Rourke heard her moving around in there now, heard her harsh breathing and the creak of the floorboards. He smelled cordite and the blood, really smelled the blood. Oh, sweet Jesus. What had she done?
He didn't want to look again, but he had to.
She had her clothes back on and she was bending over Julius's body, where he had been knocked off the bed by the impact of the bullet and onto the floor She began crooning to him, in a moaning singsong, Sorry, Julius, I'm so sorry, Julius, so sorry, please, oh, please, and all the while she was crooning she was carefully taking the revolver out of Julius's hand and replacing it with the one she'd shot him with. The other, unfired, gun she shoved deep in the pocket of her skirt. When she straightened he saw how her face was slimed with tears and blood.
She parted the beaded curtain in the doorway and then froze, half turning, and looked out the window. She must not have seen him standing behind the bamboo thicket, though, for she turned around again and pushed through the clattering beads.
He saw her walking fast toward the big house, with her hand still deep in the pocket of her skirt. She disappeared from his sight in the trees. A moment later he heard a splash and the bang of wood slamming down against wood. He took one more look at Julius through the window, but there was no doubt the guy was dead, with half his head gone. Rourke knew better than to go into the shack himself; he was a cop's son, after all.
He went out to the willow cave because she would come to him there, eventually. It was part of the game, the risk, the danger, the taste of death, and then the sex, and it had all become inseparable. He thought that before he touched her he should say to her, I saw you kill Julius, but he knew he never would. He wanted her to love him enough that she would come to him for help, for comfort, for absolution. She would come, but for none of those things.
When the smoking light of dusk was in the tops of the cypress trees, she came. She didn't speak, and he could not. She had cleaned herself up, and yet he was sure he could smell Julius's blood on her, and it was as though his own heart's blood were fouled. He felt a violent revulsion for her, for what she had done, and a desperate longing, a hunger, for her that was so great he thought that if she touched him he would fly all apart, fly into a million bloody pieces and chips of bone.
Only she did touch him, and he didn't fly apart. They came together on the floor of the willow cave, undressing each other slowly as if trying to make a lie out of their sawing breaths and racing blood. She pressed him down onto his back and straddled him, raising herself up on her knees and then slowly lowering herself down on top of him. He felt her flex and tighten around him, and he looked into her eyes that were hot and too bright, and although he tried to keep them away, still they came, fragments, lightning images. Julius's foot trembling in his death throes on the floor, his heel rattling on the wood. Julius's blood splashing on her bare breasts. Julius's curled white fingers letting go of the revolver. He saw the gun exploding in her hand, saw her killing Julius, over and over, killing Julius, and he felt all the hopeless love he bore for her, and all the fear he had of her, rise up inside him like a dark, wet bubble, rise and swell and burst into a release between her thighs.
After she was gone, he lay on his back with the smell of swamp water and cypress and blood in his throat, the smell of her in his throat.
He had wanted to save her, but he didn't know how. He couldn't even save himself.
“Why?” he said, eleven years later, as lightning jumped across the shrouded sky and thunder cracked like a gunshot. The pain in her face was too much to bear, even if he didn't quite believe it. “Why did you do it?”
She only shook her head, although she was crying. At least she was crying, even if he couldn't trust the tears to be real.
“You both had your guns pointed down,” he said, “but then you brought yours up and shot him in the face. If it was a game, then you cheated badly, darlin'. But it wasn't a game, was it? It wasn't a game.”
Her eyes flinched closed. “No. It wasn't a game.”
“For God's sake, Remy.” He took a step toward her, as if he would force it out of her—the truth, the lies, anything.
She whirled away from him.
He hadn't seen the crystal pitcher of mint julep sitting on the fireplace mantel until she picked it up and smashed it against the yellow marble. Whiskey and ice, chips and slivers of crystal rained on the floor. In her hand was left a raw and jagged piece of glass. Lightning leaped again, turning the oak trees white.
