Rourke turned away from his father-in-law. He crossed the thick-pile Turkey carpet to a green velvet-swathed window that offered a view of the statues and palms in Lafayette Square. Blue jays and mockingbirds flitted in and out of the sun-bleached light. In the distance the spires of St. Louis Cathedral trembled in the heat.
“What about LeRoy Washington?” he said.
“What about him?”
Rourke almost put his fist through one of the French panes. He spread his hand out flat against the glass instead, feeling the burning heat of the sun. “Sweet Jesus. The man is serving fifty years in Angola for something he didn't do.”
The superintendent's red leather chair groaned softly as he leaned over to pluck a cigar from the cedar humidor on his desk. “It isn't going to matter to the Chicago outfit that Maguire settled the score with his vig boy Vinny, because he did it later rather than sooner. He let it happen. Hell, Al Capone'll probably figure Maguire was in on the skim from the get-go and only decided to bump off poor Vinny when things started getting dicey, and for all we know he could be right. This is a big and ugly sleeping dog, Day, and we got to let it lie. We're not going to subject New Orleans to the threat of a gangland bloodbath just because some worthless nigger is getting a bad break.”
Rourke breathed a bitter laugh, turning away from the window. He had to put his hands in his pockets to hide their shaking. “Then what about Bridey O'Mara and all those fine and honorable words you spoke about how nobody gets away with killing one of our own?”
Color stung his father-in-law's cheeks like a sunburn. He averted his gaze from Rourke's, busying his hands with peeling off the cigar's silk wrapper and clipping the end with the slender silver knife on his watch chain. “You told me how Maguire said that all went down. Bridey was an accident. Sometimes we got to go along to get along, Day.”
Rourke took a quarter out of his pocket and tossed it onto the spotless green felt blotter, between a mother-of-pearl letter opener and an onyx postage-stamp box. “Here,” he said.
Weldon Carrigan picked up the coin, flipping it over in his palm. “What's this for?”
“Two bits.” Rourke smiled. “I figure that's just about what your honor is worth.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
DAMAN ROURKE HAD ROLLED AROUND IN THE STREET getting shot at, he'd chased goons with tommy guns all over the city, he'd played wicked bourré in a speakeasy until dawn, but it was his visit to City Hall that really left him feeling filthy.
He went home to scrub himself off in the shower and then to his favorite barbershop for a shave. He felt as though he were doing a death spiral in his Spad, free-falling through space with his knuckles white on the joystick and the roar of the engine and the wind pressing against his ears. Yet his mind was strangely scoured of thoughts and he welcomed their absence—not to think about LeRoy Washington chopping cotton with a gun bull standing over him, not to think about Remy Lelourie, who, like LeRoy, would be seeing tomorrow's dawn coming from behind the bars of a cell.
A damp breeze blew in through the open door of the barbershop from off the river, smelling of coffee, bananas, and more rain. He leaned back in the big black leather chair and shut his eyes, listening to the barber's patter and the blade snicking back and forth over the leather strop.
“I'ma tellin' you, you put your money on that Candy Dancer to win in the eighth, and you be rollin' in the dough, you. You be swillin' beaucoup champagne and sailin' a yacht on Lake Pontchartrain.”
Rourke opened his eyes and looked at the big mustachioed Cajun through the spotted mirror. Jean Baptiste Mouton was Rourke's bookie as well as his barber. “If I bet any more on that loser,” Rourke said, “I'm going to wind up on the corner swigging rotgut and selling pencils.”
Jean Baptiste pushed out a laugh from deep in his belly that made his long black mustaches flutter. He wrapped a hot, steaming towel around Rourke's face. “You be wearing more diamonds than Carter's got pills, you. They be seein' you comin' before you've even stepped out the door.”
“They'll see me coming because I'll be wearing a sandwich board advertising ‘Joe's Eats.’”
A shoe heel scraped across the threshold, and a shadow crossed the mirror. “Day, my man. How're they hangin'?”
“Still loose and feelin' good,” Rourke said after a moment, for he had heard the edge in his partner's voice.
