When she lifted her head, I could see that she’d aged a good six months since our last meet two days ago.
“Yes?”
“I’m so sorry, ma’am, but if you can bear it, I’d like to ask you some questions.”
She stared at me, not comprehending simple English. Beyond her, Leafa was herding the giggling tots into a corner.
I reached out my hand, and Meredith took it. I led her out of the baby room, through the devastation of the living room, and into the kitchen, where I cleared debris from two red chairs and bade her sit. I made instant coffee while she gazed at the floor.
It occurred to me that Meredith probably hadn’t asked Leafa to stay home. The child just saw her responsibility and took it the way Feather had done with Easter Dawn.
“You take milk and sugar in your coffee?” I asked.
“Milk.”
There were only a few drops left at the bottom of the half-gallon carton.
I gave her the coffee and sat facing her.
“I’ve found out a lot about Alexander and your husband in the past couple days,” I said. “I know that they were seen at a bar together and that they picked up a car at a garage in South LA.”
“The police was here,” she said.
“What they say?”
“If I had heard anything from Ray Alexander.”
“He’s back in town?” I asked.
“I guess he is. They thought he might’a called me on account’a I called the police. They said he was a dangerous man and I should move somewhere where he don’t know where I am ’cause he might want revenge. But how can I move all these kids? Where could I take them?”
It was a good question. I found it hard to imagine one woman giving birth ten times.
“How can he hurt me worse than he already has?” she wailed.
I took her hands. The skin was rough and callused, ashen and tight with muscle.
“I need to talk to Perry’s friends,” I said softly. “Do you know any of them?”
“His friends?” she asked.
I nodded and squeezed her hands.
“What good is friends when you ain’t got nuthin’ and they never call?”
“They might know something, Mrs. Tarr. He might have said something about where he was hanging out.”
“They put a eviction notice on my door,” she said. “Where Perry’s friends gonna be when I’m out on the street with twelve kids? Where the police gonna be when I’m diggin’ through trash cans tryin’ t’feed my babies?” She looked at me then. “Where you gonna be when that’s happenin’? I’ll tell you where, asleep in your bed while we livin’ with the rats.”
Being poor and being black were not the same things in America, not exactly. But there were many truths that all black people and poor persons of every color had in common. One of the most important particulars in our lives was the understanding of the parable of the Gordian knot. You had to be able to cut through that which bound you. Maybe that was leaving a woman behind or breaking into a bank under cover of darkness; maybe it was bowing your head and saying “Yessir” when a man had just called your wife a whore and your children dogs. Maybe you spent your whole life like some John Henry banging away at a boulder that would never give.
I took a hundred-dollar bill from my wallet and pressed it into Meredith’s hand. I could have cajoled her, called a social worker, talked until I was blue in the face. But the knot was the rent and the sword was that hundred-dollar bill.
“What’s this?” she asked, lucid at last.
“It’s what you need, right?”
Leafa was standing in the doorway behind her mother. I was happy that she had witnessed our exchange.
“Mama?” Leafa said.
“Is somebody hurt?” Meredith asked, still watching me.
“No.”
“Can you take care of it?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Then go away, baby. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Leafa backed out of the room as Meredith sat up straight.
“Why you givin’ this to me?” she asked suspiciously.
“My client is paying,” I said truthfully. “I need to know who Perry’s friends are, and you need the rent. I’ll put you down in my books as an informant.”
It was a logic that she had never encountered before. Nothing in her life had ever had monetary value, just cost or sweat.
“I give you the names of three worthless niggahs and I can keep this here money?”
“The money is yours,” I said. “I just gave it to you. Now I’m asking for those names.”
Leafa appeared again at the doorway. This time she remained silent.
“That don’t make no sense,” Meredith said. She was angry.
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s what they call irrational. But you see, Mrs. Tarr, we, all human beings, just think we’re rational when really we never do anything that makes sense. What sense does it make to throw a poor woman and her kids into the street? What sense does it make for a man to hate me for my accent or my skin color? What sense war or TV shows, guns or Pericles’ dying?”
I got to her with that. Her life, my life, President Johnson’s life in the White House, none of it made any sense. We were all crazy, pretending that our lives were sane.
30
There was a small park down in the center of Watts next to a giant sculpture called the Watts Towers. The gaudy towers were built by a man named Rodia over a period of thirty-three years. He built them from refuse and simple material. It was a whimsical place in a very grim part of town.
The park had a few trees and picnic tables on grass worn thin by hundreds of children’s tramping feet. Meredith Tarr had told me that Timor Reed and Blix Redford were there almost every day, “Drinkin’ gin and wastin’ time.” Pericles would go to visit Tim and Blix once a week or so to share their rotgut and play checkers.
I got there just before noon. There was loud music coming from one house across the street, two teenage lovers playing hooky in order to study the facts of life, and two men of uncertain age sitting across from each other at a redwood picnic table, leaning over a folding paper checkerboard. The board was held together by once clear, now yellowing adhesive tape. About half of the pieces were light-colored stones with crayon X’s, either red or black, scrawled on top.
