Читать книгу Mortal Sins - Penn Williamson - Страница 11

Chapter Six

She came toward him out of the shadowed, trash-littered alley, a mystery woman in black silk.

“I have a quarrel to pick with you, Lieutenant Daman Rourke,” she was saying, her voice as breathless and broken as he felt. “Your captain says you played a lyin’, sneaky, dirty trick on me. It seems there is no law that says I had to come down here just on your sayso and roll my fingers on that inky pad. And now you’re going to try and hang me with that nasty ol’ bloody thumbprint.”

He smiled. “Electrocute you.”

She laughed, as he had known she would. She had never been afraid of either sinning or dying.

“Dead is dead, and hell is hell, and it doesn’t much matter how you get there,” she said, her mouth almost singing the words. Her mouth was unforgettable. He had never forgotten the taste of her mouth. “But you shouldn’t try and send me there ahead of you, Day.”

She had come all the way up to him, to where he leaned against the rakish fender of his Stutz Bearcat Roadster, came up to him so close their bellies almost brushed, and she put her hand to his throat as though she was going to choke him, but gently. “That isn’t fair.”

“You know what they say about all being fair.”

“But which game are we playing at this time, darlin’—love or war?”

He could feel his pulse pounding against her hand. Once, they hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other.

“War for now,” he said. “Although we can have a go at love again, if you’ve the guts for it.”

Her fingers followed a sinew in his neck down to the hollow in his throat and paused there, pressing a little. “Is that a dare?”

Jesus, oh, Jesus.

Her hand fell to her side and she took a step back. “I bet you call her ‘baby,’” she said.

“What?” he said. He could still feel the pounding of his own pulse in his throat.

She walked away from him, trailing her hand over the automobile’s long and sexy hood, softly stroking the canary yellow paint job with those red-lacquered nails.

She laughed at the look on his face. “You do call her ‘baby.’ I bet you take her out on the Old Shell Road and say, ‘Come on, baby. Let’s see how fast you can go.’”

Rourke couldn’t help laughing with her, because she was right. He’d paid the Bearcat’s exorbitant thirty-five-hundred-dollar price tag with bourré winnings, and he thought that putting the six-cylinder, air-cooled Franklin engine through its paces was almost as good as sex.

Remy had come back to him, close enough to touch him, although this time she didn’t. “So take me for a ride in her, Day. And make her go fast.”

He had intended all along to take her for a ride. It was why he’d had the desk sergeant bring her out this back way, away from the crush of reporters and her adoring fans. He wanted to take her to a place where he could see how much, if any, she had changed.

He opened the passenger door and watched her climb in, flashing her long legs. As she settled into the Bearcat’s low-slung, hand-buffed Spanish leather seat, her black sheath dress rode up to reveal the roll of her stockings and shocking pink knees. Painted nails and rouged knees—she was sure one hot little tomato.

“Mourning becomes you,” he said.

She looked up at him, her eyes wide and guileless. “Am I being too subtle, do you think? Should I have wrapped myself up in long black taffeta skirts and a veil?”

He could feel an energy pulsing off her like heat lightning. He knew where that had come from. Even in the little bit of time he’d spent with her there in the squad room, he’d watched her come to possess them all, one by one. Seasoned, jaded cops who’d seen everything and should have known better had fallen into those big, cat-like tilted eyes, and their souls had become electrified.

And she had fed off them, was feeding off them still.

Rourke got behind the wheel and started the engine, but before he put the Bearcat in gear, he pulled a hip flask of scotch out of his pocket and held it out to her. “To soothe the grieving widow’s shattered nerves.”

“To love and war,” she said, taking the flask, touching just the back of his hand, and he despised himself for it, but he felt the burn of her touch low and deep in his belly.

Rourke sent the Bearcat shooting out of the alley in a cloud of dust and a scattering of oiled gravel.

He took Tulane Avenue to Claiborne and turned east. She didn’t ask where they were going, not even when they headed toward the river and open country on the St. Bernard Highway. He opened the Bearcat up, coaxing the speedometer up to eighty miles per hour, which was twice as fast as any sane man would drive on that road.

She was drinking steadily from the flask, probably more than was wise for someone about to be grilled by a homicide detective. “You are so mean, Daman Rourke,” she said after a time.

“Am I?”

“I walked into that police station of yours scared to death, and you give me this look. Just like some nasty ol’ monster would do, before he goes chasing after the girl and growling ‘I’m gonna get yooou.’”

He laughed, and she smiled back at him. She had to hold down her hat against the wind they made, and he could see the blue veins on the inside of her arm. Her face shone like a white rose.

This was like a scene in one of her movies, he thought. Drinking bootleg whiskey in a fast car, with the wind in their hair. The gay, irresponsible, tomorrow-we-die celluloid life.

Last night, covered head to toe in her murdered husband’s blood, still she had seemed so frightened and vulnerable. So innocent, if you didn’t know her. Last night she had tried to seduce him with her innocence.

She was still trying to seduce him. But this morning there was a brittleness, an edgy desperation, to her. She was more believable somehow, this Remy.

