Thrown-away Child

Anything else?“
    “Tell Vi I ain’t about to check out like Clete; I ain’t going to die a zero. What I do going to leave a mark.“
    “I wish you’d—”
    “What’s that coming?”
    I turned at the sound behind me, hearing it a split second after Perry had.
    A speeding engine, ratcheting gears. A Jeep with three men crowded into the front seat, bearing down on me like I was a target. Something wrong with the jouncing faces, something untrue about their colors.
    On instinct, I looked down from the faces in the windshield to the Jeep’s front bumper, where a license Plate should have been. I looked back at the faces, trying to figure out what was wrong....
    I had no time to make sense of it.
    Not with gunfire.
     

SIXTEEN

     
    “His weekly press conference is fixing to close, looks like to me. Either that or the bourbon’s finally run out.”
    Having thus informed the surprise visitor, the ball of blond frizz sitting at the reception desk glanced through the open archway where a mahogany door used to separate an outer office from private quarters. Miss Frizz turned back, cheerfully snapping her pink wad of chewing gum and waving a handful of Press-on Nails in the direction of some chairs and a table full of old magazines. “You want, officer, take a load off while you wait.”
    “Thanks just the same,” Claude Bougart said, “but I got a fine view of the proceedings right where I’m standing.”
    “Whatever bones your crawfish.”
    Under less pressured circumstances, he might have responded to Miss Frizz’s colorful remark with a friendly laugh. He could surely use a laugh now.
    Claude Bougart was as tense as a shackled man in suppers and a shaved head on his way to a plug-in chair.
    But he could reveal no anxiety.
    He had to appear confident and controlled because something had to be done ... at long last, something. Claude Bougart was the only person he knew who could make it even begin to happen. He wished he knew for certain what it was. He wished he could employ the oldest cop trick in the book, knowing the answers beforehand to the questions asked.
    But Officer Bougart was in a most unfamiliar darkness. And so nervous he wondered if he was actually something far beyond nervous; he wondered if he was out of his mind for being where he was, sure of so little, gambling so much.
    He could be certain of only two things—dead certain, so to speak. The first was, nearly nothing murky about New Orleans escaped the closely held knowledge of Alderman Giradoux. Second was, the only way to operate at an advantage with a man aware of the fact he knows something useful to nearly everybody was by means of the second oldest cop trick in the book: namely, Bougart would have to hide his own motivations by making Hippo strut.
    To do that required being slightly impudent with a powerful white man. Which is why Bougart now had to question the state of his sanity, and the odds of all that could happen to his career in the next few minutes. Which is why he was stricken, standing where he was in Miss Frizz’s outer office, gazing in at the circus of Hippo’s press conference.
    He beheld a vast inner sanctum of New Orleans Political might, amassed over four decades. A stage signer at the Saenger Theatre over on Canal Street could well have arranged such a setting, worthy of an opera about the Kingfish himself, Huey Long. An enormous desk with ornately carved oak elephants for legs occupied a sort of thrust stage. Behind this was a thronelike chair with red velvet backing and broad arms that ended up as elephant heads for handles, with genuine ivory tusks pointing halfway down to the Oriental rug on the floor. This stage was surrounded by a sort of political cabaret, with circles of little chairs huddled around small tables, hospitably cluttered with liquor bottles and highball glasses. Floor-to-ceiling leaded-glass windows were heavily draped. The walls were laden with hundreds of ribboned citations, and signed photographs of high-profile pols and low-profile operators. Potted magnolia trees were everywhere, as were all the flags ever flown over the state of Louisiana—Spanish, French, Union, Confederate, and Union again. Everybody in the place seemed to be smoking cigars the size of kitchen pipes.
    Center stage was the great man, Alderman Hippocrates Beauregard Giradoux. He usually sat behind his imposing desk, alternately pounding the top with his chunky fists or leaning back in his throne. If his mood was