Looking at those men and that board, I felt as if I were witnessing the devolution of a culture. The decrepit park, the shabby clothes Blix and Timor wore, even Otis Redding moaning about the dock of the bay on tinny but loud speakers, spoke of a world that was grinding to a halt.
“Mr. Reed. Mr. Redford,” I said to the men.
They looked up at me like two soldiers from vastly disparate battlefields who had died simultaneously and were now sitting in Limbo awaiting the verdict of Valhalla.
One man was fat and wore a gray-and-black hat with tiny ventilation eyes sewn in along the side and an old gray trench coat. From Meredith’s description, I knew this was Blix Redford. He smiled expectantly and stood up, saying, “Yes, sir, do I know you?”
At the same time the smaller Timor leaned back and scowled. He wore boys’ jeans, a threadbare T-shirt, and said nothing. Judging from the look of desperation on his face, I thought he might have been considering making a run for his life.
“My name is Easy Rawlins,” I said to Blix. “I just came from Perry Tarr’s house. I told Meredith I was looking for her husband, and she send me here to you.”
Timor calmed down a bit, and Blix’s smile evaporated.
“Didn’t she tell you that Pericles done passed on?” Blix asked.
“No,” I said, shocked at this intelligence. I took the opportunity to sit down next to Timor. The little man turned to face me warily. I could see that his left foot was encased in a filthy plaster cast.
“Oh, yeah,” Blix assured me. He sat down too. “Yeah. Raymond Alexander done slaughtered him and put him in the ground somewhere down around San Diego, I hear.”
“Where you from, man?” Timor asked me; the sneer on his face was a hatred older than the mouth that carried it. “Everybody in Los Angeles know about Mouse.”
“Who?”
“Ray Alexander, fool,” he said. “The man that killed Perry Tarr.”
I turned my palms to the sky and shook my head. I was a stranger from another country. Local folklore was a mystery to me.
“You’re telling me that this, this Mouse done killed my friend Perry and the cops won’t even put him in jail?” There was a threat in my voice.
“Keep it down, man,” Blix said. “You don’t play with Ray. That’s what they say around here. Maybe back in Arkansas or Tennessee or wherevah you from they don’t know that. But around here he’s the Grim Reaper.”
“You know where I can find this man, this Raymond Alexander?” I asked.
“Didn’t you hear what I said, brother?” Blix asked. “This man’s a killer. He’ll crush you like a bug.”
“Shit,” I said, approximating the tone of many a fool I’d listened to. “He gotta gun; I gotta gun too.”
“Come on, BB,” Timor said to his friend. “Let’s play checkers an’ let this fool go. We told him. That’s all we can do.”
Timor turned his gaze down upon the board. Blix kept watching me.
“We don’t know where he’s at, man,” the friendlier friend said.
“Well, how can I find him?” I pressed.
“Just jump off the top’a city hall, brother,” Timor said, not looking up. “You be just as dead, only a hair quicker.”
That was all I was going to get there. I stood up, still acting as if I were angry, about to go out looking for the man who killed my friend. Then I paused.
“Tell me sumpin’, man,” I said to Timor.
“What?” He still wouldn’t look at me.
“If this mothahfuckah so bad, how come you safe?”
That got his attention.
“What you talkin’ ’bout, niggah?”
“You.”
“Me? You don’t know me.”
“I know you just sat there on yo broke-leg ass and accused Raymond ‘Mouse’ Alexander of murder. I know you said that he killed Pericles Tarr and buried him in San Diego.”
“Blix said that!” Timor yelled. “You cain’t put that on me!”
He pushed himself up from the table and hobbled off on his broken foot. Blix called to him, but Timor raced away as fast as his lame gait would carry him.
Blix sat at the checkerboard laughing to himself.
“That was a good one, man,” he said. “You give me somethin’ to needle him with for the next five years.”
31
There was a big fish market on Hoover. It was just a series of stalls set in a square on a vacant lot. All day long a man named Dodo picked up ice and dry ice and delivered it to those stalls in order to keep the mackerels, perch, eels, halibuts, sand dabs, crabs, sharks, and swordfish moist and fresh. Small trucks brought the fish in in the early, early morning after the fishing boats arrived all up and down the California coastline.
People from every part of LA came to that nameless fish market. Japanese, Chinese, Italians, and Mexicans. Every culture in LA liked their fishes.
THE OWNER of the open-air market was a big Irishman called Lineman. I don’t know if that was his first or last name or maybe just a handle he’d gotten from playing football as a youth.
Lineman was a big guy whose character was fit for the black part of town. He was loud and familiar with anyone he met. He cursed, told risqué jokes, and judged people solely by how they responded to him in business and in life. He didn’t fit in in the white world very well. Maybe if he had been a silent worker in the back of some shop he would have gotten along okay, but Lineman was a good businessman, and whites got mad when he showed up at a fancy ball with some dark-skinned senorita or when he invited someone like me to the country club on the west side of town.
The wealthier white circles of Los Angeles found Lineman intolerant of their intolerance, and so the seafood entrepreneur slowly adjusted his life to work within the black and brown communities. He lived in Cheviot Hills, a mostly Jewish enclave, and worked in Watts serving all men as they served him.
