Mortal Sins

“Oh, God, Day. You’re not just … You really do believe I …” He watched her eyes brighten and grow wet with tears. Even though he knew it for the act that it was, he also thought that maybe a few things were getting through to her at last. That while she might be Remy Lelourie and the most beautiful woman in the world, there were going to be some in the city of New Orleans at least who would believe she had done this terrible thing.

He pressed his shoulder hard into the mantel to keep from touching her. She was still the most dangerous moment of his life. She had lied to him and used him and left him, hurt him in ways uncountable and unmeasurable, but he’d always wanted her anyway. He had never stopped wanting her.

“You remember how I worked the docks that summer, unloading banana boats? How I always had welts all over my hands and arms from getting bit by the rats and spiders that lived in those banana bunches?”

“Day.” She had said his name on a sigh.

“ ’Cause I remember it. Just like I remember other stuff about that summer,” he said. Welts on his hands and welts on his heart. “Like how you cried that last afternoon. Big fat crocodile tears, just like these.” He was cupping her face, gathering up her tears as if he would keep them.

“I loved you,” she said. “I loved you so bad it almost killed me.”

“You were slumming. And—funny thing—but this is the part I remember best: You were the one who left.”

She wrapped her fingers around his wrist and held his hand in place so that she could turn her head and brush her lips across his palm, and the wetness of her mouth mixed with her tears. “I was afraid. Of you, Day. I wonder if you’ve any idea how frightening you can be.”

Him frightening. That was a laugh. He leaned closer, until only a breath-space separated their mouths. He was opening the throttle wide now, putting his money down.

“You were always good, darlin’, the best I’ve ever seen, and worth every bit of the ten G’s a week they were paying you out in Hollywood.” Her fingers were pressing hard on the pulse in his wrist, so that it seemed his blood flowed into hers. “But just like any two-bit hooker who finds herself owned by a cheatin’, heavy-handed pimp, one day you up and killed your man.”

He took a step back, pulled loose from her, let go of her. His face felt as though it were made of lead, but his breathing was fast and hard.

“You killed him, Remy girl. And I’m going to nail you for it.”

Chapter Two (#ulink_a938ec12-dea6-5142-9618-c2e29017e36e)

A specter folk called the gowman was said to haunt the cypress swamp beyond the Faubourg St. John. Dressed all in white and prowling the night, the gowman lured his victims to a hideous death. He murdered the innocent, but what he did afterward was worse: He stole away the corpses he made, so there would be no body for friends and loved ones to view at the wake, no casket to put in the crypt. To those old Creole families like the St. Claires and the Lelouries, those families whose names, like their cypress houses, had been built to last forever, such a fate was beyond bearing.

The gowman was innocent of this murder at least, thought Daman Rourke as he watched the coroner’s hearse roll back down the drive. For this funeral there would be a wake and a casket, and a widow.

He leaned on the balustrade of the upstairs gallery and watched the wind blow fresh rain clouds back across the moon. Before he’d allowed her to go upstairs and get out of her bloody dress, he had gone up and taken a look at her bedroom. At her big tester bed with its canopy of rose garlands and frolicking cupids. At the semen stains on the messed sheets.

At her cloche hat and pearls laid out on her dressing table, a pair of stockings draped over the back of a chair, her shoes lined up beside it. At her tapestry valise stuffed so full of clothes, and done in such a hurry, that one of the straps wouldn’t fasten—as if she’d packed up and gotten ready to run before she’d killed him.

But then people never change, and she had run before.

The old cypress floorboards creaked beneath Fiorello Prankowski’s heavy tread as he joined Rourke at the gallery railing. Fio hooked a hip on the worn wood, folded his arms across his chest, and stared at his partner.

“You gotta figure the wife for doing it,” he said.

“Yes.” The word tasted sour in Rourke’s mouth. The way he’d behaved with her in there—like the jilted lover he once was, who had wanted to make her hurt as much as he was hurting, who had wanted to make her suffer, and never mind that whatever pain he might have owed her was eleven years too late.

