Читать книгу Mortal Sins - Penn Williamson - Страница 8

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 ruining 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 canebrakes.

“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?”

“A cootch dancer who 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 a booze-glazed look in her dark brown 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.

Fio stretched his arms up to the paling sky, popping his bones. “Man, I’m way past tired to almost dead myself. But you know soon as I roll on home, the wife is gonna jump on my case about being out all night.”

“Remy Lelourie has kindly offered to give us her fingerprints,” Rourke said. “She will be paying us a visit first thing this mornin’.”

“Oh, joy,” Fio said just as the Smoky Mary clattered over the rails behind them, her whistle wailing long and shrill and lonely.

The house where Daman Rourke lived on Conti Street had once belonged to his mother’s lover. In the last few years he’d been able to look at it without remembering that, but not tonight—or rather, this morning.

The honey wagons were rattling over the cobblestones, carting away the refuse from those places that still had outhouses, by the time Rourke finally made it home. He let himself in through the carriageway of the beautiful old Creole cottage and into the courtyard. In the murky light of dawn, the wisteria vines and elephant ears sent blue shadows splashing across the paving stones. It smelled wet, of rain-soaked leaves and black earth.

The courtyard was an oasis of peace in a rather rough-and-tumble part of town. The Faubourg Tremé was now known for its speakeasies, jazz, and bawdy houses. A hundred years before, though, it had been the custom for white plantation owners and their sons to maintain homes for their quadroon mistresses here.

In those days the gens de couleur libres had also lived in the Faubourg Tremé. They had been free men of color, not slaves; although some of them owned slaves themselves. They were tailors and blacksmiths and cabinetmakers. Some became rich, and so they built houses in the Creole style, and then they filled them with mahogany furniture, hung their walls with silk, and lived within them lives that were genteel, but separate.

They spoke French and sent their sons to school in Paris. Those sons whose skin was light enough they sent north, to disappear into the white man’s life. Some sent their daughters to parade in their satin gowns and bare brown shoulders across a quadroon ballroom, to attract the eye of a protector with money and property and a pale face. For when put on a scale, the word color outweighed the word free, and if one of them had dared even to raise his voice to a white man, he risked being lynched from the nearest green-iron lamppost.

That was long ago, though, in another time, and some things were different now. Now much of the neighborhood was little more than a slum, where you could buy any brand of sin you cared to name. The wrought-iron balconies on the old town houses drooped like tattered swags of lace; rats and dogs fought over the bones in the garbage-strewn courtyards. Yet somehow through it all the old houses and cobbled streets had kept their romance and charm, along with their secrets and hidden shame.

Daman Rourke, coming from the scenes of two brutal murders, stood within the smothered emptiness of the courtyard as if not quite knowing how he came to be there. For a moment he thought it was raining again, and then he realized it was only the water splashing in the iron fountain.

Light leaked out from around the shutters of the small rear cabinet where his mother’s housekeeper slept. Augusta always got up with the dawn; she was certain the day couldn’t begin without her and no one had ever been able to prove otherwise. Where he lived, in the garçonnière over the old kitchen, all was shadowed.

He thought of the brass bed in the old slave shack out at Sans Souci and how so like Charles St. Claire it would have been to meet his mistress there, close to hearth and home and wife. Snort a little snow, drink a little wormwood, and do a little jig on the edge of the moon.

So she walks out there, the wife, and she sees …

Maybe it was true love, he had said to Fio, and thought that he’d been lying. And maybe he’d only wanted it to be a lie.

If you love, desperately, passionately, and the one you love loves another, would you kill in the name of your love? Maybe. Probably.

Yes.

Seeing her again after all this time, in the same room, close enough to touch, to smell, had been like wrapping his fist around broken glass. Once, he might have killed her just to keep her his.

He made a sudden movement with his hand, as if he could fling the thought away. A flock of starlings rose off the roof in a black cloud of flapping wings. He turned to watch them fly away and saw his mother.

She sat on a bench, deep in the shadows near the fountain. He had walked right by her when he came in through the carriageway. Anyone else would have said something, but not Maeve Rourke. Some people used silence as a weapon; she used it as a shield. He had long ago given up waiting for her to explain herself to him.

In the dawn light, her face was white and ethereal as mist. She had on her wine-colored silk dressing gown, and her long dark hair was down and fell along the sides of her face like a nun’s veil. He started toward her, and that was when he saw that she wasn’t alone.

His daughter lay sleeping on the bench, her head in his mother’s lap. She wore a nightgown of white cotton and eyelet lace, but she had a Pelicans baseball hat on her head, and she was hugging the mitt he’d given her for her sixth birthday to her chest as though it were a teddy bear.

“Hey, Mama,” he said as he knelt and kissed his daughter’s cheek, which was soft and sticky and smelled of watermelon. “What y’all doing out here this early in the mornin’?”

“She was walking in her sleep again last night, and then she went and had a bad dream on top of it. Woke herself up with her crying, the poor thing. I thought she’d do better if I brought her out for some air.”

His mother waved a palmetto fan in a slow, drowsy motion in front of the child’s face. Maeve Rourke had been born and raised in Ireland, in County Kerry, but she was southern all the way to the bone now. As if she’d absorbed her southernness from this house and the Faubourg Tremé, and from the man who had brought her here.

“She dreamt the gowman was coming to get her,” his mother said, her voice soft. She laughed, then, and the sound of it too was soft in the dawn’s half-light, yet it surprised him, for she so rarely laughed. “I suspect it was either the gowman, or too much watermelon on top of supper.”

Ever so gently he followed with his finger the length of his daughter’s fat brown braid, where it curved over her shoulder and down her back, and he relieved some of the ache in his chest with the whisper of her name.

“Katie …”

Something brushed his cheek, a touch so light he might only have imagined it. “You looked so sad there for a moment,” Maeve said. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing. Well, no more than the usual. Two murders.”

“And now you’ve taken it all upon yourself to see the culprits are brought to justice. You shouldn’t care so much, Day.”

He had to smile. “What did you and Fio do—get together and write a script?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you are goin’ on about.” She was quiet a moment, then she breathed a soft sigh. “People will always be doing ugly things to each other, bringing each other pain.”

He didn’t say it, although he could have: that she had been the first to teach him about ugly doings and pain, and she had taught him young. They had their own family secrets, he and Maeve Rourke. Their own buried sins.

His mother waved the fan between them, while the sky lightened from cinder gray to ash. He thought he should tell her about Charles St. Claire’s bad death and that Remy Lelourie had probably killed him.

“Give her over to me,” he said instead. “I’ll put her back to bed.”

His daughter felt heavy in his arms as he lifted her. A solid and yet giving warmth, wondrously alive. At the door, he looked back to where his mother still sat on the bench. He knew it was only the way the vines were casting their shadows across her face, but in that moment she appeared strangely stricken and sad.