He cut his eyes off the road and back to her again. There was that luminescent quality about her that shone through so strongly on the movie screen, a shimmering, like an icicle melting in the sun, but she gripped the flask so hard her knuckles had bled white, and he could see faint black stains left by the fingerprinting.

“Don’t you think you ought to be getting yourself a lawyer?” he said.

She took another long pull of the scotch. “That’s what Mama told me—well, Mama didn’t tell me exactly, since we aren’t speaking. She had Belle telephone this morning and pass along the wisdom: that I need to get me a lawyer. ’Course, Mama isn’t worried about me being arrested so much as she is about me not getting the house. You know how Mama feels about Sans Souci.”

“So are you going to get the house? Does it come to you in St. Claire’s will?”

“You are such a cop anymore, Day. Now you’re thinking I killed him for a house.”

She had pushed her lips into a little pout, playing with him, being obvious about it and not even caring that he would see right through her, not caring that he knew she had coveted Sans Souci the whole of her life.

He slammed on the brakes and the Bearcat slewed to a stop, tires screeching and burning rubber. He stared at her and she stared back at him, unblinking. She wasn’t even breathing hard.

Then, as he watched, her eyes slowly filled with tears. She turned her head away, to look across an empty pasture toward an old dairy barn. The barn, once painted red, was now the color of rust. You could see, just barely, the faded image of a spotted cow on the steeply slanted roof.

He gripped her chin and pulled her head around to face him. “My, my, just look at you—the grieving widow all of a sudden. But who are the tears for, baby? For yourself, or for him? Do you want me to believe you’re sorry he’s dead?”

She shook her head, and he felt a splash of wetness on the back of his hand. “Don’t be like this, Day, please,” she said, so softly he could barely hear her. “Don’t hate me like this.”

He let go of her as if she’d suddenly caught on fire. She was setting him up, twisting him inside out, with her truths and her lies. He knew that if he let himself listen to her long enough, he would find a way to believe whatever she told him.

He listened to her cry for a while, until her cheeks were all puffy and wet, and her nose had turned red. He had seen her cry like this before, both for real and in her movies—hard, brutal tears that could make her seem so human as to be almost ugly. That she wasn’t so beautiful when she cried made it even easier to believe her. But then she probably knew that as well.

“I am sorry for Charles,” she was saying. “For his dying and the horrible way of it, and for all the pain we’d brought to each other in these last months.”

She looked at him, with her lips partly open, her eyes so wet and dark and deep. Like her tears, everything about her had the potential to be a lie. He gripped the steering wheel, hard, to keep from touching her, and drove off the road, turning onto a track that cut through the pasture toward the old dairy barn. The barn had been converted into a hangar, where a couple of Spad fighter planes and a Jenny trainer had been relegated as surplus from the war. One of the pastures had been turned into an airfield, although nothing stirred there now but the cattails and the crows. Even the wind sock hung listless in the thick, sultry air.

He had gone to war after she had left him that summer, the summer of 1916. The Great War, they called it, and great it had been from the way it consumed blood and flesh and bones by the trenchload. America hadn’t joined in the carnage yet, but there had been a French flying squadron of American volunteers, the Lafayette Escadrille. Daman Rourke had gone to France hoping to die, and instead he had renewed his love affair with danger in the form of tracer bullets blazing out of the blinding sun. He had discovered inside himself new and terrible talents, for fighting and killing and jousting in the sky.

He’d had to stop the killing after the war was over, but he hadn’t been able to give up the flying. It was so easy, he had discovered, and so very sweet, to take an airplane out on the screaming edge and dance.

Usually for stunt flying he flew one of the Spads, but he rolled the Jenny out of the barn now and began a preflight check, running his hands over the struts, testing the tension of the flying wires, tightening nuts and bolts. Remy walked around the plane the way she’d walked around the Bearcat, touching it, taking in the fragile contraption of wood and wire and fabric.

“Is it your intention to take me flying in this thing?” she finally said.

“Well, you did allow as how you wanted to go fast. Guaranteed thrills, and your money back if you get killed.” He put a whole lot of challenge and just a touch of meanness into his smile. “It’s double-dare time, Remy Lelourie.”

She only laughed.

He helped her to put on goggles, helmet, and one of his old leather jackets, and then he lifted her up into the front cockpit’s worn wicker seat. Even though she wouldn’t be doing the piloting, because of her much lighter weight she would have to ride up there to prevent the aircraft from being nose-heavy.

She sat in the cockpit, watching him, and he thought he could feel the excitement in her, the life, like a vibration along the plane’s flying wires. She watched his every move as he checked to be sure the ignition switch was off and that both the air- and gasintake valves were open before he hand-pumped air pressure into the gas tank. He went to the front of the plane and flipped the propeller four times clockwise, then came back to the cockpit and slowly shut down the air valves and turned on the magneto switch. He went around up front again, put his palms on the propeller blade, and heaved.

The engine coughed and roared to life even as he was jumping clear of the flying propeller blades. He swung up onto the wing as the plane began to roll.

