Mortal Sins

Her right hand was pressed to the hollow between her breasts, as though he had startled her. Her fingers were wrapped around a stained handkerchief that had been twisted into a ragged string. He took her hand and she let him, her eyes the whole time on his face. Her eyes were exactly how he remembered them, wide-spaced and tilted up at the corners. Dark brown with golden lights, like tiny bursting suns.

He unwrapped the makeshift bandage. A ragged cut gaped open across her palm from little finger to thumb.

“Why did you do it, Remy?” he said.

She wrenched free of him and turned away, gripping her elbows with bloodstained hands. She didn’t appear to be wearing anything underneath that single sheath of blood-soaked silk.

Rourke leaned against the mantel and stuffed his fists deep into his pockets. He allowed the space between them to empty into a hard silence, but she didn’t fill it with any words. To Fio she’d spun a tale that she had been in bed, asleep, when she’d been awakened by screams coming from the old slave shack and she had gone out there to find her husband expelling his last breath through a rip in his throat.

“Now this was supposed to’ve been around nine o’clock, you understand,” Fio had said. “But it was a whole two hours later when Miss Beulah, the colored lady who does for the family, comes down to the kitchen for something or other and she looks out the window and thinks something ‘ain’t quite right’ about the shack. So she goes on out to see what’s what, and lo and behold ‘what’ turns out to be Cinderella covered in blood, sitting ’longside of Prince Charming here, rocking back and forth and telling him over and over how sorry she is about it all.”

Rourke took a step closer to her. “You going to tell me what happened?”

She raised her head as though meeting the challenge, but her voice when she spoke was dry and scratchy, as if she’d spent the night weeping. Or screaming.

“Why? What good will it do, when you’ve already made up your mind not to believe me?”

“Just think of it as a dress rehearsal for the jury, then, because things sure don’t look good, baby. You saying you sat there and stared at the gaping raw wound of your husband’s slit throat for all that time and did nothing.”

The banjo clock on the wall chose that moment to strike one o’clock, and she flinched as if the soft gong had been a blow. “He was … there was this awful gurgling sound, Day, and all this blood came spurting out his mouth. It was like he was trying to talk to me, to tell me something, but I couldn’t, couldn’t … And then the next thing I remember is hearing Beulah scream.”

“Yeah, I guess a couple hours of time must’ve just sort of slipped away from you there. It does that sometimes after an absinthe and happy dust cocktail.”

“That was Charlie’s poison. And yours, or so I’ve heard tell.” She had lifted her head again, met his eyes again.

Her mouth trembled and twisted into a smile, but it was a wry one, full of memories and pain. “We’ve always been willing to believe the worst about each other, haven’t we, Day?”

All he could manage was a shake of his head.

She held his gaze a moment longer, then the smile faded from her face and she turned away. He watched her in silence while she picked up a mother-of-pearl smoking set from off the mantel. He waited until she fitted a cigarette into the holder and lit a match before he said, “Who was your husband sleeping with, besides you?”

The flame trembled slightly, but that was all. “Now, whatever would Charles want with anyone else, when he already possessed the most beautiful woman in the world?”

He watched as the wild self-derision burned sudden and bright in her eyes. That cruel and destructive pulse of wildness that had once, long ago, seduced them both over the edge.

Jesus save me, he thought.

He cleared his throat. “Uh-huh. And how often did he beat you?”

Her hand flew up quicker than she could stop it, although she tried. It got as far as her neck, and so she pressed her palm there as if feeling for a pulse. The color around the bruise on her cheek drained away, so that it stood out as stark as a smudge of soot.

“Oh, this little ol’ thing … You remember how the rain came up so hard and fast this evenin’? Well, I went to close the windows and the wind caught one of the shutters and it up and smacked me right in the face.” She breathed a soft, girlish laugh, and he almost laughed himself at this vision of Remy Lelourie suddenly turning into a southern belle with cotton bolls for brains.

“Cut the shuck, Remy,” he said. “One thing you’ve never been is a magnolia blossom.”

She put the cigarette down in an ashtray without having smoked it and wrapped her arms around herself again. “And you’ve always been one mean, tough bastard, haven’t you?”

