Mortal Sins. Penn Williamson

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СКАЧАТЬ ago some cops believed that the retinas captured their final view of life, like a photograph. Daman Rourke wished he could believe that those dying eyes had come to grasp all the truths that the living man had failed to see, but he knew that for a vain hope. If anything lingered in the eyes of the dead, it was what they had last felt in their hearts. Surprise, fear, perhaps, and an immense regret that this time the dying was happening to them, and that it was all, finally, going to be too late.

      He lifted his head to find the coroner’s eyes, small and hard like buckshot, studying him. “You have not asked me how he died, Lieutenant.”

      Fio blew a snort out his bent nose. “Gee. Maybe the cane knife and the big red grin he’s wearing across his throat are some kinda clues.”

      “He drowned,” Rourke said.

      Fio laughed, but the Ghoul’s shaggy eyebrows had lifted a little. He even took the cigarette out of his mouth long enough to almost smile. “You surprise me,” he said.

      He went to the back of the green leather chair, where he’d taken off an old-fashioned frock coat that was so worn in places it shone. He slung the coat over his shoulder while his gaze took a slow gander around the room, returning at last to the two detectives.

      “Someone, or something, either evil or desperate, took a long, sharp implement, most likely a cane knife, and slashed it in a backhanded blow across the victim’s throat—severing the jugular vein, the carotid artery, and the windpipe, with the result that the air passage filled with blood.” He lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the old one, then anchored a battered black fedora on his head. “Charles St. Claire did quite literally drown in his own blood.”

      He stopped on his way out the door to take one last look at the corpse. “This was not a quick way of dying, you understand. Not even in the final moments, after his throat had been slit open. It would have taken him a very long three or four minutes to die, and he would have spent that time in an agony of terror and pain.”

      He took a step, then paused again, half turning. The rotting porch groaned beneath his weight. “And it was likely that he was right-handed. The murderer, I am speaking of.”

      “He?” Rourke said.

      The Ghoul stared off down the drive, where his chauffeured green Packard awaited him. The tip of his cigarette seemed to pulse red in time with his thoughts, then he sighed, shrugged, and began to make his slow, ponderous way down the steep and narrow steps. His voice came back to them from out of the night. “It could have been a woman.”

      “Well, la-di-da and kiss my achin’ ass,” Fio said once they’d heard the Packard’s engine start up and its tires crunch on the oyster-shell drive. He fished a cigar out of his shirt pocket and scratched a match on his thumbnail. He turned, grinning, and winked at his partner as he curled his lips around the end of the cigar and drew deep to light it. “Drowned, hunh?”

      The tobacco caught and he took the cigar out of his mouth, waving it through the air and trailing smoke. “Jesus, I don’t know what stinks worse—the stiff or the Ghoul.”

      The smoke did help cut the rank smell, for Fio indulged in only the finest Havana Castle Morros. They were part of the juice he got for pretending not to know about the numbers running going on in the back room of a certain pipe and tobacco shop on the corner of Rampart and Bienville.

      Rourke said nothing. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and walked around the small room, forcing himself to look at things, to think and not feel, and there was no way, really, to keep from stepping in the blood. He wondered if a place like this old slave shack could have a memory. If inanimate things like wood and stone could absorb pain and sorrow and fear like a sponge. If so, he thought, then these walls ought to be weeping, and long before now.

      He found himself looking at the top of an ormolu-mounted bureau. At a tipped-over glass, a penknife, and a silver cigarette case—all coated with aluminum and carbon powders. Fio dusting for more fingerprints. Fio, his partner, who he would have to remember was much, much smarter than he looked.

      Rourke dipped his finger in the dregs left in the glass and licked, and tasted absinthe and the cold, numbing bite of cocaine.

      He closed his eyes for a moment, his hand curling into a fist.

      He pushed abruptly away from the bureau and brushed through a glass-beaded curtain, into the second room. The beads clattered again as Fio followed in his wake. Fio, his partner, who had the air now of a man anticipating the moment when he would be able to spring the punch line of a joke he’d been dying to tell.

      It was a small space and the brass bed filled it. The mosquito netting draped open, and the counterpane was a little wrinkled, as if someone had sat or lain there, but only for a moment. A small rag rug lay crooked on the floor and looked out of place, but then it hadn’t always been there.

      If he lifted it, Daman Rourke knew what he would find. Because some stains, some crimes, could never be washed away.

      He went to the window instead.

      “You know,” Fio said from behind him, “how you figure it’s a good bet that the person who found the corpse is the person who made the corpse …”

      The window was open but the air outside was hot and still. You couldn’t see much, with the way the bamboo and banana trees crowded against this back part of the shack. You could stand behind that curtain of green, though, shielded from sight, and watch what went on in this room, on this bed. He knew, because once he had done so.

      “So who did find him?” Rourke finally asked, although he knew that as well. God help him, but he knew.

      Fio plucked the cigar out of his mouth. He moved his jaw as though chewing his thoughts, then his battered face split into a wide grin.

      “Cinderella.”

      They called her the most beautiful woman in the world.

      Her image was everywhere, in rag sheets and magazines, on candy boxes and postcards. It flickered on the silver screens of movie palaces, and on the midnight stages of a million erotic dreams.

      The newspapers called her the Cinderella Girl sometimes too. It came from the first movie she had made, The Glass Slipper—a dark and sultry interpretation of the classic fairy tale. It was the role that had shot a young woman by the improbable name of Remy Lelourie into the galaxy of celluloid stardom. The world had seen nothing like her, before or since.

      For it wasn’t only her beauty—which was a strange kind of beauty anyway, with her eyes set too far apart and her face too bony, her mouth too wide. She seduced you in a way you didn’t dare confess, not even to your priest. You looked at her and you saw a raw hunger and desperation for life, not redemption and not salvation, but life. The down-and-dirty kind of life that happened on a hot, wet night, in a seedy room, with whiskey and desire burning in your blood.

      You looked at her, thought Daman Rourke, and you saw sin. Dangerous, delectable, unaccountable sin.

      He stood in the middle of the yard and looked at the old French colonial house. He hadn’t come near her yet and already he felt the pull of her. “Remy,” he said, seeing how it would feel to say her name again after all this time.

      He stayed where he was, not moving, looking toward the bayou now. A wind had come up, rattling the banana trees and bringing with it the smell of sour mud and dead water. He saw a pair of lantern lights СКАЧАТЬ