“Vinny McGinty.”
LeRoy straightened up and let go of the bars, his hands falling to his sides. He turned and looked at Rourke. “I suppose you're going to tell me he's dead too.”
Rourke nodded and LeRoy nodded with him, confirming the inevitable. Then he waved a hand, brushing the inevitable aside. “Anyway, I just gave that Vinny a push and ran on outta there, went home to my boat. I spend the rest of the night lyin' in bed next to Lucille, sweating and thinking I'm a dead man for what I've seen, and the next thing I know the po-lice are knockin' on my door and sayin' I the one killed Mr. Bobby Joe.”
LeRoy limped back to the table. He stood looking down at the books Rourke had brought. He ran his hand lightly over the one on top of the stack and then turned aside. “When they brought me down to the jail, I asked if I could talk to you, and they all said sure, nice and friendly as can be, and I'm thinking, man, it's lucky I got me a cop for a friend. But you never came and after a while those two bulls who arrested me took me down to the basement, into the colored toilets. They chained me to the pipes, locked the door, and then they set about hurting me like nobody's business.”
“These detectives—did you know them?”
“I knew the one, because he liked the fights, was always sitting in the front row and betting heavy, coming over to the corner to shoot the shit afterward. A mick cop name of Doherty. I didn't know the other.” LeRoy's head swung around, and Rourke thought he saw hate flare in the other man's eyes, the same pure hate he'd seen in Lucille. “But the son of a bitch was left-handed, and I saw his blue star every time he hit me.”
Rourke put his own hands in his pockets and sagged against the wall, shutting his eyes. A wrenching guilt ran through him, twisting his guts inside out. “I would've come if they'd told me,” he said, his voice thick. “You know that.”
“I didn't know it that night—what with all those blue stars I was seeing. Yours, the other cop's, Boss Maguire's. I only knew it the next morning when you came into my cell and I looked into your eyes, but by then it was too late.” LeRoy's mouth tried to smile, but it came out horrible, a death's-head grimace. “Because by then I'd already given up your precious truth.”
“I tell those two bulls—Doherty and your homeboy with the tattoo—all that I saw happen at the gym the night before,” LeRoy was saying. He was sitting on the hard wooden chair, staring at the floor, his hands fisted together and hanging loose between his knees. “I tell them it was Boss Maguire himself who'd killed his brother. When I'm done talking, they go out and leave me chained to the toilet, and I'm bleeding like a headless chicken all over the floor. A couple hours pass in hell, and then the two bulls come back, only this time they have a boss cop with them, and he was the one who told me how it was all going to go down.”
Rourke pushed himself off the wall where he'd been leaning with his hands shoved in his pockets. “That was sure some swell deal you cut. You keep your mouth shut and in return you get fifty years' hard time.”
“Beats the electric chair, and no white man's judge and jury was ever going to believe my version of the truth. No truth I saw was going to keep those white cops from proving I killed Bobby Joe Maguire if they wanted it that way.”
He twisted his hands together, then pulled them apart, staring at his clenched fists. “They started in on telling me what-all they could do to my family. Grandmama thrown out of her house. Lucille put to turning tricks on the streets. My own baby brother, LeBeau…Lordy, they'd just lynched an eight-year-old boy over in 'Bama a couple of weeks before. I knew what they could do to us all and, besides, I was going to be sent up the river anyway for doing that killing. There was no stopping it—and those are the truest words I've spoken yet.”
“You must have told Charles St. Claire some of the truth last time he was up to see you.”
“I never told him nothin'. That was part of the deal I made to keep my family safe—not to tell anybody. I ain't seen Mr. Charles St. Claire, Esquire, in over a month, man. All he ever done for me was file appeals that weren't ever goin' to happen, while he passed his own time fuckin' my wife.”
Rourke kept thinking that he should have seen, that he should have known, that he had let all the lies and injustice go on around him and he'd done nothing.
“When I came to you that first morning you were in jail,” he said, and his voice broke rough, “you should have told me. I would have found a way to make it right.”
