“One might almost believe in voodoo curses,” said a family friend, “the way tragedy and violent death have stalked the St. Claires.”
Daman Rourke tossed the Times-Picayune onto his desk and went to stand close to the barred and dust-encrusted window so that he could look down on the noisy, crowded street three stories below.
The sun had come up red and hot that morning, baking the streets and sidewalks with such ferocity that you expected at any minute the pavement would start splitting and cracking like dried river mud. Charles St. Claire’s mutilated corpse had turned up only a few hours ago, yet already it seemed that every reporter in the state had congregated before the Criminal Courts Building, which housed police headquarters and the detectives squad. The mammoth rusty brick and sandstone edifice looked like a medieval castle with its turrets and clock tower, and the press had put it under siege. The surest circulation booster, next to a gory murder, was a juicy scandal involving a beautiful Hollywood starlet, so this one had it all.
Inside, the squad room was hot and crowded as well. Most of the detectives, even those whose shifts were over, were hanging around and hoping for a personal introduction to the Cinderella Girl. She was supposed to be coming in voluntarily to have her fingerprints taken and to make an official statement as to her whereabouts and actions last night while her husband had been getting himself murdered. Fiorello Prankowski had taken it upon himself to entertain his fellow cops while they waited.
“So I got dead bodies coming out my ears all night,” he was saying, “then I drag my aching ass on home at four o’fucking-clock this morning, and that’s when the wife hits me with it. She went out and bought a Kimball parlor organ. Now, I’m asking myself—what the hell’s a parlor organ and what does she want with one? She can’t hum a tune without sounding like a cat with its tail caught in the screen door, and yet she’s telling me there’s a parlor organ sitting in the parlor and it’s all ours for only forty easy little payments. Hell, I’m already making easy little payments on everything in the house—the refrigerator, the washing machine, the bedroom suite.” He drawled out the word, saying sooo-eet. “Even the frigging vacuum cleaner’s got an easy little payment.”
“I was just reading an article about that,” said Nate Carroll. He was the youngest detective on the force and he looked like a Raggedy Andy doll. He had orange curly hair and a round, soft face with two blue buttons for eyes and two pink buttons for a nose and a mouth. All morning he’d been drooling over a slick magazine that had still shots of Remy Lelourie’s hottest love scenes. One showed her languishing in a sheik’s tent wearing nothing but veils, but Nate had so far been the only one to see it. The other detectives were riled at him because he wasn’t sharing.
“What it is,” Nate was saying, “is one of them new theories has to do with—what’s that guy? You know, Freud? When women do that—when they go out and buy stuff they don’t need—it means they got these sexual urges that aren’t otherwise being satisfied….”
His words trailed off, and the squad room fell into an awed silence as they all contemplated the fact that Fiorello Prankowski, who was an unpredictable Yankee with biceps the size of hams and fists like ball-peen hammers, had just had his manhood insulted.
Fio had been leaning lazily back on the hind legs of his chair, but now he let it fall forward and lumbered slowly to his feet. He ambled over to Nate Carroll’s desk. “You saying my wife’s new parlor organ reminds her of my organ?”
Somebody snorted and then went instantly quiet. Nate swallowed so hard his throat clicked. He stared down at the magazine in his lap as if it held a blueprint for his salvation. “I was just, you know … talking.”
“ ’Cause you’d be right,” Fio said. “Both make them long, deep notes. Do all that throbbing. Vibrating.” He whistled softly and plucked the magazine out of Nate’s grasp. “Man, is her hand holding what I think it’s holding?”
At his vigil by the window, Rourke was now smiling. A sugar wasp had found its way there as well and was bouncing against the glass. A taxicab was pulling up to the curb below, and the reporters were now all running toward it.
So she has come, he thought. He saw her legs first as they came out of the cab. Long and slender and pale. Next came the crown of a black straw hat. The hat had a flared brim and a long pheasant feather that curled down over her shoulder.
She looked up, as if she knew he watched her.
The reporters and the curious had checked for just a moment at their first sight of her, but now they surged around her. They shouted questions and snapped cameras in her face, but no one actually touched her. She moved through them gently, like a minnow swimming upstream, creating little eddies in her wake. They treated her, Rourke thought, as if she were touched by magic. But if she went down, they would tear her to pieces.
They were all waiting for her in the squad room—even Captain Malone had emerged from his office—and the expectancy was like a hum in the hot, heavy air. Rourke turned away from the window and leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the door.
The desk sergeant brought her in. She wore a simple black sheath dress that gave her a tragic air. The brim of her hat, with its curling pheasant feather, covered one eye. She looked right at Rourke and her face went even paler, and she looked away just as Captain Malone came up to her.
She gave the senior detective a shy, tentative smile, her white teeth catching on her lower lip for just an instant. The hand she held out to him looked impossibly fragile, and had red-lacquered nails.
For a moment Rourke wondered if she’d miscalculated. No lady in New Orleans would paint her fingernails, let alone do them up a bloodred when she was supposed to be a grieving widow. Remy, though, had always thrived on flirting with disaster. She would want every man in the world believing in her innocence, but only if it cost them a sliver of their souls.
Her gaze went now to every man in the room but him, and Rourke watched her pull them in one by one. She seemed to be searching inside their skins for something she wanted, coveted, craved.
His captain, looking a little stunned, was still holding her hand, as if unsure whether he was supposed to shake it or bring it up to his lips and kiss it. Captain Daniel Malone had careless southern-gentleman good looks to go with his careless southern-gentleman good manners: rumpled sandy-blond hair, dimpled chin, and sleepy brown eyes that always managed to look sad even when he smiled. His wife was the mayor’s cousin and that had got him his rank, but such was New Orleans. He was a good cop, and the detective squad liked him.
He mumbled something now about taking care of a few formalities and led Remy Lelourie over to a plain ladder-back chair.
She lowered herself gracefully onto the seat, folded her hands with those red-lacquered nails on her lap, and tucked her feet beneath her. Her shoes, Rourke saw, had little black bows at the ankles.
The captain took a seat beside her. “Miss Lelourie—that is, Mrs. St. Claire … may we get you something? Coffee? A glass of water?”
“You are too kind,” she said, so softly they all had to strain to hear. “But I’m fine, truly I am.”
Captain Malone’s hand came up to hover over her shoulder for a moment, as if he would pat it if only he dared. If she wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world, Rourke thought, she was certainly the most photographed. They had lived with her image for years, these cops, been surrounded by it everywhere, and so they had thought they knew her, maybe even thought they owned a little piece of her. Now they were seeing how wrong they had been.
“Mrs. St. Claire, I know this is difficult,” Malone said, and his words so intruded on the moment that they seemed cruel, obscene. “But if you could go over one more time what happened last night when you found your husband’s … when