Mortal Sins

Dedication

For Tracy Grant, beloved friend

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

He stood naked on the sagging porch of the old slave shack, with moonlight burnishing his skin to the smooth ivory of a marble gravestone. He might have been waiting for his lover to come.

The night smelled of death, heavy and smothering. It was summer in New Orleans, when the streets steamed in the morning and the rain teemed in the evening, when the brown river flowed thick and muddy, and the bayous spread in a primal ooze of putrefying lily pads and crawfish. In the old St. Louis Cemeteries, where the raised crypts had cracked and sunk into the earth, water lapped at the rotting bones so that the sweet smell of decay rose into the air and took on the breath of resurrected life. A summer’s night in New Orleans, rancid life and ripe death, and always—the heat.

The porch he stood on faced the Bayou St. John, although he could barely see it through the huge live oaks. Streamers of moss hung from the gnarled branches, limp in the still, heavy air. The water curved like a slow, silver snake around the low moon.

If he turned his head and looked across the yard he could have seen the big house. An heirloom of slender white colonnettes and broad galleries, and as much a part of him as his bones and breath.

If he turned his head he could have seen the window of his wife’s bedroom, but he didn’t need to look to see her as he was remembering her. Linen sheets twisted around her naked legs, lamplight pooling on her belly. Her eyelashes spiking shadows on the bones of her face.

He breathed, and the sultry air panted with him. He imagined her looking out her window now, seeing him standing naked in the night.

He turned and went inside, leaving the door open. His shadow leaped out ahead of him in the wash of the brass gasoliers. Years ago they had brought electricity out to the shack, but he loved the gaslight. Once, in his grandfather’s time, slaves had lived in this place. Of course in those days the floor had been packed dirt, the furniture a rotting table and a stool or two, rough ticking stuffed with moss and swamp grass to sleep on. Certainly no green leather chairs, no ormolu-mounted bureau, no big brass bed. When he and his brother were boys, these two small rooms had served as a sort of garçonnière. Out here where their mama wouldn’t have to let herself know better, he and Julius had indulged in a lot of expensive bourbon and cheap women. Sure enough, some sinning had gone on in those days, most of it his.

Most of the sins had been his, yes, but not all. Not all.

Pulled by memories, he looked through a curtain of blue glass beads and into the shadowed bedroom. He saw, in the silver shawl of moonlight floating through the gauzy bed netting, the sweet curve of a woman’s breast.

His breath quickened, and a hot flush prickled his bare skin. “That you, darlin’?” he said.

He took a step and the netting stilled, the shadow disappeared. His excitement died, leaving behind a melancholy ache. He wanted suddenly to be done with it all. He wanted to live a life without old longings, free of the past and old sins. Free of new sins and all the chaos and pain in his mind.

He picked up his silk robe from where he’d left it lying on the floor and shrugged it on. He went to the bureau, and his hands shook as he opened the flat silver box that was filled with not cigarettes but shaved cocaine. With the blade of a penknife, he scraped up the fine white flakes, then spilled it onto the back of his wrist. He brought it up to his nose, snorting deep, blinking.

His lips pulled back from his teeth and his eyes opened wide as the rush hit him. Beyond the open door the knife-like leaves of the banana tree stirred, sounding to his ears like a hurricane. He could feel his heart beating hard now.

He took a silk handkerchief out of his robe pocket and wiped his nose. He poured a glass of absinthe and spiked it with more cocaine. He tossed back most of the cocktail in one long swallow. The rush hit him again, harder this time, making him shudder.

Time spun away from him, letting go. He stood, swaying, drifting, caught up in the unraveling threads of a dream. Something brought him back, a noise. The locusts in the canebrakes, singing for their mates. He sucked in a deep breath and felt his chest expand with the force of it, felt the oxygen feed his blood. His blood pulsed now with the locusts’ scratching song.

And then they stopped.

A wicker rocking chair creaked out on the porch. He jerked, almost stumbling, to peer back through the open door. The chair was still. The beaded curtain clicked softly, and he spun back around. He held his breath now, listening, but he heard only the whirring of the ceiling fan and the dripping of rainwater off the fronds of the banana trees. The tripping thump of his own heart.

A chill moved down his spine, in spite of the oppressive heat. There was something dangerous about the night, a sense of ancient, predatory creatures stalking silently through the tall grass or flying among the trees on soundless wings.

He laughed.

The mosquito netting in the next room stirred again, flashing white across the corner of his eye. The netting floated open and a woman rose from the bed. A woman, naked, her body glowing silver as moonlit snow. A snow dream, he told himself. She’s only a dream.

He took a step backward though, even if she was only a dream, and still she came toward him. The beaded curtain parted around her, clicking and clacking. Thick worms writhed in her hair and her face was flat and dead, the color of the old bones rotting in the cemetery down the road.

