He blinked, and his gaze sharpened. He tapped his pencil against the photograph of the murder weapon. “Here is where the evidence seems to point most particularly to Mr. St. Claire's wife: herbloody thumbprint on the knife. The location and orientation of the identified ridges of the print show that it could have been made when the knife's momentum stopped abruptly, as when it caught on the bone, and the hand slipped from the handle onto the blade. The wound she bears on her palm could also have happened in this way. And part of the blood pattern on her dress is consistent with the bloody mist that is sprayed when a lung is punctured.”
“So what about her story?” Rourke said. “Could she have got so bloody and cut herself and planted a print on the blade, all the while pulling the knife out of him?”
“Oh, yes. If he was still alive when she came upon him, as she has claimed. And her hand could have indeed slipped while she attempted to pull the knife out of him. The knife was not found in him, after all. It is both the strength of a case against Mrs. St. Claire and its weakness. The blood on her dress, her thumbprint on the knife blade, and the wound on her hand—this evidence, it is all consistent with Mrs. St. Claire being the assailant. However, it is also consistent—although less likely—with her version of the events, and the lapse of two hours' time between the victim's death and discovery by the housekeeper can be somewhat tenuously explained by shock.”
Rourke huffed a short laugh beneath his breath. “Now that's something a jury would just love hearing—probably she did it, but maybe she didn't.”
One of the Ghoul's almost-smiles flitted across his face. “Juries can indeed be difficult, especially where science is involved. My advice to you, Lieutenant, would be to discover a compelling motive. Preferably one which involves a basic human emotion like jealousy or greed. Juries like motives.”
Rourke pushed his hands into his pockets and glanced back at the bodies, and then away again. “Motives I can do. In fact, I seem to have my pick of those.”
“And I can give you a couple more.” The Ghoul stuck his cigarette in his mouth and wheezed and lumbered his way back across the laboratory to a deep, chipped enamel sink. Alongside it sat a tray of gruesome, bloodstained instruments and a steel pan filled with the kind of horrors that come out of a slaughterhouse. Rourke swallowed down a sigh and made himself look. He really, really hated bloody pieces of dead things.
“The victim's internal organs.” The Ghoul waved his hand at the bloody mess with a flourish. “Someone killed Charles St. Claire with a cane knife, but the man was already dying. He was poisoning himself with the wormwood in the absinthe he drank to excess. Furthermore, the inflamed condition of the mucous membranes in his nasal passages and the beginnings of a perforation of the nasal septum indicate a chronic ingestion of cocaine.”
The Ghoul was taking care now to keep his gaze on the pan of organs and off the face of the man standing next to him, and Rourke had to give himself a derisive smile. “I take it you've heard about my own little flirtation with the happy dust,” he said.
“After your wife died.” The Ghoul lifted his head and met Rourke's eyes. “It is hard to lose one's love so young, so soon. But I think the worst is all over with now, yes?”
Rourke let his smile show, although the edge stayed on it. “I still have my bad nights, but I don't go out and wrestle with the gators anymore.”
“Mr. Casey Maguire you do not consider an alligator?”
Rourke laughed, wondering how gossip always managed to spread so fast around the department—he and Maguire had had their little set-to only this morning.
The Ghoul started to laugh himself, only to get caught up in a cigarette-induced coughing fit. “You might have flirted with the cocaine, Lieutenant, but Charles St. Claire went all the way. He was thoroughly addicted to his poisons, the symptoms of which are mental deterioration, confusion, paranoia, severe and sudden shifts in mood, hallucinations. One could say the man would have been misery itself to live with.”
“Misery enough to put him out of it?”
“The temptation would arise, I should think.” An expression flickered across the Ghoul's face that might have been amusement. “More fodder for the jury to chew over, yes? And I have still one other thing.” He gave Rourke a glass petri dish, along with a magnifying glass. “I found this beneath the nail of the finger that was severed.”
