Thrown-away Child

cottage in the lane and the hard story of Perry and Rose. Certainly not after being ambushed.
    And I know, I know. I am walking straight into the snake pit. I hate snakes! Where have I heard that before?
    I have just spent half an hour in a car—funky with f au de cop —talking about a very bad crime somehow Evolving mutants, orphans, and misfits. And I am deep into it with a guy who is so much like myself I Wonder if maybe we were separated at birth.
    He is on the outs with his department; my situation exactly, due to this negative attitude of mine on the subject of King Kong Kowalski. We each have nicknames that could not be considered genteel. Mine of course is Hock, as in to spit up; his is Booger, as in... well, booger. We have the same taste in women namely Ruby. (For once in my life I got the girl. I am not going to feel sorry for Claude on this particular score.)
    Our business just about complete so far as it could go for now, Claude and I step out of the car. I think over what on earth I am going to say when I have to break it to Ruby that I am on a case somewhat outside my jurisdiction.
    Then Claude lays it on some more, which right away I know pretty much blows my chances that night for sleeping the sleep of the good.
    “It wasn’t just one guy dead today,” Claude says heavily as I am about to go back inside Mama’s house and the bosom of my new and colorful family. “It was two.”
    “As in two and counting?”
    “Could be.”
    “What are we calling the second guy?”
    “He’s a kid, the type who can’t afford a name.”
    It is late and my head hurts and I do not want to spend another half hour talking about bowel-shriveling topics such as kids too poor for names. I let the question pass for now, along with the one about mutants, orphans, and misfits.
    “Perry’s the lead on Clete Tyler’s murder, but he’s out of sight someplace,” I say. “Any lead on the noname?”
    “Just one.” Claude reaches inside his blazer and pulls out a notebook and a ballpoint pen. He starts writing. “All I got’s a street and a name. Get to the street, ask anybody you see about the name and they point out the house for you. Meet me there tomorrow, early in the morning so we sure to catch him. Say about seven.“
    “Meet you? You can’t pick me up?”
    “Out of my way, Neil. Ain’t you got wheels?”
    There was always Huggy. “No problem.” I take the slip of paper Claude tears out of his notebook. “The no-name kid. How was he killed?”
    “Gunshot.”
    “Find out the caliber. Let me know.”
    “Why?”
    “I have my reasons.”
    I leave Claude wondering and head up to the house.
    But when I turn at the top of the steps and look back, now I can’t help but feel sorry for Claude. He is standing there on the sidewalk by his car, watching me go inside the house where once he came in a tuxedo to call on Ruby.
    As we are two guys apparently separated at birth, neither one of us cared to comment on the way the dice happened to fall on this score—me winding up in Ruby’s bed, him in Mama’s photo album. No sir, we said nothing about it. No doubt we shared the dread of emotional talk.
    But I have to say something. Otherwise I will wake several times during the night from the hazy remembrances of nuns scolding me for being impolite. Claude beats me to saying something, though.
    “Sweet dreams, Detective Hockaday.”
    “Not bloody likely.”
    As I walk through the door I look at the slip of Paper Claude has given me.
    Crozat Street, it says. Joe Never Smile, it says.

    When I walked back through the door into the parlor neither Ruby nor Mama asked me anything about my little talk with Claude in his car. Nobody else did either.
    Down through his thieving years, Perry had squandered his capital of familial goodwill. Even now, with rabid cops one generation removed from lynchers on his tail, concern for Perry’s travails was hard to find.
    At one time or another Perry had borrowed money from everybody in the family, never repaid. He had made promises, never kept. He had stayed awhile at everybody’s house, during which time the kind of merchandise found in pawnshop windows had a way of disappearing.
    Sympathy was all used up on Perry, excepting for Mama’s dependable compassion, which was regarded as something either saintly or weak. In any case, nobody wanted to hear about bad-news Perry.
    I stayed up until about midnight with Janny and Uncle Bud and Teddy the Torch, playing a card game I