Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  “Maybe one of them got tired of it, though,” Fio said. “All that playing around.”

  Armande thrust himself to his feet. He turned his back on them and walked to the window. He leaned over, pressing his fists on the sill. The movement pulled the fine linen of his white summer suit taut across his back and shoulders. He hadn't seemed to be such a large man when seated behind his walnut desk.

  “This is awkward,” he said. “But Mrs. St. Claire has her own lawyer, and so I'm not behaving unethically if I tell you….” He straightened and swung back around. The flush on his face had receded some, but a muscle ticked beneath his right eye. “That evening of the night Charles was murdered, Tuesday evening—heavens, was it only less than two days ago?” He paused to thrust a hand through his hair, then let it fall. “Charles had been out of the office all that day, but he came in late, about five o'clock, and he was like a man possessed. He started going through the law books in the library, tossing them on the floor when he couldn't find what he was looking for, cursing and ranting aloud. As I said, Charles was excitable, but it wasn't his way to be so…so vulgar and outright hysterical.”

  Armande's words trailed off, getting swallowed up by the splatter of the rain against the windowpanes. It was really coming down now; the oak tree in the garden loomed smudged and hulking in the misty wet.

  “What was he looking for, sir?” Fio pressed gently.

  Armande drew in a deep breath, letting it out slowly, along with his response. “Annulment statutes and precedence. He said his marriage to Mrs. St. Claire was over and that he wanted out. No, it was stronger than that. He said he needed to get out of it, and now.”

  Rourke felt as if a great empty space had blown up inside him, as if he were back up in the Jenny with the wind pressing against his ears, flying through that white, white, empty space with Remy laughing behind him, talking about the past and telling lies, and somehow getting him to believe in her again, in spite of it all.

  “So maybe the thought of her stepping out with other men was bothering him more than he'd been letting on,” Fio had said, and Armande was shaking his head. Rourke saw the man's mouth open; he felt the words come at him from out of white, empty space, like the rush of the wind.

  “I know this sounds strange, given what I said about his cursing and such—but I don't think Charles was angry that evening so much as frightened. It was all over him, the fear. In his face, in his eyes—I declare you could almost smell it on him. Naked fear.”

  “Who's LeRoy Washington?”

  They stood within the shelter of the porch and watched the rain come down so hard it was dancing and bouncing off the pavement. It sluiced off the balustrade above their heads, making a waterfall. It ran along Napoleon Avenue, overflowing the gutters and forming puddles that would qualify as lakes in some states.

  Rourke thought Fio had said something, a part of him had even made sense of the words—but time was segueing back and forth on him again. The headache behind his eyes burned white hot, and the boards of the porch were like shifting sands beneath his feet.

  “Day?”

  “Who I said. A Negro prizefighter who went to prison for killing his manager. He says he didn't do it.”

  Another silence settled between them as they watched the rain come down some more. The air had finally cooled some, and it smelled of wet trees and torn leaves.

  “Okay,” Fio said. “So maybe St. Claire uncovered new evidence that could help this boy LeRoy's case. But who-all's going to care that badly one way or the other that some darkie got railroaded for something he didn't do?”

  “Mr. Washington is a particular friend of mine,” Rourke said. His voice was quiet, but his eyes weren't. “I care.”

  Fio continued to stare at him for a slow, hard moment and then he shrugged. “All right.”

  “The murdered manager,” Rourke went on, “was Casey Maguire's baby brother, Bobby Joe.”

  Fio made a small sound that might have been either surprise or exasperation. Rourke wondered if now was the moment when he should tell his partner about Lucille. Sweet, vulnerable Lucille Durand Washington, whom that prick of a lawyer had been “banging regular,” and who had no real alibi for where she'd been the night the man was murdered.

  He wasn't sure how far he could trust Fio, though. The whole city would so love nothing better than to pin the murder of Charles St. Claire on the man's colored mistress, that the convenience of having her as a suspect would overrule even the fact that her lover had been her only hope of getting her husband out of jail.

