Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  Lying, and setting up Casey Maguire to take the fall.

  It hadn't struck Rourke as important at the time, although it should have—LeRoy saying that he hadn't told his lawyer anything, that he hadn't even seen the man in over a month. Remy Lelourie had known all along that Maguire had killed his brother, and so she'd come up with a way to send Rourke out to Angola and maybe discover that knowledge for himself, figuring he would take it one step farther and decide that the bootlegger must have killed Charles St. Claire as well.

  Setting him up to take the fall.

  Daman Rourke lay in the dark with the glass of whiskey resting warm and heavy on his belly, and he thought how even now he couldn't bring himself to believe she had really done it—killed her husband and done all those other things besides. She had always been able to twist him inside out, until he didn't care anymore what was truth and what were lies, knowing only that if he listened to her long enough, hard enough…Remy Lelourie.

  He had nearly drifted off to sleep at last when the screams woke him.

  He was out of bed instantly, with his gun in his hand. He pounded down the stairs of the garçonnière and across the courtyard, into the house. He found Katie standing in the middle of the hall, screaming in her sleep.

  He gathered her up in his left arm, lifting her onto his hip, and the movement woke her up enough to stop her cries. She looked up into his face out of heavy, groggy eyes, and he touched her forehead with his lips, feeling for a temperature. She hadn't been well since the shooting—restless, frightened, a little feverish.

  “The gowman was coming to get me, Daddy.”

  “Shhh, honey. I'mhere and nothing's going to hurtyou.”

  “But I saw him, Daddy.”

  He jerked the chain on a small crystal lamp that sat on a narrow pier table against the wall, and a gentle yellow light pooled around them. “There now, see. No gowman. Just you and me.”

  The door to his mother's bedroom opened, and she stepped into the hall. She stood there for a moment, disoriented and barely awake herself, and then her eyes widened as she took in the sight of Katie in his left arm and the gun he still held against his thigh dangling from his bandaged right hand.

  “She just had a bad dream is all,” he said to his mother. He kissed the top of his daughter's head; it felt hot under his cheek.

  Maeve gripped the collar of her robe closer to her neck as if she was cold, although there was a film of perspiration on her face. Barefoot and with her hair hanging down in a thick braid over her shoulder, she looked young and frightened, as if she'd just been awakened from a scary dream herself. “I'll make her some hot milk,” she said.

  Katie's lips fluttered a little snore against his neck as she settled deeper into him, spreading her legs around his hips, her arms tightening around his neck. “No, that's all right, Mama,” he said, keeping his voice low and crooning. “I don't think she ever quite woke up all the way. You go on back to bed and I'll stay with her for a while.”

  His mother stood there for a moment in a peculiar stillness, as if even her breath had stopped, and then she nodded and said, “It was only a bad dream.”

  He carried his daughter back into her room and laid her down on her bed. He kissed her cheek and then both her eyelids. He set the gun on the nightstand and adjusted the fan so that it wouldn't blow directly on her. He heard his mother's bedroom door close, and then, as if in response, the beat cop dropped his wooden club on the banquette outside. It was one of the city's oldest customs—a signal that all is well and that someone is on guard.

  Rourke's heart was pumping wildly again, though, as he lay down beside his sleeping daughter. His ribs ached from the battering they'd taken rolling around on the slaughterhouse killing floor. The cut on his hand burned like fire. The rush still coursed through his blood, though—the high that came from danger and destruction.

  He turned his head and stared at his gun where it sat on the nightstand, the metal of the barrel glinting in the light that spilled through the door from the hallway.

  Katie sighed in her sleep, and the sound of it was swallowed up by a sudden splash of water on the windowpanes. It was raining.

  Daman Rourke leaned against the brick column at the entrance to the Criminal Courts Building the next morning and watched as people thronged the streets around the Parish Prison. A chant started up, with the heat and beat of drums: Re-my, Re-my, Re-my Lelourie.

  The chant broke into cheers and whistles as the crowd undulated and parted, and she emerged. A white rose flew through the air to land at her feet, and then another and another, until the sky rained roses.