“Somebody has to be. And here’s another interesting fact for you: The human body holds about ten pints of blood, and Charles St. Claire left most of his splattered all over the floor and ceiling and walls of an old slave shack on his way to being hacked to death with a cane knife. Now, Lord knows I was never all that fond of poor Charlie, but that sort of last moment I’d reserve only for my worst enemy, and I got this sick feeling in the pit of my gut that the big fat juicy thumbprint on that knife is going to turn out to be yours. Was he your worst enemy, Mrs. St. Claire?”

Her eyes had grown wide and stark. “I might have touched it—the knife. It was stuck in his chest. I tried to pull it out, but it was caught on…on something … and blood was spraying all around us, and then… then all at once it came gushing up out of his throat.” Her hands fell to her sides and she looked down at herself as if suddenly just realizing what a mess she was. “It got all over me.”

She lifted her head and there was a wounded look on her face now, and he wondered, as he’d always wondered, which of all the Remys in the world was the real one. “They wouldn’t let me take a bath,” she said. “When can I take a bath?”

“You’ll have to take off all you’re wearing in front of your maid, so’s she can pass it along to us. Then tomorrow mornin’ you’re going to have to come on down to the Criminal Courts Building and give us your fingerprints.”

“Oh, God, Day. You’re not just … You really do believe I …” He watched her eyes brighten and grow wet with tears. Even though he knew it for the act that it was, he also thought that maybe a few things were getting through to her at last. That while she might be Remy Lelourie and the most beautiful woman in the world, there were going to be some in the city of New Orleans at least who would believe she had done this terrible thing.

He pressed his shoulder hard into the mantel to keep from touching her. She was still the most dangerous moment of his life. She had lied to him and used him and left him, hurt him in ways uncountable and unmeasurable, but he’d always wanted her anyway. He had never stopped wanting her.

“You remember how I worked the docks that summer, unloading banana boats? How I always had welts all over my hands and arms from getting bit by the rats and spiders that lived in those banana bunches?”

“Day.” She had said his name on a sigh.

“ ’Cause I remember it. Just like I remember other stuff about that summer,” he said. Welts on his hands and welts on his heart. “Like how you cried that last afternoon. Big fat crocodile tears, just like these.” He was cupping her face, gathering up her tears as if he would keep them.

“I loved you,” she said. “I loved you so bad it almost killed me.”

“You were slumming. And—funny thing—but this is the part I remember best: You were the one who left.”

She wrapped her fingers around his wrist and held his hand in place so that she could turn her head and brush her lips across his palm, and the wetness of her mouth mixed with her tears. “I was afraid. Of you, Day. I wonder if you’ve any idea how frightening you can be.”

Him frightening. That was a laugh. He leaned closer, until only a breath-space separated their mouths. He was opening the throttle wide now, putting his money down.

“You were always good, darlin’, the best I’ve ever seen, and worth every bit of the ten G’s a week they were paying you out in Hollywood.” Her fingers were pressing hard on the pulse in his wrist, so that it seemed his blood flowed into hers. “But just like any two-bit hooker who finds herself owned by a cheatin’, heavy-handed pimp, one day you up and killed your man.”

He took a step back, pulled loose from her, let go of her. His face felt as though it were made of lead, but his breathing was fast and hard.

“You killed him, Remy girl. And I’m going to nail you for it.”

Chapter Two

A specter folk called the gowman was said to haunt the cypress swamp beyond the Faubourg St. John. Dressed all in white and prowling the night, the gowman lured his victims to a hideous death. He murdered the innocent, but what he did afterward was worse: He stole away the corpses he made, so there would be no body for friends and loved ones to view at the wake, no casket to put in the crypt. To those old Creole families like the St. Claires and the Lelouries, those families whose names, like their cypress houses, had been built to last forever, such a fate was beyond bearing.

The gowman was innocent of this murder at least, thought Daman Rourke as he watched the coroner’s hearse roll back down the drive. For this funeral there would be a wake and a casket, and a widow.

He leaned on the balustrade of the upstairs gallery and watched the wind blow fresh rain clouds back across the moon. Before he’d allowed her to go upstairs and get out of her bloody dress, he had gone up and taken a look at her bedroom. At her big tester bed with its canopy of rose garlands and frolicking cupids. At the semen stains on the messed sheets.

