Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  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 gowmanlured 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 hono
r 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 pla
ce '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.