Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 24 —

The next person on my list was Tina Montes. She’d been kind to me the night the police broke in on the First Men and I pulled her out of there before they could crack her skull.

She lived in a rooming house on Thirty-first Street. The woman who owned it, Liselle Latour, was a pal of mine from the old days in Houston, Texas. Liselle had been born Thaddie Brown but changed her name when she ran away from home at thirteen. She’d turned to prostitution and had become a madam by the time she was twenty-five. She left Houston in ’44 with her partner/bodyguard/boyfriend Franklin Nettars. Frank had been pestering Liselle to leave Houston for years. He told her that the black folks up in L.A. made real money and that a small whorehouse around there would make them rich.

Liselle would have never left but for a fight that had come to pass in her house of ill repute. A white man — I never got his name — had a disagreement with one of the whores and wound up with a knife in his throat. The woman was arrested. Liselle managed to stay out of jail but she knew her name had been placed on the police list. And once you went on the police list in Houston, you either died, went to jail, or left town.

They took a sleeper cabin in a special colored car on the Sunset Express from Houston to L.A. The whole way Franklin was telling Liselle how great it would be when they got to California.

“He’d be sayin’,” Liselle told me, “that you could live pickin’ fruit off’a the trees while you was walkin’ down the street.” She always smiled when she mentioned his name.

The porter dropped by their cabin to tell them that they were just about to cross the California line.

“Ten seconds after that,” Liselle said, “he got a heart attack. Hit him so hard that he only felt it a few seconds before he was dead.”

I never thought about Liselle loving Franklin. I mean, they seemed more like business partners than soul mates. But when Franklin died, Liselle was a changed woman. She took her life savings and bought the place on Thirty-first. She made it a rooming house for single women and didn’t even let a male visitor past the ground floor. She never even dated another man and became very involved with the dealings of the church.

Liselle became virtuous and solitary but she didn’t forget her old friends. Neither did she pretend that she’d come from some up-standing moral background. Liselle told everyone what she had been because, as she’d say, “I don’t want you findin’ out someday and then gettin’ mad that I lied to ya.”

She was happy to see her old friends and even share a drop of spirits with them.

That’s why I felt no trepidations approaching her home.

There were two doors to the three-story wooden building, one up front and the other on the side. The front door was for the women and girls; the side was Liselle’s private entrance.

When I knocked, Liselle opened up almost immediately. Her front door was across the way from the inside door to the entrance hall of the rooming house. Liselle spent most of her day sitting in between the doors, sewing or reading her Bible. From there she’d greet her boarders and make sure that no man snuck upstairs.

“Easy Rawlins,” she cried. “Baby, how are you?”

“Just fine, Miss Latour. And you?”

“Workin’ off my sins one ounce at a time,” she said gladly.

The years had not been kind to Liselle. Her face had crossed over into middle age, and for every ounce of sin she’d lost she put on an ounce of fat. I hardly recognized the beautiful young woman that the men in the Fifth Ward used to throw their money at.

“What you doin’ here?” she asked. Her eyes narrowed.

“Why? Cain’t I come by and shout at an old friend some evenin’?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“What you want, Easy?”

“I want to sit down.”

Reminded of her manners, Liselle gestured toward the chair across from hers. She closed the hall door and slapped her hands down on her knees.

“Well?” she asked.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why you think I’m’a be here for some kinda business?”

“Because trouble follows you, Easy Rawlins. It always has, and it always will.”

“You talkin’ like I’m some kinda gangster,” I said. “But you know I’m not like that. I got a job at Sojourner Truth Junior High School and I’ve raised two kids on my own. What kinda gangster does that?”

“You the one said ‘gangster,’ not me. I just said that trouble follows you. Whenever I hear about you, I hear about somebody outta jail or back in, somebody gettin’ killed or robbed or beat up by the cops. Even them kids you got come outta worlds where adults would be hard-pressed to survive — that’s what I heard.

“But most of all, I know you married to trouble because of Raymond Alexander. Everybody who ever been anywhere around Mouse know that there’s some kinda mess on to brew. Young women cain’t help it. They see a man like Raymond an’ their tongues start to waggin’ an’ their panties get wet. But men who ran with Mouse are either fools or magnets for trouble their own selfs.”

“Mouse is dead,” I said.

“And if the stories I hear is right, you the one dropped the body off on EttaMae’s front grass.”

I had forgotten how thorough the grapevine was.

“Many a day,” Liselle continued, “I had to shoo Mr. Alexander away from my girls’ door. He come up at me all blustery, but I shook my broom at him. An’ you know evil as he was, he always backed down.

“But you know,” she added, “I don’t think that he really is dead.”

“You don’t? Why not?”

“Just how Etta left. I believe that if he had died, she would’a made a funeral, invited everyone who ever loved him and everyone who wanted to make sure that he was gone. ’Cause you know Mouse had many enemies. Like you have, Easy.”