“I keep tellin' you, there was no way of makin' it right.” LeRoy lifted his head. His face had gone gray, as if drained of blood. “An', besides, I'd've had to give up to you my own ugly part of the truth then—'bout how I'd been throwing fights for Bobby Joe for years, and winning some that were thrown to me. You and Lucille were coming to my matches, lookin' at me like I was someday going to be Champion of the World, puttin' your money and your faith on me. I cared about that, about the pride you and her took in me—man, I cherished it in my heart—and all that time I knew in my heart I was no better than the rest of them.”
His gaze broke away from Rourke's. He pushed himself to his feet and went back to the window. The prison yard was empty, and the air had gone eerily still, the way it could get sometimes right before a hurricane.
“You know how I was on the outside,” LeRoy said. “How I despised other black men for hating the color of their own skin, blamin' themselves for all the misery it brings them. You get treated like a nigger, I said to them, then you actin' like a nigger, and soon enough you goin' to be a nigger.
“I thought I had it all figured out, thought I knew how I could make things be. Promised myself I'd grow up different from my daddy, that I wouldn't run off and desert my woman and kids like he done. But what I done to Lucille—it amounts to the same thing. I promised myself I'd never crawl to the white man, but I've crawled. Jesus, I'm crawlin' in here every day of my life.”
“No,” Rourke said. “What I saw come out of the Hole just now was a man.”
LeRoy turned, and Rourke saw that his eyes were as flat as glass with the effort it was taking to keep all that he was feeling bottled up inside. “You got a way of thinking, Day, that's like no white man I have ever known. And you got a way of feeling inside your heart like no man I've ever known. But you and I aren't going to change what is, and there's never been a white man born yet who thought every other man born was really the same as him underneath the skin.” He nearly broke then. His eyes brightened and shone wetly, and he had to blink, hard. “I'm sorry to have to say this to you, and I'm not blaming you for it, you mind—but I've never been able to get over the fact that when I'm looking at you, I'm seeing a white man.”
Rourke wanted to tell him that he was wrong, but he could find no words inside him to show it up for the lie it ought to have been. No words and no hope. Maybe, he thought, if you were told a lie often enough by enough people, you would come to believe it and then it became the truth. Maybe truth was nothing more than an act of faith. If you believed the words, whatever they were, then after a while the words will have turned the lies into the only reality left to you.
Maybe there wasn't any real truth to be had anywhere.
Rourke heard someone bark an order, and the hacks began making noises outside the door. The scuffle of boots on stone steps, the rattle of a key ring. “I'm going to put Casey Maguire away for murdering his brother,” he said. “Once that happens you're going to walk out of here a free man.”
LeRoy's mouth pulled. “Free, huh? How you goin' to do that? The only ones who could swear to the truth of what happened that night are me and Vinny McGinty. He's dead and I'm a nigger, and courts of law down here in Lou's'ana don't take testimony from dead men and niggers.”
“I'll get him, one way or another. In the meantime you hang loose with the bosses. Don't get yourself put back in the Hole.”
LeRoy was slowly shaking his head back and forth. “I'm done with crawlin', Day.”
“That's not crawling. That's living to fight another day.”
“No, suh. I'm done.”
The door opened and the bull hack sauntered in, hitching his trousers up over the sag of his belly. He gave Rourke a look of pure disgust, and a mean grin to LeRoy that promised hell to pay for later. “Come along, boy,” he said, and slapped his black Betty on his palm. “You got out the Hole, but that don't mean you gettin' out of work.”
Rourke held out his hand, and LeRoy shook it. The guard hawked up a glob of phlegm from deep in his throat and spat it on the floor between them.
Rourke's eyes never left LeRoy's face. “You take care.”
“That promise you made when I got sent up, 'bout takin' care of Lucille—I'm holdin' you to it,” LeRoy said, and then he let go of Rourke's hand and walked out of the room ahead of the hack, even though he was never supposed to pass through a door ahead of any white man, let alone one of the boss men.
The hack glared at LeRoy's back with hot, angry eyes, and Rourke thought that if the man so much as breathed in LeRoy's direction, Rourke would kill him. Then the hack's gaze flickered over to Rourke's face, and you could see him deciding to let it go. He spat on the floor again, hitched up his trousers, and let it go.
