Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  “Some days, after I've done with my shopping,” she said, “I go for a walk along the levee.”

  The levee had always fascinated her, from the first moment she'd set foot in New Orleans. From the road you could look up at the tall grass bank and see masts and smokestacks floating disembodied across the sky, as if the sky itself were a river.

  They walked along the spine of the levee for a while and then sat beneath the lime green shade of some willow trees, among a splattering of buttercups. He had taken off his fancy jacket for her to sit on, so then he rolled up his shirtsleeves and rested his forearms on his bent knees. He had taken off his hat, too, and it dangled from his long fingers.

  The sheen of his hair was like the purple and black colors of a crow's wing. His mouth looked soft, and full enough to belong to a woman.

  She looked away from him, at the gray mud banks of the river. The batture was covered with hundreds of little mud chimneys, which were built by mud-divers—those ugly, crusty bugs that turned into locusts and made so much noise she couldn't sleep at night. Some people had fashioned houses out of driftwood among the cane brakes and the mud-divers' chimneys. It seemed a whimsical way to live, in those driftwood houses. She would never have chosen such a way for herself.

  His voice broke into her thoughts, asking her what she saw when she looked at the river.

  And she said, without thinking, “It's a mud-diver's heaven that I see.”

  He threw back his head and laughed. She stared at his throat, at the way the strong muscles moved and the sweat glistened on his skin. His skin wasn't olive like so many Creoles; it was deeply golden, the color of apple cider in the sun.

  She liked it that she had made him laugh, and when he was done laughing he told her what he saw when he looked at the river. His words sounded like poetry; she didn't try to make any sense of them.

  When he asked about her husband and children, she told him about her Mike and their two boys as if she felt no shame. She knew what he was, all right, and what he wanted from her, and still she was letting him steal her innocence and her honor, though he had yet to touch her.

  He said, “My wife and I are about to have our first. I hope for a son, of course.” He smiled, and his teeth were white and even in the dark gold of his face. “But I will settle for what she gives me.”

  Maeve wrapped her skirt tighter around her bent legs. She thought she ought to get up and wish him a good day and walk away. She thought that, but she never did it.

  By the time she got home, she was so late for her baby's feeding that her breasts ached and were leaking milk. Still she lingered on the stoop a moment. The sky had darkened with rain clouds, but the house glowed golden as if it had saved up the morning's sunshine just for her. The red bougainvillea that clung to the trellis over her front door trembled in the wind.

  Her Mike made a good living as a city policeman and he was proud of how he had provided for her. He had provided her with a home, one-half of a shotgun double. He had provided her with shoes so new they gave her blisters, and a colored girl named Tulie to come help with the cooking and the cleaning and to watch her babes for her while she went walking the levee with another man.

  In her hand she carried a key, and it pressed into her flesh like a brand. A key to a house on Conti Street. She thought she ought to have thrown it in his face. She thought she ought to go around back now and throw it into the cistern, where it would be lost forever.

  She slid the key deep into her pocket.

  She walked through the house and back into the kitchen. Her firstborn son, Paulie, had gotten into the dish cupboard and was banging pot lids together. Somehow Tulie's new baby was managing to sleep through the racket in a basket, which had been set on top of the icebox. A pot of red beans bubbled on the stove.

  Tulie sat at the pine table with its blue-checked oilcloth and the yellow crock of lard and the shaker of Morton salt that always sat in the center of it. The girl was nursing Daman for her, and her baby son's pink lips were pulling on the girl's nipple. His tiny hand grabbed at her breast, which was round and brown and soft, like a baked apple.

  “I'm that sorry I'm late,” Maeve said. “I hope he wasn't fussing too badly.”

  Tulie smiled. She had a big gap between her front teeth, and one day she had shown Maeve how she could whistle through the hole like a boy. And she had beautiful dark eyes, like wells, that always seemed to have been carefully emptied before she raised her thick-fringed lashes to let you look into them. Maeve thought the slaves had probably met their masters' stares with such an emptiness in their eyes.

  “Now, never you mind takin' your time, Miss Maeve,” Tulie was saying. “I's milk enough for both our boys.”

  “I went to the cathedral,” Maeve said. “And then I went for a walk on the levee. In my bare feet.” She held up her shoes so that Tulie could see. She had almost forgotten them, almost left them lying there on the levee. He had run back to the willows for her, to get them.

  Tulie smiled to see the shoes, but whatever she thought of them, she kept it to herself.

  Maeve's breasts were aching something fierce now and leaking milk. She wanted to take her son back from Tulie, to hold his weight heavy in her arms and feel his suckling, to breathe in his baby smell of milk and talcum and soft, moist flesh. Yet she stood there, saying nothing, watching the way his lips moved in and out as he nursed at Tulie's breast, how his little fist clenched and unclenched. Paulie took after her, but Day was all his father's son: fair, with that ready, dimpled smile. His eyes, too, came from his father. Midnight blue, people said they were, though she'd never understood the expression, since every midnight sky she'd ever seen had been black as pitch.

