Mortal Sins. Penn Williamson

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СКАЧАТЬ in New Orleans power came from only two frequently over-lapping sources: family and politics. So Weldon Carrigan, the son of a nobody, began his career by making the Democratic Party machine his family, and they’d served each other well. Even politics, though, had not been able to do as much for him as had his marriage to Rose Marie Wilmington, heiress to one of the city’s oldest and proudest American names. With her had come fourteen-karat respectability, a mansion in the Garden District, and three million dollars.

      He had never acknowledged the irony when, twenty years later, he had offered Daman Rourke fifty thousand of his wife’s dollars not to marry their daughter.

      Yet in spite of that rocky beginning, Rourke and his father-inlaw had over the years formed a grudging toleration for one another that occasionally crossed over into a wary respect. They both knew that, as superintendent, Weldon Carrigan had the power to make or destroy his son-in-law’s career. That was his leverage. Rourke’s leverage was Katie, which was all the Carrigans had left of their beloved and only daughter, Jo.

      Now, though, Weldon Carrigan’s chiseled face was as stony as one of the Roman busts as he watched his son-in-law enter the room. “I saw you having a heated word with Casey Maguire,” he said immediately, before Rourke even had time to say good morning. “If it’s not moving, Day, don’t poke at it.”

      Rourke tossed his straw boater onto a nearby marble table and sat down in a maroon tufted-leather chair. He stretched out his legs and rested his folded hands on his stomach. “If it turns out he had that boy strangled with piano wire and tossed in the bayou, I’m going to arrest his ass. It’ll give him the opportunity to get his money’s worth out of y’all down there at City Hall.”

      Beneath his hedgerow of thick black eyebrows, Weldon Carrigan’s eyes had the dull sheen of gunmetal. He used them to stare down at Rourke hard, letting him feel the threat, and then he smiled.

      “You must be feelin’ tired this morning. You’re usually better at hiding your damn insubordination.”

      Rourke smiled back at him, finally provoking the older man to laugh softly and shake his head as he settled his solid bulk into a wing-backed chair that looked too small for him. He had the large shoulders and hands of a working man, although he had never really done any hard physical labor. At the moment he was dressed for golf in patterned gold hose, baggy knickers, and bow tie. He would be playing eighteen holes with the mayor later that morning, as he did every Wednesday.

      “That bayou floater was already yesterday’s ball game the minute after it happened,” he said. “It’s Charles St. Claire’s untimely demise we all ought to be fretting over.” He gestured at the morning’s extra editions that were spread out on the coffee table in front of him. “You had a chance yet to read through any of this tripe? I swear, that gol-bedamned Wylie T. Jones of the Morning Trib has taken salaciousness to new depths. The body’s barely cold yet and he’s already writing about the Cinderella Girl maybe going into the dock for the Trial of the Century.”

      “I looked at them,” Rourke said. The Morning Tribune, the worst of the tabloids, had printed a photograph of the body wrapped in a bloody sheet being carried out to the coroner’s hearse. The other papers—the Times-Picayune, the States, and the Item—showed pictures of the grieving widow. She had come out onto the gallery of Sans Souci this morning, shortly after dawn, to talk with all the reporters who had gathered there. In the photographs they’d taken of her, she looked beautiful and tragic. Innocence betrayed.

      “I’ll be straight up with you, Day,” his father-in-law was saying. “This murder last night is going to have tabloids from all over and their hacks like Wylie T. Jones crawlin’ out the woodwork like roaches in a fire. If we do have to go and put Remy Lelourie on trial for the murder of her husband, we’re going to find ourselves in a three-ring circus swinging by our dicks on a trapeze with no net. For one thing there isn’t a jury in the country that would convict her, even if she’d been caught right in the act—”

      “She as good as was. Or so it looks.”

      The superintendent slammed the flat of his hand down on the table. “And I’m telling you that when it comes to this case, justice and guilt aren’t going to matter diddly. On the other hand, it can’t look as though we’re letting the murder of a man like Charlie St. Claire pass us on by without any attention being paid to it at all.” He waved his hand at the newspapers. “I don’t want some shit-sniffing bastard writing about how my cops’re nothing but a bunch of peckerwoods who couldn’t take a trip to the outhouse if there wasn’t a path already worn in the dirt to show them the way. We’ve got to get out of this St. Claire mess as cleanly and with as little fuss as we possibly can.”

      Rourke cut his gaze away to the gallery doors and their view of the heat-hazed sky. Weldon Carrigan was a politician, not a cop. He saw the spilling of blood, the pain and suffering, only as part of a political game to be duked out in the pages of the press and on the polished floors of City Hall, where some deaths mattered and others didn’t, and where the best justice was the kind that came easily.

      “So an arrest would be helpful as long as it isn’t Mrs. St. Claire’s,” Rourke said.

      The superintendent had taken a Havana cigar out of a silver case and was clipping it with a slender silver knife on the end of his watch chain. “Another suspect wouldn’t be unwelcome.”

      “Do you have anyone in mind? Or will just any-old-body do?”

      “I heard St. Claire had himself a colored mistress. You hear that?”

      “No,” Rourke lied. The coldness he’d felt in the hallway of the Criminal Courts Building had come back, worse than before. A deep, bone-breaking cold.

      “She’s not some parlor chippy either,” his father-in-law was saying. “Supposed to be married, in fact. And even though she’s a nigger, St. Claire was supposed to’ve had a real affection for her.”

      Carrigan lit the cigar with a wooden match, staring all the while at Rourke, who met his eyes but said nothing.

      “You don’t find that significant?” Carrigan said when the cigar was drawing.

      Rourke leaned forward to rest his elbows on his thighs, but he kept his gaze locked on the older man’s face. “What I find more significant is Mrs. St. Claire covered in blood and sitting next to a cane knife and the slaughtered body of her husband. You go talking to the press about a colored mistress and you’ve just given them a motive to put on the wife that’s as good as a pair of handcuffs.”

      The superintendent pushed himself abruptly to his feet. “Find out who this girl of Charlie’s is, Day. Haul her black ass in for questioning, and make her give you something. Something we can use.”

      He went to the French doors and then turned back again. His face seemed to have softened, but perhaps it was only the smoke from the cigar, which feathered the air around his eyes. “You and Katie will be coming to my party on Saturday?” he asked. Weldon Carrigan would be fifty-five on Saturday, but when it came to his birthday, he was still a child at heart. He threw himself a big party every year, complete with cake and ice cream and a fireworks display.

      “I don’t know as how I’ll have the time,” Rourke said, feeling mean. “Sounds to me like I’ll be too busy with the rubber hoses, beating confessions out of anybody that’s handy.”

      Carrigan’s teeth tightened around the cigar. “Whatever works.”

      He took the cigar out of his mouth to stare down at the burning ash, СКАЧАТЬ