Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

He frowned at Rourke and straightened up, cocking his thumb down at the racks of newspapers beneath the cash register. “It says right there in the Trib how you cops think she probably did it. Look to the woman, no?”

  Rourke bought another soda and went to the back of the store, where the chicken cages were, and where the old Negro who did the slaughtering and the sweeping out had been hovering and casting wide-eyed looks in his direction ever since he'd walked through the door.

  “Hey there, Jackie Boone,” Rourke said.

  “Hey, Mr. Day,” the old man answered on a big expulsion of pent-up breath. He lifted the ragged straw hat off his head long enough to wipe the sweat off his brow. “Hot again this evenin', ain't it?”

  “Uh-huh. How about a Coca-Cola? It doesn't pack the kick of gin, but it sure goes down cold.”

  Jackie Boone flashed a smile that was missing most of its teeth. “Thank you, suh.” He wiped his hand on his bloody apron and took the bottle of pop from Rourke. He swallowed down a good long drink, then wiped off his mouth with the back of his wrist. “Terrible thing 'bout Mr. Charles, hunh? Him dyin' in that bad way.”

  “I guess the whole neighborhood pretty much can't talk about anything else.”

  The old Negro's gaze went from his boss to the men who had set up squatters' rights on the front gallery. He scratched the coils of gray hair on his chest and lowered his voice. “What they papers and some other folk're sayin', though, 'bout how Miss Remy done it…She'd never do such a thing, no way, no how. It was probably the gris-gris what started it off, and the loup-garou what ended it.”

  You could buy the voodoo charms called gris-gris all over New Orleans, but only the most powerful voodooi-ennes claimed the secret of changing their shape into that of a werewolf and would, for the right price, promise the death of your enemy.

  “Some juju woman been puttin' spells on Mr. St. Claire? Some juju woman like Mamma Rae?”

  Jackie Boone drank down his Coca Cola and smacked his lips. “Mmmmmm-huh.”

  “Who she be spelling for?”

  The old man's gaze slid away from his. “I wouldn't be knowin' nothin' 'bout that, Mr. Day. No, suh”

  Rourke allowed a silence to fall between them while he finished off his own soda. The chickens clucked and scratched in their cages. A breeze came in through the open doorway and set the paper umbrella to twirling.

  Jackie Boone finally sighed and rolled his shoulders up high and pulled his head down low, as if he were expecting a blow. “I don't know who be wantin' to put the death curse on Mr. Charles, I swear I don't. But they say his throat was tore open, and the loup-garou she always go for the throat. Someone put a cross of wet salt on the gallery of the big house, an' then left a gris-gris in the bed in that ol' shack where he was killed. Two, maybe three weeks ago. It was bad gris-gris—dirt taken from the grave of a strangled chil', the skull of a one-eyed toad, and drops of blood from a hung man. Didn't scare him none, though, all that hoodoo. No suh, not Mr. Charles. I tol' him he needed to get hisself a frizzled chicken to keep in the yard, to scratch up any hoodoo what might be buried 'round there, but he only laughed.

  “Now look at where it got him. His throat tore out by the loup-garou.”

  From the grocery Rourke walked the rest of the way back to Sans Souci, going the long way, by the bayou road. The sun was brutal, the glare from it like a slap across his face. It beat on the sour mud and dead green water, stirring up a smell of rot.

  He came around a bend in the road just as a giant garfish exploded out of the bayou, its gills and belly blazing white in the hard sun. The gar was hooked on the end of a cane pole, and the pole was in the hands of a skinny Negro boy, who was wearing a pair of rolled-up dungarees and a big straw hat.

  The boy was reaching for the flopping fish. When he looked up and saw Rourke, his eyes grew wide. He dropped his pole and took off running, the skin of his back shining like ebony from his sweat.

  “Hey, LeBeau, hold up there!” Rourke called after him, but he had already disappeared into the thick scrub oak.

  Rourke looked down at his own shiny two-toned oxfords and his light beige linen trousers and he sighed. But he left the road anyway, climbing the levee and then heading down toward the water.

