Mortal Sins

“I’m that sorry I’m late,” Maeve said. “I hope he wasn’t fussing too badly.”

Tulie smiled. She had a big gap between her front teeth, and one day she had shown Maeve how she could whistle through the hole like a boy. And she had beautiful dark eyes, like wells, that always seemed to have been carefully emptied before she raised her thick-fringed lashes to let you look into them. Maeve thought the slaves had probably met their masters’ stares with such an emptiness in their eyes.

“Now, never you mind takin’ your time, Miss Maeve,” Tulie was saying. “I’s milk enough for both our boys.”

“I went to the cathedral,” Maeve said. “And then I went for a walk on the levee. In my bare feet.” She held up her shoes so that Tulie could see. She had almost forgotten them, almost left them lying there on the levee. He had run back to the willows for her, to get them.

Tulie smiled to see the shoes, but whatever she thought of them, she kept it to herself.

Maeve’s breasts were aching something fierce now and leaking milk. She wanted to take her son back from Tulie, to hold his weight heavy in her arms and feel his suckling, to breathe in his baby smell of milk and talcum and soft, moist flesh. Yet she stood there, saying nothing, watching the way his lips moved in and out as he nursed at Tulie’s breast, how his little fist clenched and unclenched. Paulie took after her, but Day was all his father’s son: fair, with that ready, dimpled smile. His eyes, too, came from his father. Midnight blue, people said they were, though she’d never understood the expression, since every midnight sky she’d ever seen had been black as pitch.

Later that evening, when her Mike came home for supper, she saw how his eyes were very nearly the same color as his policeman’s uniform, and she wondered why she hadn’t noticed such a thing before.

As she set the plate of red beans and rice and fried sac-à-lait down in front of him, she told him she had gone for a walk on the levee. She asked him what he saw when he looked at the river.

Mike Rourke shook his head at her. “What kind of a question is that?” he said around a mouthful of beans. “I see water. Muddy water.”

She stared back at him and she hated herself for what she was thinking, what she was feeling. He was a good provider and a good man, kind to her most of the time and affectionate with his sons. He was always touching the boys, cuddling up to them.

She turned away from him without another word and went into the bedroom. She lay down on the bed but got right back up again. She went into the bathroom, ran cold water in the sink, and splashed it on her face.

Mike’s shaving things were laid out neatly on the shelf above the sink: the porcelain mug, the badger-hair lather brush, his warranted Perfection razor.

She stared at her husband’s razor and thought of how she would come awake sometimes at night with her husband sleeping heavy beside her, and she would feel such an aching, echoing emptiness inside. Hot tears would overflow her eyes and roll down the sides of her face, into her ears, and she would wonder when Mike Rourke had become, with no warning and with no reason, this thing to run away from, like her da.

She picked up her husband’s razor, hefting it in her hand as if to feel its weight. Her mother had killed herself with Da’s razor. Mike had told her once that most people didn’t do it right—they cut across instead of up. But her mem had known how to do it.

Maeve pulled open the razor and ran her finger along the blade. Her skin split open, and the pain shocked her, and the way the blood welled up so fast and dark. The razor slipped from her hand, clattering on the tile floor.

She looked into the mirror above the sink and saw a strange woman with dark hair and dark eyes and a white face. She said the strange woman’s name the way he had said it at the market that morning, rolling it around on her tongue.

“Maeve … Maeve … Maeve …”

She walked into the kitchen with blood dripping from the end of her finger.

“Sweet Jesus!” Mike shouted when he saw her, jumping up from the table, snatching his napkin off his neck, wrapping it around the small, bleeding cut. “What have you done?”

“I wanted to see what it would feel like,” she said, but that wasn’t exactly true. She had wanted to see if she could feel it at all.

He stared at her. He looked frightened.

“It hurts,” she said.

“Aw, darlin’.” He tried to kiss her, but she jerked away from him. For a moment she thought she might retch. “I want to be alone,” she said.

She went back into the bedroom and lay down on their bed. She brought her knees up to her chest. She took the key out of her pocket and pressed it between her palms, and then she pressed her clasped hands between her bent knees. She thought she would get up later and go out into the yard and throw the key into the cistern, where it would be lost forever.

Chapter Five (#ulink_cfb0a207-38e0-5846-bbe5-aab94ba8a653)

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune, extra edition, Wednesday, July 13, 1927:

PROMINENT NEW ORLEANS LAWYER MURDERED

Wife Discovers Body

In Pool of Blood

Mr. Charles St. Claire, Esq., a criminal defense attorney known for mounting zealous, if unorthodox, cases on behalf of his clients, was found brutally slain last night in an outbuilding of his plantation house, Sans Souci, in the Faubourg Bayou St. John.

Mr. St. Claire, 30 years old, was married to a famous star of the silver screen, Remy Lelourie St. Claire. It was Mrs. St. Claire who first heard screaming coming from the old slave shack at the rear of the property and went to investigate. There she found Mr. St. Claire lying in a pool of blood, expiring from a cut in his throat. The police recovered the murder weapon, which is said to be a common cane knife, at the scene. No motive has yet been ascribed to the crime, and no arrests have been made.

Grieving Widow

Mrs. St. Claire, who emerged briefly from seclusion early this morning, spoke to reporters with her eyes full of tears bravely held back. “I, this city, and the world have lost a great man in Charles St. Claire,” she said. “I loved him with all my heart and I can’t believe he’s gone.”

