Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  “Have you heard it told, then,” she said, “how we Lelouries came to lose Sans Souci?”

  “Something about a duel between a Lelourie and a St. Claire, and cheating going on during a game of cards.”

  She stared at him a moment longer, and then she looked away, and he got the feeling that what she said next wasn't what she'd been about to say.

  “Yes, that is how the story goes. There was cheating at cards and so Sans Souci was lost, and then there was a duel, in which the Lelourie boy died and the St. Claire boy lived. Because of the wicked greed of a St. Claire, our beautiful plantation house has been out of our care for all these years and my husband never knew his granddaddy. So what does it matter who killed him, or if he brought it on himself? Charles St. Claire's dying was justice long past due.”

  “If you believe the sins of the father should be visited upon their sons. That's a long time to bear a grudge, though, and your husband has been dead for years himself, and long past caring.”

  Her face was composed, but he could see her pride, and her pain, in the way she drew herself up tall. “I was born a Lelourie, I married a Lelourie, our children are Lelouries. We are family, and none of that changed no matter what came after—not my husband's desertion of me and our girls so that he might go off and live in sin with your mother the Irish whore, and certainly not his dying. Nothing has changed. But then I would never expect a boy like you, come up from the gutter, a son of that woman, to have an understanding of these things.”

  She stood up then, as if that should be the last word on the subject. She inclined her head to him. “Good day to you, sir.”

  He waited until she got as far as the doorway before he said, “I couldn't help noticing how the umbrellas in the hall tree were still a bit wet. I hope y'all didn't get caught out in that terrible downpour last night.”

  She paused for a moment, her hand on the jamb. She half turned back to him, although he thought her gaze might have flashed for just an instant to her daughter. Belle had gone perfectly still.

  Then that smallest of smiles brushed across the older woman's mouth again. “Doubtless all our neighbors will be pleased to tell you how I have hidden my head in shame and not left this house come an evening in twenty-seven years. But the truth is my daughter and I have been known to take comfort from Mother Church and her sacraments on other days besides Sunday. Belle, will you see this gentleman out?”

  Heloise Lelourie turned and walked from the room with her head held high and her back straight, her long black skirt from another era brushing in a whisper over the floor. Rourke watched her go, understanding her more than she thought. He understood how she had fought to keep the past alive by feeding it with the hopes and dreams and desires of her children. He understood, because he himself had never been able to separate his obsession with Remy from the shame they shared over a past they suffered from but hadn't made.

  “Poor Mama,” Belle said. “But then you know why she is the way she is. And how is your own dear mama?”

  The smile Rourke gave to her held more than a touch of meanness in it. “The same. Beautiful, dark, and mysterious. Still wearing black, just like your mama.”

  He turned back to the painting and stared at it until Belle was moved to leave the window and come to stand beside him. “Is this going to be enough satisfaction for your mama?” he said. “A pretty painting hanging above the mantel? Even if Remy does end up with the deed to Sans Souci, I don't expect she'll be inviting y'all to move on in with her.”

  “What about my sister?” Belle said after a moment. “Are you going to arrest her?”

  Rourke didn't answer. He saw that they had turned a nearby sideboard into an altar. They'd covered it with a crocheted lambrequin and on that sat a plaster statue of St. Michael, patron of les familles. Pray to him and he would keep your family safe.

  The statue was surrounded by dozens of votive candles, some still burning, and some long since melted down to globs of wax. Dangling from St. Michael's prayerful, outstretched arms was a string of rosary beads. Made out of small red peas, they looked like tears of blood.

  They had been praying a lot for something lately, the two women in this house.

  Beside one of the puce velvet chairs was a walnut table laden with framed photographs. Many were of Belle when she was a child, but he didn't see any of Remy. Then he noticed that one wasn't a photograph, after all, but a lock of black hair mounted on rose velvet and enclosed in a gold-leaf frame.