She raised her arm, and at the end of it was a cane knife. The blade, long and flaring, bled red with a liquid fire.

“No,” he said, although even then he didn’t really believe in what he was denying.

She came closer, the snow woman with the horrible dead face, and then he realized what he was seeing and he laughed again.

“Remy,” he said, smiling, laughing. “Hey, you comin’ to get me, baby?” He backed another step, grinding his hips a little now, almost dancing, and she followed. She liked to play at dangerous games, did Remy, but in the end they were only games. “Come on, come on, come and get me.”

The cane knife slashed across his belly.

He grunted and looked down, he saw his flesh gape open and the blood well thick and black, and he wondered why it didn’t hurt, and then he screamed.

The knife cut him again, lower, and his scream broke into a wail. Run, he had to run; he ran but the knife came after him, came for his eyes this time, and he threw up his hands to stop it. The blade sliced across his palms, and he saw a finger go flying, but it wasn’t real and so he laughed, and then he screamed, and then he whimpered. “Please,” he said, as the knife slashed again. He opened his mouth and the screams filled it so he couldn’t breathe, rising and swelling in his throat like big wet bubbles.

He could hear her harsh panting in a wet darkness now filled with pain. He wanted her to stop so that he could breathe again, so that he could scream. He wanted to tell her he was sorry. He wanted her to understand that he wasn’t supposed to die.

He fell instead, and still she came. To cut out his heart with her knife.

He was slipping down, down deep into a hot black cocoon, his chest bursting, burning. His eyes filled with a black light, and then the light brightened into a whiteness and the world became new and sweet again. Night rain still dripped off the fronds of the banana trees, but the camellias outside the window smelled of tomorrow’s sunshine, and she was kissing him, warm, lingering kisses, her lips begging him to stay, and he didn’t want to go.

Slowly, he turned his head and looked up into her face. The screams were still trapped in his throat, beating like moths against glass. He opened his mouth to say her name one last time.

It came out in a gush of hot blood.

Chapter One

Blood was splattered and sprayed all over the walls and furniture. It lay in dark smears on the oiled wooden floor and pooled beneath the dead man’s cut throat, glossy and syrupy, like blackberry wine.

Daman Rourke stood just within the shack’s open door and tried not to breathe in the rank smell. He winced as the magnesium explosion of a flashlamp illuminated for an obscene moment the gashes in the dead man’s white flesh and his bulging, glassy eyes.

“Sweet mercy,” Rourke said.

The cop with the camera cast him a glance and then leaned over and pointed the lens at a cane knife that lay glued to the floor by a puddle of blood. “Day, my man. Welcome to the party,” he said, as the flashlamp blew with another burst of white light. “Where you been at? I’ve had guys looking for you in every gin and hot pillow joint this side of the river.”

Rourke resisted the urge to rub his hands over his face. It was past midnight at the end of a long day, beneath his linen suit coat his shirt was sticking to his back like wet paper, he had a scotch-and-rye headache throbbing behind his left eye, and he hated the smell of blood.

He shoved his hands in his pockets and smiled. “What can I say? I guess you didn’t look in low enough places.”

The other man’s thick shoulders, which had been hunched up around his ears, relaxed. The smile worked, as always. Daman Rourke could charm anybody, and he knew it. Sometimes he did it for a reason, and sometimes just to get in the practice.

Rourke stayed where he was and let his partner come to him. The other cop’s loose pongee suit was rumpled and sweat-stained, and his sparse light brown hair stuck up like tufts of salt grass on a sand dune. In this, the year of our Lord 1927, Fiorello Prankowski was the only homicide dick in the City That Care Forgot who wasn’t Irish, but then he had been born and raised in Des Moines, and allowances were made for Yankees, who couldn’t be expected to know better.

“The stiff’s Charles St. Claire,” he said. Fio had a sad, haggard face, as if all the cares New Orleans had forgotten he felt obliged to remember. “But then I guess I don’t need to tell you that, since you both were probably altar boys together at St. Alphonsus, where you used to jerk off Saturday afternoons in the sacristy. Your mama likes to tell the story of how she got a little tipsy at his mama’s wedding, and you, you bastard, once tried to screw his sister.”

“Charles St. Claire never had a sister.”

“Know him well, do you?”

“No,” Rourke said, which was not the same thing as saying he wasn’t acquainted with the man at all.

He knew it drove Fio crazy that in a city of half a million people, everybody was connected to everyone else—through blood or marriage, through shared secrets and shared desires. All those connections formed concentric and interlocking circles that no outsider could ever penetrate or understand.

Neither living nor dying in New Orleans was ever completely and truly what it seemed, but the trappings, the traditions, the rituals were all enshrined and made inviolate by a collective act of faith. You buried your family secrets deep and spun intricate, invisible webs to hide your sins from yourselves and from the world. And sometimes, thought Rourke, it was far better that the sins stayed hidden, the secrets safe.

