Walter Mosley - Bad Boy Brawly Brown

“No.”

“Can you bake a cake from scratch or lay a floor in an unfinished room?” I continued. “Or lay bricks or tan leather from a dead animal?”

“What are you getting at?” the colonel commanded.

“I can do all those things,” I said. “I can tell you when a man’s about to go crazy or when a thug’s really a coward or blowhard. I can glance around a room and tell you if you have to worry about gettin’ robbed. All that I get from bein’ poor and black in this country you so proud’a savin’ from the Koreans and Vietnamese. Where I come from they don’t have dark-skinned private detectives. If a man needs a helpin’ hand, he goes to someone who does it on the side. I’m that man, Colonel. That’s why you sent Detective Knorr to my house. That’s why you talk to me when I come by. What I do I do because it’s a part of me. I studied in the streets and back alleys. What I know most cops would give their eyeteeth to understand. So don’t worry about how I got here or how to explain what I do. Just listen to me and you might learn somethin’.” I closed my mouth then, before I said even more about what I’d learned in a world that had already passed those cops by.

They were both staring at me. I realized that any chance I had of them underestimating me had passed by also.

“So who do you think killed Strong?” Lakeland asked.

“I don’t know anything about it, Officer,” I said. “It could have been somebody in the First Men, but not those two kids.”

“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.