The Bearcat bumped over the cattle guard and the gate clanged shut, locks tumbling into place with a rattle, and the Louisiana State Penitentiary was behind them.
“Man, I'm always glad to be back on the sweet side of them bars,” Fio said, although mostly to himself.
The sky had grown darker, the air heavier, and yet it wasn't going to rain. Rourke kept thinking that there was something he had left undone with LeRoy, words left unspoken.
A puff of dust floated on the road ahead of them, and they caught up with it quickly enough—a truck carrying prisoners out to join the gangs hoeing grass out of the sugarcane. One of them, sitting on the tailgate with his legs dangling over the side, was LeRoy. He had been given his shirt back, and a straw hat.
He was looking toward the scrub oak and the river, with his hands braced on the bed of the truck, and there was something about the set of his body—like a guitar string tuned so tight it would break with a single strum.
“No,” Rourke said aloud, as though the man could hear him. “Don't do it.”
“What's going on?” Fio said, then swore as Rourke shoved the Bearcat into higher gear, flooring it.
Rourke's thought was to put the Bearcat between LeRoy and the prison truck, maybe even drive the truck off the road, making it harder for the guards to shoot. Only LeRoy didn't jump toward the levee and the river as he'd expected, but toward the cane fields.
LeRoy landed in the ditch at the side of the road, hitting the dead water with a splash. He ran down the ditch a few yards, until the bank flattened enough that he could scramble up it. His feet and hands clawed at the dirt and weeds, and then he was up and crashing into the thick rows of sugarcane. The guard who had been on the flatbed of the truck with the prisoners shouted and fired, but the truck was still moving and his shot went way wide.
The cane stalks were as tall as LeRoy's shoulders, but he didn't try to bend down or hide—he just ran. One of the guards, who was out with the chain gang in the middle of the field, half stood up in his stirrups and fired first one barrel of his shotgun and then the other. LeRoy's shirt jumped and twitched and tore and bled red, and still he ran. Then the other guns were all firing, and it was like a string of firecrackers popping off at once, and a smoky haze settled over the field.
Rourke had slewed the Bearcat to a stop and was out and running too, hitting the ditch after LeRoy and then diving into the dense rows of cane, with their stiff, sword-like leaves. He heard Fio shouting “Don't shoot! Don't shoot!” as shotgun pellets sprayed around him, tearing into the tall, green stalks and throwing up dirt, but he kept running, as if all he had to do was just get to LeRoy and they would both be saved.
Maybe it was the impact of so many shotgun pellets slamming into his back, or maybe it was LeRoy Washington's fearsome pride that just refused to quit—but whatever it was, he kept on running for a good ten feet after he was surely dead.
Chapter Thirty-One
THE SWOLLEN PURPLE CLOUDS TREMBLED WITH HEAT lightning, and a hot wind pushed through the thick green fields of cane. The stalks rustled and the sharp leaves flashed in the stark, white light like knives.
Rourke had driven twenty miles on the way back to New Orleans before he pulled off to the side of the road. He got out of the car and then sat right back down on the running board because his legs wouldn't hold him. He folded his arms over his belly and bent over, holding himself as if he'd just had his guts flayed open with a blade.
He kept seeing LeRoy's bloodied face and empty, staring eyes, kept seeing flashes of it, intense, bright, like a lighthouse beacon, flashing, flashing, washing out everything else. A fly had been crawling around LeRoy's open mouth.
“Why'd he do it?” Fio said, after a good while had passed. He was leaning against the Bearcat's fender, with his arms crossed over his chest. “The poor bastard never had no chance in hell of making it.”
Rourke slowly straightened, until he sat with his hands hanging loose and heavy between his spread knees. His eyes burned and his throat was sore, and he couldn't catch a deep enough breath. “Maybe he wanted to go down shooting.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” Fio said. “I wouldn't have had the guts for it myself, but I can see it.”
Fio pushed himself off the fender and went to the ditch that ran along the side of the road. He measured it with his eye, swung his arms back, and then jumped across. He went a few rows back into the field, where the stalks were sweeter, and cut off a piece of cane with his pocket knife.
