Mortal Sins. Penn Williamson

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      The knife-grinder had gnarled, palsied hands and a spray of moles across his cheekbones, like dandelion seeds, and he nodded solemnly as Rourke asked his question. He did remember sharpening a cane knife about a week back, but not much about the colored boy who had brought it to him. “I know all the families here ’bout and those that do for them,” he said. “This boy I never seen befo’.”

      Rourke gave him five dollars in reward money for helping the police in the course of their investigation and then walked the rest of the way to Pagliani’s Fine Foods. Mr. Pagliani was always the first to know who was expecting a baby, whose grandmother had died, and whose kid had the measles.

      The grocery had a long, wide gallery with ancient, flaking white paint that looked like dried fish scales. Men sat on crates and old ladder-back chairs beneath the shade of a china bell tree, played dominos for a nickel a game, and drank sour mash out of bottles wrapped in brown paper. The place hadn’t changed at all since Rourke was a boy, except that the Coca-Cola sign was now electrified.

      Inside, the place smelled of bananas, coffee, and the loaves of French bread piled high on the counter. As he always did when he walked through the door, Rourke looked up to see if the big paper umbrella still hung from the ceiling among the strings of Italian cheese and the coiled links of sausages. The umbrella had pink cherry blossoms and a blue dragon painted on it. From all the way back when he was a boy, Rourke had always wondered how that umbrella had come to be hanging up there, and why.

      Next to the cash register, two big-horned loudspeakers were blasting a baseball game out of a crystal set made from an empty Quaker oats box. The Pelicans were playing out at Heinemann Park, and the game was being re-created off the ticker tape by Jack Halliday.

      Rourke heard Halliday’s scratchy voice say, “That pitch just nicked the outside corner—strike two,” and a thought hit him like a fist to the heart. He had promised his Katie he would take her to that game today, and then Charles St. Claire had been murdered last night and he had forgotten all about it. He was always doing that to the poor kid, making promises he ended up breaking, sometimes with barely a thought.

      He looked up to find dapper old Mr. Pagliani standing next to the cash register, as if guarding it. The man’s dark eyes were piercing, and the mouth beneath his blackened and waxed mustache was frowning. Daman Rourke had stolen a lot of licorice whips out of this store when he was a kid, and Mr. Pagliani still didn’t quite believe that the boy he knew as a quick-fingered thief had grown up to be a cop rather than a resident of a cell in Angola.

      Rourke smiled. “Evenin’ to you, Mr. Pagliani. What inning is it?”

      The voice on the crystal set crackled with excitement. Someone had just hit a double against the right-field wall. Maybe there was a chance he and Katie could still catch the end of the game, but he knew, even as he indulged himself with the thought, that it was an easy lie. Katie had probably sat out on their front stoop, wearing her Pelicans hat and with her mitt in her lap, waiting for him to come pick her up and take her out to the ballpark, and she had gone on sitting there and waiting through the opening pitch and the first hit, and then, as the pitches and hits had come and gone, she had finally known her daddy wasn’t coming, and Rourke knew there was going to be no making up for that kind of forgetting.

      “It is the top of the ninth,” Mr. Pagliani was saying in his thick Sicilian accent, “and the Pels, they are ahead with six runs. You think maybe they win the pennant again this year?”

      “Can’t miss,” Rourke said, and smiled again, even though Mr. Pagliani was pretty wise to his tricks. He bent over to fish a Coca-Cola out of a big tin tub, which stood next to the pickle barrel and was filled with shaved ice and bottles of soda pop. The old man had to lean way over to keep an eye on his thieving hands.

      When Rourke put a coin on the worn and nicked wood of the counter, the grocer relaxed a little. He even offered to pry the cap off the bottle. “You come nosing ’round the neighborhood because of the murder that happened over at Sans Souci last night, no? Hunh. You was always coming ’round here when you was a kid and getting up to no good.”

      Rourke took a swallow of the soda. It was crisp and cold and delicious. “Yeah, but now they’re paying me to do it. A sad business, that murder.”

      Mr. Pagliani cast a slow, furtive glance around his store and then leaned forward onto his elbows as if he was about to impart a deep, dark secret. “The wife, she did it. Sliced her man up like he was salami. She was always a wild thing—that Lelourie girl. Up to no good …” His words trailed off as if he just remembered that some of the occasions when Remy Lelourie had been up to no good, she’d been in Daman Rourke’s company.

      He frowned at Rourke and straightened up, cocking his thumb down at the racks of newspapers beneath the cash register. “It says right there in the Trib how you cops think she probably did it. Look to the woman, no?”

      Rourke bought another soda and went to the back of the store, where the chicken cages were, and where the old Negro who did the slaughtering and the sweeping out had been hovering and casting wide-eyed looks in his direction ever since he’d walked through the door.

      “Hey there, Jackie Boone,” Rourke said.

      “Hey, Mr. Day,” the old man answered on a big expulsion of pent-up breath. He lifted the ragged straw hat off his head long enough to wipe the sweat off his brow. “Hot again this evenin’, ain’t it?”

      “Uh-huh. How about a Coca-Cola? It doesn’t pack the kick of gin, but it sure goes down cold.”

      Jackie Boone flashed a smile that was missing most of its teeth. “Thank you, suh.” He wiped his hand on his bloody apron and took the bottle of pop from Rourke. He swallowed down a good long drink, then wiped off his mouth with the back of his wrist. “Terrible thing ’bout Mr. Charles, hunh? Him dyin’ in that bad way.”

      “I guess the whole neighborhood pretty much can’t talk about anything else.”

      The old Negro’s gaze went from his boss to the men who had set up squatters’ rights on the front gallery. He scratched the coils of gray hair on his chest and lowered his voice. “What they papers and some other folk’re sayin’, though, ’bout how Miss Remy done it … She’d never do such a thing, no way, no how. It was probably the gris-gris

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