Mortal Sins

Rourke smiled, and his smile, he knew, could be as frightening as Casey Maguire’s eyes, even to those who came from the same place. “Seen Vinny McGinty lately?” he said.

A sadness settled over Maguire’s face. His was a strangely austere face, like the martyrs in the missals they’d carried to church with them as boys—handsome in a severe way, fine-boned, drawn. The face of a man who could weep as he killed, and so the sadness, Rourke thought, might even have been real.

“Poor Vinny,” Maguire was saying. “He was always talking about taking off north to Chicago, to see if he could make it in the prize rings up there. When he disappeared a couple of weeks ago, I assumed that’s where he’d gone. Now I hear he’s turned up dead in the swamp. What happened? Did he drown?”

“He was garroted with piano wire.”

Maguire’s face was full of beautiful surprise. “Oh, really?”

“Yes, really.”

Maguire sighed again. “I didn’t have him killed, Day, although I know I’ve little chance of convincing you of that. Lately I seem to have turned into the Devil incarnate in your mind.” Now the smile came back, a self-mocking one that invited Rourke to share in the joke. “I’ll have to see Vinny gets the best send-off money can buy. After all, he was practically family.”

It had become a mobster tradition lately, treating fellow gang members to funerals that set records of extravagance with flowers and ornate coffins. The Italians had started it, but now everybody was doing it.

“I’m sure it’ll be one fine funeral,” Rourke said. “And I guess we’ve been to a few of them, you and I. I’ve been thinking a lot about the old days, remembering things.”

What he remembered, suddenly, was one summer’s night, he and Case kneeling across from each other over the body of Rourke’s old man, who was sleeping off a drunk in the gutter, with the rain pouring down on them all, running into their eyes and mouths, turning the street into a river, and Case yelling at him to turn his father over onto his back so that he wouldn’t drown, and Rourke for just that moment not wanting to do it, thinking for just that moment, Drown, you son-of-a-bitch, drown, so that Case had done it instead, and Rourke had just sat there and watched him. Knelt there in the street with rain pouring down and his hands hanging empty and heavy at his sides.

What Rourke said was, “I was remembering how we used to walk through the Swamp on a Saturday night, and you would filch the pennies out of the pockets of all the old bums and winos, even when you weren’t hungry. Even when you were flush. You’d do it just to get in the practice.”

Maguire let several seconds pass between them in silence, and then he said, “I’m telling you I had no reason to kill the guy, Day.”

“But you did it anyway. You’d do it just to get in the practice.”

Maguire’s gaze shifted to the traffic in the street. A coal wagon and an ancient brougham had locked wheels in the intersection, and a Model T was trying to jostle around them, its horn blaring. A streetcar clattered by in the neutral zone, adding to the din.

“If you want to know who killed Vinny,” he said, “why don’t you talk to that nigger cock-queen who was selling him the flake he’d been putting up his nose these last couple of months. That boy had gotten to where he would’ve traded his soul for dope.” His gaze came back to Rourke, and the burn in his eyes was like a match flame against the skin. “But then you’d know all about that place, wouldn’t you, Day?”

Rourke knew. Cocaine, and the need it bred in you, could be like a heavy, dark cloud you dragged along with you everywhere you went. It rained on you every day, but you just couldn’t seem to shake it.

Maguire brushed past him, and this time Rourke let him go. He watched the bootlegger, who had once been his friend, get in the beautiful and expensive green Pierce-Arrow and drive off, and the taste in Rourke’s throat was raw and bitter.

Money and juice. The Boston Club’s library fairly reeked of both. Roman busts rested in marble niches, between glass-fronted cases filled with books bound in green and gold-blocked calf. Turkey rugs of muted colors covered the parquet floor, and green velvet drapes framed the French doors that looked out onto the gallery, where a lone man stood like a general facing a battleground. Hands laced behind his straight back, graying leonine head up, eyes hard with resolve.

Weldon Carrigan, superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, had plenty of both money and juice, but it hadn’t always been that way. The tenth son of a traveling shoe salesman, he had been born with two talents and a single ambition. His talents were subtle and yet deceptively simple. He had a deep understanding of how leverage could be applied to human nature, and he could make you like him. He could make you like him even when you knew that his single ambition was power, and that he wanted as much of it as he could get, spare no expense, even yours.