“Now I got to look over my shoulder?” I said, trying to sound amused.

“Man who travel in bad company got to expect grief and misery at the do’.”

“I can see that I knocked on the wrong door today.”

“I’ll tell you what, Easy,” Liselle said. “I will prove to you that you come here because’a trouble.”

“All right, prove it.”

“Christina Montes,” she said.

That brought the curtain down on my repartee. I think I managed to keep my mouth closed, but still Liselle smiled.

“Am I right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said with a sigh that I felt down in what the doctors called my bronchioles.

Liselle grinned and sat back in her wooden chair. She stretched her hand behind her and plucked a pint bottle from the edge of a bookcase. There was a small juice glass on the floor next to the chair. This she filled halfway with the amber fluid. She knew that I had given up drinking and so didn’t offer me a drink.

“What’s wrong with Tina?” I asked.

“Same thing that’s wrong with all women.”

I raised my eyebrows to ask for the other shoe.

“Men,” Liselle said. Her tone was more lascivious than it was angry. “Men mornin’, noon, and night are the bane of women and the joy of their lives.”

“She see a lotta men?”

“You just need one bad apple, Easy. You know that.”

“Does this bad apple have a name?”

“I call him the X-man,” Liselle said. “But she call him Xavier.”

“And how is this Xavier trouble?”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, Easy. He’s a good boy. If I was his mama, I’d swell with pride every time he walked into a room or opened his mouth. He’s skinny as a rail but brave and proud as a lion. That’s the kinda man a good woman want to have around.”

“So Tina’s a good woman?”

“Good as they come. Manners and charm. She got it all. Know how to fold a napkin on her lap and cleans up after herself without bein’ asked.”

“Don’t sound like trouble to me,” I said innocently.

“Yeah. You talk that sweet talk, baby. But you know the cops been to me askin’ about her, throwin’ dirt on her name” — I didn’t know but I had suspected as much — “an’ you know that the First Men been comin’ by with com’unist leaflets and rough talk about killin’ and burnin’ down the street. I asked ’em was they gonna burn down my house and they said no, but how you gonna start a fire an’ ask it to skip the houses you want to save? Once the flames get goin’, they burn down everything.”

“What did the police say?”

“That she was a revolutionary and could they search her room for arms.”

“Did you let them in?”

“Hell no. Shit. I got two guns under my own bed and another one in the hall closet. What the hell do it mean to have a gun?”

“How about a man named Henry Strong?” I asked.

“Yeah. Yeah. He was here. She introduced me to him as if he was a bowl of ice cream in the middle of the Sahara Desert. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she would tell the X-man that she was goin’ to the beauty parlor and spend the afternoon studyin’ revolution at Henry Strong’s feet — on her knees.”

“That’s all?” I asked.

“Yeah... sometimes that Conrad come by, but usually he was with his uncle.”

“Uncle? What uncle?”

“I don’t think that they were really related. He come to the door one day and I asked him who was that with him and he said his uncle, but then he smirked like it was some kind of joke.”

“What he look like?” I asked.

“Husky man. Thirty-five, maybe even forty. He looked all right but never spoke a word in my presence, never talked to anyone at all.”

“He have a name?”

Liselle twisted her face, trying to remember. All she came up with was the memory of the whiskey in her hand. She took a sip and said, “No. I don’t remember a name. A heavyset man. Big, you know, and dark.”

“Could the name have been Aldridge?” I asked.

Liselle shook her head. “I don’t remember,” she said.

I sat back then. The yen for a lungful of smoke hit me hard, but I refrained from asking Liselle for a cigarette.

“Do you know Tina very well?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you trust me?”

Liselle stalled and then said, “I know that you aren’t a bad man, Easy. But like I said, you hang around some real hard times.”

“There’s been two murders already,” I said. “Those cops came here are more like vigilantes than they are law.”

“What you want with her?”

“You know John the bartender, right?”

“Yeah?”

“His girlfriend, Alva, got a boy named Brawly. He’s all messed up in the First Men. I’m tryin’ to get him outta trouble. But if I can help Tina, I’ll do that, too.”

“And how is Christina messed up in all’a this?”

“She knows Conrad, who’s a dirty piece’a work...”

Liselle hummed her agreement.

“Brawly’s father was killed and the other man, Henry Strong, was murdered just this morning—”

“What?” Liselle said.

“So I think anybody on Tina’s side would be welcome.”

“What you want me to do, Easy?”

“I want you to talk to her, tell her who I am and what you think about me. If she hears that and wants some outside help, have her call me at home.”

“She ain’t been here in a couple’a days,” Liselle said. “But she bound to show up. All her clothes still up in her room.”

I wrote down my number on an egg carton that Liselle had thrown out.

When I opened the door to leave, Liselle put a hand on my arm and said in a conspiratorial tone, “I told you ’bout you an’ trouble now, didn’t I, Easy?”

“Yes, ma’am.”