Walter Mosley - Bad Boy Brawly Brown

That was the way things really were with them. But in Mofass’s mind things were different. In his mind he was the chief of the tepee, Jewelle did his bidding, and without him she’d have been lost. She never contradicted his account. Jewelle fell in love with Mofass when she was fifteen and he would be her god for the rest of her life.

“I needed to know some things about those tract homes you’re building down with John,” I said.

“What for?” he asked with all the solemnity of a judge.

“Well.” I hesitated for effect. “You see John’s girlfriend, Alva, has got a son, Brawly Brown, who’s in trouble. He was workin’ for John down there but stormed off in a huff — some kinda tiff with his mother, you know.”

“Kids today don’t have no kinda idea how hard life is,” Mofass said. “I see ’em on the TV shimmyin’ and shakin’ and losin’ they minds. They need to get a job and stay on it.”

“We had some trouble at one of the sites, Mr. Rawlins,” Jewelle said. “But it was a couple’a blocks over from John’s lots.”

“Are you interruptin’ me, JJ?” Mofass scolded.

“Sorry,” she said.

“That’s what I’m here for,” I said to Mofass. “I was wondering if the trouble down the street could have had anything to do with Brawly.”

“I see,” Mofass, the king of the blind, said. “That’s something to think about. You know, um, I oversee the whole operations, not every little detail. I’m tryin’ to train JJ here so that one day she can run the whole kabob. But she still just in trainin’.”

“Do you think she would know anything?” I asked the paper lion.

“Can you help Mr. Rawlins, JJ?” he asked.

“I think I can,” she said with real deference in her voice. And then to me, “Robert Condan and his cousin Renee the ones buildin’ over where the trouble was. They got a record store down on Adams. They had a shootin’ two days ago at about four or five in the morning. The police came over and shut us down for the day. But it wasn’t nuthin’. You know, just some thieves or drug addicts usin’ the place as a hideout for the night.”

“But the man killed wasn’t a thief,” I said. “He was a political organizer.”

“I know that’s what they say in the paper, but the captain I talked to told me different.”

“What captain was that?” I asked.

“How many police captains you know, Mr. Rawlins?” Jewelle said with a challenging grin.

“More than I would like to admit,” I said. “For instance, I’d bet that the cop you talked to was Captain Lorne.”

“Wow,” she said. “Yeah. It was him. Tall with silver hair?”

“I’ve never seen him,” I said. “But his name came up on the sunny side of the storm.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, not really understanding. “That’s all I know.”

There was a loud snort right then. We both turned to see that Mofass had fallen asleep. His head had slumped down to his chest and he was drooling slightly. JJ jumped up and ran from the room. Mofass snored three more times and she was back with a blanket and a towel to wipe his face. Touching him lightly on the sides of his head, she got him to lie back in the chair. She covered him up to his chin, smiled, and kissed his forehead.

I knew many people who thought that a love affair between a child like her and a man almost sixty was a disgrace. I would have agreed if I hadn’t known them. But as gruff and overbearing as Mofass was, I knew that he loved that girl with all his heart. And JJ needed a man to go through the motions of being the one in charge.

“What about the police that patrol the area?” I asked when she was through with her ministrations.

“You mean the cruiser cops?”

“Uh-huh.”

“They’re there mainly for the Manelli family.”

“Who’s that?”

“It’s the big contractor. They got seventeen different building sites around Compton. They buildin’ sixty-two blocks over the next three years, over six hundred employees.”

“And they got the police workin’ for them?”

“Yeah,” JJ said. “The Manellis think that people been stealin’ from ’em. So they got the police questioning everybody not on their payroll.”

“I know that,” I said. “They braced me a few days ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. You know, they usually leave us alone.”

“Why’s that?”

“A couple’a times when Manelli had to push some overtime to finish their model homes, John and his team lent a hand. John did it ’cause his own budget was tight and he might’a had to lay off Mercury and Chapman. So instead, he let Manelli pay their salary for a couple’a weeks.”

“John always knew how to make ends meet,” I said. And then, “Well, I better be goin’.”

When I stood up, Mofass opened his eyes. I got the feeling that he’d been pretending to be asleep.

“You got what you need, Mr. Rawlins?” he asked.

“You better believe it, William. That JJ’s gonna be a terror one day.”

“One day,” he said. “You can let yourself out. You know I get tired in the afternoons.”

JJ walked me to the door.

“Is there gonna be any problem out at the sites, Mr. Rawlins?” she asked when I reached out to shake her hand.

“I don’t think so, honey. But if there is, I will call you, okay?”

“JJ!” Mofass called from across the big room.

“Comin’, Uncle Willy,” the woman pretending to be a child said.

The next stop I made was Clarissa’s apartment.

There was at least two days of mail in her box and no answer to my knock.

Problem with the cold war is not when it’s cold but when it gets hot...” Sam Houston was regaling some poor soul who just wanted his lunch in a brown paper bag to go. The man wore blue jeans and a red checkered long-sleeved shirt. His sparse hair was curly gray, and his skin was black under a layer of fine white dust.

The googly-eyed restaurateur was about to make some other global pronouncement when he caught sight of me.

“Excuse me,” he said to the silent workman.

Sam took off his apron and lifted the door-board to the kitchen. Then he strode out to meet me in the middle of the room.

I had never seen Sam come out from behind his board, so I girded myself for war.

He had two inches on me in height and reach, and his thin body might have carried more punch than it appeared. I had learned, when I met a man named Fearless Jones years before, that some thin men could be stronger than bodybuilders.

“You know it ain’t right to come in someplace and sneak around a man’s back,” Sam said, touching my chest with a long, accusing finger.

The men sitting to my right discontinued their conversation to behold the encounter.

I didn’t want any eavesdroppers, so I said, “Why don’t we step outside, Sam?”

That took him off guard. He was angry at me but had no reason to think that I’d come back hard. For my part, I didn’t know how to shut his big mouth without taking it outside. And I didn’t know how to take it outside without saying so.

Sam stalked off toward the door while the patrons began gabbing. I stayed two full steps behind him, taking a glance back at the kitchen as I went. Clarissa was nowhere in sight.

Once outside, Sam turned around quickly and I took one step to my right. He took a little hop and fired off a right hook that missed my head by less than an inch. I let the fist go by, then shoved his shoulder lightly. The force of the push, added to the momentum of his swing, picked Sam up off the ground and dropped him on the pavement.

When he thrust his right hand up under his apron, I put my hands in the air and said, “I’m not here to fight with you, man.”