Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 10 —

The tenement Isolda Moore was staying in was nothing like her house. The unpainted wooden stairs that led to her third-floor hideaway felt soggy under my weight. The hallway was misshapen. The floor was warped and sagging, the ceiling slumped. The hallway started out wide but it narrowed as I neared Isolda’s door.

The photographs of her on the bureau mirror, even the secret ones of her in the bikini, had not done Miss Moore justice. She was lovely at first sight even though she was off balance from having yanked the wedged door free. She was a light brown woman in a polka-dot blue and white dress. The hemline reached just below her knees, revealing shapely legs. Isolda wore no bra and didn’t seem to be missing it. Her big eyes were close together and almond shaped. Her lips were poised in the permanent expectation of a kiss.

“Yes?” she asked nervously.

“Isolda Moore?” I said. She hesitated, so I went on. “My name is Easy Rawlins. John and Alva wanted me to come over and ask you a few things about Brawly.”

While I spoke, my eyes cataloged her attributes.

The worry in her face melted away when she saw the way I looked at her.

“Come on in.”

The room could have been a hotel flop in a frontier town in the Old West. The walls had never felt a coat of paint and a splinter from that rough floor could have sent you to the hospital with lockjaw. But Isolda had moved whatever furniture there was next to the window and covered it all with white and pastel-colored sheets. There were fresh-picked flowering weeds in a milk bottle on the sill. The arrangement would have put a downtown florist to shame.

“Do you drink tea, Mr. Rawlins?” she asked.

“Whatever you got,” I said.

She smiled and led me toward the cloth-covered furniture.

It was a medium-sized room and mostly unfinished, as I said. But Isolda’s design had created a small island of style there by the window. The tea she poured was ice-cold even though there was no evidence of a refrigerator in the room.

“I keep the pitcher in a bucket full’a ice I got from the liquor store,” she said, seeing the question on my face.

“You should be an interior designer,” I said.

“Thank you.”

Isolda swiveled on the chair she was in, and I felt my heart catch. She had all the skill and beauty of a woman who hooks up with a big-time minister or gangster, the kind of woman who needs a powerful man for her own skills to flower.

She had positioned herself so that the sun came down on her head, making her eyes glisten. I must have been staring a little too hard because she shifted again and asked, “Alva and John send you to find Brawly?”

“That they did. But really I think Alva wants me to find him.”

I mentioned Alva to see if Isolda had hard feelings about her cousin.

“She must be worried sick,” Isolda said, leaving me with no clue.

“John told me that Alva’s ex-husband was found murdered at your house.”

Isolda nodded, looking down at my hands.

“Who killed him?” I asked, again trying to shake her up.

“I really wouldn’t know, Mr. Rawlins.”

“John said that you thought it was Brawly.”

The sun on her face made her pained expression seem unbearable.

“Brawly and Aldridge had been quarreling for years ever since... ever since Brawly ran away from home. I was trying to get them back together but... but there was never gonna be any peace between them.”

“What did they fall out over originally?”

“I never knew,” she said, but I didn’t believe it. “That was years ago. When I went to pick him up after the fight, his jaw was all swole up and he begged me to let him come stay at my house. When I asked him about his father he showed me a bloody tooth that Aldridge had knocked out of his head.”

“Why didn’t he go to his mother?” I asked.

“Didn’t John tell you?”

“We were with Alva. She was kind of emotional at the time.”

“She is... very emotional. That was back around the time that her brother Leonard was killed. She took it so hard that she had a nervous breakdown and they had to put her in Camarillo.”

Isolda turned her lips toward me and I had to concentrate to hear what she was saying. Her eyes looked deeply into mine, and I thought that if she wasn’t a good person in her heart, many a man would have hit some jagged rocks while being distracted by her charms.

Maybe that was why Alva disliked her so much.

“That’s why Brawly had to come to you?” I asked. “Because his mother was hospitalized?”

Isolda nodded. “She was really gone. When Brawly went to see her, before his fight with Aldridge, she told him that she couldn’t love him and that he shouldn’t come to see her anymore.”

“Why did you call Alva, Miss Moore?”

“Call me Issy,” she said. “That’s what I go by, mainly.”

“Why aren’t you at your own house, Issy?”

“I haven’t been back there for a few days. I went up to Riverside and when I came back, Brawly had — I mean, Aldridge was dead. I didn’t go back because I was afraid for Brawly.” She looked away. Maybe that meant she was taking it hard, or maybe she was going through the motions — practicing for a more serious interrogation.

“Why do you think it was Brawly?” I asked. “And why didn’t you go to the cops?”

“Aldridge had come into town a few weeks ago. He came to see me.”

“He was your boyfriend?”

