Thrown-away Child

young man in a black suit and a red boutonniere.
    “The chifforobe over there,” Ruby said, pointing to a cherrywood wardrobe closet that matched the bureau and bed, “and the other pieces, they all belonged to my grandmother. Mama had them shipped down from St. Francisville when she died. Of course, it all fit better in the big bedroom. Which is Perry’s now.“
    “What was this? Your room?”
    “Janny’s and mine.” Ruby turned her head to the window. “Out there is where we spent all our time.” I got up and looked out over the alley again. A skinny black dog lapped up oily water from a puddle. A cat watched from beneath a rusting car. A few units down the line, a pair of pregnant girls shared a crack pipe.
    “The neighborhood could use a ball field,” I said. “This is the projects, Irish. What we need are parents and social workers and condoms and sanitation crews and smaller classrooms and vaccinations and medical insurance and credit. And jobs. I mean real jobs with futures to them, not those casino jobs.“
    “Casinos?”
    “Oh, that’s the newest thing around here. It’s supposed to be the economic salvation of New Orleans.“
    “You don’t see it that way.”
    “Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich. That’s why politicians and preachers rarely denounce the scam.”
    Where I should have seen kids playing there was instead an expanse of weeds and broken glass. “Still, a ball field couldn’t hurt,” I said.
    “There used to be one. With wooden bleachers and Astroturf and everything. It was a gift to us kids from some rich ladies’ club.”
    “What happened to it?”
    “My friends and I tore apart the seats and set fire to the Astroturf.” Ruby paused. She had a hurt and angry look on her face, as if she was trying to start a fight. “Are you shocked, dear heart?”
    I lied and said I was.
    “In a thousand years, those ladies wouldn’t understand why we wrecked their ball field. What about you? Do you understand?”
    “The rich don’t need to be tough and rude. They don’t understand that these are social skills poor kids have to practice.”
    “Not bad for a blue-eyed choirboy.”
    “Your choirboy never saw Park Avenue until he was a grown-up cop.”
     

FIFTEEN

     
    The detective trade has taught me that a man in need of disappearance, given the briefest running time, will generally make quick and skillful choices about his burrow. Such determination is second nature to human beings.
    In our work as children, we play games meant to serve us through life; among the most vital is hide-and-seek. Maybe our biggest weakness as adults is that most of us have mastered only half the game. Hiding is instinctive, requiring virtually no thought. Few of us become seekers because most adults would sooner drop dead than think.
    I suppose I should be grateful. The New York Police Department pays me to find people who make themselves scarce, almost always for socially unacceptable reasons. Since I am not the brightest in my business, I do not need competition from any more thinking people than there already are.
    My mother-in-law, I deduced, was a thinker—therefore, a natural-born detective. Nobody had to tell her that a case is solved when a cop finds the sweet spot— that vulnerable place where hiding and seeking is one and the same. Mama just knew that.
    “Like I say, Perry spend a lot of nights laying bugeyed awake, wondering how cheating-heart people able to show their faces after they gone thrown away somebody.” Mama said this to me after Ruby had gone upstairs. “Anybody got imagination, they can see Perry Duclat is a man who lost his way from searching. Somebody lost like that ain’t too difficult to scare up. All’s you need to do is respect what he’s after, and get close to it.”
    Mama suggested I begin at the beginning, a little place in the tired-out part of town. An old neighborhood that gave Perry early memories of his pretty mother. Mama said, “Rose used to sing at this one saloon…”
    So I waited until Ruby fell to sleep, then changed my clothes: dry boxers, chinos, sneakers, T-shirt, and my Yankees cap. I took Huggy Louper’s card from my wallet and rang up his number from the kitchen telephone.
    True to his word —Whenever you need a lift, the dispatcher’ll have me to you, Huggy-on-the-spot — Louper and his taxi with the dashboard hula dancer soon came to collect me. While I waited for him on Mama’s front porch, I