Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  From the New Orleans Times-Picayune, final edition, Wednesday, July 13, 1927:

  BODY FOUND IN SWAMP

  The body of a man was discovered in the swampland east of New Orleans shortly before dawn this morning. Police say the body appears to have been in the water at least two weeks, and that the cause of death was strangulation with a length of piano wire. The victim has been tentatively identified as Vincent McGinty, age 20 years, a resident of a boardinghouse on Tchoupitoulas Street.

  Daman Rourke looked back once from the end of the gangplank. She sat on the deck of her houseboat, almost swallowed up by the falling darkness, and he had never seen anyone look more alone. To see her that way hurt so, he said her name aloud.

  “Lucille.”

  She surprised him by answering, her voice throaty and deep, as if she sang the words. “You go on home now, Mr. Day. I'll be all right.”

  He walked back to where he'd left the Bearcat on Esplanade, with only the serenade of the tree frogs and the locusts for company, but he didn't go on home. He drove out to the place on the edge of the swamp where last night they had found Vinny McGinty's strangled body.

  Smudges of lemon grass and tobacco burned against the mosquitoes in front of Jack's Place, but they seemed to be doing little good against the insects that boiled out of the marsh like clouds of steam. The smoke was even thicker inside, and laced with the smells of muscatel, sweat, and the slab of ribs frying in grease on the grill.

  Jack Jackson, who was tending to his own bar, was a tall, ropy man with a head like a cue ball and shrewd, pale yellow eyes that emptied of all thought and feeling as soon as Rourke walked through the door. He did everything short of shuffling his feet as he slipped into the role of trying to satisfy the white man's illusions about the way a colored man was supposed to behave, and he answered Rourke's questions with the care of someone walking through a minefield, aware at every moment how little it would take to make everything blow up in his face.

  Not to his surprise, Rourke got nothing useful out of the man at all.

  The musicians, the singer, the cootch dancers, the joint's clientele—they all were careful and polite, and they too added nothing new to the tale of Vinny McGinty's sorry death. Sugar wasn't there, and no one seemed to know where she had got to.

  Back outside, he walked down to the bayou, but except for a few broken canebrakes and some matted-down saw grass, there was nothing to see. The water was stagnant and smelled of dead garfish, or maybe of dead Vinny McGinty.

  You wouldn't have to walk too far out into the swamp, Rourke thought, to find a tub of fermenting potatoes and an alky cooker. It was possible that Vinny had made a play for a piece of Jackson's moonshine business, or maybe he'd come out to collect a vig on a loan. But Rourke didn't seriously believe that any of these people out here had anything to do with the murder of Casey Maguire's errand boy.

  He walked back down the lane, past Jack's Place and a watermelon patch, to one of the shacks, where an old woman sat in the dark in a willow rocker on a sagging porch overgrown with purple trumpet vine.

  “I know you's out there, Mr. Day,” the old woman said in a voice that broke like a boy's. “So you might's well come on up to the house an' say hey an' eat some of my filé gumbo.”

  Rourke crossed a plank board that lay over a stagnant rain ditch coated with mosquitoes. He was met on the way by an old arthritic bluetick dog, who escorted him up onto the shadowed porch.

  “Evenin', Tante Adenise,” he said.

  The old woman got to her feet with the help of a bamboo cane, her body unfolding itself slowly like the leaves on a fan. Her bowed legs carried her precariously across the threshold of her open door. “You come on in and take a seat, you.”

  It smelled good inside, of boudin and gumbo and the steam of chicory coffee rising from a pot on the black, four-lid woodstove.

  She went to light a lamp, but he stopped her. “Leave it be, Tante. There's a sweetness to the dark tonight.”

  The shack's two small windows had no glass, or even paper, and enough moon- and starlight found their way inside to put a strange silver patina on the furnishings: a black iron bed, a chiffonier with only three legs, a wash-stand with creosote curtains. A picture of Abraham Lincoln held a place of honor above the knotty pine eating table. Next to the president was tacked a curling photograph of LeRoy Washington in prizefighter's silk trunks and hose, his gloved fists raised in the classic boxer's stance.

