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.”
“Really?” I said. “Is this Raymand in jail now?”
“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 risque 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