  He stared at the lock of hair a moment, but what he picked up was a photograph of Belle framed in ornate silver. She had been such a pretty child that everyone called her Belle so often it had become her name. Those thick apricot curls, round dimpled cheeks, a rosebud mouth. Remy had been a dark child, in looks and temperament. Remy had been edgy and fierce, and with the individual parts of her face—her eyes and mouth and chin and cheekbones—all seeming too much for making up the whole of it.

  Rourke set down Belle's photograph and picked up another. This one was of a young Charles St. Claire and his brother, Julius, posed arm in arm on the gallery of Sans Souci and dressed for sailing.

  “You can't tell them apart, can you?” Belle said, peering over his shoulder to look at the picture along with him. “But they were only alike in their looks. Why, Julius was all the gentlemanly virtues personified.”

  “And Charles?”

  She smiled, pleased that he'd obliged her by asking. “He could be charming too, although he had his mean side. But then you know that.”

  He knew it now, he supposed, although in the days when this photograph was taken, Rourke had barely ever thought of Charles.

  But he sure enough had hated Julius.

  “Mama always used to declare that of the two boys, Julius was the sweetest and the weakest,” Belle was saying. “But then he was also the oldest, and Sans Souci would have come to him if he hadn't died—not that that ever really mattered to Remy, though. She loved Julius for himself.”

  She reached around him and brushed her finger over Charles St. Claire's smiling image. “Some people are going to say that's why she killed him, you know. Why Remy killed Charles. For the house, and because she loved Julius best and she must've come to find out that she couldn't wrap Charles 'round her little finger the way she'd done with his brother. She must've come to find out that no matter how alike in looks they were, Charles wasn't really Julius and never would be.”

  Rourke returned the photograph to the table and picked up the one of Belle again. He turned it around and held it up for her to see. “You were sure a pretty little thing, Miss Belle. Back in those days. Pretty enough to be in the movies.”

  Her face twitched as though he had struck her. She snatched the picture out of his hand and slammed it down on the table. She leaned close to him, close enough for him to see the fine lines feathering her eyes and catch a faint whiff of mildew that clung to her dress. “It was Julius she loved. He was the one she was going to marry that summer. That summer he died and she ran off.”

  Rourke went out of the parlor and down the hall, pausing only long enough to pick up his hat from the sofa table and put it on.

  “Why, I remember how we used to talk about it, Remy and I. How we carried on, planning her wedding, the dress she would wear, and all the flowers, and how there'd be a champagne fountain at the reception.” She had followed him out the front door, onto the gallery with its peeling gray paint. Her face was flushed, and the anger in her voice came as if from a fire raging inside her. “It was Julius that Remy loved. Never you, and not Charles.”

  The clothes-pole man was long gone, but the fruit man had stopped to make a sale next door, and now he'd just started off down the avenue again.

  “Aw-range, so sweet right off the tree, lay-deeee.” The fruit man wore a battered top hat; his mule wore a floppy straw one. A big pan scale swung on a chain as his wagon lumbered along, flashing silver in the sun.

  “It was always Julius she loved.”

  Rourke l
ifted his own hat and gave her his best southern-gentleman smile. “Or so you would have me believe, Miss Belle. But then we all have our own little shuck and hustle.”

  Rourke left the Lelourie cottage, retracing the way back to Sans Souci, but on foot this time. He crossed the avenue and passed through the scrolled iron gates of the St. Louis Cemetery No. 3, where some of the crumbling old crypts dated back to the turn of the last century. Over a hundred years' worth of Lelouries and St. Claires had been brought to their eternal rest here in this city of the dead.

  The tomb of the Famille Lelourie was in the style of a Greek temple with a marble child-angel dancing on top of it. The caskets were kept in vaults, behind a lacy wrought-iron gate, but the names of the Lelourie dead had been carved throughout the years onto the temple's lichen-mottled walls. One of the names, he thought, must belong to the Lelourie boy who had lost Sans Souci in a game of cards and then died in a duel.

  One set of deeply engraved letters seemed to stand out larger than the others: REYNARD LELOURIE. There was no inscription to go along with the name, though; no “Beloved Husband of Heloise,” no “Beloved Father of Remy and Belle.” Certainly no “Beloved Lover of Maeve Rourke.” But above the name was a smaller set of letters: MAUREEN, BELOVED DAUGHTER OF REYNARD.

