Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  She came up to him until only a hand-space separated them. Her face was cast in a strange sadness, as if the mystery she carried inside her had at last worked its way out. “Don't you understand yet how much I love you?” She reached up and touched one corner of his mouth with her fingers. “I would never allow you to ruin your whole life for me. And, besides, you're forgetting who and what I am. Where ever could I go where no one would know me?”

  He wrapped his fingers around her wrist and held her hand in place so that he could turn his head and brush his lips across her knuckles. “Some places don't have extradition, and it might not come to that, anyway.” He kissed her hand again, then let her go. “Did your husband ever mention a client by the name of Vinny McGinty?”

  She tilted her head slightly to one side in that way she had that showed she was thinking. “No, I don't think so. Not to me, anyway.”

  “How about a man named LeRoy Washington, then?”

  “LeRoy Washington,” she said after a moment. “A Negro prizefighter who went to prison for killing his manager? I think Charles might have driven up to Angola to talk with him a couple of days before he was killed. I remember that evening because it was a good one, and we'd had so few good ones for so long. He was all excited when he came home, Charles was, and he wanted to drink champagne. We had a couple of glasses and then we put a record on the phonograph and danced.”

  “Did he tell you anything about what had got him so excited? Think, Remy. It might be important.”

  Her teeth sank into her bottom lip and she closed her eyes. When she opened them again she was shaking her head. “It just wasn't Charles's way to talk about his work. No, wait…. We had lit the candles in the sconces by the fireplace and he held up his glass and looked at the light through the champagne, like you do, to see the bubbles, and he laughed and said something about Cain having a lot to answer for.”

  The sugarcane and rice fields unfolded beneath a sky that was thick with clouds early that next morning, but, unlike yesterday's, these clouds wouldn't rain. Rourke was driving his own Stutz Bearcat speedster rather than a squad car, and he had the pedal to the floor. Fiorello Prankowski sat hunched over in the passenger seat, staring wildly out the bug-splattered windshield, with his jaw knotting and his hands gripping his knees.

  “You aren't going to slow the 'Cat down,” Rourke said, “by pressing a hole through her floorboard. The brake's over here.”

  Fio showed his teeth. “What's that expression y'all use down here? Brassy ma…”

  “Brassa ma chu.”

  “Yeah. Well, brassa ma Yankee chu.”

  Rourke smiled and started singing “Ma, He's Making Eyes at Me.” Fio made a growling noise deep in his throat.

  A few more miles clicked by, fast, and Fio said, “You ever gonna get around to telling me why we're on this little joy ride?”

  “They claim Al Capone's outfit pulled in a hundred and five million last year.”

  Fio whistled. “Man, that buys a lotta parlor organs.”

  “So where does he make his dough?”

  Fio gave Rourke a look. “Golly, let me think. The rackets? Bootlegging, prostitution, loan sharking, protection and extortion, the numbers. Little stuff like that.”

  “Prizefights,” Rourke said.

  “Yeah, he's got his fingers in that sticky pie all over the country.”

  “So if you were all the way down here in New Orleans, running a club, sponsoring a few contenders, maybe you figure you could skim a little off good ol' Al's take of the gate, maybe even fix a few matches to give yourself a break, and what with the way good ol' Al is rolling in the dough, he isn't going to miss it.”

  “We aren't talking chicken feed here, though,” Fio said. “Even way down yonder in New Orleans, those boxing matches can produce a couple-hundred-thousand-dollar gate. Guy like Al Capone didn't get where he's at overlooking the details. And nobody likes being made into a patsy.”

  “So a smart guy,” Rourke said, “wouldn't get greedy. He'd take his own cut of the prizefighting pie and give up the rest, nice and easy, just like he was supposed to do.”

  “If I was Casey Maguire,” Fio said, “and already making myself a fortune running rum, I would give up whatever else I had to to get along.”

