Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  Her gaze went now to every man in the room but him, and Rourke watched her pull them in one by one. She seemed to be searching inside their skins for something she wanted, coveted, craved.

  His captain, looking a little stunned, was still holding her hand, as if unsure whether he was supposed to shake it or bring it up to his lips and kiss it. Captain Daniel Malone had careless southern-gentleman good looks to go with his careless southern-gentleman good manners: rumpled sandy-blond hair, dimpled chin, and sleepy brown eyes that always managed to look sad even when he smiled. His wife was the mayor's cousin and that had got him his rank, but such was New Orleans. He was a good cop, and the detective squad liked him.

  He mumbled something now about taking care of a few formalities and led Remy Lelourie over to a plain ladder-back chair.

  She lowered herself gracefully onto the seat, folded her hands with those red-lacquered nails on her lap, and tucked her feet beneath her. Her shoes, Rourke saw, had little black bows at the ankles.

  The captain took a seat beside her. “Miss Lelourie—that is, Mrs. St. Claire…may we get you something? Coffee? A glass of water?”

  “You are too kind,” she said, so softly they all had to strain to hear. “But I'm fine, truly I am.”

  Captain Malone's hand came up to hover over her shoulder for a moment, as if he would pat it if only he dared. If she wasn't the most beautiful woman in the world, Rourke thought, she was certainly the most photographed. They had lived with her image for years, these cops, been surrounded by it everywhere, and so they had thought they knew her, maybe even thought they owned a little piece of her. Now they were seeing how wrong they had been.

  “Mrs. St. Claire, I know this is difficult,” Malone said, and his words so intruded on the moment that they seemed cruel, obscene. “But if you could go over one more time what happened last night when you found your husband's…when you found him. Please think it over and leave nothing out, no matter how insignificant it might seem. The smallest detail may turn out to be the clue that will break the case.”

  She nodded, slowly, and then her shoulders straightened bravely, but she kept her eyes demurely lowered on the hands in her lap. “I had gone to bed and just drifted off when I was awakened by screaming coming from that old slave shack in back of the house. Since Charles often spent time there when he wanted to be alone, to think and to read, I immediately became afraid for him. But I sleep in the nude, you see, so I had to stop and throw my dress back on before I could go out there.”

  “Did you—” The captain's voice broke roughly while each man in the room was still rocking beneath his own image of a naked Remy Lelourie lying sprawled on silken sheets. “Did you see anyone? Anyone leaving the shack?”

  “No, I saw no one…except for Charles. He was lying on the floor and blood was everywhere, and a knife was stuck in his chest. I think I might have pulled it out—the knife. Charles was still breathing, you see. He had a horrible cut in his throat, but he was still breathing, and the cut in his throat was making this awful gurgling noise and spewing blood. He was struggling to say something…. I think it was my name. He was trying to beg me to help him, only I couldn't, I couldn't…” She shut her eyes, but a single tear escaped to roll slowly down one flawless cheek.

  Somebody breathed loudly; another man sighed. She was playing them like Satchmo played his cornet, Rourke thought, crying up that last sad note until it cut to the bone.

  “He died…my Charlie died in my arms,” she said, her voice bleeding like Charles St. Claire had bled. Somebody, Rourke thought, ought to be applauding. Then, slowly, the brim of her hat lifted as her head came up, and she looked right at him, and he almost fell into her eyes.

  The desk sergeant saved him by coming up to stand in front of him, blocking his view of her. “The super just rang up,” the sergeant said. “He wants to see you, pronto. He said to tell you he's taking breakfast at the Boston Club this mornin'.”

  Rourke pushed himself off the wall. “When Mrs. St. Claire is done here, don't let her go out through that mob out front. Take her down to the basement and show her the way up to the alley 'round back.”

  “Sure, Loot,” the desk sergeant said with a winking grin as Rourke brushed past him, heading for the door.

  Her voice—soft, sad, sweet—followed after him. “I guess I must have gone into shock then, because the next thing I remember is hearing Beulah scream. And the feel of Charles's body, cold and heavy in my arms.”

  He was halfway to the stairwell at the end of the hall when he met Roibin Doherty coming out of the toilet, buttoning up his fly. Rourke started to go around him, but Doherty planted himself in the way, and when Rourke made to go around him a second time, he shifted, putting himself in the way again. The man's red-veined cheeks bulged with a drooling chaw, whiskey fumes floated off him like hot off a tar road, and hate burned in his swollen, watery eyes. Hate that had long been festering.

  “Pardon me,” Rourke said, making an effort to keep his own face flat and empty.

  Doherty swayed into him, breathing a reeking laugh, and Rourke almost gagged on a reflex of revulsion and an old, remembered fear.

  “Won't be gettin' no pardon from me, boy,” Doherty said in a voice as rough as a furnace shaker. “Won't be gettin' no pardon from the gov'ner neither on the day they fry your ass up in Angola.”