Isolda shifted her eyes toward the window. Again they glittered in the light. I doubt if she was looking at anything. Her gaze was definitely of the internal variety.

“We were close. I mean, Aldridge kept his own schedule. If he come to town and I was with a man, he let me alone. But if I was free, he’d stay with me awhile.”

“Did Alva know about you two?” I asked, looking for some kind of thread.

“I haven’t spoke to Alva in ten years.”

“Did Brawly know that his father was shacked up with you?”

I had hoped the rough language would get under her skin, but Isolda wasn’t worried about me or what I thought.

“He came by when Aldridge was there, about two weeks ago. They were eyein’ each other like wild animals in the entryway, but I had them sit down at the table like two normal human beings. I made tea and brought out some bread and butter. I told them that they was father and son and that they had to start actin’ like it.”

Isolda turned her gaze on me again. I didn’t mind the attention. I wondered how those men felt.

“It went okay at first,” she said as if I had asked my question. “They talked and asked each other ’bout what they been doin’. Brawly even laughed once.”

Isolda had the wistful tones of love in her voice. I wonder if it was love for Brawly or for his father.

“But then Aldridge had to come out with that damn flask,” Isolda said. “Said he wanted to make a toast to their seein’ each other after so long.”

“He was a bad drunk?” I asked.

“Both of ’em,” she said with a sneer. “Both of ’em. That’s why I give ’em tea. They drank to their reunion. They drank to me. They drank to a long life and who knows what else. Then Aldridge made the mistake of toastin’ Brawly’s mother. Brawly told his father that he never wanted to hear her name outta his mouth again.”

She said these last words in the tone Brawly must have used. It made me cringe. I’d seen drunken men kill over just that tone of voice.

“The only reason one or the other wasn’t killed right then was that I put my body in between ’em.” Isolda put a hand in the air, swearing.

She pulled down the left shoulder sleeve of her polka-dot dress, revealing an ugly green bruise just above the curve of her breast. It was one of those deep marks that last for months.

“That’s what I had to get before they stopped,” she said. “I pushed Brawly out the door and told him not to come back until he learned how to be civil.”

“So where were you when Aldridge was killed?” I asked.

“In Riverside, like I said,” she said. “I heard about a man gettin’ killed on my block on the radio and I called a neighbor to find out what happened. As soon as I knew, I came back down — in case Brawly needed me.”

“And why didn’t you go to the cops? If you didn’t do it, then there’s no reason to be scared.”

“You ever been questioned by the cops?” Isolda asked me.

For the first time our eyes really met. It was no man-and-woman gaze, but a real understanding.

I had been “questioned” a hundred times and more. And every time my life and liberty had been on the line. It hadn’t mattered that I was innocent or that they had no proof of my guilt. There was no Emancipation Proclamation posted on the jailhouse bulletin board. No Bill of Rights, either.

The sleeve of Isolda’s dress was still hanging off her shoulder. My fingertips got itchy with the closeness of her flesh.

“Do you think Brawly could overpower a man Aldridge’s size?” I asked.

“How you know about his size?”

“Alva told me,” I said, hoping he was a fat man when she had known him.

“Brawly look like a kid,” she said. “He might be a kid in his mind. But he’s strong, scary strong. At a high school picnic once, when Brawly was livin’ with me, some kids bet him that he couldn’t pull a big stone out the ground. That rock was big. Big. Brawly yanked it up like it was made’a cardboard instead’a granite. You know he was with a couple’a heavyset footballers. I could see the fear in them boys’ eyes.”

“Did Brawly make that bruise on you?”

“I don’t remember. It was a whole mess. Them pushin’ and shovin’ all over the place. But even if he did do it, it was only ’cause I got in the way.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.”

“He have any friends you know about?”

“Why are you askin’ me all these questions? Are you some kinda policeman or sumpin’?”

“Just a friend’a John and Alva’s, like I said. They asked me to look for Brawly, and that’s what I’m doin’.”

“Well, I ain’t seen ’im since he left outta my house two weeks ago.”

“Did he say where he was goin’?”

“He said he was gonna kill Aldridge if he didn’t watch out.”

“You didn’t tell me if he had any friends.”

“There was this one white girl. BobbiAnne Terrell was her name, I think. They went to high school together.”

“Up in Riverside?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Would you know her number?”

“No. Maybe it’s in the book.”

Somewhere during our conversation a coldness set in between me and Isolda. Maybe it was because I represented Alva. Or maybe she saw no use in me.

“Why’d you call Alva, Issy?”

“To tell her about Aldridge and Brawly. And to find out if she knew where he was.”

“Why’d you want to know that?”

“I was like a mother to that boy, Mr. Rawlins. And that’s some-thin’ that don’t just wear off.”