“Yeah, fuckin' waste of time,” Nate said. “So how come you're not over at the Parish Prison?”
“Should I be?”
“Not unless you don't care if it looks to the boss like they managed to collar St. Claire's killer without you.”
The nib of Rourke's fountain pen ripped a jagged tear through the paper. He pulled in a careful breath and slowly raised his head. Something bad must have still showed on his face, though, because the other man smiled weakly and took a step back.
“Who?” Rourke said.
The rookie detective cleared his throat. “Uh, the lil' nigger gal St. Claire was supposed to've been banging. It was Roibin Doherty who sniffed her out—who would credit it, huh? He and Prankowski went to pick her up.”
The Parish Prison butted up against the rear of the Criminal Courts Building, and Rourke went to it through the connecting corridors in the basement.
He walked down a sloping hallway lined with holding cells—dank, dark cages full of cockroaches and human wretches who howled at him, or sobbed, or shouted obscenities. Half the bare lightbulbs were dimming or burned out, and the peeling walls, unpainted since the last century, were the color of old vomit. They smelled sour: of fear and sweat and years' worth of overflowing piss buckets.
At the end of the long hall was a single interrogation room. Rourke had known grown men to break before they made it that far, almost welcoming the beating that would give them the excuse to confess.
The interrogation room was bare of any furniture, except for a stool in the middle of the cement floor. The stool sat over a drain hole, which was there for when the place needed to be hosed down. The legs of the stool had been sawed off so that anyone made to sit on it would find himself in an undignified and vulnerable squat.
Fiorello Prankowski was leaning, with his hands in his pockets, against the wall next to the door when Rourke came through it. Roibin Doherty was circling the stool, and on it sat Lucille. Her hands had been cuffed together, pulled down between her bent legs, and fastened by a chain to a ring in the floor. Her back was bowed in a taut arch; her head hung heavily, her chin resting on her breastbone. One sleeve of her cheap yellow calico dress was ripped out at the shoulder. He couldn't see her face through the long copper coils of her hair, but he could hear the wetness in her throat when she breathed and swallowed.
“Well, if it ain't Loo-tenant Rourke,” Doherty said. “Hey, boy, this nigger cunt claims to know you. Fancy that. And now you're just in time to hear her tell us how she went after Charlie St. Claire's cock and balls with a cane knife.”
Rourke's breath backed up in his throat. “Get him out of here,” he said to Fio.
When he got no response, he turned slowly and met his partner's eyes, and he lied.
“I was with her that night.”
Doherty hacked a laugh. “What? You gonna claim you were balling her too?”
“Get him out of here,” Rourke said.
Fio's jaw had locked up tight as a fist; it crunched as he unhinged it. “The whole night?”
“Up until when you sent people out looking for me after the body was discovered. Only it's not what you think.”
“He's thinking you're full of shit,” Doherty said.
Lucille raised her head. Her face was wet and tear-swollen, and a cut at the corner of her mouth trickled blood. “Mr. Day…Tell 'em how I didn't do it.”
Doherty swung around and kicked out, slamming the toe of his brogan into Lucille's belly. “Nigger bitch!”
Rourke didn't know he was beating the man until he felt bone and cartilage collapse under his fist. Fio had thrust himself between them, shouting something, and Rourke tried to go around him. Doherty stumbled backward, groping for the door.
“He's fucking nuts.” Doherty pulled out his shirttail to mop the blood off his face. “Jesus, did you see what he did? He fucking broke my nose.”
“Sergeant, go on back to the squad room,” Fio said. “We're done here.”
“Fuck this shit.” Doherty flung blood and mucus off the ends of his fingers onto the floor. “You got no right—”
“Yeah, I do. I'm pulling rank.”
Fio muscled the older cop out the door and shut it. He turned and stared at Rourke for a long, bitter minute, then tossed him the handcuff key. “Talk,” he said.
Rourke snatched the key out of the air. He knelt beside Lucille and unfastened the metal shackles from around her wrists. She had vomited after Doherty had kicked her in the belly and she was still breathing hard, almost gagging. He didn't want her talking, and so he said nothing. She wouldn't look at him.
