years ago this place had been a sugar plantation, before the city had grown up around it. Only a few acres and the house remained, but her beauty and charm were there still. In her tall and elegant windows, in the finely carved colonnettes and balustrades. In the wide galleries that spread all around her, like the dancing skirts of a southern belle. The man who built the house had called her Sans Souci. Free of worry, without a care.
The spell was broken by the chug and rattle of the coroner’s hearse turning down the drive, come to take away the earthly remains of Charles St. Claire, who was free now of not only worry but everything else.
A gaggle of reporters with cameras slung over their shoulders was riding on the running boards, and the sight of them sent Rourke sprinting the rest of the way across the yard to the house and up onto the shadowed gallery. Light from the headlamps bounced off the brass uniform buttons of a beat cop, who stood at stiff attention in front of the door.
Rourke showed him his gold shield. “Sure is a hell of a hot night for it,” he said, and smiled.
The patrolman, who looked barely out of school, read the name on the badge and stiffened up even straighter. “Lieutenant Rourke, sir?” he said, wariness and wonder both in his voice. His round, freckled face was red and sweating beneath his scuttle-shaped hard hat.
Rourke turned up the wattage on his smile. He had no illusions that the young man’s awed reaction had anything to do with Lieutenant Daman Rourke’s sterling reputation as an ace detective. Even being Irish and the son of a cop wasn’t going to take you from walking a beat to carrying a detective lieutenant’s badge by the time you were thirty. Promotions can come fast and easy, though, when your father-in-law is the superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department.
“Are you feeling generous tonight?” Rourke said.
The patrolman swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple disappeared into his collar. “Sir, I … Sir?”
The reporters were leaping off the running boards now as the meat wagon rolled to a stop. They would go first to the slave shack to pop photographs of the body. Pictures too gory to be printed, but not too gory to be passed around and cracked wise over in the newsroom.
Rourke brushed past the young cop, flashing another smile as he did so. “So be a pal, then,” he said, “and promise them anything short of a night with your sister, but keep those press guys out of my face.”
The boy finally relaxed, grinning. “Well, I don’t got me a sister, but I know what you mean. Sir?”
Rourke paused, the cypress door swinging open beneath his hand.
“She couldn’t have done it. Not Remy Lelourie. Could she?”
Rourke crossed over the threshold, saying nothing. He entered a hall that was wide and cool beneath a high ceiling fan, and sweet with the smell of oiled wood. The sliding doors between the double parlors were thrown open, and he could see into rooms that were dressed for summer in flowered slipcovers and rush mats. The French windows were open to the night, and a breeze stirred their long saffron draperies.
A small, slender woman in a gray silk dress stood before a yellow marble fireplace with her back to the door, her head bent. Her dark hair was cut boyishly short, baring her long neck. Her legs were bare as well, her feet caked and splattered with dried blood.
Rourke had to stop a moment and lean against the jamb. It was a strange high, to be seeing her again and with the smell of blood filling his head. A high as powerful as any that came from a glass of absinthe and cocaine.
“Hey, Remy,” he said. “How you doin’, girl?”
Slowly she turned, lifting her head. The softly tragic expression on her face looked drawn there as if by a knife. For a moment the wrench of memory was so strong he nearly choked on it.
“Day,” she said, and that was all, but hearing it tore something loose inside him.
He walked up to her, holding her fast with his gaze. She waited for him, allowing him to look, daring him to see behind her eyes. The front of her dress looked like someone had taken a bucket of blood and drenched her with it. She even had blood in her hair.
Her right hand was pressed to the hollow between her breasts, as though he had startled her. Her fingers were wrapped around a stained handkerchief that had been twisted into a ragged string. He took her hand and she let him, her eyes the whole time on his face. Her eyes were exactly how he remembered them, wide-spaced and tilted up at the corners. Dark brown with golden lights, like tiny bursting suns.
He unwrapped the makeshift bandage. A ragged cut gaped open across her palm from little finger to thumb.
“Why did you do it, Remy?” he said.
She wrenched free of him and turned away, gripping her elbows with bloodstained hands. She didn’t appear to be wearing anything underneath that single sheath of blood-soaked silk.
Rourke leaned against the mantel and stuffed his fists deep into his pockets. He allowed the space between them to empty into a hard silence, but she didn’t fill it with any words. To Fio she’d spun a tale that she had been in bed, asleep, when she’d been awakened by screams coming from the old slave shack and she had gone out there to find her husband expelling his last breath through a rip in his throat.
“Now this was supposed to’ve been around nine o’clock, you understand,” Fio had said. “But it was a whole two hours later when Miss Beulah, the colored lady who does for the family, comes down to the kitchen for something or other and she looks out the window and thinks something ‘ain’t quite right’ about the shack. So she goes on out to see what’s what, and lo and behold ‘what’ turns out to be Cinderella covered in blood, sitting ’longside of Prince Charming here, rocking back and forth and telling him over and over how sorry she is about it all.”
Rourke took a step closer to her. “You going to tell me what happened?”
She raised her head as though meeting the challenge, but her voice when she spoke was dry and scratchy, as if she’d spent the night weeping. Or screaming.
“Why? What good will it do, when you’ve already made up your mind not to believe me?”
“Just think of it as a dress rehearsal for the jury, then, because things sure don’t look good, baby. You saying you sat there and stared at the gaping raw wound of your husband’s slit throat for all that time and did nothing.”
The banjo clock on the wall chose that moment to strike one o’clock, and she flinched as if the soft gong had been a blow. “He was … there was this awful gurgling sound, Day, and all this blood came spurting out his mouth. It was like he was trying to talk to me, to tell me something, but I couldn’t, couldn’t … And then the next thing I remember is hearing Beulah scream.”
“Yeah, I guess a couple hours of time must’ve just sort of slipped away from you there. It does that sometimes after an absinthe and happy dust cocktail.”
“That was Charlie’s poison. And yours, or so I’ve heard tell.” She had lifted her head again, met his eyes again.
Her mouth trembled and twisted into a smile, but it was a wry one, full of memories and pain. “We’ve always been willing to believe the worst about each other, haven’t we, Day?”
All he could manage was a shake of his head.
She