Fiorello Prankowski's lips pulled back from the butt of the Castle Morro he had clamped between his teeth. “Yeah. Yeah, I'll just bet they are.” He jerked his head at Jean Baptiste. “Get lost for a while, will you?”
“I'm goin' to get a cup of coffee, me,” Jean Baptiste said, and left whistling.
Fio set his cigar down on the stained marble shelf beneath the mirror and picked up the straight razor that Jean Baptiste had been sharpening. He tested the hone of the blade with his thumb and then sliced the razor through the air as if it were a toy sword—and barely missed Rourke's nose.
“You feelin' okay?” Fio finally said as he whipped a lather brush around a shaving mug, working up a thick foam. “I'm only asking 'cause I come whistling on into the squad room this morning, after spending a nice quiet Sunday evenin' with my wife and kids, enjoying our new parlor organ, and everybody's talking about my partner. Talking about how last night he went and got shot at and how he took offense, and now half of New Orleans and all of West End Park is looking like the morning after a hurricane.”
He peeled the towel off Rourke's face and began to brush on the lather. The badger bristles were soft, the soap smelled of cedar, and steam floated through the air, warm and moist, mixing with the river breeze. Rourke allowed his eyes to drift closed as he listened to Fio's aw-shucks routine.
“Funny thing about putting a flatfoot on to watch a suspect's house and make sure she doesn't pull a Houdini in the middle of a homicide investigation—if you can see 'em going, then you can see 'em coming. All I can say is I hope you kept an eye open while you were banging her.”
“Maybe we shouldn't go down that road, Fio.”
“Sure, let's never mind the righteousness of a homicide detective sleeping with the prime suspect. Let's go some-where's else. We finally got some answers back on our California inquiries. She gives a whole new meaning to the phrase femme fatale, does the Cinderella Girl. There was the up-and-coming leading man, who drove his car off a cliff when he found out she was two-timing him with something called a gaffer. And there's the woman now doing time for trying to blow off her husband's dick with a shotgun after he told her he wanted a divorce so's he could marry guess who.”
Fio wiped the razor clean, folded it and set it carefully down on the white marble shelf, next to his smoldering cigar, and turned to look at Rourke.
“There. All done and just in time, 'cause we got us a busy Monday afternoon ahead of us. Things to do, people to see, arrests to make.”
Rourke sat unmoving and watched Fio through the mirror as he left. After a moment he got up, put on his hat, tucked a dollar bill beneath a jar of pomade for Jean Bap-tiste, and left, himself.
Fio was waiting for him just outside the door, with his hat fanning his face and his thick shoulders and one foot braced against the brick wall, next to the barber's red-and-white-striped pole. Rourke stopped and half turned to look at him. Fio's hair stuck out in sandy spikes all over his head, and the bags beneath his worried eyes were sagging down to his cheekbones.
“She slits your throat,” Fio said, “or you put a gun in your mouth. Either way, she's killed you, partner.”
Rourke smiled. “Yeah, I know. In the meantime, let's go have some fun. Let's go see the Ghoul.”
The blast from the gunshot concussed and echoed in the room. The blue chambray shirt tore, and the chest underneath it twitched and jumped. The cotton-stuffed man would have fallen to the floor if he hadn't been strapped to the post.
The Ghoul retrieved the bullet from the dummy and brought it over to the two detectives. Rourke still held Roibin Doherty's .38 Special in his outstre
tched hand and, to his horror, he saw the barrel tremble, and then the trembling was in his hand and he couldn't stop it.
He dropped his arm and glanced at Fio to see if he had been found out, but his partner's attention was all on the Ghoul.
“The comparison microscope,” the Ghoul was saying as he puffed a wreath of cigarette smoke around his head, “will tell us if there is a match between a bullet fired from the gun found in the sergeant's hand and the bullet found in his head. Two halves of separate bullet images can be joined together under the same lens, enabling us to compare closely the marks of each.”
The Ghoul picked up a hollow probe-like device, which was fitted with a light and a magnifying glass. “We begin, however, by examining the inside of the revolver's barrel with the helixometer.”