  Later that evening, when her Mike came home for supper, she saw how his eyes were very nearly the same color as his policeman's uniform, and she wondered why she hadn't noticed such a thing before.

  As she set the plate of red beans and rice and fried sac-à-lait down in front of him, she told him she had gone for a walk on the levee. She asked him what he saw when he looked at the river.

  Mike Rourke shook his head at her. “What kind of a question is that?” he said around a mouthful of beans. “I see water. Muddy water.”

  She stared back at him and she hated herself for what she was thinking, what she was feeling. He was a good provider and a good man, kind to her most of the time and affectionate with his sons. He was always touching the boys, cuddling up to them.

  She turned away from him without another word and went into the bedroom. She lay down on the bed but got right back up again. She went into the bathroom, ran cold water in the sink, and splashed it on her face.

  Mike's shaving things were laid out neatly on the shelf above the sink: the porcelain mug, the badger-hair lather brush, his warranted Perfection razor.

  She stared at her husband's razor and thought of how she would come awake sometimes at night with her husband sleeping heavy beside her, and she would feel such an aching, echoing emptiness inside. Hot tears would overflow her eyes and roll down the sides of her face, into her ears, and she would wonder when Mike Rourke had become, with no warning and with no reason, this thing to run away from, like her da.

  She picked up her husband's razor, hefting it in her hand as if to feel its weight. Her mother had killed herself with Da's razor. Mike had told her once that most people didn't do it right—they cut across instead of up. But her mem had known how to do it.

  Maeve pulled open the razor and ran her finger along the blade. Her skin split open, and the pain shocked her, and the way the blood welled up so fast and dark. The razor slipped from her hand, clattering on the tile floor.

  She looked into the mirror above the sink and saw a strange woman with dark hair and dark eyes and a white face. She said the strange woman's name the way he had said it at the market that morning, rolling it around on her tongue.

  “Maeve…Maeve…Maeve…”

  She walked into the kitchen with blood dripping from the end of her f
inger.

  “Sweet Jesus!” Mike shouted when he saw her, jumping up from the table, snatching his napkin off his neck, wrapping it around the small, bleeding cut. “What have you done?”

  “I wanted to see what it would feel like,” she said, but that wasn't exactly true. She had wanted to see if she could feel it at all.

  He stared at her. He looked frightened.

  “It hurts,” she said.

  “Aw, darlin'.” He tried to kiss her, but she jerked away from him. For a moment she thought she might retch. “I want to be alone,” she said.

  She went back into the bedroom and lay down on their bed. She brought her knees up to her chest. She took the key out of her pocket and pressed it between her palms, and then she pressed her clasped hands between her bent knees. She thought she would get up later and go out into the yard and throw the key into the cistern, where it would be lost forever.

  Chapter Five

  FROM THE NEW ORLEANSTIMES-PICAYUNE,EXTRA edition, Wednesday, July 13, 1927:

  PROMINENT NEW ORLEANS LAWYER MURDERED

  Wife Discovers Body

  In Pool of Blood

  Mr. Charles St. Claire, Esq., a criminal defense attorney known for mounting zealous, if unorthodox, cases on behalf of his clients, was found brutally slain last night in an outbuilding of his plantation house, Sans Souci, in the Faubourg Bayou St. John.

  Mr. St. Claire, 30 years old, was married to a famous star of the silver screen, Remy Lelourie St. Claire. It was Mrs. St. Claire who first heard screaming coming from the old slave shack at the rear of the property and went to investigate. There she found Mr. St. Claire lying in a pool of blood, expiring from a cut in his throat. The police recovered the murder weapon, which is said to be a common cane knife, at the scene. No motive has yet been ascribed to the crime, and no arrests have been made.

  Grieving Widow

  Mrs. St. Claire, who emerged briefly from seclusion early this morning, spoke to reporters with her eyes full of tears bravely held back. “I, this city, and the world have lost a great man in Charles St. Claire,” she said. “I loved him with all my heart and I can't believe he's gone.”

  Mrs. St. Claire, the 29-year-old daughter of Mrs. Heloise Lelourie and the late Mr. Reynard Lelourie, is a native New Orleanian who has enjoyed considerable success of late as a motion picture actress. In February of this year, Mrs. St. Claire returned to New Orleans from her home in Hollywood, California, for the premiere of her latest endeavor, Jazz Babies, whereupon she became reacquainted with Mr. St. Claire, a third cousin once removed and a childhood friend. After a whirlwind courtship, they married in a small, quiet ceremony at the Old Church of the Immaculate Conception. They were residing together at Sans Souci at the time of Mr. St. Claire's death.

