Walter Mosley - Bad Boy Brawly Brown

“Stop it,” Clarissa cried. “What do you want from me?”

“It’s like I told you from the start,” I said. “I’m workin’ for Brawly’s mother. She thinks he’s in trouble, and I think she’s right. What I need from you is to help me help him outta the mess he don’t even know he in.”

“He told me not to talk to you.”

Sam reared up and opened his mouth, but I put up a hand before he could holler.

“I know,” I said. “I know. You love him and you think he loves you. And if you go behind his back, he might get so mad that he’ll just walk away — you might not never see him again. But that ain’t nuthin’. You’re a pretty girl and good in your heart. You’ll find another boyfriend and Brawly will still be breathin’.”

“He said that you were the police” was her reply.

“Honey,” Sam said. “You know that man I always talked about — Raymond Alexander?”

“The one they called Mouse?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. You know all them stories I said about him. About when he faced down and killed three armed men in the Fifth Ward and all he had was a stick. About when the police heard that he was holed up in a house outside’a L.A. and said that they couldn’t go because it was across the county line.”

“And when three of his girlfriends,” Clarissa added with a grin, “made his birthday party with bows in their hair.”

“That’s him.”

Clarissa smiled and said, “So?”

“This here Easy Rawlins was Mouse’s best friend. They ran together for almost thirty years, since they were kids. If there’s anything I’m sure of, it’s that Mouse would never have run with a man that could turn another black man over to the cops.”

“I thought you said that Mouse was dead,” Clarissa said.

“Nobody ever saw a body or went to a funeral,” Sam replied. “And even if they did, that wouldn’t turn Easy here into no rat.”

Clarissa considered for a moment and so did I. I wondered at the strength of character and will of a man like Raymond who could reach out beyond the grave to help me in that Riverside hideout.

“No,” Clarissa was saying, “he didn’t ever tell me what he was doin’. All I know is that they started to work with Mr. Strong on somethin’. They were like a special group inside the Party, and only a few of them knew what was goin’ on.”

“What were they doing?” I asked again.

“I don’t know. Conrad would come over and pick Brawly up at all hours. They’d go off and meet with Mr. Strong—”

“Did he meet with anybody else?” I asked.

“I think so,” she said. “But I never knew who. I mean, I figured that they were in the group but it was all secret.”

“Now why they wanna keep somethin’ like that a secret?” Sam asked his cousin.

“Sam,” I said, “I let you come along but this is my party.”

He didn’t like to hear it, but he sat back on the couch.

“But you did know about the guns,” I said.

She looked down at her knotted hands and nodded.

“How’d you know?”

“One day Brawly had Conrad’s Cadillac,” she whispered. “He had let Conrad off at somebody’s place and they didn’t want his car to be around there, so Brawly took it. He brought me out there and showed me in the trunk. It was six or seven rifles wrapped in army blankets.”

“What he say they planned to do with them?”

“He said that those rifles would take the first shots in the revolution.” She began to weep.

I believe that as she spoke to me, the full meaning of Brawly’s words hit home. Sometimes you have to hear yourself saying something out loud before you understand it.

“Did he say what they planned to do?”

She shook her head.

“Did he tell you what he did with those guns after they took them out from BobbiAnne’s place?”

Again, no.

“How did BobbiAnne and Conrad get together?” I asked, thinking that a change of tempo might get me closer to what I didn’t know.

“Conrad got in trouble with some men who he had been gambling with,” Clarissa said. “They was gonna bust him up and so Brawly called his high school girlfriend and asked her to put him up. You were right; her parents both died last year. Him of a heart attack and then she just faded away.”

“And after that is when BobbiAnne moved down to L.A.?”

“Yeah,” Clarissa said. “She moved down to be near Conrad.”

“And do you think that she was a part of this special group that Strong started?”

“No,” Clarissa said. “They didn’t have no white people in the First Men. White people couldn’t come in the door, that was the rule.”

The image of those policemen breaking through the windows went through my mind.

“Where’s Brawly?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You got any idea? Any at all?”

“No, sir.”

“What about Isolda?” I asked.

“Who?” Sam chirped.

I ignored him, staring at Clarissa’s downcast face.

“What about her?” she asked.

“Why do you hate her?”

“Because’a what she did to Brawly.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s not for me to say.”

“If you want me to try and help him, you better believe you better tell me somethin’.”

Clarissa looked at me with real spite in her eyes. I could see that she was going to tell me something, and somehow she believed that I would be hurt by it.

“She took him in when him and his father fought, and then she tried to make him into her husband,” she said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Brawly,” she said, sneering. “She’d walk around the house with no clothes on and come into his bed with him at night. She’d get him all hot and make him love her.”

I sat back in my chair.

“What you say?” Sam asked.

“She had sex with him until finally he stole a radio out of a store so that the county would take him away,” Clarissa said.

“She had sex with him.” Sam repeated the words as if they were some intricate puzzle.

“Do you know where Brawly is now?” I asked again.

And again Clarissa shook her head.

“Is he going to call?”

“Not until Sunday,” she said.

“That’ll be too late,” I muttered.

“What you say, Easy?” Sam asked.

I took a deep breath and stood up. “You gonna stay up here?” I asked Clarissa.

It was the first time she thought that she might leave the house where Brawly had hidden her.

“Yeah,” she said, darting a glance at Sam.

“Come on back down with us, baby,” Sam said. “You can stay with me and Margaret. You be safe there.”

“Two people dead already,” I reminded her. “And none of us know who’s doin’ it.”

The ride back to L.A. was almost completely silent. Clarissa sat in the back.

When we got in range of L.A.’s radio waves we listened to KGFJ, the soul station. James Brown and Otis Redding serenaded our bruised minds. Once Sam asked me if I ever heard from EttaMae — Mouse’s wife, the mother of his son, LaMarque, and one of my best friends.

“No,” I said. “She’s gone.”

He didn’t follow up the question and I didn’t offer any explanations of my guilt.

“Wait up a minute, Easy,” Sam said to me.

I was parked in front of his house off of Denker at about eight. He walked Clarissa into the house and I laid back and shut my eyes. A pattern was beginning to appear in my mind. It wasn’t a pretty picture, nor was it very clear. I still didn’t know where Brawly fit, or if I could save him.

I had a clear path of investigation, though. I knew what I was after and I knew who and what might be after me.

Sam came out and climbed into the passenger’s seat.