At her cloche hat and pearls laid out on her dressing table, a pair of stockings draped over the back of a chair, her shoes lined up beside it. At her tapestry valise stuffed so full of clothes, and done in such a hurry, that one of the straps wouldn’t fasten—as if she’d packed up and gotten ready to run before she’d killed him.

But then people never change, and she had run before.

The old cypress floorboards creaked beneath Fiorello Prankowski’s heavy tread as he joined Rourke at the gallery railing. Fio hooked a hip on the worn wood, folded his arms across his chest, and stared at his partner.

“You gotta figure the wife for doing it,” he said.

“Yes.” The word tasted sour in Rourke’s mouth. The way he’d behaved with her in there—like the jilted lover he once was, who had wanted to make her hurt as much as he was hurting, who had wanted to make her suffer, and never mind that whatever pain he might have owed her was eleven years too late.

Fio flipped his cigar butt out into the night. “Blood all over her, those missing two hours, and the maid finding her with the body, crying about bein’ so sorry. Yeah, she did it, all right, as sure as I’m a poor Italian-Polack boy from Des Moines. And ain’t it almost always the one who is supposed to love you best,” he said, voicing an old cop truism. “Her story’s pretty half-assed, but it might hold up. I mean it’s gonna be tough to find a jury who’ll send Remy Lelourie upriver to fry, even for killing her old man.”

“Even tougher if enough folk figure he was asking for it.”

“Was he?”

From where they were, up on the second-story gallery, you could look across the bayou water and see the lights of the gates to City Park, where seventy years ago, beneath a grove of live-oak trees, a St. Claire had shot a Lelourie to death in a duel over lost honor and a game of faro.

“I played a game of bourré with the gentleman once,” Rourke said. “Charles St. Claire had no fear, and no limit.”

“Hunh, you should talk. So who won?”

“I did.”

Fio huffed a laugh. “There you go … Everybody’s got something, though. If he didn’t have fear, what did he have?”

“Money, pride, greed, lust. And secrets.” Rourke smiled. “All of the usual southern deadly sins.”

“Aw, man, don’t tell me that. What secrets?”

“He had a sterling silver name, and juice in all the high and mighty places, but he’s been a hophead for years, and one who really got his kicks out of walking on the wild side. He liked to use people—men, but especially women. And then he liked making them pay for the privilege of being used.”

Fio had turned his head back around to look at him, and Rourke could feel the dissecting edge in the other man’s gaze.

“He was also,” Rourke went on, “the only white Creole lawyer around these parts with enough brass to defend a Negro in court, and on rare occasions he even won. That Charles St. Claire was able to save a few sorry black asses from a life of hoeing sweet potatoes and cutting cane on an Angola chain gang—well, certain folk will tell you that was his very worst sin.”

“And what will they tell me is Remy Lelourie’s very worst sin?”

“That she left us all those years ago. Or tried to.”

Fio waited two slow beats before he said, “I know you want her to be innocent, but she probably isn’t, so don’t—” He cut himself off, blowing a big breath through his teeth.

“Don’t what?” Rourke said.

“Don’t let it break your heart this time.”

“This time?” For a moment Rourke wondered how much his partner knew—if he’d heard something somewhere, a whisper, a rumor. It was impossible, though. The real secrets, the sins, were buried too deep. Only he and Remy knew what had really happened down in that slave shack eleven years ago, and Remy would never tell.

Fio shrugged. “I’m only saying, she’s young and beautiful and it’s an ugly thought that she’s responsible for that mess down there.” He waved his hand in the direction of the slave shack. “But you always end up letting yourself care about them too much, the murdered ones and their murderers—you care too much and they end up breaking your heart.”

Rourke stared at the other cop, letting an edgy silence fall between them. “You done?”

“Yeah, I’m done.”

Rourke stared at Fio some more, then he smiled and shook his head. He waited until Fio smiled back at him, and then he said, “Jesus, Prankowski. You are so full of shit.”

He pushed off the balustrade, turning his back on the bayou. His headache was blinding now, and his legs and arms felt weightless, invisible, as if he were disappearing back into the past where once they had been, he and Remy.

“You know,” Fio said as they left the house by the back gallery stairs, “that’s the part about all of this that I don’t get the most. She had it all—she was a friggin’ movie star, for Christ’s sake. So what did she come back here for, to up and marry a man like St. Claire?”

“Maybe it was true love.”