  “Maureen,” he said, and the name was like a foreign word whose meaning you only half understand.

  In his memory it is a warm spring evening when Rourke is seven years old. The sun is gone but the day still holds on to its light, the sky a dusky gold wrapped with black ribbons of clouds, and Rourke is playing baseball with a gang of boys in an abandoned lot across from the wharves on Tchoupitoulas Street. In his memory his father staggers out of a bar in the Swamp and comes for him while he is catching behind the plate, or maybe he is playing shortstop.

  His father had been sloppy drunk that evening, his face all red and sweaty, and he'd smelled. Rourke didn't know what he'd done to set his old man off, and he didn't care. All he wanted to do was get out of there and away from the other boys, more ashamed of having a falling down, stinking boozer for a daddy than afraid of the whipping he thought was coming.

  The shame was a roaring in his ears, so loud he couldn't hear what his father was saying, and then he did and he knew whatever was coming would be bad, because it was always bad when his father talked about her.

  “…such a tough lil' bastard, always so goddamned tough. It's 'cause you got religion. You got the faith—only it ain't God you pray to, it's her. You got this conviction inside you that she'll be comin' back for you one day, that she's goin' to be savin' your sweet ass. Well, boy, today's the day I'm showin' you different.”

  That at least is what his father says in his memory, and the grip on his arm is like a shackle of iron, unbreakable, but that probably wasn't true. He could easily have gotten loose from a shambling drunk who was having trouble even keeping his own feet underneath him.

  Still, in his memory he is being dragged to a house in the Quarter, on Conti Street, bursting through the front door and into a strange parlor and then beyond, to a room where his mama and a man are lying on the bed without their clothes on. His father and Reynard Lelourie are shouting but he can't hear the words, nor can he see their faces. The only thing in that room is his mother, kneeling up on the bed, and she is crying and holding out her hand to him, and her naked belly is swollen, distended, huge.

  He had wanted to run away, but he hadn't been able to tear his gaze from her belly, and though he made not a sound, was barely breathing, in his mind he was screaming, because his daddy had been right—a small part of him had believed she would one day be coming home. He was her son, and surely she must love him too much to stay away forever.

  A couple of months later somebody told him that the baby, a little girl, had lived only a week or so and then quietly died. For a long while afterward, whenever he imagined the baby lying in her tiny coffin, she would always have his mother's face.

  Until this day, though, he had never come to the Lelourie crypt, and so he had never known that his baby half-sister had been named Maureen.

  Rourke left the cemetery and walked through a green tunnel of oaks and elms and sycamores, on sidewalks that were buckled and peaked by the roots of the old trees and the passing years.

  He paused to talk to those he met: to the maiden aunts who snipped the dead blooms off their mother's prize rosebushes; to the young wives who met at each other's houses for bridge and mah-jongg parties; to the colored girls who swept off the porches and rocked the babies on their laps. To the men who delivered the ice and the coal and the gossip from other mouths and places.

  The neighborhood lived on its galleries, especially during the hot summers—creaking back and forth in rocking chairs, observing the rhythms of life. Some of these families had resided in their houses for generations. They thought they knew the Lelouries and the St. Claires as well as they knew themselves, but they didn't always know themselves all that well. They saw everything, but they didn't always see it right.

  As he walked, Rourke kept an eye out among all the peddlers and hustlers for a knife-grinder, because the murder weapon had looked recently sharpened and it was the wrong time of year for cutting sugar cane. He finally found the old man and his cart a block down from the neighborhood corner grocery.

  The knife-grinder had gnarled, palsied hands and a spray of moles across his cheekbones, like dandelion seeds, and he nodded solemnly as Rourke asked his question. He did remember sharpening a cane knife about a week back, but not much about the colored boy who had brought it to him. “I know all the families here 'bout and those that do for them,” he said. “This boy I never seen befo'.”