“HEY, LINEMAN,” I said, slapping his wide-shouldered back.
“Easy Rawlins,” he hailed. “How you doin’?”
“They barred me from the complaint desk, so I guess everything must be fine.”
Lineman liked to laugh.
We were standing at the northeast corner of the block of sixteen stalls. Every one of the fish stands was an independent dealer. They rented the stalls for a hundred dollars plus expenses a week apiece. Lineman kept the ice flowing and made deals all over Southern California, selling fresh fish to everyone from restaurants to school cafeterias.
“What can I do for you, Easy?” Lineman asked.
I told him about Pericles Tarr and how I got Jeff Porter’s name from his wife.
We were walking around the perimeter of the block as we talked. Lineman never stood still. He was always doing something, going somewhere, just getting back or preparing to leave.
He’d once been arrested for the kidnap and murder of a black girl, Chandisse Lund. She was fourteen and had worked for the fish market a couple of years. The last anyone had seen of her, she was getting into Lineman’s brand-new cherry red Cadillac. He made bail and came to my office, telling a story about a child who had been molested by her own father and who wanted to escape to her older sister’s house. The only problem was that the sisters had disappeared and no one could find a witness to say the two were together.
“How could I say no?” he asked me. “Child comes up to me and says her father’s doing that to her, I had to do what she asked.”
“You could have gone to the cops,” I suggested.
“I could have spit in her face too,” Lineman said. “You know the cops aren’t gonna worry about some black girl in Watts.”
“They might.”
“Would you take that kind of chance with your children?”
That convinced me of Lineman’s character and his innocence. I went out looking and found out that the sister, Lena, had a boyfriend named Lester. Lester had gone missing too, but he kept in touch with his uncle Bob, and so I located them in Richmond up in the Bay Area.
I brought Chandisse down to the Seventy-sixth Street Precinct, where she and her sister’s minister pressed charges against her father and at the same time cleared Lineman of any wrongdoing.
Two weeks later Lineman came to my office again.
“You haven’t sent me a bill, Mr. Rawlins,” he said. “I like to pay my debts.”
“You know, down where I come from we trade favors,” I told him. “So I was thinking that maybe every month or so I could drop by and get a couple of sand dabs for frying or some blue crabs for a gumbo.”
We’d been close since then.
“I NEED TO TALK to Jeff Porter,” I told Lineman as we walked down the row.
He stopped, turned around military-style, and walked me back three stalls.
“Hey, Jeff,” Lineman said to a big black man who resembled a walrus in size, shape, and skin color. He even had a drooping salt-and-pepper mustache.
“Hey, Lineman,” Jeff replied. “What’s up?”
“This here is Easy Rawlins,” Lineman said. “He’s a very special friend of mine. He saved my life. And he’s a good man, somebody to trust.”
Porter nodded in a dignified manner.
“He wants to know some things,” Lineman continued. “It would be a favor to me if you obliged.”
Lineman patted me on the back and moved off like a shark that would suffocate if it didn’t keep going forward. At the same time, Jeff Porter put out a hand for me to shake. That was an odd experience. Porter’s hand was both powerful and blubbery. It seemed to me at that moment that the whole block was turning into some kind of f
abulous underwater paradise.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Rawlins?” the big man asked.
I wanted to reply, but I was distracted by the blood and entrails that festooned his broad white apron. The thousands of deaths represented by that haphazard map of destruction oppressed me.
Was Pericles Tarr slaughtered in San Diego like Blix had said? I wasn’t sure if I had the heart to find out.
“It’s gonna be a nice day, huh?” I said.
“Sun’s not good for a fish man, Mr. Rawlins. We like shade and cool breezes, otherwise the product might go bad.”
“Pericles Tarr,” I said.
“They say he’s dead,” Porter said in answer to my implied question.
“I’d like to prove that.”
“That’s a dangerous piece of business, isn’t it?”
I knew what he was talking about.
“I was raised as a youngster in Houston,” I said. “One of my best friends was a skinny boy with a big mouth named Raymond Alexander.”
It’s hard for a walrus to look surprised, but Porter managed it.
“I’m a private detective, Jeff,” I said. “I’m one of Ray’s closest friends, but I’m looking for Perry because his daughter Leafa told me that she doesn’t think her daddy is dead.”
“Leafa’s a child.”
“She’s the clearest mind I’ve met in the Tarr household,” I said.
Jeff laughed and then nodded.
“You might be right about that,” he said. “And who knows, maybe the girl makes some sense.”
“Why you say that?”
“You know Perry was not happy in that house full’a ugly, unruly kids. He used to go ovah my place to take a nap because he said that every time he heard footsteps in his house he’d start to shakin’. Meredith wasn’t nuthin’ but a dishrag up in the bed, an’ Perry was workin’ harder than three slaves in master’s cotton field. I don’t know if Mouse killed him or not, but you know if he did it woulda been a blessin’, not a crime.”
“He ever say that he wanted to run?” I asked.
“Not too much. Only every day for five years.”
“You say Meredith wasn’t satisfying him. He have some other woman for that?”
Blonde Faith er-11 Page 14