“Yeah? Then true love sure doesn’t last long. When did they tie the knot—back in February sometime? That makes it five months.”

They crossed the yard to the oaks that lined the drive, where Rourke had parked his Indian Big Chief motorbike. It had started to rain again, in large, fat drops.

He had straddled the leather seat and kick-started the engine when Fio’s big hands gripped the handlebars and he leaned over, bringing his face close to Rourke’s. “You mind telling me where you’re going? Partner.”

Rourke stared back at him, but his answer when it came was mild enough. “To a speak.”

“If you need a drink, I got a flask in my pocket.”

“I’m looking for a woman. You got one of those in your pocket too?”

Fio blew his breath out. In the white light from the bike’s headlamp, his face looked drained of blood the way Charles St. Claire’s had been. “What do you know that you’re not telling me?”

“Nothing,” Rourke lied, smiling so it would go down easy.

He rolled down the drive and along the bayou road until he turned onto Esplanade Avenue, where he opened the Indian’s throttle into a roar and tore down the rainslick pavement. The bike shuddered between his legs, and the hot, wet wind slapped him in the face, while a saxophone wailed “Runnin’ Wild” in his head.

Three years before, a Prohibition agent—strictly in the name of research, of course—had decided to prove how easy it was for a thirsty man to buy himself a glass of hooch in various cities throughout the dry country. It took him a whole twenty-one minutes to find and make his illegal purchase in Chicago. It took him three minutes in Detroit.

In New Orleans it took him thirty-five seconds.

Daman Rourke wasted even less time that wet and bloody summer’s night, but then he knew where he was going.

The speakeasy was on Dumaine Street, masquerading as a laundry, although a few shirts occasionally did get boiled in the big copper tubs out back. Enough so that you could detect a faint smell of soap and scorched starch beneath the reek of tobacco smoke and booze-soaked sawdust.

Rourke leaned his elbows on the water-marked bar and ordered a scotch and rye from a slope-shouldered, slack-lipped man in a greasy apron. When the man came with his drink, Rourke put his dollar down. The bartender figured him for a cop and so he didn’t pick the money up, but Rourke would leave it lie anyway, for no matter how low he did go, he always went there in style and he always paid his own way.

The hooch was good, straight off the boat from Honduras, and still it burned when it hit his belly. Tonight, the speak seemed sad and quiet. From the back room drifted the clatter of billiard balls and the murmur of men playing cotch. A man in a red-striped vest slumped, passed out, at a piano, his black hands gently folded together on the silent ivory keys as if in prayer.

Yet under the tarnished light of a copper-shaded lamp, a couple danced anyway, lost in music only they could hear. Feet shuffling in a slow drag, bellies pressed close, hips grinding together in a parody of love. The woman’s tawdry yellow dress was coming unraveled at the hem, her brassy hair was black at the roots, and her eyes were clenched tightly shut. As if not looking was as good as not knowing.

When the bartender came back to see if he wanted another, Rourke nodded, even though his headache was now pounding loud as a Mardi Gras band. “Last time I was in here,” he said, “must’ve been, oh, ’bout a week back—you had a gal singin’ the heartbreak blues so damn fine. Made a man want to crawl into bed with a full bottle and a willin’ woman, and drown his sorrows deep in the both of them.”

Rourke paused to trace a pattern through the water rings with his finger, and when he looked back up his smile was backwoods friendly, with just a hint of bashfulness in it, as if he hadn’t tried this particular game before and was seeing how far he could go with it. “Since then, well, I just haven’t been able to get that lil’ gal’s song out my mind.”

The bartender took a vague swipe at the scarred wood with a corner of his apron, while he sucked on his fat bottom lip and tried to assess if the cop leaning on his bar was looking to get laid or be put on the pad. “You’re pro’bly thinkin’ of Lucille. Only thing is, she said she wasn’t feelin’ so hot this evenin’, so I told her to take it off.”

“What a cryin’ shame,” Rourke said, while inside he felt sick, and cold with fear at the trouble he could see coming his way. Lucille’s way. Lucille, who should have been here in this speak, singing the blues, and yet wasn’t, and so she probably had no alibi now for where she had been while Charlie St. Claire was out in that shack, drowning in his own blood.

The bartender chewed on his lip some more, while his gaze flitted everywhere but on Rourke’s face. Finally he leaned forward and lowered his voice to a hoarse, whiskey-fed whisper.

