Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 16 —

That afternoon found me on Grand Avenue, just north of Sunset. The address that Jackson had given me was a big brick edifice that looked more like a factory than an apartment building. The entrance was small, but the bell board had more than three dozen tenants listed. I went up and down the list until settling on the name b. terrell. I thought about the letters for a minute and then remembered Brawly’s high school girlfriend.

B. Terrell’s apartment was on the sixth floor. I was breathing hard by the time I was through the third flight of stairs. By the time I reached her door, I had to stop and catch my breath.

I knocked four times. The hall was empty and the lock was susceptible to the three playing cards that I carried in my wallet.

B. Terrell’s apartment was of a monotonous, almost penal design. It was made up of four rooms that were all of equal size. Living room, kitchen, toilet, and bedroom. Each chamber was cube-shaped, and together they formed a bigger square. Each room had two doors that led to two other rooms. The living room was too small and the bathroom too large. The kitchen would have been hard to move around in. Only the bedroom really worked as it was supposed to.

The front door led into the living room. On a small coffee table was a framed photograph of a younger Brawly arm-in-arm with a blond-haired white girl. She had the healthy look of a Scandinavian, not pretty but handsome enough. They were smiling and obviously in love, at least at that moment. There was mail on the kitchen table addressed to BobbiAnne Terrell. In the bathroom medicine cabinet there were four boxes of Trojan condoms and a jar of petroleum jelly.

Under the bed there was a heavy metal box painted drab green. In it I found three carbines, six 45-caliber pistols, and two M-1 rifles. The top shelf of the closet had stacks of ammunition for those guns and some others.

I took one of the pistols, loaded it, and put it in my windbreaker pocket. I was halfway through the living room, on my way to the door, when the lock jiggled and the front door opened.

She was surprised to see a big black man in the middle of the room, but not enough to scream or run. I was surprised, too.

“Hello,” she said, sounding more curious than afraid.

She looked just as she did in the photograph. The dress was even the same, a coral-colored one-piece that buttoned down the front. She had a nice figure, if you liked your women on the beefy side. Her face was wide and freckled in the center.

“Hi,” I said.

“Who are you?”

“Easy,” I said. “Easy Rawlins.”

“What are you doing in my apartment?”

“Looking for Brawly Brown. The door was unlocked and I didn’t have anywhere else to be, so I walked in and called his name. I was just about to leave when you came in.”

“Why are you looking for Brawly?”

“Lotta people looking for him,” I said. “But I’m representing Alva, his mother.”

BobbiAnne checked the doorknob but there was no way to tell if it had been unlocked when I got there.

“I’ve looked everywhere,” I said, intending to calm her with conversation. “The First Men, at his cousin Isolda’s—”

“You here for her?” BobbiAnne said with a flash of anger.

“No. I just looked in at her. She’s the one who gave me your name.”

“That bitch,” BobbiAnne said.

“Why you say that?” I asked.

“Not a bitch but just sick,” the Nordic girl amended. She moved into the room, put at ease, I guess, because I stayed stationary.

“Sick how?”

“She used Brawly.”

“Yeah?”

“What are you going to do when you find Brawly?” she asked, changing the flow of the conversation.

I moved to a straight-backed wooden chair, indicating that I wanted to extend our conversation.

“The boy’s in trouble,” I said. “The police think he’s going to go ballistic with politics, Isolda thinks he might have killed his father, and Alva just thinks that he’s runnin’ with the wrong crowd. For all I know, they might all be right.”

Something I said got to the girl. A worried look invaded her optimistic features, and she took to the small sofa opposite me.

“Are you here to turn him over to the police?”

“I told you already that I’m here for his mother,” I said. “Mothers don’t turn their babies over to the cops.”

“How did you find me?”

“That’s the second time you changed the subject,” I said. “Not polite, but I’ll tell you that I wasn’t looking for you. I asked around about Brawly and heard that he had a girlfriend lived in this building. Once I saw your name, I knew it had to be you because Isolda told me that you were Brawly’s friend in high school. Now can you help me find the younger Mr. Brown?”

BobbiAnne had big, upstanding breasts and broad shoulders, crystal blue eyes and a stomach that protruded just slightly. All of this worked to make her more attractive as the moments went by. She was the kind of girl who would turn beautiful on you overnight.

Her face was worried, but still she didn’t seem fragile or vulnerable. I liked that.

“I don’t know where Brawly is,” she said. “But he’s not in any trouble that I know of. Nothing except that his mother doesn’t understand him.”

“Have you talked to him in the last day or so?”

“He called. He said that he was going to come by but first he had to see a... a friend.”

“Anton Breland?” I said, remembering the alias Conrad sometimes used.

“How do you know him?” For the first time Miss Terrell’s face showed real concern.

“Met him. He pulled out a pistol on me and left me stranded three miles away from my car.”

“Oh. I didn’t like him when I first met him,” she said. “But him and Brawly have gotten pretty close. For the past six months he’s really been getting into the black thing. He said that he realized that black people had to get the white man off their backs.”

“Is that when he left you?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” I said, “I didn’t see his name downstairs.”

“We never lived together.”

“So Brawly isn’t in any kind of trouble?” I asked.

“No,” she said in an uncertain tone.

“I can’t help him if you don’t tell me.”

“I don’t even know you.”

“The question is,” I said, “do you know Brawly?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that if the police come in here and find those guns up under your bed, they’re gonna drag you off to jail. Especially when they find those army-issue M-ones.”

“You searched my house?”

“Listen to me, girl,” I said. “I don’t care about you or those guns. I ain’t a cop and I don’t concern myself with politics. All I want is to figure out how Brawly is doing and get him outta trouble if I can. If you want to sleep with a thirty-year jail sentence up under your bed, it’s okay with me. But if you know what’s good for you, you’ll tell me how I can get to Brawly and talk some sense to him.”

“I don’t know anything, Mr. Rawlins,” she said.

“Are those his guns under your bed?”

She didn’t answer that question.

“What are they for?” I tried again

“Just... just for self-defense, just in case.”

“Have you touched them?” I asked.

“Touched what?”

“Those guns.”

“No.”

“Don’t,” I said, and then stood up.

BobbiAnne’s whole body jerked at my sudden movement. It was the first real evidence I had that she was afraid of me.

“Brawly’s in trouble,” I said. “And if you aren’t careful, he’ll drag you down with him.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” she said.

“If you can get a judge to believe that, you might only get fifteen years.”