  When the four Washington boys were growing up, Adenise Treebaut used to say she'd found them one by one out back in her watermelon patch. The boys liked the story, even though they knew they'd really come to her all at once, when her daughter, their mama, had run off to Chicago with a trumpet player and their daddy had died doing a jolt in Angola. Blind since the age of four from a bout with scarlet fever, Adenise had put food in her grandsons' bellies and clothes on their backs by working on her hands and knees at Jack's Place, scrubbing the floors every morning of the nightly leavings of men's lust and drink.

  She was proud of the fine, strapping boys she'd raised, but she was proudest of LeRoy. She had thought to see him go so far, as far as the moon she used to say to him. Instead he had gone where his daddy had ended up, to the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

  You couldn't prizefight in New Orleans without a club and a sponsor, and LeRoy's had been the Boxing Irish, owned by Casey Maguire. The Boxing Irish had the best training gym in the city, managed by Maguire's little brother, Bobby Joe. There had always been a bit of a thing going on between LeRoy and Bobby Joe Maguire. Bobby Joe thought LeRoy was a prideful nigger who needed a boot on his neck to remind him of his place. What LeRoy thought he had kept quiet about, except that he couldn't keep it from showing in his eyes. One day, money turned up missing out of the gym's petty cash box, and Bobby Joe said LeRoy had taken it.

  That night Bobby Joe Maguire was found lying sprawled in the middle of the sparring ring, after someone had wrung his neck like they do with a chicken's. The police came and they arrested LeRoy Washington for the crime, the trial lasted a day, and the judge—known for being both soft-hearted and soft-headed—had given him fifty years instead of the electric chair. It was the only break LeRoy had caught.

  Lucille and Tante Adenise had always believed in his innocence. Rourke, being a cop, shouldn't have been so certain—for LeRoy Washington was proud and he had a temper, and he wouldn't have backed away from any man, even a white man, who'd called him a thief. Except that a badly beaten LeRoy had sat in a cell in the House of Correction the morning after his arrest, looked Rourke straight in the eye, and said he hadn't done it. So in the two years since, Rourke had spent as many of his off-duty hours as he could spare looking for another lead, another suspect, another motive for the murder of Bobby Joe Maguire. All he'd found, though, was a big nothing, and LeRoy was still in a cell and likely to die there. Nobody made it through a fifty-year stretch in Angola.

  LeRoy's grandmother set a bowl of gumbo and a cup of tar-black chicory coffee down on the scarred pine table and motioned Rourke to a chair. At the first spoonful of the thick okra-and-shrimp stew, Rourke had to shut his eyes. “Oh, sweet, sweet mercy. I do believe you make the best filé gumbo this side of heaven.”

  “Hunh. Don't think I don't know when I'm being buttered up like a hot biscuit,” the old woman said, but she was pleased.

  She wouldn't sit down at the table with him, so Rourke waited until she'd gone back out to her rocker, and then he picked up his bowl and coffee and joined her out on the porch. The night was still and thick, and the murmur of the insects in the bayou seemed to give voice to the sultry heat.

  Tante Adenise sucked on a cold cob pipe and rocked while Rourke ate. “You been up to see LeRoy?” she asked after a while.

  “Not since the last time I told you about.”

  She nodded, hummed, rocked. “I know what you come out here for anyways, you, and it ain't to visit with this ol' blind woman, no suh. You out here lookin' to see what you can see 'bout tha
t poor dead boy the bayou done threw up last evenin'. Did he drown?”

  “Strangled.”

  “That what I thought. I figured that boy wasn't drowned, 'less it was done in a bathtub. Mmmmm-huh.” She nodded and sucked on the bit of her pipe. “Wasn't no stranglin' done out here, though, either. He was brought already dead and in the thick o' the night, two weeks ago last Sunday.”

  “How do you mean ‘brought’? In a pirogue?”

  “Brought in a truck by two white mens. The truck was a Ford and it been haulin' shrimps before it be put to work haulin' dead mens.”

  “Well, shoot, is that all you can tell me,” Rourke said, teasing her. She would have smelled the shrimp, even all the way up here, her nose was that sharp. So were her ears—LeRoy used to say she could not only hear the angels singing, she knew which ones were off-key.