  “They were such a happy couple,” said Mrs. St. Claire's sister, Miss Belle Lelourie. “And now this horrible thing has happened.”

  No Stone Unturned

  Mayor Arthur J. O'Keefe, Sr, and Superintendent of Police, Mr. Weldon Carrigan, have jointly called for a vigorous investigation into Mr. St. Claire's suspicious death.

  “We will leave no stone unturned,” vowed Superintendent Carrigan. “I want to assure the good people of New Orleans that the perpetrator of this foul deed will be brought to justice with the greatest possible dispatch.”

  The murder victim, Mr. Charles St. Claire, was a member of one of New Orleans' oldest and most distinguished Creole families, but the St. Claires have been haunted by tragedy in recent years. Mr. Charles St. Claire's parents, Jacques St. Claire and Annabel Devereaux St. Claire, were both killed suddenly seven years ago in a train accident outside of Paris, France. Mr. Charles St. Claire's elder brother, Mr. Julius St. Claire, committed suicide eleven years ago at the age of 22, and an only sister, Marie, died of influenza during the epidemic of 1918. Outside of his wife and her branch of the family, Mr. Charles St. Claire has no surviving relatives, except for distant cousins residing in Mobile.

  “One might almost believe in voodoo curses,” said a family friend, “the way tragedy and violent death have stalked the St. Claires.”

  Daman Rourke tossed the Times-Picayune onto his desk and went to stand close to the barred and dust-encrusted window so that he could look down on the noisy, crowded street three stories below.

  The sun had come up red and hot that morning, baking the streets and sidewalks with such ferocity that you expected at any minute the pavement would start splitting and cracking like dried river mud. Charles St. Claire's mutilated corpse had turned up only a few hours ago, yet already it seemed that every reporter in the state had congregated before the Criminal Courts Building, which housed police headquarters and the detectives squad. The mammoth rusty brick and sandstone edifice looked like a medieval castle with its turrets and clock tower, and the press had put it under siege. The surest circulation booster, next to a gory murder, was a juicy scandal involving a beautiful Hollywood starlet, so this one had it all.

  Inside, the squad room was hot and crowded as well. Most of the detectives, even those whose shifts were over, were hanging around and hoping for a personal introduction to the Cinderella Girl. She was supposed to be coming in voluntarily to have her fingerprints taken and to make an official statement as to her whereabouts and actions last night while her husband had been getting himself murdered. Fiorello Prankowski had taken it upon himself to entertain his fellow cops while they waited.

  “So I got dead bodies coming out my ears all night,” he was saying, “then I drag my aching ass on home at four o'fucking-clock this morning, and that's when the wife hits me with it. She went out and bought a Kimball parlor organ. Now, I'm asking myself—what the hell's a parlor organ and what does she want with one? She can't hum a tune without sounding like a cat with its tail caught in the screen door, and yet she's telling me there's a parlor organ sitting in the parlor and it's all ours for only forty easy little payments. Hell, I'm already making easy little payments on everything in the house—the refrigerator, the washing machine, the bedroom suite.” He drawled out the word, saying sooo-eet. “Even the frigging vacuum cleaner's got an easy little payment.”

  “I was just reading an article about that,” said Nate Carroll. He was the youngest detective on the force and he looked like a Raggedy Andy doll. He had orange curly hair and a round, soft face with two blue buttons for eyes and two pink buttons for a nose and a mouth. All morning he'd been drooling over a slick magazine that had still shots of Remy Lelourie's hottest love scenes. One showed her languishing in a sheik's tent wearing nothing but veils, but Nate had so far been the only one to see it. The other detectives were riled at him because he wasn't sharing.

  “What it is,” Nate was saying, “is one of them new theories has to do with—what's that guy? You know, Freud? When women do that—when they go out and buy stuff they don't need—it means they got these sexual urges that aren't otherwise being satisfied.…”

  His words trailed off, and the squad room fell into an awed silence as they all contemplated the fact that Fiorello Prankowski, who was an unpredictable Yankee with biceps the size of hams and fists like ball-peen hammers, had just had his manhood insulted.

  Fio had been leaning lazily back on the hind legs of his chair, but now he let it fall forward and lumbered slowly to his feet. He ambled over to Nate Carroll's desk. “You saying my wife's new parlor organ reminds her of my organ?”

  Somebody snorted and then went instantly quiet. Nate swallowed so hard his throat clicked. He stared down at the magazine in his lap as if it held a blueprint for his salvation. “I was just, you know…talking.”

  “'Cause you'd be right,” Fio said. “Both make them long, deep notes. Do all that throbbing. Vibrating.” He whistled softly and plucked the magazine out of Nate's grasp. “Man, is her hand holding what I think it's holding?”

  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. Ataxicab was pulling up to the curb below, and t
he 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.