Fifteen minutes later I strode on cramped feet into our small living room. John was standing there looking like a fish out of water in his overalls and work boots.
“Easy.”
“What can I do for you, John?”
“I need your help.”
“Didn’t we already have this talk yesterday?” I asked.
John shifted his shoulders, looking all the more uncomfortable.
“You want some coffee or something to eat?” I asked him.
“I got to get down to the lots.”
“Come on in the kitchen anyway. I just woke up.”
“I ain’t got time to fool around, Easy. I need your help and I need it now.”
I turned my back on him and went into the kitchen.
I always liked the kitchen in the morning because that’s when the sun flooded the windows. While I was filling the percolator with tap water, John walked in.
“Hey, man,” he said. “I’m sorry. I know you just woke up, but things got worse overnight.”
He slumped down on one of the kitchen chairs as I measured out four level tablespoons of MJB.
“What happened?”
“It’s Brawly. I think he might’a killed somebody.”
“Who?”
“You remember Alva told you about her ex-husband?”
“Yeah.”
“He was killed yesterday at her cousin Isolda’s house.”
“How you know that Brawly did it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s Isolda. She called Alva last night, only Alva wouldn’t talk to her, so instead I got on the line.”
“Yeah?”
“She said that Brawly and his father had had a big fight and that she was tryin’ to keep ’em apart but she had to go away and she thinks that they run into each other at her house.”
“So she didn’t actually see Brawly kill Aldridge,” I said.
“I don’t know,” John said. “I don’t know what that woman saw and what she didn’t. All I know is that Alva’s takin’ it bad and I’m worried about her. I’m real worried.”
“About what exactly?”
A shadow moved over John’s already dark visage. I got the feeling that he was about to say something and then decided against it.
“Easy, just go talk to Isolda. Okay? She’s holed up in a place down off Alameda. Just go talk to her. And if you can shake Brawly loose someplace, call me and tell me where he is. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“All right. Gimme the address and I’ll see what she has to say.” When it came down to it, I couldn’t send John away. I’d been in a few tight spots in my time and he had never turned his back on me.
“You want me to go with you?”
“No. You go back to your lots. Put up some timber for me. I’ll talk to Isolda and I’ll find Brawly, too.”
There was a powerful emotion on John’s strong face. If I hadn’t known him better, I would have thought that he wanted to kill me. That’s how hard love was for all black men at one time.
“Hello?” He said, answering the phone on the seventeenth ring.
“Jackson?”
“Easy?” I could hear his fear through the line. “Easy, how’d you get my number?”
“I always got your number, Jackson. I always got it.”
He was looking around, I was sure, worried that I might be at some window or at his front door.
“Don’t worry, Jackson. I ain’t hidin’ outside your front door.” I paused. “I ain’t at the back door, neither.”
“I was lookin’ out the window, man,” he said. “You cain’t fool me.”
“Where’s Jesus’s money, Jackson?”
“Say what?”
“You heard me, man. Where’s the two hundred forty-two dollars you took out from under his bed?”
“Wasn’t no two hundred dollars up under there,” Jackson whined. “Shit. Not even one-forty.”
Jackson Blue was by far the most intelligent person I had ever known but if he was rattled, he could be fooled by a child.
“I want the boy’s money,” I said.
Jackson had been our houseguest for a few days when he was on the run from some Westside gangsters. He was playing a numbers game in their territory and they wanted a few ounces of flesh. I thought I was doing him a favor until he disappeared with Jesus’s savings can.
“All right. Okay, man,” Jackson said. “I just borrowed it, anyway. You know them men was out after me. They still are.”
“I could come by and pick it up,” I said.
Jackson sputtered. His fearfulness made me laugh. He was always in trouble, always around the hardest of hard men. But still, he was afraid of his own shadow.
“Where you get my number, Easy?”
Jackson was a brilliant thinker and as well read as many a university professor, but when it came to reading people, he hadn’t made it through the first grade.
He had a girl who he bragged on, name of Charlene Lorraine. Charlene liked the cowardly Jackson for some crazy reason and let him share her bed now and then. She liked him but didn’t respect or fear or care about him in any way. I gave her twenty dollars only two weeks after the day Raymond Alexander and John F. Kennedy were shot. She gave me Jackson’s number without even asking why.
“I ain’t seen him but one time, Easy,” the buxom Miss Lorraine told me. “I think he must have some other girlfriend somewhere.”
“So you’re jealous?” I asked her.
“Jealous?” she exclaimed. “That’d be like bein’ jealous if somebody else petted your little dog. He’s cute and all, but it ain’t like he no real man or nuthin’.”
Charlene let her arms hang back making her bosom protrude even farther. She looked me up and down but I didn’t bite. Not that I wouldn’t have minded being reeled up into her bed, but I had Bonnie by that time and other women were not a main concern on my mind.
“John gimme your number,” I lied.
“Where he get it?”
“I didn’t need to know that, Jackson. What I need is a line on a few people you might have come across in your petty crimes.”
“What people?”
“I want you to ask around about Aldridge Brown, Brawly Brown, and dude name of Strong run with a group called the Urban Revolutionary Party or the First Men.”
“Which one?” Jackson asked. “Urban Party or First Men?”
“They go by both names.”
“If I do that, you gonna let me slide on the piggy-bank money?”
“If you do that, I’ll connect you with an honest job so you can pay Jesus back from your first month’s salary.”
“What was them names again?” he asked.
I told him.
“Okay. I could do that. Yeah. Why’ont you call me tomorrow afternoon. I should have whatever I can get by then.”
“Why don’t you call me, Blue?”
“Well, you know...”
“No. What?”
“Jesus might answer.”
That was Jackson. He lived his whole life among murderers, muggers, and thieves but he was afraid of a sixteen-year-old boy who was even smaller than him.
“All right, Jackson. I’ll call you tomorrow at two. You better be there.”
“I ain’t got nowhere else to be, Easy,” he said. “Nowhere at all.”
— 10 —
The tenement Isolda Moore was staying in was nothing like her house. The unpainted wooden stairs that led to her third-floor hideaway felt soggy under my weight. The hallway was misshapen. The floor was warped and sagging, the ceiling slumped. The hallway started out wide but it narrowed as I neared Isolda’s door.
The photographs of her on the bureau mirror, even the secret ones of her in the bikini, had not done Miss Moore justice. She was lovely at first sight even though she was off balance from having yanked the wedged door free. She was a light brown woman in a polka-dot blue and white dress. The hemline reached just below her knees, revealing shapely legs. Isolda wore no bra and didn’t seem to be missing it. Her big eyes were close together and almond shaped. Her lips were poised in the permanent expectation of a kiss.