“I have a hope chest full of such pretty things for a bride,” Belle was saying, “but nothing for a baby.”
Rourke drew in a deep breath, choosing his words carefully. “You told Mr. St. Claire that,” he said. “On Tuesday, when you went to see him. You told him about the baby.”
Her mouth had gone slack, her breathing shallow, and her hands were clawing through the dirt now, almost frantic. “I was sick in the mornings—I didn't even know why at first. It was mama who figured it all out, about me bein' sick, and how I hadn't needed the rags for a while. I was so excited after Mama explained it to me, because I knew Charles would be just thrilled when I told him the good news. Every man wants a son, and he'd told me more than once that Remy wouldn't give him one. She was hateful to him, Remy was.”
A breeze had come up, but it was only blowing hot. Rourke could feel the sweat running down his sides, making his shirt stick to his skin. The sun had risen over the roof enough now to catch her in its merciless heat and light. Her face bore dark grooves around her nose and mouth, as if they'd been drawn there in charcoal. Harsh red color streaked her neck, like welts. He thought how he'd never really liked her much and now he felt bad for that, as if his liking her might have saved her.
“It must have been a shock for Mr. St. Claire at first, though,” Rourke said. “When you told him.”
“He laughed. He just laughed and laughed and laughed, and pretty soon I was laughin' too, just to hear him go on like that.” She laughed now, a shrill, bird-like cry. Her hands stilled in their frantic scrambling through the soil.
She cocked her head and a small furrow appeared between her eyebrows, as if she was struggling to understand something. “Then suddenly he turned all mean,” she said. “Just like before. He told me I had to leave, that I was to leave him alone, and he said such hateful things to me, he really ought to be sorry. Somebody should make him sorry.”
“And how did you do that? How did you make him sorry?”
She was smoothing out the dirt now, patting it down with her hands, as if she felt driven to repair what she had done. “Remy. Remy was going to make him sorry.”
The palm trees out in the neutral ground clicked dryly in the hot breeze, but a coldness had seeped so deep into Rourke, he actually shivered. “You told your sister about Charles and about the baby,” he said.
Belle nodded, smoothing and patting, smoothing, patting, her body rolling with the motion. “Mama and me, we went to Sans Souci together, to see Remy. Oh, and I remember now, it was raining. Mama explained to my sister how there was a way to fix things. She said we could all go away together for a while and when we come back Remy will tell everyone the baby is hers.”
Belle drifted into a taut silence for a moment, and then she frowned, her mouth pulling down hard and a little mean. “She's always snatching things away from me, Remy is. She made Julius kill himself and then she made everyone believe she's the pretty one. She took Charles first so I couldn't have him. It's cruel and wicked of her to be taking my baby, too.”
Rourke put on his hat and got slowly to his feet. “Is that what she said she would do, take the baby and raise it as her own?”
Belle looked up at him, her eyes squinting against the sun. It gave her pale, sweating face a shrewd look now that didn't match her dreamy, singsong words. “Sorry, is what she said. Sorry, sorry, sorry. She said she'd make Charles sorry for sayin' all those mean, nasty things and hurtin' my feelin's like he did.”
Rourke felt a tugging in his gut, the uncoiling excitement that came when the puzzle of a case finally began to fit together. Only this time the excitement had an edge to it that cut, sharp as a cane knife.
He was a cop, and so he'd always had to make himself allow for the possibility that Remy Lelourie had killed her husband, especially knowing her, knowing, fearing, remembering, If she'd done it once… Until this moment, though, he hadn't realized how desperately he wanted for her not to have done this one, how, deep down, he had needed to believe in her innocence this one time if he was going to go on living with the truth of how much he loved her.
It hadn't been jealousy, Rourke thought, not the jealousy of a wife over a cheating, lying scoundrel of a man. It hadn't anything to do with Julius, or being found out, or the house or money. The Cinderella Girl had gone after Charles St. Claire with a cane knife for a reason only New Orleans would understand. He had seduced her baby sister, planted a bastard on her baby sister, and then cruelly rejected and abandoned her. Family is what you are born into, not what you marry. A girl is known by her maiden name until the day she dies, and after, long, long after. Heloise's girls they were, Remy and her baby sister, Belle.