“You are so wrong about me, Day.” Blood dripped from her hand that held the deadly shard of glass. “So wrong, so wrong. What do I need to do to prove it to you? Kill myself?” The glass flashed, slashing across her wrist, and a line of bright red blood welled on the paleness of her flesh. “No, that is way too easy. I'll destroy what I am.”
He had already launched himself at her but he wasn't able to grab her wrist, so he wrapped his hand around the shard of glass just in time to keep it from slicing into her cheek. The glass cut deep into his fingers, and such was the living force of her will that she kept on cutting him for two more heartbeats before she cried out and flung the shard away.
He stared at her, his hand bleeding a river onto the floor.
She shook her head hard, splattering tears. “I can bear it if the whole world hates me, but not you. Not you.”
Sweet mercy. “Remy, don't—”
She covered his mouth with her hand, the one she had cut, and he tasted her blood. “I looked up and there you were,” she said, “standing at my daddy's coffin—the bravest thing I'd ever seen. I wanted to cut out your heart and eat it.”
His lips moved in the blood on her hand. “You did.”
“Did you cry for yourself when I left you?”
“No.”
“Then don't you go cryin' for me now.”
Because he had been expecting it, waiting for it, he heard it first—through the rain and wind and thunder, the crunch of tires on the oyster-shell drive. Lights from an automobile's headlamps shot out of the wet and smoky night and into the darkened room.
Her eyes widened, caught for a brief moment in the squad car's lights, before she lowered her head. Her hand fell from his mouth and she turned away from him.
He waited with her in silence, through the front door crashing open and the tramp of feet in the hall.
“Christ,” Fio said when he saw Rourke. “Did she try to kill you, too?”
“No. It was an accident.” Only it hadn't been an accident, or an act. She would have mutilated herself to prove to him…what? That she was innocent?
Yet he had seen her, with his own eyes he had seen her kill.
It wasn't a game.
If she did it once…
He went outside, onto the gallery, and a few moments later they brought her out. Someone had bandaged her cuts with handkerchiefs and put handcuffs on her wrists.
She stopped in front of him, and she was looking up at him as if he were already a memory. She reached up with both hands, the links of the handcuffs rattling, and she touched her fingers to his throat.
“We can bear this, Day. It will be like the snake—all we got to do is stare it down without flinching.”
The next morning he went back out to Sans Souci with a couple of patrolmen dressed in bathing suits. He showed them where the cistern was and watched them climb in.
The thunder and lightning had blown away with the night, but it was still raining hard, the drops pocking and dimpling the cistern's black water. He could smell the wet earth on the wind.
It took them only a few minutes to fish out the white-enameled, purple-spangled Mardi Gras mask. Medusa with snakes for hair. Seen through the slanting rain, it looked as though the snakes were alive.
Then, because he knew it was there, he told them to climb back in the cistern and look for a French gold-plated pinfire revolver.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
ABRUTAL RAIN STREAMED AGAINST THE WINDOW WHERE Remy Lelourie stood looking up at a
ragged scrap of dirty gray sky. In the greasy light she was too thin and frail, like a waif in the shapeless brown cotton shift and her cropped, shingled hair.
She turned when the door closed behind him. Her face was blotchy, wet, and red, her eyes puffy with tears. She had not just been weeping; she'd been bawling.
Rourke stared at her too long, and her mouth pulled into a painful smile. “You're looking at me like you would a butterfly pinned to a board, waiting to see if my wings will flutter.”
He tried to smile back at her, but he didn't think he'd quite managed it. “Sorry.” He realized he was still standing with his back against the door and his bandaged hand wrapped around the knob. He took a couple of steps into the small interrogation room, bringing himself closer to her. “Are you making it okay?”
She looked down at the Parish Prison garb she wore. “Cinderella before the prince.”
“Remy—”
“Thank you for coming, Day. I was afraid you wouldn't.” She lifted her head. A bright, painful light glittered in her eyes. “I wasn't sure of the protocol—how a woman should go about asking favors of the policeman who arrests her.”
He tried to keep everything he felt and thought off his face. “Anything you say to me is fair game for your trial, Remy. You shouldn't be talking to me without a lawyer.”