  She made a loud hooting noise now to let Rourke know what she thought of his sense of humor. “I got me country ears and nose, white boy, not like your clogged-up city ears and nose. People look at this old woman, see blind, and think stupid. But ain't never been nothin' wrong with my ears and nose. They creepin' around, they white mens, thinkin' they bein' quiet, but they makin' noise like they unloadin' shrimps baskets at the French Market. White mens from the Irish Channel, like you.”

  Rourke smiled in the darkness. “Probably more like me than I'd care to acknowledge.”

  She made a wet sound with her tongue. “They know you, sure 'nough. One of them said somethin' 'bout it bein' crazy to do it this way, 'stead of just lettin' that poor dead boy sink like a stone without even leavin' no ripples on the water. An' then the other said somethin' 'bout you. Said that nigger-lovin' cop Rourke had to be thrown a bone, otherwise you keep on diggin' 'til you found the whole skeleton.”

  Rourke stopped chewing to think about that for a moment. “They used my name?”

  “Mmmmm-huh. I heard yo' name plain. Sounds like they wantin' you to be puttin' a whole buncha things together an' addin' up to a lie 'stead of the truth. You think this got somethin' to do with LeRoy?”

  “I don't know.” Rourke fiddled with the puzzle pieces in his mind, trying to fit them together. LeRoy had spent the last two years in jail for killing Casey Maguire's little brother, Bobby Joe. When he wasn't collecting vigs for the Maguires, Vinny McGinty had been hanging around the Boxing Irish club—so, hell, he might have even sparred a few rounds with LeRoy before the man was put away.

  Charles St. Claire had been LeRoy's lawyer, supposedly working on his appeal while screwing LeRoy's wife a couple of times a week as a retainer fee.

  “You said in the thick of the night, two weeks ago Sunday?”

  “Don't have no clock, me, but felt like 'bout one, one-thirty. An' I ain't so old yet that I don't remember one day from the next.”

  Two weeks ago Vinny McGinty is strangled with piano wire, then brought out here and dumped into the swamp; last night someone in a wild frenzy hacks Charles St. Claire to death with a cane knife—two different murders of two very different men, whose only link was that they were both acquainted with LeRoy Washington. But then this is New Orleans—pick any two people at random and you could eventually discover a connection between them. In Rourke's experience with life and crime, wild coincidence often played a bigger role than deductive reasoning was ever able to allow for. What did seem to matter, though, was that Vinny McGinty's body had been dumped out here on purpose, and “here” was home to Tante Adenise and the Washington boys.

  The old woman's sightless eyes were turned toward the wet and black bayou, but her concentration was focused on Rourke, as tangible as the stroke of a hand across his face. “You a good man, Mr. Day,” she said. “You able to get beneath the skin of people, to know their souls. But you shouldn't go blamin' yourself for what-all you find there.” She lifted her head, as if she were sniffing out the night like a bird dog. “You best be careful what you do with this bone they be throwin' you. I got me some bad feelin's. I see bats flyin' 'cross the moon, and the bayou's done turned the color o'blood.”

  Rourke didn't smile; he had a deep and abiding respect for Tante Adenise's bad feelings. “Tante, I got to ask you a favor,” he said. “I need you to get your LeBeau to come see me, and the sooner the better.”

  She didn't say anything for a moment, and her hands, gripping the arms of her rocker, tightened hard. “What he done?”

  “Nothing that I know of for sure, but maybe something. Something small that could get made into something big. Also, I think he might have seen something, and he could get hurt if he were to speak of it to the wrong person.”

  “I don' know what you talkin' 'bout. LeBeau just a boy.”

  Rourke let it ride for a bit, while he finished up the gumbo and the night settled in deeper. Out in the marsh, a gator flopped. “Y'all hear out this way about what happened to Charles St. Claire?” he finally said.

  “White man own the world. Colored people get by knowin' what we got to know. 'Course we hear.”

  “Then you'd know that when a man like Mr. St. Claire gets chopped up with a cane knife, certain folk might see it as an awkward predicament and they might look to solve that predicament the easiest way they can, and if that means putting that knife into the hands of a scapegoat, well, then they might could find a way to let their collective conscience do just that.”

