Weldon Carrigan had gone through the ritual of lighting his cigar, and when he looked up now the eyes he fastened on his son-in-law were hard. “I want you to know that we're taking what happened to Mrs. O'Mara the other night very seriously—”
“So am I,” Rourke said, his smile as sharp as broken glass.
Carrigan punched the air in front of Rourke's chest with his finger. “There is to be a full investigation because nobody gets away with killing one of ours. But I want you staying out of it, goddammit. If her husband has—”
“Sean O'Mara's dead.”
Carrigan sighed and backed off a little, nodding. “I can understand why you had to believe that he's dead, given that y'all were friends. Hell, I'm not blaming you for sleeping with the woman,” he added after a moment. “Jo's been gone a long time.”
Another silence fell between them, and Rourke waited now for the chewing out he was due for rousting the Maguires at Tio Tony's.
“In the meantime, we'll still put a couple of flatfeet to watching your mama's cottage 'round the clock,” Carrigan said instead, his gaze going to where Katie was trying to whack the bejesus out of a shuttlecock. “Christ, this is turning out to be one long, hot summer.”
Jo had died on a day in October. In his memory, white clouds are tumbling over the treetops and she is wearing a yellow dress and a big picture hat. She had a little heart-shaped mole on her neck, right below her ear. Sometimes when he made love to her, he would try to suck it off.
“…had a conversation with the DA this morning,” Car-rigan was saying. “He believes he has enough to go on for a warrant and an indictment. He'll be doing it on Monday—Remy Lelourie for the murder of her husband in the first degree.”
Rourke took a silver-rimmed glass off the tray of a passing waiter. It was spiked all right, and so cold it made his head ache. “Are you sure y'all are up to it?” he said. “Last I knew you were runnin' from the idea like a nun from a brothel.”
“Do you think this is amusing?” Carrigan snapped back. “Because it isn't amusing.”
It wasn't amusing.
She had been standing right over there, underneath the mimosa tree, laughing. In his memories Jo is laughing, and turning toward him with his name on her lips, laughing, the brim of her hat slowly tilting up, laughing, and he almost sees her face, almost, and then her heart stops. She had been laughing, turning and laughing, and her heart, full of holes no one could see, had been beating and then it had stopped.
“No, you're right,” his father-in-law said, and the weariness was back on him, pulling at his mouth and eyes and making him look older than his fifty-five years. “We got the forensics. We got means, motive, and opportunity. But in spite of all that smug advice the Times-Picayune was handing out this morning, we aren't ready for a trial and we probably never will be. The Cinderella Girl is going to have it won the minute she walks into the courtroom.”
“Maybe that's why she killed him,” Rourke said. “To see if she could get away with it.”
Her heart stops and she dies, and the record you are dancing to ends before you are through, and only afterward do you realize that the music had barely begun. She has left you before you can ever come to know her.
She dies, but the stars go on shining and the sun still comes up hot in a Louisiana July morning. She dies and it doesn't change the way the wind feels in your hair, or the need you have for a drink or a woman, or the occasional wild dance on the edge of the moon.
The sky was the deep purple of a ripe plum and promising more rain later that evening when Rourke pulled up behind the old dusty Model T where it was parked on a particularly bad block of Rousseau Street in the Irish Channel.
A single, scraggly palm rattled in the light breeze as he crossed the weed-choked yard, and a strong, sour whiff of boiling cabbage floated from the open kitchen window next door. Roibin Doherty's bargeboard house was built from the scavenged wood of old flatboats that had broken up and drifted downriver, and it looked it.
Rourke knocked three times and got no answer. He was going to jimmy the lock, but he didn't have to. The door swung open beneath his hand on a groan of rusting hinges.
The shades were pulled down in front of the windows, and so the room was darker than the falling night outside. Rourke closed the door behind him and stood just over the threshold. He listened and heard the locusts singing in the weeds out back and a faucet dripping in the kitchen sink. The house smelled sour, of a drunk's sweat.
He took three slow, careful steps and tripped over a body lying heavy and still on the floor.