Rourke had forgotten that he still held the .38. The grip was hard and round and cool against his hand, but the trembling hadn't stopped. It had just gone deeper.
“You will note,” the Ghoul said, leaning in close, and Rourke held his breath against the raw, damp odor of the man's body, “the spiral grooves—the rifling—on the inside of the barrel. And the lands, the raised parts between the grooves. They are what will leave the distinctive markings on any bullets fired from this gun.”
Rourke used the instrument as the coroner showed him, but although he looked, he wasn't really seeing. Sweat burned in his eyes, and he thought at times that he could almost feel his heart beating against the wall of his chest. Just get through this evening, he thought, and it would all be over.
He handed the gun and the helixometer to Fio and allowed the Ghoul to usher him over to the comparison microscope. The coroner's round, sweating face shone with his excitement.
“See the distinctive rifling patterns on the image of the bullet on your right—six lands and a right twist—and compare it to the image on your left. Now, the image on your left is that of the test-fired bullet; on your right, the bullet which I have dug out of Sergeant Detective Doherty's brain. As you can see, there is a distinct difference. And there is more.”
The Ghoul levered his flabby bulk upright, groaning and creaking with the effort. He replaced the images in the microscope with others. “When a gun is discharged, its firing pin strikes the back of the brass casing, which sets off a detonator inside the cartridge, as I'm sure you know. What you might not know is that the pin leaves a distinctive and individual imprint on the casing. If you will look, please, on the base of the casing image to your right—which came from the spent cartridge recovered from the cylinder of Sergeant Doherty's .38—there is a tiny raised imperfection, the result of a faulty breechblock on the gun that fired it. The image on the left is of the test-fired cartridge and bears no such imperfection.”
“So,” Fio said, “all this hocus-pocus is tellin' us that Roibin Doherty didn't shoot himself.”
The Ghoul squinted up at Fio through a blue veil of tobacco smoke. “Not with his own .38 Policeman's Special, he did not.”
Fio was being careful not to look Rourke's way, but new lines of worry were already digging into his face. With suicide officially ruled out, Roibin Doherty's death had just gone from “under suspicious circumstances” to murder, and Fio's partner had just become the prime suspect.
“The trajectory of the bullet through his brain is inconsistent with suicide,” the Ghoul said. “It was a contact wound, however. There were powder burns and stippling visible, and a circular pattern around the bullet's point of entry. The barrel of a gun was certainly pressed against his head behind the ear and the trigger was pulled, execution style. The attempt to make it look like a suicide was, in my opinion, quite sloppy.”
Fio rolled his eyes. “Well, golly. I guess the killer wasn't figuring on us having Wonder Coroner to point out all the places where he fucked up.”
The Ghoul gave Fio a long, unblinking look, and then he said, “As per your request, Lieutenant Prankowski, I also ran comparisons on that old case of yours. The suicide of Mr. Charles St. Claire's brother, I believe you said it was? Now, mind you, a French pinfire revolver was among the first to use a self-contained cartridge in which bullet, powder, and cap were all held in a brass case. Circa eighteen fifty-three, I would say.”
Fio's gaze flashed to Rourke and hot color crept up his neck. “Why don't you just cut to the chase, Mr. Mueller?”
“The ‘chase,’ Mr. Prankowski, is, Yes, there was a match. The revolver you gave to me almost certainly fired the bullet which you also gave to me.”
“So I guess Julius could have killed Julius, after all,” Rourke said, his gaze on Fio but his voice as blank as he was keeping his face.
“Yeah, well…” Fio waved his hand at the Ghoul's comparison microscope. “If you can believe that hocus-pocus.”
Rourke smiled, but this time only with his eyes. “I heard it said once that faith is mostly a matter of desire.”
Fio held his gaze a moment longer, then he stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked down. “I guess I'd better go break it to the captain that somebody besides Roibin Doherty put that hole in Roibin Doherty's head.”
The Ghoul waited until the door to the laboratory closed behind Fio's broad back before he turned to Rourke. “You will also be wanting to know about that plant matter you sent to me for analysis. It is the Abrus precatorius, commonly known as the paternoster pea or love bean. Not a native plant, but it can be found in Florida, and is sometimes used in the making of jewelry and rosaries. It is also a highly toxic poison, although as a method of inflicting death it would be difficult. The pea would have to be first crushed into a powder and mixed with something edible, preferably sweet, to be effective.”
