Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  He laughed.

  She could forgive him for making her into a whore and she could forgive him for killing their babies, but not for that laugh. She was never going to forgive him for the way he laughed.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  EARLY MONDAY MORNING AND ALMOST TWO WEEKS now since the murder of Charles St. Claire, Rourke found the Ghoul sitting on a stool in front of the chipped enamel drain board, slicing a scalpel into something that looked like a human heart.

  “Lieutenant Rourke. Just the man I wished to see,” the coroner said. He lurched and lumbered to his feet, trailing smoke. “I realize that the St. Claire case is officially closed, however—”

  “It's open.”

  The Ghoul's eyebrows came up a little, but all he said was, “Indeed.”

  Rourke went to the wall where the photographs of the murder were still thumbtacked to the corkboard. He studied the sprawled and mutilated body with its gaping throat wound, the black splatters of blood on the walls, the dark smears of it on the oiled wooden floor. “Footprints,” he said aloud. “Did anything ever come out of the footprints?”

  “Which footprints?” the Ghoul said. “The ones made during the murder or the ones left by the patrolmen who answered the call and trampled all over the scene with their big flat feet? I managed to recover three partials belonging to the victim and one nearly perfect match to Mrs. St. Claire's left hallux, where it had been planted right next to the body.”

  “Then there's nothing to tell us whether a third person was in that shack the night of the killing, before the cops arrived.”

  “Besides the domestic who discovered the body? No, there is no way of proving it conclusively one way or the other.”

  Rourke stared at the photographs, thinking, then he shrugged and shook his head. “What do you want with me?”

  The Ghoul blinked behind the veil of his cigarette smoke. “What?”

  “You said you wanted to see me.”

  “Oh. Yes, indeed.” He went to the counter that held his microscopes and began to rummage through a stack of specimen slides. “I met Mrs. St. Claire briefly that night of the murder, when I arrived at the shack. That other detective, the big Polish one, was interviewing her, and I passed by her close enough to detect her perfume. Very distinctive, it was. Sandalwood and lily of the valley, with a hint of musk. The smell of that perfume was pervasive in the hair of the victim, and then there was that bruise on her cheek—Ah, here we are…” he said, fishing a couple of slides from out of the pile with a flourish.

  “It was the bruise, you see—it kept nagging at my subconscious, and then at the last possible moment before the mortuary hearse was about to cart away the body for embalming, it suddenly occurred to me what I should have thought to look for in the first place. I only had time to make a quick examination and to preserve some samples, but over this weekend I was finally able to study what I had found. I must say it was a great satisfaction to me to discover that I had been right to play my hunches, as you say. Do you play your hunches, Lieutenant Rourke?”

  “All the time.”

  The coroner took a deep drag on his perpetual cigarette as he put one of the slides beneath a reflected-light microscope and turned it on. “Forensics is telling us, Detective, that Mr. St. Claire engaged in sexual congress with a female between the time he last bathed and his death.”

  Rourke gave the microscope a dubious look. “Sweet Jesus. You didn't cut open his cock, did you?”

  The Ghoul tried laughing, but hacked instead. “No, no. That wasn't necessary. What I did find, though, was evidence of dried semen and vaginal fluid on the organ. And two hairs from a female pubes entangled among his own. The sex act was violent, or at the least extraordinarily vigorous, as the hairs had been pulled out by their roots.”

  “Are you finally getting around to telling me that Charles St. Claire raped somebody right before he died?”

  “Raped or engaged in extremely rough lovemaking, yes. It was that bruise, you see, that kept nagging at me, and the smell of her perfume in his hair.”

  Rourke thought of Remy lying on those stained linen sheets, torn, bruised, her voice broken from screaming. He remembered her as he'd first seen her that night, drenched in blood.

  “If he hit her, raped her…” Rourke said, and heard a sudden, murderous, roughness in his own voice.

