Mortal Sins

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Mortal Sins Page 8

by Penn Williamson


  “I looked at them,” Rourke said. The Morning Tribune, the worst of the tabloids, had printed a photograph of the body wrapped in a bloody sheet being carried out to the coroner's hearse. The other papers—the Times-Picayune, the States, and the Item—showed pictures of the grieving widow. She had come out onto the gallery of Sans Souci this morning, shortly after dawn, to talk with all the reporters who had gathered there. In the photographs they'd taken of her, she looked beautiful and tragic. Innocence betrayed.

  “I'll be straight up with you, Day,” his father-in-law was saying. “This murder last night is going to have tabloids from all over and their hacks like Wylie T. Jones crawlin' out the woodwork like roaches in a fire. If we do have to go and put Remy Lelourie on trial for the murder of her husband, we're going to find ourselves in a three-ring circus swinging by our dicks on a trapeze with no net. For one thing there isn't a jury in the country that would convict her, even if she'd been caught right in the act—”

  “She as good as was. Or so it looks.”

  The superintendent slammed the flat of his hand down on the table. “And I'm telling you that when it comes to this case, justice and guilt aren't going to matter diddly. On the other hand, it can't look as though we're letting the murder of a man like Charlie St. Claire pass us on by without any attention being paid to it at all.” He waved his hand at the newspapers. “I don't want some shit-sniffing bastard writing about how my cops're nothing but a bunch of peck-erwoods who couldn't take a trip to the outhouse if there wasn't a path already worn in the dirt to show them the way. We've got to get out of this St. Claire mess as cleanly and with as little fuss as we possibly can.”

  Rourke cut his gaze away to the gallery doors and their view of the heat-hazed sky. Weldon Carrigan was a politician, not a cop. He saw the spilling of blood, the pain and suffering, only as part of a political game to be duked out in the pages of the press and on the polished floors of City Hall, where some deaths mattered and others didn't, and where the best justice was the kind that came easily.

  “So an arrest would be helpful as long as it isn't Mrs. St. Claire's,” Rourke said.

  The superintendent had taken a Havana cigar out of a silver case and was clipping it with a slender silver knife on the end of his watch chain. “Another suspect wouldn't be unwelcome.”

  “Do you have anyone in mind? Or will just any-old-body do?”

  “I heard St. Claire had himself a colored mistress. You hear that?”

  “No,” Rourke lied. The coldness he'd felt in the hallway of the Criminal Courts Building had come back, worse than before. A deep, bone-breaking cold.

  “She's not some parlor chippy either,” his father-in-law was saying. “Supposed to be married, in fact. And even though she's a nigger, St. Claire was supposed to've had a real affection for her.”

  Carrigan lit the cigar with a wooden match, staring all the while at Rourke, who met his eyes but said nothing.

  “You don't find that significant?” Carrigan said when the cigar was drawing.

  Rourke leaned forward to rest his elbows on his thighs, but he kept his gaze locked on the older man's face. “What I find more significant is Mrs. St. Claire covered in blood and sitting next to a cane knife and the slaughtered body of her husband. You go talking to the press about a colored mistress and you've just given them a motive to put on the wife that's as good as a pair of handcuffs.”

  The superintendent pushed himself abruptly to his feet. “Find out who this girl of Charlie's is, Day. Haul her black ass in for questioning, and make her give you something. Something we can use.”

  He went to the French doors and then turned back again. His face seemed to have softened, but perhaps it was only the smoke from the cigar, which feathered the air around his eyes. “You and Katie will be coming to my party on Saturday?” he asked. Weldon Carrigan would be fifty-five on Saturday, but when it came to his birthday, he was still a child at heart. He threw himself a big party every year, complete with cake and ice cream and a fireworks display.

  “I don't know as how I'll have the time,” Rourke said, feeling mean. “Sounds to me like I'll be too busy with the rubber hoses, beating confessions out of anybody that's handy.”

