Thrown-away Child

and solicitous as a department store Santa Claus. Which came as no particular surprise to me. Cops in New York are likewise jovial at homicide scenes; the grislier the scene, the giddier the cops.
    Two minutes ago I had made the acquaintance of Sergeant Lavond LeMay. That was after I badged my way past the outer line of uniforms at an old juke joint called the Di Moin and asked for the command sergeant. A skinny patrolman with his hand down the back of his pants scratching his haunches nodded toward the river, in the general direction of a low cement building inside a small fenced square. He said, “Go see the man over yonder in the panama hat.”
    After getting the name of the panama owner, my badge and I walked yonder —through an opening torn into the fence and through a second line of uniforms, then up to the building itself. I smiled at a middle-aged, softly built man in the kind of three-piece polyester suit available in the plainclothes cop section of any Sears Roebuck in America, and a floppy white panama that was all his own style. I lied to beat the band.
    “Sergeant, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Detective Neil Hockaday, a close friend of Alderman Hippocrates Beauregard Giradoux.”
    “Don’t sound like you from around here, friend.“
    “Actually, no. I’m all the way down from New York City to study your very excellent southern detection methods. Soon as Hippo heard the news flash of this terrible homicide you’re investigating—why, he sent me over on the double.”
    The sergeant looked confused. Either that or his underwear was chafing him.
    “Hippo says I got to especially look you up, Sergeant LeMay,” I said. “Hippo tells me you’re one of his top men.”
    I waited through a couple of tense seconds. Then Sergeant Lavond LeMay’s ashy white face cleared of suspicion, and he said, “Well that’s right nice of Hippo. Why’nt you just call me Vonny?”
    “Vonny it is, then. Call me Hock.”
    I took hold of the sergeant’s hand, gloved in a gauzy fabric, and shook it. Vonny LeMay wore gloves because he was albino fair. His face was round as a silver dollar, and he had silver fuzz for brows over eyes as Pale blue as skim milk. The wide-brimmed panama kept his head and face bathed in skin-preserving shade. Vonny was at the center of a gathering herd of New Orleans detectives, all of them white, about a yardstick away from the building doorway. Vonny had one foot propped on top of a wooden crate stencilled U.S. ARMY SURPLUS.
    We talked pleasantly for a bit. How long I had been in New Orleans, how I liked it so far, when I was returning to New York—that sort of thing. Conversational foreplay, as I was beginning to learn, was a vital element of Louisiana communication.
    Eventually, I told Vonny I wanted a look inside. Did I? This was when the sergeant remarked merrily on the foulness of the odor I would encounter, and how I would require proper protection.
    Vonny turned his head and spat again, missing one of the other detective’s shoes by about an inch.
    “Ain’t healthy a-tall to be breathing down that kind of gott-damn nigger reek other side of the door,” Vonny said. He cast a look around him to make sure there were no black cops in the vicinity, assuming his remark would give no offense to a white man. “Don’t you agree?”
    “You’ve been inside yourself, Vonny?”
    “Hell no, not me. Nobody gone in ’cept for the fingerprint boys taking a looksee right now.”
    “Any of them come out yet?”
    “Nope.”
    The air wafting out from that door was truly malodorous, like the worst blast of sewer gas I ever wanted to know. A breeze off the Mississippi, slight as it was, blew the stink up everybody’s nose, mine included. I coughed. My eyes smarted, as if somebody had cracked open a cannister of tear gas.
    “Well, you know—maybe it don’t make no nevermind how your niggers go, life’s cheap to them people.” Vonny offered something of a sympathetic sigh at what he saw as an unfortunate truth.
    Just then, a three-man crew of gasping forensic officers staggered out from the doorway into the open air. They hacked and spit into handkerchiefs until the hankies were so sopped they had to drop them.
    “G’wan now, take one of these here,” Vonny said, not particularly moved by his colleagues’ discomfort. He removed his foot from the crate, pulled off the thin wooden lid, and reached inside. He handed me an oxygen mask.
    I slipped olive drab canvas over my head