“Blesta told me that you and Merc would go off and play snooker after work a few times a week,” I said.
“Used to,” Chapman said. “Used to, but we ain’t played in months.”
“Where you think he been goin’ lately?” I asked.
“Gettin’ his hambone greased,” Chapman said. He looked me in the face.
“Who wit’?”
“He never said a word about it,” Chapman replied. “I just knew by the way he was actin’ that he was gettin’ it on with some girl.”
Chapman looked me in the eye for a second and then he looked down.
“That all you got, Easy?” John asked me.
“Yeah.”
“Then I got a question,” the bartender said to Kenneth Chapman. “Why didn’t you tell me when Brawly’s father come around here?”
“Brawly’s a man, John,” Chapman replied. “I cain’t be workin’ with him and treatin’ him like a child, too.”
“Do you think Merc left town?” I asked Chapman.
“I don’t know.”
“You still don’t wanna help me after what I told you?”
“What you said is just talk, Easy. And talk is cheap.”
JOHN WALKED ME down to my car after our chat with Chapman.
“What you think about Mercury?” he asked me.
“Once a thief…,” I said.
“What’s that got to do with that group Brawly’s messed up with?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe nothing.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe I been lookin’ at this whole thing wrong. Maybe you were right from the beginning. Maybe Brawly’s tied up with a bunch’a thugs and thieves.”
“What are they gonna steal?”
“If Mercury’s in it, it’s likely to be a payroll. There any big ones out around here?”
“Manelli,” John said. “They’re big and they pay once a month — in cash.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “That’s the top of the list. You know when the next payday is?”
John just shook his head and scowled.
38
WHEN I KNOCKED on Mercury Hall’s door later that morning, I had my hand on the .38-caliber pistol in my pocket. Blesta opened the door as far as the guard chain would allow. She stuck her face into the crack and so did little Artemus two feet below.
“Boo!” the child said.
“He’s gone,” Blesta said.
“Say what?” I asked her.
“Down to Texas to get a job,” she said.
There were bags under her eyes and a strained quality to her voice.
“He said he’s gonna send for us,” she added.
“Can I come in?”
“I’m sorry, but no, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “You know with Merc gone, I got to be careful.”
“Careful of me?”
Her stare was all the answer she offered.
“What’s wrong, Blesta?” I asked.
“Mercury told me not to talk to you,” she said. She was an honest young woman. The truth was a balm to her.
“Lotta men been sayin’ that about me lately. You think I might hurt your man?”
“Where’s Daddy?” Artemus asked. Maybe it was the first time he realized his father was gone.
“Not now, Arty,” Blesta said.
“You tell Mercury, when he calls you from the road, that I’m out here lookin’ for him. Okay?”
“I don’t think he’s gonna call for a few days,” Blesta said.
“Not till Sunday?” I asked.
Blesta nodded, though I believe it was against her will.
“Where’s Daddy?” Artemus asked in an anxious tone.
“If he calls you before then, you tell him what I said.”
Blesta looked down to avoid my gaze. She closed the door.
“Where’s my daddy?” Artemus shouted from behind the door.
I walked down to my car, hoping that Mercury really was on the road down South.
ISOLDA ANSWERED her shanty apartment door in nothing but a bathrobe. That was at eleven o’clock in the morning. I wondered how she managed to pay her nickel rent — or her dollar mortgage, for that matter.
When she smiled at me the questions in my mind dimmed somewhat. Sexual charm will do that to a man.
“Mr. Rawlins.”
“Miss Moore.”
Her kissing lips turned into an inviting smile and I found myself in a chair on her little island of luxury amid the shambles of the room. The smell of lilac was in the air, and a frosty glass of iced tea was soon to find its way into my hand.
“Have you found Brawly?” she asked.
“I just don’t understand it,” I said.
“What?”
“Why a woman like you — so beautiful and able to create beauty even in a hole like this — why would you need to seduce a fourteen-year-old boy?”
Isolda Moore was no pushover. Her smile diminished slightly. Her head tilted a bit to the side.
“You’re right,” she said. “You don’t understand.” Five words that she meant to be a confession, an explanation, and absolution.
But I wasn’t having it her way.
“No, I don’t,” I said. “I don’t get that at all. I got me a teenager up in the house right now and I could tell you this — I wouldn’t stand for no woman north of thirty with her hands in his under-pants.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Isolda said. “It wasn’t like you said.”
“How else could it be?” I asked angrily. I wasn’t really mad, at least not at what had happened to Brawly all those years before.
“He called me from a phone booth on Slauson. Called me collect. I was all the way up in Riverside and he was cryin’ his eyes out and mumbling because of his swollen mouth. I broke every speed limit comin’ down to get him. I found him sittin’ on a park bench with the tears still in his eyes. The first night up at my house he didn’t even want to sleep alone in his own bed. He begged me to sleep with him and when I said no he crawled in next to me when he thought I was asleep.”
“Why didn’t you send him away?” I asked.
