Mortal Sins Read online

  It hadn't all been a lie, what he'd last said to Fio about needing to get laid.

  Memory could be like a train whistle in the night, sucking you deep into the low-down blues. You could stop it, sometimes, with booze or drugs, but the best way he'd found was to lose yourself in the arms of a woman, if she was your woman, maybe. If she hadn't left you yet, or died on you, or just plain given up on you.

  No trumpet sobbed out its heart in this uptown neighborhood of double shotgun and camelback houses. Rourke killed the bike's engine as he rolled it to a stop alongside Bridey O'Mara's front stoop.

  Shadows stirred on a gallery smothered with purple wisteria. A porch swing creaked.

  He stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at the woman on the swing. His woman, maybe. She sat with her knees drawn up beneath her chin and her arms wrapped around her legs. Her head was tucked low, as if she were trying to hide behind the long fall of her Irish red hair.

  “Hey, baby,” he said. “It's after two in the mornin'. What're you doing still up?”

  She raised her head, and the curtain of her hair parted. Light from the street lamps bled through the thick vines and onto her face. Her cheeks glowed damp with sweat, or maybe tears.

  He stayed where he was at the bottom of the steps, staring up at her. She stared back at him a moment, then jerked her head away. “A couple of cops were here looking for you. I had to tell them I hadn't seen you in over a week.”

  Her voice had come out broken and rough. She gripped her legs tighter and rocked a bit. The swing moaned. “I was sitting out here remembering the night Sean didn't come home. Lordy, how it did storm—do you remember? Thunder and lightning and pouring down like it wasn't ever going to quit.”

  Rourke climbed the steps and sat down next to her on the swing. Her eyes were bright and hot.

  “I sat out here on this swing that night, too,” she said, “waiting for him to come home, with the storm going on all around me, and it was like I was falling through a long, black silence. I think that must be what dying's like, Day, don't you? Falling through a long, black silence.”

  He started to touch her, then didn't. “I won't go disappearing on you, Bridey.”

  She let go of her legs and leaned against him, her shoulder pressing against his. She wore only a thin cotton wrapper, and he could feel the heat of her body.

  Memory could be like a train whistle in the night, and sometimes you felt the pull of its call in spite of all your good intentions and best defenses. He thought of Charles St. Claire lying in puddles of blood, his eyes wide open to death. He was afraid he knew well what horror those eyes had seen in their last moments, because long ago his own eyes had watched Remy Lelourie kill.

  This was the place where his thoughts kept getting stuck, like a scratch on a record: If she'd done it once, once, once, she could do it again. Yet he knew already that she had the power to make him believe otherwise. Or not to care.

  “I know he's dead,” said the woman sitting next to him on the swing, and Rourke's mind made a dizzying jerk as he thought that she, too, was seeing that slashed body in the bloody slave shack. Then he realized her thoughts were back in another rainy night, waiting for a man who never came.

  “I know his boat went down in that storm,” she said. “I know that's what happened, I do. But sometimes…”

  Sometimes.

  Rourke turned into her and pulled her close, so he could lay his head between her breasts, and it felt so good. He thought he might have felt her lips in his hair, and then she pulled away from him and stood up. She took him by the hand and led him into her bedroom.

  Her eyes were the golden gray color of pewter caught in candlelight. She had dustings of freckles on her breasts that were wet now from his tongue. He lay upon her, and as she looked up at him, her face was full of feelings and memories that he didn't want to know. He wanted to stay wrapped up in her, lost in her, forever.

  It had been them against the world, growing up poor and tough and running wild on Rousseau Street in the Irish Channel. Daman Rourke, Casey Maguire, Sean O'Mara, and Bridey Kinsella. The summer they were twelve, they went to Mamma Rae, the voodooienne, and for a dollar apiece she tattooed blue eight-pointed stars on the inside of their left wrists. She made up a charm and walked backward three times counterclockwise around a virgin's fresh grave in the light of a waning moon, and then she pronounced them blood brothers for life. It hadn't mattered that Bridey was a girl; she was one of them. They were all three half in love with her, even then.

