Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 32 —

“Back then our customers were Jewish gangsters and white girls who wanted to be starlets,” Melvin Royale told me. “Now we got a mixed clientele of a lower pedigree.”

Melvin was a Negro, large and verbose, just the way I liked it. He had worked as a bellman at the Colorado Hotel and Residences for twenty-seven years. Twelve of those years he was the head bellman.

I met Melvin after asking at the front desk if there were any jobs open for nighttime porters or bellhops. All hotels need people for the graveyard shift, so the carrottop clerk sent me down into the basement office of Mr. Royale.

The reception area of the hotel was small but elegant in a worn-down-but-comfortable sort of way. There were two potted ferns on either side of the carpeted stairway leading to the rooms. The banister of the staircase was mahogany, with a shiny brass cap at the first step.

But the stairs going down to the basement were moldy and damp. Melvin’s office was barely large enough to hold him and the end table that he proudly called his desk. The chair he had me sit in had its two back legs sticking out of the door.

“You ever work as a bellman before?” Melvin asked me.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “At the DuMont in St. Louis and at the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco.”

“You move around a lot, huh?”

“I come outta Mississippi,” I said. “At first I went up to Chi, but you know that wind was colder than a mothahfuckah up there. St. Louis was better, but they still had snowflakes for three months and I spent half my salary on coal. Now, it never snowed in San Francisco but I was still wearin’ a heavy sweater half the time in August. L.A. got warm weather and you see colored people almost everywhere you go.”

“They might not got a sign keepin’ us out, but you better believe that there’s places you better not be.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I know. I ain’t no fool.”

Melvin laughed. We were getting along just fine. Old friends.

“You kinda tall for a bellhop, ain’t you, Leonard?” he asked, using the name I’d given.

“I’ve done my share of hard labor, Mr. Royale,” I replied. “Heavy stones and eighty-pound sacks of cotton. A suitcase or two is more than enough for me.”

Again Melvin laughed.

“You got the right attitude,” he said. “Ain’t no reason to bust your hump for these white peoples. Shit. You strain your back or break your leg and they’ll drop you just like that.” He snapped his fingers, causing a loud report. “They don’t care. I had a boy workin’ with me in here twenty-some years, Gerald Hardy was his name. Gerry would do anything these people asked. One time I remember he worked thirty-two days straight. Thirty-two days! And half’a that was double shift. He worked like that for years. Always happy and willin’ to do some things that weren’t quite legal and willin’ to overlook other things that was downright wrong.

“One day Gerry gets the flu. He calls in sick, sayin’ that he cain’t pull himself out the bed. The boss man, Q. Lawson, says okay, take it easy. But the next day he’s on the horn wonderin’ why Gerry ain’t here. They had a function that night and were relyin’ on Gerry’s overtime. Well, to make a long story short, four days went by and Gerry was fired. I lent him money for two months’ rent, but you know I couldn’t go no further than that.

“Gerry was dead in five months’ time. Kicked outta his house and sick inside somehow. Every maid, porter, bellhop, and waiter in this buildin’ was at his funeral, but do you think Q. Lawson sent even a lily to the grave? No, sir. You better believe I ain’t gonna strain my back or damage my health for him or any other white man.”

“But you got colored tenants in here now, right?” I asked.

“Couple of ’em,” Melvin said. “But they all special cases. If they got some tap dancer in a Hollywood movie or some delegate from a foreign nation. Sometimes when a rich white person is stayin’ at some hotel in Beverly Hills, they send what they call their nonessential staff to be down here. I mean things is changin’, ain’t no doubt to that. Marion Anderson or James Brown could stay just about anywhere they please. But your everyday Negro still have the door shut in his face.”

“But didn’t that man get killed down Compton live in here?” I asked. “That’s what made me wanna come ask for this job. When I read that a nice hotel had colored residents, I thought to myself — Leonard, that would be a good place to work for.”

“No, brother,” Melvin said in a friendly but condescending tone. When he leaned back in his chair his oily face glinted in the electric light. His skin had the color and radiance of wood resin. “No, brother. Only special Negroes stay here. An’ they less likely to spare a kind word or an extra coin than the white residents.”

“So that man...that...that...”