  Doherty's rank was detective sergeant, but he didn't do much detecting anymore. He was supposed to be looking after the property and evidence room, maintaining the archival files, and only occasionally covering a case on the street when the workload was heavy. What he mostly did was drink away the hours, waiting for the day when his pension would kick in and brooding over his conviction that Daman Rourke ought to be picking cotton on a prison chain gang instead of carrying a detective's badge. Usually, though, Rourke could find a way to avoid him, or Doherty's own sense of survival led him into keeping his malice to himself.

  Rourke took a step back now and gave the older man a slow once-over, as if cataloging the cotton suit coat, rumpled and stained with sweat and tobacco juice; the wet spot on the front of his trousers; the grimy, thinning, tangled gray hair.

  Rourke smiled, showing his eyeteeth. “Jesus, Sarge. You are like a walking spittoon.”

  Doherty swiped at the sweat that dripped off the end of his nose and smirked. “You're scared, ain't you, boy? Plumb scared shitless, because it won't be so easy for y'all to get away with it this time, you an' her. Not gonna be no suicide verdict for poor ol' Charlie St. Claire, no sirree bob. Kinda hard to make it look like the man slashed his own throat with a cane knife.”

  Rourke smiled again, and he was still smiling when he planted his fist deep in Doherty's drinker's belly. It was, he thought, like punching a pillow.

  The man doubled over, gasping and wheezing, and Rourke walked around him. He was almost to the head of the stairs when Doherty called out, “Hey, what's the dirty little secret, boy?” and Rourke made the mistake of turning back around.

  Doherty stood swaying in the middle of the hall, a pinched, malevolent light burning in his eyes. Behind him, lounging in the open door to the squad room, was Fiorello Prankowski.

  “What's the secret, huh?” Doherty said again. He wiped the tobacco juice off his mouth with a fat thumb and grinned. “Jus' what did them poor St. Claire boys have on that lil' witch of a gal of yours, that Remy Lelourie?”

  Rourke said nothing. Doherty's smile widened, showing off a mouthful of brown teeth and gray gums. He shot a stream of tobacco juice onto the brown linoleum floor and then tottered off down the hall toward the property room.

  “Bastard's been on the sauce so long his brains have turned to boiled grits,” Fio said, but Rourke had seen the sharp calculation come into his partner's eyes before he'd covered it with a smile and a shake of his head. “Maybe you shouldn't take it so personal.”

  Rourke shrugged. It was probably a hundred degrees in that hallway, the air so wet you could wring it out and get bathwater, and yet he felt co
ld inside. “I gotta go see the super,” he said. “I'll catch you later.”

  Fio touched his forehead in a mock salute. “Yeah, sure. You do that, partner. You catch me later.”

  Outside, a brassy sun smote the sidewalk like a hammer. City smells—of gasoline and garbage and dust—floated on the thick, motionless air like algae on swamp water.

  Rourke walked over to Canal Street, where the Boston Club imposed its presence upon the South with classic white elegance. In a city where two or more folk gathering on a street corner were apt to form a club, this was still the oldest and proudest men's gathering place. If you wanted an invitation to pass through its plain but hallowed front door, it helped if your daddy was a member, and his daddy before him, and yet there were always ways to get around not being born to the proper family. Ways like money and juice.

  This morning, a green Pierce-Arrow touring car, all gleaming brass and wood and leather and chrome, was parked alongside the club's front curb. Underneath the shade of the club's upper gallery, the city's official bootlegger stood shooting the breeze with two city-council members and a state legislator. Money and juice. Casey Maguire might have been born poor and Irish, but he'd always possessed a sure knowledge about the privileged and powerful that they barely realized about themselves: He knew all the ways they were for sale.

  Rourke waited for the conversation to end, and for the bootlegger to cross the sidewalk toward his car, and then he did what that old drunken sergeant had done with him a moment ago—he planted himself in the way.

  Only this time the contest was more even. Casey Maguire boxed daily at the New Orleans Athletic Club; his body was quick and lean and braided with muscle. He wasn't nearly as tall as Rourke, though, and he had to tilt back on his heels and lift his head to meet Rourke's eyes.

  “Good mornin', Day,” he said. A small smile played around his wide mouth, as if he knew where this was going and was merely amused by it. “It's been a while since we've spoken. I hope I'm finding you well.”

  Casey Maguire had worked most of the Irish Channel out of his accent, he'd put polish on his manners and sophistication into his dress, but he hadn't been able to do anything about his eyes, which were so pale they were nearly colorless, like spit. When you come from a place where you learn early to do mean unto others before they can do it unto you, it shows in your eyes. Maguire could be frightening, even to those who had come from the same place.

  When Rourke didn't say anything, Maguire moved to go around him. Rourke shifted his weight, putting himself in the way again.

  Maguire blew a soft sigh out of pursed lips, as if he were mildly exasperated. “If we're going to dance, Detective, maybe we should be doing it to music.”

  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 overlapping sources: family and politics. So Weldon Car-rigan, 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 muchforhimas had his marriage to Rose Marie Wil-mington, 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-in-law 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.”