He spoke to Fio instead. “You've met my mama's housekeeper, Miss Augusta? Lucille's her daughter. When we heard that evenin' how Lucille was feeling poorly, my mama sent me over to her houseboat with some gumbo. She and I sat out on the deck and talked, drank some sour mash, and made some music. That was all we did, but we did it while Charles St. Claire was getting cut.”
She tried standing up, only to fall against him, sending a sharp pain through his own battered ribs. He wrapped his arm around her waist, half lifting her back onto her feet. She was barefoot, her legs grimy and scratched. He wondered how they had gotten her into this room and onto that stool, if they'd dragged her kicking and screaming down that long, ugly hall.
“Lemme go,” she said, but he didn't. He tightened his hold around her, wishing he could pick her up and carry her in his arms as he would a child.
They had to go around Fio to get to the door.
“Don't mind me,” the other cop said. “I'm just going to stand here for a while and mull it all over. You know, poke at it like you do a loose tooth with your tongue, and try to figure out where and how-all you've been lying to me.”
Rourke made himself take a breath, and then another. He felt close to killing somebody.
“I wanted to keep her out of it.”
“Shit. How did you possibly think you could keep her out of it?”
“She's LeRoy Washington's wife and LeRoy is a friend. When he went to prison I made him a promise I'd take care of her.” Rourke gave his partner a hard, challenging look. “I would do the same for you and your wife.”
“But she's just a—” Fio cut himself off, and a dark flush spread in a stain over his cheekbones to his ears. “You willing to go into court and alibi her under oath?”
“She didn't kill him.”
“Yeah. So you say.”
The bayou flowed black and thick under a sky that threatened rain.
Rourke wrestled the squad car over the last few ruts and bumps in the road and coasted to a stop alongside the levy in front of Lucille's boathouse. The car's engine ticked away its heat, smelling of burning oil.
They looked together out the windshield at the stand of cypress trees across the water. Clawed branches, like witches' brooms, swept the bottoms of the sagging dark clouds; the wind was coming up.
Lucille looked at the trees, but she wouldn't look at him. After a while she said, “How come you lied for me?”
“You know why.”
“For LeRoy.”
“And for you.”
She shook her head, and then let it fall back. She raised her arm, holding it up to the muted light coming in through the window, turning her arm over and then over again, as if with wonder, as if she were seeing her own arm for the first time.
“When I was growin' up on Pailet Lane,” she said, “the aunts and mamas use to talk alla time 'bout how I was comin' up light. But they never 'splained it to me right. They never tol' me no matter how light I'd come up, no matter how much white I had in me, I'd always be a nigger. One drop of African blood—that's all it takes for the white man's world to call me a nigger. For me to be a nigger.”
“Luce—”
“No.” She let her arm fall back into her lap, closing her eyes. “You don't know what it's like. You think you do, but you don't. There's no way you can know how scared I was in that room, squattin' on that stool and chained to the flo
or. The white man, he still lookin' for ways to keep the colored folk his slaves, an' Angola prison does y'all fine as anythin' else. When's a body with dark skin ever get a fair trial in Lou's'ana? When's the last time you seen a jury believe a Negro's word against any white man's, let alone a cop's?”
She opened her eyes and turned to look at him at last, and he was rocked back by the naked hatred he saw in her eyes. “You got white skin and you a cop,” she said. “So don't you be tellin' me you know what it's like.”
She started to get out of the car, but he stopped her by grabbing her wrist. “You're right, Luce—I'm a cop, and one who has just put it all on the line for you. Which is why you're going to tell me right here, right now, what got Charlie St. Claire so upset Tuesday evenin' that he went hieing off in a panic, looking to get an annulment for his marriage to the most beautiful woman in the world, only to finish off his very bad day by getting his throat slit with a cane knife. Why an annulment, Luce? Tell me.”
“I don't know why. I was Mr. Charlie's nigger bed slave, what for would he be tellin' me things 'bout his wife?”
