  “And do you think that she was a part of this special group that Strong started?”

  “No,” Clarissa said. “They didn’t have no white people in the First Men. White people couldn’t come in the door, that was the rule.”

  The image of those policemen breaking through the windows went through my mind.

  “Where’s Brawly?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You got any idea? Any at all?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What about Isolda?” I asked.

  “Who?” Sam chirped.

  I ignored him, staring at Clarissa’s downcast face.

  “What about her?” she asked.

  “Why do you hate her?”

  “Because’a what she did to Brawly.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s not for me to say.”

  “If you want me to try and help him, you better believe you better tell me somethin’.”

  Clarissa looked at me with real spite in her eyes. I could see that she was going to tell me something, and somehow she believed that I would be hurt by it.

  “She took him in when him and his father fought, and then she tried to make him into her husband,” she said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Brawly,” she said, sneering. “She’d walk around the house with no clothes on and come into his bed with him at night. She’d get him all hot and make him love her.”

  I sat back in my chair.

  “What you say?” Sam asked.

  “She had sex with him until finally he stole a radio out of a store so that the county would take him away,” Clarissa said.

  “She had sex with him.” Sam repeated the words as if they were some intricate puzzle.

  “Do you know where Brawly is now?” I asked again.

  And again Clarissa shook her head.

  “Is he going to call?”

  “Not until Sunday,” she said.

  “That’ll be too late,” I muttered.

  “What you say, Easy?” Sam asked.

  I took a deep breath and stood up. “You gonna stay up here?” I asked Clarissa.

  It was the first time she thought that she might leave the house where Brawly had hidden her.

  “Yeah,” she said, darting a glance at Sam.

  “Come on back down with us, baby,” Sam said. “You can stay with me and Margaret. You be safe there.”

  “Two people dead already,” I reminded her. “And none of us know who’s doin’ it.”

  THE RIDE BACK to L.A. was almost completely silent. Clarissa sat in the back.

  When we got in range of L.A.’s radio waves we listened to KGFJ, the soul station. James Brown and Otis Redding serenaded our bruised minds. Once Sam asked me if I ever heard from EttaMae — Mouse’s wife, the mother of his son, LaMarque, and one of my best friends.

  “No,” I said. “She’s gone.”

  He didn’t follow up the question and I didn’t offer any explanations of my guilt.

  WAIT UP A MINUTE, Easy,” Sam said to me.

  I was parked in front of his house off of Denker at about eight. He walked Clarissa into the house and I laid back and shut my eyes. A pattern was beginning to appear in my mind. It wasn’t a pretty picture, nor was it very clear. I still didn’t know where Brawly fit, or if I could save him.

  I had a clear path of investigation, though. I knew what I was after and I knew who and what might be after me.

  Sam came out and climbed into the passenger’s seat.

  “You think you could drop me off back at the restaurant?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  I didn’t do anything, though. I didn’t start the car or move very much at all.

  “So we gonna go?” Sam asked.

  I lit a Chesterfield.

  “This ain’t bar talk, Sam.”

  “What ain’t?”

  “Not one thing you heard today,” I said. “Not that Riverside house or Brawly Brown or the mention of army rifles. Loose lips ’bout any’a that shit get the man who said it dead.”

  Sam brought his hand to his long throat, trying to hide his fear with a contemplative pose.

  “Get his cousin killed,” I continued, “and be a threat to my own peace’a mind.”

  I turned to him with whatever it was my face looked like when I was deadly serious. “This shit can get you killed.”

  “I ain’t sayin’ a word, man,” Sam said.

  I stared at him until he looked away.

  Sam never tried to get under my skin again after that day. When I’d come into Hambones he’d be friendly, but there was no more sharp-edged banter or superiority on his part. I missed our old arguments but, on the other hand, I appreciated his fear.

  37

  BY THE TIME I got home the children had eaten and gone to bed. Bonnie was curled up on the sofa, reading a French novel in tight pants and a blue velvet shirt that was buttoned only halfway up the front.

  When I walked in she came to me and kissed me. She didn’t ask why I was late or where I had been. She knew. She didn’t need me to apologize for being me. I felt, at that moment, that Bonnie had known me for my whole life.