  Rourke gave him five dollars in reward money for helping the police in the course of their investigation and then walked the rest of the way to Pagliani's Fine Foods. Mr. Pagliani was always the first to know who was expecting a baby, whose grandmother had died, and whose kid had the measles.

  The grocery had a long, wide gallery with ancient, flaking white paint that looked like dried fish scales. Men sat on crates and old ladder-back chairs beneath the shade of a china bell tree, played dominos for a nickel a game, and drank sour mash out of bottles wrapped in brown paper. The place hadn't changed at all since Rourke was a boy, except that the Coca-Cola sign was now electrified.

  Inside, the place smelled of bananas, coffee, and the loaves of French bread piled high on the counter. As he always did when he walked through the door, Rourke looked up to see if the big paper umbrella still hung from the ceiling among the strings of Italian cheese and the coiled links of sausages. The umbrella had pink cherry blossoms and a blue dragon painted on it. From all the way back when he was a boy, Rourke had always wondered how that umbrella had come to be hanging up there, and why.

  Next to the cash register, two big-horned loudspeakers were blasting a baseball game out of a crystal set made from an empty Quaker oats box. The Pelicans were playing out at Heinemann Park, and the game was being re-created off the ticker tape by Jack Halliday.

  Rourke heard Halliday's scratchy voice say, “That pitch just nicked the outside corner—strike two,” and a thought hit him like a fist to the heart. He had promised his Katie he would take her to that game today, and then Charles St. Claire had been murdered last night and he had forgotten all about it. He was always doing that to the poor kid, making promises he ended up breaking, sometimes with barely a thought.

  He looked up to find dapper old Mr. Pagliani standing next to the cash register, as if guarding it. The man's dark eyes were piercing, and the mouth beneath his blackened and waxed mustache was frowning. Daman Rourke had stolen a lot of licorice whips out of this store when he was a kid, and Mr. Pagliani still didn't quite believe that the boy he knew as a quick-fingered thief had grown up to be a cop rather than a resident of a cell in Angola.

  Rourke smiled. “Evenin' to you, Mr. Pagliani. What inning is it?”

  The voice on the crystal set crackled with excitement. Someone had ju
st hit a double against the right-field wall. Maybe there was a chance he and Katie could still catch the end of the game, but he knew, even as he indulged himself with the thought, that it was an easy lie. Katie had probably sat out on their front stoop, wearing her Pelicans hat and with her mitt in her lap, waiting for him to come pick her up and take her out to the ballpark, and she had gone on sitting there and waiting through the opening pitch and the first hit, and then, as the pitches and hits had come and gone, she had finally known her daddy wasn't coming, and Rourke knew there was going to be no making up for that kind of forgetting.

  “It is the top of the ninth,” Mr. Pagliani was saying in his thick Sicilian accent, “and the Pels, they are ahead with six runs. You think maybe they win the pennant again this year?”

  “Can't miss,” Rourke said, and smiled again, even though Mr. Pagliani was pretty wise to his tricks. He bent over to fish a Coca-Cola out of a big tin tub, which stood next to the pickle barrel and was filled with shaved ice and bottles of soda pop. The old man had to lean way over to keep an eye on his thieving hands.

  When Rourke put a coin on the worn and nicked wood of the counter, the grocer relaxed a little. He even offered to pry the cap off the bottle. “You come nosing 'round the neighborhood because of the murder that happened over at Sans Souci last night, no? Hunh. You was always coming 'round here when you was a kid and getting up to no good.”

  Rourke took a swallow of the soda. It was crisp and cold and delicious. “Yeah, but now they're paying me to do it. A sad business, that murder.”

  Mr. Pagliani cast a slow, furtive glance around his store and then leaned forward onto his elbows as if he was about to impart a deep, dark secret. “The wife, she did it. Sliced her man up like he was salami. She was always a wild thing—that Lelourie girl. Up to no good…” His words trailed off as if he just remembered that some of the occasions when Remy Lelourie had been up to no good, she'd been in Daman Rourke's company.