nodded, slowly, and then her shoulders straightened bravely, but she kept her eyes demurely lowered on the hands in her lap. “I had gone to bed and just drifted off when I was awakened by screaming coming from that old slave shack in back of the house. Since Charles often spent time there when he wanted to be alone, to think and to read, I immediately became afraid for him. But I sleep in the nude, you see, so I had to stop and throw my dress back on before I could go out there.”
“Did you—” The captain’s voice broke roughly while each man in the room was still rocking beneath his own image of a naked Remy Lelourie lying sprawled on silken sheets. “Did you see anyone? Anyone leaving the shack?”
“No, I saw no one … except for Charles. He was lying on the floor and blood was everywhere, and a knife was stuck in his chest. I think I might have pulled it out—the knife. Charles was still breathing, you see. He had a horrible cut in his throat, but he was still breathing, and the cut in his throat was making this awful gurgling noise and spewing blood. He was struggling to say something…. I think it was my name. He was trying to beg me to help him, only I couldn’t, I couldn’t …” She shut her eyes, but a single tear escaped to roll slowly down one flawless cheek.
Somebody breathed loudly; another man sighed. She was playing them like Satchmo played his coronet, Rourke thought, crying up that last sad note until it cut to the bone.
“He died … my Charlie died in my arms,” she said, her voice bleeding like Charles St. Claire had bled. Somebody, Rourke thought, ought to be applauding. Then, slowly, the brim of her hat lifted as her head came up, and she looked right at him, and he almost fell into her eyes.
The desk sergeant saved him by coming up to stand in front of him, blocking his view of her. “The super just rang up,” the sergeant said. “He wants to see you, pronto. He said to tell you he’s taking breakfast at the Boston Club this mornin’.”
Rourke pushed himself off the wall. “When Mrs. St. Claire is done here, don’t let her go out through that mob out front. Take her down to the basement and show her the way up to the alley ’round back.”
“Sure, Loot,” the desk sergeant said with a winking grin as Rourke brushed past him, heading for the door.
Her voice—soft, sad, sweet—followed after him. “I guess I must have gone into shock then, because the next thing I remember is hearing Beulah scream. And the feel of Charles’s body, cold and heavy in my arms.”
He was halfway to the stairwell at the end of the hall when he met Roibin Doherty coming out of the toilet, buttoning up his fly. Rourke started to go around him, but Doherty planted himself in the way, and when Rourke made to go around him a second time, he shifted, putting himself in the way again. The man’s red-veined cheeks bulged with a drooling chaw, whiskey fumes floated off him like hot off a tar road, and hate burned in his swollen, watery eyes. Hate that had long been festering.
“Pardon me,” Rourke said, making an effort to keep his own face flat and empty.
Doherty swayed into him, breathing a reeking laugh, and Rourke almost gagged on a reflex of revulsion and an old, remembered fear.
“Won’t be gettin’ no pardon from me, boy,” Doherty said in a voice as rough as a furnace shaker. “Won’t be gettin’ no pardon from the gov’ner neither on the day they fry your ass up in Angola.”
Doherty’s rank was detective sergeant, but he didn’t do much detecting anymore. He was supposed to be looking after the property and evidence room, maintaining the archival files, and only occasionally covering a case on the street when the workload was heavy. What he mostly did was drink away the hours, waiting for the day when his pension would kick in and brooding over his conviction that Daman Rourke ought to be picking cotton on a prison chain gang instead of carrying a detective’s badge. Usually, though, Rourke could find a way to avoid him, or Doherty’s own sense of survival led him into keeping his malice to himself.
Rourke took a step back now and gave the older man a slow once-over, as if cataloging the cotton suit coat, rumpled and stained with sweat and tobacco juice; the wet spot on the front of his trousers; the grimy, thinning, tangled gray hair.
Rourke smiled, showing his eyeteeth. “Jesus, Sarge. You are like a walking spittoon.”
Doherty swiped at the sweat that dripped off the end of his nose and smirked. “You’re scared, ain’t you, boy? Plumb scared shitless, because it won’t be so easy for y’all to get away with it this time, you an’ her. Not gonna be no suicide verdict for poor ol’ Charlie St. Claire, no sirree bob. Kinda hard to make it look like the man slashed his own throat with a cane knife.”
Rourke smiled again, and he was still smiling when he planted his fist deep in Doherty’s drinker’s belly. It was, he thought, like punching a pillow.
The man doubled over, gasping and wheezing, and Rourke walked around him. He was almost to the head of the stairs when Doherty called out, “Hey, what’s the dirty little secret, boy?” and Rourke made the mistake of turning back around.
Doherty stood swaying in the middle of the hall, a pinched, malevolent light burning in his eyes. Behind him, lounging in the open door to the squad room, was Fiorello Prankowski.
“What’s the secret, huh?” Doherty said again. He wiped the tobacco juice off his mouth with a fat thumb and grinned. “Jus’ what did them poor St. Claire boys have on that lil’ witch of a gal of yours, that Remy Lelourie?”
Rourke said nothing. Doherty’s smile widened, showing off a mouthful of brown teeth and gray gums. He shot a stream of tobacco juice onto the brown linoleum floor and then tottered off down the hall toward the property room.
“Bastard’s been on the sauce so long his brains have turned to boiled grits,” Fio said, but Rourke had seen the sharp calculation come into his partner’s eyes before he’d covered it with a smile and a shake of his head. “Maybe you shouldn’t take it so personal.”
Rourke shrugged. It was probably a hundred degrees in that hallway, the air so wet you could wring it out and get bathwater, and yet he felt cold inside. “I gotta go see the super,” he said. “I’ll catch you later.”
Fio touched his forehead in a mock salute. “Yeah, sure. You do that, partner. You catch me later.”
Outside, a brassy sun smote the sidewalk like a hammer. City smells—of gasoline and garbage and dust—floated on the thick, motionless air like algae on swamp water.
Rourke walked over to Canal Street, where the Boston Club imposed its presence upon the South with classic white elegance. In a city where two or more folk gathering on a street corner were apt to form a club, this was still the oldest and proudest men’s gathering place. If you wanted an invitation to pass through its plain but hallowed front door, it helped if your daddy was a member, and his daddy before him, and yet there were always ways to get around not being born to the proper family. Ways like money and juice.
This morning, a green Pierce-Arrow touring car, all gleaming brass and wood and leather and chrome, was parked alongside the club’s front curb. Underneath the shade of the club’s upper gallery, the city’s official bootlegger stood shooting the breeze with two city-council members and a state legislator. Money and juice. Casey Maguire might have been born poor and Irish, but he’d always possessed a sure knowledge about the privileged and powerful that they barely realized about themselves: He knew all the ways they were for sale.
Rourke waited for the conversation to end, and for the bootlegger to cross the sidewalk toward his car, and then he did what that old drunken sergeant had done with him a moment ago—he planted himself in the way.
Only this time the contest was more even. Casey Maguire boxed daily at the New Orleans Athletic Club; his body was quick and lean and braided with muscle. He wasn’t nearly as tall as Rourke, though, and he had to tilt back on his heels and lift his head to meet Rourke’s eyes.
“Good mornin’, Day,” he said. A small smile played around his wide mouth, as if he knew where this was going and was merely