“If it’s a hankerin’ for blackberries you got, there’s a place ’round the corner on Burgundy. Look for a brown door faded to the color of a drunk’s piss. They got ’em from ripe to green, and every which way in between.”

Rourke knocked back the last of his drink and laid another dollar down on the bar. He smiled again, and there was nothing backwoods or bashful about it. It was the smile of a boy who had grown up with a drunk for a father in the Irish Channel, where they had corner saloons that made this one resemble a Sunday school room, and bartenders who kept the peace with brickbats and bolo knives.

“You have yourselves a good night now,” he said. The slack-lipped man didn’t answer or nod, he just turned and walked carefully down to the other end of the bar.

Outside the rain had come and gone, but it hadn’t taken the heat with it. Rourke had already started down the street when he saw a woman leaning against a mist-haloed street lamp. She was naked except for a faded blue wrapper and an old-fashioned corset.

Even with her standing in the shadows he could see that the skin of her legs glowed smooth and coal black, but her face was a pasty pink. Sometimes a country girl, young to the business and before she’d learned what it was a man really wanted, would buy pink chalk, wet it with perfume, and smear it on to make herself look white.

This one had at least got her hustle down. She rolled her belly in a little dance and made a wet, smacking noise with her lips. “Hello, daddy. Wanna do a little business?”

Rourke shook his head, then said, “No, thank you,” to ease the rejection, and then had to laugh at himself for thinking she would care. She was young, but not that young. Yet as he passed her by, he thought that underneath the pink chalk she’d been someone he knew.

He walked down Dumaine, along a brick banquette slick and silver with rain, toward the mouth of the alley where he had parked the Indian. Off in the night someone was playing a trumpet. Whoever it was, all the misery of his life and the sorrow in his soul was coming out of that horn. Daman Rourke stopped to stand beneath a dripping balcony and listen as the trumpet went crying up the last note, making music so sweet it hurt, like the slash of a cane knife to the heart.

It hadn’t all been a lie, what he’d last said to Fio about needing to get laid.

Memory could be like a train whistle in the night, sucking you deep into the low-down blues. You could stop it, sometimes, with booze or drugs, but the best way he’d found was to lose yourself in the arms of a woman, if she was your woman, maybe. If she hadn’t left you yet, or died on you, or just plain given up on you.

No trumpet sobbed out its heart in this uptown neighborhood of double shotgun and camelback houses. Rourke killed the bike’s engine as he rolled it to a stop alongside Bridey O’Mara’s front stoop.

Shadows stirred on a gallery smothered with purple wisteria. A porch swing creaked.

He stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at the woman on the swing. His woman, maybe. She sat with her knees drawn up beneath her chin and her arms wrapped around her legs. Her head was tucked low, as if she were trying to hide behind the long fall of her Irish red hair.

“Hey, baby,” he said. “It’s after two in the mornin’. What’re you doing still up?”

She raised her head, and the curtain of her hair parted. Light from the street lamps bled through the thick vines and onto her face. Her cheeks glowed damp with sweat, or maybe tears.

He stayed where he was at the bottom of the steps, staring up at her. She stared back at him a moment, then jerked her head away. “A couple of cops were here looking for you. I had to tell them I hadn’t seen you in over a week.”

Her voice had come out broken and rough. She gripped her legs tighter and rocked a bit. The swing moaned. “I was sitting out here remembering the night Sean didn’t come home. Lordy, how it did storm—do you remember? Thunder and lightning and pouring down like it wasn’t ever going to quit.”

Rourke climbed the steps and sat down next to her on the swing. Her eyes were bright and hot.

“I sat out here on this swing that night, too,” she said, “waiting for him to come home, with the storm going on all around me, and it was like I was falling through a long, black silence. I think that must be what dying’s like, Day, don’t you? Falling through a long, black silence.”

He started to touch her, then didn’t. “I won’t go disappearing on you, Bridey.”

She let go of her legs and leaned against him, her shoulder pressing against his. She wore only a thin cotton wrapper, and he could feel the heat of her body.

Memory could be like a train whistle in the night, and sometimes you felt the pull of its call in spite of all your good intentions and best defenses. He thought of Charles St. Claire lying in puddles of blood, his eyes wide open to death. He was afraid he knew well what horror those eyes had seen in their last moments, because long ago his own eyes had watched Remy Lelourie kill.