  Carrigan's teeth tightened around the cigar. “Whatever works.” He took the cigar out of his mouth to stare down at the burning ash, sighing. “Jo told me once—I think it was one of those times when she was trying to explain to me why it was that she just had to have you. She said that to you being a cop was like being a priest, like it was kind of a holy calling from God, and so you walked a tightrope between the way the world was and the way you wanted it to be and you saw nothing but darkness beneath you and no end in sight. Now, my daughter, she thought the greatest act of courage she could imagine was that your honor kept you clinging to that rope, when anyone else would've just let go long ago.”

  Weldon Carrigan looked back up and his mouth curled into something that was definitely not a smile, and Rourke knew he was about to be asked for something he wouldn't be able to give. “Me, I told her that martyrs usually ended up burning at the stake. I want you to bury this Vinny what's his name—this two-bit goon—and forget about him. Meanwhile, the city of New Orleans would also be very grateful if you could find some way to clean up the murder of Charlie St. Claire without us having to hold a goldamned Trial of the Century. You can start by running down this nigger gal he was supposed to have been banging.”

  “And to hell with truth and justice,” Rourke said, and immediately wanted to kick himself. Honor, truth, and justice. Shit.

  The smile Rourke gave to himself was full of self-derision as he stretched to his feet. He picked up his straw boater and sauntered from the room, singing under his breath just loud enough for the super to hear, “In the meantime, in between time, ain't we got fun?”

  Chapter Six

  SHE CAME TOWARD HIM OUT OF THE SHADOWED, trash-littered alley, a mystery woman in black silk.

  “I have a quarrel to pick with you, Lieutenant Daman Rourke,” she was saying, her voice as breathless and broken as he felt. “Your captain says you played a lyin', sneaky, dirty trick on me. It seems there is no law that says I had to come down here just on your say-so and roll my fingers on that inky pad. And now you're going to try and hang me with that nasty ol' bloody thumbprint.”

  He smiled. “Electrocute you.”

  She laughed, as he had known she would. She had never been afraid of either sinning or dying.

  “Dead is dead, and hell is hell, and it doesn't much matter how you get there,” she said, her mouth almost singing the words. Her mouth was unforgettable. He had never forgotten the taste of her mouth. “But you shouldn't try and send me there ahead of you, Day.”

  She had come all the way up to him, to where he leaned against the rakish fender of his Stutz Bearcat Roadster, came up to him so close their bellies almost brushed, and she put her hand to his throat as though she was going to choke him, but gently. “That isn't fair.”

  “You know what they say about all being fair.”

  “But which game are we playing at this time, darlin'—love or war?”

  He could feel his pulse pounding against her hand. Once, they hadn't been able to keep their hands off each other.

  “War for now,” he said. “Although we can have a go at love again, if you've the guts for it.”

  Her fingers followed a sinew in his neck down to the hollow in his throat and paused there, pressing a little. “Is that a dare?”

  Jesus, oh, Jesus.

  Her hand fell to her side and she took a step back. “I bet you call her ‘baby,’” she said.

  “What?” he said. He could still feel the pounding of his own pulse in his throat.

  She walked away from him, trailing her hand over the automobile's long and sexy hood, softly stroking the canary yellow paint job with those red-lacquered nails.

  She laughed at the look on his face. “You do call her ‘baby.’ I bet you take her out on the Old Shell R
oad and say, ‘Come on, baby. Let's see how fast you can go.’”

  Rourke couldn't help laughing with her, because she was right. He'd paid the Bearcat's exorbitant thirty-five-hundred-dollar price tag with bourré winnings, and he thought that putting the six-cylinder, air-cooled Franklin engine through its paces was almost as good as sex.

  Remy had come back to him, close enough to touch him, although this time she didn't. “So take me for a ride in her, Day. And make her go fast.”

  He had intended all along to take her for a ride. It was why he'd had the desk sergeant bring her out this back way, away from the crush of reporters and her adoring fans. He wanted to take her to a place where he could see how much, if any, she had changed.

