Thrown-away Child

not avert their eyes. Not even the old ones with the lacy fans and their heads covered in tignons, for the figure before them was a perfect masculine beauty.
    He raised his hands, clenched in huge fists, and cried out over a church fallen to deathly quiet:
    “I am Willis Flagg! I am Willis Flagg!”
    From a pew near the widow Violet Flagg, a trembling Miss Hassie stood up, and shrieked, “Jesus, Mary, Joseph—it’s him! Oh La, it’s him... !”
     
     

ONE

     
    You do not crap where you eat.
    This and some other counsel I tried to impart to inspector Tomasino Neglio the last time I saw him. Which was yesterday at noon when the two of us had it out in his office downtown over the little matter of how in God’s name I can do right by anything holy in staying with a department that contains the likes of Sergeant King Kong Kowalski, who has an arrest warrant face, meat breath, and fingers like rolled quarters. (Which is to mention only one choice example of a wrong number who carries the NYPD-approved 9-millimeter semiautomatic while I myself am still twisting slowly on the rubber gun squad because I have been overly fond in the past of a certain Mr. Johnnie Walker.) I mention God because the department chaplain, Father John Sheehan, was also on hand for yesterday’s unpleasantness.
    After speaking my piece, I might have been slightly out of breath and wild-eyed. This I figured from the suspicious way Neglio and the padre looked at me, like maybe they were thinking they ought to toss the net and hustle me off to the puzzle house. When all I did was say what needed saying, for crying out loud.
    “Let’s all go to lunch, someplace nice with tablecloths and clean forks. It should be a big change in your life.” This the inspector suggested to me by way of changing the subject on my mind. “Afterwards— you want, I can get my driver to take you uptown. You can see my own family doc. He’ll give you some pills. Make you feel better, make you all loose and lovely.”
    “The good father being here,” I said, waving a thumb toward Sheehan, who sat cross-legged in a chair by a potted date palm clipping his nails, “I won’t mention the graphics I am thinking of. So you should imagine for yourself exactly where I would tell you and the family croaker you should insert the goodtime pills.”
    Neglio sighed. He got up off his maroon wingback leather chair and stepped over to one of his two banks of windows overlooking the New York harbor from twenty floors above the ruckus of Manhattan. These windows are the kind that actually open, the big tilt-in jobs that make it easy for cleaning, and also for jumping. Neglio yanked open one of the windows. There was a rush of harbor-soaked wind, and he said to me, “You know, I got this bona fide concern about your state of mind.”
    “How’s that?”
    The inspector did not exactly answer me. What he said was more in the way of a challenge.
    “If you don’t lighten up,” Neglio said, looking out the window, then back at me, “you should give the department a freaking break and go ahead—do the brain dive.”
    “What do you make of this?” I asked, turning to Sheehan. “Inspector Neglio here, he’s one of us. I don’t mean a shamrock, but anyhow Catholic. A good Catholic suggesting suicide? Isn’t that a cardinal sin?” Sheehan said nothing. Instead he brushed a pile of little crescent-shaped cuttings from his puffy lap, then started on his cuticles.
    “Father?”
    “I heard you, son.” Sheehan straightened his black horn-rimmed glasses and looked up at me. He sighed and stroked his beard, too thin to cover up the dimples. “A lot of devout Catholics can’t honestly regard the idea of suicide as being so terrible. For instance, on rainy winter Sundays when there’s a lot of boredom a man may be well advised to carry a gun. Not to shoot himself, but to know exactly that he’s always making a choice.”
    “A very life-affirming sentiment,” I said. “As a priest, you’d make an excellent grave digger.” Sheehan only shrugged. Then he went back to his self-inflicted manicure.
    “Let’s get down to it,” Neglio said, highly impatient now. He closed up the window. He went back to his desk and lifted a crisp cuff to consult his Rolex. I also own a brand of wristwatch ending with the letters ex. Mine, however, I selected from a plastic display case on a little rotating stand on a Lamston’s counter back in the days when there was such a thing as