If Remy Lelourie had killed her husband, it was because he had hurt la famille.
Chapter Twenty-Six
THE RED LIGHTS WERE ON ABOVE BOTH DOORS OF THE confessional box, and so Rourke sat in a pew to wait.
The Old Church of the Immaculate Conception was cool and smelled of damp stone and candlewax and holy water. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He felt battered, as if his bones had been taken out of his body and used for baseball bats.
He was desperate for sleep, but he still had to meet Casey Maguire at the Flying Horses, and later this evening he had an arrest to make: Remy Lelourie, for the murder of Charles St. Claire in the first degree. He had talked the captain into letting him wait to serve the warrant until after it grew dark and tomorrow morning's first editions had already gone to press. He didn't want her dragged off to the Parish Prison in handcuffs with flashlamps popping in her eyes and reporters shouting their questions in her face.
They had done their jobs too well, he and Fio, building the case against her brick by brick until they had her sealed up behind a jail-cell wall. Throughout it all he had clung to his faith, the credo he worked by: that the murdered ones mattered, that they deserved the dignity of having the world know why they had died and who had killed them. It was his job to speak for the dead, but that didn't mean that this time it wasn't going to hurt.
One summer, long ago, he had fallen in love with a girl full of passion and fear, who had been maybe more than just a little crazy, a girl who had thrived on feeding all the crazi-ness in him. He had been hooked deep by her that summer, and she'd kept her hold on him through time.
But maybe something else had a deeper hold on him, he thought, an excitement, a rushing high he always got from tempting hell. They were alike, he and Remy Lelourie, and so she should have known. What if I killed him, Day? she had said, taunting him, daring him. What if I did it?
She should have remembered that he never met a dare he wouldn't take.
Rourke heard the hinges of the door to the confessional box creak and he opened his eyes. A nun in a simple black habit with black beads swinging from her waist came out. She went to the bronze statue of St. Peter, knelt, and added the brush of her lips to the thousands of lips that had kissed the saint's foot during the last seventy years, lips that had nearly worn it away with their faith. Rourke couldn't imagine what sins a nun would need to confess, and on a Monday morning, but then he supposed even nuns were not beyond the temptation of evil.
The nun went to the altar rail, where she knelt again and began to make her penance. Rourke got up and went into the confessional where she had been. A faint scent of rose-water lingered within the dark, enclosed space.
He could hear the murmur of the priest's voice giving absolution to the sinner on the other side of the box. He waited in the dark, and it seemed for a moment that he could hear his own heart beating, could hear it skip and stutter. Then the wooden door slid back, and he was looking at the priest through the wire-mesh screen. The priest sighed and stirred, impatient perhaps, for the confessional hour was nearly over. The gold embroidery in his green sacramental stole glittered in the bit of light seeping through the seam around the door. The light defined the priest's face: the round Irish chin, high forehead, short nose.
Which was so unlike his own face, as was everythin
g else about Father Paul Rourke. They were so unalike, he and Paulie, and yet so close. In the scalding, searing way that people who have shared disasters, such as hurricanes and train wrecks, are close.
In the warm, close silence, he suddenly couldn't speak. There were no words.
“It's hard to begin sometimes, I know,” said the shadow on the other side of the screen, fatherly understanding mellowed by humor. “Why don't you ask our Lord for His blessing and then we'll see what happens next.”
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
There were no words. He could pile up confessions like a drunk on a pity binge, but he wasn't going to feel shriven.
“Never mind,” he said. “It was a slow week.”
“Day? Is that you?…No, don't run off this time,” his brother added quickly, because Rourke was already fumbling for the door latch.
He couldn't get the door open and he almost put his fist through the mahogany panel. “Day, you got to quit doing this to yourself,” his brother was saying. “Someone else has already died on the cross for all the world's sins.”
