From the New Orleans Times-Picayune, extra edition, Thursday, July 14, 1927:
GRENADE KILLS COP'S WIDOW
A grenade, hurled last night from the open window of an automobile, exploded on the front gallery of a house on Prytania Street belonging to Mrs. Bridget O'Mara, killing the 30-year-old woman instantly.
Peace was shattered at 11:25 P.M., Wednesday, on this quiet residential block in the Lower Garden District. Witnesses reported hearing the squeal of tires a few seconds before the explosion and saw a large black automobile with two men inside fleeing the scene shortly afterward. “There was a loud, sharp bang, and then flames and smoke,” said a neighbor, who requested anonymity for fear of a reprisal. “The whole street just shook something fierce. I thought the world was coming to an end.”
The police admit that the identity of the perpetrators and a motive for the bombing are unknown at this time. However, they believe that the intent of the attack was not to slay Mrs. O'Mara, but rather that it was directed at one of their own, homicide detective Lieutenant Daman Rourke, who was standing in the street in front of Mrs. O'Mara's house at the time.
Lieutenant Rourke, who was unavailable for comment at press time, suffered a concussion, and cuts and contusions. The detective is one of the principle investigators in the Charles St. Claire murder case, but the police are saying that there is no proof of a connection between the two events at this time.
Mrs. O'Mara was the widow of another homicide detective, Sergeant Sean O'Mara, whose boat disappeared during a fishing expedition on Lake Pontchar-train two months ago, and who is now presumed dead.
Daman Rourke was still two scotch and ryes away from being drunk.
Luckily, it was a problem the Swamp could take care of without breaking into a sweat, even deep into a hot July night. It was the toughest part of town, the Swamp—a few blocks along Girod Street near the river, where the flat-boatmen did their drinking and whoring. Since Prohibition, the barrelhouses and saloons had withdrawn behind doors with grilles and peepholes, but they were still there, selling their rotgut and heat lightning, and pain.
His father had always descended into the Swamp for his wildest benders, and on the third day or so, Rourke would come to fetch him home. Once, when he was ten, he'd had to walk through a group of women kneeling in the street muck in front of the swinging, slatted doors of the barrelhouse where his father lay inside, sleeping in a puddle of vomit on the sawdust floor The women, all Garden District matrons by the look of them, were singing about temperance and the light of Jesus and handing out white ribbons as pledges of purity against alcoholic drink. They had tried to give a ribbon to Daman Rourke that day, but he had pushed through them with his head down, pretending not to see. He had wanted to believe that the reformation and salvation they sang of was possible, but he'd already been taught better.
He strolled down that same street now, on legs that were a little too loose and with a head floating thick with illegal hooch and hard memories. He had a particular place in mind he was going to, but first he intended to make himself only one less scotch and rye away from being drunk. One less and no more because he had a stopping place—yeah, he could stop anytime. And if he didn't stop, well, you just have to look for new reasons to hate yourself when you start to wear out the old ones.
Even though the storm had passed, the gutters still ran and water dripped off eaves and spouts. The night sky had cleared, leaving the quarter moon haloed with a yellow ring. Rourke walked down an alley that stank of cat piss, climbed the rickety back steps of a dilapidated Victorian flophouse, and entered a hole in the wall that called itself a concert saloon because it had a dance floor and something that passed for a band.
He went up to the bar, which was nothing more than a crude plank board resting atop stacks of barrels. He caught the eye of one of the beer jerkers, girls who made a penny on every drink they sold and augmented their earnings with three-dollar trips to the rooms upstairs.
The hooch the girl brought him looked and smelled like horse liniment, but he drank it anyway. As he brought the empty glass back down to the bar, his gaze caught his reflection in a mirror advertising Carter's Little Liver Pills. He wasn't surprised to see his father's face staring back at him.
It just wasn't going to be a case of “there but for the grace of God go I,” anymore, uh-uh Instead it was only a matter of time.
It was long after midnight now and Katie would be sleeping. But earlier, before she'd gone to bed, she would have helped her grandmama peel and cut up the peaches for the ice cream while she waited for her daddy to come home. Because she still wanted to believe in promises, did his Katie.