She blinked and nodded. “I just…” Suddenly, she emitted a sharp little despairing cry and bent partway over, hugging herself.
He took a couple of steps toward her and almost didn't keep himself from touching her. He waved at the battered oak table and four metal chairs that filled the room. “Maybe you'd better sit down.”
She chose the chair beneath the window and he sat across from her. The room smelled of stale smoke and years worth of rancid sweat that came from fear and clung to the peeling beige walls. She'd laid one of her hands down flat on the table in front of her, the one that had been cut like his and was bandaged now. The table was stained with water rings and pocked with cigarette burns; the fingers of her bandaged hand looked ephemeral, luminescent, as though they were being lit from within.
She was trembling as if she had a chill. He watched as her eyes filled with tears, then went on watching as they fell.
She drew in a deep, hitching breath. “Oh Lordy, Day. I am so scared.”
“Did you kill him, Remy?”
She made a strangled sound, then her head jerked, hard, and tears splashed her hand. “Yes,” she whispered, and the breath left him so hard it was as if he'd been punched in the chest.
She had her chin tucked so close to her chest that all he could see was the top of her head. “I shot him out in the slave shack, with the French revolver,” she said, the words barely audible. “You saw.”
His breath came back, shuddering into him so fast it left him feeling queasy, like a seasickness.
“Yes, I saw,” he said softly. “But I'm talking about Charles now. Did y'all have a fight that night over what he'd done to your sister?”
She flung up her head. “How do you know about—?” Her eyes looked so frightened they bulged. “Oh, God. It was my fault, all my fault. I couldn't be what he wanted, and then we just started hurting each other, back and forth, a horrible, ugly game. He used Belle to get back at me—he could be such a bastard. Such a mean, cruel bastard.”
Her shoulders bowed and she bent forward again, cupping her elbows, rocking a little. “You're not going to think Belle killed him now, are you?” she said softly. “Belle could never do such an awful thing.”
Rourke rather thought Belle could, but he said, “No, Belle could never. But you did it for her, you killed Charles for Belle. Because of Belle and the baby he gave her.”
She looked up at him again, stared at him, her eyes roaming all over his face, and she might as well have been touching him with her hands, her mouth.
“The world can be a lonely place, don't you think so, Day? Even when you ought to be feeling on top of it. When it got real bad I used to close my eyes and picture our willow island, and then when I had it just right in my mind, I would put you there, and undress you and lay you down, and then I would lay myself down with you and you would hold me close, just hold me.”
“Remy—”
“No.” The word had the force of a shout, even though she spoke softly. “Don't tell me something I can't bear.” She reached out and touched his hand where it lay on the table. Lightly, her fingers barely brushing his knuckles and the edge of the bandage. “They say the Indians had special places, places where they would go alone to worship the Great Spirit and no lies would be allowed. It's a sacred place to me, Day, our willow island. The only thing I do hold sacred. I swear to you on that place, I did not kill Charles.”
Her fingers stroked the bones of his hand. He was terrified of the truth he thought he heard coming up from her heart and saw in her eyes, because he was so certain of the lie. Because to let himself believe and then to be disappointed would be more than he could bear.
He knew what lived inside of her, and it was dark. Dark and sad and crazy. She could run a race with a train, and put a loaded gun to both her head and yours. She could make you so crazy with lust-desire that you'd strip yourself down to guts and bone to have her.
He had watched her kill Julius. Kill him and then be cold-blooded enough afterward to remember that the cops would know if a gun had been fired, and so she'd switched the revolvers to make it look like suicide.
She had murdered that boy and then she had run away and made herself one of the most famous people in the world, because she could hurl the million faces of Remy Lelourie through a camera and onto a movie screen, until she was everyone's fantasy come true.
She could be anything you wanted her to be.
She could be innocent.
God help him, but he believed her.
Outside, it was raining now as if a hole had been ripped open in the sky. The rain rushed in the gutters and along the galleries, shooting off the ends of the sloping roofs. In the Quarter, the water had already overflowed the low brick banquettes to lap at the stoops of shops and cottages.
