mind that whatever pain he might have owed her was eleven years too late.
Fio flipped his cigar butt out into the night. “Blood all over her, those missing two hours, and the maid finding her with the body, crying about bein’ so sorry. Yeah, she did it, all right, as sure as I’m a poor Italian-Polack boy from Des Moines. And ain’t it almost always the one who is supposed to love you best,” he said, voicing an old cop truism. “Her story’s pretty half-assed, but it might hold up. I mean it’s gonna be tough to find a jury who’ll send Remy Lelourie upriver to fry, even for killing her old man.”
“Even tougher if enough folk figure he was asking for it.”
“Was he?”
From where they were, up on the second-story gallery, you could look across the bayou water and see the lights of the gates to City Park, where seventy years ago, beneath a grove of live-oak trees, a St. Claire had shot a Lelourie to death in a duel over lost honor and a game of faro.
“I played a game of bourré with the gentleman once,” Rourke said. “Charles St. Claire had no fear, and no limit.”
“Hunh, you should talk. So who won?”
“I did.”
Fio huffed a laugh. “There you go … Everybody’s got something, though. If he didn’t have fear, what did he have?”
“Money, pride, greed, lust. And secrets.” Rourke smiled. “All of the usual southern deadly sins.”
“Aw, man, don’t tell me that. What secrets?”
“He had a sterling silver name, and juice in all the high and mighty places, but he’s been a hophead for years, and one who really got his kicks out of walking on the wild side. He liked to use people—men, but especially women. And then he liked making them pay for the privilege of being used.”
Fio had turned his head back around to look at him, and Rourke could feel the dissecting edge in the other man’s gaze.
“He was also,” Rourke went on, “the only white Creole lawyer around these parts with enough brass to defend a Negro in court, and on rare occasions he even won. That Charles St. Claire was able to save a few sorry black asses from a life of hoeing sweet potatoes and cutting cane on an Angola chain gang—well, certain folk will tell you that was his very worst sin.”
“And what will they tell me is Remy Lelourie’s very worst sin?”
“That she left us all those years ago. Or tried to.”
Fio waited two slow beats before he said, “I know you want her to be innocent, but she probably isn’t, so don’t—” He cut himself off, blowing a big breath through his teeth.
“Don’t what?” Rourke said.
“Don’t let it break your heart this time.”
“This time?” For a moment Rourke wondered how much his partner knew—if he’d heard something somewhere, a whisper, a rumor. It was impossible, though. The real secrets, the sins, were buried too deep. Only he and Remy knew what had really happened down in that slave shack eleven years ago, and Remy would never tell.
Fio shrugged. “I’m only saying, she’s young and beautiful and it’s an ugly thought that she’s responsible for that mess down there.” He waved his hand in the direction of the slave shack. “But you always end up letting yourself care about them too much, the murdered ones and their murderers—you care too much and they end up breaking your heart.”
Rourke stared at the other cop, letting an edgy silence fall between them. “You done?”
“Yeah, I’m done.”
Rourke stared at Fio some more, then he smiled and shook his head. He waited until Fio smiled back at him, and then he said, “Jesus, Prankowski. You are so full of shit.”
He pushed off the balustrade, turning his back on the bayou. His headache was blinding now, and his legs and arms felt weightless, invisible, as if he were disappearing back into the past where once they had been, he and Remy.
“You know,” Fio said as they left the house by the back gallery stairs, “that’s the part about all of this that I don’t get the most. She had it all—she was a friggin’ movie star, for Christ’s sake. So what did she come back here for, to up and marry a man like St. Claire?”
“Maybe it was true love.”
“Yeah? Then true love sure doesn’t last long. When did they tie the knot—back in February sometime? That makes it five months.”
They crossed the yard to the oaks that lined the drive, where Rourke had parked his Indian Big Chief motorbike. It had started to rain again, in large, fat drops.
He had straddled the leather seat and kick-started the engine when Fio’s big hands gripped the handlebars and he leaned over, bringing his face close to Rourke’s. “You mind telling me where you’re going? Partner.”
Rourke stared back at him, but his answer when it came was mild enough. “To a speak.”
“If you need a drink, I got a flask in my pocket.”
“I’m looking for a woman. You got one of those in your pocket too?”
Fio blew his breath out. In the white light from the bike’s headlamp, his face looked drained of blood the way Charles St. Claire’s had been. “What do you know that you’re not telling me?”
“Nothing,” Rourke lied, smiling so it would go down easy.
He rolled down the drive and along the bayou road until he turned onto Esplanade Avenue, where he opened the Indian’s throttle into a roar and tore down the rainslick pavement. The bike shuddered between his legs, and the hot, wet wind slapped him in the face, while a saxophone wailed “Runnin’ Wild” in his head.
Three years before, a Prohibition agent—strictly in the name of research, of course—had decided to prove how easy it was for a thirsty man to buy himself a glass of hooch in various cities throughout the dry country. It took him a whole twenty-one minutes to find and make his illegal purchase in Chicago. It took him three minutes in Detroit.
In New Orleans it took him thirty-five seconds.
Daman Rourke wasted even less time that wet and bloody summer’s night, but then he knew where he was going.
The speakeasy was on Dumaine Street, masquerading as a laundry, although a few shirts occasionally did get boiled in the big copper tubs out back. Enough so that you could detect a faint smell of soap and scorched starch beneath the reek of tobacco smoke and booze-soaked sawdust.
Rourke leaned his elbows on the water-marked bar and ordered a scotch and rye from a slope-shouldered, slack-lipped man in a greasy apron. When the man came with his drink, Rourke put his dollar down. The bartender figured him for a cop and so he didn’t pick the money up, but Rourke would leave it lie anyway, for no matter how low he did go, he always went there in style and he always paid his own way.
The hooch was good, straight off the boat from Honduras, and still it burned when it hit his belly. Tonight, the speak seemed sad and quiet.