To get to the old corrugated tin warehouse you had to squeeze through a broken slatted fence and cross a vacant lot littered with shattered bottles and rotting newspapers and rat droppings.
A single bare bulb dangled above the open door, where just inside a fat man in a pocketed apron sat on a folding chair and collected your dollar and gave you a ticket he ripped off a roll. Beyond him lay darkness, stifling hot and fogged with smoke. It wasn't until you got all the way inside that you saw the pit, enclosed by bloodstained wooden boards and lit by burning pitch torches.
Crude bleachers ten rows deep rimmed the dark cavern, and crowded together on the rough planks were men of all colors—Negroes, mulattos, redbones and whites—passing around bottles and buckets of beer, betting against the house and one another, and bellowing advice to the two men who knelt at opposite ends of the pit, each cradling a docked and shaved-necked gamecock. The birds, sensing blood, churred low and deep and clawed at the dirt with their fighting spurs.
In a prime viewing spot before the pit was a single chair, and sitting in it as if she occupied a throne was a stately figure in a long white sequined gown. A high, stiff collar flared around her face like the lip of a bell, and her skin caught the light of the torches, holding it with the muted glow of slightly tarnished brass. Her straight black hair fell to her shoulders and framed deep, slanted eyes.
An enormous Negro stood at her back and searched out the crowded, noisy darkness with eyes that gleamed like peeled eggs. A bolo knife hung from a leather cord around his neck and lay against a chest that was slabbed with muscle and glistened with oily sweat.
Rourke knew she'd spotted him the moment he paid his dollar and walked through the door, but she pretended surprise as he came up to her, smiling wetly with her full and painted mouth, batting eyelashes thick as feather dusters. It was only when you got this close to Miss Fleurie that you noticed the big hands and the Adam's apple in her muscular neck.
“Well, if it isn't Lieutenant Daman Rourke, as we all live and breathe. Most men, after they have a brush with death, go to church. I guess you decided to come slummin'.”
She spoke in a husky voice that some folk claimed held a trace of the Yankee in it. Bets had been circulating for years on the nature of Miss Fleurie and her origins, but she wasn't saying. She wouldn't even admit to being a man, and if she'd ever taken a lover, he or she wasn't saying, either.
Rourke smiled as he sat down on the end of the bleacher next to her, although drink, the lateness of the hour, and his sore ribs were making him feel weary unto death. “It's always a pleasure seein' you, too, Miss Fleurie.”
She pursed her red mouth into a perfect O. “Oooh. Miss Fleurie, she in trouble now,” she said, and tossed back her hair with a hand that flashed a diamond ring big as a chickpea.
Miss Fleurie bootlegged the liquor sold in the colored juice joints and barrelhouses and bordellos, and she kept hopheads of all races flying high, supplying the best cocaine, opium, and marijuana to be had in town.
But for kicks she owned and ran one of the more popular speakeasies down in the French Quarter, one that drew the tourists and the college crowd. When she wasn't here at a cockfight or at the track, most nights you could find Miss Fleurie at the Pink Zebra. She had turned her speakeasy and herself into one of the city's main attractions, thrilling her flush customers wi
th a slice of the naughty life: flapper music, gin fizzes, and a flamboyant, flaming drag queen.
She also had one other claim to fame, one that she shared with homicide detective Daman Rourke: They were the two best bourré players in New Orleans. They had never played each other, though, but that was only because Rourke had stayed away for years from the Pink Zebra and Miss Fleurie never played bourré anywhere else.
At a signal from the referee, the trainers had thrown their birds into the middle of the pit. The two cocks, one cinder gray, one black tipped with gold, leaped into the air and landed with wings flapping, spurs flailing, grappling beak to beak. The gray scored first, sinking its spur deep into its enemy's back. Blood gouted and sprayed in bright drops through the air, glittering like red crystal tears, spattering across Miss Fleurie's face and the flaring collar of her gown.
“They live to fight, those cocks,” she said. “If they can't fight they just pine away and die.”
