Mortal Sins

At his vigil by the window, Rourke was now smiling. A sugar wasp had found its way there as well and was bouncing against the glass. A taxicab was pulling up to the curb below, and the reporters were now all running toward it.

So she has come, he thought. He saw her legs first as they came out of the cab. Long and slender and pale. Next came the crown of a black straw hat. The hat had a flared brim and a long pheasant feather that curled down over her shoulder.

She looked up, as if she knew he watched her.

The reporters and the curious had checked for just a moment at their first sight of her, but now they surged around her. They shouted questions and snapped cameras in her face, but no one actually touched her. She moved through them gently, like a minnow swimming upstream, creating little eddies in her wake. They treated her, Rourke thought, as if she were touched by magic. But if she went down, they would tear her to pieces.

They were all waiting for her in the squad room—even Captain Malone had emerged from his office—and the expectancy was like a hum in the hot, heavy air. Rourke turned away from the window and leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the door.

The desk sergeant brought her in. She wore a simple black sheath dress that gave her a tragic air. The brim of her hat, with its curling pheasant feather, covered one eye. She looked right at Rourke and her face went even paler, and she looked away just as Captain Malone came up to her.

She gave the senior detective a shy, tentative smile, her white teeth catching on her lower lip for just an instant. The hand she held out to him looked impossibly fragile, and had red-lacquered nails.

For a moment Rourke wondered if she’d miscalculated. No lady in New Orleans would paint her fingernails, let alone do them up a bloodred when she was supposed to be a grieving widow. Remy, though, had always thrived on flirting with disaster. She would want every man in the world believing in her innocence, but only if it cost them a sliver of their souls.

Her gaze went now to every man in the room but him, and Rourke watched her pull them in one by one. She seemed to be searching inside their skins for something she wanted, coveted, craved.

His captain, looking a little stunned, was still holding her hand, as if unsure whether he was supposed to shake it or bring it up to his lips and kiss it. Captain Daniel Malone had careless southern-gentleman good looks to go with his careless southern-gentleman good manners: rumpled sandy-blond hair, dimpled chin, and sleepy brown eyes that always managed to look sad even when he smiled. His wife was the mayor’s cousin and that had got him his rank, but such was New Orleans. He was a good cop, and the detective squad liked him.

He mumbled something now about taking care of a few formalities and led Remy Lelourie over to a plain ladder-back chair.

She lowered herself gracefully onto the seat, folded her hands with those red-lacquered nails on her lap, and tucked her feet beneath her. Her shoes, Rourke saw, had little black bows at the ankles.

The captain took a seat beside her. “Miss Lelourie—that is, Mrs. St. Claire … may we get you something? Coffee? A glass of water?”

“You are too kind,” she said, so softly they all had to strain to hear. “But I’m fine, truly I am.”

Captain Malone’s hand came up to hover over her shoulder for a moment, as if he would pat it if only he dared. If she wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world, Rourke thought, she was certainly the most photographed. They had lived with her image for years, these cops, been surrounded by it everywhere, and so they had thought they knew her, maybe even thought they owned a little piece of her. Now they were seeing how wrong they had been.

“Mrs. St. Claire, I know this is difficult,” Malone said, and his words so intruded on the moment that they seemed cruel, obscene. “But if you could go over one more time what happened last night when you found your husband’s … when you found him. Please think it over and leave nothing out, no matter how insignificant it might seem. The smallest detail may turn out to be the clue that will break the case.”

She nodded, slowly, and then her shoulders straightened bravely, but she kept her eyes demurely lowered on the hands in her lap. “I had gone to bed and just drifted off when I was awakened by screaming coming from that old slave shack in back of the house. Since Charles often spent time there when he wanted to be alone, to think and to read, I immediately became afraid for him. But I sleep in the nude, you see, so I had to stop and throw my dress back on before I could go out there.”

“Did you—” The captain’s voice broke roughly while each man in the room was still rocking beneath his own image of a naked Remy Lelourie lying sprawled on silken sheets. “Did you see anyone? Anyone leaving the shack?”

“No, I saw no one … except for Charles. He was lying on the floor and blood was everywhere, and a knife was stuck in his chest. I think I might have pulled it out—the knife. Charles was still breathing, you see. He had a horrible cut in his throat, but he was still breathing, and the cut in his throat was making this awful gurgling noise and spewing blood. He was struggling to say something…. I think it was my name. He was trying to beg me to help him, only I couldn’t, I couldn’t …” She shut her eyes, but a single tear escaped to roll slowly down one flawless cheek.

Somebody breathed loudly; another man sighed. She was playing them like Satchmo played his coronet, Rourke thought, crying up that last sad note until it cut to the bone.

“He died … my Charlie died in my arms,” she said, her voice bleeding like Charles St. Claire had bled. Somebody, Rourke thought, ought to be applauding. Then, slowly, the brim of her hat lifted as her head came up, and she looked right at him, and he almost fell into her eyes.

The desk sergeant saved him by coming up to stand in front of him, blocking his view of her. “The super just rang up,” the sergeant said. “He wants to see you, pronto. He said to tell you he’s taking breakfast at the Boston Club this mornin’.”

Rourke pushed himself off the wall. “When Mrs. St. Claire is done here, don’t let her go out through that mob out front. Take her down to the basement and show her the way up to the alley ’round back.”

“Sure, Loot,” the desk sergeant said with a winking grin as Rourke brushed past him, heading for the door.

Her voice—soft, sad, sweet—followed after him. “I guess I must have gone into shock then, because the next thing I remember is hearing Beulah scream. And the feel of Charles’s body, cold and heavy in my arms.”

