Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 41 —

Tina was waiting for me at the door. I liked that. I’ve always been a punctual man. It was my army training. If a man said 7:59, you got there on time because by eight you might be dead.

When she opened the door I saw that she had a raised bruise on her right temple. There was a small scab at the center of the bump, surrounded by yellowish skin.

“Let’s get away from here,” she said to me at the doorstep.

“Where to?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said carelessly. “Down Central.”

We went to the car and drove off.

“How long have you been out?” she asked me.

“They let me go a few hours after they caught us,” I said. “How about you?”

“Just over a day. They had me in a cell with drunks and women livin’ on the street.”

“That’s where you got the knot on your head?”

Instinctively, Tina brought up her hand to cover the injury.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. I got in a fight with a woman who got mad at me for not having a cigarette.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “They shouldn’ta done that to you.”

“How did you get out so fast?” Tina asked.

“I called the man city hall’s got on you. He sent word upstairs and they kicked me aloose.”

“So you were working with the men who arrested us?” she said, not so much accusing me as verifying what she’d already believed.

“No,” I replied. “The men who arrested you think that they’re the ones on you, but really it’s a secret squad, the one I told you about. They got a soldier been to Vietnam runnin’ it. They’re the ones you got to worry about. They tapped me because they think I’ll turn you over.”

“If that’s true, then why would you tell me?”

“Same reason I called Liselle last night,” I said. “Because I don’t wanna push you or trick you. You got enough people on your ass.”

“Who else?”

“Even though he’s dead, there’s Henry Strong. Whatever he was doin’, it might’a looked like it was for you but really it would’a led to your downfall. I’m ninety-nine percent sure that he was a stool for the cops. And then there’s the secret group he was workin’ with inside the First Men—”

“What secret group?” Tina asked. There was a deadness to the question, almost as if she didn’t care if I answered.

“Conrad, Brawly, and Strong are the only ones I’m sure were in it. And whatever they were planning to do, it has to do with them guns Brawly and Conrad were hiding at BobbiAnne’s.”

Christina Montes was quiet for a moment then. She gazed out of the passenger’s window at the stores on Central.

“They had me rent them a house,” Tina said.

“What?”

“Brawly and Conrad. They had me rent them a house on One thirty-six.”

“When?”

“Yesterday. Conrad gave me two hundred and fifty-five dollars.”

“That almost proves it,” I said.

“But you said that Henry was workin’ for the cops,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Whatever they plannin’, I’m sure the police know their every move and that they plan to discredit your group.”

“I don’t believe it,” Tina said. “You should. I’m the only man tellin’ you the truth.”

“It’s too crazy. Why would they go to all that trouble?”

“To make it look like you’re crazy killer criminals. To have people, both black and white, happy when you get run down like dogs and thrown into prison for the rest of your lives.”

There I was, the conservative veteran explaining a campaign of subterfuge to a revolutionary.

“Where’s the house you rented at?” I asked.

“I...I don’t know if I should say.”

“What you should do,” I said, “is give me the address, pack up your boy Xavier, and haul outta town. Go to San Diego or ’Frisco. Anywhere but here.”

“You’re just trying to scare me.”

“Why’d you wait for me to come this morning, Tina?”

“Because...because you asked me to.”

“That means in some way you trust me, right? I mean, you trusted me to come. You trusted me not to bring the cops.”

“No,” she said, in a rather peculiar tone. I turned my head and saw that she had a small pistol pointed at the side of my chest.

“You plan to shoot me?” I asked her.

“You’re the one who’s been against us the whole time,” she said. “You killed Henry and probably Brawly’s father, too. Henry called me to ask me what you had said at the meeting, before the cops came. I told him that you’d talked to Clarissa and she gave me your number. When I was in jail I started thinkin’ about it. Henry was going to see you the night he was killed. That’s why I agreed to meet you.”

“To kill me?”

The fact that she didn’t answer caused sweat to sprout on my brow.

