Walter Mosley - Bad Boy Brawly Brown

I didn’t care about the details. I didn’t care that they had been together at all.

“Where?” I asked.

“My neck.”

“No. Where were you when you first... um... kissed him?”

“At his place.”

“The Colorado Hotel?”

“No.” She gave me a Watts address, not far from Central Avenue.

“Okay,” I said. “We don’t have to talk about that with Xavier. But did Henry say anything other than he thought he was gonna be assassinated? Killed?”

“No.”

“He was shot over by some tract houses goin’ up over in Compton,” I said. “You ever go there with him, or he ever talk about it?”

“Brawly was out there,” she said, hesitating over the memory. “I think Henry went out there with him once, maybe more times.”

“Why?”

“Henry liked Brawly. He said that he was a revolutionary in the rough. He told me that he was cultivating him for the movement.”

Like he was doing with you, I thought.

“You wanna go see Xavier?” I asked.

“Why?”

“Because I know things that he should know. Because somebody’s killin’ people close to you and it would be good to find out who.”

“I know who it is,” she said.

“You think you know,” I said. “But you can’t put a face on ’em. You think you know, but why would the cops kill Aldridge Brown? Why kill Strong? He’s from Oakland. Xavier’s the head man. Why not him or you — or Anton Breland?”

“How can I trust you?” Her question cut all the way down to my core. I thought of Mouse and how he went out with me and never came back. And he was my friend.

“You can’t,” I said. “How could you? You don’t know me. You don’t know who I know. All you know is that I knew where to look for you and that I know where to find Xavier. Come with me, watch me, and maybe you’ll find out if you can trust me or not.”

Jasper Xavier Bodan lived on the third floor of a rooming house on Hoover. He was at the end of a long hall lit by a single bulb.

There was a strip of light showing at the foot of his door.

“Who is it?” he asked after Tina knocked.

“Tina,” she said. “And the man who pulled me out of the storefront the other night. Easy Rawlins.”

The door opened inward. The room beyond seemed to be empty. I followed Tina with my hands visible at waist level. Xavier was standing behind the door with an extremely small pistol in his hand.

He pushed the door shut and glowered at us.

“Why you bring him here?” he asked Tina.

“He already knew your address,” she said. “He invited me to come with him.”

“Why you talk to him in the first place?”

“He found my address, and Miss Latour said that he was good at helpin’ black folks out when they’re in trouble,” Tina said. She was another young woman pleading for her black man to listen to reason. “I brought him because he says that he wants to help.”

“I don’t need your help,” he said to me. “I should have let Conrad shoot you the other night.”

When he held the pistol up in my face, it didn’t seem so small anymore. The proximity of the muzzle affected my lungs. I could breathe in just fine, but my exhaling ability seemed to be paralyzed.

“Put that gun down, Xavier,” Tina said. “He came here to talk to you.”

“I don’t need to talk.”

“Yes, you do,” I said. Forcing the air out of my lungs was one of the most difficult physical tasks I’d ever performed. I was dying for a cigarette. “There’s things you don’t know. Things that will put all of this in a different light.”

“Listen to him, baby,” Tina said. She moved next to the skinny kid. When she put her hand on his gun arm, I flinched, afraid that he might clench up and shoot me by mistake.

When Xavier let his pistol down to his side, my whole body relaxed. I realized that I had to use the bathroom but decided that it wasn’t a good time to ask where the facilities were.

“Can I sit?” I asked.

“Over there.” He pointed to a solitary wooden chair.

I sat down and reached for my pocket, remembering again that I’d thrown my cigarettes away.

“You got a cigarette?”

Tina reached into her purse and came out with a filter-tipped smoke.

“What you got to tell me?” Xavier said as Tina lit a match for me.

I inhaled deeply and my throat and lungs felt a strange cold burning all the way down. For a second I was afraid that I’d been poisoned but then I realized that it was a mentholated cigarette.

“The cops,” I said, choking on the strange smoke.

“What about ’em?”

“They came to me and asked me to spy on you,” I said.

“Why they want to put a spy on me?” Xavier asked.

I shrugged.

“Then why come tell me about it?” Xavier asked.

“You the one thinks the cops killed Strong,” I said.

“He says that Brawly’s father is dead, too,” Tina added.

“Aldridge? Why’d anybody wanna kill Aldridge?”

“That’s a good question,” I said. “But I got even a better one for you.”

“What’s that?”

“I went down to the cops and told them that I was willing to help them, to share information—”

“You what?” When Xavier’s gun came up again I was less afraid, but not foolish.

“Hold on, man,” I said. “I already told you that I’m tryin’ to help Brawly. When the cops came to me and started talkin’ ’bout the Urban Party, I wanted to find out what they had on him.”

“That’s what you say.” Xavier kept the gun leveled at my chest. “But I don’t know you. You might be planning to turn me over.”

“He already knew your address, baby,” Tina said. “I told you that. He didn’t need to come here to get you arrested.”

“Then maybe it’s something else.”

There was sweat on Xavier’s upper lip. He was no more than twenty-two years old but he was standing up pretty well under the pressure of the situation. I glanced around the place while he considered my possible duplicities. You could have called it a compartment rather than an apartment. The most outstanding feature was a small window looking out on a club’s red neon sign — merrian’s. There was an aqua-colored vinyl couch that I’m sure he slept on and a table with stacks of books and papers on it.

“There is a special squad assigned to you,” I said. “D Squad they call it. It’s headed up by a man named Lakeland. He’s from the army, but they tapped him to watch you.”

It was too much for him to come back at me with doubts or challenges.

“Oh no,” Tina said, looking at her man.

“We don’t know if what he’s sayin’ is true,” Xavier said.

I was proud of him for trying to stay on top of the growing problem.

“But Henry said that they were trying to kill us,” Tina reasoned.

If I were planning to overpower them, that would have been the moment. Xavier turned his eyes on Tina. Maybe it was because she called Strong by his first name. Maybe it was his anger that she wanted to believe what I was saying.

“They didn’t kill Henry,” I said.

“Now how the hell you gonna know that?” he said.

“Because I was there, in their office, when they found out about it. They were surprised. For cops, they were even upset.”

“Where’s their office?” Xavier asked.

“I got to urinate,” I replied.

Tina giggled. She was close to hysteria.

“What?” Xavier asked me.

“I got to go, man.”

“No,” Xavier said. There was power in his voice and even the trace of an evil smile on his sweaty lip. He moved closer to me and said, “You sit here till I get the answers I want.”

That was too much.