Rourke stumbled out of the confessional box and nearly ran down the aisle, banging his hip into the end of one of the pews. He pushed through the bronze-studded doors and staggered to a stop, nearly blinded by the white harsh blaze of the midday sun.
The Flying Horses lived in a fanciful white wooden building with stained-glass clerestory windows and a cupola. Rourke unsnapped the flap of his shoulder holster and came through the wide arched doorway on the balls of his feet. He felt like Tom Mix, meeting the bad guy for a showdown at high noon. All he needed was a horse named Tony.
The carousel's calliope was playing “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.” Shrill notes piped out of the steam whistles to float through the heavy summer air. Children filled the building, their laughter piping louder than the whistles. He spotted Casey Maguire sitting alone on a bench next to the hamburger wagon.
Rourke studied the people around the bootlegger. Standing at the hamburger wagon was a little girl with bright red-yellow curls, like orange peels, holding the hand of a boy wearing a Mardi Gras mask—the head of a grinning red devil with purple horns and yellow fangs. Next to the bench was a trio of nuns, Sisters of Charity in their dusty blue-wool habits, white starched bibs, and the white starched creations on their heads that looked like a fleet of ships sailing by. Their faces glowed pink with excitement as they watched the wooden horses gallop around.
Rourke's gaze scanned the rest of the building, over and then over again, as he walked slowly to the bench and sat down next to Maguire. They had a short staring contest, and Maguire was the first to look away.
“You look like hell,” the bootlegger said.
Rourke thought Maguire wasn't looking so hot either. Whisker stubble dusted the man's jaw like soot, and his skin hung pasty and loose. His eyes were red-veined and blurry.
A muscle ticked in Maguire's cheek as he watched the carousel. “You got to understand that this conversation, us being here—it's not happening,” he said.
Rourke looked out the open doorway. The moss on the oaks hung limp in the heat. The sun beat upon the grass and the flower beds and the gravel path, but a native could tell you it would rain again by this evening.
“I got the juice to make it so, Day.”
Rourke turned his head and studied Maguire's averted face. “Are you in bed with the Chicago outfit?”
A wry smile full of self-derision pulled at the corner of the other man's mouth. “Why would an Irish boy from New Orleans do business with that Yankee wop Al Capone?”
“Yeah,” Rourke said. “That's what I thought.” He felt no surprise, only a bone-deep, hollow-gut weariness. Casey Maguire's first job had been plucking chickens at the slaughterhouse he now owned, but he had never really been on the straight and narrow. His racketeering had been all nickel-and-dime stuff, though, until the Volstead Act became the law of the land. Then suddenly, within six months, he had a fleet of boats, warehouses, cutting plants, and the bootlegging business for the whole Gulf Coast in the palm of his hand. He couldn't have come up with the money for an operation of that size and scope on his own.
“You remember that time on the Ferris wheel,” Rourke said, “when I went to jump and you saved my ass? I figure you went up on a wheel and then you jumped just as it was starting to turn, and now you're on that long fall down.”
The smell of burning onions floated to them from the hamburger wagon. The boy in the red devil's mask was now chasing his little sister, and she was screaming and laughing, both.
“Sometimes,” Maguire said, “you can end up crossing a line you don't even see until you're already over on the other side.”
“What line did Vinny McGinty cross?”
Maguire exhaled a deep, sighing breath, like someone who had been waiting a long time for a dreaded pain and now finally it was here. “My brother Bobby Joe had Vinny working the gate for the Boxing Irish club fights, and it turned out Vinny was skimming the receipts. Bobby Joe must've caught him at it, and so Vinny killed him. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I thought it was that nigger boxer who'd done it. When I found out it was that little prick Vinny, I did what I had to do. Bobby Joe was my baby brother, for God's sake. You going to tell me you wouldn't kill the man who killed your brother?”
“Not to mention that the Chicago outfit was due a big piece of those gate receipts that got stolen. Yeah, I can see how a guy like Mr. Capone, a guy with a certain reputation to uphold, wouldn't be too happy if he somehow heard that one of your boys had been fucking him in the ass and that you had let it happen.”