He was halfway to the stairwell at the end of the hall when he met Roibin Doherty coming out of the toilet, buttoning up his fly. Rourke started to go around him, but Doherty planted himself in the way, and when Rourke made to go around him a second time, he shifted, putting himself in the way again. The man’s red-veined cheeks bulged with a drooling chaw, whiskey fumes floated off him like hot off a tar road, and hate burned in his swollen, watery eyes. Hate that had long been festering.

“Pardon me,” Rourke said, making an effort to keep his own face flat and empty.

Doherty swayed into him, breathing a reeking laugh, and Rourke almost gagged on a reflex of revulsion and an old, remembered fear.

“Won’t be gettin’ no pardon from me, boy,” Doherty said in a voice as rough as a furnace shaker. “Won’t be gettin’ no pardon from the gov’ner neither on the day they fry your ass up in Angola.”

Doherty’s rank was detective sergeant, but he didn’t do much detecting anymore. He was supposed to be looking after the property and evidence room, maintaining the archival files, and only occasionally covering a case on the street when the workload was heavy. What he mostly did was drink away the hours, waiting for the day when his pension would kick in and brooding over his conviction that Daman Rourke ought to be picking cotton on a prison chain gang instead of carrying a detective’s badge. Usually, though, Rourke could find a way to avoid him, or Doherty’s own sense of survival led him into keeping his malice to himself.

Rourke took a step back now and gave the older man a slow once-over, as if cataloging the cotton suit coat, rumpled and stained with sweat and tobacco juice; the wet spot on the front of his trousers; the grimy, thinning, tangled gray hair.

Rourke smiled, showing his eyeteeth. “Jesus, Sarge. You are like a walking spittoon.”

Doherty swiped at the sweat that dripped off the end of his nose and smirked. “You’re scared, ain’t you, boy? Plumb scared shitless, because it won’t be so easy for y’all to get away with it this time, you an’ her. Not gonna be no suicide verdict for poor ol’ Charlie St. Claire, no sirree bob. Kinda hard to make it look like the man slashed his own throat with a cane knife.”

Rourke smiled again, and he was still smiling when he planted his fist deep in Doherty’s drinker’s belly. It was, he thought, like punching a pillow.

The man doubled over, gasping and wheezing, and Rourke walked around him. He was almost to the head of the stairs when Doherty called out, “Hey, what’s the dirty little secret, boy?” and Rourke made the mistake of turning back around.

Doherty stood swaying in the middle of the hall, a pinched, malevolent light burning in his eyes. Behind him, lounging in the open door to the squad room, was Fiorello Prankowski.

“What’s the secret, huh?” Doherty said again. He wiped the tobacco juice off his mouth with a fat thumb and grinned. “Jus’ what did them poor St. Claire boys have on that lil’ witch of a gal of yours, that Remy Lelourie?”

Rourke said nothing. Doherty’s smile widened, showing off a mouthful of brown teeth and gray gums. He shot a stream of tobacco juice onto the brown linoleum floor and then tottered off down the hall toward the property room.

“Bastard’s been on the sauce so long his brains have turned to boiled grits,” Fio said, but Rourke had seen the sharp calculation come into his partner’s eyes before he’d covered it with a smile and a shake of his head. “Maybe you shouldn’t take it so personal.”

Rourke shrugged. It was probably a hundred degrees in that hallway, the air so wet you could wring it out and get bathwater, and yet he felt cold inside. “I gotta go see the super,” he said. “I’ll catch you later.”

Fio touched his forehead in a mock salute. “Yeah, sure. You do that, partner. You catch me later.”

Outside, a brassy sun smote the sidewalk like a hammer. City smells—of gasoline and garbage and dust—floated on the thick, motionless air like algae on swamp water.

Rourke walked over to Canal Street, where the Boston Club imposed its presence upon the South with classic white elegance. In a city where two or more folk gathering on a street corner were apt to form a club, this was still the oldest and proudest men’s gathering place. If you wanted an invitation to pass through its plain but hallowed front door, it helped if your daddy was a member, and his daddy before him, and yet there were always ways to get around not being born to the proper family. Ways like money and juice.

This morning, a green Pierce-Arrow touring car, all gleaming brass and wood and leather and chrome, was parked alongside the club’s front curb. Underneath the shade of the club’s upper gallery, the city’s official bootlegger stood shooting the breeze with two city-council members and a state legislator. Money and juice. Casey Maguire might have been born poor and Irish, but he’d always possessed a sure knowledge about the privileged and powerful that they barely realized about themselves: He knew all the ways they were for sale.

Rourke waited for the conversation to end, and for the bootlegger to cross the sidewalk toward his car, and then he did what that old drunken sergeant had done with him a moment ago—he planted himself in the way.

Only this time the contest was more even. Casey Maguire boxed daily at the New Orleans Athletic Club; his body was quick and lean and braided with muscle. He wasn’t nearly as tall as Rourke, though, and he had to tilt back on his heels and lift his head to meet Rourke’s eyes.

“Good mornin’, Day,” he said. A small smile played around his wide mouth, as if he knew where this was going and was merely amused by it. “It’s been a while since we’ve spoken. I hope I’m finding you well.”

Casey Maguire had worked most of the Irish Channel out of his accent, he’d put polish on his manners and sophistication into his dress, but he hadn’t been able to do anything about his eyes, which were so pale they were nearly colorless, like spit. When you come from a place where you learn early to do mean unto others before they can do it unto you, it shows in your eyes. Maguire could be frightening, even to those who had come from the same place.

When Rourke didn’t say anything, Maguire moved to go around him. Rourke shifted his weight, putting himself in the way again.

Maguire blew a soft sigh out of pursed lips, as if he were mildly exasperated. “If we’re going to dance, Detective, maybe we should be doing it to music.”