Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 21 —

“Hello, Mrs. Plates,” I said later that morning.

Jorge Peña, Garland Burns, Troy Sanders, and Willard Clark had already come in, had coffee, and gone out again. “You’re a few minutes late, aren’t you?” I chided her but I didn’t really care.

Helen Plates was a natural blond Negro, also from the Midwest. She had a complaint for everything from politics to drinking water, from poor blacks to rich whites. She could never get in to work right on time but she was my hardest worker, next to Garland, and Helen never minded if I asked her to do a little overtime. I think she liked to stay late because her husband was an invalid and she worked harder for him than she ever did at Truth.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “You know I had to make sure Edgar took his pills before I left. His cousin, Opal, is fine to sit around and feed him soup, but she don’t know how to dole out them pills. You know, he has to take his blue pill every three hours, his pink pills two at a time every five, there’s the square white ones that he takes every hour, and the round white ones that he takes three times a day. The first time I left Edgar with Opal she just gave him all of ’em at once at ten-thirty. I called Dr. Harrell and he made us pump out his stomach at the emergency ward in the hospital.”

“But if you can’t trust Opal, then what are you going to do for the rest of the day?” I asked her.

“I have to call every time he needs to take a pill.”

My next question should have been, Well, if all you have to do is call, then why did you have to stay late this morning? But instead I asked, “Do you have Mercury’s address?”

Mrs. Plates’s friendly patter petered out then. She sat back in her chair and turned her face away from me, as if maybe I was naked and should be ashamed of myself.

“That’s a personal thing, Mr. Rawlins. I don’t know if Mercury wants me to be handin’ out his numbers like that.”

“He didn’t seem to mind you tellin’ me that he was in trouble over that burglary he committed when it helped him out,” I said.

“Shhh, baby. Mercury ain’t like that no more. He’s workin’ construction in Compton and you don’t know who might be at the door listenin’.”

“Write down his address, will you, Mrs. Plates?”

“Why?” I could see in her face that she didn’t want me to tell her the truth.

“I’m doin’ some work for John — you know, the man Mercury and Chapman work for. He needs me to locate one of his employees, and I was thinkin’ that Merc might know a thing or two.”

“Is John’s employee in trouble?”

“You don’t even know his name, Helen. Why worry about him? Mercury isn’t in trouble, either — that’s all you need to know.”

I spent the morning wandering around the grounds, checking out pink slips that various teachers and administrators had left reporting problems with the plant. There was paint peeling off the ceiling of the girls’ shower room and a faulty light in the teachers’ lounge. Nothing serious. Nothing I couldn’t handle with my eyes closed. I was having a good time.

At noon I went to the main building and took out the dirty and creased white card that Detective Knorr had given me. All it had was a telephone number with an Axminister exchange.

I dialed the number.

“D Squad,” a woman’s voice said.

“Detective Knorr, please,” I said in a stern, barely civil, white man’s tone.

“He’s not in right now,” the woman said. “May I take a message?”

“This is Grimes,” I said. “I have a special expenses check for the detective that’s come back three times. Can you give me the right address?”

“What address are you using?”

I gave her the address of the Seventy-seventh Street Precinct.

“Your records are obviously out of order,” she snapped. My tone had gotten under her skin. She gave me Vincent Knorr’s office address with vindictive pleasure.

I left work at one. That was seven hours and I’d worked hard. I wasn’t worried about Newgate getting mad at me. None of my custodians — or his teachers, for that matter — would tell him where I was. If he asked for me, the standard reply was “I saw him a few minutes ago. He was headed for the other campus.”

The address the angry secretary gave brought me to a building on Hope, just down the block from City Hall. Made from stone, the entrance brought me into a building-sized room that had a domed ceiling with a tiny colored-glass opening at the very top. A woman sat at a desk blocking entrée to the large circular room. Her nameplate read MISS PFENNIG.

Pfennig’s copper-colored hair came out of a wash basin and she had probably been ugly even when she was a child, which was more than forty years earlier. Her long nose had gone awry, like a sapling grown under heavy shade, wavering this way and that in search for the light. Her eyes were a translucent gray. Her skin was gray also, but lusterless and drab.

I came in from the bright sun, so it took a few moments for my vision to adjust to the tomblike interior. Even the skylight couldn’t brighten that dark globular room. With no windows and the roof at least thirty feet away, there was little possibility that it would ever muster any more than a dusklike gloom.

“What do you want?“ Pfennig asked.

I ignored her rudeness, looking at the doorways along the edges of the perfectly circular room. The floor might have been fifty feet in diameter. I found myself amazed at the profound waste of space. I thought of Jackson Blue’s lopsided room. At least he used the space he had for books and studying, for thinking, no matter how misguided. It struck me that Jackson might not have been so wrongheaded as I thought. After all, here I was in the medieval bastion of the special police squad assigned to hounding and destroying a black political group. How could someone justify being a law-abiding citizen after seeing something like that?