  “Only it didn't happen that way. The Chicago outfit got shortchanged on their bag money—Maguire told me that himself. He put it all on poor Vinny, but what if it was his baby brother, Bobby Joe, who was skimming the gate and fixing fights? A couple of days before he was killed, Charles St. Claire drove up to Angola to talk with LeRoy Washington, who happens to be doing fifty years' hard time for killing Bobby Joe Maguire. When St. Claire came home that night, he told his wife that Cain had a lot to answer for.”

  Fio stared at the side of Rourke's face, then finally said, “Are you saying Casey Maguire killed his own brother?”

  “Cain's sin—brother killing brother. Bobby Joe was stealing from the bag money meant for the Chicago outfit. When he found out about it, Casey Maguire probably got visions of Al Capone swinging a baseball bat at his head, and so in a fit of rage and panic, he wrung his baby brother's neck.”

  A boy bouncing over a fallow field in a tractor gave them a wave. A hay truck rattled past, going south. A flock of starlings rose up from the telephone wires and trailed across the gray sky. “Only somebody saw him do it,” Rourke said.

  Fio pointed his finger like a gun and made a clicking noise with his tongue. “Vinny McGinty.”

  “Two somebodies.” Rourke stepped hard on the gas and the Bearcat's engine roared. “Vinny—my bone—and LeRoy Washington.”

  Chapter Thirty

  ROURKE TURNED THE CAR ONTO AN OILED ROAD THAT cut through thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine. Fio made pockets of air in his cheeks, then blew them out in a sigh. Rourke was feeling the same way himself. He couldn't pass through the Tunica Gate with PENITENTIARY spelled out in wrought iron without experiencing a primal fear that he was looking at the end of his own road.

  They passed a chain gang breaking a field down by the river, swinging axes and shovels into the roots of tree stumps. The line of slaving, sweating men was surrounded by convict-guards on horseback, carrying sawed-off, double-barreled shotguns propped on their thighs. The guards had to serve the time of any inmate who escaped while on their watch, so no warning shots were ever fired. The guards always aimed straight off to kill. The cons working the field were the bad stripes, anyway, the dangerous ones, marked out by their black and white striped jumpers and straw hats painted red.

  Rourke pulled to a stop at the prison entrance, beneath the shadow of the wooden gun tower. They showed their badges, the iron-barred gate swung open, and they were waved on through, the low-slung Bearcat bumping over the cattle guard.

  Rourke parked under the shade cast by an old stone building that was the Negro camp. He stayed where he was for a moment, though, with his hands still wrapped around the wheel. Beneath his suit coat, his shirt was sticking wet to his back. The smell of stewing collard greens drifted over from the Old Camp Kitchen.

  “You expect this nig—this LeRoy Washington is going to answer your questions with anything close to the truth?” Fio said.

  Rourke looked out over the wide flat fields of the prison farm, fields of sugarcane and sweet potatoes. A line of prisoners was walking down the rows, carrying hoes over their shoulders. Their backs were bent and their heads were hanging, their eyes on the ground.

  Fio pushed the door open and pried himself out of the car. “Well, he sure as hell isn't gonna spill his guts with me there, 'cause nobody ever tells me anything. I think I'll go shoot the breeze with the warden. I'll bet he's got a bottle of homemade lightning in his desk drawer. This being a prison and all.”

  A trusty convict with gnarled brown teeth escorted Rourke to a guardroom next to the dormitory. The whole place reeked of stale sweat and the ancient toilets that had to be flushed out with buckets. The trusty seemed to take relish in warning Rourke that the man
he'd come to see was a bad stripe. “Gonna have to break 'im or kill 'im, that's what the Boss said. He's been in the Hole this time goin' on fifteen days. Might've broken the record if you hadn't come along.”

  The Hole couldn't be seen from where they were, but Rourke knew what it was like. Three iron sweatboxes sitting in a vacant field on a concrete slab, too small to stand up or lie down in, so that all you can do is sit with your knees drawn up and with a slop bucket between your ankles. Just sit and bake and try to breathe enough to stay alive through an air hole the size of a quarter drilled into the iron door.

  The room the trusty took him to was closer to the size of a closet and furnished with a wooden table, two wooden chairs, and a butt can. Its puke yellow walls were streaked with rust and speckled with mildew.

