It could have happened, Rourke thought. Or maybe that was some other joint. The singer had come to the end of her song. He thought he should probably amble on down there and ask around if anyone had seen anything. Nobody would have; this wasn’t a part of town where you let yourself pay much attention to what went on around you.
It wasn’t even a part of New Orleans city proper—this large expanse of bays and channels and flooded cypress and willows that comprised the swampy wasteland northeast of the river. In the old days they’d called it the “wet grave,” but that was because of the yellow fever and not because it was a dumping ground for murdered goons.
The gray light picked out the body of Vinny McGinty lying on the bank of the bayou, bloated, decaying, dead. As dead as Charles St. Claire. Charlie St. Claire had been the flamboyant, handsome son of a fine old New Orleans family—rich, dissolute, and married to the most beautiful woman in the world. Whereas Vinny had been nothing but an ugly immigrant scrub from out of the Irish Channel, who’d dreamed of glory in the ring and ended up busting kneecaps for a living instead. No two men could have been more different in life, and yet, in their final moments, in their surprise and fear and their agony, they had been the same.
Maybe Fio was right, Rourke thought, maybe he did care too much. But the murdered ones at least deserved the dignity of having the world know why they had died and who had killed them. The ones responsible ought to pay, even if only by being found out.
Fio stretched his arms up to the paling sky, popping his bones. “Man, I’m way past tired to almost dead myself. But you know soon as I roll on home, the wife is gonna jump on my case about being out all night.”
“Remy Lelourie has kindly offered to give us her fingerprints,” Rourke said. “She will be paying us a visit first thing this mornin’.”
“Oh, joy,” Fio said just as the Smoky Mary clattered over the rails behind them, her whistle wailing long and shrill and lonely.
The house where Daman Rourke lived on Conti Street had once belonged to his mother’s lover. In the last few years he’d been able to look at it without remembering that, but not tonight—or rather, this morning.
The honey wagons were rattling over the cobblestones, carting away the refuse from those places that still had outhouses, by the time Rourke finally made it home. He let himself in through the carriageway of the beautiful old Creole cottage and into the courtyard. In the murky light of dawn, the wisteria vines and elephant ears sent blue shadows splashing across the paving stones. It smelled wet, of rain-soaked leaves and black earth.
The courtyard was an oasis of peace in a rather rough-and-tumble part of town. The Faubourg Tremé was now known for its speakeasies, jazz, and bawdy houses. A hundred years before, though, it had been the custom for white plantation owners and their sons to maintain homes for their quadroon mistresses here.
In those days the gens de couleur libres had also lived in the Faubourg Tremé. They had been free men of color, not slaves; although some of them owned slaves themselves. They were tailors and blacksmiths and cabinetmakers. Some became rich, and so they built houses in the Creole style, and then they filled them with mahogany furniture, hung their walls with silk, and lived within them lives that were genteel, but separate.
They spoke French and sent their sons to school in Paris. Those sons whose skin was light enough they sent north, to disappear into the white man’s life. Some sent their daughters to parade in their satin gowns and bare brown shoulders across a quadroon ballroom, to attract the eye of a protector with money and property and a pale face. For when put on a scale, the word color outweighed the word free, and if one of them had dared even to raise his voice to a white man, he risked being lynched from the nearest green-iron lamppost.
That was long ago, though, in another time, and some things were different now. Now much of the neighborhood was little more than a slum, where you could buy any brand of sin you cared to name. The wrought-iron balconies on the old town houses drooped like tattered swags of lace; rats and dogs fought over the bones in the garbage-strewn courtyards. Yet somehow through it all the old houses and cobbled streets had kept their romance and charm, along with their secrets and hidden shame.
Daman Rourke, coming from the scenes of two brutal murders, stood within the smothered emptiness of the courtyard as if not quite knowing how he came to be there. For a moment he thought it was raining again, and then he realized it was only the water splashing in the iron fountain.
Light leaked out from around the shutters of the small rear cabinet where his mother’s housekeeper slept. Augusta always got up with the dawn; she was certain the day couldn’t begin without her and no one had ever been able to prove otherwise. Where he lived, in the garçonnière over the old kitchen, all was shadowed.
He thought of the brass bed in the old slave shack out at Sans Souci and how so like Charles St. Claire it would have been to meet his mistress there, close to hearth and home and wife. Snort a little snow, drink a little wormwood, and do a little jig on the edge of the moon.
So she walks out there, the wife, and she sees …
Maybe it was true love, he had said to Fio, and thought that he’d been lying. And maybe he’d only wanted it to be a lie.
If you love, desperately, passionately, and the one you love loves another, would you kill in the name of your love? Maybe. Probably.
Yes.
Seeing her again after all this time, in the same room, close enough to touch, to smell, had been like wrapping his fist around broken glass. Once, he might have killed her just to keep her his.
He made a sudden movement with his hand, as if he could fling the thought away. A flock of starlings rose off the roof in a black cloud of flapping wings. He turned to watch them fly away and saw his mother.
She sat on a bench, deep in the shadows near the fountain. He had walked right by her when he came in through the carriageway. Anyone else would have said something, but not Maeve Rourke. Some people used silence as a weapon; she used it as a shield. He had long ago given up waiting for her to explain herself to him.
In the dawn light, her face was white and ethereal as mist. She had on her wine-colored silk dressing gown, and her long dark hair was down and fell along the sides of her face like a nun’s veil. He started toward her, and that was when he saw that she wasn’t alone.
His daughter lay sleeping on the bench, her head in his mother’s lap. She wore a nightgown of white cotton and eyelet lace, but she had a Pelicans baseball hat on her head, and she was hugging the mitt he’d given her for her sixth birthday to her chest as though it were a teddy bear.
“Hey, Mama,” he said as he knelt and kissed his daughter’s cheek, which was soft and sticky and smelled of watermelon. “What y’all doing out here this early in the mornin’?”
“She was walking in her sleep again last night, and then she went and had a bad dream on top of it. Woke herself up with her crying, the poor thing. I thought she’d do better if I brought her out for some air.”
His mother waved a palmetto fan in a slow, drowsy motion in front of the child’s face. Maeve Rourke had been born and raised in Ireland, in County Kerry, but she was southern all the way to the bone now. As if she’d absorbed her southernness from this house and the Faubourg Tremé, and from the man who had brought her here.
“She dreamt the gowman was coming to get her,” his mother said, her voice soft. She laughed, then, and the sound of it too was soft in the dawn’s half-light, yet it surprised him, for she so rarely laughed. “I suspect it was either the gowman, or too much watermelon on top of supper.”
Ever so gently he followed with his finger the length of his daughter’s fat brown braid, where it curved