“I came to see Detective Knorr,” I said.

“Who?”

“Detective Knorr.”

“You must be mistaken,” Miss Pfennig said. “There’s no one here by that name.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not mistaken, you are. You’re mistaking me for a black radical come here to blow up this building because of the conspiracy within these walls. You’re mistaking me for an angry black militant tired of the lies and attempts to make your claims of our inferiority seem true.”

I smiled, and fear blossomed in the ugly woman’s face.

A man appeared from the shadows. He was tall and chiseled, blond on white wearing a tan suit and black shoes. An undercover cop if I had ever seen one.

“Is there a problem, Miss Pfennig?”

“This man was threatening to blow up the building,” she said.

“No,” I said again. “I said that you thought I was, when really I just wanted to speak to Detective Knorr.”

“What do you want with Vincent?” The light-haired detective would never be a success in his job.

I handed over the card that Vincent Knorr had given me.

“He wanted me to drop by if I had any information.”

The chiseled cop studied the card, turning it over two or three times. He was looking for a trick.

“There’s no name on this card,” he said at last.

“No. I guess you guys got some kinda secret goin’ on around here. Vincent thought that I was the right kind of rat for your purposes.”

“Come with me,” the Aryan dream ordered.

“Hal,” Miss Pfennig said. It was just one word but there was a lot behind it.

Hal ignored her and repeated, “This way.”

We walked in a straight line to a door about sixty-two degrees up the circle from Pfennig’s desk. Hal knocked and then opened the door without waiting for a reply. The room we entered had normal lighting. It also had a mahogany desk and a thickset secretary. She had long hair that would have looked better short and wore a pink dress that should have been battleship gray. Her eyes were round but still uninviting.

“Yes, Sergeant Gellman?” If I were a young man and had heard that deep and sensual voice on the phone, I would call back a few times, hoping for a way in.

“This man has a card he said he got from Detective Knorr. He’s here looking for him,” Hal said.

“And you brought him here?”

Hal’s mouth opened as if he intended to speak, but there were no words in the pipe.

“You couldn’t even leave him at the front desk?”

“He was being belligerent with Doris.”

“Did you frisk him?”

Again Hal Gellman searched for words that did not exist.

Looking back and forth between those two, I began to have heart that change was possible in my lifetime. My enemies were both blind and small-minded, vain and unable to imagine me even though I was standing right there in front of them.

The nameless secretary pressed a button on a walnut box that sat on her desk.

A man’s voice said, “Yes, Mona?”

“Ezekiel Porterhouse Rawlins came to the front door, and Sergeant Gellman brought him here. What should I do?”

Small-minded, maybe, but they did their homework.

A silence followed Mona’s question. Hal stared at the wall above her head.

His glare and his situation reminded me of my father.

My father disappeared forty-two days after my eighth birthday. He went out to work at a lumberjack camp and never returned. I have very few memories of him, but what I do remember is cast in bronze.

He once told me that anything that happened to a man before he was sixty was a good thing.

“Not everything,” I said, testing my own childish knowledge against his.

“Yes,” he said, “everything.”

“Uh-uh, not if you get your arm cut off.”

“Even if you’re right-handed and you get your right arm cut off,” he said. “Even that will turn out to be a good thing if you’re a real man.”

“But how?”

“Because a real man will know that he has to overcome anything that gets in the way of him caring for his family. A real man will study the arm he has left. He will build its strength, learn how to use tools with it. He will make sure that he’s a better man with one arm than other men are with two. And he’ll make it so, no matter how hard he has to try. A real man can be beat only if you kill him. And with his dyin’ breath he will try to overcome Death itself.”

Standing there between those bickering police, I thought of my father and of Raymond Alexander, who never feared Death or her emissaries. Hal Gellman was being given a chance, though he probably didn’t realize it. The deep-voiced Mona was helping him to see something. His boss’s silence was telling him something.

I saw no awareness in his angry glare, though. That was my lesson.

The beech door behind Mona opened and a tall man, about my age, walked into the room. He wore a cheap dark suit with a white shirt and no tie. His shoulders were narrow and his gaze, behind the round wire-rimmed glasses, was intense.

“Rawlins?” he said.

I nodded.

He looked me up and down, decided by some unknown calculations that I wasn’t a threat, and said, “Colonel Lakeland. Come with me.”

He turned and walked back through the buff doorway.

As I followed I experienced a familiar feeling of elation. It’s a reaction that black people often have when going into the slave master’s quarters. In there, we imagine, is the place where freedom resides. And if we get the chance, maybe we could pick up a little of that most precious commodity when the man is otherwise occupied.

I smiled at my silly delight.

Mona mistook my smile as being for her. She sneered at me and I was jarred back to reality.