Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 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.