“What do you plan to do?” I asked her.

“Just drive.”

We were still headed south on Central, in the Sixties. I took a deep breath through my nose and gritted my teeth.

I had been in some tough situations in my life, with and without Mouse. And I knew that it wasn’t in the hardest moment that you were likely to lose your life. A small girl with a baby gun might not have frightened most men. But I realized that she could kill me or bring me to my death just as easily as the recently deposed champion, Sonny Liston, could knock my head off.

“So, you been a part of the secret group the whole time?” I asked.

“No, Conrad and them just told me when we got outta jail,” she said. “They told me about you. Conrad told me how you brought Henry out to Compton and shot him in the back of the head.”

“Yeah?” I said. “And how would Conrad know that?”

“He saw you. He was hiding in the house. He said that you must’a fooled him to get him to bring you to where they were meeting, just like you fooled me an’ Xavier into gettin’ arrested.”

“So then they told you to kidnap me?”

“No,” Tina said with a sneer. “You called on me. I would have stayed away from you, but you stuck your nose out once too often.”

“So now you’re in with the gang,” I said. “Now you plan to use those guns Brawly and Conrad stole.”

“Those guns are only for self-defense.”

“Does Xavier know all this, too?”

“No. They only told me. Xavier’s nonviolent. He didn’t even have bullets in his gun the night you saw him.”

“That’s why you were layin’ up in Strong’s bed?” I asked. “Because you needed a man who could resort to violence?”

“You don’t know a thing about me,” she said from the spleen. “I do what I have to do.”

“Did your friends kill Aldridge Brown?” I asked.

“For all I know, you and your cop friends killed him, too.”

We were down around Ninetieth Street. A futile plan was all I had. My old house was on 116th. I still owned it. My friend Primo lived there for free.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Keep driving,” she said.

Two green lights and four red ones later we came to the signal at 116th. It was turning amber when I was maybe three feet from the crosswalk. I gunned the engine to make the light and then suddenly cut across traffic to make a left turn. I used my left hand to steer and with my right I hit Tina in the head much harder than a man should ever strike a woman. Her head hit the window and made a small cracking sound. I hoped that it was glass I was hearing as I sped past the blasting horns toward the deep driveway and front yard of my old house.

Primo was sitting on the porch with his ebony-colored Panamanian wife, Flower. Around them were babies and children, some theirs, some their children’s children.

“Easy,” my old friend shouted.

“Come on over here, man,” I cried.

We carried the unconscious woman into the house while Spanish-speaking babies and infants capered around us, wanting to be a part of the game. Tina’s skull had broken the glass, but she didn’t seem all that damaged. While Flower set her in the bed, I rummaged through her purse.

She was the same kind of liar that I had always been — she lied by telling the truth about something distracting while coming to her own conclusion. The only problem was that her conclusions about me were wrong.

Still, she had the receipt for the house she rented on 136th. The landlord, Jaguar Realty, had offices on Crenshaw.

Outside the house Primo and I stood by my car. I was smoking a cigarette while he puffed on a slender cigar.

Primo was shorter than I was and broad in both the shoulders and hips. He was a thick man, but the only fat on him was around his belly. He had a full mane of black hair that hid a portion of his forehead and true-black eyes that were usually filled with mirth — but I had seen them when they were honed down to a killing glint.

He was serious that day, but his eyes still smiled.

“She tried to kill you?” he asked me.

“Kidnap me is more like it,” I said. “Take me to some men who would like to do me in.”

“What men?”

“Revolutionaries,” I said. “Like Zapata.”

“Oh,” Primo said. “Good men for storybooks but you don’t want to be around them when they’re alive.”

I chuckled and then I laughed. Primo laughed with me for a while.

“Can you keep her here a day or two?” I asked him. “Sleeping?”

“Sure,” he said with no conflict, consideration, or question as to why. “I’ll call you if I need to.”

We shook hands and said good-bye.