  It was some time before LeRoy was brought in, shuffling between a pair of hacks, his legs cramping so bad he could never have walked on his own. His hair dripped sweat, and his striped trousers were stained with dirt and sweat and dried blood. He wasn't wearing a shirt, and raw insect bites covered his bare chest and arms, some so infected they bled and wept pus. Rourke had heard about them staking convicts out on the ant hills up on the levee for punishment, but he'd never believed it was really done until now.

  One of the hacks left right off, but the older one stayed and gave Rourke a surly look. He had a flat face pitted by deep acne scars, and pale slitted eyes, like pumpkin seeds. “Here's the dinge con you was wantin' a chat with,” he said. He slapped LeRoy hard enough in the small of his back with his black Betty to make the man grunt. “And you, boy—you mind your party manners or your nigger ass'll be goin' back in the Hole for so long the only way you'll be coming out'll be feetfirst.” He smacked LeRoy in the back again with his black leather sap, only harder. “What you say, boy?”

  “Yes, suh, Boss,” LeRoy said, the words cracking rough from thirst. He looked at Rourke out of eyes that were so purple and swollen they were like the pulpy bruises on rotting fruit. He was sucking in air as if the world was about to run out of it.

  Rourke tried to keep what he was feeling off his face so that he wouldn't shame the man. “Go fetch a bucket of water and then get out,” he said to the gun bull. “Do it,” he added when the man didn't move fast enough. The threat of violence was raw in Rourke's voice.

  As soon as the hack was out the door, LeRoy sagged against the wall and began rubbing the cramps out of his legs, his face wincing with the pain he hadn't let on to before. Rourke went to look out the small, barred window. It was open, to let some air into the room, but the air it let in was hot and dank, and dead.

  The hack came back again with a dripping bucket and then left, as far as the other side of the closed door, anyway.

  “Better go easy on it at first,” Rourke said as LeRoy gulped the water down almost too fast to swallow. LeRoy gave him a look, but drank only a bit more and poured the rest of it over his head.

  He wiped the sweat and water out of his eyes with the flat of his fingers and then nodded at the stack of books Rourke had brought with him and set on the table. “If you brought those along for me, Day, you just wasted your time and money. I lost all my reading privileges and I don't expect to ever be getting them back.” His voice changed, became drawling and empty. “Camp captain complained I forgettin' my place. Said that what happens when niggers get a bit of book learnin' in them. They forget their place an' so they gotta get sent to the Hole to be reminded of it.”

  Long, long ago, in the good old days, they used to sit on the deck of LeRoy's houseboat arguing philosophy and logic into the night. Rourke had been a flatfoot on the night shift and going to college during the day, but LeRoy had read books Rourke had never heard of. When he wanted to, LeRoy could “talk educated white,” as he liked to put it. “White as any friggin' member of the Boston Club.” White men, LeRoy had told him once, grew uncomfortable when their colored help and field hands sounded smarter than they were, so Negroes had learned from bitter experience that they ought at least to give a good impression of knowing their place in the world.

  Most of the time, around whites, LeRoy spoke the language of his people, remembering his place, but out of pride and not fear.

  “I'll talk to the warden,” Rourke said. “Call in some favors and see if you can't get your reading privileges back.”

  LeRoy's lip curled. “Yeah, you do that.”

  LeRoy picked up the box of ready-mades and the matches that were lying on top of the books. He tapped out a smoke and then carefully split a match in two, because in prison they were worth almost as much as the cigarettes themselves.

  “A couple of them are weed,” Rourke said. “So be careful when and where you do your smoking.”

  LeRoy hooted a laugh. “Man, you are something else. You come waltzing into prison carrying dope in your pocket—they could just decide to keep you here.”

  They shared a smile, and then LeRoy slowly subsided into one of the chairs. He set the cigarette and match back on the table untouched. His hands clutched his thighs, and he stared at the floor.

  When he lifted his head again, his face had the look of a man who was drowning. “You haven't come all the way up here twice in one month, and on a day that's not visiting day, just to say hey. Is it Lucille? Something bad happen to Lucille?”

