Most of the sins had been his, yes, but not all. Not all.
Pulled by memories, he looked through a curtain of blue glass beads and into the shadowed bedroom. He saw, in the silver shawl of moonlight floating through the gauzy bed netting, the sweet curve of a woman’s breast.
His breath quickened, and a hot flush prickled his bare skin. “That you, darlin’?” he said.
He took a step and the netting stilled, the shadow disappeared. His excitement died, leaving behind a melancholy ache. He wanted suddenly to be done with it all. He wanted to live a life without old longings, free of the past and old sins. Free of new sins and all the chaos and pain in his mind.
He picked up his silk robe from where he’d left it lying on the floor and shrugged it on. He went to the bureau, and his hands shook as he opened the flat silver box that was filled with not cigarettes but shaved cocaine. With the blade of a penknife, he scraped up the fine white flakes, then spilled it onto the back of his wrist. He brought it up to his nose, snorting deep, blinking.
His lips pulled back from his teeth and his eyes opened wide as the rush hit him. Beyond the open door the knife-like leaves of the banana tree stirred, sounding to his ears like a hurricane. He could feel his heart beating hard now.
He took a silk handkerchief out of his robe pocket and wiped his nose. He poured a glass of absinthe and spiked it with more cocaine. He tossed back most of the cocktail in one long swallow. The rush hit him again, harder this time, making him shudder.
Time spun away from him, letting go. He stood, swaying, drifting, caught up in the unraveling threads of a dream. Something brought him back, a noise. The locusts in the canebrakes, singing for their mates. He sucked in a deep breath and felt his chest expand with the force of it, felt the oxygen feed his blood. His blood pulsed now with the locusts’ scratching song.
And then they stopped.
A wicker rocking chair creaked out on the porch. He jerked, almost stumbling, to peer back through the open door. The chair was still. The beaded curtain clicked softly, and he spun back around. He held his breath now, listening, but he heard only the whirring of the ceiling fan and the dripping of rainwater off the fronds of the banana trees. The tripping thump of his own heart.
A chill moved down his spine, in spite of the oppressive heat. There was something dangerous about the night, a sense of ancient, predatory creatures stalking silently through the tall grass or flying among the trees on soundless wings.
He laughed.
The mosquito netting in the next room stirred again, flashing white across the corner of his eye. The netting floated open and a woman rose from the bed. A woman, naked, her body glowing silver as moonlit snow. A snow dream, he told himself. She’s only a dream.
He took a step backward though, even if she was only a dream, and still she came toward him. The beaded curtain parted around her, clicking and clacking. Thick worms writhed in her hair and her face was flat and dead, the color of the old bones rotting in the cemetery down the road.
She raised her arm, and at the end of it was a cane knife. The blade, long and flaring, bled red with a liquid fire.
“No,” he said, although even then he didn’t really believe in what he was denying.
She came closer, the snow woman with the horrible dead face, and then he realized what he was seeing and he laughed again.
“Remy,” he said, smiling, laughing. “Hey, you comin’ to get me, baby?” He backed another step, grinding his hips a little now, almost dancing, and she followed. She liked to play at dangerous games, did Remy, but in the end they were only games. “Come on, come on, come and get me.”
The cane knife slashed across his belly.
He grunted and looked down, he saw his flesh gape open and the blood well thick and black, and he wondered why it didn’t hurt, and then he screamed.
The knife cut him again, lower, and his scream broke into a wail. Run, he had to run; he ran but the knife came after him, came for his eyes this time, and he threw up his hands to stop it. The blade sliced across his palms, and he saw a finger go flying, but it wasn’t real and so he laughed, and then he screamed, and then he whimpered. “Please,” he said, as the knife slashed again. He opened his mouth and the screams filled it so he couldn’t breathe, rising and swelling in his throat like big wet bubbles.
He could hear her harsh panting in a wet darkness now filled with pain. He wanted her to stop so that he could breathe again, so that he could scream. He wanted to tell her he was sorry. He wanted her to understand that he wasn’t supposed to die.
He fell instead, and still she came. To cut out his heart with her knife.
He was slipping down, down deep into a hot black cocoon, his chest bursting, burning. His eyes filled with a black light, and then the light brightened into a whiteness and the world became new and sweet again. Night rain still dripped off the fronds of the banana trees, but the camellias outside the window smelled of tomorrow’s sunshine, and she was kissing him, warm, lingering kisses, her lips begging him to stay, and he didn’t want to go.
Slowly, he turned his head and looked up into her face. The screams were still trapped in his throat, beating like moths against glass. He opened his mouth to say her name one last time.
It came out in a gush of hot blood.
Blood was splattered and sprayed all over the walls and furniture. It lay in dark smears on the oiled wooden floor and pooled beneath the dead man’s cut throat, glossy and syrupy, like blackberry wine.
Daman Rourke stood just within the shack’s open door and tried not to breathe in the rank smell. He winced as the magnesium explosion of a flashlamp illuminated for an obscene moment the gashes in the dead man’s white flesh and his bulging, glassy eyes.
“Sweet mercy,” Rourke said.
The cop with the camera cast him a glance and then leaned over and pointed the lens at a cane knife that lay glued to the floor by a puddle of blood. “Day, my man. Welcome to the party,” he said, as the flashlamp blew with another burst of white light. “Where you been at? I’ve had guys looking for you in every gin and hot pillow joint this side of the river.”
Rourke resisted the urge to rub his hands over his face. It was past midnight at the end of a long day, beneath his linen suit coat his shirt 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