Mortal Sins. Penn Williamson

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      Yet under the tarnished light of a copper-shaded lamp, a couple danced anyway, lost in music only they could hear. Feet shuffling in a slow drag, bellies pressed close, hips grinding together in a parody of love. The woman’s tawdry yellow dress was coming unraveled at the hem, her brassy hair was black at the roots, and her eyes were clenched tightly shut. As if not looking was as good as not knowing.

      When the bartender came back to see if he wanted another, Rourke nodded, even though his headache was now pounding loud as a Mardi Gras band. “Last time I was in here,” he said, “must’ve been, oh, ’bout a week back—you had a gal singin’ the heartbreak blues so damn fine. Made a man want to crawl into bed with a full bottle and a willin’ woman, and drown his sorrows deep in the both of them.”

      Rourke paused to trace a pattern through the water rings with his finger, and when he looked back up his smile was backwoods friendly, with just a hint of bashfulness in it, as if he hadn’t tried this particular game before and was seeing how far he could go with it. “Since then, well, I just haven’t been able to get that lil’ gal’s song out my mind.”

      The bartender took a vague swipe at the scarred wood with a corner of his apron, while he sucked on his fat bottom lip and tried to assess if the cop leaning on his bar was looking to get laid or be put on the pad. “You’re pro’bly thinkin’ of Lucille. Only thing is, she said she wasn’t feelin’ so hot this evenin’, so I told her to take it off.”

      “What a cryin’ shame,” Rourke said, while inside he felt sick, and cold with fear at the trouble he could see coming his way. Lucille’s way. Lucille, who should have been here in this speak, singing the blues, and yet wasn’t, and so she probably had no alibi now for where she had been while Charlie St. Claire was out in that shack, drowning in his own blood.

      The bartender chewed on his lip some more, while his gaze flitted everywhere but on Rourke’s face. Finally he leaned forward and lowered his voice to a hoarse, whiskey-fed whisper.

      “If it’s a hankerin’ for blackberries you got, there’s a place ’round the corner on Burgundy. Look for a brown door faded to the color of a drunk’s piss. They got ’em from ripe to green, and every which way in between.”

      Rourke knocked back the last of his drink and laid another dollar down on the bar. He smiled again, and there was nothing backwoods or bashful about it. It was the smile of a boy who had grown up with a drunk for a father in the Irish Channel, where they had corner saloons that made this one resemble a Sunday school room, and bartenders who kept the peace with brickbats and bolo knives.

      “You have yourselves a good night now,” he said. The slack-lipped man didn’t answer or nod, he just turned and walked carefully down to the other end of the bar.

      Outside the rain had come and gone, but it hadn’t taken the heat with it. Rourke had already started down the street when he saw a woman leaning against a mist-haloed street lamp. She was naked except for a faded blue wrapper and an old-fashioned corset.

      Even with her standing in the shadows he could see that the skin of her legs glowed smooth and coal black, but her face was a pasty pink. Sometimes a country girl, young to the business and before she’d learned what it was a man really wanted, would buy pink chalk, wet it with perfume, and smear it on to make herself look white.

      This one had at least got her hustle down. She rolled her belly in a little dance and made a wet, smacking noise with her lips. “Hello, daddy. Wanna do a little business?”

      Rourke shook his head, then said, “No, thank you,” to ease the rejection, and then had to laugh at himself for thinking she would care. She was young, but not that young. Yet as he passed her by, he thought that underneath the pink chalk she’d been someone he knew.

      He walked down Dumaine, along a brick banquette slick and silver with rain, toward the mouth of the alley where he had parked the Indian. Off in the night someone was playing a trumpet. Whoever it was, all the misery of his life and the sorrow in his soul was coming out of that horn. Daman Rourke stopped to stand beneath a dripping balcony and listen as the trumpet went crying up the last note, making music so sweet it hurt, like the slash of a cane knife to the heart.

      It hadn’t all been a lie, what he’d last said to Fio about needing to get laid.

      Memory could be like a train whistle in the night, sucking you deep into the low-down blues. You could stop it, sometimes, with booze or drugs, but the best way he’d found was to lose yourself in the arms of a woman, if she was your woman, maybe. If she hadn’t left you yet, or died on you, or just plain given up on you.

      No trumpet sobbed out its heart in this uptown neighborhood of double shotgun and camelback houses. Rourke killed the bike’s engine as he rolled it to a stop alongside Bridey O’Mara’s front stoop.

      Shadows stirred on a gallery smothered with purple wisteria. A porch swing creaked.

      He stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at the woman on the swing. His woman, maybe. She sat with her knees drawn up beneath her chin and her arms wrapped around her legs. Her head was tucked low, as if she were trying to hide behind the long fall of her Irish red hair.

      “Hey, baby,” he said. “It’s after two in the mornin’. What’re you doing still up?”

      She raised her head, and the curtain of her hair parted. Light from the street lamps bled through the thick vines and onto her face. Her cheeks glowed damp with sweat, or maybe tears.

      He stayed where he was at the bottom of the steps, staring up at her. She stared back at him a moment, then jerked her head away. “A couple of cops were here looking for you. I had to tell them I hadn’t seen you in over a week.”

      Her voice had come out broken and rough. She gripped her legs tighter and rocked a bit. The swing moaned. “I was sitting out here remembering the night Sean didn’t come home. Lordy, how it did storm—do you remember? Thunder and lightning and pouring down like it wasn’t ever going to quit.”

      Rourke climbed the steps and sat down next to her on the swing. Her eyes were bright and hot.

      “I sat out here on this swing that night, too,” she said, “waiting for him to come home, with the storm going on all around me, and it was like I was falling through a long, black silence. I think that must be what dying’s like, Day, don’t you? Falling through a long, black silence.”

      He started to touch her, then didn’t. “I won’t go disappearing on you, Bridey.”

      She let go of her legs and leaned against him, her shoulder pressing against his. She wore only a thin cotton wrapper, and he could feel the heat of her body.

      Memory could be like a train whistle in the night, and sometimes you felt the pull of its call in spite of all your good intentions and best defenses. He thought of Charles St. Claire lying in puddles of blood, his eyes wide open to death. He was afraid he knew well what horror those eyes had seen in their last moments, because long ago his own eyes had watched Remy Lelourie kill.

      This was the place where his thoughts kept getting stuck, like a scratch on a record: If she’d done it once, once, once, she could do it again. Yet he knew already that she had the power to make him believe otherwise. Or not to care.

      “I know he’s dead,” said the woman sitting next to him on the swing, and Rourke’s mind made a dizzying jerk as he thought that she, too, was seeing that slashed СКАЧАТЬ