Thrown-away Child

the desk. He held an iced tumbler of Maker’s Mark to his sweating brow, and motioned for the policeman to approach.
    “Step right on up here, Booger.” The alderman moved the tumbler to his plump lips, and sipped noisily. “You know I maintain an open-door policy, this time of day anyhow.”
    “There’s no door at all, sir.”
    “That’s the stuff.”
    Bougart walked up to Giradoux’s desk and stood in front of it. He might have been offended by Hippo calling him “Booger” but instead was glad. It had made him angry, and his anger was calming.
    “What can I do for you, son?” Giradoux pointed to a leather club chair at the side of his desk. Bougart declined.
    “You and I ever met, sir?”
    “I believe not.”
    “How’d you know they call me Booger?”
    “I make it my business to know all sorts of things.“
    “So I hear.”
    “Big stories are made out of little scraps of hearsay most folks would count as nothing at all.” Hippo sipped more bourbon. Poker-faced, he studied the policeman in front of him. Without the aid of bourbon, Claude Bougart was doing the same with Alderman Giradoux. Both men realized it of the other, and how their words had a contested quality.
    Hippo said, “That’s how come I’m in the habit of listening around. Little bits of chatter and gossip and resentments, they do have a way of accumulating.“
    “I’ll remember that. It’s good philosophy for a Policeman.”
    “You want a drink, son?”
    “Another day.”
    “Later it shall be.”
    “That was quite a performance.”
    “My little old weekly press conference?”
    “Don’t you ever worry those reporters are going to catch on that all you’re giving them’s just a bag of wind?”
    “Son, I could take that as an insult. But I’m going to slough it off and pass along something helpful to you.“
    “What’s that?”
    “Never worry about reporters wising up. If reporters were acrobats, they’d all be dead.”
    “I’ll remember that, too. Thanks.”
    “You’re most welcome, Booger. Now, you care to state your business?”
    “Police work, sir. You know—life and death, good and evil.”
    Hippo said nothing. He finished off the tumbler of bourbon, opened a desk drawer, pulled out a fresh bottle, and poured himself another drink. What in blazes is this boy driving at? He looked up.
    Bougart was staring hard at Giradoux, hard enough to force an expression on the alderman’s face he knew to be close to the surface. It was only there for a heartbeat, but Bougart saw it. He had seen it since boyhood: the way a white man crinkles his eyes in even the mildest confrontation with a black man, an expression of combined confusion and contempt. Any halfway observant black man knew when he had a white man on edge.
    Further calmed, and pleased with himself, Officer Bougart changed his mind about sitting. He lowered himself into the club chair, took off his stiff-brimmed policeman’s cap, and set it in his lap. “Know what I wonder about sometimes, sir?”
    “No, I do not.”
    “Well, how do I say it? By a policeman’s lights, the world’s a very sick and crazy place.”
    “I expect lots of folks see by that light.”
    “Yes, sir, probably so. For instance, you ever notice the violence in a lot of your respectable faces?“
    “Look here, Booger—”
    Bougart interrupted by tossing his head back and laughing, so long and deep that Hippo could see the little brown freckles that splotched the pink roof of Bougart’s mouth. When he was finished laughing, Bougart said, “I wonder if we can truly know whether or not at this very minute you and I are sitting in a madhouse.”
    Alderman Giradoux rolled his eyes. “Sometime fairly soon, you want to come to the point?”
    “All right, Hippo.” Bougart saw the crinkle in Giradoux’s eye again. It stayed there longer this time. “We found us a murder this afternoon, sir. Down by the Tchoupitoulas Street levee.”
    “You calling that an unusual occurrence for the neighborhood?”
    “That’s a funny question.”
    “Who’s laughing, son?”
    Bougart thought, There it was—the edge to Hippo’s voice to match the uneasy expression. He asked, “You ever heard of a con from Angola name of Cletus Tyler?”
    “That’d be the dead man?”
    “Know him?”
    “Know of him anyways. That boy hangs at Shug’s over to Jackson Avenue, along with about a thousand other criminals I’ve known of.”
    Claude Bougart let the boy pass. “So you’re familiar with