Thrown-away Child

the screen, followed by film of the riverside power station—and finally new film, with Janice doing the voice-over.
    “This was the grisly scene this afternoon at the Paris Avenue dump when police discovered the bodies of twenty homeless, as yet unidentified black men. Police officials say the men were probably gunned down as they slept—shot with the so-called street-sweeper, the semiautomatic weapon favored by military commandos and drug dealers...”
    The news film then dissolved into side-by-side pictures of two smiling men, Hippo Giradoux and Zeb Tilton. The names appeared beneath their faces, as naturally as any prison-processing portrait I have ever seen.
    “Damn, she’s tearing them up!” Claude said. “Hell’s nothing but an iceberg now!”
     

FORTY-FIVE

     
    Sister’s eyes were closed. Her delicate face was up-tilted to an oval window—her precious stained-glass Jesus. Circled doves formed a plumed halo around the head of the Son of God.
    Despite the commotion all around her, Sister betrayed not the slightest facial expression. Sunlight streaked through the windowed eyes of Jesus and shone down upon her.
    Then quite suddenly, she was—what? Seized by the spirits? Sister trembled, as in the throes of sexual frenzy. Minister Tilton had told her the first time she knew such a frenzy, “You just met up with the sweet-assed tremble, my lady-child.”
    Then, as suddenly, Sister collapsed into serenity.
    Minutes passed. The congregation held its collective breath. Finally, Sister rose from the bench to stand, her body now moving as smoothly as water up a stream. She saw nothing of the people in front of her.
    She snapped her neck left and right, tossing back beaded plaits of black hair. Her face glistened with sweat.
    Sister raised her hands. Her eyes dropped shut again behind heavy lids. And she chanted:
     
    “Danse Calinda, boudoum, boudoum
    Danse Calinda, boudoum, boudoum...!”
     
    Then, in great bursts of silver gray mist shooting up from stream jets built into the floorboards for just such very moments of high religious drama, Minister Zebediah Tilton appeared.
    Ascending on a hydraulic lift from a pit below the raised altar stage, he was resplendent in a shining black robe, trimmed at the neck and sleeves in sable and covered with gris-gris.
    I turned to Ruby and whispered in her ear, “I can tell you now I was worried Tilton might not show.“
    “Janny got him good with the insinuations on her broadcast. He had to be here. Otherwise he’d be admitting guilt.”
    “Perry’s clued into everything, right? About the Jeep, the gunmen—?”
    “Everything. We’ve got all the angles rounded off. So what do you have to say to me?”
    “You’ve been a very good tin wife.”
    “Thanks, sexy.”
    I looked past Ruby, and past Mama sitting on the other side of her. Claude, sitting at the end of the pew, caught my look. I gave him the nod he wanted to see. Claude nodded back, his signal to me that his buddies in the Ninth Ward had made a successful dawn raid on Mueller and his Jeep. I had little doubt that Claude’s men had employed unusually persuasive methods to convince Mueller to give up Eckles and LeMay.
    Ruby and I turned and nodded at Teddy the Torch, two pews back. He mouthed a response. Fabulous!
    Minister Tilton beamed at his congregants and then knelt before the altar table as Sister’s chanting grew in volume and urgency.
    He crossed himself, then again faced his flock. He rapped the floor with a gold-topped ebony cane. And when the worshipers hushed, he reached into his pocket for a silver Tiffany lighter—to fire the wick of a single candle on the table, shaped like a crucifix, and black as Minister Tilton’s robe.
    Then he sang, and the dark wattles below his neck quivered to the stamping feet of the worshipers. Minister Tilton’s forehead beaded with sweat. He stopped and raised up his hammy arms, commanding his people, “Ladies and gentleman, this hear-uh church of ours... this glow -ree-us Land of Dreams Tabernacle... we show an open door to everybody! Yes sir, yes ma’am—yeah, you right, I’m talking about everybody/ Doubters and pouters, shouters and shiners.” A-men!
    “But whosoever shall be- uh with us upon this beauty-ful morning... Oh La, please—you must understand!”
    Understand!
    “You all got one big dew- tee in common today, don’t you know.”
    “That’s right... Tell it, brother...!”
    “You all got to join me, hear-uh? We must lift up our