“Like I said, I did what I had to do.”
“And Bridey? Was she something else you had to do?”
Maguire's only reaction was to allow his eyes to briefly close, yet it affected Rourke more than a sob would have done. “Bridey's dying was an accident. One of the Chicago boys was down here collecting their bag money and he heard me blowing off steam about how I had a cop on my case, giving me grief, and the next thing I know these wop goons show up in town to help me out.”
Rourke could see how and why this could happen. Ever since they'd gotten kicked out in 1890, the Mafia had been trying to buy, woo, and finagle their way back into the heart of the City That Care Forgot. Casey Maguire was the closest thing New Orleans had to a genuine mobster, so having a man with Maguire's connections and juice deep in their debt—owning the man inside and out—would be one way the Chicago outfit could guarantee themselves a nice, fat piece of the local crime business.
“I tried to convince them it would be better for business just to scare you off,” Maguire was saying. “Just lob a grenade or something up onto the front gallery of Bridey's house.” He braced his elbows on his knees and bent over his clasped hands as if in prayer. “Y'all were supposed to be back in the bedroom. What in hell was she doing out on the gallery? What were you doing out in the goddamn street? Jesus.”
Rourke stared down at the top of Maguire's head. “Goddamn goons with tommy guns were firing at me and my little girl last night.”
Maguire pulled his hands apart with a sudden, violent motion and raised his head to meet Rourke's eyes. “I know, I know, Day. What can I say? I'm talking to you like this, brother to brother like from the old days, so I can tell them you're going to be laying off me and then they can lay off you and then maybe the both of us can get out of this mess without getting our asses handed to us.”
“Fuck 'em.”
Maguire laughed. “I knew you'd say that.”
“What about Charles St. Claire?”
“What about him? I admit to killing one guy who fuckin' deserved it and now you want to lay off every corpse you've got on me? How come the whole world knows the Cinderella Girl killed Charlie St. Claire but you?”
Rourke felt a burning in his wrist and he looked down. He'd been rubbing the tattoo so hard the skin around it was red and inflamed.
Maguire had pushed himself to his feet. “You know what-
all went down now and why,” he said, “and that's just going to have to satisfy this fucking unnatural need in you to always be a cop. You're going to have to let it go. For your own sake, Day, let it go.”
Rourke let the other man take a couple of steps away before he spoke, pitching his voice loud enough to be heard over the shrieking children and the steam calliope. “Case.”
Maguire turned back around. The stained-glass windows cast splotches of red and blue light onto his face, making him look eerily bruised and bloodied.
“Bridey matters,” Rourke said. “The murdered ones all matter—even guys like Vinny McGinty. One way or the other I'm taking you down.”
“I believe he told you that,” Weldon Carrigan said. “And I believe that's probably more or less the way it happened, but it ends right here. We got other fish to fry.”
The police superintendent sat behind his mahogany and ormulu-mounted desk in his office in City Hall, surrounded by polished woods, plush leather, and a wreath of Havana tobacco. Rourke stared down at him, saying nothing.
“In a few hours we're going to be arresting a frigging movie star for murder,” Carrigan went on, “and then all hell is going to break loose. I don't need you out there chasing down a case I told you to forget about.”
Rourke still said nothing.
“Come on, Day. Nobody gives a rat's patootie about Vinny McGinty. He didn't even measure up to a two-bit loser, and for killing Bobby Joe Maguire he deserved what he got. What we don't need is any more of the Chicago outfit coming down here with their grenades and tommy guns wanting to even up scores over some penny-ante gate-receipt fiddle. You hear what Al Capone did to that one guy who he caught crossing him? He beat in the goon's head with a baseball bat in front of twenty other goons, for chrissakes.”
“He, at least, appears to have something of a grasp on the concept of crime and punishment.”
Weldon Carrigan's thick black eyebrows furrowed together above his narrowed eyes. “Don't you crack wise with me, boy.”
Mortal Sins Page 32