  Gnats and mosquitoes boiled out of the saw grass and canebrakes. His eyes burned in the wet heat. On the bank where the boy had been fishing lay an upside-down pirogue. The log canoe looked well cared for, caulked and clean of algae on the bottom. A couple of small, crude wooden spears were stuck in the ground nearby, and caught on the branches of a dead cypress was a looped line that dangled black hooks like jet beads off a necklace. All that a boy would need for catching frogs.

  Rourke picked up one of the Civil War Minie balls the boy had been using as fishing weights. Rourke juggled the ball in his hand a moment, then sent it skipping across the water. He looked back toward Sans Souci. From here, especially from out on the water, you could see the slave shack, and the wide expanse of lawn and trees between it and the house.

  He thought of the lantern lights he had seen out here on the bayou last night—boys gigging for frogs in the moonlight. Boys who might well have seen a murderer come and go.

  He climbed back over the levee and down to the road and crossed onto the St. Claire land. He passed through pools of shadow made by the live oaks. His shoes crushed the dried husks that lay scattered under the pecan trees. The sharp fronds of the banana trees hung listless in the heavy air.

  He walked from the slave shack across the lawn toward the big house. On the bayou side of the house, a huge cistern sat among a tangled bed of ferns and wild lilies. It was shaped like a fat beer barrel, although it was at least as large as two truck beds—bigger around than most other cisterns, but not as tall. It wasn't for the house anymore, not since the advent of indoor plumbing, but it was still used to water the garden. Its staves had once been painted dark green, a long time ago, and its big metal hoops were rusting through in places. On top was a hinged lid and strainer to keep out the leaves and the rats, and to make sure that the neighborhood cats didn't fall in.

  He stopped in front of it, his heart beating hard, as if he'd been running.

  The hinges on the cistern's lid screamed as he opened it and looked inside, but of course he saw only water, the black-brown color of chicory coffee. When he brought a pool of it up in his cupped hands, though, it was clear and cool. The lid screamed again as he shut it.

  A hard stillness came over him as he stood there next to the cistern. A feeling of held breath, of taut waiting. He hadn't heard her come, but he knew she was there.

  “Looking for more dead bodies, Lieutenant Rourke?”

  Chapter Eight

  FOR A MOMENT HE COULD ONLY STAND THERE AND STARE at her. He had always been half afraid that she was way more than a little crazy.

  “Just a couple of hours ago you were trying to seduce me into believing in your innocence,” he finally said. “Now you might as well be challenging me to search the premises for more murder victims.”

  “No.” Remy Lelourie came up to him and laid her hand against his cheek. “If I wanted to seduce you, I would do this.” She pressed her mouth against his in a kiss that was almost virginal, and then in the instant before its ending, she ran her tongue along the inside of his lower lip, and he felt the carnality of that deep in the marrow of his bones.

  Her hand fell to her side, and she took a step back. She wasn't smiling. “You look hot,” she said. “Come inside and I'll fix you something long and cool to drink.”

  He followed her up the gallery steps and through the kitchen door.

  “If I were to empty out that cistern,” he said to her back, “what do you think I would find?”

  She looked at him over her shoulder. “Not another dead body, Lieutenant Rourke. Surely you knew that I was only teasin'.”

  She'd said that very well, but he thought that if he touched her she'd be trembling.

  “On the walk back over here from your mama's…Did you know
I'd gone to see your mama?”

  “'Course I know. Belle telephoned to tell me I was about to be arrested. Am I?”

  “Not yet.”

  She smiled. “I almost feel disappointed.”

  “The day is young,” he said. “Anyway, I was thinking about grieving widows and matinee idols, and I was remembering that movie you were in where you threw yourself onto your lover's burning funeral pyre. You had every man in the world wishing he could know if only for one night a woman willing to die with him.”

  “The Rajah's Secret Wife. A love so powerful it survived death and flames, and the director trying to get into the leading man's bed rather than mine for a change.” She laughed softly and shook her head. “That particular film really was nearly the death of me. One of my veils caught on fire and I got smoke in my lungs and wound up getting pneumonia. The studio sent flowers to the hospital, though.”