“Send him where? His mother was in the madhouse and his father nearly broke his jaw. If it wasn’t for me, they would’a put him out as a foster child or in the orphanage.” Isolda’s voice was full of passion that she had not shown before. “And after a couple of nights in the bed together I felt his want. I knew it was wrong, but he needed me.”
“His girlfriend said that you walked around naked, that you seduced him into your bed.”
“That’s the way he has to remember it,” Isolda said with a nod. “Because after it went on for a while I told him that it had to end. I told him that he needed to have a girl his own age. That’s when he took up with BobbiAnne. But, you know, even when he had been with her he’d come back home and wanna climb in the bed with me.” There was pride in her voice. “And when I refused him he got mad and blamed me for the way he felt.”
It was a solid argument, good enough to have been in a play. Sometimes you did things bad because of love and hurt the people you cared for most. Maybe if Isolda was some bucktoothed third-grade teacher, I might have believed her. But every part of her life was so perfectly arranged, I couldn’t see her giving in to the whirlpool of someone else’s passion.
“Is Alva mad at you for sleeping with her husband or her son?” I asked then.
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“I’m askin’ you.”
“I ain’t told her about either one,” Isolda said.
“Did you know Henry Strong?” I asked.
“Never heard of him.”
“Hm.”
“What?”
“Nuthin’,” I said. “It’s just that somebody’s been lyin’ to me.”
“Who?”
“Maybe Kenneth Chapman.”
For the first time she stumbled. It was no more than turning her head away from me, looking off for something easy t
o fall from her tongue. She turned back, but still she wavered.
“What’d he say?” she asked at last.
“That you and him and a man named Anton Breland had drinks with Strong and Aldridge.” I was lying to force her to admit some kind of connection between the murdered men.
“I don’t know what he’s talkin’ about.”
“But you know Chapman?”
“Once when I went to pick up Brawly for lunch, he introduced me to him and a stocky man named Mercury. They worked with Brawly. But I ain’t never been out with them. And I don’t know no Henry Strong.”
“I see. Yeah. Uh-huh.” I was just making noise while Isolda floundered in my suspicions. She was telling me the truth about not going out with Chapman while lying about Strong, I was sure of that. But I needed more.
“What did this Chapman say?” she asked.
“Just that you had been with them. And when I asked him about Aldridge he told me that Brawly and Aldridge got along just fine, even after that fight you said they had.”
“They did have that fight,” Isolda protested. “I ain’t lyin’.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. I’m sure that it’s Chapman lied to me. Sure of it. You know him and Mercury was burglars a long time ago. I thought they give it up, but you never know with crooks.”
Isolda let her bathrobe fall open so that I could see her left breast. She was thirty-five if she was a day, but gravity hadn’t touched her yet. It was the breast of a twenty-year-old. Any male from six weeks to ninety years old would have had trouble resisting. If I hadn’t had Bonnie in my life, I might have crossed the line — for just a kiss. But instead I took out a Chesterfield and sat back, out of range of her charm.
She acted as if the robe had fallen open by mistake and covered up.
I inhaled deeply, feeling of two minds about the benefits and detriments of smoking. On one hand, tobacco robbed me of my wind, but on the other, it gave me something to do while the devil was tempting me.
I stood up.
“Time to go,” I said lamely.
“Where?” she asked, rising and coming toward me.
“To talk to Chapman again, I guess.”
“What about his partner?” Isolda asked. “Mercury.”
“He left town,” I said. “Probably the smartest one of the bunch.”
39
JACKSON BLUE was in his bathrobe, too.
I shook my head when he came to the door.
“What’s wrong with you, Easy?” he asked.
“Don’t nobody work?” I said. “I mean, am I the only one who thinks he got to get up in the morning and at least put on a pair of pants?”
Jackson grinned. White teeth against black skin has always had a soothing effect on me. It made me happy.
Jackson led me down the stairs into his house.
“I’m workin’,” he said as he went. “Been readin’ about a guy named Isaac Newton. You ever hear about him?”
“Of course I have,” I said. “Every schoolkid knows about Newton’s apple.”
“Did you know that he invented calculus?”
“No,” I said, not particularly interested.
I took my seat at his table and he took to the one-piece school desk. He stretched out in the chair like a cat or an arrogant adolescent.
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, at the same time this dude name’a Leibniz came up with the same calculations, but Newton invented it, too. Newton was a mothahfuckah.”
“How long ago did he live?” I asked.
“Died in 1727,” Jackson said. “A rich man, too.”
“So he did his work,” I said. “You just sittin’ ’round here in your drawers.”
“But, Easy,” Jackson said with that grin. “I’m learnin’. I know things. I know things ninety-nine percent’a your white people don’t know.”
“I know about gravity, Jackson. Maybe I didn’t know about calculus, but what good is it knowin’ that, anyway?”
“It’s not just that, Easy. It’s not knowin’ one thing. It’s under-standin’ the man. If you understand him, then you got somethin’ to think about in your own world.”