  “You are thinking that it could have been self-defense. But a prosecutor could say she was his wife, and that gave him conjugal rights over her. A prosecutor could say she had no legal right to deny him, certainly not to murder him. I am speaking, of course, hypothetically, as if the case were still open, as if we haven't all decided that it was a bootlegger and not his wife who murdered Charles St. Claire.”

  Rourke bent over and put his eye to the microscope. Magnified, the hair was a curled sheath filled with dark, fibrous matter. He could see the white bulb of the root. He knew he had to ask, although he didn't really want to. Maybe Case had been right, after all. Maybe he should just be letting it go.

  “Could this have come from a Negro?”

  “An interesting question, but I do not know that you can always tell.” The Ghoul scratched his cheek, lost in thought a moment. “The pure African Negro's pubes would perhaps be distinctive. But the American Negro, where there has been such a hybridization with the white race…” He shrugged. “All I can say is that the hairs are of a human, not an animal, and most likely a female; and the degree of pigmentation indicates she wasn't much over thirty years of age.”

  Which described them all, Rourke thought. Remy, Lucille, Belle. Belle…Sweet mercy. Had Remy walked in on him raping her sister?

  A skimming of clouds enshrouded the first stars in gauze when Daman Rourke went back out to Sans Souci later that evening. He parked out on the bayou road and walked toward the house through the oaks and pecan trees, his shoes crunching on the rotting seed husks. The breeze was light and gentle, like the breath of a sleeping baby.

  Light blazed onto the gallery from the open French doors. He saw their shadows first and then the women—Remy, Belle, and Heloise—walking slowly along the gray-painted cedar boards. In the deep purple dusk, they might have been ghosts from another time. From where he watched among the trees, their voices came to Rourke in whispers, like the rustle of hooped skirts and the click and flutter of fans.

  He wondered if they spoke of the coming baby. Belle would be showing soon, and so she would have to go away. If Remy intended to raise the child as her own, then she would be going away as well. It would not be the first time such a thing was done in a house like Sans Souci. Belle's baby would become one of the secrets of la famille. One of those secrets not confessed and never spoken of, but remembered somehow.

  It was an ugly thing, the seduction of one sister by the husband of another. Yet such was the way things worked in the South with la famille—you could be at each other's throats, but when trouble came your way you always knew your family would stand by you.

  Heloise, Remy, Belle. La famille. Family is what you are born into, not what you marry. A girl is known by her maiden name until the day she dies, and after, long, long after.

  A mother and her two daughters making birthday pralines for the daddy who had deserted them.

  He died screaming.

  Rourke thought of the Mardi Gras mask thrown into the cistern and the white enamel paint and purple spangle driven under Charles St. Claire's fingernail. The killing had been planned. Perhaps they all three had killed him together. Or perhaps, like Vinny, Remy Lelourie was supposed to be the bone, the one who was supposed to look guilty so that the other two could get away with it.

  Whatever the Lelourie women were speaking of this night, though, they were done with it now. Rourke watched Belle and her mother come down the gallery stairs and walk along the oyster-shell drive toward Esplanade Avenue and home. If they looked his way, they didn't see him.

  He did not go up to the big house, but rather he stayed among the trees and watched the gallery,
which was empty now, the way he liked to watch the graveside after a funeral, and which was why he was still there when Lucille Durand came up over the bayou levee and walked right up onto the sagging porch of the old slave shack.

  She went inside, but a few moments later she came back out again. She stood on the porch and looked up at the big house. Rourke followed her gaze and saw that Remy Lelourie had come back out onto the gallery. The two women looked at each other across the green lawn and over the fronds of the banana trees. They all made a haunting triangle, Rourke thought—the white woman on the gallery of the big house, the colored woman on the porch of the slave shack, and the man watching the both of them from among ancient southern oaks that dripped moss like strings of tears.

  The Greater Liberty Baptist Church on Desire was baking in the summer heat. Even with the door and windows wide open and all the fans going, it was stifling inside. The air was thick with the smell of bay rum and sugary perfumes, of melting starch and the chicken gumbo served at the wake.

