Free Little Green by Walter Mosley

the day was over,” Mouse was saying as Feather washed dishes and Peter dried. “So we better be off.”
    “Take Feather back up to the Bel-Air house, will you, Ray?”
    “I wanna stay here with you, Daddy.”
    “I have to do something for Uncle Ray,” I said, “and there was this strange guy hanging around here. I’d feel safer if you were up in there.”
    “Okay. But are you coming back home tonight?”
    “If I don’t I will certainly call.”
    I saw my friends and family off at the front door. They cruised up Genesee in Raymond’s pink Caddy. Feather was waving out the back window as they went.
    Seeing them go I had to resist the impression that my lifeblood was draining away in their wake.
    Back in the house I called Martin Martins, who was, for lack of a better term, a handyman.
    Martins had moved to L.A. from Mississippi in the late forties like I had from Texas. He was a genius at anything mechanical or that had to do with building. Most of his leisure hours were spent studying machines and architectural design by looking at devices of all sorts and watching builders at work. I believe that he could have single-handedly built a skyscraper given enough time and resources—he was that good.
    A few years earlier Martins was shot as he came out of a bar on Avalon at around midnight. The bullet, aimed at his heart, was true, but the shooter didn’t know that the mechanic had an iron device, given to him by the bartender, in his left breast pocket. People were always giving Mr. Martins odd gadgets and tools because he loved to study any technology new to him. He liked to get just a piece or section of some larger device and try, from that one puzzle piece, to figure out the function of the machine it came from.
    The .45 slug knocked Martin for a loop, and luckily for him, the shooter ran rather than check out his work.
    At two that morning Jackson Blue called me asking for a late meeting with his friend Martins.
    “Do you know who shot you?” I asked Martins at a few minutes shy of three a.m. We were sitting at a corner table in Cox Bar—an unlicensed establishment hidden off of an unnamed alley in the bowels of Watts.
    “It looked like Bill Fern,” the long-limbed master craftsman replied.
    Martin was the color of a dark plum and formed from many angles. His face was nearly a perfect triangle set on the point of his chin. He had high cheekbones, long fingers, and a flat plane of chest that spoke of a day laborer’s strength. “But I don’t know why he wanna shoot at me. I mean, we hardly even know each other, and I can’t think of one wrong I’ve done him.”
    “What’s this Bill do for a living?” I asked.
    “Work for the city, I think, collectin’ trash. At least, that’s what he used to do a few years ago.”
    “How’d you meet him?”
    “My wife’s coworker Nanette Yomen had a party for all the colored people she knew worked for the city.”
    “Did your wife know Bill?”
    Even Martin’s eyes were composed of angles. The orbital bones formed squares around the orbs. It’s always a pleasure working with an intelligent man. He squeezed those squares down into thin quadrangles while peering inside his own mind.
    After maybe two minutes he said, “I got twenty-one thousand dollars in the bank.”
    That’s all he had to say. We—me, him, and Jackson Blue, who was there for the introduction—all understood what had transpired.
    I knew a disbarred lawyer named Milo Sweet who wrote up the divorce agreement. They split everything minus five hundred dollars for expenses. Bill Fern was at the final meeting. He apologized to Martin and said that there was no reason to hold a grudge.
    I gave the five hundred to Mouse and asked him to visit Bill at his apartment and impress upon him that if any violence happened to Martin that Ray had already been paid to take Bill’s life.
    I didn’t charge a dime for that job. A good handyman in my corner outweighed any fee.
    “Hello?” Hela Klineman