  Sean had been the one to marry her in the end, though, and he'd kept her until one Sunday two months ago, when he had taken his small trawler out onto Lake Pontchartrain for some spring evening fishing and hadn't been seen or heard from again. If you didn't know Sean O'Mara, you would say how he was a cop who'd gone bad, a boozer and a loser who had racked up big debts with his bootlegger and his bookie. You would say there were riverboats and trains leaving New Orleans all the time, and that sometimes the only way out from under was to start over.

  Only if you grew up together in the hard-luck, hard-scramble neighborhood of the Irish Channel with him watching your back while you watched his, you would know that Sean O'Mara could run wild at times, but he would never run away.

  Or this was what you told yourself on those nights when you lay in Sean O'Mara's spool-turned bed, with Sean O'Mara's wife. When strands of her long hair were caught on your chest, and you could feel the heat of her breath against your face.

  “Bridey,” he said.

  She sighed in answer and pressed her hip into his belly, and his throat closed up on some emotion he couldn't name.

  He had sat up with Bridey all that night, and several nights after, while they dragged the lake and the city's underbelly of speakeasies and hot pillow joints, looking for Sean. He hadn't meant to touch her, not even when she'd cried and asked him to hold her, not even when she had covered his mouth with hers in a kiss full of despair. For her, he knew, their touching was only a way of taking comfort from an old friend. For him it was a different sort of comfort—sweetly lonesome, edged with pain, like the wail of a saxophone. His own wife had been dead going on seven years. He had photographs to remind himself of what she'd looked like, but he had long ago forgotten the music her voice could make when she spoke his name.

  He touched the woman who was lying beside him now, on the inside of her left wrist, where the small faded blue star was but a shadow, like a birthmark. “Bridey,” he said again.

  A smile was beginning to grow at the edges of her mouth and eyes when the telephone rang.

  He saw her face change, saw the hope flare like a struck match for just an instant in her eyes, and he looked away. She would always, he thought, be out on that swing, waiting.

  “It's probably only Mama,” she finally said when the bell had jangled a third time. “She has a hard time sleeping nights since Daddy died.”

  He watched her rise naked from the bed and walk into the parlor, where the telephone rested on a narrow mahogany stand. She answered it with one hand and gathered her hair up off her neck with the other, and the movement arched her back and lifted her breasts. In the light cast by the parlor's red-shaded lamp, her breasts glowed pink, like rare seashells.

  He heard her say, “Yes, he's here. Just a moment, please.”

  He got up, glancing at the camelback clock as he passed by the dresser. It still lacked a couple of hours before dawn.

  He went to her, their bodies brushing together, then parting. He took the handset from her and spoke into the receiver. “Yeah?”

  Fiorello Prankowski's voice, thick with static, came at him out of the night. “Day? We've got us another one.”

  Chapter Three

  THE DEAD MAN LAY WET AND BLOATED, FACEDOWN ON the bayou bank in a web of green algae and swamp trash. Rourke had to pick his way through sucking, sour yellow mud, cattails, saw grass, and the remnants of a rotted pirogue. He really, really hated looking at dead things, and the night was ruinin
g the hell out of his new shoes.

  He squatted down next to the body and motioned to the young patrolman who was holding a lantern to bring the light closer. “You done?” he said to Fio, who'd been photographing the scene. “I want to turn him.”

  The flash lamp on Fio's camera strobed one last time over the black water and clawed branches of the dead cypress trees. “Yeah, yeah, do it,” he said. “Christ.” He shuffled a couple of steps backward, rubbing his nose. The stench was bad: thick and gray and fetid.

  Rourke grabbed the dead man by the left arm and shoulder and heaved. The guy was strangely light, but soggy, as if he'd soaked up the swamp like a soft sponge. He landed on his back with a sodden plop.

  “Shit!”

  A baby water moccasin, its black head flaring, darted out of the gaping hole of the dead man's open mouth. Rourke jerked backward, his heel slipping on the wet ooze, and he almost fell on his butt. The snake slithered out of the corpse's mouth and around his throat to disappear into the cane-brakes.

  “Jesus,” Fio said.