  She sat in utter stillness now, no longer rocking, her fear as palpable as the night's humidity. Her two older grandsons had fled New Orleans for jobs in the northern factories, and LeRoy was in prison. LeBeau was all she had left. “Makes it 'specially easy,” she said, “for they certain folk to solve their predicament if that goat is black.”

  The moon rose over the roof just then, flooding the porch with a silver light, and Rourke saw the sheen of tears on the old woman's shrunken cheeks.

  “That LeBeau,” she said, “he only thinkin' to scare Mr. Charlie a little with the hoodoo. He had nothin' to do with no cane knife.” She rubbed the gnarled knuckles of one hand with the other. “He just a boy.”

  “I know. Tell him to come see me, Tante.”

  “So you can put him in jail, you?”

  “No.”

  “Hunh. An' what 'bout Lucille?”

  “She's going to be fine.”

  She would not be fine. Gossip had been floating around for a good while that Charles St. Claire kept a flat in the Quarter where he brought his colored mistress. Her name wasn't known before this because no one had much cared; but they cared now, the tabloids had already started digging into the scandal, and so Lucille would not be fine.

  Tante Adenise had begun to rock and croon her 'termination song in time with the beat of the rocker's slats on the warped floor. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Suddenly her head fell back and she emitted a sharp little cry, like a dying bird. “Lordy, lordy. Looks like I can't get the miseries out of this house no matter how hard I try.”

  He left Tante Adenise, carrying her bad feelings with him.

  He didn't want to go home, where he would spend the night alone. No, that wasn't true. His daughter and his mama were waiting there to give him company. What he wanted, though, was to wrap his fists in Bridey O'Mara's long red hair.

  He wasn't sure she wanted him. She worked evenings at Krauss Department Store, selling gloves, and she often went afterward to her mama's for supper. Tonight she was staying to help wash up, and so he had to wait for her out on her mama's front gallery. Because of the sin they made, he and Bridey, sleeping together without the blessing of Holy Church, her mama hated the very air he breathed, and he respected her feelings by staying out of her house.

  Bridey smiled, though, when she came out and saw him waiting for her on her mama's steps. He stood up and slipped his arm around her waist, pulling her to him. He could smell the sweet powder she'd put on after her bath.

  They walked home slowly, stopping at a speak to buy a bucket of cold, sudsy beer. Once inside the house, they started stripping off clothes. He put Gershwin on the phono
graph and they danced to “Someone to Watch Over Me,” while desire and the heat of the night touched their skin like a moist breath. He held her in his arms, and he thought the giving warmth of her body through her thin slip was what had been missing for so long in his life.

  When the record fell into a scratchy silence, she touched the back of his hand and smiled at him with her eyes.

  He took her into the bedroom and laid her down on the spooled bed. He kissed her eyes, her nose, her mouth, and finally the sun freckles on the tops of her breasts. He touched her hair and wished that he could somehow touch her heart.

  He made love to her, and after it was over he tried to hold on to the moment, the way you cling to sleep so as not to let go of a sweet dream. But the moment faded like a dream, and he rose from the softness of her body and sat on the side of the bed.

  She laid her hand on his back and left it there. Only when he heard her breathing fall into the rhythms of sleep did he slide out from beneath her touch and get up. He pulled on his trousers and his shirt, although he left the shirt unbuttoned, and went back out into the night.

  He walked out into the middle of the street and looked up. The moon was slender and sharp as a sickle, the sky bursting with stars. There was a sharpness to the silence, so that small sounds became loud: the palmetto bugs rattling around the street lamps, the creaking branches of the crepe myrtle tree that grew next to her front gallery, a ship's horn blowing down on the river.

  When he'd married Jo he had hoped he would never be lonely again, but then she had died. He couldn't think of his wife without his heart seizing up, but how much could you really love a woman, knowing her for only a year? He supposed what he mostly mourned now when he thought of Jo was the loss of the hope that she had given him, and grieving had a way of burrowing itself inside you and making itself at home. He had been wanting to let go of the pain for so long now, so long, but it had become as comfortable and familiar to him as an old blues song. He wanted to let go, but he was also afraid.