Mortal Sins

“So who did find him?” Rourke finally asked, although he knew that as well. God help him, but he knew.

Fio plucked the cigar out of his mouth. He moved his jaw as though chewing his thoughts, then his battered face split into a wide grin.

“Cinderella.”

They called her the most beautiful woman in the world.

Her image was everywhere, in rag sheets and magazines, on candy boxes and postcards. It flickered on the silver screens of movie palaces, and on the midnight stages of a million erotic dreams.

The newspapers called her the Cinderella Girl sometimes too. It came from the first movie she had made, The Glass Slipper—a dark and sultry interpretation of the classic fairy tale. It was the role that had shot a young woman by the improbable name of Remy Lelourie into the galaxy of celluloid stardom. The world had seen nothing like her, before or since.

For it wasn’t only her beauty—which was a strange kind of beauty anyway, with her eyes set too far apart and her face too bony, her mouth too wide. She seduced you in a way you didn’t dare confess, not even to your priest. You looked at her and you saw a raw hunger and desperation for life, not redemption and not salvation, but life. The down-and-dirty kind of life that happened on a hot, wet night, in a seedy room, with whiskey and desire burning in your blood.

You looked at her, thought Daman Rourke, and you saw sin. Dangerous, delectable, unaccountable sin.

He stood in the middle of the yard and looked at the old French colonial house. He hadn’t come near her yet and already he felt the pull of her. “Remy,” he said, seeing how it would feel to say her name again after all this time.

He stayed where he was, not moving, looking toward the bayou now. A wind had come up, rattling the banana trees and bringing with it the smell of sour mud and dead water. He saw a pair of lantern lights floating among the dead cypress, where Negro boys often gigged for frogs at night.

A hundred years ago this place had been a sugar plantation, before the city had grown up around it. Only a few acres and the house remained, but her beauty and charm were there still. In her tall and elegant windows, in the finely carved colonnettes and balustrades. In the wide galleries that spread all around her, like the dancing skirts of a southern belle. The man who built the house had called her Sans Souci. Free of worry, without a care.

The spell was broken by the chug and rattle of the coroner’s hearse turning down the drive, come to take away the earthly remains of Charles St. Claire, who was free now of not only worry but everything else.

A gaggle of reporters with cameras slung over their shoulders was riding on the running boards, and the sight of them sent Rourke sprinting the rest of the way across the yard to the house and up onto the shadowed gallery. Light from the headlamps bounced off the brass uniform buttons of a beat cop, who stood at stiff attention in front of the door.

Rourke showed him his gold shield. “Sure is a hell of a hot night for it,” he said, and smiled.

The patrolman, who looked barely out of school, read the name on the badge and stiffened up even straighter. “Lieutenant Rourke, sir?” he said, wariness and wonder both in his voice. His round, freckled face was red and sweating beneath his scuttle-shaped hard hat.

Rourke turned up the wattage on his smile. He had no illusions that the young man’s awed reaction had anything to do with Lieutenant Daman Rourke’s sterling reputation as an ace detective. Even being Irish and the son of a cop wasn’t going to take you from walking a beat to carrying a detective lieutenant’s badge by the time you were thirty. Promotions can come fast and easy, though, when your father-in-law is the superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department.

“Are you feeling generous tonight?” Rourke said.

The patrolman swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple disappeared into his collar. “Sir, I … Sir?”

The reporters were leaping off the running boards now as the meat wagon rolled to a stop. They would go first to the slave shack to pop photographs of the body. Pictures too gory to be printed, but not too gory to be passed around and cracked wise over in the newsroom.

Rourke brushed past the young cop, flashing another smile as he did so. “So be a pal, then,” he said, “and promise them anything short of a night with your sister, but keep those press guys out of my face.”

The boy finally relaxed, grinning. “Well, I don’t got me a sister, but I know what you mean. Sir?”

Rourke paused, the cypress door swinging open beneath his hand.

“She couldn’t have done it. Not Remy Lelourie. Could she?”

Rourke crossed over the threshold, saying nothing. He entered a hall that was wide and cool beneath a high ceiling fan, and sweet with the smell of oiled wood. The sliding doors between the double parlors were thrown open, and he could see into rooms that were dressed for summer in flowered slipcovers and rush mats. The French windows were open to the night, and a breeze stirred their long saffron draperies.

A small, slender woman in a gray silk dress stood before a yellow marble fireplace with her back to the door, her head bent. Her dark hair was cut boyishly short, baring her long neck. Her legs were bare as well, her feet caked and splattered with dried blood.

Rourke had to stop a moment and lean against the jamb. It was a strange high, to be seeing her again and with the smell of blood filling his head. A high as powerful as any that came from a glass of absinthe and cocaine.

“Hey, Remy,” he said. “How you doin’, girl?”

Slowly she turned, lifting her head. The softly tragic expression on her face looked drawn there as if by a knife. For a moment the wrench of memory was so strong he nearly choked on it.

“Day,” she said, and that was all, but hearing it tore something loose inside him.

He walked up to her, holding her fast with his gaze. She waited for him, allowing him to look, daring him to see behind her eyes. The front of her dress looked like someone had taken a bucket of blood and drenched her with it. She even had blood in her hair.

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.