Chapter Twenty-Two
ROURKE LANDED ON HIS KNEES AND STAYED THERE. He slipped his gun from its holster, but he still heard nothing more than the water dripping and the locusts singing. Out in the street a voice started hollering shrilly for Jimmy to come home.
Rourke's eyes had adjusted enough to the dark that he could see the gray outline of a lamp sitting on a table by a sofa. He fumbled beneath the lamp shade, found the chain and gave it a yank, and a weak yellow light filled the shabby room.
Roibin Doherty lay sprawled on a stained and unraveling rag rug, next to a brown upholstered armchair, which was all naked springs and burst stuffing, and an overturned spit can filled with chewed Red Man. His tangled, graying hair was greasy with sweat and dirt; his small mouth drooled a river of spit and tobacco juice, and blood.
Which wasn't surprising, considering the bullet hole in his right temple and the .38 Policeman's Special clutched in his right hand. Rourke pressed his fingers to Doherty's neck. The flesh felt cold, dead.
Rourke eased back onto his heels, breathing fast and deep. Sweat filmed and stung his eyes.
He stood up slowly, looking around the small and littered parlor, at empty Red Man pouches and bottles of rotgut, a stack of pornographic postcards, an unopened box of poker chips. The coffee table, though, was clean of debris; it even looked recently dusted. Squared up in the middle of it, as if for display, was a battered crime case file that had Julius St. Claire written in black ink across the front of it and was stamped with the seal of the Crescent City police.
Rourke flipped open the file folder with the barrel of his gun. Stapled to the inside was a cellophane envelope containing a spent bullet and a shell casing, and underneath it a coroner's report. Indications are of suicide or accidental self-inflicted death by gunshot. There was a smell of burning in the wound and signs of powder blackening. The revolver in the hand of the deceased had been recently fired…. Rourke flipped the folder closed again.
In the kitchen he found chicken bones, a fry pan white with congealed grease, and a lot of roaches.
He walked back into the bedroom and was hit with the sour smell of old and unwashed sheets, and was hit again when he saw what was on the wall opposite the rusting iron bedstead.
The wall was papered with newspaper clippings, cracked and curling photographs, and notes scrawled on stained and torn pieces of paper. Some of the clippings and photographs were of Remy Lelourie, but most were of him: of his high-society wedding and the notices of Katie's birth and her first communion just last month, and press write-ups of the more notorious cases he had worked on. The most recent ones, having to do with Charles St. Claire's murder, had been thumbtacked on top of old ones that went back to his first year as a detective.
Rourke stared at the wall, feeling unclean. He had started to turn away when one of the newspaper clippings caught his eye.
He'd reached for the tack, to take it down, when out in the front room the door creaked open.
Rourke pulled the tack out of the clipping and he had to catch the piece of paper as it fluttered toward the floor. He quietly folded it and put it in his trouser pocket. He was easing back the hammer on his gun when he heard a match strike and smelled the smoke of a Castle Morro.
Rourke put up his gun and walked back out to the front of the house, not being careful anymore about the noise he made since his bright yellow Bearcat was parked right out front. He stopped in t
he doorway between the kitchen and the parlor and leaned against the jamb with his hands in his pockets.
Fiorello Prankowski was on his haunches, squatting next to the body.
“Somebody ought to call the cops,” Rourke said.
Fio thumbed back his hat and looked up. His lip curled around the cigar he was crushing in his teeth. “You see, that's the trouble I've been having lately. I thought we were the cops.”
“He was dead when I got here.”
“Yeah, yeah, that's what they all say.” Fio took the cigar out of his mouth and looked down at the body again. “Bullet hole in his head, gun in his hand. It's suicide as I live and breathe.”
“So it would seem.” Rourke pushed himself off the doorjamb. “You'd better go take a look in the bedroom.”
“Aw, man. What?” Fio lumbered heavily to his feet, and Rourke stepped aside so he could pass. “If it's another dead guy, I'm quitting.”