Rourke's smile changed, showing a flash of real amusement. “Otherwise they die by fighting.”
She made a soft hooting noise deep in her throat; she hadn't bothered to wipe the blood off her face. The black had grabbed the gray by its comb and thrown it into the dust, wings beating, beak stabbing, spurs slashing and impaling.
“Speaking of fighting cocks, you given much thought to Casey Maguire lately?” Rourke said. “'Cause I think he's got his eye on your little slice of the bootlegging pie. It was a clue I got yesterday, when he tried to finger you for murder.”
Her mouth curved into a small smile. “You use what you think might work,” she said. She did not, he noticed, ask him whose murder or which murder.
She turned to the giant behind her and touched him lightly on the arm. “Go to the speak next door and get us some drinks, darlin'. A Manhattan for Miss Fleurie and for the gentleman a scotch and rye.”
She watched him go and then turned her attention back to Rourke. She crossed one slender, silk-stockinged leg over the other while she fitted a cigarette into an ebony holder that was nearly a half a foot long. She held it out for him to light, leaning into him.
His hand closed over her wrist, holding the cigarette in place while he lit it with a match, but as she started to straighten and pull away, he tightened his grip. “You're going to tell me everything you know about both Vinny McGinty and Charles St. Claire.”
She raised her plucked and penciled eyebrows. “Who?”
He squeezed her wrist, hard, crushing flesh to bone. It took a while, because she was tough, but he kept squeezing, harder and harder, until he saw the pain begin to register in her eyes, and even then he said nothing more.
She looked from his eyes to his hand that was crushing her wrist, then back up to his eyes. In the pit, the black cock was trailing a broken wing but it wasn't quitting. It attacked again with a blustery rattle and a flurry of feathers and sharp, flashing spurs. Shouts and screams pulsed and bounced off the tin walls. The hot air reeked of blood and sweat.
“You're being too subtle for Miss Fleurie, sugar,” she said. “She thought the whole point of paying for juice was to keep from getting squeezed.”
“But I'm not on your payroll. Sugar. So how about I pick a law out of a hat and arrest you for breaking it? Then I haul your sweet ass down to the House of Correction and throw you into a two-man cage with the biggest, meanest corn-holer I can find. Or am I still being too subtle for you?”
Derision sparked in her eyes, but her mouth had drawn tight and gray now from the pain he was giving her. A roar went up from the crowd as the fighting cocks sprang again and wrung together. A mist of blood and ripped plumage hung in the dust cloud over the pit.
“They both liked to blow coke up their nose, and Miss Fleurie, she was their snow queen,” she said, and then her mouth quirked into a taunting smile. “So arrest me.”
He smiled back at her, keeping the mean on it, but he had let her go. “That much I know,” he said. “Give me something I don't.”
She brought her wrist up and looked at the marks, like a string of purple grapes, that he had left on her golden flesh. In the pit the cocks were really tearing the shit out of each other now. Slashing and beating and stabbing.
“What more is there to say about Vinny McGinty? Step out the door and spit into the gutter and you're likely to hit another just like him. He was a paying customer, though, so I don't know why I should want to go and kill him.”
Her hand was steady as she brought the tip of the cigarette holder to her mouth and drew deep. She held in the smoke for two beats before she let it out slowly. “Mr. Charlie, now, he wasn't so unique either. He was just a naughty boy who wanted to be a good boy without having to give up the joy of being naughty. Still, I got to kind of liking him those times I used to bring his coke 'round to that flat he kept down on Rampart Street.” Her mouth pulled wryly and she breathed a laugh, along with more smoke. “What you want to go and look at Miss Fleurie like that for? You think you're the only one who's got friends? Mr. Charlie always invited Miss Fleurie up and he'd sit down and have a drink with her like she was white, talk to her like she wasn't some freak show, and we'd both pretend we didn't know what kind of game he was really playing at.”
Her gaze went back to the pit. The black cock had been gored through the eyes, but he fought on, trying to slash and impale an enemy he could no longer see. “Lately, though, nothing was mattering to Charles St. Claire much anymore except getting high. He was at that place where he would have sold his soul for the flake going up his nose.”
