Mortal Sins. Penn Williamson

“Is that a dare?”

      Jesus, oh, Jesus.

      Her hand fell to her side and she took a step back. “I bet you call her ‘baby,’” she said.

      “What?” he said. He could still feel the pounding of his own pulse in his throat.

      She walked away from him, trailing her hand over the automobile’s long and sexy hood, softly stroking the canary yellow paint job with those red-lacquered nails.

      She laughed at the look on his face. “You do call her ‘baby.’ I bet you take her out on the Old Shell Road and say, ‘Come on, baby. Let’s see how fast you can go.’”

      Rourke couldn’t help laughing with her, because she was right. He’d paid the Bearcat’s exorbitant thirty-five-hundred-dollar price tag with bourré winnings, and he thought that putting the six-cylinder, air-cooled Franklin engine through its paces was almost as good as sex.

      Remy had come back to him, close enough to touch him, although this time she didn’t. “So take me for a ride in her, Day. And make her go fast.”

      He had intended all along to take her for a ride. It was why he’d had the desk sergeant bring her out this back way, away from the crush of reporters and her adoring fans. He wanted to take her to a place where he could see how much, if any, she had changed.

      He opened the passenger door and watched her climb in, flashing her long legs. As she settled into the Bearcat’s low-slung, hand-buffed Spanish leather seat, her black sheath dress rode up to reveal the roll of her stockings and shocking pink knees. Painted nails and rouged knees—she was sure one hot little tomato.

      “Mourning becomes you,” he said.

      She looked up at him, her eyes wide and guileless. “Am I being too subtle, do you think? Should I have wrapped myself up in long black taffeta skirts and a veil?”

      He could feel an energy pulsing off her like heat lightning. He knew where that had come from. Even in the little bit of time he’d spent with her there in the squad room, he’d watched her come to possess them all, one by one. Seasoned, jaded cops who’d seen everything and should have known better had fallen into those big, cat-like tilted eyes, and their souls had become electrified.

      And she had fed off them, was feeding off them still.

      Rourke got behind the wheel and started the engine, but before he put the Bearcat in gear, he pulled a hip flask of scotch out of his pocket and held it out to her. “To soothe the grieving widow’s shattered nerves.”

      “To love and war,” she said, taking the flask, touching just the back of his hand, and he despised himself for it, but he felt the burn of her touch low and deep in his belly.

      Rourke sent the Bearcat shooting out of the alley in a cloud of dust and a scattering of oiled gravel.

      He took Tulane Avenue to Claiborne and turned east. She didn’t ask where they were going, not even when they headed toward the river and open country on the St. Bernard Highway. He opened the Bearcat up, coaxing the speedometer up to eighty miles per hour, which was twice as fast as any sane man would drive on that road.

      She was drinking steadily from the flask, probably more than was wise for someone about to be grilled by a homicide detective. “You are so mean, Daman Rourke,” she said after a time.

      “Am I?”

      “I walked into that police station of yours scared to death, and you give me this look. Just like some nasty ol’ monster would do, before he goes chasing after the girl and growling ‘I’m gonna get yooou.’”

      He laughed, and she smiled back at him. She had to hold down her hat against the wind they made, and he could see the blue veins on the inside of her arm. Her face shone like a white rose.

      This was like a scene in one of her movies, he thought. Drinking bootleg whiskey in a fast car, with the wind in their hair. The gay, irresponsible, tomorrow-we-die celluloid life.

      Last night, covered head to toe in her murdered husband’s blood, still she had seemed so frightened and vulnerable. So innocent, if you didn’t know her. Last night she had tried to seduce him with her innocence.

      She was still trying to seduce him. But this morning there was a brittleness, an edgy desperation, to her. She was more believable somehow, this Remy.

      He cut his eyes off the road and back to her again. There was that luminescent quality about her that shone through so strongly on the movie screen, a shimmering, like an icicle melting in the sun, but she gripped the flask so hard her knuckles had bled white, and he could see faint black stains left by the fingerprinting.

      “Don’t you think you ought to be getting yourself a lawyer?” he said.

      She took another long pull of the scotch. “That’s what Mama told me—well, Mama didn’t tell me exactly, since we aren’t speaking. She had Belle telephone this morning and pass along the wisdom: that I need to get me a lawyer. ’Course, Mama isn’t worried about me being arrested so much as she is about me not getting the house. You know how Mama feels about Sans Souci.”

      “So are you going to get the house? Does it come to you in St. Claire’s will?”

      “You are such a cop anymore, Day. Now you’re thinking I killed him for a house.”

      She had pushed her lips into a little pout, playing with him, being obvious about it and not even caring that he would see right through her, not caring that he knew she had coveted Sans Souci the whole of her life.

      He slammed on the brakes and the Bearcat slewed to a stop, tires screeching and burning rubber. He stared at her and she stared back at him, unblinking. She wasn’t even breathing hard.

      Then, as he watched, her eyes slowly filled with tears. She turned her head away, to look across an empty pasture toward an old dairy barn. The barn, once painted red, was now the color of rust. You could see, just barely, the faded image of a spotted cow on the steeply slanted roof.

      He gripped her chin and pulled her head around to face him. “My, my, just look at you—the grieving widow all of a sudden. But who are the tears for, baby? For yourself, or for him? Do you want me to believe you’re sorry he’s dead?”

      She shook her head, and he felt a splash of wetness on the back of his hand. “Don’t be like this, Day, please,” she said, so softly he could barely hear her. “Don’t hate me like this.”

      He let go of her as if she’d suddenly caught on fire. She was setting him up, twisting him inside out, with her truths and her lies. He knew that if he let himself listen to her long enough, he would find a way to believe whatever she told him.

      He listened to her cry for a while, until her cheeks were all puffy and wet, and her nose had turned red. He had seen her cry like this before, both for real and in her movies—hard, brutal tears that could make her seem so human as to be almost ugly. That she wasn’t so beautiful when she cried made it even easier to believe her. But then she probably knew that as well.

      “I am sorry for Charles,” she was saying. “For his dying and the horrible way of it, and for all the pain we’d brought to each other in these last months.”

      She looked at him, with her lips partly open, her eyes so wet and dark and deep. Like her tears, everything about her had the potential to be a lie. He gripped the steering wheel, hard, to keep from touching her, and drove off the road, turning onto a track that cut through the pasture toward the old dairy barn. The barn had been converted into a hangar, where a couple of Spad fighter planes and a Jenny trainer had been relegated as surplus from the war. One of the pastures had been turned into an airfield, although nothing stirred there now but the cattails and the crows. Even the wind sock hung listless in the thick, sultry air.

      He had gone to war after she had left him that summer, the summer of 1916. The Great War, they called it, and great it had been from the way it consumed blood and flesh and bones by the trenchload. America hadn’t joined in the