“Henry Strong.”

“That’s it, that’s the name. Henry Strong. He was a movie actor or somethin’?”

Melvin pursed his big brown lips and frowned, ever so slightly. I was a hair over the line, but just that. Not enough to be out of order. Not enough for him to think that I was anything other than Leonard Lee, hopeful to be a bellhop at a hotel where famous Negroes sometimes stayed.

“Naw,” Melvin Royale said. “He was some kinda gangster turned rat. I mean, they said in the papers that he was a political communist or somethin’, that he worked with a group of black protesters. But you know the only peoples that came up here to see him were white men in cheap suits and white prostitutes.”

“Really?” I said, widening my eyes as if the idea were too strange to comprehend.

“Uh-huh. On’y white people. The men paid his rent — in cash.”

“Why you say ‘rat’?” I asked.

“Because them men brought him here had badges, they said that they wanted to keep Strong on the quiet.”

I whistled and Melvin smiled at my country naïveté.

“Damn,” I said. “A month’s rent in a nice place like this must be a whole lotta money.”

“Month?” Melvin said. “Hank Strong been here over a year — on and off.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking of Alva and how much information could be held in just a word.

I filled out the application form that Melvin gave me. I put down a Social Security number, an address, a phone number, three references, and a job history going back seven years. It was all lies. I told him that I’d come in at eleven that evening, ready for work. I said that all I needed from him was a red cap size seven and three-quarters. I said all that and walked out the door.

The apartment building where Strong seduced Christina was on 112th Street, four blocks down from Central. It was a wood-frame building covered with plaster and painted to look like stone brick. Henry’s apartment was toward the back, its door facing a small concrete path half obscured by untamed bushes. There was nowhere to hide around his door. I was sure he took the place for just that reason.

The lock was too sophisticated for my card trick, but the door was so cheap that my forty-four-year-old shoulder was good enough to break it in.

The room seemed to be oval shaped. I think that was due to a failure of architectural design. There was a bed and a coffee table, a rocking chair and sink. None of the furniture matched, and there was a thin layer of dust over everything. He had three good suits in his closet and six pairs of shoes. There was a brown and black Stetson hat hung on a nail in the wall and a box of Havana cigars on the floor next to a glass that once held bourbon whiskey. There was a small metal box with a red cross on it under his bed. In there was the half-drunk pint of whiskey, a pack of three condoms (with one gone), and a straight razor.

There was nothing in any pocket, nor was there anything under the mattress. There were no books or newspapers or even a drawer where he could have hidden some kind of note. I had searched the whole place in less than ten minutes. And then for some reason I went back to the bed. It was neatly made, like a soldier’s bunk. The fitted sheet over the mattress, another sheet and blanket folded back under the pillow so that you could see all the layers of bedclothes.

I patted the tight fitted blanket from top to bottom.

Something was there between the sheets and mattress.

I pulled off the blanket, finding nothing but the covering sheet. I pulled off the second sheet, revealing nothing but the pristine whiteness of the fitted slip. But under that I found something that might have been the best sleeping aid a poor man could have: rows of twenty-dollar bills fanned out under the sheet. Under the twenties was a layer of fifties and hundreds. When I’d finished counting, it came to just under six thousand dollars.

Under the money I found an envelope and a slender notepad. The envelope contained two tickets for the Royal Northern cruise liner headed for Jamaica.

The tickets were issued to a Mr. and Mrs. J. Tourbut, the date of departure was Friday afternoon. The names meant nothing to me. The notepad was empty except for a memo scrawled on one of the center pages.

Saturday A.M. 6:15, 6:45.

The time meant nothing, but the day reminded me of something Conrad had said while he was being beaten. The money looked nice. It had its own special mathematics. It might have been money that Strong was holding for the Urban Revolutionary Party and other revolutionary organizations. But it might also have been a nest egg for Mr. and Mrs. Tourbut — provided by the man who had been paying his rent.

I wondered if Tina knew that the money was under her bottom when Henry was touching her neck.

I rolled the cash into two big wads and shoved them into my windbreaker pockets. I took the tickets and the note, too. Then I got into my emerald-colored car and headed for a place that most black people weren’t aware of in 1964.