  Fiorello Prankowski thumbed his hat back farther on his head for a better look at the show. “Fuckin' reporters,” he said. “They got no shame. All we've been hearing for a week is how we've been dragging our asses in arresting her, and now they're all over our case 'cause it turns out some other guy did it.”

  Rourke pushed his hands deeper into his pockets and leaned harder against the column, as if he were now what was holding the building up. He watched her start to get into a duck-green Pierce-Arrow he had never seen before, but then she paused for a moment to lift her radiant face up to the sky and she was smiling.

  “I guess Vinny McGinty must've thought that if he went to a lawyer and spilled his guts about what went down, Maguire would figure there was no sense anymore in killing him,” Fio said, still working the case over in his mind. “Jesus…Like he couldn't add up that one squealing goon plus one grandstanding lawyer is only gonna get you two dead bodies.”

  “Except that wasn't how it happened,” Rourke said. “He told me with his dying breath that he didn't kill Charles St. Claire.”

  “And you believe him?”

  “He swore it on the blue star.”

  Fio tilted his head back to stare at Rourke, trying to figure it out. Trying to figure Rourke out. Rourke kept his face averted, not helping him any.

  “These are not happy thoughts, partner,” Fio finally said. “'Cause if Casey Maguire didn't kill ol' Charlie, then somebody else did.”

  Rourke said nothing. The crowd had surged around the car, unwilling to let her go. A little girl in a starched white pinafore held a magnolia blossom up to the window. Remy Lelourie leaned out, laughing, to take it withboth hands, and it was as if she were embracing them all. She was theirs once again. Innocence redeemed.

  Fio sighed and tugged his hat brim back down over his eyes. “If she did it after all, then she's home free.”

  Rourke's gaze followed the Pierce-Arrow as it pulled out into the traffic and disappeared around the corner. Home free. They had tried, convicted, and executed Casey Maguire yesterday in that shootout on the slaughterhouse killing floor. He and Fio were hero cops, the press had their hot story, the Department could close out the St. Claire murder case, and the Cinderella Girl was home free.

  The crowd was moving away now, leaving white roses scattered and trampled on the sidewalk and floating in the rainwater in the gutter. Rourke wondered what she would do now that it was over. She would leave, he thought, go back to the good life of champagne baths and tango dances and petting parties in the purple dawn. He wondered if this time she would tell him good-bye.

  “Well, partner, this is sure an exciting conversation the two of us are having about how we probably fucked up the case,” Fio said, “but I'm done detecting for today. Plumb wore out. I'm going to go home, is what I'm going to do now. Maybe pluck out a song or two on my parlor organ.”

  “Play one for me,” Rourke said, and he smiled, but his heart wasn't in it.

  Rourke watched Fio leave and then pushed himself off the column and began the hot walk down Saratoga Street toward City Hall. He had himself announced into his father-in-law's office, only to go without a word of greeting to the window.

  The palms and statues were still there in Lafayette Square, but this morning a spasm band was entertaining the loafers on the park benches, their bottle-capped shoes striking sparks off the paving stones as they
danced. He couldn't tell for sure, but he thought the boy strumming the washboard was LeRoy's baby brother, LeBeau.

  “Hambone, hambone, have you heard? Mama's gonna buy me a mockingbird.”

  “Well, hello there to you, too, Day,” Weldon Carrigan said to his back.

  Rourke turned around and braced his shoulder against the window's wide wooden casement, crossing his legs at the ankles.

  “Officially, I got to reprimand you for the way you handled this Maguire mess,” the superintendent was saying as he opened the bottom drawer of his mahogany desk and pulled out a bottle of bourbon and a pair of cut-crystal tumblers. “The newspapers are calling it the Slaughterhouse Bloodbath. Going in there with guns blazing, a half a dozen citizens dead—although none of them innocent, praise the Lord.”

  He poured a couple of fingers of the bourbon into each glass and pushed one toward the edge of the desk in Rourke's direction. “Unofficially, now…you've saved our collective asses, Day. For one thing, there isn't going to be any Trial of the Century.”