  “I don't know,” Rourke said instead. “The hit a couple of weeks ago on Vinny McGinty, and then last night on me—two guys in a black Lincoln, tossing a Chicago pineapple. Now St. Claire's partner throws us that bone about Al Capone. It's starting to all feel connected in some way, only I can't see how.”

  Fio thought on that for a bit, while the rain teemed and the water gushed from the spouts and rose another two inches in the street.

  Finally he rubbed his bent nose, shaking his head. “I don't know either, Day. This is New Orleans. You meet a guy and turns out his mama knows your mama, or he knows a guy used to work for your brother, or you both got cousins living next door to each other in Slidell. I think you've got a hard-on for Casey Maguire, and you're letting that affect your judgment. You need to be careful—and I'm telling you this serious here. The man's got friends in high places.”

  “Yeah. He has sure enough bought himself a lot of friends.”

  Fio clamped his jaw down so hard Rourke heard his teeth grate. “I know you weren't including me in that remark,” Fio said. “Otherwise I'd have to hit you, and you aren't feeling so good.”

  Rourke smiled. He jumped off the porch and ran out into the rain.

  They were soaked through by the time they got in the car. Steam fogged the windows, and the rain pounded like hammers on the roof.

  Fio tried to look angry, but he couldn't really keep it up. He rubbed the condensation off the windshield with the flat of his big palm, punched on the ignition, then sighed and turned it off. He twisted around in the seat to look at Rourke.

  “Whatever theory it is you're working on, Remy Lelourie don't fit into it nowheres that I can see. I guess maybe your mind was wandering when Mr. Armande got to the part about the other men and the annulment. Call me crazy, but maybe whatever it was that made ol' Charlie St. Claire suddenly think he had to get the Cinderella Girl out of his life, was the very same thing that drove her to kill him. I don't know. It's just a theory.”

  She had said, among all her other lies, that all she'd wanted to do was come home. Jesus save us, Rourke thought, but she might as well have walked into the St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 and thrown open the doors to all the crypts—where the old sins still lived, not confessed and never forgotten.

  “The way I'm seeing it,” Fio said, talking through Rourke's silence, “is Remy Lelourie's got herself a righteously ugly secret she doesn't want the rest of the world to know about, and somehow her man doped it out and so she killed him. It's the oldest motive in the book, next to catching him in bed with another broad. The fear of being found out.”

  Fio started up the engine and slipped it into gear. “That little vamp act she was putting on in the squad room yesterday morning—man, that was scary. Like some dream you find at the bottom of a bottle of whiskey, all mystery and fire and sin. She was seducing every cop in that room, wringing them empty, and by the time she was finished with them there wasn't a one could call his soul his own. They'd have done anything for her. Died for her, killed for her.”

  Fio's breathing had grown loud and heavy, fogging the windshield again; trickles of sweat ran down the sides of his flushed face, soaking his collar. It made Rourke smile in spite of the cold fear he was feeling inside. “And you're immune?” he said.

  Fio popped the clutch, and the car shot forward in a spray of water. “Shit. I'd have to be dead to be immune. She scares me, though. You both scare the hell out of me.”


  “You scare me,” Maeve Rourke said to her son.

  She looked up and down Conti Street, at the two uniformed patrolmen who had been put on watch at either end of the block, and then she looked behind her, at the third patrolman who stood within the carriageway of her Creole cottage. Another cop hovered at her right shoulder. He'd been detailed to accompany her to evening Mass, and he was trying hard not to look fascinated. Maeve Rourke had once been one of New Orleans' most beautiful and notorious sinners, a woman who had dared to choose love above all else. She was still beautiful.

  “It's only a precaution, Mama,” Daman Rourke was saying. “Until we find out what-all was behind what happened at Bridey's house last night.”

