Mortal Sins

He stood in the middle of the yard and looked at the old French colonial house. He hadn’t come near her yet and already he felt the pull of her. “Remy,” he said, seeing how it would feel to say her name again after all this time.

He stayed where he was, not moving, looking toward the bayou now. A wind had come up, rattling the banana trees and bringing with it the smell of sour mud and dead water. He saw a pair of lantern lights floating among the dead cypress, where Negro boys often gigged for frogs at night.

A hundred years ago this place had been a sugar plantation, before the city had grown up around it. Only a few acres and the house remained, but her beauty and charm were there still. In her tall and elegant windows, in the finely carved colonnettes and balustrades. In the wide galleries that spread all around her, like the dancing skirts of a southern belle. The man who built the house had called her Sans Souci. Free of worry, without a care.

The spell was broken by the chug and rattle of the coroner’s hearse turning down the drive, come to take away the earthly remains of Charles St. Claire, who was free now of not only worry but everything else.

A gaggle of reporters with cameras slung over their shoulders was riding on the running boards, and the sight of them sent Rourke sprinting the rest of the way across the yard to the house and up onto the shadowed gallery. Light from the headlamps bounced off the brass uniform buttons of a beat cop, who stood at stiff attention in front of the door.

Rourke showed him his gold shield. “Sure is a hell of a hot night for it,” he said, and smiled.

The patrolman, who looked barely out of school, read the name on the badge and stiffened up even straighter. “Lieutenant Rourke, sir?” he said, wariness and wonder both in his voice. His round, freckled face was red and sweating beneath his scuttle-shaped hard hat.

Rourke turned up the wattage on his smile. He had no illusions that the young man’s awed reaction had anything to do with Lieutenant Daman Rourke’s sterling reputation as an ace detective. Even being Irish and the son of a cop wasn’t going to take you from walking a beat to carrying a detective lieutenant’s badge by the time you were thirty. Promotions can come fast and easy, though, when your father-in-law is the superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department.

“Are you feeling generous tonight?” Rourke said.

The patrolman swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple disappeared into his collar. “Sir, I … Sir?”

The reporters were leaping off the running boards now as the meat wagon rolled to a stop. They would go first to the slave shack to pop photographs of the body. Pictures too gory to be printed, but not too gory to be passed around and cracked wise over in the newsroom.

Rourke brushed past the young cop, flashing another smile as he did so. “So be a pal, then,” he said, “and promise them anything short of a night with your sister, but keep those press guys out of my face.”

The boy finally relaxed, grinning. “Well, I don’t got me a sister, but I know what you mean. Sir?”

Rourke paused, the cypress door swinging open beneath his hand.

“She couldn’t have done it. Not Remy Lelourie. Could she?”

Rourke crossed over the threshold, saying nothing. He entered a hall that was wide and cool beneath a high ceiling fan, and sweet with the smell of oiled wood. The sliding doors between the double parlors were thrown open, and he could see into rooms that were dressed for summer in flowered slipcovers and rush mats. The French windows were open to the night, and a breeze stirred their long saffron draperies.

A small, slender woman in a gray silk dress stood before a yellow marble fireplace with her back to the door, her head bent. Her dark hair was cut boyishly short, baring her long neck. Her legs were bare as well, her feet caked and splattered with dried blood.

Rourke had to stop a moment and lean against the jamb. It was a strange high, to be seeing her again and with the smell of blood filling his head. A high as powerful as any that came from a glass of absinthe and cocaine.

“Hey, Remy,” he said. “How you doin’, girl?”

Slowly she turned, lifting her head. The softly tragic expression on her face looked drawn there as if by a knife. For a moment the wrench of memory was so strong he nearly choked on it.

“Day,” she said, and that was all, but hearing it tore something loose inside him.

He walked up to her, holding her fast with his gaze. She waited for him, allowing him to look, daring him to see behind her eyes. The front of her dress looked like someone had taken a bucket of blood and drenched her with it. She even had blood in her hair.

Her right hand was pressed to the hollow between her breasts, as though he had startled her. Her fingers were wrapped around a stained handkerchief that had been twisted into a ragged string. He took her hand and she let him, her eyes the whole time on his face. Her eyes were exactly how he remembered them, wide-spaced and tilted up at the corners. Dark brown with golden lights, like tiny bursting suns.

He unwrapped the makeshift bandage. A ragged cut gaped open across her palm from little finger to thumb.

“Why did you do it, Remy?” he said.

She wrenched free of him and turned away, gripping her elbows with bloodstained hands. She didn’t appear to be wearing anything underneath that single sheath of blood-soaked silk.

