Walter Mosley - Bad Boy Brawly Brown

“I’m sorry, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “You know I had to make sure Edgar took his pills before I left. His cousin, Opal, is fine to sit around and feed him soup, but she don’t know how to dole out them pills. You know, he has to take his blue pill every three hours, his pink pills two at a time every five, there’s the square white ones that he takes every hour, and the round white ones that he takes three times a day. The first time I left Edgar with Opal she just gave him all of ’em at once at ten-thirty. I called Dr. Harrell and he made us pump out his stomach at the emergency ward in the hospital.”

“But if you can’t trust Opal, then what are you going to do for the rest of the day?” I asked her.

“I have to call every time he needs to take a pill.”

My next question should have been, Well, if all you have to do is call, then why did you have to stay late this morning? But instead I asked, “Do you have Mercury’s address?”

Mrs. Plates’s friendly patter petered out then. She sat back in her chair and turned her face away from me, as if maybe I was naked and should be ashamed of myself.

“That’s a personal thing, Mr. Rawlins. I don’t know if Mercury wants me to be handin’ out his numbers like that.”

“He didn’t seem to mind you tellin’ me that he was in trouble over that burglary he committed when it helped him out,” I said.

“Shhh, baby. Mercury ain’t like that no more. He’s workin’ construction in Compton and you don’t know who might be at the door listenin’.”

“Write down his address, will you, Mrs. Plates?”

“Why?” I could see in her face that she didn’t want me to tell her the truth.

“I’m doin’ some work for John — you know, the man Mercury and Chapman work for. He needs me to locate one of his employees, and I was thinkin’ that Merc might know a thing or two.”

“Is John’s employee in trouble?”

“You don’t even know his name, Helen. Why worry about him? Mercury isn’t in trouble, either — that’s all you need to know.”

I spent the morning wandering around the grounds, checking out pink slips that various teachers and administrators had left reporting problems with the plant. There was paint peeling off the ceiling of the girls’ shower room and a faulty light in the teachers’ lounge. Nothing serious. Nothing I couldn’t handle with my eyes closed. I was having a good time.

At noon I went to the main building and took out the dirty and creased white card that Detective Knorr had given me. All it had was a telephone number with an Axminister exchange.

I dialed the number.

“D Squad,” a woman’s voice said.

“Detective Knorr, please,” I said in a stern, barely civil, white man’s tone.

“He’s not in right now,” the woman said. “May I take a message?”

“This is Grimes,” I said. “I have a special expenses check for the detective that’s come back three times. Can you give me the right address?”

“What address are you using?”

I gave her the address of the Seventy-seventh Street Precinct.

“Your records are obviously out of order,” she snapped. My tone had gotten under her skin. She gave me Vincent Knorr’s office address with vindictive pleasure.

I left work at one. That was seven hours and I’d worked hard. I wasn’t worried about Newgate getting mad at me. None of my custodians — or his teachers, for that matter — would tell him where I was. If he asked for me, the standard reply was “I saw him a few minutes ago. He was headed for the other campus.”

The address the angry secretary gave brought me to a building on Hope, just down the block from City Hall. Made from stone, the entrance brought me into a building-sized room that had a domed ceiling with a tiny colored-glass opening at the very top. A woman sat at a desk blocking entrée to the large circular room. Her nameplate read MISS PFENNIG.

Pfennig’s copper-colored hair came out of a wash basin and she had probably been ugly even when she was a child, which was more than forty years earlier. Her long nose had gone awry, like a sapling grown under heavy shade, wavering this way and that in search for the light. Her eyes were a translucent gray. Her skin was gray also, but lusterless and drab.

I came in from the bright sun, so it took a few moments for my vision to adjust to the tomblike interior. Even the skylight couldn’t brighten that dark globular room. With no windows and the roof at least thirty feet away, there was little possibility that it would ever muster any more than a dusklike gloom.

“What do you want?“ Pfennig asked.

I ignored her rudeness, looking at the doorways along the edges of the perfectly circular room. The floor might have been fifty feet in diameter. I found myself amazed at the profound waste of space. I thought of Jackson Blue’s lopsided room. At least he used the space he had for books and studying, for thinking, no matter how misguided. It struck me that Jackson might not have been so wrongheaded as I thought. After all, here I was in the medieval bastion of the special police squad assigned to hounding and destroying a black political group. How could someone justify being a law-abiding citizen after seeing something like that?

“I came to see Detective Knorr,” I said.

“Who?”

“Detective Knorr.”

“You must be mistaken,” Miss Pfennig said. “There’s no one here by that name.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not mistaken, you are. You’re mistaking me for a black radical come here to blow up this building because of the conspiracy within these walls. You’re mistaking me for an angry black militant tired of the lies and attempts to make your claims of our inferiority seem true.”

I smiled, and fear blossomed in the ugly woman’s face.

A man appeared from the shadows. He was tall and chiseled, blond on white wearing a tan suit and black shoes. An undercover cop if I had ever seen one.

“Is there a problem, Miss Pfennig?”

“This man was threatening to blow up the building,” she said.

“No,” I said again. “I said that you thought I was, when really I just wanted to speak to Detective Knorr.”

“What do you want with Vincent?” The light-haired detective would never be a success in his job.

I handed over the card that Vincent Knorr had given me.

“He wanted me to drop by if I had any information.”

The chiseled cop studied the card, turning it over two or three times. He was looking for a trick.

“There’s no name on this card,” he said at last.

“No. I guess you guys got some kinda secret goin’ on around here. Vincent thought that I was the right kind of rat for your purposes.”

“Come with me,” the Aryan dream ordered.

“Hal,” Miss Pfennig said. It was just one word but there was a lot behind it.

Hal ignored her and repeated, “This way.”

We walked in a straight line to a door about sixty-two degrees up the circle from Pfennig’s desk. Hal knocked and then opened the door without waiting for a reply. The room we entered had normal lighting. It also had a mahogany desk and a thickset secretary. She had long hair that would have looked better short and wore a pink dress that should have been battleship gray. Her eyes were round but still uninviting.

“Yes, Sergeant Gellman?” If I were a young man and had heard that deep and sensual voice on the phone, I would call back a few times, hoping for a way in.

“This man has a card he said he got from Detective Knorr. He’s here looking for him,” Hal said.

“And you brought him here?”

Hal’s mouth opened as if he intended to speak, but there were no words in the pipe.

“You couldn’t even leave him at the front desk?”