He was gone for quite a while, and when he came back his face seemed to have new cares worn into the old grooves. “I know the guy didn't like you and we can't all be Miss America to everybody, but Jesus, that was spooky.” He looked around the room, turning a circle in place. “This whole place is spooky. I mean, a detective sergeant's pay is no chicken feed, as we oughta know, and after all the years he's got on the job he's got to be pulling in some righteous juice. So how come he's living like a bum?”
Rourke shrugged. “He played the horses and wasn't either smart or lucky. I heard that lately the sharks had their teeth in his balls.”
“Yeah, I heard that too.” Fio looked down at the body again, his hands on his hips. “I don't think it was a vig collector did this, though. It ain't their style. When they cap a guy, they like to make it look like a lesson, not suicide.”
Rourke leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets, staring down at the milky caul that was forming over the dead cop's eyes, and saying nothing.
“Hey, come on, partner. I'm spinning tales all by myself here,” Fio said. “Let me hear who you think did it.”
“I don't know,” Rourke said, telling for once the unvarnished truth.
Fio gave him a slow, careful look, then his gaze finally went to the crime case file carefully centered in the middle of the coffee table. He put on an exaggerated surprise to see it, but he didn't make a move to pick it up.
It was, Rourke thought, what Fio had probably been invited here to see. “Go on and take a look,” he said.
Fio scrubbed at his nose with the flat of his big thumb. “Naw, I don't need to. I got a good idea what-all's in it. Doherty and me, we had us a few brews after the wake last night. We talked about old times. He had a lot to say about the summer of nineteen sixteen.”
In the summer of 1916 Rourke had been nineteen, working a double shift—mornings on the banana boats, evenings on an oyster lugger—making money so that he could someday go to college, maybe be a lawyer instead of just a flatfoot cop like his old man had been. In the summer of 1916, he had been desperately, hopelessly in love with a girl who had been maybe more than just a little crazy. A girl who was feeding all the craziness in him.
“The Red Sox took the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series that year,” Rourke said. “Four games to one.”
“Yeah. And to hear Doherty tell it, that was also the summer you shot Julius St. Claire in the head in the bedroom of that slave shack back of Sans Souci and then fixed it to look like a suicide.”
In the summer of 1916, Sergeant Roibin Doherty and a couple of his fellow detectives had taken Rourke down into a room in the Parish Prison and beaten him so badly with sap sticks and socks full of marbles that he'd pissed blood for weeks after. He had kept himself from telling them the one thing that might have stopped the beating, but he hadn't been able to stop himself from screaming.
Fio was staring at him hard now. Rourke met the other man's eyes, but said nothing.
“Are you fucking Remy Lelourie?” Fio said.
“Lately?” Rourke smiled. “No.”
Fio rubbed the back of his head and heaved a deep sad sigh. “'Cause Doherty thought you were fucking her back in the summer of nineteen sixteen. You and Julius St. Claire both, until you got tired of sharing. Or maybe y'all decided to settle it the old-fashioned way—like a couple a quick-draw cowboys. You see, this revolver in Julius's hand, apparently it was one of a matching pair, which means, lo and behold, that there were two of them. One of them ended up in Julius's dead hand, and the other disappeared that very same day. Amazing, huh?”
Rourke went to the coffee table and picked up the case file. He ripped off the cellophane envelope and tossed it at Fio. “Here's the shell casing that was found in the chamber of the revolver Julius St. Claire had in his hand and the bullet that tore open his head. The gun is on the wall in the front parlor of Sans Souci this very day. So why don't you just give it all to the Ghoul and see if he can make something out of it with his fancy new ballistics equipment.”
Fio had snatched the envelope out of the air. “And what'll that prove? Somebody with a cop for his old man might be smart enough to know you can tell if a gun's been fired and do some switching.”
“Yeah, but if there isn't a match, at least you can rule out one suspect. You'll know that Julius didn't kill Julius.”