But in New Orleans power came from only two frequently over-lapping sources: family and politics. So Weldon Carrigan, the son of a nobody, began his career by making the Democratic Party machine his family, and they’d served each other well. Even politics, though, had not been able to do as much for him as had his marriage to Rose Marie Wilmington, heiress to one of the city’s oldest and proudest American names. With her had come fourteen-karat respectability, a mansion in the Garden District, and three million dollars.

He had never acknowledged the irony when, twenty years later, he had offered Daman Rourke fifty thousand of his wife’s dollars not to marry their daughter.

Yet in spite of that rocky beginning, Rourke and his father-inlaw had over the years formed a grudging toleration for one another that occasionally crossed over into a wary respect. They both knew that, as superintendent, Weldon Carrigan had the power to make or destroy his son-in-law’s career. That was his leverage. Rourke’s leverage was Katie, which was all the Carrigans had left of their beloved and only daughter, Jo.

Now, though, Weldon Carrigan’s chiseled face was as stony as one of the Roman busts as he watched his son-in-law enter the room. “I saw you having a heated word with Casey Maguire,” he said immediately, before Rourke even had time to say good morning. “If it’s not moving, Day, don’t poke at it.”

Rourke tossed his straw boater onto a nearby marble table and sat down in a maroon tufted-leather chair. He stretched out his legs and rested his folded hands on his stomach. “If it turns out he had that boy strangled with piano wire and tossed in the bayou, I’m going to arrest his ass. It’ll give him the opportunity to get his money’s worth out of y’all down there at City Hall.”

Beneath his hedgerow of thick black eyebrows, Weldon Carrigan’s eyes had the dull sheen of gunmetal. He used them to stare down at Rourke hard, letting him feel the threat, and then he smiled.

“You must be feelin’ tired this morning. You’re usually better at hiding your damn insubordination.”

Rourke smiled back at him, finally provoking the older man to laugh softly and shake his head as he settled his solid bulk into a wing-backed chair that looked too small for him. He had the large shoulders and hands of a working man, although he had never really done any hard physical labor. At the moment he was dressed for golf in patterned gold hose, baggy knickers, and bow tie. He would be playing eighteen holes with the mayor later that morning, as he did every Wednesday.

“That bayou floater was already yesterday’s ball game the minute after it happened,” he said. “It’s Charles St. Claire’s untimely demise we all ought to be fretting over.” He gestured at the morning’s extra editions that were spread out on the coffee table in front of him. “You had a chance yet to read through any of this tripe? I swear, that gol-bedamned Wylie T. Jones of the Morning Trib has taken salaciousness to new depths. The body’s barely cold yet and he’s already writing about the Cinderella Girl maybe going into the dock for the Trial of the Century.”

“I looked at them,” Rourke said. The Morning Tribune, the worst of the tabloids, had printed a photograph of the body wrapped in a bloody sheet being carried out to the coroner’s hearse. The other papers—the Times-Picayune, the States, and the Item—showed pictures of the grieving widow. She had come out onto the gallery of Sans Souci this morning, shortly after dawn, to talk with all the reporters who had gathered there. In the photographs they’d taken of her, she looked beautiful and tragic. Innocence betrayed.

“I’ll be straight up with you, Day,” his father-in-law was saying. “This murder last night is going to have tabloids from all over and their hacks like Wylie T. Jones crawlin’ out the woodwork like roaches in a fire. If we do have to go and put Remy Lelourie on trial for the murder of her husband, we’re going to find ourselves in a three-ring circus swinging by our dicks on a trapeze with no net. For one thing there isn’t a jury in the country that would convict her, even if she’d been caught right in the act—”

“She as good as was. Or so it looks.”

