Mortal Sins

The feelings of aversion and distrust were mutual. Moses Mueller, coroner for New Orleans Parish for less than a year, already held to the firm belief that the collective intelligence of all the detectives on the force was only slightly above that of a mollusk.

“So what’s he think?” Rourke asked as he made his reluctant way to the body. He hated looking at dead things.

“You asking me?” Fio said, following after and rolling his shoulders like a horse with an itch. “You know the Ghoul—he never gives us squat. He told me it was murder, like I was supposed to run out and stop the presses. Hell, I had to give up on my theory that the stiff went chasing himself around the room hacking at himself with a cane knife.”

The Ghoul had leaned over to sniff at the corpse’s gaping, blood-caked mouth. “Oh, man,” Fio said. “Why does he do stuff like that?”

Rourke was trying to keep from stepping in the blood. It had dried in some places, in stacks like glossy black tiles scattered on the floor, but in other places it was still wet and sticky, and he had just bought his expensive-as-hell alligator wing tips with last week’s winnings at the track. No matter how low he did go, he always went there in style.

Charles St. Claire had not died in style. His paisley silk robe gaped open, revealing naked flesh that had been literally bled white. His throat had been slit, his chest cavity ripped open, and his guts oozed out of a cut in his belly. A slash across his pelvis had left his penis hanging by a small string of what looked like gristle.

The Ghoul was smelling the corpse’s hair now. Ash from the burning cigarette that drooped from a corner of his mouth sifted down into Charles St. Claire’s open and glazed gray eyes.

Rourke almost flinched, half expecting those eyes to blink. With his gaping throat and his eyes wide open and filmed with a milky caul, the dead man almost seemed to be wearing a look of laughing surprise. Death: life’s one sure thing. So what’s the matter, Charlie St. Claire? Weren’t you ready? The trouble is, Rourke thought, it was easy to forget what a playful trickster was good ol’ Death. How, like a naked girl popping out of your birthday cake, he could still catch you bright-eyed and smiling foolishly.

The Ghoul had lifted the dead man’s hand to peer at it closely. It had a deep gash across the palm and was missing a middle finger, but a gold watch and diamond pinkie ring glittered in the light from the flickering gasoliers.

“Any ideas as to when it happened?” Rourke asked as he hunkered down on his heels beside the body.

The coroner wiped the sweat off his upper lip. Cigarette smoke curled in steady streams out his nostrils. “Certainly not within the last hour or two or, perhaps, even three—regrettably one cannot be more precise.” His words, as usual, were very precise, although with a flavor of the Old World about them. “Rigor mortis has started to set in in the eyelids and cheek muscles.”

“He talks to you,” Fio said. “How come he only talks to you?”

“He likes me.” Rourke leaned over for a better look at the knife. It was heavy, wide-bladed, and hooked, and was supposed to be used for cutting sugarcane. “Well, diddy-wah-diddy,” he said on a soft whistle. For a thumbprint, flashy as a neon sign, was etched in blood at the top of the blade.

“If that quaint colloquialism is meant to convey awe,” the Ghoul said, “then I find I must agree with it.” He pushed back up to his feet, his bulk shifting in lurches. “Such splendid arches and loops and whorls, and all distinct enough to be seen even with the naked eye. But before we do too much celebrating, I should point out that they could belong to the victim, who might have tried to wrest the weapon away from his attacker. Although it is, of course, always dangerous to speculate.”

“Yeah? So maybe I’ll just go on ahead and speculate that they’re the killer’s anyway. Just for what the hell.” Not, Rourke thought, that he could count on it mattering. Many juries in New Orleans still tended to view the evidence of fingerprints as just so much hoodoo.

“Hey, get a look at this,” Fio said. He had knelt to peer under a green leather wing-backed chair and now he lumbered back up, laughing. “It’s the poor bastard’s finger. His diddling finger.” He laughed again and tossed the severed digit between the dead man’s sprawled legs. “Better wrap it on up with the rest of him. What with his dick only swinging by a thread, he’s gonna be needing something bonier to use on the chippies in hell.”

Moses Mueller stared at the big cop, blinking against the cigarette smoke that floated before his face. “You are speaking,” he said, “of a man.”

“Hunh?” Fio said, and Rourke had to look down to hide a smile.

The smile faded, though, as he slowly stood with his gaze still on the dead man’s face, on the sightless eyes. It wasn’t so long ago some cops believed that the retinas captured their final view of life, like a photograph. Daman Rourke wished he could believe that those dying eyes had come to grasp all the truths that the living man had failed to see, but he knew that for a vain hope. If anything lingered in the eyes of the dead, it was what they had last felt in their hearts. Surprise, fear, perhaps, and an immense regret that this time the dying was happening to them, and that it was all, finally, going to be too late.

He lifted his head to find the coroner’s eyes, small and hard like buckshot, studying him. “You have not asked me how he died, Lieutenant.”

Fio blew a snort out his bent nose. “Gee. Maybe the cane knife and the big red grin he’s wearing across his throat are some kinda clues.”

“He drowned,” Rourke said.

