Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 44 —

“Where’s Brawly?” I asked, just to see what she would say.

“I don’t know.”

“If you in on the plan, then why wouldn’t you know?”

“They were all shaken up with the bust and you nosin’ around. With all that heat, they went into hiding,” she said. “Mercury said that he was gonna come to me after it was all over. He said that we’d go down to Texas and split his share.”

The fact that she could say those words amazed me. I just stared at her, wondering how she could get so deep into evil and not seem to have any remorse at all.

“What?” she asked. “What?”

“Why did Strong want to get in with Mercury in the first place?” I asked. “I mean, he’s no race man.”

“Henry didn’t talk to me about that. He didn’t even know that I knew anything,” Isolda said. “But Brawly told me that he was interested in the construction business from the beginning. He talked to him about payrolls and the police. And when he heard that Mercury and Chapman specialized in payrolls, Hank said that he wanted to meet them.”

I just shook my head.

“It’s not like you think,” she said. “I’m just tryin’ to make it.”

“By turnin’ Brawly in?”

“I was tryin’ to save him.”

“Save him how? By blamin’ him for murder?”

“I only said that. I knew he had a alibi. He was with me. He the one drove me up to Riverside. All kindsa people saw us. I thought that if I told John and Alva that he might’a killed Aldridge, that they would have taken him away or somethin’. I didn’t want him messed up with Merc an’ them. I knew that it’d be dangerous.”

“Why was Brawly with them in the first place?”

“He thought that they were raising money for the First Men,” she said. “That they were going to use it to build their school.”

“Where’s Brawly?” I asked again.

“I don’t know. They in hidin’, like I told you. They was in a house down Watts but they got scared because that bitch Tina was supposed to show up but she never did. They thought that you must’a grabbed her or somethin’.”

“Then they called off the robbery?”

“They never told her about what they were doin’,” Isolda said. “They asked me to rent ’em a house, but I said no. I didn’t want to be tied to no robbery. So they got her to do it, but she didn’t know why.”

“If you know where they ain’t, then why don’t you know where they are?” I asked.

“I don’t,” she whined. “They broke up and went into hidin’. All they told me was that they was gonna take refuge, that was somethin’ Strong used to talk about. They only gonna come out when it’s time to do the job.”

For some time I had wanted to slap Isolda Moore across her face. The desire became stronger as the minutes went by. Finally I stood up. The suddenness of my motion scared her enough that she pushed back and fell over in her chair.

I didn’t help her to her feet.

“You better run, woman,” I said. “Because I’m not gonna let that robbery take place. And when they catch your boy Mercury, you better believe he’s gonna turn over on you.”

Down on the street and in my car I didn’t know what to do. I had solved a crime that nobody asked me to solve. It wasn’t my job to catch murderers or foil robberies. All I had to do was keep Brawly out of trouble. But that was impossible because he was in trouble before I was called in.

I drove in circles, wondering what I should do. I was afraid to go to John because he might have put his own life on the line trying to save the boy. Lakeland was planning to catch them in the commission of the crime, I was sure of that. He would clean out the problem by setting them up.

Tina wouldn’t have talked to me; neither would Xavier.

Clarissa was at Sam’s house but she refused to come to the phone.

I finally decided to go over to John’s lots. Him and Chapman were working on the support for the front porch of a faux-adobe house. It struck me as senseless to be working while so much wrong was going on. How could those men still lift their hammers, knowing that their best friends and loved ones had gone so far astray?

“Easy,” Chapman said, seeing me first.

“Ken, John.”

“What you want, Easy?” John’s tone was exasperated, as if he were Job in one more conflict with the Deity.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said.

“Alva’s in the hospital.”

“What’s happened?”

“Nerves. They got her under sedation, she so worried about Brawly and upset over Aldridge.”

“I’m sorry, John. I just tried to do what you asked me to do.” That got me a hard look. John’s fists clenched, his shoulders hunched. Chapman took a step backward. But John wasn’t going to hit me. He knew I was right.

“I came by to ask you men some questions,” I said.

“What?” Chapman asked.

“I’m lookin’ for Brawly. I think he might’a run to ground somewhere for the day and part of the night. You got any idea where he could be?”

“If I knew, I’d be there,” John said.

Chapman looked at the ground.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout Brawly, Ease,” he said. “I’d tell you if I did.”

I had no idea if Chapman was lying to me or not. For all I knew, he and Mercury were in the heist together. They’d been partners for years, since they were children.

I had no idea what their childhood was like, so an image from my own early years crossed my mind. My mother was dead and my father was gone. My older half sister and half brother had been taken away to live with cousins on their mother’s side in El Paso. I had been passed on to a man named Skyles. He had been married to one of my mother’s sisters and owned a farm. He took me on to be his slave.

Skyles worked me from sunup to sundown and then fed me only the scraps from his nightly supper. After three weeks I decided to run away. I made up my mind on a Tuesday, but the train I had to jump didn’t go by till Thursday night. I stole a full sack of Skyles’s food and hid in an abandoned barn across the road from his house.

Those two nights I watched him through the loose boards yellin’ and smashin’ his own things — he was that mad that I stole from him and ran.

“Walk with me, John,” I said to my friend.

We went out to my car in the street.

“Lemme have the keys to your apartment,” I said.

“Why?”

“Don’t ask me, man. Just trust me.”