She had put plenty of real passion into her denial, but Rourke had seen the startled fear flash across her face when he'd spoken the word annulment. He tightened his grip on her wrist and made his voice go mean. “Don't make me think about taking you back uptown.”
She stared at him, unblinking, and he felt the muscles and sinews of her wrist tighten as she made a fist. “Lawd God, you alike enough to Mr. Charlie to be his brother—made from stone the both of you. He was alla time tellin' me he loved me like a wife, but that di'n't stop him from makin' me into just another whore. Alla time braggin' on the good he doin' for my ‘people,’ like that goin' to change how I feel 'bout him. ‘I'm a champion of the Negro,’ he used to say to me, usually right after he got done fuckin' me in the mouf, an' you could tell how he liked sayin' them words 'cause it made him feel like the good massa.”
She pulled away from him. She looked down at the red marks on her wrist put there first by the handcuffs and then by his fingers, then she looked back up at him and her mouth curled into something that wasn't even close to a smile. “Is that how you feelin' now, Mr. Day—like the good massa?”
She got out of the car and he watched her walk away from him, watched her climb the levee and disappear over the other side. He thought he would never be able to forget the purity of the hate he had seen in her eyes.
Chapter Fourteen
THE CORONER'S LABORATORY WAS DEEP IN THE BASE-ment of the Criminal Courts Building, next door to the colored toilets. You walked into the Ghoul's lair and the stench of formaldehyde and decay would hit you like a blow. The two electric fans only managed to stir up the foul air.
Moses Mueller was at the far end of the room, attempting to pry open a wooden crate with a crowbar. He looked up as the bare electric bulb cast Rourke's shadow onto the wall in front of him—a wall that might have been painted white at one time but was now the color of old vomit, with faded, rusty streaks that Rourke hoped weren't ancient bloodstains but probably were.
“Ah, it is Lieutenant Rourke, I see,” the Ghoul said. “Here to discuss the postmortem. Good, good.” He held a finger in the air like a professor about to make a significant point. “But if you will allow me just another moment.”
He gave the crowbar a hard yank and the wood split apart with a scream. “You will be pleased to know that I have purchased for us two marvelous new inventions: a helixometer and a comparison microscope. We will now be able to conduct ballistic tests in this godforsaken southern backwater.”
During the year since Moses Mueller had taken over as the parish coroner, he had been buying all the latest, most experimental forensic equipment for the lab with his own money—once he figured out he had precious little hope of prying much of a budget out of City Hall. Rourke wondered about the Ghoul's money. The man dressed like a tramp, but there was that chauffeured green Packard, and cash to throw away on a comparison microscope and a heli-whatever.
The mention of ballistics had made Rourke curious enough to come up for a closer look, though, and in spite of the cost to his nose. A lit cigarette was dangling from the coroner's lower lip, but even with the smoke wreathing his head, the slickum in his black hair, and the yellow stains of Lucky Tiger cologne around his collar, he still smelled like something that had just crawled out of a grave.
The Ghoul was panting with the effort it was taking to bend over and pry open the front of the crate. Nails squealed as they pulled free, but all Rourke could see inside was packing straw.
“With these two instruments I shall be able to compare a bullet fired from a suspect's gun with the one found in the victim's body. What do you say to that, Lieutenant? What a pity no firearm was involved in our latest murder.”
“You never know.”
The coroner tilted his head back and gave Rourke a bemused look. “Well, I do believe we can safely conclude that Mr. St. Claire did not die from a gunshot wound.” He straightened up with another groan, laid the crowbar down on top of the crate, and mopped his sweating forehead with a grimy handkerchief. “Have you been engaging in yet another bout of fisticuffs, Lieutenant? You have flecks of blood on the cuff of your shirt, and the backs of the knuckles on your right hand seem to be oozing fresh blood as well.”
“They had a run-in this evenin' with Roibin Doherty's nose.”
“Ah, splendid. Sergeant Doherty's nose—splendid indeed…And now to the photographs. I have pieced together a theory of how the unfortunate Mr. St. Claire spent his last earthly moments on Tuesday night.”