  “And here all this time I thought you were living the glamorous life out there in Hollywood. Champagne baths and tango dancing and petting parties in the purple dawn.”

  She laughed again, and he realized he was smiling at her, and meaning it, and he made himself quit.

  He watched her take a cut-glass pitcher out of the dish safe and pour into it enough bourbon from a bottle with a label to get them both good and soused. She had a languid, boneless way of moving that millions of women the world over had tried to copy. Just as they had tried to copy with paint and pencil the slashing bones, the tilting eyes, the generous mouth.

  She added sugar to the bourbon, and a trickle of water, and some mint leaves. She then set about attacking the ice in the box rather viciously with a sharp scraper. He watched the strong, young muscles in her bare arm clenching and unclenching, and the smile playing around her mouth that told him she knew what he was thinking.

  She put the shaved ice into two tumblers that were rimmed with sterling silver, and poured the julep over it, and then gave him one of the drinks, making sure their fingers brushed.

  She touched her glass to his. “To even more love and war.”

  He took a small, slow sip, and even then his throat closed up with the kick of the booze. She was back to staring up at him with those wide-open eyes and that vulnerable and desperate look on her face that had always affected him, even when he knew better.

  She smiled a sad smile and shook her head. “I've spent the last ten years of my life surrounded by beautiful men, and none of them was you.”

  “But you made do,” he said.

  She shook her head again, and he thought her mouth might have trembled a little, but he didn't want to see it because he was afraid she was still acting.

  “Belle wrote to me sometimes,” she said. “Belle made certain to write me about your getting married. I was sorry to hear later that your wife had died.”

  Sorry. That was what everyone had said. How sorry they were and what a tragedy it was that God had taken her so young. By the time he got to her she was already dead. He had kissed her mouth, her neck, her ear, and then her mouth again. He hadn't been able to let go of her, even after she began to grow cold in his arms.

  He realized Remy was staring at him again and he dropped his gaze down to the glass in his hand, shielding his thoughts.

  “You loved her,” she said.

  Had he loved Jo? He thought he must have, but he could no longer truly measure the shape and depth of what he'd had with his wife. Once he must have believed that she would save him from everything, even himself, but she had died too soon.

  He felt a woman's fingers lightly brush his cheek, and then Remy Lelourie was walking away from him, out into the hall and toward the front of the house. She had always walked away expecting him to follow her, and he always did.

  She led him upstairs into the parlor they had been in last night. This time of day in most houses the jalousies would be closed against the heat, but she had left them thrown open, and sunlight poured like honey through the windows.

  Rourke stood still and looked around him, at the high, corniced ceilings, the faux marbre walls, the polished heart-pine floors. “Your mama,” he said, “seems to be anticipating with pleasure the fine day this house passes back into Lelourie hands. Maybe once that happens she'll be able to forgive you for letting Julius die on you before y'all could be husband and wife and you could be mistress of Sans Souci. Your little sister Belle, though, now she thinks you didn't marry Charles so much for the house as because you're still in love with Julius, and you hoped his brother was the next best thing, only you found out later that he was just about the very worst thing.”

  She had been listening to him with her head slightly tilted, that soft smile playing around her mouth. “My heavens,” she said. “What frantic detecting you've been doing. No wonder you look so hot and worn out.”

  He stared at her until her smile began to fade and she turned away from him, and then he came after her, using his cop's voice. “Why did you marry him, Remy?”

  She went to one of the tall, narrow windows that overlooked the moss-garlanded oaks and the crushed-shell drive. The long gauzy curtains stirred out over the gray planks of the gallery, but softly, as if they had moved with her sigh.

  “Charles was New Orleans,” she said. “Like this house is New Orleans, and I did so very badly want to come home. I came here for that movie premiere, already half thinking I would stay awhile, and he was at the party and the next thing I knew he was courting me. It was rather sweet the way he went about it, old-fashioned and gentle. He didn't seem to want—” She cut herself off and gripped her elbows with her hands, holding herself. “I thought that because he'd known me from when we were just kids, then he would know what I was, just little ol' Remy Lelourie, his third cousin from on up the road. I thought he could love me for myself.”

