Rourke smiled and touched his own cheek, near the corner of his mouth, where on the other man a deep V-shaped scar puckered the skin. It was called a rat mark, put there in prison by a shiv on the face of a man who was an informer.
A flush colored Paddy Boyle's scarred face, and his right hand made an inadvertent movement to the small of his back, where he would be carrying a revolver of some sort, probably a hogleg.
Maguire looked up then, saw them, and slid out of the booth. His face seemed drawn even thinner with a terrible pain. He spread his arms as if he would embrace Rourke, but then he let them slowly fall.
“Day, I heard—Jesus, what an awful thing,” he said instead. “Poor Bridey. I still can't believe it.”
Rourke's smile turned all down-home southern charm. “Well, try bending your mind to it some more. It's only right you should be able to believe her dead, since you're the one who killed her.”
“Day.” Blood suffused Maguire's pale face. He closed his eyes, shaking his head, but Rourke thought that deep inside him something had flinched.
“I loved her,” Maguire said, his voice thick and gritty. “I was the only one of us never to have her, but I probably loved her the best of either of you two bastards.”
“I do believe that, Case. I believe you loved her, only you just went and killed her anyway. Yeah, so maybe that grenade was meant for me and not her, but if that's how it went down, then too bad for you, because she's dead. And I'm not.”
Maguire turned half away from him, waving his hand. “How do you like this guy? We were best friends growing up, tight as brothers, and now he's here treating me like I'm spit on the sidewalk.”
Something ripped open inside of Rourke then, or perhaps the rent had been there all along and he was only just now feeling it. His gut still told him Case had done it, but now his heart was pleading for it to be a lie, and this weakness of his both disgusted and enraged him.
His hand flashed out and gripped Maguire's left wrist. From the corner of his eye he saw Paddy Boyle pull his gun. Behind him, he heard Fio cock his own .38 Special revolver. The goons at the counter pulled back the hammers on their weapons, and suddenly Tio Tony's sounded like a ditchful of crickets in July.
“Easy, boys,” Maguire called out, his gaze fastened hard on Rourke's face. “Nothing's going to happen.”
Rourke twisted Maguire's wrist over and shoved up his shirtsleeve, exposing the small eight-pointed blue star. “You broke the faith.”
Rourke felt the tendons in Maguire's wrist constrict as his hand closed into a fist. “Not me, Day,” he said, his voice low, aching. “You.”
Slowly, gently, he pulled loose of Rourke's grasp. “We were family once, closer than the family God gave us. You think I don't remember how it was with you? You were always wilder than the rest of us put together—Jesus, I swear I used to think sometimes you were certifiably crazy. But we were stand-up, the four of us. Blood brothers for life. Only you went and pinned on a badge and married some Garden District debutante, and suddenly you're Saint Daman and your shit doesn't stink. Sean became a cop, too, but he never did that.”
“What Sean did do—he should've known better.”
“Sean did know better. Unlike you, he had no grand illusions about himself. Before he blew town, Sean O'Mara was a man just like your daddy—a drunk cop who owed his soul to the loan sharks and took his graft in trade in the brothels.”
It was all true, and it hurt to know it, to acknowledge it. Rourke took a step, bringing himself close to the other man. He heard Maguire's breath hitch, saw his eyes widen just a little. His own eyes, Rourke knew, had turned heavy-lidded, cold.
“Before,” he said, pitching his voice low and soft, “I was figuring on sending you up for a thirty-year jolt in Angola for killing Vinny. But now, if I found out you did Bridey too, I'm going to tear your lying, murdering heart out.”
The skin tightened around Maguire's eyes, but he let his breath out slow and careful. “For Bridey's sake, in her memory, I'm going to pretend I didn't hear you say that.”
Paddy Boyle made some kind of noise that at the last moment he turned into a cough. He had laid his gun down on the table when he'd figured out there was no mortal danger to his boss. Now he lit a cigarette and dropped the burned match into his half-empty plate. He looked up at Rourke, blue smoke curling out of his nose.
His mouth parted, as if he would say something, but he never got the chance. Rourke seized him by his pomaded hair and slammed his face down on the table. Cigarette, lips, and teeth smashed into the plate, and the cheap pottery shattered into pieces.
