Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 13 —

Clarissa walked out of Hambones at about eleven-thirty. It was a Sunday night and Hambones wasn’t the hot spot that it had once been. She turned left and walked down the street. I let her go about a block or so before turning the engine over. I drove a block past her and then pulled over to the curb on the opposite side of the street.

When she walked past me again, I turned off the engine. After she was a block away I got out. She was walking swiftly, clacking her wooden heels. My shoes were rubber soled, however, so I could keep up without being heard.

She wasn’t nervous, but like any woman with some sense she cast a glance backward now and then. I avoided detection by keeping to the shadows across the street. We went like that for six or seven blocks. Then Clarissa turned right on Byron. She went a block and a half before coming to a squat three-story building that looked like an oversized incinerator. It was covered with kumquat-colored plaster and seemed to sag under its own weight. Clarissa went into a door on the ground floor. A light came on in a tiny window.

I went over to her door and strained to listen. The building was so cheap that I could hear her footsteps. She opened a door, put down something metal, probably a pot. Something like a chair or couch sagged and then a radio went on in the middle of the song “The Duke of Earl.”

She was cooking or brewing tea and listening to music. I figured that I’d wait around until she decided to go to bed.

Clarissa’s building had a sister structure across the street. On its north side was a small entryway where the garbage cans were stored until trash day. I climbed in behind the lidded metal cans, lit up a Chesterfield, and breathed through my mouth.

The desert quiet of southern California nights was always a pleasure to me. In the South around Texas and Louisiana there were loud bugs and night birds, wind in the trees, and less identifiable noises from the wetlands and its inhabitants. But in L.A. the night was wrapped in silence as if there were always a predator near, waiting to pounce on some hushed victim.

That night, I suppose, the predator was me.

Almost nothing happened for the next hour or so. A family of spiders had set up a system of webs above my head, so even the rare moth didn’t stay around long.

The entrance to Clarissa’s apartment was illuminated by a concrete lamp that was set in the lawn in front of her door. The light in her window stayed on, so I kept to my post.

My copper-faced Gruen watch said 12:48 when a lime green Cadillac drove up and stopped in front of Clarissa’s building. I could see the damage done by the wooden fence he’d hit broadside the night before. Handsome Conrad was still in the driver’s seat. He was still edgy, looking around nervously. He even glanced in my direction, but I was too deep in shadow to be seen.

Brawly hopped out of the passenger’s side and said something into the back window. Conrad squealed off down the street, as if he thought the police were still chasing him. Maybe they were.

Brawly knocked on Clarissa’s door. She answered with a kiss and an embrace. Brawly was a bulky kid, but Clarissa managed to get her arms around him. She was whispering something in his ear, holding on hard.

They retreated into the house, leaving me to wonder about my next move.

It didn’t take me long. I crossed the street and walked up to her door. There was some kind of argument going on.

“You didn’t answer my question!” Clarissa was saying in a loud tone.

I rapped on the hollow door much harder than was necessary. What followed was a sudden silence. I knocked again.

“Who is it?” came the voice that had sounded the alarm at the revolutionary headquarters the night before.

“Easy Rawlins,” I said out loud. “Open up.”

“Who are you?”

“Open up, Brawly, Clarissa.”

That did the trick. Brawly pulled the door wide so he could see the man who knew his name.

As the door was coming open, I felt the flush of victory. But when I saw his size up close, and the anger knit into his brow, I feared that my triumph could turn into defeat.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked.

“A man who’s been to Isolda’s front doorway,” I said.

The words didn’t seem to cause him any discomfort or fear.

“What she got to do with you?” he asked.

“Let me in, Brawly. We shouldn’t be talkin’ murder out where any ear could hear.”

“Let him in, honey,” Clarissa said. She was standing at his shoulder.

He backed up and I entered the apartment.

It was even smaller than John and Alva’s place, more like a playhouse than an adult’s home. If I had laid down and stretched out my arms, I could have touched one wall with the flat of my feet and the opposite one with my fingertips.

“Who is he?” Brawly asked his girlfriend.

“He’s a friend’a Sam’s,” Clarissa said. “Easy Rawlins, like he said.”

“Your mama sent me,” I said.

There was a big yellow chair in a corner of the sad little room. I’d been on my feet for over an hour, so I took the opportunity to sit.

Brawly remained upright while Clarissa hovered close to him, fearful, I imagined, that he might lose control.

“What you doin’ bangin’ on my woman’s door in the middle’a the night?”

“Lookin’ for you,” I said.

