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.”