“It won't be ripe enough,” Rourke called out to him, but Fio either didn't hear or didn't care.
Rourke watched him come back to the car with the cane in his hand. He watched Fio cut off a lower joint and peel it and then cut off a round and pop it into his mouth. Fio chewed it, and the juice leaked out of the corners of his mouth, and his eyes shut at the sweetness of it, the way a child's would do.
It was part of a Louisiana childhood, Rourke thought, eating a piece of sugarcane fresh from the field. He had done it, and LeRoy would have done it, but it was one of the many things they had never done together.
“So I guess we had it figured right,” Fio said as he wiped the sticky juice off his mouth with his handkerchief. “Little brother Bobby Joe was fixing the fights and skimming the gate receipts, and Maguire caught him at it. Maguire lost his temper or he just decided to solve his problem the easy way. He knew he had to clean up the mess and keep the Chicago outfit from hearing about what'd been going on down here in New Or-leans, or his ass was gonna be chopped liver. He did tell you the truth about that part of it, anyway—only the mess was of Bobby Joe's doing, not that poor sap Vinny McGinty's. All Vinny did was see it all go down…. Him and LeRoy Washington.”
Lightning pulsed again on the horizon. The wind smelled of hot tar from the road and fresh-peeled sugarcane. “Vinny was already one of Maguire's goons,” Rourke said, speaking partly to Fio but mostly to the God who sent lightning flashing across the heavens and shotgun pellets slamming into a man's back. “So with Vinny everything was bonaroo, at least for a while.”
“If that's New Orleans for ‘hunky-dory,’ then, yeah,” Fio said. “And LeRoy Washington was just another worthless nigger whose word don't count. Somebody who could be tapped to take the fall.”
Rourke's hands clenched together, making a fist. “And who told the cops who'd arrested him what-all he had seen—that Casey Maguire had killed his own brother.” It was probably always going to hurt that LeRoy hadn't trusted him with the truth, hadn't trusted that Rourke would try to save him.
Fio shrugged. “Yeah, he told Sean O'Mara and Roibin Doherty. It was your friend's bad luck that those were two cops Maguire could buy down to their badges.”
“He already owned them.” Rourke's wrist began to burn. He realized he was rubbing the tattoo and he made himself quit.
> Fio cut off another round of sugarcane and flipped it from the knife blade into his mouth. “But somehow in the last couple of months it must have all started to unravel.”
“Miss Fleurie said Vinny had been scared bad by something and was asking about lawyers,” Rourke said. White light strobed across the sky again, quicker than a heartbeat. “She sent him to Charles St. Claire.”
Fio threw the last of the cane into the ditch. “Charles St. Claire, the dragon slayer, who got slayed instead, and there you have it. That feeling you had about it all being connected somehow—the hits on you and Vinny McGinty, St. Claire's getting cut—it was Casey Maguire all along, and man, are we fucked. We went and threw the Cinderella Girl in jail for a killing she didn't do.”
Something tugged at the edges of Rourke's thoughts and was gone. Images strobed in his head like a movie reel, in black and white flashes and silent, jerky movements. LeRoy running, falling, dying, lying bloody in a cane field, with a fly crawling in his open mouth.
Fio blew a hollow laugh through his nose. “I was just remembering…St. Claire said that together he and Al Capone were gonna rock the good ol' Crescent City back on her heels, and they did. Oh, mama, that they did.”
It had grown dark as dusk. The air was crackling and smelled of sulfur. Rourke got up and walked into the middle of the road. It cut through the cane fields like a black mourning ribbon.
He felt Fio come up behind him.
“I was supposed to be his friend.”
He heard Fio stir, breathe, then a moment later he felt a heavy hand clamp down on his shoulder. “You were.”
The sheets of lightning were dancing across the sky now, one right after the other, fast and frenetic, like a flapper doing the Charleston. Get hot.
“Let's go roust Maguire and his goons,” Rourke said. “Ask him how it feels to kill your own brother.”
“Aw, man,” Fio said.
Mortal Sins Page 36