“The Ghoul is here,” Fio said, pointing his chin at the corpse, and at the man who was squatting over it.

Not that anyone could have missed him, for he had the thick, blubbery roundness of a walrus. The cops called him the Ghoul because he always smelled of rotting flesh. He spent his life in the bowels of the Criminal Courts Building, cutting open dead bodies and examining disgusting specimens under microscopes, drawing conclusions too wild ever to be admitted into court.

The feelings of aversion and distrust were mutual. Moses Mueller, coroner for New Orleans Parish for less than a year, already held to the firm belief that the collective intelligence of all the detectives on the force was only slightly above that of a mollusk.

“So what’s he think?” Rourke asked as he made his reluctant way to the body. He hated looking at dead things.

“You asking me?” Fio said, following after and rolling his shoulders like a horse with an itch. “You know the Ghoul—he never gives us squat. He told me it was murder, like I was supposed to run out and stop the presses. Hell, I had to give up on my theory that the stiff went chasing himself around the room hacking at himself with a cane knife.”

The Ghoul had leaned over to sniff at the corpse’s gaping, blood-caked mouth. “Oh, man,” Fio said. “Why does he do stuff like that?”

Rourke was trying to keep from stepping in the blood. It had dried in some places, in stacks like glossy black tiles scattered on the floor, but in other places it was still wet and sticky, and he had just bought his expensive-as-hell alligator wing tips with last week’s winnings at the track. No matter how low he did go, he always went there in style.

Charles St. Claire had not died in style. His paisley silk robe gaped open, revealing naked flesh that had been literally bled white. His throat had been slit, his chest cavity ripped open, and his guts oozed out of a cut in his belly. A slash across his pelvis had left his penis hanging by a small string of what looked like gristle.

The Ghoul was smelling the corpse’s hair now. Ash from the burning cigarette that drooped from a corner of his mouth sifted down into Charles St. Claire’s open and glazed gray eyes.

Rourke almost flinched, half expecting those eyes to blink. With his gaping throat and his eyes wide open and filmed with a milky caul, the dead man almost seemed to be wearing a look of laughing surprise. Death: life’s one sure thing. So what’s the matter, Charlie St. Claire? Weren’t you ready? The trouble is, Rourke thought, it was easy to forget what a playful trickster was good ol’ Death. How, like a naked girl popping out of your birthday cake, he could still catch you bright-eyed and smiling foolishly.

The Ghoul had lifted the dead man’s hand to peer at it closely. It had a deep gash across the palm and was missing a middle finger, but a gold watch and diamond pinkie ring glittered in the light from the flickering gasoliers.

“Any ideas as to when it happened?” Rourke asked as he hunkered down on his heels beside the body.

The coroner wiped the sweat off his upper lip. Cigarette smoke curled in steady streams out his nostrils. “Certainly not within the last hour or two or, perhaps, even three—regrettably one cannot be more precise.” His words, as usual, were very precise, although with a flavor of the Old World about them. “Rigor mortis has started to set in in the eyelids and cheek muscles.”

“He talks to you,” Fio said. “How come he only talks to you?”

“He likes me.” Rourke leaned over for a better look at the knife. It was heavy, wide-bladed, and hooked, and was supposed to be used for cutting sugarcane. “Well, diddy-wah-diddy,” he said on a soft whistle. For a thumbprint, flashy as a neon sign, was etched in blood at the top of the blade.

“If that quaint colloquialism is meant to convey awe,” the Ghoul said, “then I find I must agree with it.” He pushed back up to his feet, his bulk shifting in lurches. “Such splendid arches and loops and whorls, and all distinct enough to be seen even with the naked eye. But before we do too much celebrating, I should point out that they could belong to the victim, who might have tried to wrest the weapon away from his attacker. Although it is, of course, always dangerous to speculate.”

“Yeah? So maybe I’ll just go on ahead and speculate that they’re the killer’s anyway. Just for what the hell.” Not, Rourke thought, that he could count on it mattering. Many juries in New Orleans still tended to view the evidence of fingerprints as just so much hoodoo.

“Hey, get a look at this,” Fio said. He had knelt to peer under a green leather wing-backed chair and now he lumbered back up, laughing. “It’s the poor bastard’s finger. His diddling finger.” He laughed again and tossed the severed digit between the dead man’s sprawled legs. “Better wrap it on up with the rest of him. What with his dick only swinging by a thread, he’s gonna be needing something bonier to use on the chippies in hell.”

Moses Mueller stared at the big cop, blinking against the cigarette smoke that floated before his face. “You are speaking,” he said, “of a man.”

“Hunh?” Fio said, and Rourke had to look down to hide a smile.