He had me then. Just like Sam Houston talking about newspaper articles, Jackson made claims that made me want to stop and understand.
“Okay, man,” I said, looking at my wristwatch. “Two minutes to hear what you mean.”
I expected Jackson to smile again, but instead he put on his serious face.
“It’s like this,” he said. “Newton was a religious man, what they called a Arianist.…”
“A what?”
“It don’t matter, except that it meant that he was a heretic in England, but he didn’t let nobody know. He was a alchemist, too. Tryin’ to turn lead to gold and like that. He lived through the plague years. And at the end of his life he was the president of the science club and the head of the national mint.”
“All that?”
Jackson nodded almost solemnly. “As the head of the mint he was in charge of executions. And all them things he discovered — he kept ’em to himself for years before he let the world know.”
“So what, Jackson?”
“So what? This is black history we talkin’ here, Easy.”
“So now you sayin’ Newton was a black man?”
“No, brother. I’m sayin’ that all they teach in schools is how a apple done falled on Isaac’s head and that’s it. They don’t teach you about how he believed in magic or how he was in his heart against the Church of England. They don’t want you to know that you can sit in your room and discover things all by yourself that nobody else knows. I’m down here collectin’ knowledge while some other Negro is outside someplace swingin’ a hammer. That’s what I’m sayin’.”
“Swingin’ a hammer is more than you do,” I said out of reflex. I didn’t really believe it. Jackson Blue’s rendition of Isaac Newton reminded me of me, a man living in shadows in almost every part of his life. A man who keeps secrets and harbors passions that could get him killed if he let them out into the world.
“You a fool if you believe that, Easy.”
“And you just a fool, Jackson,” I said.
“How you see that?”
“This man you talkin’ about kept his secrets — for a while. But then he let the world know — that’s the only reason you know it today. When are you gonna let the world know?”
“One day I might surprise ya, Easy. Uh-huh.”
“Well,” I said, “until that day comes, I need you to do somethin’ for me.”
“What’s that?”
“Before I get into that, why don’t you answer my question?”
“What question?”
“How come you in your house in your underwear in the afternoon? I mean, who pays the rent?”
“Somebody who thinks that my studies are something important, that’s who.”
I could tell that he wasn’t going to reveal his golden goose. And it really wasn’t any of my business, so I went back to the reason I had come.
“I need you to apply for a job, Jackson,” I said.
“A job? I don’t know what the fuck’s got into you, brother. But I done worked more in my forty-two years than most white men twice my age. An’ I’m a lazy mothahfuckah.”
I had to laugh. It was funny and it was true. I celebrated the moment of joy by lighting up a cigarette.
“I ain’t askin’ you to work. I mean, maybe one day, tops. I just want you to apply for the job and then take it. But you don’t have to build up no real sweat or nuthin’.”
“What kinda job?”
“Construction.”
“Construction? Damn, Easy, that’s the hardest work out there. Just spendin’ the day out under that sun like to give me heat stroke.”
“Two hundred fifty dollars for one day,” I said.
“Where do I sign up?”
“Manelli Construction Company down in Compton. You can use John for a reference.”
“What you wan
na know from them?”
“Everything you can find out. Who’s in charge. Who’s workin’ there. I wanna know about payroll and catering trucks and who’s on duty what hours. I wanna know about security and what anybody knows about Henry Strong’s murder three nights ago.”
Jackson digested the order, nodded.
“This about Brawly and the First Men?”
“Strong got killed out to there. John’s crew worked for Manelli when John couldn’t make the paychecks and they needed help. Somehow Mercury and Chapman got sumpin’ to do with what’s happenin’ with Brawly. I just need to know.”
Jackson nodded again and then extended his palm. I laid one of Mr. Strong’s hundred-dollar bills across it. That made Jackson smile.
We settled up quickly after that. He’d go down to Manelli’s that afternoon and show up for work the next day. Because the amount of time crossed over two days, I promised to pay for his expenses, as long as they didn’t get out of hand.
After that we talked about Newton some more. Jackson told me that the kind of calculus Newton created was called differential calculus. He tried to explain that mathematics was the language of the way things worked, that that was the real secret men were always going for — to speak in the language of things. I barely understood him, even on an everyday level, but I knew that he was saying something that was important to my life.
40
I CAME HOME to find Jesus and Feather in the front yard with Bonnie. They were trimming rosebushes that I’d cultivated on either side of the front door. Bonnie loved the apple-sized, mottled red and yellow roses. When she agreed to come live with me, she’d said, “Only if you promise to keep those roses by the door. That way I’ll think that they’re flowers you give me every day.”
Feather was collecting the roses in a tin pail that looked too big for her to carry. She was laughing while Jesus used his shears on one of the bushes. It was getting close to sunset and the sky was full of clouds that were a brilliant orange and black with the light at their back.
“Daddy!” Feather cried. She ran at me and tackled my legs. “I got another B-plus.”
“That’s great, baby.” I lifted her over my head and then brought her down for a kiss on the cheek.
Bad Boy Brawly Brown Page 21
