Thrown-away Child

get along fine.”
    I thought a perverse thought: I like New Orleans, in spite of the mossy heat and palpable sorrow; I like a town where a streetcar carries desire; I like a place where language hangs resplendent in the air, like fresh laundry on the line. I could live here—in the city that Ruby fled.
    Napoleon Avenue finally came up and I had to leave the streetcar. I made a tent with the pages of the Times-Picayune and covered my head against the rain that had begun splattering down. It was the fat' dropped kind of rain. By the time I had walked the six blocks over to Magazine Street, and despite the sheltering arms of oak bowers along the way, everything from my chest down was drenched.
    I stood beneath the Blossom Cinema marquee and shook myself. The newspaper I tossed into the gutter like it was soggy macaroni.
    A familiar car pulled up.
    The driver leaned across the front seat and rolled down the passenger window, releasing chow mein and cigarette fumes. Claude Bougart, in nice dry civilian clothes, was drinking nice hot coffee from a Styrofoam cup.
    “Afternoon, Hock,” he said. “How’s it going?”
    My shoes made squishy noises as I stepped up to Claude’s car and leaned into the window.
    “What are you doing, following me around?” I asked Claude. I did not feel friendly toward him. If he was tailing me in his car, he at least could have given me a lift from Napoleon Avenue and saved me from a soaking.
    “Had to make sure, man.”
    “Of what?”
    “That somebody else ain’t after you.”
    “Who’d want to be?”
    “Po-lice grapevine has it that you been doing some powerful riling up since I saw you last.”
    “That’s what they call it?”
    “Brother Hockaday, stop a minute, think on the species of po-lice you been around today. Try to read by their dim lights.”
    “I see what you mean. By the way, where were you?”
    “My name’s Paul, and it’s between y’all.”
    “Sure, Claude, I get it.” I was now feeling even Wore unfriendly toward Bougart. “You don’t want to get involved when a platoon of flatheads straight out °f Deliverance gets the drop on me. You don’t mind
    it that I’m doing your heavy lifting. But when the shooting starts you’d just as soon be out of town.“
    “Oh now, I wouldn’t say—”
    “For the love of Christ, Claude, I’m standing here in the damn rain! You don’t even care about that!“
    “Aw, man, you got me all wrong.” Bougart waved me back, then pushed open the door so I could slide in. Sopping wet clothes would not be the worst things that had sat on that front seat.
    Claude handed me a wad of leftover paper napkins from a Pizza Hut box on the dashboard. I used them to dry my face and hands. “I got towels and a duffel bag in the trunk,” he said. “Never know when a rain like this’ll sneak up on you, catch you unawares. Bag’s got sneakers and jeans and a T-shirt. I guess we about the same size more or less.”
    “More or less.” I said that coldly and Claude heard it the same.
    “Look, I’m only being careful, okay? Sure you right, Neil, I need you to front me. Right tool for the right job. You get the picture?”
    “Do I ever.”
    “Picture’s sharply black and white, you know? Black and white’s that double feature you almost saw.”
    “Almost?”
    “We got us more business.”
    Claude put the car in gear and we drove off.
    I changed my mind about liking the city that Ruby had fled.

    The news of two more MOMS murders was all over town. Ruby had heard the first report—the slaughter of fifteen black boys living in the old Power & Light substation in back of the Di Moin —while she finished scanning through Perry’s journals before leaving her mother’s house. Then as soon as she reached City Hall, it seemed every radio in every office was turned to news of the butchery in the old dump off Paris Avenue.
    In the records room of City Hall, Ruby found the cross-referenced matches she was searching for. It took some serious digging to backlog the personal identities hiding behind innocuous company names, but Ruby was dogged.
    She clipped notes into a looseleaf binder she had picked up at the K&B pharmacy on her way downtown, then left City Hall. She needed to walk and think things through. And she was hungry, right then and there in the middle of the day, which for Ruby was somewhat unusual. At home in New York she would have fruit or a croissant in the morning; if she had a business luncheon, it was all she