Walter Mosley - Bad Boy Brawly Brown

“That’s outside my field of expertise, Officer Knorr. I’m a janitor. I wax floors and empty trash bins. Boiling blood is some other department. And I already did my stint in the army.”

Knorr smiled.

The kettle whistled. It began with a weak chirp that quickly became a scream, like the emergency that Knorr feared.

I poured our coffees into powder blue mugs with red roses stenciled on them. Feather had picked them out at a small shop we visited on a day trip to the little Swedish town of Solvang, just inland from Santa Barbara.

Knorr sat across from me, smiling through the rising steam. He reached into his breast pocket and came out with a small stack of photographs. He handed them to me.

They were grainy black-and-white shots, slightly blurred because the subjects were unaware of the photographer and so moved unexpectedly at times. There were many different people in the snapshots, but the constant was me: me talking to Handsome Conrad and skinny Xavier Bodan, me standing outside of the Urban Revolutionary Party’s front door, me running out the back, pulling Tina by the arm and rushing toward a Cadillac that I knew was green.

The fever I’d felt two days earlier returned as a chill. For a moment a dark part of my mind wanted to strangle Officer Knorr and then make a run for the state line.

“I showed those pictures around and came up with your name, Mr. Rawlins.”

“Why you wanna single me out?”

“I know everybody else’s name. Christina Montes, Jasper Xavier Bodan, and Anton Breland, who also goes by the name Conrad. I could lay a name and a few aliases on everybody at that meeting. Everybody but you.”

I was memorizing the names I didn’t already know while trying to keep my breath from driving me to violence.

“What’s the problem, Officer? Is it against some law to go to a political meeting?”

“What were you doing there?”

“Why?”

“It could have some bearing on a case that I’ve been assigned to.”

“What case?”

“We have reason to believe that these political activists are planning some kind of violent protest. Maybe even an armed attack of some kind. I mean to keep that from happening.”

It was impossible to read behind that cool expression or Knorr’s soft words. Did he believe what he was asking me? Or was this some complex ploy to trip me up or to somehow vilify those children?

“I went there looking for a young man named Brawly Brown,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because his mother was worried about him and wanted me to make sure that he was healthy and safe.”

Knorr winked at me. I didn’t know if it was a nervous tic or a sign that he was happy with my answer.

“Did you find him?”

“I saw him at the opposite end of room. Then your armored guard came through the windows and started breaking heads.”

“That wasn’t me. That was Captain Lorne. He thinks you can beat the Negroes by dispersing them. I know better.”

Slowly a picture of the internal man was coming clear.

“So you just take pictures while he abuses our rights?” I said.

“Rights,” Knorr said. “Those people don’t respect what America has given them. They don’t deserve rights.”

“That’s not for you to decide, Officer. Rights are guaranteed by the Constitution, not judged by some messenger boy from city hall.”

If it was possible Knorr’s green eyes got even cooler.

“This boy Brown,” he said, “is at the center of the trouble I’m working on. He’s been in contact with the people who are planning an insurrection.”

I wondered if what Knorr was saying was true. On top of that, I wondered if he believed what he said.

“Why you gonna come in here and tell me all this, Officer? You don’t know me. I might be Khrushchev’s man in L.A., for all you know. I could be lookin’ for Brawly to sign up for the war.”

“I’ve talked to a few people about you, Mr. Rawlins. Easy — that’s what they call you, isn’t it? You have a rap sheet but not for this kind of stuff. You work one-on-one. Sometimes you’re on the wrong side, but you’re a loyal American. I know your war record.”

“The war is over,” I said. “You won and I didn’t.”

“You don’t believe that shit,” Knorr said. “If you did, you wouldn’t have Jesus and Feather...”

When he mentioned my children’s names a chilly nausea invaded my intestines.

“You wouldn’t have that job at Sojourner Truth Junior High School. I heard that you even intervened when there was gang violence at your school; you called in the cops and gave them the information they needed to keep a gang war from happening.”

“What do you want from me, Officer?”

Knorr took a dirty white card from his pocket and placed it on the table.

“That’s my number,” he said. “Call me when you got something. As an informant we can come up with probably a thousand dollars’ reward. And as an American you’ll be helping your people and mine.”

I didn’t touch the card, nor did I look at it directly.

“Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t you leave?”

He gave me a one-eighth nod and frigid grin, then got to his feet and moved toward the door. As I watched him go, my mind went back to Mouse.

“Kill him,” my friend whispered from the grave.

That afternoon found me on Grand Avenue, just north of Sunset. The address that Jackson had given me was a big brick edifice that looked more like a factory than an apartment building. The entrance was small, but the bell board had more than three dozen tenants listed. I went up and down the list until settling on the name b. terrell. I thought about the letters for a minute and then remembered Brawly’s high school girlfriend.

B. Terrell’s apartment was on the sixth floor. I was breathing hard by the time I was through the third flight of stairs. By the time I reached her door, I had to stop and catch my breath.

I knocked four times. The hall was empty and the lock was susceptible to the three playing cards that I carried in my wallet.

B. Terrell’s apartment was of a monotonous, almost penal design. It was made up of four rooms that were all of equal size. Living room, kitchen, toilet, and bedroom. Each chamber was cube-shaped, and together they formed a bigger square. Each room had two doors that led to two other rooms. The living room was too small and the bathroom too large. The kitchen would have been hard to move around in. Only the bedroom really worked as it was supposed to.

The front door led into the living room. On a small coffee table was a framed photograph of a younger Brawly arm-in-arm with a blond-haired white girl. She had the healthy look of a Scandinavian, not pretty but handsome enough. They were smiling and obviously in love, at least at that moment. There was mail on the kitchen table addressed to BobbiAnne Terrell. In the bathroom medicine cabinet there were four boxes of Trojan condoms and a jar of petroleum jelly.

Under the bed there was a heavy metal box painted drab green. In it I found three carbines, six 45-caliber pistols, and two M-1 rifles. The top shelf of the closet had stacks of ammunition for those guns and some others.

I took one of the pistols, loaded it, and put it in my windbreaker pocket. I was halfway through the living room, on my way to the door, when the lock jiggled and the front door opened.

She was surprised to see a big black man in the middle of the room, but not enough to scream or run. I was surprised, too.

“Hello,” she said, sounding more curious than afraid.

She looked just as she did in the photograph. The dress was even the same, a coral-colored one-piece that buttoned down the front. She had a nice figure, if you liked your women on the beefy side. Her face was wide and freckled in the center.