The smile faded, though, as he slowly stood with his gaze still on the dead man’s face, on the sightless eyes. It wasn’t so long ago some cops believed that the retinas captured their final view of life, like a photograph. Daman Rourke wished he could believe that those dying eyes had come to grasp all the truths that the living man had failed to see, but he knew that for a vain hope. If anything lingered in the eyes of the dead, it was what they had last felt in their hearts. Surprise, fear, perhaps, and an immense regret that this time the dying was happening to them, and that it was all, finally, going to be too late.

He lifted his head to find the coroner’s eyes, small and hard like buckshot, studying him. “You have not asked me how he died, Lieutenant.”

Fio blew a snort out his bent nose. “Gee. Maybe the cane knife and the big red grin he’s wearing across his throat are some kinda clues.”

“He drowned,” Rourke said.

Fio laughed, but the Ghoul’s shaggy eyebrows had lifted a little. He even took the cigarette out of his mouth long enough to almost smile. “You surprise me,” he said.

He went to the back of the green leather chair, where he’d taken off an old-fashioned frock coat that was so worn in places it shone. He slung the coat over his shoulder while his gaze took a slow gander around the room, returning at last to the two detectives.

“Someone, or something, either evil or desperate, took a long, sharp implement, most likely a cane knife, and slashed it in a backhanded blow across the victim’s throat—severing the jugular vein, the carotid artery, and the windpipe, with the result that the air passage filled with blood.” He lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the old one, then anchored a battered black fedora on his head. “Charles St. Claire did quite literally drown in his own blood.”

He stopped on his way out the door to take one last look at the corpse. “This was not a quick way of dying, you understand. Not even in the final moments, after his throat had been slit open. It would have taken him a very long three or four minutes to die, and he would have spent that time in an agony of terror and pain.”

He took a step, then paused again, half turning. The rotting porch groaned beneath his weight. “And it was likely that he was right-handed. The murderer, I am speaking of.”

“He?” Rourke said.

The Ghoul stared off down the drive, where his chauffeured green Packard awaited him. The tip of his cigarette seemed to pulse red in time with his thoughts, then he sighed, shrugged, and began to make his slow, ponderous way down the steep and narrow steps. His voice came back to them from out of the night. “It could have been a woman.”

“Well, la-di-da and kiss my achin’ ass,” Fio said once they’d heard the Packard’s engine start up and its tires crunch on the oyster-shell drive. He fished a cigar out of his shirt pocket and scratched a match on his thumbnail. He turned, grinning, and winked at his partner as he curled his lips around the end of the cigar and drew deep to light it. “Drowned, hunh?”

The tobacco caught and he took the cigar out of his mouth, waving it through the air and trailing smoke. “Jesus, I don’t know what stinks worse—the stiff or the Ghoul.”

The smoke did help cut the rank smell, for Fio indulged in only the finest Havana Castle Morros. They were part of the juice he got for pretending not to know about the numbers running going on in the back room of a certain pipe and tobacco shop on the corner of Rampart and Bienville.

Rourke said nothing. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and walked around the small room, forcing himself to look at things, to think and not feel, and there was no way, really, to keep from stepping in the blood. He wondered if a place like this old slave shack could have a memory. If inanimate things like wood and stone could absorb pain and sorrow and fear like a sponge. If so, he thought, then these walls ought to be weeping, and long before now.

He found himself looking at the top of an ormolu-mounted bureau. At a tipped-over glass, a penknife, and a silver cigarette case—all coated with aluminum and carbon powders. Fio dusting for more fingerprints. Fio, his partner, who he would have to remember was much, much smarter than he looked.

Rourke dipped his finger in the dregs left in the glass and licked, and tasted absinthe and the cold, numbing bite of cocaine.

He closed his eyes for a moment, his hand curling into a fist.

He pushed abruptly away from the bureau and brushed through a glass-beaded curtain, into the second room. The beads clattered again as Fio followed in his wake. Fio, his partner, who had the air now of a man anticipating the moment when he would be able to spring the punch line of a joke he’d been dying to tell.

It was a small space and the brass bed filled it. The mosquito netting draped open, and the counterpane was a little wrinkled, as if someone had sat or lain there, but only for a moment. A small rag rug lay crooked on the floor and looked out of place, but then it hadn’t always been there.

If he lifted it, Daman Rourke knew what he would find. Because some stains, some crimes, could never be washed away.

He went to the window instead.

“You know,” Fio said from behind him, “how you figure it’s a good bet that the person who found the corpse is the person who made the corpse …”

The window was open but the air outside was hot and still. You couldn’t see much, with the way the bamboo and banana trees crowded against this back part of the shack. You could stand behind that curtain of green, though, shielded from sight, and watch what went on in this room, on this bed. He knew, because once he had done so.