/>   Dinner was waiting on the stove. Baked chicken and rice under a peach gravy with brussels sprouts on the side. We ate and talked about her travels in Africa and Europe with Air France. She was a black stewardess working in three languages in a country I once considered living in because it seemed so much better than America.

  “It’s better in some ways,” Bonnie once said when I suggested that we live together in Paris. “But it’s not without prejudice.”

  “Do they hang colored people in the countryside?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “But that’s because in France they aren’t afraid of blacks, just certain that we are from a lesser culture. We are interesting, but in the end just primitives. At least here in America the white people I’ve met are afraid of Negroes.”

  “And that’s better?” I asked.

  “I believe so,” she said. It was a turn of a phrase that she’d learned along the way. Bonnie picked up things from the way people spoke and then used them in her own manner. “If you’re afraid of someone, then in some way you are forced to think of them as equals. It is not a child but a man you face.”

  She was a deep soul and I was lucky for the time I had to spend with her.

  That night we didn’t make love but just held each other. I listened to her breathing until it turned deep and I knew she was asleep. I drifted on behind her, murder just a distant thunder in my mind.

  I HAD TWENTY-SEVEN sick days accrued at that time and a pretty good union, so I called in sick the next morning and drove off to see John at his construction site.

  He had on white overalls and old alligator shoes, one of which had worn through over the little toe. He wore a tool belt and a wristwatch with a thick gold band, and he was hammering away at a nail in an awkward, one-handed fashion.

  “Hey, John,” I said.

  “Easy.”

  “I hope you using enough nails on that sucker,” I said.

  “I done had to buy so many nails that I do believe these here houses could be called armored homes.”

  We both laughed and clasped hands.

  I suppose I was sensitive around that time. John and I rarely shook hands. We were real friends with no need to express our peaceful intentions. But that day there was an obstacle, maybe more than one, between us. We held on to each other to make sure that we didn’t get separated.

  “I heard that you were out by my house yesterday,” he said.

  “I needed to get the truth from her, John. You know I couldn’t do that with you in the room.”

  “That truth gonna help you find Brawly?” There was an angry edge in his tone.

  “Findin’ him ain’t gonna be nearly as hard as savin’ him.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Alva was right,” I said. “Brawly’s in sumpin’ bad.”

  “It’s them First Men,” John said.

  “Some of ’em,” I agreed. “But it’s more than that, too.”

  “What more?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” I said. “But did you know that Henry Strong, one of the mentors to the First Men, used to come around here and see Brawly?”

  “No.”

  “Did you know that Aldridge Brown used to come around to see his son, too? They had lunch together more than once.”

  “I don’t believe it. Brawly hated Aldridge.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “Alva did,” John said. “He’s her son. She should know.”

  “Your mother’s still alive, ain’t she?” I asked.

  “You know she is.”

  “You tell her everything you feel? You always tell her the truth? I mean, Brawly knows how his mother feels about Aldridge. Why would he tell her if they squared up and started talkin’ again?”

  “Maybe that’s true,” he said. “But even if it is, how’d you find out?”

  “I came out here one day when you were gone and talked to Chapman and Mercury. They told me because I asked.”

  “And here they supposed to be my men.”

  “They wouldn’ta said anything if I didn’t ask, John. And you know we go back. Me an’ Mouse pulled their fat outta the fire when they robbed those dockworkers.”

  “Okay,” John said. “So Strong and Brawly’s father came out here. So what?”

  “So what if Brawly killed Aldridge? Strong, too? I caught a glimpse of the man who shot him. It could’a been Brawly, I don’t know.”

  “So? What you sayin’?”

  “If Brawly killed them people, he’s way past a good talkin’-to and sowin’ his wild oats. What you want me to do if he’s a double murderer?”

  John looked at me, taking long, slow breaths. I had counted six exhalations when he asked, “How was Strong killed?”

  “Ambushed, chased down like a dog, and then shot in the back of his head.”

  John did not like that.

  “Could you just walk away?” he asked.

  “I’m in it already, John. The police know I’m in it. They are, too.”

  “I knew I shouldn’ta called you, Easy. I didn’t want to, but Alva needed to feel like she was doin’ somethin’. She had lost him for so many years and there she was, losin’ him again.” John bit his lip and shook his head slowly. “She asked me to bring you in, so what could I say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Find out, Easy. Find out what happened.”

