Thrown-away Child

windows of the grill were covered by greasy Venetian blinds, the old kind with the chunky blades.
    A blind man with a straw hat and folding cane walked into the grill ahead of us, and took his apparently regular booth at the first window. A tired waiter shuffled over and dropped a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich without a word. The blind man felt around for a skinny bottle of Tabasco sauce, opened it, and lubricated his sandwich.
    Huggy and I took the far window booth. Between us and the blind man was a booth full of musicians, all wearing very dark sunglasses: a Japanese guy in black jeans, earrings, and a Miles Davis T-shirt with about a twenty-eight-inch waist, which is what a seaweed diet will do for you, and three long-legged American girls with skimpy silk blouses, skirts slit up the sides to reveal black hose up to the knee and pale white thighs, and suede platform heels. The girls were applying Rocky Horror Picture Show makeup and looking increasingly less angelic.
    A couple of good-old-boy bartenders at the counter were discussing various methods of skimming the till in saloons from New Orleans north to Baton Rouge. Shortchanges, overcharges, credit card edits—the usual grifts.
    The waiter appeared. He wore a floppy blue-black hairpiece, wrinkled white skin, and thick spectacles, giving him a faint Roy Orbison resemblance. “Ready to grease down, gentlemen?”
    “Eggs soft-scrambled and biscuits with maple butter for me,” Huggy said. “No meat.”
    “Bacon, not too crisp, fried eggs over easy,” I said. Remembering about the uniform ghastliness of bread anywhere outside of New York, I went with Huggy on the biscuits.
    The food came in a flash. I had not remembered about grits being an automatic addition to anything ordered in the morning in a southern restaurant, so I pushed the dribbly eyesore off into a corner of my plate.
    “Said you want to speak to me about something,” Huggy said. He caught a biscuit crumb that fell from his lips to his hand. “Now, I know from picking you up at the train station that you ain’t a lawyer and you ain’t a priest—”
    “And that I’ve got the knack of pretending to be stupid before I’m wise.”
    “How can Huggy help you?”
    “I’ve been thinking about how you killed your wife.”
    “Oh, gawd.”
    “Her name was Ory?”
    “It was.”
    “And your lawyer. He was Hippocrates Beauregard Giradoux.”
    “Shirttail cousin of mine. That’s right.”
    “You know him well?”
    “Know him good enough, I guess.” Huggy sucked cooled-down coffee through the spaces between his teeth, a sort of oral hygienic habit, repellent but effective. “Good enough to see through the joy-boy crap he throws up to everybody like a splatter of locusts on a windshield ’til you can’t see the driver no more.“
    “You got something against him, Huggy?”
    “Not really. He saved my behind when they put me on trial for Ory’s untimely passing, that’s for sure. I’m only saying I know the man’s nature.”
    “Which is?”
    “One thing, Hippo’s got power now, and it’s changed him. He’s gone cold, ’less he wants something. He got a way of tipping his hat to you on a Sunday morning and saying How-do and making it sound like he just said Drop dead.”
    “What about another thing?”
    “He’s learned the politician’s way of taking. He could steal sweetness out of gingerbread.”
    I took out a pad and pen from my shirt pocket and wrote down a reminder to manufacture some reason for a personal call on the good alderman.
    “You ain’t a lawyer, you ain’t a priest,” Huggy said, scratching at short tufts of orange on his otherwise scabby head. “Care to tell say what’s your interest in all this?”
    “Maybe I’ll fill you in later; maybe I’ll need some more dope only you can provide. I’ll tell you then.” I wondered about the load behind Huggy’s question. All this? “Right now, I’ve got an appointment on Crozat Street.”
    Huggy Louper was confused and bedazzled by my mysterious manner and said nothing as we finished our coffee. I caught him looking at me several times in his rearview mirror as he drove me to where I would find Joe Never Smile. My guess was that Huggy had led a quiet and exemplary life since killing his wife, too quiet and too exemplary to suit his style.
     

     
    Crozat Street ran south through the Iberville housing project west of Basin Street. The neighborhood’s early risers—mostly old women with heavy-lidded