Rourke leaned against the mantel and stuffed his fists deep into his pockets. He allowed the space between them to empty into a hard silence, but she didn’t fill it with any words. To Fio she’d spun a tale that she had been in bed, asleep, when she’d been awakened by screams coming from the old slave shack and she had gone out there to find her husband expelling his last breath through a rip in his throat.

“Now this was supposed to’ve been around nine o’clock, you understand,” Fio had said. “But it was a whole two hours later when Miss Beulah, the colored lady who does for the family, comes down to the kitchen for something or other and she looks out the window and thinks something ‘ain’t quite right’ about the shack. So she goes on out to see what’s what, and lo and behold ‘what’ turns out to be Cinderella covered in blood, sitting ’longside of Prince Charming here, rocking back and forth and telling him over and over how sorry she is about it all.”

Rourke took a step closer to her. “You going to tell me what happened?”

She raised her head as though meeting the challenge, but her voice when she spoke was dry and scratchy, as if she’d spent the night weeping. Or screaming.

“Why? What good will it do, when you’ve already made up your mind not to believe me?”

“Just think of it as a dress rehearsal for the jury, then, because things sure don’t look good, baby. You saying you sat there and stared at the gaping raw wound of your husband’s slit throat for all that time and did nothing.”

The banjo clock on the wall chose that moment to strike one o’clock, and she flinched as if the soft gong had been a blow. “He was … there was this awful gurgling sound, Day, and all this blood came spurting out his mouth. It was like he was trying to talk to me, to tell me something, but I couldn’t, couldn’t … And then the next thing I remember is hearing Beulah scream.”

“Yeah, I guess a couple hours of time must’ve just sort of slipped away from you there. It does that sometimes after an absinthe and happy dust cocktail.”

“That was Charlie’s poison. And yours, or so I’ve heard tell.” She had lifted her head again, met his eyes again.

Her mouth trembled and twisted into a smile, but it was a wry one, full of memories and pain. “We’ve always been willing to believe the worst about each other, haven’t we, Day?”

All he could manage was a shake of his head.

She held his gaze a moment longer, then the smile faded from her face and she turned away. He watched her in silence while she picked up a mother-of-pearl smoking set from off the mantel. He waited until she fitted a cigarette into the holder and lit a match before he said, “Who was your husband sleeping with, besides you?”

The flame trembled slightly, but that was all. “Now, whatever would Charles want with anyone else, when he already possessed the most beautiful woman in the world?”

He watched as the wild self-derision burned sudden and bright in her eyes. That cruel and destructive pulse of wildness that had once, long ago, seduced them both over the edge.

Jesus save me, he thought.

He cleared his throat. “Uh-huh. And how often did he beat you?”

Her hand flew up quicker than she could stop it, although she tried. It got as far as her neck, and so she pressed her palm there as if feeling for a pulse. The color around the bruise on her cheek drained away, so that it stood out as stark as a smudge of soot.

“Oh, this little ol’ thing … You remember how the rain came up so hard and fast this evenin’? Well, I went to close the windows and the wind caught one of the shutters and it up and smacked me right in the face.” She breathed a soft, girlish laugh, and he almost laughed himself at this vision of Remy Lelourie suddenly turning into a southern belle with cotton bolls for brains.

“Cut the shuck, Remy,” he said. “One thing you’ve never been is a magnolia blossom.”

She put the cigarette down in an ashtray without having smoked it and wrapped her arms around herself again. “And you’ve always been one mean, tough bastard, haven’t you?”

“Somebody has to be. And here’s another interesting fact for you: The human body holds about ten pints of blood, and Charles St. Claire left most of his splattered all over the floor and ceiling and walls of an old slave shack on his way to being hacked to death with a cane knife. Now, Lord knows I was never all that fond of poor Charlie, but that sort of last moment I’d reserve only for my worst enemy, and I got this sick feeling in the pit of my gut that the big fat juicy thumbprint on that knife is going to turn out to be yours. Was he your worst enemy, Mrs. St. Claire?”

Her eyes had grown wide and stark. “I might have touched it—the knife. It was stuck in his chest. I tried to pull it out, but it was caught on…on something … and blood was spraying all around us, and then… then all at once it came gushing up out of his throat.” Her hands fell to her sides and she looked down at herself as if suddenly just realizing what a mess she was. “It got all over me.”

She lifted her head and there was a wounded look on her face now, and he wondered, as he’d always wondered, which of all the Remys in the world was the real one. “They wouldn’t let me take a bath,” she said. “When can I take a bath?”

“You’ll have to take off all you’re wearing in front of your maid, so’s she can pass it along to us. Then tomorrow mornin’ you’re going to have to come on down to the Criminal Courts Building and give us your fingerprints.”