  “Get some light back over here,” Rourke said to the rookie cop, who had dropped the lantern in the mud. Rourke leaned back over the body. He thought at first the man's throat had been cut, and then the light caught the glint of a piano wire buried deep in the white, poached flesh.

  “A professional hit,” Fio said. In the tangle of weeds and abandoned trotlines wrapped around the dead man's legs was a thick rope with a frayed end. The rope's other end was tied in a bowline knot around one thin, twisted ankle. “Looks like he's been in the swamp at least a couple of weeks, maybe more. You recognize him, what's left of him?”

  The face had begun to undergo adipocere from so much time in the water, turning bloated, grotesque, the color of yellowed old wax. But a lurid birthmark the size and shape of a cauliflower flared up the man's neck and over his right cheek, and memory clicked in Rourke's mind: of a round, chinless face marked by that terrible purple stain and made even uglier by a flattened nose pitted with acne scars and small, cement-colored eyes. You couldn't tell if they'd seen any truths at their moment of the death, those eyes, because the crawfish had been at them.

  Rourke searched the past for a name. “Could be a kid from the Irish Channel, name of McGinty. Vinny McGinty. If it's the guy I'm thinking of, he tried to make it as a prizefighter a couple of years back, but he had lead feet and a glass jaw—couldn't even last past the first bell. After he quit the ring, though, he still used to hang out around the Boxing Irish club, trying to talk the contenders into sparring a few rounds. He made his broad and booze money by collecting vigs for the Maguires.”

  Fio blew a thick breath out his nose. “Wonderful, just wonderful. Casey Maguire's got so much juice he can't take a leak without the mayor offering to come along and hold his dick for him…Jesus, what a friggin' night. First a high-society blue blood gets himself slashed to bloody ribbons by the Cinderella Girl, and then one of Maguire's goons comes floating up out of the bayou with his eye sockets sucked clean by the crawdaddies. We're fucked, partner. Fucked. We got ourselves one murder suspect who's a matinee idol and more famous than Babe Ruth, and another murder suspect who fancies himself the New Orleans Al Capone.”

  Casey Maguire was indeed a force to be reckoned with of hurricane proportions in the city of New Orleans. He was what the tabloids called a mobster and City Hall called a businessman. He owned a sugar refinery and a slaughterhouse, along with pieces of all the usual nefarious rackets, but the Volstead Act had truly made him a king. He had a monopoly on all the hooch sold in the city's many speakeasies; he owned the smugglers' boats that brought the brand-name liquor in from Mexico and South America; and he owned the cutting plants where it was watered down and put into bottles. He owned the courts and the federal revenue agents and the city police who were sworn to uphold the laws that made most of what he did illegal.

  Very few people knew, though, that beneath the starched white cuff of his shirt, on the skin of his left wrist, was etched the tattoo of a small blue eight-pointed star. Even fewer people knew what it meant. The juju woman had told them, the summer they were twelve, that they'd all be cursed if even one of them ever broke faith with the blood oath.

  “I guess there's no reason to figure he was actually dumped all the way out here,” Fio was saying as he frowned down at the body. “He could've been floating along for a while, once that rope broke.”

  Rourke stood up, dusting off his hands. “Who found him?”

  “Acootchdancerwho works at that Negro smoke joint on down the road. She said she was taking a walk to get a breath of air. What she'd probably done was take a walk to turn a trick, but whoever the john was—if there was one—he's vamoosed.”

  The girl had straightened brown hair and coffee-brown skin. She sat on the running board of the patrol car, her thin shoulders hunched around the jelly glass of spotioti she had cradled in her hands.

  Her head tilted slowly back as Rourke walked up to her. She had abooze-glazed look in her darkbrown eyes, but she wasn't so far gone that she didn't know she was looking at the white man's law. He saw the fear and wariness settle over her face, like closing the shutters up tight on a storm-battered house.

  He nodded at her. “Thank you for waiting, Miss…”

  She heaved a deep sigh that smelled of the muscatel and whiskey. “Sugar. Well, my given name is Dora, but everybody calls me Sugar. Sugar Baudier.” She tried to put a smile on, but it didn't stick. “I'm a dancer. I work at Jack's Place, on down yonder.”

