Thrown-away Child

remember it always smell maggoty and dead from wormy snake breath.”
    Perry was quiet for a few seconds, wishing he had his notebooks. He asked, “Sometimes, you think about hating Zeb Tilton?”
    “I sure do.” Sister crossed herself. “I like it if something happen to him.”
    “Yeah, for what he done to you.”
    “No, Perry. It don’t matter about that. Reason I hate Minister Tilton is he poison Mama and Daddy on me, convinced them they got to cast me out since I was spoil’t and unclean.”
    “Shoo!”
    “Minister Tilton, he tell Mama and Daddy he been hearing things about me—very bad things Auntie Hassie tell him. He say if not for me, why Larry wouldn’t be dead and Daddy never would’ve had to be locked up by the po-lice. Leastwise ’til the judge say to go on home, since he only defending his daughter girl.
    And he say Mama would’ve never gone a little round the fruitcake bend like she gone.”
    “Tilton right there to scoop you up, right? Take you in after your folks be so stupid they listen to a conjure man can’t keep his pants zipped. Shame on your people for turning their backs on a little girl.”
    “Like I’m good-for-nothing New Orleans dirt!“
    “Something heavy’s got to come down. That’s what I’m thinking.”
    “Perry, I don’t want nothing to happen to Minister Tilton like what Daddy did to his army buddy. But something.”
    “Something.” Perry stood up from the table. He took his empty soup bowl to the sink where he had seen his Aunt Violet wash up dishes after hundreds of Wednesday-night spaghetti banquets and just as many Friday-night bingo marathons. “Something,” he said again.
    “What about tomorrow?” Sister asked. “You got to be gone from the premises early. I be letting you back here come nightfall, but you can’t afford to let Minister Tilton or nobody else find you round here by daylight. You got someplace to go for the morning and afternoon?”
    “One place is my room at Aunt Vi’s, long’s it looks safe enough from the po-lice. I got to get my notebooks, to help me think.”
    “Yeah, think about something. I be worried for you.”
    “Don’t fret on me, little Connie.”
    “A’course I will. You and me, we the same. I don’t know much, but I sure know that.”
    “What you think you know?”
    “Somebody throw you away, too.”
     

TWENTY-FOUR
     

    Over the last several years of my career I have been variously dragged into investigations of a number of very bad crimes. I am talking about crimes so bad and bowel-shriveling that the spillage of human blood and tabloid ink reached parity.
    Back in ’89 there was the murder of a flimflam Harlem radio preacher. This reprehensible character turned out to be weirdly connected to big money real estate, which in Manhattan is a sea of green swamping everybody with monthly ransoms instead of rents.
    Then a couple of years later this squatter turned up one day in the park where I read the newspapers, an artist on the skids calling himself Picasso and jabbering about slaughter on Tenth Avenue. The jabber was considerably more than hot air, and I wound up on a roller-coaster ride through the dark maze of Picasso’s sorrowful life.
    After that, I thought I was pretty clever by leaving the country. I innocently went to Ireland to look up some of my own sorrowful family tree. Some innocence. My inquiries set off a chain of mindless political violence, ending with the discovery of the father I never knew—a man who had wasted his life on grand tribal revenge: a vision, as only an Irishman could see, to drown all the dogs of war.
    The year after that—after marrying Ruby, by the way, and being furloughed from the department to rethink my relationship with Mr. Johnnie Walker—I one day innocently phoned up my wife at her ad agency job and asked her out to lunch. I never made the date. Instead, I wound up in the bachelor apartment of a Madison Avenue tycoon who was very bloody, very naked, and very dead on account of his being nailed down to the kitchen floor. This was quite another dark ride, with one stop I will not soon forget—a nightclub for gay necrophiliacs called Devil’s Heaven.
    But now, here am I—innocently out of town around Thanksgiving time, meeting my wife’s big and colorful family. I am better than a thousand miles from New York, way down south in the land of dreams. Yet, still—I cannot look away. Not after what Claude Bougart has been telling me, not after learning about the