“Pralines,” Rourke said, thinking of his mother's lover lying in his coffin the day after his fiftieth birthday, and of the rosary strung with paternoster peas still hanging from the arms of St. Michael in the Lelourie women's front parlor.
“Ah, yes, pralines,” the Ghoul said. “A sweetly nasty death to be sure.”
“He died screaming.”
That evening the wind came up strong with the fall of darkness. At Sans Souci it shook the black branches of the oaks and rattled the banana trees. Thunder cracked, loud and harsh, and a brutal rain slashed against the windowpanes. The black sky trembled with lightning.
The electricity had gone out. Remy Lelourie stood in the dark with her back toward the door, watching the storm. She was dressed as if she expected company, in long black velvet, and in the cobalt light he saw only the radiant white flesh of her back and shoulders and neck. It was more erotic than if she'd been naked.
He had come to her, as before, without knocking, but she must have sensed his presence, for she turned, saying, “Day?” just as lightning struck again outside, and a white light cut jagged across her eyes like the broken shards of a mirror.
Then she got a look at his own eyes, and the blood drained away from her face, leaving it the gray color of bone. She knew, then, what he would say, and she feared what he would say, perhaps she had been fearing it for years. It was why she had left him that first time. She should, for her own sake, have stayed gone.
“I saw you kill Julius,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
IN THE SUMMER OF 1916, HE HAD BEEN BOTH IN LOVE and in misery.
Remy Lelourie.
Her soul was wild, and her heart was free, and her body was giving—but she was damaged, deep down. She had no stopping place, none at all. She would dare anything.
He knew he hadn't been her first lover. She acknowledged her past and she indulged her appetites, that was her way. She'd been fucking Julius St. Claire before she'd met him, and he had a real mean and ugly suspicion that she was fucking him after. It was that house, or so he told himself. Sans Souci. She had some sort of crazy obsession over that house, planted like a poisonous seed in her heart by her half-crazy mama. When she left him it was going to be for Julius St. Claire and Sans Souci.
So on that miserably hot and muggy summer's evening, after he had lu
gged the last crate of oysters over to the truck, he looked over at the water pump where she usually met him and she wasn't there, and he knew, oh yeah, he knew all right where he would find her.
He drove out there on his motorcycle, going the back way, along the bayou road. He left his bike in the ditch and walked through the scrub pine and canebrakes. The locusts were singing so loud they made the air vibrate. The heat was like a hard slap on the back of his shoulders and neck.
He was walking past the old slave shack when he heard a sharp little cry, that little cry she always made during sex, and he hated himself for doing it and he hated her for making him do it, making him love her more than pride and honor, but he went around to the shack's bedroom, to the open window.
He shielded himself behind a thicket of bamboo and looked inside—
Saw a muzzle flash, saw the back of Julius St. Claire's head explode into a red cloud, and pieces of skull and brains and blood go flying, splattering. A shred of a second later came the sounds: the crack of the bullet firing, the slap of the gore as it hit the floor and walls and furniture, the thud of Julius falling with half his head gone.
Rourke flinched and shut his eyes, as if a sudden blaze had blinded him. He jerked away from the window, flattening his back against the bamboo thicket, his breathing hard. Already, though, his mind was trying to grasp and assimilate what he had seen—like sudden images lit by lightning—in that instant before the muzzle flashed and Julius St. Claire's head exploded.
Remy, naked and kneeling on the bed, and Julius St. Claire on the bed with her, facing her. Julius is crying, making whimpering animal-like noises, and he is holding one of the old gold-plated French revolvers stiffly at his side, with the barrel pointing down. Remy's face is white, so white, but her eyes are burning hot, and the other, matching revolver is in her hand, her hand is coming up with the gun, pointing the gun at Julius, coming up, coming up, and firing point-blank at Julius's face. The muzzle flashes like heat lightning in the sky.
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