He led the way over to a corkboard, his broad backside rolling like a tugboat caught in a heavy wake. They had to navigate around a pair of steel dissecting tables. One had a body covered with a stained sheet lying on it, bodily fluids seeping into the channels that led to a drain clogged with cigarette butts. On the other table lay what was left of Vinny McGinty.
Rourke's step faltered. He came across a lot of dead bodies on the job and he always hated it, but there was something about seeing poor Vinny reduced to a piece of butchered meat on a coroner's slab that cut deep. The kid had been a loser, a vig collector, and a hop fiend, and he didn't have a blue star tattooed on his wrist, but he and Rourke had come from the same place. Rourke looked at Vinny and saw too much of himself.
At least they hadn't brought Bridey here, Rourke thought. He didn't know if he could have stood that.
The Ghoul had turned back around when he realized Rourke had stopped following. “I'm only just close to finishing the preliminary work on that one,” he said. “Execution by means of a wire garrote, most likely from a piano, done at least two weeks ago, possibly more. Markers in his digestive tract might help us to pinpoint the actual time of death better, if we knew what he'd last eaten. Lividity suggests the body was moved after the heart stopped pumping. Oh, and his body was meant to be found eventually. That rope around his leg had been deliberately frayed to break.”
“My bone,” Rourke said as he joined the Ghoul by his corkboard.
The Ghoul blinked against the smoke floating in front of his face. “I beg your pardon?”
“He was meant to be found by me.”
“Ah,” the Ghoul said, as if he understood. Rourke wondered if he did, because he himself sure as hell didn't.
The photographs, of St. Claire's body and the room in which he died, were lined up in neat rows and covered the entire board. They had been taken with a camera that was equipped with a grid, so that one could measure such things as the distance of the corpse from the door.
“Mr. St. Claire's wounds,” the Ghoul was saying, “are consistent with the cane knife found at the scene. The cut to his abdomen probably happened first, as it is not incapacitating and so he would still have been able to attempt to escape his assailant.”
He picked up a pencil and pointed it at a photograph of bloodstains on the wall. “Once the bloodletting starts, if the knife is swung back for the next stab, you might see, as
we do here, cast-off patterns—these small splatters higher up on the walls and ceiling, which line up in long, narrow arcs. What is occurring is that blood is being flung off the weapon as it is moved through the swing. These patterns tell us the nature of the swing, whether it was up and down, left to right. As I had surmised, our assailant was right-handed.”
The Ghoul stopped to draw a wheezy breath and drop his cigarette butt on the floor. “I should note at this point that Mrs. St. Claire's dress bears copious bloodstains, but none in a cast-off pattern.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning either she was not the one swinging the knife, or she was the one swinging the knife but the cast-off pattern happened to fall elsewhere rather than on her clothing.”
The Ghoul fired up another cigarette. He sucked in a deep lungful of smoke, held it a moment, then breathed it out through his nose. “So the attack begins. Mr. St. Claire tries to get away, tries to defend himself. His hands are cut, he loses his finger. The knife slashes across his groin, an artery is partially transected, and so you have arterial spurting. These spurts leave trails on the floor. Here, and here and here, for he is still running and the blood is spurting, you understand, producing these numerous spinelike projections emanating from the trail. But then comes the fatal cut—the one across his throat.”
The Ghoul pointed to another photograph, this one a close-up view of Charles St. Claire's black, gaping death wound. “He has fallen to the floor by now, thrashing in his agony, and blood is spewing from his mouth.”
“Spewing all over the murderer?”
“It would have been unavoidable. Yes, the blood is spewing—gushing, really. He begins to drown in his own blood; he is dying. Still for Mr. St. Claire it is not over. His assailant slashes the knife down one last time, across his chest and with considerable force, with a fury, one might say, and the blade becomes caught, for a moment at least, on a rib bone, a lung is punctured, and Mr. St. Claire continues to die….” His words trailed off as he became lost in the scene he described, as if he were there in the slave shack, living in the moment of Charles St. Claire's terrible, violent death.
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