  The ladies of Pailet Lane flapped their cardboard fans and touched at their wet cheeks with the backs of their wrists. Lucille, sitting in the front pine pew, wasn't weeping. She stared at her mama's coffin with eyes that had turned to stone.

  Watching her from where he sat in the back of the church, with his own mama and daughter, Daman Rourke thought that for Lucille it must be as though she had put all the good left in her life into that coffin for burying.

  The Reverend Jackson Powell was a man who towered above his pulpit and whose deep voice resonated off the rafters and whitewashed walls like a bass saxophone. “Augusta Durand was a good soul,” he proclaimed with uplifted hands, as if he would gather to him all the answering amens and hallelujahs. “Agood soul and a good woman, who spoke her mind and shared the bounty of her heart, and loved her Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ in heaven. Amen.”

  Rourke thought it the finest and truest compliment he'd ever heard paid to anyone. She was a good soul.

  They took the casket to the cemetery in a hearse pulled by horses wearing black plumes. Everyone walked alongside, and the funeral band played “Nearer My God to Thee.” The drummers had put handkerchiefs under the snares of their drums, making a tunk-a, tunk-a beat in time with the horses' hooves striking the road.

  The Durand family didn't have one of the whitewashed brick crypts. At a corner of the cemetery, the procession stopped in front of an open vault that was shaped like an oven and set high up in the brick wall. The pallbearers slid the coffin into the vault, wood scraping against brick. Reverend Powell spoke, his melodious voice making of the words a song of glory.

  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

  The drummers pulled the handkerchiefs out from under the snares and rolled their sticks on the drum heads, and the band broke into “When the Saints.” The mourners opened up their umbrellas beneath the cloudless sky and left the cemetery dancing.

  Rourke stayed behind with Katie and his mother, who had brought flowers—tea roses and jasmine—as a gift for her own dead. He filled a verdigris vase for her with fresh water from a faucet on a pipe.

  She took the flowers to the Lelourie family tomb, with its dancing marble child-angel and the wall with those names of her scandalous past engraved on the stone: REYNARD LELOURIE, her lover; MAUREEN, the daughter she had borne him. His baby sister, born of his mother and her lover many years ago. He wondered what she would be like now, this fruit of Maeve and Reynard's sin, if she had lived to be a woman grown. This sister who had shared half of his blood, and half of Remy's blood as well, he realized.

  Maeve bent over to fit the vase of flowers into the tomb's immortelle, everlasting metal memorial wreath, made to go on existing long after all the bones had turned to dust and even the memories had died. He could tell nothing of what she was thinking, feeling. She kept her silence as she always had.

  They sat in the hot shade on a stone bench beneath a fig tree, while Katie played hopscotch on the flagstone path. “When you were a boy,” his mother said, “it seemed the only time I saw you was in a cemetery.”

  She had said something like that to him once before, but he couldn't remember when. As a boy, he'd had no memory of her as his mother before she had left. He had seen her only that once, when his father had dragged him to see her naked in the bed of her lover. They hadn't spoken words until the day after his father's funeral, but by then he was fifteen and believed he no longer had any need of her.

  In the Irish Channel, when a body is laid out at a wake, a saucer is placed on the dead person's chest for friends and family to put in nickels and dimes, money for the undertakers. Mike Rourke's sons, though, had had no need for charity. Their father had died a hero's death in the line of duty, trying to break up a knife fight between two shrimpers on the wharf. His funeral had been attended by every policeman and fireman and politician in the city.

  Rourke had gone back to the cemetery the next evening by himself. It had been hot that day, as well, and the murmur of the insects in the weeds outside the crumbling, chalk-white walls had made it seem as if the heat itself had a voice.

  They had surprised each other at the ovens, where the many mourners had left mountains of flower bouquets and a gold and red banner had been draped over the wall reading CRESCENT CITY POLICE. He hadn't wanted to be there with her, but he wasn't going to let her chase him away. So he stood in the hot sun before his father's vault, saying nothing, with the heat of the flagstone path rising through the soles of his shoes and sweat running off his face.