Rourke tightened his grip on the slick hair and jerked the man's head back up. Clumps of fish and rice and beans dripped off Paddy Boyle's face, and his legs flailed beneath the table as he tried to get away. Rourke still had him by his hair and he snapped a couple of hard punches into the man's nose and broken, bleeding mouth. Pink spittle flew from Boyle's lips and blood gushed from his nose like water from a broken pipe. Rourke slammed the bloody face back into the shards of pottery, again and then again, as the rage and grief exploded out of him.
He heard Fio shouting, felt Fio's hands pulling him away. He let go of Paddy Boyle's hair and stepped back, drew in a breath, and then another, nodding to whatever Fio was saying even though he couldn't hear him with the way the blood was roaring hot in his ears.
Paddy Boyle tried to lift his head, his eyelids fluttering as he clung to consciousness by a thread, then he fell facedown in the broken plate. Blood had splattered in fanlike patterns all over the booth, the wall, the floor Rourke's gaze went from the beaten man and the ruins of the table and found Casey Maguire. The bootlegger stared at him, his pale eyes jittering with anger, but his hands were quiet at his sides.
Rourke smiled. “Tell your junkyard dog that the next time he pulls a gun on me, I'll ram it down his fucking throat.”
Rourke thought he heard a woman screaming, and then he realized it was a church bell ringing. He drew in a deep breath, wincing as his sore ribs pulled, smelling the mud of the river and the damp brick at his back. He was outside, leaning against the wall of a warehouse, although he couldn't remember how he'd gotten here.
Fio stood in front of him, his neck flaming with color, a muscle jumping in one cheek. “You kind of hung me out to dry there, partner.”
Rourke's gaze cut away. In a vacant part of the wharf across the street, some boys were playing pitch-and-catch. The smack of the ball into leather echoed in the heavy air. One of the kids—a scrawny thing in ragged knickers—was wearing a Pels cap.
Katie.
Rourke shut his eyes, but what he saw was bad so he opened them again. His ears rang with the memory of Bridey's scream, and his face suddenly felt cold. People he loved had always tended to leave him or die on him, but he didn't see how he could live through losing Katie.
He could still feel the blood singing in his neck, but his hands felt useless and thick at his sides. He tightened them into fists, then opened them, tightened and opened, tightened and opened, and breathed.
He'd have to put the word out, talk to his contacts on the street, see if anyone had a lead on who the fedoras in the black Lincoln were. He could wire the Chicago PD. Mobsters up in Chicago used grenades on each other all the time; that's why they called them Chicago pineapples. And Lincolns were the automobile of choice for Al Capone and his boys. Maybe Sean wasn't dead. Maybe Sean had gone up north, gotten into trouble, and that trouble had followed him home.
He kept playing the moment over and over again in his head. The black Lincoln swerving at the house, the flying grenade, Bridey. The guys in the fedoras would have been wearing hoglegs for sure, would have had machine guns with them. He had been standing out in the open, in the middle of the street, yet they hadn't fired a single shot.
The black Lincoln swerving at the house, the flying grenade, Bridey, Bridey screaming. Bridey dying. Bridey.
No, he still had to believe it more likely that the hit had been meant for him, and
Bridey had simply died in his place.
And that brought it back to Casey Maguire and Vinny, the bone.
Or maybe Charles St. Claire.
“Partner,” he said aloud. He brought his gaze back to Fio. “Did you ever get around to talking to St. Claire's law partner yesterday?”
The skin of Fio's face was still stretched tight with anger. “Golly, are we going back to detecting? And here I thought we were about to declare war on the local bad guys.”
Rourke's hand hurt. He made another fist and looked down at the raw place where the skin had split across his knuckles. He looked back up at Fio and flashed a sudden, genuine grin. “Sweet mercy, that did feel good, though,” he said.
Fio narrowed his eyes at him. “You think I don't know what you're trying to do. Go to hell.”
“Okay,” Rourke said. He pushed himself off the wall and headed for the squad car.
“You're gonna have to wash up and change your suit before we go calling on any uptown lawyers,” Fio called after him. “You've got goon's blood all over you.” He waited another beat, then followed after Rourke, jingling the nickels and dimes in his pocket. “Detecting. Uh-huh, this is the life. Day I was born, you'd have thought my mama would've seen trouble coming and drowned me for luck.”
