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 amused by it. “It’s been a while since we’ve spoken. I hope I’m finding you well.”
Casey Maguire had worked most of the Irish Channel out of 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
