Thrown-away Child

hauled out the dead guy.”
    “Where is this interferin’ Negro?”
    “The boys, they say he run off.”
    “Get a description?”
    Fontana consulted his notes, then started to speak.
    He stopped when Hartman walked up behind him and tapped his shoulder.
    Hartman was accompanied by a large black woman in a green-and-blue polka-dot dress and a wide-brimmed straw garden hat. She was somewhere in her sixties with a boxy figure, a stern expression, and skin as wine dark as the river on a summer’s night.
    “I think we maybe got us a witness,” Hartman said, grinning at the other detectives. He ignored Officer Bougart. Hartman used a handkerchief to wipe perspiration off the back of his neck.
    Then he said to the detectives, “Gentlemen, this here’s Miss Hassie Pinkney. She lives right up over the levee in the lane off Tchoupitoulas.” Hartman said to Miss Hassie, “Now, tell these men just what you told me, Mama.”
    “I ain’t your mama.”
    “Sorry, Miz Pinkney.” There was a smirk in Hartman’s apology, the kind that would take another generation of Hartmans before possibly disappearing.
    “ ’Pology accepted. Now, I seen that devil Perry Duclat run out of here like he was bein’ chased by all the angels of Christendom.” Hassie Pinkney waved her long fingers as she said this, then stepped around the blocky Detective Mueller for a gawk at Tyler’s corpse. She took her time gawking, then said, “La yes, I see it right from my window. Perry come barrelin’ up from the levee, pass my house, and disappear down around to Tchoupitoulas Street. Next thing, everybody’s down here nosing ’round.”
    Mueller asked, “You know where we might find this Perry Duclat, Miz Pinkney?”
    ‘Well, he stay by Miss Violet’s.”
    That’d be exactly who and where?”
    Miss Hassie happily provided Violet Flagg’s address in the St. Bernard housing project. Detective Hartman noted it down for Mueller.
    “What’s this Duclat boy look like, ma’am?” Mueller further asked.
    “Ain’t a boy. He’s a man.”
    “Sorry, ma’am.”
    “Shame y’all have to be ’pologizing so much.”
    “Suppose you just tell me what Perry Duclat looks like.”
    “Well, he’s one handsome fella with no right to bein’ handsome. Tall, somewheres between forty-five and fifty. Got a straight nose and a thin face and nice wide shoulders. Built gorgeous, like Billy Dee. He got the good hair, too.”
    Mueller turned to Fontana. “Sound like what you got off those kids?”
    “On the button.”
    “All right, I think we know what we got to do now to close up,” Mueller said to the other detectives. “Thanks for the cooperation,” he said to Miss Hassie. To Officer Bougart, he said, “See you around, Booger.”
    The crime scene mop-up would be handled by the Orleans Parish medical examiner’s crew, along with the listless detail of forensic cops. Detectives Mueller, Eckles, Fontana, and Hartman had their own routine to follow. And so they left, with purpose in their step if in no particular haste.
    Claude Bougart, for whom fate had perhaps finally assigned a shapeless intent, had no such clear idea of what he would do next. Only that something needed doing. At long last, something.
     

NINE

     
    “How many times I done warned you?”
     “Oh, many times, Miss Hassie. Yes indeed, many times. That is certainly not at issue.” Reverend Zebediah Tilton laughed, and tipped back his drink until the glass went empty of Scotch whisky. He sucked an ice cube into his mouth, savoring the trace liquor.
    “I tol’ you!” Hassie Pinkney said. She looked away from Tilton, disgusted by his evident pleasure in demon liquor. “He’s been peeping at me with them two devil eyes of his.”
    “Well now, I don’t expect you got to worry about that anymore now that he’s flown the coop.” Tilton winked at the girl in the white robe sitting to the right of his desk. Sister Constance Ritchie gave him no reaction. Her coffee-brown face remained impassive, her ands remained folded together in her lap. Tilton turned away, and asked Miss Hassie, “Just how did you say Perry was spying on you?”
    Every time I come by the window to take me a look over to Mr. Newcombe’s, right there he was! He be looking up at me, laughing like a fool.”
    “But, what was he doing exactly?”
    “Loitering all over the back porch is what. Writing in a pad. All the time writing. Or drawing. Else he’s reading a book. Never the Good Book!”
    “Sounds