  He'd telephoned his father-in-law from the hospital as soon as he could after the attack, knowing Weldon Carrigan could have a guard put on the Conti Street house within minutes. Then he'd telephoned Maeve and told them all to stay inside, keeping to the back rooms, until he could be with them. He knew it wasn't wholly rational, but he hadn't wanted his family stepping out into the open when he wasn't around, even though it was his presence that probably put them in the most danger.

  His mother was staring at him now, a small frown darkening her eyes, as if she longed to understand him but could not. Which was only fair for a change, since he'd spent his entire life trying and failing to understand her and the choices she had made. “Well, if you insist,” she finally said. “Although I feel rather like I'm leading a parade.” He thought he saw her mouth curve into a fleeting smile before she reached up to her hat and peeled the black net veil down over her face.

  Rourke watched her walk away from him down the banquette, the policeman trailing in her wake. A woman in mourning black for the lover she'd lost eleven years ago. She hadn't stepped foot in a church while Reynard Lelourie was alive, but in the years since his death she'd gone to Mass almost every day. Rourke had often wondered what she prayed for—he didn't think it was forgiveness. In all the time since he and Katie had come to live with her, he had never heard her utter one word of regret for what she'd done to him and his father and brother. Or for what had been done to Mrs. Lelourie and her two little girls.

  Just then he heard a shriek, and the street seemed to explode in front of his eyes, into white light and fire and wailing sirens, and Bridey screaming, screaming…and then he realized it was only Katie laughing.

  He turned around, making himself breathe, making himself stop shaking, to watch his little girl at play.

  He'd had Fio drop him off at home so that his family could get out for a couple hours, and Katie had joined some of the neighborhood boys in a game of street hockey played on roller skates, with palmetto branches for sticks and a packed wad of newspaper for a puck. At only six and a half, she was several years younger than the other kids, but they didn't seem to mind her joining in their game.

  She threw herself into it with a fierceness, though, that kept sending Rourke's heart up into his throat. He watched while his little girl and a towheaded boy almost twice her size spotted the puck at the same time and skated for it. The boy got there first, but Katie charged into him, flinging up her elbow to smack the boy in the mouth. The boy squealed as his skates shot out from under him and he landed on his rump. The puck was all Katie's now, and she was flying toward the goal and the turned-over garbage can that served as a net.

  She swung back her stick to take a shot just as the toe of her skate caught in a crack in one of the pavement blocks. The skate twisted off her foot, and she went down hard on her hands and knees.

  Rourke took a step, then stopped when he saw her push herself back onto her feet. She was laughing as she came toward him, hopping and pushing herself along on the one skate. She plopped herself down onto their front stoop, where Augusta was already sitting, knees spread, snapping an apronful of beans.

  Rourke took the skate and the key Katie kept on a rubber band around her wrist and squatted before her, although the movement pulled at his aching ribs. He wriggled the skate back onto her Converse All Star Ked. It was still such a small shoe, he thought. When she was a baby, just the sight of her tiny booties had always turned him cold with terror. He'd never loved anyone the way he loved Katie—so utterly and unconditionally. Yet she was so small and helpless, so totally dependent on him, and he was so scared, all the time he was scared that he would fail her. Or maybe, Rourke thought, with a derisive smile for himself, he was only afraid that she would somehow grow up ahead of him and leave him behind.

  Still, his hands shook a little as he tried to fit the skate key's wing nut onto the bolt. He turned the key, tightening the clamps onto the rubber sole of her Ked, while Katie examined a scrape on her knee through a rip in her black lisle stocking. He looked up in time to catch Augusta shooting him a glare strong enough to curdle milk.

  “I don't know what you 'bout,” she said, “raisin' that chile to be a hooligan.”

  “Did you see me, Daddy?” Katie said, oblivious to the trouble he was in, or maybe not. “I smacked that Ernie Parker right in the kisser with my elbow, and he yelped like a stuck pig. Ernie Parker is such a pantywaist.”