Chapter Twelve
RAINDROPS THE SIZE OF BOTTLE CAPS WERE PINGING on the hood and windshield by the time they pulled up in front of Charles St. Claire's law offices on Napoleon Avenue. Rourke had stiffened up in the car on the drive uptown, and he got out carefully. He winced as he pulled at his battered ribs while struggling to get into the clean suit coat he'd picked up from home on the way.
The firm was small, just St. Claire and another Creole by the name of Jean Louis Armande, according to the discreet brass plaque mounted next to the door. They worked out of a converted Queen Anne house, resplendent with fluted colonnettes, turned-wood balustrades, carved panel-work, and a turret with fish-scale shingles.
While a secretary announced them, Rourke and Fio waited in a front parlor that was like the overfurnished, overstuffed, overdecorated rooms of the fashionable men's clubs. Fio settled into a plush green velvet sofa and began thumbing through a magazine. Rourke wandered over to look at the artwork, a series of Currier and Ives lithographs depicting history's worst disasters: the sinking of the Titanic, the Chicago fire, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Maybe, Rourke thought, looking at bad news on such a cosmic scale was supposed to make you conclude that the wreck of your own life wasn't so terrible.
Rourke was studying a lithograph of San Francisco in rubble and flames after the '06 earthquake when the firm's surviving member came out himself to escort them back to his office. Jean Louis Armande's looks belied his venerable Creole name. He was a freckled-faced man with thinning hair the color of dead leaves, a pudgy nose and mouth, and bushy eyebrows that crawled above his seawater blue eyes and rimless eyeglasses like caterpillars.
His languid manners were pure old New Orleans, though. He saw them settled into leather armchairs, asked after their health, and commented on the weather. He offered them coffee, which he poured himself from a rose-sprigged china pot. As he handed around the delicate cups and saucers, Rourke noticed deep, flaming red scratches on the backs of his freckled hands.
He saw Rourke looking and flushed, then his small, pursed lips produced a surprisingly charming smile. “My daughter has a new kitten that thinks it's a tiger.”
Armande's spacious office overlooked the garden. A window framing a moss-garlanded live oak tree formed a southern pastoral backdrop for a walnut desk, whose glossy surface bore a Tiffany lamp, a cut-glass inkwell, and an onyx postage-stamp box—but no papers or documents of any kind.
The lawyer sat behind the desk and folded his hands in front of him. Although Rourke had never met the man before, around the Criminal Courts Building Jean Louis Armande was known to handle his firm's prosaic, but more lucrative, civil cases, while his flamboyant partner had amused himself playing the dragon slayer and championing lost causes in criminal court.
“I would prefer,” Armande said in that soft, lilting way some Creoles had of talking, “to assist the police as much as possible in their investigation of my law partner's unfortunate…demise. However, as I will be assuming most of Mr. St. Claire's cases—provided the clients wish it, of course—I don't know how much information I might be able to venture forth about his professional life without wandering into the area of attorney-client privilege.”
“How about his Negro clients?” Rourke said. “You taking them on too?”
“I should hardly think so.” The lawyer's small lips pursed and twitched as if he were amused by the question. “I have nothing against pro bono publico, you understand, but unlike Charles I've never seen where is the public good in keeping another worthless nigger out of jail.”
“Black skin kind of being like the mark of original sin in your eyes?” Rourke said. He was smiling, but it was pure mean, and the look in his own eyes slowly forced Armande's gaze to fall to his clasped hands.
“Mr. St. Claire was working the appeal of a Negro prizefighter by the name of LeRoy Washington,” Rourke said. “Mr. Washington was convicted two years ago of choking his manager to death. That ring any bells with you?”
Armande made pockets of air in his cheeks while he thought, or pretended to. “No, I'm afraid it doesn't.”
“Where were you Tuesday night between, say, eight o'clock and midnight?”
Armande looked surprised at the question. “At home. With my family.”
“You sure about that?”