  He smiled and raised his glass in a toast, then took a sip, seeming to savor the taste of the bourbon with pleasure, although his pleasure faded some when Rourke made no move to pick up his own glass. “Since when do you got something against drinking before noon?”

  Rourke slanted his father-in-law a hard look from beneath the lowered brim of his hat, but inside he was feeling unclean just being in this room, as if he were sticking his hand in a spittoon. “What do you got to celebrate, Weldon? I would think you'd be missing Casey Maguire and the pad he had y'all on here at City Hall. Or has the next one like him already come along?”

  The other man's face went tight with anger for a moment, then eased into a smile as charming as any Rourke could produce. “I think you should go on home now, Day. Maybe take a few days off the job. It's been a long and tiring week.”

  “LeRoy Washington is dead. Shot to death by the gun bulls while trying to escape.”

  Carrigan studied his glass as he twirled the booze around a couple of times before taking another slow sip. “I'm afraid I don't—oh, yes. The unfortunate Negro boy who went to prison for killing Bobby Joe Maguire.”

  “He wasn't a boy.”

  Carrigan raised his head, his gaze meeting Rourke's. His face still held its customary look of affability gloving an iron fist, but a small tick had begun to pulse below his right eye. “What exactly is this about?”

  “It's about LeRoy Washington and the boss cop he said came to him while he was chained to a toilet and looking at a murder rap that had ‘sure thing’ written all over it. A boss cop with the juice to cut the kind of deal that gets a colored man prison for killing a white man instead of the electric chair.”

  A flush seeped slowly over Weldon Carrigan's cheekbone, and the tick beneath his eye picked up its beat.

  “Andit's aboutabent cop by the name of RoibinDoherty,” Rourke went on, “whom I saw leaving your house the evenin' of your birthday party, and a few hours later he turns up dead. He was shot witha .38. Acop's gun. Except for that one time he lost his temper and strangled his brother, Maguire preferred to do his killing secondhand. He used Doherty to get rid of Sean and Vinny for him, and that just naturally makes me wonder just who he used to cap Doherty.”

  Carrigan carefully set his glass of bourbon on the desk, lining it up between the onyx postage-stamp box and the cedar humidor. “I think you'd better shut up now, boy, while you still got a job.”

  Rourke managed a laugh, although it came out scratched. “Cut the shuck, Weldon. We both know you'll never get me fired. You're too scared of what you think I can prove.”

  He straightened slowly and came to stand next to the desk, leaning over it so that Carrigan started to lean back in his chair, away from him, before he stopped himself. “I will have my quarterback, though,” Rourke said.

  Weldon Carrigan glared up at him, his face now showing the iron fist ungloved, but if there was one thing he understood it was leverage, and at the moment Rourke had it all.

  “What are you talking about?” the superintendent said. “What quarter?”

  Rourke smiled. It was not one of his nicer ones. “The two bits I gave you for your honor…I overpaid.”

  His ribs were still too sore for him to play his sax, so Rourke went flying instead.

  He took the Spad up until the earth was a smear of brown and blue and green beneath him, an impressionist palette done by the hand of an indifferent God. The wind was one long screaming note in his ears, and the dying day had turned the sky the color of blood dried by the sun. Up here you could feel the vastness of the universe and understand how slender, how fragile, was the thread that held you to it.

  Fly hard enough, far enough, fast enough, and the string would break.

  The stars were popping like hot sparks in the black sky when he went out to Sans Souci later that night.

  He parked the Indian at the top of the oyster-shell drive and walked around to the back of the house. The air was taut, waiting, as he crossed the yard. It was so still that each leaf on the pecan and oak trees looked etched in metal.

  He climbed onto the porch of the old slave shack and looked out toward the bayou. The water was like a sheet of black glass, mirroring the moon.

  Nine nights ago, Charles St. Claire had been dying here, drowning in his ownblood. Before that moment came, maybe he had stood like this out on the porch and seen that bad ol' moon come rising up to float in the bayou. Maybe he had seen his killer coming for him from out of the hot, wet darkness, the midnight heat.