  She turned back around to face him again. The sharpbones of her cheeks were flushed, her dark eyes bright with unshed tears. Innocence betrayed. “We hadn't even been married a month when I understood just how wrong I had been.”

  “You made a mistake, but that didn't mean you had to go on trying to live with it.”

  Her mouth made a wry, twisting movement that might have been regret. “Your mama can tell you—we Lelouries don't believe in divorce.”

  So you killed him instead. He could have said that, but he didn't. Still, he waited for her to deny it. He realized that neither last night, nor yet today, had she said, I didn't kill him, Day. I didn't kill my husband.

  He wanted to choke the truth out of her, even if the truth was raw and ugly. He wanted to take her in his arms and hold her. Once he had done that. Once.

  Once he had whispered her name to himself just for the magic of its sound.

  This time he was the one to turn away from her. To her it might have seemed as if he wandered the room aimlessly, but he knew what he was after. He'd seen it when he walked through the door last night. It was the second thing he had noticed, after her. An etched, gold-plated revolver mounted on the wall above a pier table that held a simple milk-glass vase of bloodred roses. A French pinfire revolver, over seventy years old but still in prime condition.

  He set his julep on the table and took the pistol down from the wall.

  Once before, he'd held this gun in his hand, had felt its weight and the awe that came from knowing in his gut that this was death and death was forever. The gun's grip fitted cold against his palm now, slick with oil and the clammy sweat of old fears remembered.

  He heard the click of her heels on the floor behind him. He turned with the gun in his hand and looked at her.

  “It's the gun that Julius killed himself with,” she said. “Charles had it mounted up there shortly after we were married. He said it was to remind himself that he had it all over his brother now—being alive and having me, while Julius was dead.”

  She was lying. He knew for a certainty that she was lying about the most important part of it, at least, but he didn't care. His mouth had gone sour, as if he could even taste the sweat on his t
ongue, and it was like the taste of a gun barrel in your mouth, cold and bitter, the taste of death. Death faced down and beaten, the best high he'd ever found.

  Beneath the noise of his heart sloughing in his ears, he thought he heard Remy's voice as he'd heard it that day, heard it way too many times for the good of his soul: Do it, Day. I dare you. Her taking him out there on the screaming edge and him loving every dark moment of it.

  “For you I would do it….” For a moment he wasn't sure if he was hearing her voice now or only imagining it, remembering it. “For you I would throw myself onto a burning pyre. I would die with you, Day.”

  Somehow, without his realizing it, she had wrapped both her hands around his hand that held the gun, and she was turning the gun toward herself, bringing it up to her face, bringing it up until the barrel was pressing against her cheek. He looked into her eyes and saw how the wildness had come into them, and he thought of how he hadn't checked to see if the damned thing was loaded.

  “Don't,” he said. “We aren't kids anymore, and this isn't a game. Your man died a bad death, and if it turns out you did it, then heaven help you, darlin', because I win and you lose, pure and simple. This time the only one who will pay the nasty price is you.”

  Slowly she shook her head, and the gun's barrel slid across her cheek until the muzzle was caressing her lips. “Nothing's ever been pure and simple between us.”

  He let go of the gun, surrendering it to her. He realized his mistake when he saw her thumb pull back the hammer, and the barrel swing around and up, until it was pointing at the sweet spot right between his eyes.

  He smiled.

  She pulled the trigger, and the firing pin fell on the empty chamber with a soft and gentle click that had the reverberating impact of a heart suddenly stopping in mid-beat.

  “I dare you, Day,” she said. “I double-dare you.”

  After he left her, he kept walking on down the road along the bayou, wishing it were possible to walk until he found the edge of the world. He would do a dance when he found it then, oh yes, he'd dance on the edge of the bad ol' world and see if he could keep from falling off.