Fio flipped his cigar butt out into the night. “Blood all over her, those missing two hours, and the maid finding her with the body, crying about bein’ so sorry. Yeah, she did it, all right, as sure as I’m a poor Italian-Polack boy from Des Moines. And ain’t it almost always the one who is supposed to love you best,” he said, voicing an old cop truism. “Her story’s pretty half-assed, but it might hold up. I mean it’s gonna be tough to find a jury who’ll send Remy Lelourie upriver to fry, even for killing her old man.”

“Even tougher if enough folk figure he was asking for it.”

“Was he?”

From where they were, up on the second-story gallery, you could look across the bayou water and see the lights of the gates to City Park, where seventy years ago, beneath a grove of live-oak trees, a St. Claire had shot a Lelourie to death in a duel over lost honor and a game of faro.

“I played a game of bourré with the gentleman once,” Rourke said. “Charles St. Claire had no fear, and no limit.”

“Hunh, you should talk. So who won?”

“I did.”

Fio huffed a laugh. “There you go … Everybody’s got something, though. If he didn’t have fear, what did he have?”

“Money, pride, greed, lust. And secrets.” Rourke smiled. “All of the usual southern deadly sins.”

“Aw, man, don’t tell me that. What secrets?”

“He had a sterling silver name, and juice in all the high and mighty places, but he’s been a hophead for years, and one who really got his kicks out of walking on the wild side. He liked to use people—men, but especially women. And then he liked making them pay for the privilege of being used.”

Fio had turned his head back around to look at him, and Rourke could feel the dissecting edge in the other man’s gaze.

“He was also,” Rourke went on, “the only white Creole lawyer around these parts with enough brass to defend a Negro in court, and on rare occasions he even won. That Charles St. Claire was able to save a few sorry black asses from a life of hoeing sweet potatoes and cutting cane on an Angola chain gang—well, certain folk will tell you that was his very worst sin.”

“And what will they tell me is Remy Lelourie’s very worst sin?”

“That she left us all those years ago. Or tried to.”

Fio waited two slow beats before he said, “I know you want her to be innocent, but she probably isn’t, so don’t—” He cut himself off, blowing a big breath through his teeth.

“Don’t what?” Rourke said.

“Don’t let it break your heart this time.”

“This time?” For a moment Rourke wondered how much his partner knew—if he’d heard something somewhere, a whisper, a rumor. It was impossible, though. The real secrets, the sins, were buried too deep. Only he and Remy knew what had really happened down in that slave shack eleven years ago, and Remy would never tell.

Fio shrugged. “I’m only saying, she’s young and beautiful and it’s an ugly thought that she’s responsible for that mess down there.” He waved his hand in the direction of the slave shack. “But you always end up letting yourself care about them too much, the murdered ones and their murderers—you care too much and they end up breaking your heart.”

Rourke stared at the other cop, letting an edgy silence fall between them. “You done?”

“Yeah, I’m done.”

Rourke stared at Fio some more, then he smiled and shook his head. He waited until Fio smiled back at him, and then he said, “Jesus, Prankowski. You are so full of shit.”

He pushed off the balustrade, turning his back on the bayou. His headache was blinding now, and his legs and arms felt weightless, invisible, as if he were disappearing back into the past where once they had been, he and Remy.

“You know,” Fio said as they left the house by the back gallery stairs, “that’s the part about all of this that I don’t get the most. She had it all—she was a friggin’ movie star, for Christ’s sake. So what did she come back here for, to up and marry a man like St. Claire?”

“Maybe it was true love.”

“Yeah? Then true love sure doesn’t last long. When did they tie the knot—back in February sometime? That makes it five months.”

They crossed the yard to the oaks that lined the drive, where Rourke had parked his Indian Big Chief motorbike. It had started to rain again, in large, fat drops.

He had straddled the leather seat and kick-started the engine when Fio’s big hands gripped the handlebars and he leaned over, bringing his face close to Rourke’s. “You mind telling me where you’re going? Partner.”