Fio laughed, but the Ghoul’s shaggy eyebrows had lifted a little. He even took the cigarette out of his mouth long enough to almost smile. “You surprise me,” he said.

He went to the back of the green leather chair, where he’d taken off an old-fashioned frock coat that was so worn in places it shone. He slung the coat over his shoulder while his gaze took a slow gander around the room, returning at last to the two detectives.

“Someone, or something, either evil or desperate, took a long, sharp implement, most likely a cane knife, and slashed it in a backhanded blow across the victim’s throat—severing the jugular vein, the carotid artery, and the windpipe, with the result that the air passage filled with blood.” He lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the old one, then anchored a battered black fedora on his head. “Charles St. Claire did quite literally drown in his own blood.”

He stopped on his way out the door to take one last look at the corpse. “This was not a quick way of dying, you understand. Not even in the final moments, after his throat had been slit open. It would have taken him a very long three or four minutes to die, and he would have spent that time in an agony of terror and pain.”

He took a step, then paused again, half turning. The rotting porch groaned beneath his weight. “And it was likely that he was right-handed. The murderer, I am speaking of.”

“He?” Rourke said.

The Ghoul stared off down the drive, where his chauffeured green Packard awaited him. The tip of his cigarette seemed to pulse red in time with his thoughts, then he sighed, shrugged, and began to make his slow, ponderous way down the steep and narrow steps. His voice came back to them from out of the night. “It could have been a woman.”

“Well, la-di-da and kiss my achin’ ass,” Fio said once they’d heard the Packard’s engine start up and its tires crunch on the oyster-shell drive. He fished a cigar out of his shirt pocket and scratched a match on his thumbnail. He turned, grinning, and winked at his partner as he curled his lips around the end of the cigar and drew deep to light it. “Drowned, hunh?”

The tobacco caught and he took the cigar out of his mouth, waving it through the air and trailing smoke. “Jesus, I don’t know what stinks worse—the stiff or the Ghoul.”

The smoke did help cut the rank smell, for Fio indulged in only the finest Havana Castle Morros. They were part of the juice he got for pretending not to know about the numbers running going on in the back room of a certain pipe and tobacco shop on the corner of Rampart and Bienville.

Rourke said nothing. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and walked around the small room, forcing himself to look at things, to think and not feel, and there was no way, really, to keep from stepping in the blood. He wondered if a place like this old slave shack could have a memory. If inanimate things like wood and stone could absorb pain and sorrow and fear like a sponge. If so, he thought, then these walls ought to be weeping, and long before now.

He found himself looking at the top of an ormolu-mounted bureau. At a tipped-over glass, a penknife, and a silver cigarette case—all coated with aluminum and carbon powders. Fio dusting for more fingerprints. Fio, his partner, who he would have to remember was much, much smarter than he looked.

Rourke dipped his finger in the dregs left in the glass and licked, and tasted absinthe and the cold, numbing bite of cocaine.

He closed his eyes for a moment, his hand curling into a fist.

He pushed abruptly away from the bureau and brushed through a glass-beaded curtain, into the second room. The beads clattered again as Fio followed in his wake. Fio, his partner, who had the air now of a man anticipating the moment when he would be able to spring the punch line of a joke he’d been dying to tell.

It was a small space and the brass bed filled it. The mosquito netting draped open, and the counterpane was a little wrinkled, as if someone had sat or lain there, but only for a moment. A small rag rug lay crooked on the floor and looked out of place, but then it hadn’t always been there.

If he lifted it, Daman Rourke knew what he would find. Because some stains, some crimes, could never be washed away.

He went to the window instead.

“You know,” Fio said from behind him, “how you figure it’s a good bet that the person who found the corpse is the person who made the corpse …”

The window was open but the air outside was hot and still. You couldn’t see much, with the way the bamboo and banana trees crowded against this back part of the shack. You could stand behind that curtain of green, though, shielded from sight, and watch what went on in this room, on this bed. He knew, because once he had done so.

“So who did find him?” Rourke finally asked, although he knew that as well. God help him, but he knew.

Fio plucked the cigar out of his mouth. He moved his jaw as though chewing his thoughts, then his battered face split into a wide grin.

“Cinderella.”

They called her the most beautiful woman in the world.

Her image was everywhere, in rag sheets and magazines, on candy boxes and postcards. It flickered on the silver screens of movie palaces, and on the midnight stages of a million erotic dreams.

The newspapers called her the Cinderella Girl sometimes too. It came from the first movie she had made, The Glass Slipper—a dark and sultry interpretation of the classic fairy tale. It was the role that had shot a young woman by the improbable name of Remy Lelourie into the galaxy of celluloid stardom. The world had seen nothing like her, before or since.

For it wasn’t only her beauty—which was a strange kind of beauty anyway, with her eyes set too far apart and her face too bony, her mouth too wide. She seduced you in a way you didn’t dare confess, not even to your priest. You looked at her and you saw a raw hunger and desperation for life, not redemption and not salvation, but life. The down-and-dirty kind of life that happened on a hot, wet night, in a seedy room, with whiskey and desire burning in your blood.

You looked at her, thought Daman Rourke, and you saw sin. Dangerous, delectable, unaccountable sin.