“For what it's worth,” Fio said, “I don't think you did it. You might go in with guns blazing, but you wouldn't try to get away with it afterward. I've never seen you take so much as a free cup of java—you're just so fucking pure. Naw, if you committed murder, they'd find you next to the corpse, already braiding the rope to hang you with.”
Rourke's mocking smile was all for himself. “I'm touched you think so highly of me, Fio.”
“Don't get too full of yourself, though. You might not be fucking her now, but I think the two of you are playing some deep sick game, you and Remy Lelourie. Heads she gets away with murder; tails you put her away for it. I'll bet you don't even know which way you're hoping the nickel lands.”
He knew. Never mind what lies he'd been telling to her and to himself, he knew.
He pushed his hand in his pocket, his fingers closing around the newspaper clipping. He thought of the way she'd looked in the cemetery last night, while she'd been so desperately trying to seduce him. He thought of the sadness in her, so dark and dreadful.
I can't save you, Remy.
“What?” Fio said, having seen the look on Rourke's face.
Rourke pulled his hand out of his pocket. “This was tacked up on the wall in the bedroom. It's a photograph of Remy Lelourie at a Mardi Gras ball about a week after her marriage last February.”
You wouldn't have known it was Remy without the caption to tell you, because she was wearing an elaborate Mardi Gras mask, of Medusa, who had snakes for hair.
The girl up on the screen, larger than life, was doing the Charleston on top of a grand piano, legs flying, beads flapping, her painted mouth blowing kisses to the world. “Get hot!” a man in the audience yelled at the celluloid girl, and as if she'd heard him, she laughed, and he laughed back at her. “I love my wife, but oh, you kid!”
Jazz Babies. It was the last movie Remy Lelourie had made before her marriage, a fun but strangely empty story about a fun but strangely empty girl living the glamorous life in Hollywood. Daman Rourke watched that beautiful face as it was caught in quick, revealing flashes by the camera's lens. He thought how it wasn't truth but sweet seductive falsehood that audiences craved.
The movie wasn't over yet, but he got up anyway and left through a door hung with heavy velvet draperies. He walked down a carpeted staircase lined with crystal sconces and into a lobby brilliant with the refracted light from a massive chandelier reflected over and over in huge mirrors on yellow velvet walls, and between the mirrors was her face.
Studio publicity shots, posters from her films, newspaper clippings. Recent ones, of the bereaved widow on the steps of Sans Souci. A photograph of the night last February when she had come home to New Orleans, ste
pping off the train at the old Union Street Station, wearing a black cloche hat and a gray coat with a fur collar. It had been a real winter's night, cold and drizzly, cold as only New Orleans can be, a damp cold that seeps into your bones. Yet hundreds of people had been there to meet her, even more than when Valentino had come a couple of years before. Rourke had stood at the back, at the far fringes of the crowd that cold winter's night. She hadn't seen him.
The next night, in the Blue Room of the Roosevelt Hotel after the premiere of Jazz Babies, she had danced the tango with her future husband, and then she had thrilled the crowd by dancing the Charleston on top of the piano, a jazz baby come to life. There was a picture on the wall of that moment as well.
There was another clipping that Rourke always had to stop to look at, this one from a French newspaper, taken on a beach on the Riviera. She is in a bathing suit, scandalous by American standards, baring not only her arms but most of her breasts, and all of her legs clear up to the tops of her thighs. She is trying to jump out of the way of the splashing breakers, and she is looking back over her shoulder, laughing. A man, nearly out of the frame, is watching her—some film director, the caption says. On his face is the haunted, desperate look of a man who shares her bed but knows he will never have even the smallest part of her that really matters.
The movie was ending now, and the organ was playing a wedding march. Rourke pushed open the glass doors of Loew's State Theater and stepped out onto the wet sidewalk of Canal Street.
He turned up his collar against the rain that fell out of a misty indigo sky. He crossed over to the neutral ground and walked along the streetcar tracks. The rain ran down the store windows like tears; the waving palm fronds made shadow puppets on the grass. A gust of wind picked up a piece of newspaper and slapped it against his leg. He bent over to peel it off and saw her face.
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