Rourke walked down Canal Street to the river. He climbed the levee and stood there in the relentless downpour. Clouds pressed down on him, heavy and swirling with mist. Below him the river flowed, high and fast and yellow with mud. Branches and small logs trailed in the current, forming little eddies that foamed and bubbled.
One week ago today, Charles St. Claire had been hacked to death with a cane knife in the old slave shack in back of Sans Souci. Most times you just do your job. You look at the body and ask some questions and you either figure out who did it or you don't, but you speak for those murdered ones if you can, because that is your job. He felt as though he'd lived ten lifetimes since Charles St. Claire's death, most of it hard and cruel, as most of life was. He kept thinking he ought to be learning better, but he never did.
If she was innocent, then someone else was guilty.
So, come at it like you do with a snapping alligator, come at it from the other end.
Heloise Lelourie. Who had probably killed once before, poisoning the husband who had deserted her with pralines laced with love beans. She would see Charles St. Claire as another such man—deserter, adulterer, a man who had damaged both of her daughters, cheating on the one with the other, a man who had planted a St. Claire bastard on a Lelourie. La famille Lelourie was everything to her. La famille, Sans Souci, and all the sins of the past buried with the dead, in their houses of secrets.
Belle. Ripping up her beloved garden in pain and fear and fury. The woman used and scorned, the woman left pregnant and alone, and no Mardi Gras king would be toasting Belle Lelourie as the parade passed her by.
Lucille. You might as well call it rape, what Charles St. Claire had been doing to her these last two years. Lucille, who hated her rapist with a soul-scouring purity, and who was supposed to have been home, sick and alone, the night he'd been killed.
Mamma Rae, voodooienne and loup-garou if y
ou were so inclined to believe, putting hoodoo spells on Mr. Charlie for LeRoy. LeRoy up at Angola finding out how his wife had been whoring for him these last two years. LeRoy and LeBeau and Mamma Rae. Lucille.
Makes it 'specially easy for they certain folk to solve their predicament if that goat is black.
Tante Adenise, with the miseries in her house and her bad feelin's, seeing bats flying across the moon, and the bayou turning the color of blood.
A thought clung there, deep at the back of his mind.
One of them said somethin' 'bout it bein' crazy to do it this way 'stead of just lettin'that poor dead boy sink like a stone without even leavin'no ripples on the water. An'then the other said somethin' 'bout you. Said that nigger-lovin' cop Rourke had to be thrown a bone, otherwise you keep on diggin' 'til you found the whole skeleton.
Vinny McGinty, his bone.
The steel stairs rang beneath Rourke's feet as he took them two at a time to the holding cells, where Remy Lelourie had been put until her arraignment. He waited, impatiently, leaning against the stained, damp wall among the shouts and sobs, and the clattering and banging noise of prison life, for the matron to open the barred door.
The whole place smelled like a jail, he thought—sweat and fear and desperation.
The cell, lit by a solitary caged and naked bulb, was shadowed in the corners. She'd been sitting on the slab of concrete that passed for a bunk, with her legs drawn up under her chin. She stood up when the door rattled and clanged open.
She looked bruised around the eyes, and the skin about her mouth was taut and gray. She stood up slowly as he entered her cell, her eyes searching his. It broke his heart to see hope flicker briefly across her desperate face.
After running all the way back from the river in the pouring rain, now he could only stare at her. In the silence he could hear the water dripping off his coat and hat brim.
He couldn't believe how he had ever doubted her, how he had once thought to hurt her.
He glanced outside the cell to be sure the matron was out of earshot. “One way or the other, darlin', I'm getting you out of this place.” It wasn't what he'd come here to say, but it felt right. He hadn't been able to save her eleven years ago, but he could save her now. “You just cling to that belief through whatever comes, because all I got to do is flash my badge to get you out of this cell, and it'll be easy enough after that to get you out to a boat in the Gulf that could take you down to Mexico or South America somewhere.”
Mortal Sins Page 34