  Rourke blinked, and the moon in the water shattered into pieces.

  He went inside.

  He stood in the dark for a moment, and it seemed he could hear the panting breaths, could feel the screams come bubbling up, bursting in his own throat, feel the cut of the knife and taste death in the hot blood that filled his mouth.

  Could hear the rattle of the banana leaves and the locusts' scratching song falling into a breath-held silence. Hear rotting wood groaning beneath a footstep—

  He whirled.

  Her face was white in the moonlight, and beautiful, but her eyes burned wild. Crazy.

  She came toward him across the porch and through the door. He only breathed again when he saw that her hands were empty.

  She came all the way to him, and his heart was still racing, running even faster now. She wore the same white satin robe she'd had on the night he'd taken her on the floor of Sans Souci, the robe and nothing else.

  When she put her hands around his throat, he didn't try to stop her. She pulled his head down to her mouth and she was tasting him with her mouth, kissing him, moving her tongue with his. Her hands pulled him closer, so that their bellies and hips ground together. Her skin was hot.

  He reached up and wrapped his hands around her wrists and thrust her hard away from him.

  She was trembling all over, and she looked at him as if she would devour him. “You don't know what it's like,” she said, “to have to wait and wait and wait for you for years, and then to have to wait some more.”

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then wiped it again, but he couldn't get rid of the taste of her. “You bour-réed me good, baby,” he said. “You really had me believing you didn't do it.” He wiped his mouth again. His hand was shaking. “I guess my first clue that you were lying all along should've been when you told me there was no other man.”

  She stared at him, saying nothing, and the sight of her was like the sound of a saxophone, and that could cut you in half when you were alone.

  Her eyes closed for a moment, and her mouth tightened with something, pain, regret—it didn't matter because by then it seemed that what he was seeing was so far away it wasn't even in this world.

  “I had to lie to you about that, Day. You would never have believed anything else if I told you I'd been sleeping with Casey Maguire.”

  “Oh, lady, you got that right.” His laugh was sharp, cutting himself more than her.

&nbs
p; She brought her hand up to her throat, was rubbing her throat as if the secret were buried there, right above her collarbone. “You don't understand,” she said. “He was the closest I could come to you. He had your blue star.”

  Sweet Jesus.

  “And I lied to you about Charles going up to Angola to see that colored boy because I had to get out of jail. I saw a way of getting you to see how Casey Maguire could have done it all, but I didn't do any killing myself. Not this time.” She smiled, but it cracked midway and turned into something else. “I lied to you, Day, over and over, and yet still I'm saying you must believe me. You must believe in me.”

  This time the laugh that came out of him was ragged, desperate. “Baby, wanting to believe you has never been my trouble.”

  She reached up and touched him, a light brush of her fingers across his cheek. “Then do. Believe in me, love me. Love me, Daman Rourke, if you dare.”

  She left him, then, walking out the door without looking back, left him feeling strangely bereft and empty, like a promise unfulfilled.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  FROM THE EDITORIAL PAGE OF THE NEW ORLEANSTimes-Picayune, Friday, July 21, 1927:

  KEEP IT IN CHICAGO, BOYS

  New Orleans has once again sent a message to all organized criminal outfits to get out of town and stay out. Mr. Casey Maguire and his gang of Mafia-financed bootleggers were involved in a shootout with police Wednesday evening that has left six of their number dead, including Mr. Maguire. When the heroic law enforcement officers—who had reason to suspect the bootlegger was responsible for the brutal slaying last week of prominent New Orleans attorney Mr. Charles St. Claire—arrived at Mr. Maguire's slaughterhouse to question him, one of his men panicked and opened fire, and a veritable bloodbath ensued. This time, however, it was the ones responsible who paid the ultimate price for their lawlessness. Yes indeed, a message has been sent to Mr. Al Capone and his ilk, those criminals who might think to conduct their dirty business here in New Orleans: Abandon all hope ye who enter here. Keep it in Chicago, boys.