Thrown-away Child

Eckles. Detective dueller hitched up trousers that kept slipping down around a protruding underbelly.
    “Yes, sir, Ricky Ray,” Mueller said to Detective Eckles, loud enough so all the neighborhood folks billing around behind the yellow crime scene tape could hear. “This here unfortunate fellow, he ain’t going to be doing no more of his old bad bidness round Tchoupitoulas Street.”
    Ricky Ray Eckles used the pointy toe of a snakeskin boot to poke at the soggy lump of the late Cletus Tyler, whose body had been dragged out from beneath the jetty and was now sprawled faceup on the walking path along the river. He said to Mueller, “Butt ugly ain’t he, Paul?”
    Some forensics officers, all of them white, were crouched inside the tiny cement crevice where Tyler had spent his final night in mortal violence. They flashed lights around the dank black hole, searching! the dirt and gravel for homicide clues. They did not appear to be especially interested in what they were doing.
    A mobile unit TV news van was busily setting up for live coverage via satellite. A male reporter with a microphone in his hand was having a female assistant spray his corn-colored hair. Next to the van was another vehicle, this one belonging to the Orleans Parish medical examiner. A doctor with a black bag and two beefy morgue workers with a gurney waited for stage directions from the television field producer before stepping down to the corpse to give it the usual going-over.
    Up above the jetty and the walkway, Officer Claude Bougart of the uniformed squad stood with the neighbors who had clustered around the levee for a look at the dead body. Like the lookers, Officer Bougart was black.
    One of the lookers, an angry young man whose head was covered by a flat-topped kufi in the pan-African colors of red, black and green, demanded of Officer Bougart, “How come you stand here let that pig talk his trash right in our faces?”
    Bougart turned his back to his white colleagues so as not to be heard. He pressed fingers to his lips and said to the young man in the kufi, “Keep it to yourself, my brother. You make an issue about what these cops are saying, it’s not going to help me or you in the long run. I’m trying to work this my own way. Follow me?” The young man shoved his hands in his pockets. He kept quiet, but Bougart knew it was not likely to last. He had seen a lot of hotheads in his police career. And how cops like Eckles and Mueller took pains to needle hotheads—outspoken black men being particular favorites—into giving them an excuse to haul out the leather saps.
    “Stinks real bad, too,” Eckles said of the late Cletus Tyler, needling hotheads with big ears. “Somethin’ far and away beyond the usual. He stinks awful as a month-old boiled cabbage.”
    “Naw, I haven’t met the cabbage ever reeked so bad’s this one.” Mueller put a handkerchief over his nose and mouth and knelt down on one knee next to Tyler’s body.
    Tyler’s deflated neck had been slashed along two parallel tracks. So deep were the slash wounds that it appeared his head could fall off at the slightest manipulation, like a loose drumstick on a roast turkey. The flesh between the wound tracks had become a raised abrasion the size and shape of a night crawler. The blood that filled his mouth and nostrils was gelled, globs of it halting further flow from these orifices. Somewhat fresher, brighter blood trickled out from his earlobes and tear ducts. The coup de grâce, so it appeared, was a high-velocity bullet hole that had ripped open the left half of his chest, from heart to his shoulder blade.
    A third wound reddened Tyler’s abdomen, which was covered by his blood-soaked coat and shirt.
    Mueller asked Eckles, “What in hell you suppose’s under the shirt?”
    “Only one way of finding out. Tear it back; let’s have a gander.”
    Mueller removed a pair of surgical gloves from his pocket and put them on. Then he pulled the coattails away from Tyler’s drained body, along with the bloodied shirt. Wet buttons skittered across the walkway.
    “Hoo-whee!” Mueller whistled. The lookers could see only the mess of blood in the area of Cletus Tyler’s waist, but not the small black wound enveloped by his navel. Mueller called up to Officer Bougart, “Hey there—Booger! Come on here for a minute. Want to ask you something.”
    The hothead tore off his kufi and thwacked it against his leg in disgust. He grabbed Officer Bougart’s sleeve, and