Bad Boy Brawly Brown: An Easy Rawlins Mystery by Walter Mosley

Author:Walter Mosley [MOSLEY, WALTER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General
ISBN: 9780759528123
Google: wvtsMj71v5sC
Amazon: B000FBFLAI
Publisher: Hachette Digital, Inc.
Published: 2003-07-01T19:43:32+00:00

24

THE NEXT PERSON on my list was Tina Montes. She’d been kind to me the night the police broke in on the First Men and I pulled her out of there before they could crack her skull.

She lived in a rooming house on Thirty-first Street. The woman who owned it, Liselle Latour, was a pal of mine from the old days in Houston, Texas. Liselle had been born Thaddie Brown but changed her name when she ran away from home at thirteen. She’d turned to prostitution and had become a madam by the time she was twenty-five. She left Houston in ’44 with her partner/bodyguard/boyfriend Franklin Nettars. Frank had been pestering Liselle to leave Houston for years. He told her that the black folks up in L.A. made real money and that a small whorehouse around there would make them rich.

Liselle would have never left but for a fight that had come to pass in her house of ill repute. A white man — I never got his name — had a disagreement with one of the whores and wound up with a knife in his throat. The woman was arrested. Liselle managed to stay out of jail but she knew her name had been placed on the police list. And once you went on the police list in Houston, you either died, went to jail, or left town.

They took a sleeper cabin in a special colored car on the Sunset Express from Houston to L.A. The whole way Franklin was telling Liselle how great it would be when they got to California.

“He’d be sayin’,” Liselle told me, “that you could live pickin’ fruit off’a the trees while you was walkin’ down the street.” She always smiled when she mentioned his name.

The porter dropped by their cabin to tell them that they were just about to cross the California line.

“Ten seconds after that,” Liselle said, “he got a heart attack. Hit him so hard that he only felt it a few seconds before he was dead.”

I never thought about Liselle loving Franklin. I mean, they seemed more like business partners than soul mates. But when Franklin died, Liselle was a changed woman. She took her life savings and bought the place on Thirty-first. She made it a rooming house for single women and didn’t even let a male visitor past the ground floor. She never even dated another man and became very involved with the dealings of the church.

Liselle became virtuous and solitary but she didn’t forget her old friends. Neither did she pretend that she’d come from some up-standing moral background. Liselle told everyone what she had been because, as she’d say, “I don’t want you findin’ out someday and then gettin’ mad that I lied to ya.”

She was happy to see her old friends and even share a drop of spirits with them.

That’s why I felt no trepidations approaching her home.

There were two doors to the three-story wooden building, one up front and the other on the side. The front door was for the women and girls; the side was Liselle’s private entrance.

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