“Is Brawly hurt?”
“Not that I know of, but I’m pretty sure he’s in trouble. He is in trouble,” I repeated myself for effect, “and only you tellin’ me the truth is gonna help me help him.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“The kind of trouble that comes from hotheaded young men with wild women and guns everywhere.”
“Oh.”
It was the short syllable that preceded a big fall. I didn’t want to hurt her. From the beginning, my job had been to keep her from unbearable pain. But sometimes you have to feel pain before you get better. I hoped that this was one of those times for Alva Torres.
“Why is Brawly mad at you?” I asked.
“He thinks I don’t love him,” she whispered. “He thinks that I abandoned him when he was a child.”
“Why he think that?”
“Because I sent him to his father. He was so headstrong and physically he was strong, too. I’d tell him to go to bed or come back in the house and he’d just push me aside, just push me aside like I was one of the kids at the playground. And then...” She let her words trail off and stared at a point somewhere behind me.
“Yes? And then what?”
“His uncle died in a bank robbery attempt.”
Alva caved in on herself in the chair. She wept. I wanted to touch her, to reassure her, but I didn’t. The pain she felt was beyond my reach.
“When was this?”
“Nineteen fifty-four,” she said. “It was a Bank of America down on Alvarado. He went in there with a stocking mask and they shot him in the street with forty-two hundred dollars in his pocket.”
“Were him and Brawly close?”
“Yes, they were. Leonard would come over and Brawly would act right. Brawly and me both loved Leonard.”
“So what happened after he died?” I asked.
“The police kept comin’ ovah, askin’ ’bout what I knew about Leonard and his partner.”
“What happened to this partner?”
“He got away with most of the money. And the cops thought I knew about it. They kept comin’ over until I just couldn’t take it and they had to put me in the hospital.” Alva clutched her hands together.
“You let yourself get that sick rather than turn in Aldridge?”
Alva looked up at me with both surprise and relief in her eyes.
“I didn’t know until a long time later that it was Aldridge,” she said. “I would have never sent Brawly to live with him if I knew.”
“How did you find out?”
“Aldridge told Brawly and they fought.”
“When Brawly was fourteen?”
Alva nodded. “He told me when he came down here to live.”
“He didn’t tell you when you were in the hospital?”
“I don’t think so. But I don’t remember everything,” she said pitifully. “They give me drugs. Brawly said that he came and saw me and I told him that I wasn’t his mother and he should go away. But I don’t remember that. Then he went to stay with Isolda.”
Hatred replaced sorrow in Alva’s voice.
“And what happened then?”
“She twisted him,” Alva said. “She did dirty things to him and turned him against me.”
“Why she do that?”
“Because she’s wicked, that’s why.”
There didn’t seem to be much further I could get with that line of questions, so I switched gears.
“When did Brawly move away from Isolda?”
“When he was sixteen he got in trouble with the police. They said that he stole a radio out some store and put him on trial. If he was a white boy, they would have threatened him and let him go home. But bein’ black up there, they put him on trial and convicted him. He had to live in a residence for delinquents and report to this juvenile detention center until he was nineteen. He was on probation until twenty-one. That’s when I told him that he could come down here and I’d help him finish his high school degree and go to college. After he dropped out, John said that we could rent him a room in our building and he could work for us.”
“Did he steal the radio?” I asked.
“Yeah. But it was just a boy’s mistake. Brawly ain’t no thief. He’s just angry. And why shouldn’t he be? He had his childhood taken away from him.”
“Why’d you and Aldridge break up?” I asked.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Well,” I said, “that’s why Brawly lost his childhood, ain’t it? Maybe that’s the key to me talkin’ to him when I finally pin him down.”
Alva looked at me then. Before that day I had always thought that a man or woman who had a mental breakdown was weaker than other people. But I could see in her eyes the strength to handle more pain than I could imagine.
“It was the same old thing”— her voice wavered —“same old thing. He couldn’t keep his hands off the girls. Finally he found someone he liked so much that he didn’t even come home half the time. I put his things on the front yard one night, and in the morning they were gone.”
Many thoughts went through my mind but I kept them to myself.
“Can you save my son, Mr. Rawlins?”
I reached out and took both of her hands in mine.
“If it’s at all possible, I will bring him back here to you, Alva,” I said. “Even if I have to hog-tie him to the roof of my car.”
She giggled, and then she grinned.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry I misjudged you, Mr. Rawlins.”
I smiled and patted her hands. I nodded, accepting her apology, but I knew she had not misjudged me. She had seen me for what I really was. The only mistake she’d made was believing that she’d never need my kind of help.
— 31 —
I dropped by Colonel Lakeland’s office at about ten that morning.
Miss Pfennig wasn’t happy about it, but she sent me on through to Mona, who was, if anything, even less enthusiastic about my presence. But Mona called her boss, and he had her send me right in.
Detective Knorr was seated at the table, in the same chair that I had chosen to keep from being the center of attention.
“Yes, sir,” I said without being asked anything.
I took a seat, also uninvited.
Knorr gave me his assassin’s smile. Lakeland was more honest and simply frowned.
“What do you have for us?” Lakeland asked me.
“Not too much,” I said. “Nothing solid.”
“How’d you get arrested?” Knorr asked.
“Just like I told them,” I said. “Me and Jasper and Christina had gone to see BobbiAnne, but she was out and the door was open. I’ve been havin’ a weak bladder lately and—”
“Cut the shit, Rawlins,” Lakeland said. He took a familiar-looking 45-caliber pistol from somewhere behind his desk. “What in the hell is this?”
“I found it on the table in that woman BobbiAnne’s living room,” I said.
“That the story you told Petal?” he said.
I knew he was talking about Pitale. Maybe that was the way he pronounced his name.
“No story,” I said. “It was sitting right there in plain sight.”
“How’d you like to spend thirty-five years in a federal prison, Mr. Rawlins?” Lakeland asked.
“No thanks.”
“Because this, this gun, was stolen from a federal facility in Memphis, Tennessee, and that’s the sentence for the theft.”
“I think my paternal grandfather was from Tennessee,” I said. “The story goes that he killed a white man and had to relocate to Louisiana for his health.”
Knorr’s light eyes regarded me as a child might stare at the wing he was about to pluck off a fly.
“It was on her coffee table,” I said. “I picked it up, put it in my pocket, and then the cops busted in. Why were they there, anyway?”
“Petal works for Captain Lorne. They’re also keeping watch on the First Men’s members,” Lakeland said.