up a mother-of-pearl smoking set from off the mantel. He waited until she fitted a cigarette into the holder and lit a match before he said, “Who was your husband sleeping with, besides you?”
The flame trembled slightly, but that was all. “Now, whatever would Charles want with anyone else, when he already possessed the most beautiful woman in the world?”
He watched as the wild self-derision burned sudden and bright in her eyes. That cruel and destructive pulse of wildness that had once, long ago, seduced them both over the edge.
Jesus save me, he thought.
He cleared his throat. “Uh-huh. And how often did he beat you?”
Her hand flew up quicker than she could stop it, although she tried. It got as far as her neck, and so she pressed her palm there as if feeling for a pulse. The color around the bruise on her cheek drained away, so that it stood out as stark as a smudge of soot.
“Oh, this little ol’ thing … You remember how the rain came up so hard and fast this evenin’? Well, I went to close the windows and the wind caught one of the shutters and it up and smacked me right in the face.” She breathed a soft, girlish laugh, and he almost laughed himself at this vision of Remy Lelourie suddenly turning into a southern belle with cotton bolls for brains.
“Cut the shuck, Remy,” he said. “One thing you’ve never been is a magnolia blossom.”
She put the cigarette down in an ashtray without having smoked it and wrapped her arms around herself again. “And you’ve always been one mean, tough bastard, haven’t you?”
“Somebody has to be. And here’s another interesting fact for you: The human body holds about ten pints of blood, and Charles St. Claire left most of his splattered all over the floor and ceiling and walls of an old slave shack on his way to being hacked to death with a cane knife. Now, Lord knows I was never all that fond of poor Charlie, but that sort of last moment I’d reserve only for my worst enemy, and I got this sick feeling in the pit of my gut that the big fat juicy thumbprint on that knife is going to turn out to be yours. Was he your worst enemy, Mrs. St. Claire?”
Her eyes had grown wide and stark. “I might have touched it—the knife. It was stuck in his chest. I tried to pull it out, but it was caught on…on something … and blood was spraying all around us, and then… then all at once it came gushing up out of his throat.” Her hands fell to her sides and she looked down at herself as if suddenly just realizing what a mess she was. “It got all over me.”
She lifted her head and there was a wounded look on her face now, and he wondered, as he’d always wondered, which of all the Remys in the world was the real one. “They wouldn’t let me take a bath,” she said. “When can I take a bath?”
“You’ll have to take off all you’re wearing in front of your maid, so’s she can pass it along to us. Then tomorrow mornin’ you’re going to have to come on down to the Criminal Courts Building and give us your fingerprints.”
“Oh, God, Day. You’re not just … You really do believe I …” He watched her eyes brighten and grow wet with tears. Even though he knew it for the act that it was, he also thought that maybe a few things were getting through to her at last. That while she might be Remy Lelourie and the most beautiful woman in the world, there were going to be some in the city of New Orleans at least who would believe she had done this terrible thing.
He pressed his shoulder hard into the mantel to keep from touching her. She was still the most dangerous moment of his life. She had lied to him and used him and left him, hurt him in ways uncountable and unmeasurable, but he’d always wanted her anyway. He had never stopped wanting her.
“You remember how I worked the docks that summer, unloading banana boats? How I always had welts all over my hands and arms from getting bit by the rats and spiders that lived in those banana bunches?”
“Day.” She had said his name on a sigh.
“ ’Cause I remember it. Just like I remember other stuff about that summer,” he said. Welts on his hands and welts on his heart. “Like how you cried that last afternoon. Big fat crocodile tears, just like these.” He was cupping her face, gathering up her tears as if he would keep them.
“I loved you,” she said. “I loved you so bad it almost killed me.”
“You were slumming. And—funny thing—but this is the part I remember best: You were the one who left.”
She wrapped her fingers around his wrist and held his hand in place so that she could turn her head and brush her lips across his palm, and the wetness of her mouth mixed with her tears. “I was afraid. Of you, Day. I wonder if you’ve any idea how frightening you can be.”
Him frightening. That was a laugh. He leaned closer, until only a breath-space separated their mouths. He was opening the throttle wide now, putting his money down.
“You were always good, darlin’, the best I’ve ever seen, and worth every bit of the ten G’s a week they were paying you out in Hollywood.” Her fingers were pressing hard on the pulse in his wrist, so that it seemed his blood flowed into hers. “But just like any two-bit hooker who finds herself owned by a cheatin’, heavy-handed pimp, one day you up and killed your man.”
He took a step back, pulled loose from her, let go of her. His face felt as though it were made of lead, but his breathing was fast and hard.
“You killed him, Remy girl. And I’m going to nail you for it.”
A specter folk called the gowman was said to haunt the cypress swamp beyond the Faubourg St. John. Dressed all in white and prowling the night, the gowman lured his victims to a hideous death. He murdered the innocent, but what he did afterward was worse: He stole away the corpses he made, so there would be no body for friends and loved ones to view at the wake, no casket to put in the crypt. To those old Creole families like the St. Claires and the Lelouries, those families whose names, like their cypress houses, had been built to last forever, such a fate was beyond bearing.
The gowman was innocent of this murder at least, thought Daman Rourke as he watched the coroner’s hearse roll back down the drive. For this funeral there would be a wake and a casket, and a widow.
He leaned on the balustrade of the upstairs gallery and watched the wind blow fresh rain clouds back across the moon. Before he’d allowed her to go upstairs and get out of her bloody dress, he had gone up and taken a look at her bedroom. At her big tester bed with its canopy of rose garlands and frolicking cupids. At the semen stains on the messed sheets.
At her cloche hat and pearls laid out on her dressing table, a pair of stockings draped over the back of a chair, her shoes lined up beside it. At her tapestry valise stuffed so full of clothes, and done in such a hurry, that one of the straps wouldn’t fasten—as if she’d packed up and gotten ready to run before she’d killed him.
But then people never change, and she had run before.
The old cypress floorboards creaked beneath Fiorello Prankowski’s heavy tread as he joined Rourke at the gallery railing. Fio hooked a hip on the worn wood, folded his arms across his chest, and stared at his partner.
“You gotta figure the wife for doing it,” he said.
“Yes.”