  Augusta made a noise that came up from deep in her bosom and shot out her nose. “Huuunnnh, how that chile do talk. She pickin' that up from the radio. You hadn't ought to let her be listenin' to no radio. No tellin' what hooligan slang she might be pickin' up.”

  Rourke grinned up at Katie. “Holy mackerel, I'm in hot water now.”

  Katie giggled, but then she slipped her arm around Augusta's waist and gave her a quick hug. The woman made another noise, a softer one, and she shared a smile with Rourke.

  He stood, pulling Katie up with him. She balanced herself by holding onto his arms with both hands, while she tilted her head back and looked up, where the sun shone through a break in the clouds, misty and soft in the trees and rooftops. It would rain again before nightfall, and the sun and clouds were casting shadows on her face that made her look oddly haunted.

  “Daddy? How long before it gets dark?”

  “A while yet. You've still got time for some more cutthroat hockey before we need to go in. Only how about going a little easy on poor Ernie from here on out, okay?”

  She clung to him still, running her skates back and forth over the bricks of the banquette now, hard enough for the metal wheels to throw out tiny sparks. “Are those policemen here to make sure the gowman stays away?”

  “There's no such thing as a gowman, Katie. You know that.” He wanted to tell her of the real threat he had brought into her life, and of how much she meant to him, and how desperate was his need to keep her safe, but the words wouldn't come. She was hanging on to his arms, looking up at him, and still the words wouldn't come. He could feel them instead, all those unspoken words, sliding through his fingers like grains of sand.

  “The gowman doesn't come when you're here,” she was saying, “so will you stay home with us tonight just in case?”

  He grasped her shoulders, stilling her. “I need to stop by the squad room and then I have to go pay someone a visit later on this evenin', but I'll be back before it's even time for you to go to bed, and if it's not too late I'll crank us up some ice cream. You can be thinking of what flavor you'd like.”

  She pushed her lower lip out in a pout, but he had felt the tension go out of her shoulders. “Who are you going to be visiting that's so important?”

  He started to say he was going to see a ghoul, but he caught himself just in time. “He's a man I work with, a doctor of a sort. I'll be back before your bedtime. I promise.”

  She looked up at him, love and accusation in her eyes, beautiful dark, grayish green eyes with golden flecks. Her mother's eyes. “You don't always keep your promises.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  ROURKE SAT AT HIS DESK IN THE EMPTY SQUAD ROOM. He put his hands down flat on the old worn and ink-stained blotter, pressed them down hard to keep them from shaking.

  He stared at his hands. He stretched his fingers out wide, so wide the v
eins and bones pushed against the skin. He was so afraid, afraid that if he stopped moving, stopped thinking, then the only thing left would be the sound of Bridey screaming. It felt as if his chest had developed a weak place over his heart, as if all flesh and bone had been stripped away until only the thinnest layer of skin remained, thin as a skein of ice, and if he touched it, if anything even so much as brushed against it, he would shatter.

  He heard a step out in the hall and he made one hand pick up his pen; he made the other hand pull out a requisition form and lay it on the desk in front of him.

  Nate Carroll came sauntering through the door; he was whistling, his orange Raggedy-Andy curls bouncing with his every step.

  Rourke made himself smile. “Hey, Nate.”

  The young man looked surprised to see him. “Hey, Rourke,” he said.

  He pushed through the swinging wooden gate in the railing that separated the working part of the squad room from the desk sergeant's domain. He went to his own desk and sat, fired up a Lucky Strike, picked up his telephone receiver, jiggled the plunger a couple of times, then hooked the receiver back on the cradle again.

  He got up and wandered over to Rourke's desk, leaned over Rourke's shoulder. “What are you doing?” he said.

  “What does it look like, for chrissakes? I'm filling out fucking requisition forms.” Rourke put an X in the box marked Authorized Expenditure and forged the captain's initials. “There's a fucking crime wave happening, and I got to waste my valuable time begging for every fucking pencil and thumbtack.”