Thrown-away Child

building. When we were walking off, he asked, “Ever see anything like it up there to New York?“
    “I’ve seen a lot of messes. What do you do about cleaning up after something like this, Sergeant?“
    “Fire department’s fixing to drop by with some long hooks. That way we can fish out the slop, cover it up with lime to minimize the stench.”
    “What about notification?”
    “Notify who? Them boys got kin, ain’t none of them know about up to now. If it’d be up to me, I’d just torch the whole bunch right on site here. Sounds cold, but it’d save time and money. Like I told you, Hock, life’s cheap to these people.”
    “Yeah, you told me.”
    Vonny and I walked for a minute without talking.
    “Oh, Vonny—I forgot the most important thing.“
    “Well, what’s that?”
    “My friend Hippo asked if you’d care to join us for lunch today.” Another whopping lie. I looked back toward the power station. A fire truck was slowly making its way up from the road toward the crime site. “But with all this on your plate, I guess the alderman would understand if you had to take a rain check. Too bad for you, Vonny. We’ve got reservations at the Commander’s Palace.”
    “You do?”
    “Well, you know—Hippo does.”
    “The man has clout.”
    “That’s an interesting word.”
    “Clout?”
    “Look here, Vonny. Do you think you could delegate some responsibility? I just know that Hippo would love to hear about what’s happened here direct from your lips.” I took a look at my wristwatch. “Got to have your answer now, or I’ll be late.”
    “No problem.”
    Vonny raised a gloved hand, signaling the same outer line uniform I had spoken with earlier, the one scratching inside his pants. He was scratching outside his crotch now. He stopped scratching and ran over on the double. Vonny told him to go square his absence with the senior detective.
    Then Vonny said to me, “Okay, let’s go downtown. We’ll take my car. Jeez, I’d like to take a shower.” Vonny lifted an arm and tucked his albino face into the pit. “Shit, I believe I can smell them niggers on me.”
    I put some money into Huggy Louper’s shirt pocket when I walked past his taxicab on the way to Vonny’s unmarked Chrysler. Huggy was dozing in the driver’s seat.
    A largely unsmoked cigarette had burned clear down to Huggy’s orange fingers. Then it must have been snuffed out by the calluses. The hula dancer on the dashboard shivered daintily in a frisson of air-conditioning. On the other hand, I was growing hot under the collar.
    More importantly, I could see in the dark.
     

THIRTY-SEVEN

     
    “Where we going to do the meet-up with Hippo— right down to Commander’s Palace?” Vonny LeMay turned the car onto Canal Street at the Moon Walk end.
    “I’m supposed to come straight back to his office first,” I said. “But if you want, Vonny, you could drop me off at City Hall, then go wait for us to turn up later at the restaurant.”
    “No, no. That’s all right. That’s very okay. I don’t mind accompanying you up to the Hall.”
    I figured as much.
    “Well, I just thought—you’ve probably been up there in Hippo’s office so many times over the years. I mean, you know—the way Hippo goes on and on about you.”
    “He talks about me?”
    “Sure he does. Just the other day he was telling some people how you were handling... well, let’s say, the bad element of this fair city. Know what I mean?”
    “Niggers.”
    “What else?”
    Every so often I would steal a side glance at Vonny as we crept along through the crush of midday traffic. He had removed his panama, which was sitting on the vinyl seat between us. The material of the hat was straw, bleached down to bone white. Vonny’s large bare head was whiter yet. Even the veins running along his skull below a wispy corona of transparent fuzz were white, and I thought it possible that the blood coursing through those veins was as milky as his eyes.
    I developed a simple-minded theory that seemed appropriate, given the simple mind sitting next to me. Vonny LeMay despised African-Americans for the understandable reason that every black man, woman, and child had something he never would have—color.
    We finally reached Rampart Street. Vonny turned left onto Poydras, the palm-lined thoroughfare where the city’s banks and oil companies do business from office silos made with a lot of chrome and mirrored glass, perfect for deflecting intrusions of light. Vonny