Thrown-away Child

like something from the Huey Long days. Claude had hardly prepared me for the splendor. Many New York politicians of my acquaintance would take one look at the elephant-leg desk and the velvet throne and the potted magnolias and all the booze bottles and flags and framed tributes and devoutly believe they had died and gone to Tammany Heaven.
    “Hey now, who in the gott-damn hell let you in?” Hippo protested, in the process letting fly some warm pieces of his lunch.
    The alderman was seated behind his desk wearing a parachute-size napkin tucked into his shirt collar and spooning down a dish of jambalaya as Vonny and I strode across the Oriental rug toward him. The jambalaya smelled good, but I could not imagine it tasting better than Mama’s from the other night. Sausage juice covered Hippo’s lower lip.
    “Alderman, we are here to register complaint about the New Orleans police department,” I announced. “Also I want to use your telephone. Just a local call.”
    “Wait—what the...?” Sergeant LeMay was bewildered beyond finishing his question.
    “What’s the matter, Vonny?” I asked, turning to him.
    “Ain’t so, ain’t so!” Vonny addressed his denials to Hippo and looked as if he might work up some color yet. Vonny pulled off his panama and wiped his head in exasperation. Also he opened his coat and put his hand on the revolver hanging off his belt.
    “I’m telling the truth,” I said. “I want to complain about the cops, and I have a call to make.”
    “Hold on now, the both of you!” Hippo’s eyes turned to mean slits, like a bulldog protecting a bone. He asked Vonny, “That’s your name, is it—Vonny?”
    “Sergeant Lavond LeMay.” Vonny nodded his paste white head. “Central station detective squad.”
    “The sarge looks a little peaked, don’t you think?” I asked Hippo. “That makes two problems Vonny has with color.”
    “You talk funny,” Hippo said. “You some kind of Yankee?”
    “This kind.” I laid out my gold shield on Hippo’s desk. He picked it up, read it, shoved it back toward me.
    “What you doing strayed so far outside your briar patch?”
    “My wife—”
    “This New York fella, he claim he’s a old pal of yours, Hippo,” said Vonny, interrupting. He was quite excited, which for him was evidenced by a sort of nicotine yellow shade creeping up his neck and through his cheeks. Any other white man would have been purple and scarlet by now. “Tried to get real buddy-buddy with me on a lying basis. Even told me I should call him by his nickname—Hock.”
    “Hock? As in to cough, to blow chunks?” Hippo asked this with mockery playing across his juicy lips.
    “Gott-damn Yankee, he tricked me,” Vonny said. “Then he used me to get past your receptionist out there.”
    “Your sergeant’s slow, but he catches on,” I said to Hippo.
    Hippo removed the napkin from his collar and wiped his hands. He cleared away the half-empty jambalaya bowl and folded his flabby arms on the desktop. “Tell me—what’s the specific nature of your complaint, Detective Hockaday?”
    “Specifically, your cops are pigs.”
    “Pigs?” Hippo chuckled, making his amusement sound malevolent. “I ain’t heard the po-lice called pigs since the days we had all them hairy-headed hippies running wild.”
    “This guy, he’s a gott-damn communist hippie and a gott-damn lying Yankee!” Vonny turned from Hippo to me. Clutching his revolver, he said, “Tell you what pig is, you hippie, you. Pig stands for pride, integrity, and guts!”
    “Take your hand off the gun and button that coat of yours over your pig gut,” I said. “And try to understand something—this is between Hippo and myself now.”
    “Go ahead, Vonny, relax,” Hippo said. “This man ain’t going bite us.”
    Vonny did as he was told.
    “Ever since I got here the other day,” I said to Hippo, “I have been hearing disturbing things from the mouths of your officers.”
    “I am a lowly alderman, Detective Hockaday. Police bidness hasn’t got anything directly to do with me.
    “I hear otherwise.”
    “Is that so?” Hippo gave me a measured look. If he and I were in the ring, it would have been the kind of look boxers give each other in the early rounds, when they are jabbing and testing.
    Giradoux could have thrown me out of his office right then and there, and that was the risk I ran. But I was gambling on his being a fighter, like most long-lasting politicians. No fighter was going to step