Mrs. St. Claire, the 29-year-old daughter of Mrs. Heloise Lelourie and the late Mr. Reynard Lelourie, is a native New Orleanian who has enjoyed considerable success of late as a motion picture actress. In February of this year, Mrs. St. Claire returned to New Orleans from her home in Hollywood, California, for the premiere of her latest endeavor, Jazz Babies, whereupon she became reacquainted with Mr. St. Claire, a third cousin once removed and a childhood friend. After a whirlwind courtship, they married in a small, quiet ceremony at the Old Church of the Immaculate Conception. They were residing together at Sans Souci at the time of Mr. St. Claire’s death.

“They were such a happy couple,” said Mrs. St. Claire’s sister, Miss Belle Lelourie. “And now this horrible thing has happened.”

No Stone Unturned

Mayor Arthur J. O’Keefe, Sr., and Superintendent of Police, Mr. Weldon Carrigan, have jointly called for a vigorous investigation into Mr. St. Claire’s suspicious death.

“We will leave no stone unturned,” vowed Superintendent Carrigan. “I want to assure the good people of New Orleans that the perpetrator of this foul deed will be brought to justice with the greatest possible dispatch.”

The murder victim, Mr. Charles St. Claire, was a member of one of New Orleans’ oldest and most distinguished Creole families, but the St. Claires have been haunted by tragedy in recent years. Mr. Charles St. Claire’s parents, Jacques St. Claire and Annabel Devereaux St. Claire, were both killed suddenly seven years ago in a train accident outside of Paris, France. Mr. Charles St. Claire’s elder brother, Mr. Julius St. Claire, committed suicide eleven years ago at the age of 22, and an only sister, Marie, died of influenza during the epidemic of 1918. Outside of his wife and her branch of the family, Mr. Charles St. Claire has no surviving relatives, except for distant cousins residing in Mobile.

“One might almost believe in voodoo curses,” said a family friend, “the way tragedy and violent death have stalked the St. Claires.”

Daman Rourke tossed the Times-Picayune onto his desk and went to stand close to the barred and dust-encrusted window so that he could look down on the noisy, crowded street three stories below.

The sun had come up red and hot that morning, baking the streets and sidewalks with such ferocity that you expected at any minute the pavement would start splitting and cracking like dried river mud. Charles St. Claire’s mutilated corpse had turned up only a few hours ago, yet already it seemed that every reporter in the state had congregated before the Criminal Courts Building, which housed police headquarters and the detectives squad. The mammoth rusty brick and sandstone edifice looked like a medieval castle with its turrets and clock tower, and the press had put it under siege. The surest circulation booster, next to a gory murder, was a juicy scandal involving a beautiful Hollywood starlet, so this one had it all.

Inside, the squad room was hot and crowded as well. Most of the detectives, even those whose shifts were over, were hanging around and hoping for a personal introduction to the Cinderella Girl. She was supposed to be coming in voluntarily to have her fingerprints taken and to make an official statement as to her whereabouts and actions last night while her husband had been getting himself murdered. Fiorello Prankowski had taken it upon himself to entertain his fellow cops while they waited.

“So I got dead bodies coming out my ears all night,” he was saying, “then I drag my aching ass on home at four o’fucking-clock this morning, and that’s when the wife hits me with it. She went out and bought a Kimball parlor organ. Now, I’m asking myself—what the hell’s a parlor organ and what does she want with one? She can’t hum a tune without sounding like a cat with its tail caught in the screen door, and yet she’s telling me there’s a parlor organ sitting in the parlor and it’s all ours for only forty easy little payments. Hell, I’m already making easy little payments on everything in the house—the refrigerator, the washing machine, the bedroom suite.” He drawled out the word, saying sooo-eet. “Even the frigging vacuum cleaner’s got an easy little payment.”

“I was just reading an article about that,” said Nate Carroll. He was the youngest detective on the force and he looked like a Raggedy Andy doll. He had orange curly hair and a round, soft face with two blue buttons for eyes and two pink buttons for a nose and a mouth. All morning he’d been drooling over a slick magazine that had still shots of Remy Lelourie’s hottest love scenes. One showed her languishing in a sheik’s tent wearing nothing but veils, but Nate had so far been the only one to see it. The other detectives were riled at him because he wasn’t sharing.

“What it is,” Nate was saying, “is one of them new theories has to do with—what’s that guy? You know, Freud? When women do that—when they go out and buy stuff they don’t need—it means they got these sexual urges that aren’t otherwise being satisfied….”

His words trailed off, and the squad room fell into an awed silence as they all contemplated the fact that Fiorello Prankowski, who was an unpredictable Yankee with biceps the size of hams and fists like ball-peen hammers, had just had his manhood insulted.

Fio had been leaning lazily back on the hind legs of his chair, but now he let it fall forward and lumbered slowly to his feet. He ambled over to Nate Carroll’s desk. “You saying my wife’s new parlor organ reminds her of my organ?”

Somebody snorted and then went instantly quiet. Nate swallowed so hard his throat clicked. He stared down at the magazine in his lap as if it held a blueprint for his salvation. “I was just, you know … talking.”

“ ’Cause you’d be right,” Fio said. “Both make them long, deep notes. Do all that throbbing. Vibrating.” He whistled softly and plucked the magazine out of Nate’s grasp. “Man, is her hand holding what I think it’s holding?”