That was a good time to light up a cigarette. It made me feel confident while relaxing my nerves in the presence of the behemoth John asked me not to harm.

“Don’t fuck with me, niggah,” he said. But the words didn’t sound genuine. He was big but he was still playacting, not yet a man in his own right.

“Are you the one slaughtered Aldridge Brown?” I asked him.

“What?...”

“Aldridge Brown,” I said. “Was it you who killed him?”

Brawly grabbed me by my arms and picked me up out of the chair. He lifted me high enough that the ceiling was no more than an inch from my head.

The sense of weightlessness reminded me of when I was a defenseless child in the grip of some rough adult, yearning for the ground beneath my feet.

“What the fuck you talkin’ ’bout?” he said, his voice a full octave higher.

“Put me down,” I said without tripping over a single syllable.

“Put him down, baby!” Clarissa yelled.

“He was killed at Isolda’s house,” I said. “Beat to death at the front door yesterday morning. Ain’t you read the papers?”

Brawly let me down gently enough but when he slumped onto that cotton brown couch, it felt as if the floor might collapse. As it was, the whole house shook. I imagined that people were jumping out of their beds, worried that another L.A. earthquake was shaking down the building.

“Beat to death?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And when I went to talk to Isolda the only story she had was that you and Aldridge had a fight and you left sayin’ that you’d kill him if he ever said your mother’s name again.”

“That bitch,” Clarissa hissed.

“It’s not true,” Brawly said. “I was with... I wasn’t even in town yesterday morning.”

He shot a guilty glance at Clarissa, but she was too upset to notice.

“You didn’t see Aldridge at Isolda’s house?”

“Not yesterday.”

“Did you two get drunk and argue a couple’a weeks ago at her house?” I asked.

“Couple’a months, yeah. We had a drink or two. The conversation got a little hot but we ain’t had no fight. If we did, he’d be...” Brawly didn’t need to finish that sentence. “I didn’t kill ’im, man. I swear.”

“Somebody did,” I said.

Brawly sat back, looking more than ever like the child in his mother’s photograph.

“He’s dead?” Brawly asked again. “Dead?”

“That’s right.”

“My father?” he asked of no one in particular.

Clarissa perched herself on the armrest of the sofa. She put her arm around his head.

“My father, my dad...”

It was a moving performance. It might have even been real remorse, but I had seen people cry over loved ones they had murdered just hours before. The feelings of pain were there whether or not their hand had delivered the final stroke.

I lit up another cigarette.

“You don’t know anything about it?” I asked when the tears had passed. “I mean, you didn’t even read about it or hear it on the news?”

“Brawly’s been busy,” Clarissa told me.

“Shut your mouth,” Brawly warned.

I wouldn’t have been suspicious if he followed his own advice.

“Busy doin’ what?”

“Who are you, man?” Brawly asked me.

“Friend’a Alva Torres doin’ a good deed by her boy.”

“I ain’t got nuthin’ to do with her,” Brawly told me.

“That’s your mother, honey,” Clarissa said. “That’s blood.”

“And just about the only drop left,” I added. “She’s concerned about you. When she asked me to find you, I told her she probably didn’t need to worry. But now that I seen the mess your life is in, I understand why she wants you to come home.”

“I don’t have no home. They kicked me out.”

“I don’t believe that for one second, son. Your mama loves you even if you don’t care for yourself.”

“He’s right, baby,” Clarissa said.

“You don’t know shit, Clarissa. So don’t be tryin’ to tell me nuthin’.”

“The cops gonna look hard at you if they think you were fighting with him,” I said.

“That was almost two months ago,” Brawly said. “We made up since then.”

“Where were you Saturday morning?” I asked.

“Up north,” Brawly said. “I left Friday night.”

“Can you prove that?”

A guilty look flashed on the boy’s face. He seemed to hold himself back from looking at Clarissa.

“People saw me,” he said evasively.

“Who?”

“Why I got to answer to you? Who the fuck are you to come in here in the middle’a the night and question me?” Brawly said.

When he rose up from the couch my heart did a double thump to get enough blood into action in case I needed to fight.

“I don’t have to talk to you.”

“I’m just tryin’ to help you, boy,” I said.

I made the mistake of putting my hand on his shoulder.

Brawly shoved both arms out at me and I went backward. My feet actually left the ground. I felt the wall hit my back and my left ankle twist as my foot touched down.

Clarissa said, “Baby.”

The front door slammed open.

When I looked up I saw Brawly storming out into the street, leaving his girlfriend with a strange man in the middle of the night.