“When y'all did this talking,” Rourke said, “what was it about?”
“What everybody else talks about. How hot it's been, buying on margin and selling short.” The smile playing on her mouth deepened, became self-derisive. “He was all the time trying to get Miss Fleurie to kiss so he could tell.”
“Did he do any of this telling to you, like maybe about who he was kissing?”
She brought her gaze back to his face. “You mean besides Lucille Durand?”
“Yeah, besides her.”
Her slanted eyes narrowed at the corners, became taunting. “Oh, there was a someone else, sure enough. Only you should know by now that Miss Fleurie, she doesn't give things away. You want it you got to come and play for it. You and me over the bourré pot at the Pink Zebra this Sunday night.”
She startled a laugh out of him. “What've you been smoking?”
“You give me a game, I'll give you the name. A two-hundred-dollar pot with a twenty-dollar bottom limit.”
Sweet Jesus. Rourke felt the blood start to sing in his neck. He could lose everything he owned down to his alligator shoes in one sweet night playing for stakes like that. He told himself he wasn't going to do it, wasn't going out on that screaming edge this time, not this time, uh uh, because it was getting to be too many days in a row now, and it was bad for you, like cocaine. He told himself that he would walk away from it, this time he would walk away, but he was lying.
She was laughing at him now with her eyes. “Miss Fleurie always say, you got to pay by playing.”
Rourke smiled. “I'm going to beat your ass hollow, sweetheart.”
She pursed her mouth and waved her hand in front of her face like a fan. “Oooh. A girl can dream.”
The bodyguard with the bolo knife came up with the drinks, but Rourke was already pushing to his feet. She stopped him by laying her hand on his back. He turned slowly, so that for a moment her hand seemed to cling to the linen cloth of his coat before it fell to her lap.
“I lied,” she said. “Sometimes Miss Fleurie do give it away for free…. Vinny McGinty was all the time talking about going up north to Chicago, so when he disappeared a couple of weeks ago, Miss Fleurie figured that was where he'd gone. But the last time she saw Vinny that boy was some scared, too scared to even care about getting high. All he wanted was the name of a good lawyer, and so Miss Fleurie gave him the name of a dragon slayer.”
He studied her face, but she was giving nothing more aw
ay. She drew on her cigarette, blew smoke out in front of her, and looked into it with flat eyes.
“I hope Miss Fleurie didn't bet on the gray,” he said.
She swung her head back around to look into the pit, where the black cock stood with one gold-tipped wing trailing in the dirt and one spurred foot buried to the hilt in the neck of its foe. It threw back its blinded, bloodied head and crowed in triumph.
Chapter Seventeen
“HE WAS BROKE,” FIO SAID.
Rourke had started to bring a hot tamale up to his mouth, but he stopped with it poised in the air and stared at his partner. They were sitting on an iron bench beneath the banana trees in Jackson Square, grabbing a bite of supper in the waning of a Friday that had turned out to be hot and grouchy and long.
Yesterday's edition of the Morning Tribune featuring Wylie T. Jones's column “Why Isn't Cinderella in Jail?” had outsold the competition five to one. As a result, the city's other four newspapers had woken up this morning simultaneously struck with the same revelation: Their street circulation would go up more every day the saga of the matinee idol and her brutally murdered husband dragged on, and a Trial of the Century would milk that baby for all it was worth.
Today's first and extra editions, taking their cue from Wylie T. Jones, had been full of editorials on how all the evidence pointed to the wife having done it, and how nobody, no matter how famous or beautiful, should be above justice and the law. Inflamed by printer's ink, public opinion had turned on Remy Lelourie like a rabid dog, and suddenly the mayor and the city council and the city prosecutor's office and the police department were all asking each other why she hadn't been arrested yet.
“Charlie St. Claire was broke up until Cinderella came along, that is,” Fio said. The big cop seemed to be taking things nice and easy today, but Rourke could sense an undercurrent of constraint now riding between them. It would be a long time if ever, he thought, before he could regain his partner's trust, and the lies and the omissions hadn't even all come out yet.
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