  He opened the passenger door and watched her climb in, flashing her long legs. As she settled into the Bearcat's low-slung, hand-buffed Spanish leather seat, her black sheath dress rode up to reveal the roll of her stockings and shocking pink knees. Painted nails and rouged knees—she was sure one hot little tomato.

  “Mourning becomes you,” he said.

  She looked up at him, her eyes wide and guileless. “Am I being too subtle, do you think? Should I have wrapped myself up in long black taffeta skirts and a veil?”

  He could feel an energy pulsing off her like heat lightning. He knew where that had come from. Even in the little bit of time he'd spent with her there in the squad room, he'd watched her come to possess them all, one by one. Seasoned, jaded cops who'd seen everything and should have known better had fallen into those big, cat-like tilted eyes, and their souls had become electrified.

  And she had fed off them, was feeding off them still.

  Rourke got behind the wheel and started the engine, but before he put the Bearcat in gear, he pulled a hip flask of scotch out of his pocket and held it out to her. “To soothe the grieving widow's shattered nerves.”

  “To love and war,” she said, taking the flask, touching just the back of his hand, and he despised himself for it, but he felt the burn of her touch low and deep in his belly.

  Rourke sent the Bearcat shooting out of the alley in a cloud of dust and a scattering of oiled gravel.

  He took Tulane Avenue to Claiborne and turned east. She didn't ask where they were going, not even when they headed toward the river and open country on the St. Bernard Highway. He opened the Bearcat up, coaxing the speedometer up to eighty miles per hour, which was twice as fast as any sane man would drive on that road.

  She was drinking steadily from the flask, probably more than was wise for someone about to be grilled by a homicide detective. “You are so mean, Daman Rourke,” she said after a time.

  “Am I?”

  “I walked into that police station of yours scared to death, and you give me this look. Just like some nasty ol' monster would do, before he goes chasing after the girl and growling ‘I'm gonna get yooou.’”

  He laughed, and she smiled back at him. She had to hold down her hat against the wind they made, and he could see the blue veins on the inside of her arm. Her face shone like a white rose.

  This was like a scene in one of her movies, he thought. Drinking bootleg whiskey in a fast car, with the wind in their hair. The gay, irresponsible, tomorrow-we-die celluloid life.

  Last night, covered head to toe in her murdered husband's blood, still she had seemed so frightened and vulnerable. So innocent, if you didn't know her. Last night she had tried to seduce him with her innocence.

  She was still trying to seduce him. But this morning there was a brittleness, an edgy desperation, to her. She was more believable somehow, this Remy.

  He cut his eyes off the road and back to her again. There was that luminescent quality about her that shone through so strongly on the movie screen, a shimmering, like an icicle melting in the sun, but she gripped the flask so hard her knuckles had bled white, and he could see faint black stains left by the fingerprinting.

  “Don't you think you ought to be getting yourself a lawyer?” he said.

  She took another long pull of the scotch. “That's what Mama told me—well, Mama didn't tell me exactly, since we aren't speaking. She had Belle telephone this morning and pass along the wisdom: that I need to get me a lawyer. 'Course, Mama isn't worried about me being arrested so much as she is about me not getting the house. You know how Mama feels about Sans Souci.”

  “So are you going to get the house? Does it come to you in St. Claire's will?”

  “You are such a cop anymore, Day. Now you're thinking I killed him for a house.”

  She had pushed her lips into a little pout, playing with him, being obvious about it and not even caring that he would see right through her, not caring that he knew she had coveted Sans Souci the whole of her life.

  He slammed on the brakes and the Bearcat slewed to a stop, tires screeching and burning rubber. He stared at her and she stared back at him, unblinking. She wasn't even breathing hard.

  Then, as he watched, her eyes slowly filled with tears. She turned her head away, to look across an empty pasture toward an old dairy barn. The barn, once painted red, was now the color of rust. You could see, just barely, the faded image of a spotted cow on the steeply slanted roof.

  He gripped her chin and pulled her head around to face him. “My, my, just look at you—the grieving widow all of a sudden. But who are the tears for, baby? For yourself, or for him? Do you want me to believe you're sorry he's dead?”