Rourke peered through the magnifying glass at the contents of the dish, while the Ghoul told him what he was seeing. “A chip of white enamel such as might be used to glaze ceramic. And a purple spangle, measuring a quarter-inch in diameter, which could have come from a woman's party dress, or a costume.”
“There aren't any spangles on the dress she was wearing that night.”
“No.”
“Could he have picked it up earlier?”
“The chip of white enamel glaze perhaps. But the spangle was jammed beneath his nail with considerable force and deeply enough that it pierced the soft bed. It would have hurt—so much that he would have wanted to pry it out immediately. Provided he was not being distracted by other, worse, pain.”
There was something vaguely familiar about the purple spangle, but Rourke couldn't place it. It didn't fit with anything else about that night.
Rourke's gaze went from the sheet-draped body on the dissecting table—a piece of bloody, mangled meat now—and then on to the photographs of Charles St. Claire's terrible last moments. It had been a bad death, a bad murder. The act of someone who had no stopping place.
“Why?” he wondered, unaware that he'd spoken aloud.
“If you are asking me rhetorically,” the Ghoul said, his gaze also on the photographs, “then I would have to answer, Just about anyone could have done such a thing and for just about any reason. Even in our own hearts we can never really know for a certainty what foul deeds we might be capable of when in a state of fear or rage. Or passion. But surely you, a policeman, would know above all other men how this is true.”
Rourke knew. Since his rookie year when he had seen a woman dunk her newborn baby into a washtub of boiling water, he had known that there was no limit to the ugly, cruel, and purely evil things human beings could do, even to the ones they were supposed to love.
“Now, if you were wondering,” the Ghoul was saying, “whether I believe the Cinderella Girl took a cane knife and slashed and slashed, again and again, across the naked body of her husband until he died, drowning in his own blood…Then I would have to say the forensic evidence suggests that she did.”
He looked up at Rourke blinking through the veil of smoke that floated between them. This time the smile came through, although Rourke wasn't sure he liked it. “Others have been hanged on much less.”
It was as if she'd been waiting for him. She stood on the upstairs gallery of Sans Souci and watched him come, beneath a sky that looked bruised and hued with a strange and smoky green light.
He drove up on his Indian and stopped beneath the last oak before the house. He looked up at her. She turned and went inside, but he knew she was coming to him, and so he waited.
He heard her step on the shell drive before he saw her materialize out of the shadows. She was all Hollywood vamp this evening, wearing some white slinky tunic decorated with long strings of beads over black silk harem pants, and shoes with heels thin and sharp as spikes. A sequined headband shimmered in her dark boyish hair. She looked tougher since he'd last seen her yesterday, and yet she looked hurt, her eyes wary, as if all the betrayal, the lies, had been his and not hers.
She stopped before him. He could smell the coming rain and the chalk of the crushed oyster shells, and then she climbed onto the bike, straddling his lap with her thighs, and all he could smell was her.
They had come this way before, her riding in front of him on his motorcycle. Through the Pizatti Gate and into City Park, along palm-lined Anseman Avenue, past the voluptuous bare-breasted statues. Late one night the summer they'd been lovers she had taken off all her clothes and posed for him
next to those marble replicas of ancient goddesses. He had thought her body whiter and more beautiful than theirs.
They left the park at Black Bridge, where the railroad tracks cross the bayou, and got off the bike to climb to the top of the levee. Below them, kerosene lights burned in the boathouses against the coming rain. She stood against a plum-colored sky that pulsed with veins of lightning. Thunder cracked, and the wind clutched at her hair and whipped the beaded strings of her tunic around her hips.
“How about another dare, Remy?” he said. “The train will be coming along the bridge soon. We can always see if we can still beat it across.”
She stared at him, her eyes wide and stark. Lightning flashed. “You know what's the funny thing about running, Day?” she said as the thunder exploded around them. “Once you start you can't stop. No matter how tired or scared you get, no one will let you stop.”
