“You had a chance yet to read through any of this tripe? I swear, that gol-bedamned Wylie T. Jones of the Morning Trib has taken salaciousness to new depths. The body’s barely cold yet and he’s already writing about the Cinderella Girl maybe going into the dock for the Trial of the Century.”
“I looked at them,” Rourke said. The Morning Tribune, the worst of the tabloids, had printed a photograph of the body wrapped in a bloody sheet being carried out to the coroner’s hearse. The other papers—the Times-Picayune, the States, and the Item—showed pictures of the grieving widow. She had come out onto the gallery of Sans Souci this morning, shortly after dawn, to talk with all the reporters who had gathered there. In the photographs they’d taken of her, she looked beautiful and tragic. Innocence betrayed.
“I’ll be straight up with you, Day,” his father-in-law was saying. “This murder last night is going to have tabloids from all over and their hacks like Wylie T. Jones crawlin’ out the woodwork like roaches in a fire. If we do have to go and put Remy Lelourie on trial for the murder of her husband, we’re going to find ourselves in a three-ring circus swinging by our dicks on a trapeze with no net. For one thing there isn’t a jury in the country that would convict her, even if she’d been caught right in the act—”
“She as good as was. Or so it looks.”
The superintendent slammed the flat of his hand down on the table. “And I’m telling you that when it comes to this case, justice and guilt aren’t going to matter diddly. On the other hand, it can’t look as though we’re letting the murder of a man like Charlie St. Claire pass us on by without any attention being paid to it at all.” He waved his hand at the newspapers. “I don’t want some shit-sniffing bastard writing about how my cops’re nothing but a bunch of peckerwoods who couldn’t take a trip to the outhouse if there wasn’t a path already worn in the dirt to show them the way. We’ve got to get out of this St. Claire mess as cleanly and with as little fuss as we possibly can.”
Rourke cut his gaze away to the gallery doors and their view of the heat-hazed sky. Weldon Carrigan was a politician, not a cop. He saw the spilling of blood, the pain and suffering, only as part of a political game to be duked out in the pages of the press and on the polished floors of City Hall, where some deaths mattered and others didn’t, and where the best justice was the kind that came easily.
“So an arrest would be helpful as long as it isn’t Mrs. St. Claire’s,” Rourke said.
The superintendent had taken a Havana cigar out of a silver case and was clipping it with a slender silver knife on the end of his watch chain. “Another suspect wouldn’t be unwelcome.”
“Do you have anyone in mind? Or will just any-old-body do?”
“I heard St. Claire had himself a colored mistress. You hear that?”
“No,” Rourke lied. The coldness he’d felt in the hallway of the Criminal Courts Building had come back, worse than before. A deep, bone-breaking cold.
“She’s not some parlor chippy either,” his father-in-law was saying. “Supposed to be married, in fact. And even though she’s a nigger, St. Claire was supposed to’ve had a real affection for her.”
Carrigan lit the cigar with a wooden match, staring all the while at Rourke, who met his eyes but said nothing.
“You don’t find that significant?” Carrigan said when the cigar was drawing.
Rourke leaned forward to rest his elbows on his thighs, but he kept his gaze locked on the older man’s face. “What I find more significant is Mrs. St. Claire covered in blood and sitting next to a cane knife and the slaughtered body of her husband. You go talking to the press about a colored mistress and you’ve just given them a motive to put on the wife that’s as good as a pair of handcuffs.”
The superintendent pushed himself abruptly to his feet. “Find out who this girl of Charlie’s is, Day. Haul her black ass in for questioning, and make her give you something. Something we can use.”
He went to the French doors and then turned back again. His face seemed to have softened, but perhaps it was only the smoke from the cigar, which feathered the air around his eyes. “You and Katie will be coming to my party on Saturday?” he asked. Weldon Carrigan would be fifty-five on Saturday, but when it came to his birthday, he was still a child at heart. He threw himself a big party every year, complete with cake and ice cream and a fireworks display.
“I don’t know as how I’ll have the time,” Rourke said, feeling mean. “Sounds to me like I’ll be too busy with the rubber hoses, beating confessions out of anybody that’s handy.”
Carrigan’s teeth tightened around the cigar. “Whatever works.”
He took the cigar out of his mouth to stare down at the burning ash, sighing. “Jo told me once—I think it was one of those times when she was trying to explain to me why it was that she just had to have you. She said that to you being a cop was like being a priest, like it was kind of a holy calling from God, and so you walked a tightrope between the way the world was and the way you wanted it to be and you saw nothing but darkness beneath you and no end in sight. Now, my daughter, she thought the greatest act of courage she could imagine was that your honor kept you clinging to that rope, when anyone else would’ve just let go long ago.”
Weldon Carrigan looked back up and his mouth curled into something that was definitely not a smile, and Rourke knew he was about to be asked for something he wouldn’t be able to give. “Me, I told her that martyrs usually ended up burning at the stake. I want you to bury this Vinny what’s his name—this two-bit goon—and forget about him. Meanwhile, the city of New Orleans would also be very grateful if you could find some way to clean up the murder of Charlie St. Claire without us having to hold a goldamned Trial of the Century. You can start by running down this nigger gal he was supposed to have been banging.”
“And to hell with truth and justice,” Rourke said, and immediately wanted to kick himself. Honor, truth, and justice. Shit.
The smile Rourke gave to himself was full of self-derision as he stretched to his feet. He picked up his straw boater and sauntered from the room, singing under his breath just loud enough for the super to hear, “In the meantime, in between time, ain’t we got fun?”
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