his accent, he’d put polish on his manners and sophistication into his dress, but he hadn’t been able to do anything about his eyes, which were so pale they were nearly colorless, like spit. When you come from a place where you learn early to do mean unto others before they can do it unto you, it shows in your eyes. Maguire could be frightening, even to those who had come from the same place.
When Rourke didn’t say anything, Maguire moved to go around him. Rourke shifted his weight, putting himself in the way again.
Maguire blew a soft sigh out of pursed lips, as if he were mildly exasperated. “If we’re going to dance, Detective, maybe we should be doing it to music.”
Rourke smiled, and his smile, he knew, could be as frightening as Casey Maguire’s eyes, even to those who came from the same place. “Seen Vinny McGinty lately?” he said.
A sadness settled over Maguire’s face. His was a strangely austere face, like the martyrs in the missals they’d carried to church with them as boys—handsome in a severe way, fine-boned, drawn. The face of a man who could weep as he killed, and so the sadness, Rourke thought, might even have been real.
“Poor Vinny,” Maguire was saying. “He was always talking about taking off north to Chicago, to see if he could make it in the prize rings up there. When he disappeared a couple of weeks ago, I assumed that’s where he’d gone. Now I hear he’s turned up dead in the swamp. What happened? Did he drown?”
“He was garroted with piano wire.”
Maguire’s face was full of beautiful surprise. “Oh, really?”
“Yes, really.”
Maguire sighed again. “I didn’t have him killed, Day, although I know I’ve little chance of convincing you of that. Lately I seem to have turned into the Devil incarnate in your mind.” Now the smile came back, a self-mocking one that invited Rourke to share in the joke. “I’ll have to see Vinny gets the best send-off money can buy. After all, he was practically family.”
It had become a mobster tradition lately, treating fellow gang members to funerals that set records of extravagance with flowers and ornate coffins. The Italians had started it, but now everybody was doing it.
“I’m sure it’ll be one fine funeral,” Rourke said. “And I guess we’ve been to a few of them, you and I. I’ve been thinking a lot about the old days, remembering things.”
What he remembered, suddenly, was one summer’s night, he and Case kneeling across from each other over the body of Rourke’s old man, who was sleeping off a drunk in the gutter, with the rain pouring down on them all, running into their eyes and mouths, turning the street into a river, and Case yelling at him to turn his father over onto his back so that he wouldn’t drown, and Rourke for just that moment not wanting to do it, thinking for just that moment, Drown, you son-of-a-bitch, drown, so that Case had done it instead, and Rourke had just sat there and watched him. Knelt there in the street with rain pouring down and his hands hanging empty and heavy at his sides.
What Rourke said was, “I was remembering how we used to walk through the Swamp on a Saturday night, and you would filch the pennies out of the pockets of all the old bums and winos, even when you weren’t hungry. Even when you were flush. You’d do it just to get in the practice.”
Maguire let several seconds pass between them in silence, and then he said, “I’m telling you I had no reason to kill the guy, Day.”
“But you did it anyway. You’d do it just to get in the practice.”
Maguire’s gaze shifted to the traffic in the street. A coal wagon and an ancient brougham had locked wheels in the intersection, and a Model T was trying to jostle around them, its horn blaring. A streetcar clattered by in the neutral zone, adding to the din.
“If you want to know who killed Vinny,” he said, “why don’t you talk to that nigger cock-queen who was selling him the flake he’d been putting up his nose these last couple of months. That boy had gotten to where he would’ve traded his soul for dope.” His gaze came back to Rourke, and the burn in his eyes was like a match flame against the skin. “But then you’d know all about that place, wouldn’t you, Day?”
Rourke knew. Cocaine, and the need it bred in you, could be like a heavy, dark cloud you dragged along with you everywhere you went. It rained on you every day, but you just couldn’t seem to shake it.
Maguire brushed past him, and this time Rourke let him go. He watched the bootlegger, who had once been his friend, get in the beautiful and expensive green Pierce-Arrow and drive off, and the taste in Rourke’s throat was raw and bitter.
Money and juice. The Boston Club’s library fairly reeked of both. Roman busts rested in marble niches, between glass-fronted cases filled with books bound in green and gold-blocked calf. Turkey rugs of muted colors covered the parquet floor, and green velvet drapes framed the French doors that looked out onto the gallery, where a lone man stood like a general facing a battleground. Hands laced behind his straight back, graying leonine head up, eyes hard with resolve.
Weldon Carrigan, superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, had plenty of both money and juice, but it hadn’t always been that way. The tenth son of a traveling shoe salesman, he had been born with two talents and a single ambition. His talents were subtle and yet deceptively simple. He had a deep understanding of how leverage could be applied to human nature, and he could make you like him. He could make you like him even when you knew that his single ambition was power, and that he wanted as much of it as he could get, spare no expense, even yours.
But in New Orleans power came from only two frequently over-lapping sources: family and politics. So Weldon Carrigan, the son of a nobody, began his career by making the Democratic Party machine his family, and they’d served each other well. Even politics, though, had not been able to do as much for him as had his marriage to Rose Marie Wilmington, heiress to one of the city’s oldest and proudest American names. With her had come fourteen-karat respectability, a mansion in the Garden District, and three million dollars.
He had never acknowledged the irony when, twenty years later, he had offered Daman Rourke fifty thousand of his wife’s dollars not to marry their daughter.
Yet in spite of that rocky beginning, Rourke and his father-inlaw had over the years formed a grudging toleration for one another that occasionally crossed over into a wary respect. They both knew that, as superintendent, Weldon Carrigan had the power to make or destroy his son-in-law’s career. That was his leverage. Rourke’s leverage was Katie, which was all the Carrigans had left of their beloved and only daughter, Jo.
Now, though, Weldon Carrigan’s chiseled face was as stony as one of the Roman busts as he watched his son-in-law enter the room. “I saw you having a heated word with Casey Maguire,” he said immediately, before Rourke even had time to say good morning. “If it’s not moving, Day, don’t poke at it.”
Rourke tossed his straw boater onto a nearby marble table and sat down in a maroon tufted-leather chair. He stretched out his legs and rested his folded hands on his stomach. “If it turns out he had that boy strangled with piano wire and tossed in the bayou, I’m going to arrest his ass. It’ll give him the opportunity to get his money’s worth out of y’all down there at City Hall.”
Beneath his hedgerow of thick black eyebrows, Weldon Carrigan’s eyes had the dull sheen of gunmetal. He used them to stare down at Rourke hard, letting him feel the threat, and then he smiled.
“You must be feelin’ tired this morning. You’re usually better at hiding your damn insubordination.”
Rourke smiled back at him, finally provoking the older man to laugh softly and shake his head as he settled his solid bulk into a wing-backed chair that looked too small for him. He had the large shoulders and hands of a working man, although he had never really done any hard physical labor. At the moment he was dressed for golf in patterned gold hose, baggy knickers, and bow tie. He would be playing eighteen holes with the mayor later that morning, as he did every Wednesday.
“That bayou floater was