  “She's fine. I talked to her for a quick minute just this mornin', before I left to drive up here. She sends you all her love.”

  LeRoy had managed to get some of the prison-hard back into his face. Rourke knew he couldn't bear hearing about Lucille's love, couldn't bear thinking about it, when he wasn't going to have her for another forty-eight years.

  “Charles St. Claire is dead,” Rourke said, delivering the bad news on the chin, where LeRoy would want to take it. “Somebody cut him up with a cane knife, slit his throat. I figured since he was your lawyer, you'd better know.”

  LeRoy stared straight ahead with his palms still gripping his thighs. A hard, black shine had come into his eyes.

  “I asked Luce this morning if you knew about her and Charlie,” Rourke said, hitting the man again and hating himself for it. “She told me you did.”

  LeRoy breathed a harsh laugh. “What you think—that she tellin' you 'bout it all this time an' never tol' me? If knowin' 'bout it means I pimped for her, then that's what I done.” He pointed a stiff finger up at Rourke's face. “That's what you done.”

  “All that she's ever done was for love of you.”

  LeRoy's eyes squeezed shut, and his lips pulled back from his teeth in a grimace. “Man, I know that. But if I gotta let some sumbitch of a lawyer poke my wife so I can get outta here, then I do that. I do that,” he said, his head nodding so hard the veins in his neck stood out like ropes.

  He pushed himself out of the chair with such force that it skidded across the floor. “Shee-it. Crack you open, Day, and you're still a cop inside. What you think I done, huh? That sumbitch was my only ticket to ride, what for would I want to have someone rip him up?” LeRoy's mouth twisted into a hard, mean smile. “Save that for later, yeah. After I'm out. When I can do it myself.”

  “I know you didn't have anyone kill Charles St. Claire.”

  LeRoy had been pacing the room, walking away from Rourke, but now he spun back around. “Then what you come up here for?”

  “The truth about who strangled Bobby Joe Maguire.”

  LeRoy threw back his head in a laugh that was prison mean. “The truth! Y'all think a nigger won't never tell a white man anything close to the truth, and you'd be right, uh-huh.”

  He stared hard at Rourke a moment, then his shoulders sagged. He turned and went to the window. He reached up and grasped the bars with his two big hands, as if he could bend the bars open with a force of will.

  “The other day they brought a new fish into the camp—some pathetic, skinny kid couldn't've been older than seventeen. He asked me if I was the LeRoy Washington who knocked Ricky Martson out cold in the seventh round of the Carnival of Champions, and I told h
im no. Just some scared kid making conversation and hoping I wouldn't eat him alive, and I looked him right in the eye and I lied to him for no good reason.” He breathed a sour laugh. “You find yourself lying about everything in here. There just ain't any truth to be had.”

  Rourke had nothing he could say to that that wouldn't sound like a lie in itself. It had come to seem to him lately in his life that if you're blamed and punished long enough, you eventually become guilty of all the sins charged against you. You own those sins, then, as surely as if you had committed them.

  “There's a woman facing a life in prison, maybe even the electric chair for a killing she didn't do. The truth,” Rourke said, “might save her.”

  LeRoy's back stiffened, but he didn't turn around. “Is she white?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why in hell should I care?”

  “The truth,” Rourke said, relentless.

  LeRoy's head fell forward, pressing against the bars. The silence strung out between them.

  “I went back to the gym that night,” LeRoy finally said, “to have it out with Bobby Joe over him accusing me of stealing—and, man, I don't know what I was thinking.” He pushed out an empty laugh. “Like I was gonna change that white man's mind 'bout anythin'. But it didn't matter anyway because there was already a big rumpus going on. Bobby Joe and his big brother going at it over the flimflam Bobby Joe had been running with the Boxing Irish. Next thing I know I'm watching Boss Maguire wring Bobby Joe's neck with his bare hands, and all I'm thinking about now is getting my black ass outta there. But when I go to run, I smack right into that homeboy of Mr. Maguire's, who was always hanging around the gym. Vinny something or other.”