The wind gusted so hard she rocked back on her heels, and the clouds opened up. Large flat raindrops struck the water hard, as if God were flinging rocks from heaven. It wasn't a small rain; it battered Rourke's hands and face, yet she had turned her own face up to the sky, as if she wanted to be beaten.
They had been standing apart, but now he went to her. He laid his hand against her cheek. In the two days since her husband's murder, the bruise had darkened and turned yellow at the edges.
“What did you two fight about that night, Remy?”
She startled beneath his hand, and pulled away from his touch.
“When did he hit you, darlin'? Was it before or after he told you he was going to try and have your marriage annulled?”
He watched her carefully, looking for surprise. What he saw was fear. It gusted across her face with the same force the wind had, rocked her like the wind.
She wrapped her arms hard around herself as if she had to hold herself together. Haunted, her eyes glowed at him.
“Was Charles going around telling people that? Why? Did he tell them why?”
“Suppose you take a wild guess for me.”
She closed her eyes and turned away, and her head fell forward as though it were weighted down. “I don't know. I don't even know why he married me in the first place anymore. I thought he wanted me, but I think he wanted other men's envy more. He wanted me to quit the movies, to belong only to him, and he was hoping I would get pregnant right away, but I made him…I didn't want a child and I had no intention of giving up on my acting, and then one after another other things just seemed to come between us.”
“What other things? His other women? Your other men?” Lightning streaked across the sky, and it was like the flash of a bullet firing out of a gun muzzle, white, deadly. “Was it Julius?”
Her back was curved and taut, the knob of bone at the nape of her neck prominent against the pale skin. “Is that it, Remy? Did Julius's dying come between you?”
He began to measure the lengthening silence with the rough, purring rhythm of the rain. The lanterns in the boathouses flickered. A ball of lightning rolled through the flooded canebrakes and broke into sizzling shards against a pier on the bridge.
Slowly she raised her head and looked at him. “There is no other man.”
“That must be a first for you,” he said, wanting to stop himself now, afraid that he wouldn't. She hadn't been faithful to him, either. The whole time they'd been lovers that summer, she had been fucking Julius too.
Somehow she had gotten close to him. Somehow she was laying her hands on his collarbone, and he felt the heat of them through the thin wet cambric of his shirt. “Day, please don't. I'm so scared, and I need you, and I can't bear to have you hating me.”
He knew her, knew how she could be. She would play him, see how deep she could go into owning his soul, and she was so very good at it, the best he'd ever seen. He told himself he knew her too well, because if he thought for a moment that she really needed him, he wouldn't be able to help himself. He'd start looking for ways to turn every lie she'd ever told into truth.
She brushed her lips against his throat, and he let her, because risk was always so sweet, even when it was cruel. He turned his head so that his own lips could linger in her hair. “I stopped hating you long ago, baby, if I ever did. But what I haven't been so good at is forgetting. I can't help thinking about that last afternoon, the two of us on the willow island, making love, you crying in my arms….” And all the while Julius St. Claire was lying in that slave shack with a bullet in his head and a gun in his hand, and the taste of your mouth still on his. “I can't help remembering how the next day you were gone, and without so much as a so long, darlin'.”
He felt the whisper of her lips once more, and then they were no longer touching him and it was already a memory. A look of utter sadness shadowed her face, but her words were hard. “Perhaps you ought to be thanking me for sparing you.”
He tried to match her with a hardness of his own, but he felt torn up inside and he was hurting. “Why? Because I haven't ended up dead yet?”
“Something like that.”
Chapter Fifteen
IT WAS SO HOT THAT JUNE EVENING WHEN THEY WAKED Remy Lelourie's daddy that you could practically hear the heat, as if the very air were panting and dripping sweat. Everybody stood around flapping funeral-parlor fans in front of faces that were as red as boiled beets, sweltering in their dark mourning clothes.
Her mama's face, though, Remy thought, was gray. Nearly as gray as the face of the man lying dead in his coffin.
Her daddy.