“Of course I'm sure.” The lawyer's voice had broken over the protest, and a flush spread in a slow stain over his cheeks. “We had our disagreements—I will admit to that—but I would hardly kill a man because we didn't always view the world or the law from the same philosophical perspective. Charles St. Claire was not only my law partner, he was my friend.”
Rourke could feel his own partner's eyes on him, but he wouldn't look Fio's way. The room fell into a strained silence that was underscored by the hum of the window fan and the click of rain against the glass.
Fio scratched the back of his neck, cleared his throat. “Mr. St. Claire was supposed to've had a colored girl he was banging regular and was said to be rather fond of. Would you happen to know about that?”
“Oh, dear.” Now Armande's lips pursed into a supercilious smile as he recovered his demeanor. “You fail to understand: Gossip has always trailed after Charles like ants at a picnic. He liked women, and because they liked him in return he had a tendency to indulge himself. Indulge and then discard them, and whatever her pathetic hopes I can't imagine how this Lucy's fate would eventually have been any different.”
“Lucy?” Fio said. “You do know her then.”
“Certainly not. I overheard Charles speaking to her on the telephone once. He called her Lucy.”
“Just Lucy?”
Armande's thick eyebrows rose up over the tops of his glasses. “She's nothing but a bit of colored tail. Since when do they have last names?”
Rourke's hand was hurting him. He looked down and saw that he was making a fist, and he slowly unclenched it. The beat of the rain on the window was a roar in his ears, and then the noise faded to a hiss and patter and he heard Armande's slow Creole drawl, and he realized that Fio must have asked another question. Time had done that odd misstep on him again.
“As a matter of fact, I did prepare the will,” Armande was saying. “His wife gets all of his assets, including the house and property. Sans Souci.”
His gaze lifted back up to Rourke's face, then shifted away again, around to the window this time. He watched the rivulets of rain race each other down the panes.
“There is one thing I should mention,” he said. “Although I hesitate to do so, because it might not be either pertinent or germane to the matter at hand, and such remarks taken out of context can be quite inflammatory and misleading—” He drew in a deep breath as if girding himself bef
ore plunging on. “But one morning a couple of weeks ago I came upon Charles in the hallway, and he was laughing to himself. When I asked him what he was finding so amusing, he told me that together he and Al Capone were going ‘to rock the good ol’ Crescent City back on her heels,'but I—”
“Al Capone?” Fio said, sitting up a little straighter.
“As I was about to say, I assumed he was only being Charles—having his little joke with me, as he was wont to do. It's only in hindsight that I…” He turned his head back around, his gaze sliding off Rourke and settling on Fio. “It's just that there were so many things that could set Charles off into speaking and behaving irrationally, and so one learned to…A new woman—and there was always a new woman, even after he married. A bourré game. And then he was…well, he liked to indulge in the occasional cocktail.”
“Along with the occasional snort of cocaine?” Rourke said.
Armande's eyelids flickered behind his glasses. “I would know nothing about that.”
“I'm sure you wouldn't, sir,” Fio put in, smiling and exuding a little southern charm himself. He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his thighs and turning his hat around in his hands. “But the women, the drinking, the gambling—although regrettable, certainly, I gather they were customary misbehavior, so to speak, on the part of Mr. St. Claire. Do you know of anything unusual that was going on in your partner's life recently?”
“Unusual?” Armande's eyelids flickered again and another stain of color spread up his neck. “No. Unless you mean…Oh, it's all probably rather silly and harmless, but about a week ago Charles brought a voodoo charm in to work with him, said he'd found it tucked into his bed. He seemed to think his wife was behind it—he said he wouldn't be surprised to wake up one night and find a loup-garou in his arms. Only he was laughing about it. They played games with each other, he and Rem—Mrs. St. Claire.”
Fio raised his gaze from the contemplation of his hat. “You would say he was a happily married man, then?”
The flush spread up over Armande's face all the way to his receding hair, and his gaze jittered away from Fio now and back to the window. “In his own way, yes, he seemed to be so. She challenged him and he needed that. Charles craved excitement in his life. He had other women, but then he was never going to be faithful to just one woman, no matter whom he married. And though I can't name names, I always had the impression she dallied with other men. I don't know that Charles minded—indeed, I think he rather liked hearing about it. The excitement again. It was all part of their game.”
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