Walter Mosley - Bad Boy Brawly Brown

“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.”