Well, he had been her daddy in the sense that he'd stuck his thing up between her mama's legs one night and left behind a little token of his appreciation. In New Orleans, whenever you patronized a butcher or a grocer he gave you a lagniappe, a little something extra free of charge to thank you for your patronage, like a bit of parsley or a lollipop. That's what she and Belle were—a lagniappe from her daddy to her mama. Thank you, my dear, and so long, darlin'.
He had died of eating spoiled gumbo, had her daddy. Or so the doctor was saying, although Mamma Rae could probably tell it differently. If it had been left up to Remy they wouldn't have come within miles of this wake, but Mama had wanted to…. She didn't know what her mama had wanted to do. Gloat was what she had thought, but now, looking at the way her mama stared at the man lying dead in his coffin, she wasn't so sure. You saw eyes like that sometimes on women who were addicted to laudanum.
Remy Lelourie looked around the parlor and allowed a sneer to show all over her face. The mirrors and pictures on the walls draped in black crepe; the clocks that were stopped. Daddy's black lacquered coffin balanced on a pair of chairs. A horseshoe of dyed red carnations sitting at Daddy's feet, a holy lamp burning at Daddy's head. There weren't a whole lot of mourners about. Just a few of her daddy's business acquaintances, herself, Belle, and Mama. Oh, yes, and the hostess, of course. Mrs. Maeve Rourke. Daddy's mistress, and the keeper of his house and heart for sixteen years. Lord God almighty, tongues sure were going to wag over this one.
Even with the perfumed candles burning and liberal use of lilac water and cologne, the room was still beginning to acquire a smell. But then that was what came of dying in New Orleans anytime between March and November, when your mourners were likely to work up a sweat. That woman was not only perspiring like a steam locomotive, she was looking positively haggard and sallow. Surely, there was no accounting for some daddies' tastes.
Remy was so busy looking at everything else that she missed seeing the boy come in. Suddenly he was just there, standing before the coffin with his hat in his hands, looking down at her dead daddy.
The last time she'd seen him had been about seven or eight years ago. He'd used to hang around outside their house for hours at a time in those days, spying on her and Belle. Remy had hated him, hated the very thought of his existence on this earth, and she decided that the worst torment she could make for him was to ignore him. As a plan it had only been a partial success. She'd ignored him so well he had quit coming around for her to torment.<
br />
Since his whole concentration was on her dead daddy, she didn't have to ignore him now. She knew he was a year older than she, which made him nineteen, but he had the body of a fully grown man. She had thought his face too sweet and pretty before, like the picture of an angel on a holy card. She liked it even less now—it was too defined by bold, uncompromising angles. She didn't like his mouth either; it was too sure of itself.
He must have felt her staring, for his head jerked up, and their gazes met and it was the same as that time she'd stuck her finger in a lamp socket just to see what it would feel like, a physical jolt that left her feeling shaken and hollow in her belly, scared and yet strangely exhilarated. She looked away from him, then looked back. He was more daring than she, for he had not looked away.
He stared at her for a moment longer than she could bear it, and then he looked beyond her.
China shattered on the floor, silencing the already dead quiet room, and everyone turned to look. Maeve Rourke stood in the doorway, with shards of a broken tea set and puddles of tea at her feet. For a moment the noise seemed to have stopped not only conversation and breath, but time as well.
“Day,” she said, and her voice, too, sounded like a breakable thing. She started toward him, her arms outstretched as if she would gather him to her breast like a child.
“Don't,” he said, and that was all. He turned on his heel and walked out of there, loose and confident, careless even, as if he'd just been passing by.
Remy Lelourie went after him, although she'd almost left it until too late. She had to run out the cottage's front door and halfway down Conti Street to catch him up.
“Daman Rourke!” she cried out, using his name for the first time. Even when she'd thought of him to herself before, he'd always been only that woman's boy.
He stopped and turned slowly, holding himself stiffer now, and she recognized the look on his face because she had lived with it so many times herself. It was, Swallow your blood and don't let your enemies know you're hurt.
Mortal Sins Page 20
