Mortal Sins. Penn Williamson

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СКАЧАТЬ was sticking to his back like wet paper, he had a scotch-and-rye headache throbbing behind his left eye, and he hated the smell of blood.

      He shoved his hands in his pockets and smiled. “What can I say? I guess you didn’t look in low enough places.”

      The other man’s thick shoulders, which had been hunched up around his ears, relaxed. The smile worked, as always. Daman Rourke could charm anybody, and he knew it. Sometimes he did it for a reason, and sometimes just to get in the practice.

      Rourke stayed where he was and let his partner come to him. The other cop’s loose pongee suit was rumpled and sweat-stained, and his sparse light brown hair stuck up like tufts of salt grass on a sand dune. In this, the year of our Lord 1927, Fiorello Prankowski was the only homicide dick in the City That Care Forgot who wasn’t Irish, but then he had been born and raised in Des Moines, and allowances were made for Yankees, who couldn’t be expected to know better.

      “The stiff’s Charles St. Claire,” he said. Fio had a sad, haggard face, as if all the cares New Orleans had forgotten he felt obliged to remember. “But then I guess I don’t need to tell you that, since you both were probably altar boys together at St. Alphonsus, where you used to jerk off Saturday afternoons in the sacristy. Your mama likes to tell the story of how she got a little tipsy at his mama’s wedding, and you, you bastard, once tried to screw his sister.”

      “Charles St. Claire never had a sister.”

      “Know him well, do you?”

      “No,” Rourke said, which was not the same thing as saying he wasn’t acquainted with the man at all.

      He knew it drove Fio crazy that in a city of half a million people, everybody was connected to everyone else—through blood or marriage, through shared secrets and shared desires. All those connections formed concentric and interlocking circles that no outsider could ever penetrate or understand.

      Neither living nor dying in New Orleans was ever completely and truly what it seemed, but the trappings, the traditions, the rituals were all enshrined and made inviolate by a collective act of faith. You buried your family secrets deep and spun intricate, invisible webs to hide your sins from yourselves and from the world. And sometimes, thought Rourke, it was far better that the sins stayed hidden, the secrets safe.

      “The Ghoul is here,” Fio said, pointing his chin at the corpse, and at the man who was squatting over it.

      Not that anyone could have missed him, for he had the thick, blubbery roundness of a walrus. The cops called him the Ghoul because he always smelled of rotting flesh. He spent his life in the bowels of the Criminal Courts Building, cutting open dead bodies and examining disgusting specimens under microscopes, drawing conclusions too wild ever to be admitted into court.

      The feelings of aversion and distrust were mutual. Moses Mueller, coroner for New Orleans Parish for less than a year, already held to the firm belief that the collective intelligence of all the detectives on the force was only slightly above that of a mollusk.

      “So what’s he think?” Rourke asked as he made his reluctant way to the body. He hated looking at dead things.

      “You asking me?” Fio said, following after and rolling his shoulders like a horse with an itch. “You know the Ghoul—he never gives us squat. He told me it was murder, like I was supposed to run out and stop the presses. Hell, I had to give up on my theory that the stiff went chasing himself around the room hacking at himself with a cane knife.”

      The Ghoul had leaned over to sniff at the corpse’s gaping, blood-caked mouth. “Oh, man,” Fio said. “Why does he do stuff like that?”

      Rourke was trying to keep from stepping in the blood. It had dried in some places, in stacks like glossy black tiles scattered on the floor, but in other places it was still wet and sticky, and he had just bought his expensive-as-hell alligator wing tips with last week’s winnings at the track. No matter how low he did go, he always went there in style.

      Charles St. Claire had not died in style. His paisley silk robe gaped open, revealing naked flesh that had been literally bled white. His throat had been slit, his chest cavity ripped open, and his guts oozed out of a cut in his belly. A slash across his pelvis had left his penis hanging by a small string of what looked like gristle.

      The Ghoul was smelling the corpse’s hair now. Ash from the burning cigarette that drooped from a corner of his mouth sifted down into Charles St. Claire’s open and glazed gray eyes.

      Rourke almost flinched, half expecting those eyes to blink. With his gaping throat and his eyes wide open and filmed with a milky caul, the dead man almost seemed to be wearing a look of laughing surprise. Death: life’s one sure thing. So what’s the matter, Charlie St. Claire? Weren’t you ready? The trouble is, Rourke thought, it was easy to forget what a playful trickster was good ol’ Death. How, like a naked girl popping out of your birthday cake, he could still catch you bright-eyed and smiling foolishly.

      The Ghoul had lifted the dead man’s hand to peer at it closely. It had a deep gash across the palm and was missing a middle finger, but a gold watch and diamond pinkie ring glittered in the light from the flickering gasoliers.

      “Any ideas as to when it happened?” Rourke asked as he hunkered down on his heels beside the body.

      The coroner wiped the sweat off his upper lip. Cigarette smoke curled in steady streams out his nostrils. “Certainly not within the last hour or two or, perhaps, even three—regrettably one cannot be more precise.” His words, as usual, were very precise, although with a flavor of the Old World about them. “Rigor mortis has started to set in in the eyelids and cheek muscles.”

      “He talks to you,” Fio said. “How come he only talks to you?”

      “He likes me.” Rourke leaned over for a better look at the knife. It was heavy, wide-bladed, and hooked, and was supposed to be used for cutting sugarcane. “Well, diddy-wah-diddy,” he said on a soft whistle. For a thumbprint, flashy as a neon sign, was etched in blood at the top of the blade.

      “If that quaint colloquialism is meant to convey awe,” the Ghoul said, “then I find I must agree with it.” He pushed back up to his feet, his bulk shifting in lurches. “Such splendid arches and loops and whorls, and all distinct enough to be seen even with the naked eye. But before we do too much celebrating, I should point out that they could belong to the victim, who might have tried to wrest the weapon away from his attacker. Although it is, of course, always dangerous to speculate.”

      “Yeah? So maybe I’ll just go on ahead and speculate that they’re the killer’s anyway. Just for what the hell.” Not, Rourke thought, that he could count on it mattering. Many juries in New Orleans still tended to view the evidence of fingerprints as just so much hoodoo.

      “Hey, get a look at this,” Fio said. He had knelt to peer under a green leather wing-backed chair and now he lumbered back up, laughing. “It’s the poor bastard’s finger. His diddling finger.” He laughed again and tossed the severed digit between the dead man’s sprawled legs. “Better wrap it on up with the rest of him. What with his dick only swinging by a thread, he’s gonna be needing something bonier to use on the chippies in hell.”

      Moses Mueller stared at the big cop, blinking against the cigarette smoke that floated before his face. “You are speaking,” he said, “of a man.”

      “Hunh?” Fio said, and Rourke had to look down to hide a smile.

      The smile faded, СКАЧАТЬ