This was the place where his thoughts kept getting stuck, like a scratch on a record: If she’d done it once, once, once, she could do it again. Yet he knew already that she had the power to make him believe otherwise. Or not to care.

“I know he’s dead,” said the woman sitting next to him on the swing, and Rourke’s mind made a dizzying jerk as he thought that she, too, was seeing that slashed body in the bloody slave shack. Then he realized her thoughts were back in another rainy night, waiting for a man who never came.

“I know his boat went down in that storm,” she said. “I know that’s what happened, I do. But sometimes …”

Sometimes.

Rourke turned into her and pulled her close, so he could lay his head between her breasts, and it felt so good. He thought he might have felt her lips in his hair, and then she pulled away from him and stood up. She took him by the hand and led him into her bedroom.

Her eyes were the golden gray color of pewter caught in candlelight. She had dustings of freckles on her breasts that were wet now from his tongue. He lay upon her, and as she looked up at him, her face was full of feelings and memories that he didn’t want to know. He wanted to stay wrapped up in her, lost in her, forever.

It had been them against the world, growing up poor and tough and running wild on Rousseau Street in the Irish Channel. Daman Rourke, Casey Maguire, Sean O’Mara, and Bridey Kinsella. The summer they were twelve, they went to Mamma Rae, the voodooienne, and for a dollar apiece she tattooed blue eight-pointed stars on the inside of their left wrists. She made up a charm and walked backward three times counterclockwise around a virgin’s fresh grave in the light of a waning moon, and then she pronounced them blood brothers for life. It hadn’t mattered that Bridey was a girl; she was one of them. They were all three half in love with her, even then.

Sean had been the one to marry her in the end, though, and he’d kept her until one Sunday two months ago, when he had taken his small trawler out onto Lake Pontchartrain for some spring evening fishing and hadn’t been seen or heard from again. If you didn’t know Sean O’Mara, you would say how he was a cop who’d gone bad, a boozer and a loser who had racked up big debts with his bootlegger and his bookie. You would say there were riverboats and trains leaving New Orleans all the time, and that sometimes the only way out from under was to start over.

Only if you grew up together in the hard-luck, hard-scramble neighborhood of the Irish Channel with him watching your back while you watched his, you would know that Sean O’Mara could run wild at times, but he would never run away.

Or this was what you told yourself on those nights when you lay in Sean O’Mara’s spool-turned bed, with Sean O’Mara’s wife. When strands of her long hair were caught on your chest, and you could feel the heat of her breath against your face.

“Bridey,” he said.

She sighed in answer and pressed her hip into his belly, and his throat closed up on some emotion he couldn’t name.

He had sat up with Bridey all that night, and several nights after, while they dragged the lake and the city’s underbelly of speakeasies and hot pillow joints, looking for Sean. He hadn’t meant to touch her, not even when she’d cried and asked him to hold her, not even when she had covered his mouth with hers in a kiss full of despair. For her, he knew, their touching was only a way of taking comfort from an old friend. For him it was a different sort of comfort—sweetly lonesome, edged with pain, like the wail of a saxophone. His own wife had been dead going on seven years. He had photographs to remind himself of what she’d looked like, but he had long ago forgotten the music her voice could make when she spoke his name.

He touched the woman who was lying beside him now, on the inside of her left wrist, where the small faded blue star was but a shadow, like a birthmark. “Bridey,” he said again.

A smile was beginning to grow at the edges of her mouth and eyes when the telephone rang.

He saw her face change, saw the hope flare like a struck match for just an instant in her eyes, and he looked away. She would always, he thought, be out on that swing, waiting.

“It’s probably only Mama,” she finally said when the bell had jangled a third time. “She has a hard time sleeping nights since Daddy died.”

He watched her rise naked from the bed and walk into the parlor, where the telephone rested on a narrow mahogany stand. She answered it with one hand and gathered her hair up off her neck with the other, and the movement arched her back and lifted her breasts. In the light cast by the parlor’s red-shaded lamp, her breasts glowed pink, like rare seashells.

He heard her say, “Yes, he’s here. Just a moment, please.”

He got up, glancing at the camelback clock as he passed by the dresser. It still lacked a couple of hours before dawn.