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disfigured but the article didn’t specify how. The article did explain why this murder was front-page news where the previous three were garbage liners—Robin Garnett was a white woman.
    I found out that Robin was a coed at UCLA. She lived with her parents and had attended L.A. High. What the article didn’t say was why she was down in that neighborhood in the first place.
    I lit a Camel and drank my coffee. I opened the shades so that I could see them coming when they came.
    At about nine, Gabby Lee emerged from my bedroom with Edna all dressed up for the park. I held out my arms and Edna screamed joyously. She reached for me but Gabby Lee held back.
    “Bring my baby here to me,” I said simply.
    I held Edna and she held my nose. We made sounds at each other and laughed and laughed.
    “We gotta go,” Gabby Lee said after a while.
    “I thought you was gonna clean?”
    “I gotta be alone for that,” she snapped. “Anyway, it’s a nice day out there and babies need some sun.”
    I handed my daughter back to the sour woman. Gabby lit up with Edna in her arms. That baby was so beautiful she could make a stone statue smile.
    When they left the phone started ringing. It rang for a full minute before the caller disconnected. After that I took the phone off the hook.
    I pulled a copy of Plato’s writings from my shelf and read the “Phaedo” by the sunlight coming in my living-room window. My eyes hazed over when he died on that stone bench. I wondered at how it would be to be a white man; a man who felt that he belonged. I tried to imagine how it would feel to give up my life because I loved my homeland so much. Not the hero’s death in the heat of battle but a criminal’s death.
    At eleven forty-seven a long black sedan parked in front of my house. Four men got out. Three of them were white men in business suits of various hues. The fourth was Quinten Naylor. They all got out of the car and looked around the neighborhood. They weren’t timid about being deep in Watts. That’s how I knew that they were all cops.
    Quinten led the procession up to my door. They were all big men. The kind of white man who is successful because he towers over his peers. Almost every boss I had ever had was a white man and he was either a tall man or very fat; intimidation being the first requirement for obedience on the job.
    I was at the door, behind a latched screen, when they mounted the porch.
    “Good morning, Easy,” Naylor said. He wasn’t smiling. “We tried to call. I brought some men who want to discuss the news with you.”
    “I got to be somewhere in forty-five minutes,” I said, not budging an inch.
    “Open up, Rawlins.” That came from a tight-lipped, Mediterranean-looking man in a two-piece silvery suit. I thought I recognized him but most cops blended into one brutal fist for me after a while.
    “You got some paper for me to read?” I asked, not impolite.
    “This is Captain Violette, Easy,” Quinten said. “He’s precinct captain.”
    “Oh,” I mocked surprise. “An’ these the other Pep Boys?”
    Violette was my height, around six-one. The man next to him, behind Naylor, wore a threadbare baby-blue suit. He was an inch shorter and blunt in his appearance. His pasty white face was meaty and his ears were large. Black hairs sprouted everywhere on him. From his eyebrows, from his ears. He pushed his hand past Naylor to my door. It was blunt and hairy too.
    “Hello, Mr. Rawlins. My name is Horace Voss. I’m a special liaison between the mayor’s office and the police.”
    I could see that there was no turning this crowd away, so I unlatched the screen and shook Mr. Voss’s hand.
    “Well, come on in if you want, but I ain’t even dressed yet, an’ I gotta be somewhere soon.”
    Five big men made my living room seem like a small public toilet. But I got them all sitting somewhere. I leaned against the TV cabinet.
    The man I hadn’t met yet was the tallest one of all. He wore a tan wash-and-wear