  “And if she lose the boy?”

  “She still got me,” he said.

  Mouse had been my closest friend since I was a child, but I never respected any man as much as I did John. He was taciturn with a mean temper, but in the end you could always count on him to do what was right.

  “Mercury and Chapman out around here someplace?” I asked.

  “Chapman is,” John said. “Mercury quit.”

  The fever I’d been feeling for days broke at that moment. Half the puzzle fell into place and I wondered, as one always does in hindsight, why hadn’t I seen it before.

  CHAPMAN WAS APPLYING A ROUGH COAT of plaster to a three-beamed wall when John and I walked in.

  “John,” Chapman said. “Mr. Rawlins.”

  He had a splotch of plaster on the side of his broad nose and plaster in his hair. Chapman had straightened hair that he combed down the back of his neck. With his light skin, heavy features, and straight hair, strangers often had trouble guessing his racial background.

  John moved to stand against the wall on the other side of Chapman. He noticed that we had cut off his avenue of escape.

  “I hear that Mercury quit,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Chapman said. “Yeah, he sure did. Been threatenin’ to move down to Texas for so long that I guess he felt he had to do sumpin’ about it.”

  “He left town?”

  “That’s what he told me he was doin’.”

  “But you his best friend,” John said. “Best friend should know for sure about his partner.”

  “Have you called his house?” I added.

  “He said he was goin’ to Texas, to look for work. Bought me a drink to say he was leavin’ the next day. Why I’ma call him if he supposed to be gone?”

  “Supposed to be,” I said. “That mean you don’t believe him?”

  “What is this? Some kinda police interrogation?”

  “I was out at Mercury’s house the other day,” I said.

  “So?”

  “You know, that’s a nice house he got.”

  “So?”

  “Where do you live, Kenneth?” I asked the ex-burglar.

  “Over on One-sixteen. The LaMarr Towers.”

  “That’s projects,” I said in mock surprise.

  “So what?”

  “So how come you in the projects and Mercury got a house over in the nice part’a the slum?”

  “He got some money from an uncle that died back in Arkansas.”

  “Did you know his uncle?” John asked.

  “Yeah. I went with him to the funeral.”

  “Was he
rich?” I asked.

  “Rich enough to leave Mercury ten thousand dollars, I guess.”

  “He bought the house for cash?” I asked.

  “That’s what he said,” Chapman answered. I could see that an old suspicion was rekindled in his mind.

  “I hear that they got extra police patrols because of thefts out around the sites,” I said.

  “So what?”

  “So maybe you two didn’t go as straight as you said you did.”

  “You listen to me, Easy Rawlins,” Chapman lectured. “I put up my burglary tools right after you and Mr. Alexander got them men off’a us. I even took the five hundred you gave me and donated to my mother’s church. I already told you where Mercury said he got his money. That’s all I know.”

  “When I was out to his place I asked him about you and Henry Strong and Aldridge Brown,” I said.

  “Asked what?”

  “Didn’t you use to hang out with Brawly and them?”

  “We had drinks once or twice, but it was Mercury hung out with them. Why? What’d he say?”

  “That you were thick as thieves with all three,” I said. “That they’d come and pick you up after work and you’d go off together.”

  “That was him. Not me. No. I don’t like Aldridge, ’cause he’s a braggart. And Strong made you feel like he was keepin’ secrets. I don’t like a man like that. That’s why I never hung out with you, Easy.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Nobody ever know what you thinkin’,” Chapman said. “That day we went out to see them union men, we didn’t know that you was gonna bring Mouse along. And then when you made them pay us…I ain’t complainin’ about the help, but I knew right then you was too deep for me.”

  “And you felt the same about Strong?” I asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “He had a way of gettin’ you to talk about stuff. Merc and me don’t like to brag that much about the old days, but the first night we saw Strong, Mercury started in on how when we were teenagers we’d break into candy stores. Strong wheedled it outta him. I was always too busy for drinks after I seen that.”

  I glanced at Chapman’s plastering job. It was excellent. He used a circular motion of his knife to make every application neat and perfect. The swirls were all of equal size and depth. When he came back to level the wall, it would be just right.