  Then she had spoken to him, the first words he could remember hearing from her, asking him if he wanted to come and live with her now, now that he'd been left on his own, what with Paulie gone into the seminary and his daddy gone to Jesus in heaven.

  He had laughed in her face.

  Then years later, before another tomb, with a silent and faintly fragrant rain falling and the stones beneath his feet feeling wet and cold, and his heart feeling wet and cold and missing his wife…Yes, that was when she'd said it, he remembered now. We shouldn't only be meeting at cemeteries.

  “Your father was a good and decent man at heart.”

  He'd been watching Katie while he'd been lost in his thoughts, but now he slowly turned his head and looked at his mother. From the way she sat, though, so composed, her face etched with grief and yet in a strange way also empty, he wondered if he'd only imagined her speaking, for he thought he could hear the fig leaves rustling above their heads although he felt no wind.

  In the years since he'd brought his infant daughter and come to live with her in her lover's house, they had never spoken of his father, and he had wanted it that way, because all the words left unspoken and all the thoughts left unacknowledged spared him from having to admit that the life he lived now felt like an act of betrayal.

  “He was a good man,” she said again, and this time he watched her mouth form the words and so he knew they were real.

  He waited for her to say something more, but what? To say she was sorry, sad, indifferent? She'd had a choice between her sons and her lover, and she had chosen her lover. His father had had a choice between them and the bottle, and he had chosen the bottle.

  She had kept her face averted from his gaze, but now she turned her head and met it square on.

  “I loved Reynard Lelourie,” she said, and he saw in her eyes an emotion that was both an anguish and an ecstasy. “Oh, how I did love him. With all that I am, I did love him. I won't even say I couldn't help myself, because that wouldn't be true. I wanted to love him, I allowed it to happen. I chose it. And I won't say I regret it, for I don't, not a moment of it. Not a moment of it.” She stopped, closing her eyes, and after a moment a tear gathered on her eyelash and fell onto her cheek.

  He didn't put his arm around her or touch her in any way. “It's done now,” he said. “And they are both gone.”

  Her eyelids clenche
d tighter, and then she let out a slow breath and nodded. “Yes. They're gone.”

  They sat together for a while longer, fallen once again into their familiar and safer silence. He was about to ask her if she was ready to go home when she stood up and went back to the tomb with its dancing marble angel.

  She opened the gate and went inside so that she could trace with her fingers the name MAUREEN carved into the stone. “I had her with me for a time after she was born. I rubbed my nose against her cheek and it was soft. Her hair was so soft beneath my hand.”

  A footstep scraped on the brick path behind them, and they turned together. Lucille came up to them and stopped before the gate to the tomb and then she went inside, as though she, too, wanted to read and trace the names. Her face held a hard and flushed intensity.

  Maeve started to raise her arm, as if she would wrap it around the girl and draw her close, but then she let it fall.

  “I want to go up t' Angola, see my LeRoy's grave,” Lucille said. “Could I ask you to drive me up there, Mr. Day? Could you do that one thing for me?”

  He would have liked to touch her in some way too, but he could see that she wouldn't let him. “Tomorrow, if you like,” he said. “We'll go tomorrow.”

  “That would be fine,” she said, and walked back down the brick path without having once looked at either one of them.

  Fog was coming in thick off the river when they drove through the gate of the Louisiana State Penitentiary. The old stone buildings looked black in the damp. The air was so still and heavy that sounds bounced and echoed—the clang of the metal gate, the bullying shout of some gun bull, and, incongruously, ababy's crying, coming from one of the small clapboard cottages where the hacks and their families lived. The “free people” the prisoners called them.

  “I've never seen fog like this in summer,” Rourke said, trying to pull Lucille's gaze off the bleakness of the camps. She sat with her arms wrapped tight around her waist, her face closed to him. “I hope LeBeau has the sense not to take the pirogue out into the swampland in this soup, otherwise it won't be much of a picnic that he and Mama and Katie will be having.”