He climbed into the cockpit and took the Jenny up. The horizon was strung with wisps of gray clouds, like dirty feathers, but the sky above them glowed with a soft, saffron light. They went up and up, flying, until the palmettos, the water oaks and willows, were all reduced to green splashes on brown earth, and the oyster and shrimp boats looked small as doodlebugs on the water. They flew, soaring high toward the sun, and he widened his eyes so that he saw the whole world below, above and around him.

He cruised for a while, getting the feel of the plane, and then he warmed up with a few barrel rolls and a couple of loop-the-loops. At the end of the last loop, he fell out into a slight dive, then climbed to full power until he was flying completely upside down. At the top of the circle, instead of cutting his engine and diving down to complete yet another loop, he held full power and rolled a half turn to the left and back again into an upright position, and then he twisted the plane around into a long, straight spin, going down and down and down, and he held it, held it, held it, as the ground came rushing up to meet them.

He waited until the last possible second to pull out of the spin, waited until he was a heartbeat away from being too late, reaching for that belly-clenching, breathless place between greased lightning and the sweet spot where it hits.

Any other woman in the world would have screamed. Death was screeching at them on the press of the wind, but Remy Lelourie was laughing.

She hadn’t changed.

On the drive from the airfield back to the city, they stopped along the side of the road where a man was selling slices of watermelon off the tailgate of a battered pickup truck. They ate the fruit sitting side by side on the Bearcat’s running board, spitting seeds into the dirt and getting their hands and faces all sticky.

Pinpricks of sunlight pierced the black straw of her hat, freckling her ear and jaw. Her lips were wet with watermelon juice. He thought of the way it had been between them once, how they’d been no more than kids, really, and yet there had been something pure and distilled in the fury of their love, like the blue flame of a match before it burns out on its own. Afterward, he had gone off to war, he’d married another woman, had a child by her and then buried her—he had lived and thought himself over Remy Lelourie.

“What are you doing here?” he asked aloud. “You had the whole world to play in, so what have you come back for?”

Her mouth pulled into something that was not quite a smile. “You might find this hard to believe, but there’s a limit to how much one can bear of a thing—even champagne baths and tango dancing and petting parties in the purple dawn.”

He spat a seed at a fence post. “Yeah, I’ve had that same feeling myself lately—too much of a good thing. Like too many scotch-and-ryes and bourré games that last past two in the morning. Too many dead bodies.”

She turned her head and met his gaze, but her face kept her secrets well. He had read once that when you are acting whatever you are thinking, the camera will catch it. But if your thoughts are lies—what then does your audience see?

“I wanted to come home, Day,” she said. “Oh, maybe not for forever, but for a little while. Sometimes the past can seem as if it has a powerful hold on you, way more than any future can ever hope to claim. I just wanted to come home for a spell. Is that so hard to understand?”

“No,” he said, but that was a lie as well. He didn’t understand all of it, not when he remembered how their future had been destroyed by what she had done that hot summer’s evening eleven years ago. He had always known why she had left. What he still didn’t know was how—brave as she was, reckless as she was—she had ever dared to come back.

“It was double-dare time for Remy Lelourie,” she said softly, as if she were reading his mind, and that was impossible, surely, for she couldn’t have known what he had seen.

He took her watermelon rind and tossed it, along with his, into the weed-choked ditch. He gave her his handkerchief to wipe her hands, and the juice off her mouth. “We’d better be getting you home,” he said.

They spoke only once more on the way back to New Orleans. He asked her where she’d been going with her suitcase all packed up last night, the same night her husband just happened to have got himself carved up with a cane knife, and she said, “It’s been so hot lately, I decided to go out to the lake for a spell.” But he knew that that too was a lie.

He let her out at the top of the oyster-shell drive and watched her walk away from him through the moss-strung oaks, watched her passing through sunlight and shadow, toward the house with its slender white colonnettes and wide, gracious galleries. Although she was a thoroughly modern girl with her bobbed hair and painted nails, her rolled stockings and rouged knees, she looked as if she belonged only to that house and to the South, to the past.

Once, years ago, when they were lovers, his greatest fear had been that she would give up everything, even him, to possess Sans Souci. She had left him anyway, only she’d left the house, as well.

In the end, though, it was Sans Souci she had chosen to come back to, and not him.

Her mama had been the one to plant that particular obsession in Remy’s head. Generations ago, as far back as the 1850s, the plantation had belonged to the Lelouries. It had been lost, in a game of cards or through a duel, or maybe those old stories lied and it had simply been sold to pay off bad debts—the how of it had never been important, anyway. What had always mattered to the Lelouries was getting it back. You had to be from New Orleans to understand that a house like Sans Souci was more than cypress wood and bricks. It was a testimony to past glories and old sins, a bequest wrapped up in pride, honor, and immortality. A legacy of ambition, greed, and deceit. It was la famille.

It was a thing Rourke did understand, this obsession with the past and la famille. His past and Remy’s—it was like a shared sin, not forgotten, but never confessed. For once, years ago, his mother had left him and his father and brother, and had gone to live with her lover in the house on Conti Street.

Her lover, whose name had been Reynard Lelourie.