He hesitated for a moment and then produced a steel ring that held dozens of keys. He removed a brass Sergeant and handed it over.

I took the key to my car and drove it over to John’s.

I found the number in John’s little phone book in the top drawer of their bureau. I dialed it. He answered on the second ring.

“Hello?” The voice was breathy but brooding. I could almost see the taciturn young man’s face in the words.

“Rita there?” I asked in a voice that, I hoped, sounded nothing like mine.

“Wrong number,” he said, and then slammed down the phone.

I hadn’t been to Odell’s house in over a year. His wife, Maudria, had passed sixteen months earlier. I had gone to the funeral and then to their house to eat salami sandwiches and sit with Odell.

He was near seventy but didn’t look much older than he had twenty years before. He was just softer and a little shorter — his ears were larger, too.

“Easy,” he said through the brittle screen door. “How you doin’?”

“Fine.”

He studied me for a moment and then said, “Come on in.”

The house had become a mausoleum. The heavy brown drapes were drawn. The furniture was neat and for the most part unused. There was the smell of mothballs and scotch whiskey in the air.

He escorted me to a pitted maple table next to the sink in the kitchen. The unwashed windows allowed only a small amount of sunlight in, but it was enough. He poured me a glass of lemonade made from frozen concentrate and took out a bottle of scotch for himself.

“How you doin’?” I asked my oldest living friend.

“Oh, okay,” he said. “Not too much. Like Maudria used to say, no news is good news.”

“You goin’ out?” I asked. “Seein’ anybody?”

“No. Ain’t nobody to see. You know when you get to be my age everybody’s dyin’. Dyin’ or dead. If I walk out that door wearing jeans and with bus money in my pocket, it means I’m goin’ to the hospital to visit a friend. If I’m in a suit, it means a funeral.”

We talked like that for a while. Odell kept quoting his dead wife or talking about funerals and disease. I was sad to see my old friend so broken-down. I wondered about Brawly while we talked. If I saved the boy, would he end up like my friend? Sad and broken-down at the end of his life?

“Well, you didn’t come by to hear me complain,” Odell said. “What can I do for you, Easy?”

“I need a pair of your thin cotton huntin’ gloves and that rabbit gun,” I said.

“What for?”

“Somethin’ Mouse told me,” I said. “In a dream.”

He nodded as if my answer were perfectly reasonable.

I explained about John and Alva and the wayward Brawly Brown.

“Brawly’s big as a grizzly bear,” I was saying, “and at least as strong. There’s no way I can stop him or force him. I don’t believe that John and I together could hold him down. So I need you to do one more thing for me.”

Odell took one more shot of scotch while I sipped on my lemonade. After our drink he got my gloves and rifle. The gun was all broken down in a leather case. I gave him the phone number with a little speech I wanted him to recite at seven-thirty.

I parked out back in an alley behind the empty office building next to the used-car lot and across the street from John’s building. I jimmied open the back door and then forced my way into an office on the third floor. That was 6:35.

I opened the window and sat there in the twilight thinking that Mouse was advising me even after he was gone.

I thought about him and Etta, about their crazy life. There was no rancor or condemnation in my thoughts. We had all made it by sheer dumb luck. Any poor black child of the South who woke up in the morning was lucky if he lived to make it to bed that night. You were bound to be beaten, stabbed, and shot at least once or twice. The question wasn’t if you were going to get killed, it was, were you going to get killed on that particular day?

“Easy,” Mouse would say to me. “You know you just too sensitive. You think that you can keep somethin’ bad from happenin’ here or there. But that kinda power ain’t in your reach. It was all settled a long time ago. What happens with you — when you get borned, when you die, who you kill, who kills you — that was all writ down in your shoes and your blood. Shit. You be walkin’ down the road outside’a Pariah, hopin’ that New Orleans is just beyond that yonder stand of live oaks. But it ain’t. No, baby, you want it, you want it bad, but there’s just more swamp after them trees, and more swamp after that.”

My respect for Raymond was intense because he never worried about or second-guessed the world around him. He might have gotten tired now and then, but he never gave up. When I thought about that, I knew I had to go search out his grave.

At 7:15 I put my watch on the windowsill and opened Odell’s gun case. That .25-caliber rabbit gun was his pride and joy. I screwed in the barrel and fit the cherrywood stock into place. The best part of his rifle was its telescopic sight. Back when I first came to L.A., Odell would go out hunting and come back with enough rabbits to feed Maudria, him, and me — and two or three others besides.

I filled the magazine and pointed the muzzle through the window at the front door. I held that pose, glancing at the Gruen now and then. At 7:30 I knew that Odell was making the call.

“The cops!” Odell would have yelled. “The cops comin’!” And then he’d hang up.

At 7:32 the door swung open. Brawly came lumbering out with a large paper bag in his arms. When he turned back to the open door, I fired the first shot. He yelled in pain and fell to the ground. I fired again. From the open door Conrad emerged. He screamed something and made to grab Brawly by his arm. I fired again. That bullet missed Conrad. He was so scared that he dropped the bag he was carrying and fled down the street.

I raised my sight to the upper floor. John came out. When he saw the prostrate boy, he ran for the stairs. I had never seen John run before.

I turned over on my back, broke down the rifle, packed it away, and headed for the stairs. Within minutes I was in my car and driving back to my own home and my own children.