  She shook her head, and he felt a splash of wetness on the back of his hand. “Don't be like this, Day, please,” she said, so softly he could barely hear her. “Don't hate me like this.”

  He let go of her as if she'd suddenly caught on fire. She was setting him up, twisting him inside out, with her truths and her lies. He knew that if he let himself listen to her long enough, he would find a way to believe whatever she told him.

  He listened to her cry for a while, until her cheeks were all puffy and wet, and her nose had turned red. He had seen her cry like this before, both for real and in her movies—hard, brutal tears that could make her seem so human as to be almost ugly. That she wasn't so beautiful when she cried made it even easier to believe her. But then she probably knew that as well.

  “I am sorry for Charles,” she was saying. “For his dying and the horrible way of it, and for all the pain we'd brought to each other in these last months.”

  She looked at him, with her lips partly open, her eyes so wet and dark and deep. Like her tears, everything about her had the potential to be a lie. He gripped the steering wheel, hard, to keep from touching her, and drove off the road, turning onto a track that cut through the pasture toward the old dairy barn. The barn had been converted into a hangar, where a couple of Spad fighter planes and a Jenny trainer had been relegated as surplus from the war. One of the pastures had been turned into an airfield, although nothing stirred there now but the cattails and the crows. Even the wind sock hung listless in the thick, sultry air.

  He had gone to war after she had left him that summer, the summer of 1916. The Great War, they called it, and great it had been from the way it consumed blood and flesh and bones by the trenchload. America hadn't joined in the carnage yet, but there had been a French flying squadron of American volunteers, the Lafayette Escadrille. Daman Rourke had gone to France hoping to die, and instead he had renewed his love affair with danger in the form of tracer bullets blazing out of the blinding sun. He had discovered inside himself new and terrible talents, for fighting and killing and jousting in the sky.

  He'd had to stop the killing after the war was over, but he hadn't been able to give up the flying. It was so easy, he had discovered, and so very sweet, to take an airplane out on the screaming edge and dance.

  Usually for stunt flying he flew one of the Spads, but he rolled the Jenny out of the barn now and began a preflight check, running his hands over the struts, testing the tension of the flying wires, tightening nuts and bolts. Remy walked around the plane the way she'd walked around the Bearcat, touching it, taking in the frag
ile contraption of wood and wire and fabric.

  “Is it your intention to take me flying in this thing?” she finally said.

  “Well, you did allow as how you wanted to go fast. Guaranteed thrills, and your money back if you get killed.” He put a whole lot of challenge and just a touch of meanness into his smile. “It's double-dare time, Remy Lelourie.”

  She only laughed.

  He helped her to put on goggles, helmet, and one of his old leather jackets, and then he lifted her up into the front cockpit's worn wicker seat. Even though she wouldn't be doing the piloting, because of her much lighter weight she would have to ride up there to prevent the aircraft from being nose-heavy.

  She sat in the cockpit, watching him, and he thought he could feel the excitement in her, the life, like a vibration along the plane's flying wires. She watched his every move as he checked to be sure the ignition switch was off and that both the air- and gas-intake valves were open before he hand-pumped air pressure into the gas tank. He went to the front of the plane and flipped the propeller four times clockwise, then came back to the cockpit and slowly shut down the air valves and turned on the magneto switch. He went around up front again, put his palms on the propeller blade, and heaved.

  The engine coughed and roared to life even as he was jumping clear of the flying propeller blades. He swung up onto the wing as the plane began to roll.

  He climbed into the cockpit and took the Jenny up. The horizon was strung with wisps of gray clouds, like dirty feathers, but the sky above them glowed with a soft, saffron light. They went up and up, flying, until the palmettos, the water oaks and willows, were all reduced to green splashes on brown earth, and the oyster and shrimp boats looked small as doodlebugs on the water. They flew, soaring high toward the sun, and he widened his eyes so that he saw the whole world below, above and around him.

 

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