“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.
— 34 —
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.”
He was breathing hard.
“Then why we out here in the street then?” He stopped fumbling.
I offered my hand and he took it. “I didn’t want nobody to listen to what we had to say,” I said while helping him to his feet.
“Why not?”
“Do you like Clarissa?”
“Hell yeah,” he said. He was slapping imaginary dust from his arms and chest. “That’s why I’m mad at you sneakin’ around, talkin’ ’bout one thing but then stalkin’ my girl.”
“Your girlfriend?” I asked.
“No. Clarissa’s my cousin. Everybody work for me is family, you know that.”
“Listen, Sam,” I said. “I don’t know what you been told, but I didn’t lie to you. I was lookin’ for Brawly and I found him — with her.”
“What you mean, ‘with her’?”
“He’s her boyfriend. Didn’t you know that?”
That shut Sam’s mouth for a good five seconds. It might have been the best comeback I’d ever had with him. Even though I was involved in a life-and-death situation, I took a moment to savor his confusion.
“That ain’t right,” he said at last. “She said that you followed her and tried to get over on her at her apartment. She said that she cain’t be comin’ in to work ’cause she scared you gonna be on her here.”
“I did go to her place but I was followin’ Brawly, not her.” The lie was not really so bad. I had seen her with Brawly at the Urban Party’s gathering. When I followed her, it was only to get to him.
“You lyin’ to me, Easy Rawlins?”
“Come on, Sam, you know better’n that.”
“Not when it come to pussy I don’t,” he said. “Niggah work a eight-hour day six days a week and pray to God on Sunday, but when pussy walk by he might just lose his mind.”
As I said, the maddening thing about Sam Houston was that he was almost always on target. He had a good mind, just no real direction to point it in.
“I am not after Clarissa,” I said. “Least not the way you say. I got me a woman and I don’t need to go skulkin’ around after some girl-child.”
There was the ring of truth in my words. Sam squinted so that his eyes were hardly larger than a horse’s orb.
“Then why she wanna lie?” he asked.
“You tell me, Sam. Would you have been upset to see her with Brawly? Would you have done something about that?”
“No. I mean, I might’a given her grief. I might’a said a thing or two.”
“But,” I said, “if you knew she was with him and I came to you and said that the boy was trouble, you might have been willin’ to help me get a line on her.”
“What you sayin’, Easy?”
“I’m sayin’ that since I last talked to you, two men have been murdered and Brawly’s in it somewhere. I don’t know where exactly, but I do know that it’s bad.”
“Murder?”
“Murder. Two men. Dead as doornails.”
“Who?”
“Henry Strong, the mentor of the First Men”— Sam spit at the mention of the radical organization —“and Aldridge Brown.” I continued: “Brawly’s father.”
“Who killed ’em?” Sam asked.
“Hard to say. The cops think it was the First Men. The First Men think it was the cops. Brawly’s cousin has nominated him for at least one of the killings. It’s all up in the air. I’m just lookin’ for some shelter before it come back down to earth.”
Sam pulled at the collar of his gray T-shirt and moved his chin around as if he couldn’t get enough air. He wasn’t used to being on the short end of the conversation.
“So what you want?” he asked. “Brawly Brown,” I said for the hundredth time, it seemed.
Sam put his left hand on top of his head and his right hand on his chin.