Blonde Faith

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 fabulous 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?”

“Perry’s my friend, man. You know that’s not how you talk about your friends.”

“Every man and woman I talked to so far has said Perry is dead. How’s tellin’ me how I might find out why gonna hurt?”

The walrus scratched his mustachios and pondered. Finally he shrugged and said, “Pretty Smart.”

“What is?”

“That’s her name. Her mama named her that.”

“You know where she lives?”

“I don’t even know what she looks like. All I know is that Perry would call her from my house sometimes. Maybe she come by there and took a nap with him if I wasn’t home.”