  She waved her hand at the road that was little more than parallel tracks cut through the saw grass. The road led to a row of weathered shacks with sagging stoops set up on stilts that backed up against the train tracks and faced the bayou. Anchoring the row of shacks was one more shack as dilapidated as the rest, knocked together from scrap boards and tin, which Rourke figured to be Jack's Place from the noise and light leaking out around its rotted shutters. Laughter, the bawl of a saxophone, and a woman crooning “The Mean Lovin' Man Blues.”

  The singer was letting the pain of heartbreak bleed into every aching note. Rourke hadn't even realized he'd paused to listen, until the girl, scared by his weighty silence, started giving him the answers to the questions he hadn't even asked yet.

  “I come out here for a walk, 'cause it was hot inside, and the smoke got to botherin' my asthma, and there he was, out 'longside the bayou, lyin' there in the mud and lookin' like he been dead for a good long while, so I said to myself, Better you go tell Jackson that he better get on down to Mr. Morgan's grocery an' telephone the po-lice, which is what we done. He done.”

  “Was there anyone out here with you, or just hanging out down along the bayou, when you came for your walk?”

  She shook her head so hard he was surprised her ears didn't start ringing. “No, suh. Uh-uh. No, suh.”

  “How about going back a couple of weeks ago? You see or hear anything out of the ordinary happening along the bayou or 'round Jack's Place?”

  “I di'n't see nothin'. No, suh.”

  Her salt-faded dress hung on her scrawny frame and was stiff with dried sweat. In spite of the hard grip she was putting on that jelly glass of spotioti, her hands still trembled. If she was on the hustle she wasn't making much of a living at it, Rourke thought; she looked half-starved and wrung down to nothing on bad booze. But then the men who frequented Jack's Place wouldn't have much more than a quarter to pay for what she had to sell.

  “Miss Baudier,” Rourke said. “You probably don't know this, but the city of New Orleans gives a reward to any citizen who assists the police during the investigation of a suspicious death.” He pulled out what bills he had in his pocket, which amounted to all of five dollars, and held them out to her.

  She stared up at him and he could see she didn't believe him, but she took the money anyway.

  “Giving out rewards again, I see,” Fio said as Rourke joined him. He was waiting at the top of the bayou bank for the Ghoul to show up in his chauffeured green
Packard. “You go and try to put that on the report under expenses and the captain's gonna have your ass.”

  Rourke stared out over the bayou. False dawn was bleeding the sky a bone white, and a mist was creeping up around the cypress roots. He thought he could hear the Smoky Mary coming at them, rumbling along the train tracks that ran in back of the shacks.

  “This Jack's Place—we ain't exactly talking high class,” Fio went on. After almost a year of working together, he was used to Rourke's silences, had learned to talk through them. “Didn't some poor saps get blinded by drinking a white lightning made of wood alcohol and Jamaica ginger out here one night?”

  It could have happened, Rourke thought. Or maybe that was some other joint. The singer had come to the end of her song. He thought he should probably amble on down there and ask around if anyone had seen anything. Nobody would have; this wasn't a part of town where you let yourself pay much attention to what went on around you.

  It wasn't even a part of New Orleans city proper—this large expanse of bays and channels and flooded cypress and willows that comprised the swampy wasteland northeast of the river. In the old days they'd called it the “wet grave,” but that was because of the yellow fever and not because it was a dumping ground for murdered goons.

  The gray light picked out the body of Vinny McGinty lying on the bank of the bayou, bloated, decaying, dead. As dead as Charles St. Claire. Charlie St. Claire had been the flamboyant, handsome son of a fine old New Orleans family—rich, dissolute, and married to the most beautiful woman in the world. Whereas Vinny had been nothing but an ugly immigrant scrub from out of the Irish Channel, who'd dreamed of glory in the ring and ended up busting kneecaps for a living instead. No two men could have been more different in life, and yet, in their final moments, in their surprise and fear and their agony, they had been the same.

  Maybe Fio was right, Rourke thought, maybe he did care too much. But the murdered ones at least deserved the dignity of having the world know why they had died and who had killed them. The ones responsible ought to pay, even if only by being found out.