The superintendent slammed the flat of his hand down on the table. “And I’m telling you that when it comes to this case, justice and guilt aren’t going to matter diddly. On the other hand, it can’t look as though we’re letting the murder of a man like Charlie St. Claire pass us on by without any attention being paid to it at all.” He waved his hand at the newspapers. “I don’t want some shit-sniffing bastard writing about how my cops’re nothing but a bunch of peckerwoods who couldn’t take a trip to the outhouse if there wasn’t a path already worn in the dirt to show them the way. We’ve got to get out of this St. Claire mess as cleanly and with as little fuss as we possibly can.”

Rourke cut his gaze away to the gallery doors and their view of the heat-hazed sky. Weldon Carrigan was a politician, not a cop. He saw the spilling of blood, the pain and suffering, only as part of a political game to be duked out in the pages of the press and on the polished floors of City Hall, where some deaths mattered and others didn’t, and where the best justice was the kind that came easily.

“So an arrest would be helpful as long as it isn’t Mrs. St. Claire’s,” Rourke said.

The superintendent had taken a Havana cigar out of a silver case and was clipping it with a slender silver knife on the end of his watch chain. “Another suspect wouldn’t be unwelcome.”

“Do you have anyone in mind? Or will just any-old-body do?”

“I heard St. Claire had himself a colored mistress. You hear that?”

“No,” Rourke lied. The coldness he’d felt in the hallway of the Criminal Courts Building had come back, worse than before. A deep, bone-breaking cold.

“She’s not some parlor chippy either,” his father-in-law was saying. “Supposed to be married, in fact. And even though she’s a nigger, St. Claire was supposed to’ve had a real affection for her.”

Carrigan lit the cigar with a wooden match, staring all the while at Rourke, who met his eyes but said nothing.

“You don’t find that significant?” Carrigan said when the cigar was drawing.

Rourke leaned forward to rest his elbows on his thighs, but he kept his gaze locked on the older man’s face. “What I find more significant is Mrs. St. Claire covered in blood and sitting next to a cane knife and the slaughtered body of her husband. You go talking to the press about a colored mistress and you’ve just given them a motive to put on the wife that’s as good as a pair of handcuffs.”

The superintendent pushed himself abruptly to his feet. “Find out who this girl of Charlie’s is, Day. Haul her black ass in for questioning, and make her give you something. Something we can use.”

He went to the French doors and then turned back again. His face seemed to have softened, but perhaps it was only the smoke from the cigar, which feathered the air around his eyes. “You and Katie will be coming to my party on Saturday?” he asked. Weldon Carrigan would be fifty-five on Saturday, but when it came to his birthday, he was still a child at heart. He threw himself a big party every year, complete with cake and ice cream and a fireworks display.

“I don’t know as how I’ll have the time,” Rourke said, feeling mean. “Sounds to me like I’ll be too busy with the rubber hoses, beating confessions out of anybody that’s handy.”

Carrigan’s teeth tightened around the cigar. “Whatever works.”

He took the cigar out of his mouth to stare down at the burning ash, sighing. “Jo told me once—I think it was one of those times when she was trying to explain to me why it was that she just had to have you. She said that to you being a cop was like being a priest, like it was kind of a holy calling from God, and so you walked a tightrope between the way the world was and the way you wanted it to be and you saw nothing but darkness beneath you and no end in sight. Now, my daughter, she thought the greatest act of courage she could imagine was that your honor kept you clinging to that rope, when anyone else would’ve just let go long ago.”

Weldon Carrigan looked back up and his mouth curled into something that was definitely not a smile, and Rourke knew he was about to be asked for something he wouldn’t be able to give. “Me, I told her that martyrs usually ended up burning at the stake. I want you to bury this Vinny what’s his name—this two-bit goon—and forget about him. Meanwhile, the city of New Orleans would also be very grateful if you could find some way to clean up the murder of Charlie St. Claire without us having to hold a goldamned Trial of the Century. You can start by running down this nigger gal he was supposed to have been banging.”

“And to hell with truth and justice,” Rourke said, and immediately wanted to kick himself. Honor, truth, and justice. Shit.

The smile Rourke gave to himself was full of self-derision as he stretched to his feet. He picked up his straw boater and sauntered from the room, singing under his breath just loud enough for the super to hear, “In the meantime, in between time, ain’t we got fun?”