Wages of Sin

by Penelope Williamson

  Rourke made himself look at the nails. They more accurately should have been called spikes, he thought, for their heads were the size of a thumbnail and their shanks had to be at least seven inches long to drive through the width of the wrist and deep enough into the beam to bear the body's weight. Where they pierced the flesh, the skin was discolored blue, and rivulets of blood ran down the priest's arms to be soaked up by his sleeves. Not enough blood, though, to indicate that he'd bled to death.

  “What was the actual cause of death?” he asked aloud.

  The Ghoul came close to smiling—a rare event. “Ah, that I cannot tell you yet. The medical reason for death by crucifixion has never been fully understood. Perhaps it happens with heart failure or a form of suffocation. Or perhaps sheer exhaustion if one hangs long enough.”

  “Our witness says he heard screaming and then a gunshot not long before he found him.”

  “Oh, sure,” Fio said. “That makes a whole lot of sense. Go to the trouble to nail a guy to a pasta drying rack and then shoot him to death.”

  “Yeah,” Jack Murphy chimed in. “Maybe he was shot while trying to escape.”

  The Ghoul gave them both a sour look. “A coup de grâce, perhaps you are thinking,” he said to Rourke. “I am not seeing any bullet holes, but nothing can be a certainty until I can have a good look at him back at the morgue.”

  He stepped back, his gaze sweeping slowly up and down the body. “I wonder why he was not stripped naked. They always stripped them, the Romans did, before they nailed them to the crossbeam.”

  A thick mist was rising off the river and winding like strips of wet gauze through the close, narrow streets of the Quarter. Rourke stood outside, beneath the macaroni factory's arched portico, and breathed deeply of the cool, damp air, trying to get the smell of blood and burnt flesh out of his throat.

  The meat wagon had come and Father Patrick Walsh had been taken down off his cross, wrapped in a gray blanket, and carried away on a stretcher. The Ghoul had left in his chauffeured green Packard. Fio had taken a couple more photographs and finished dusting for prints, and the beat cops had been left inside in case the killer came back. It had been known to happen, Rourke thought, but he himself had never been so lucky on any of his cases.

  Fio came out of the factory now, pulling the door closed behind him. He held his shoulders high and his head low, as if he was ducking a punch. He cast a long glance at Rourke's averted face, then went through the motions of lighting up a Castle Morro.

  “Man,” he said once the cigar was finally drawing, “I've seen some bad shit, but that…”

  The wind blew the sweet perfume of Havana tobacco in Rourke's face, and he closed his eyes for a moment. Across the street, at the raided hot car farm, a gust slapped a sheet of newspaper at the chicken wire fence and set a Victory Gasoline sign to swinging on its chains with loud creaks. An empty pork 'n' beans can scraped along the gutter.

  Fio pushed a heavy breath out through his teeth. “Don't go all moody and crazy on me, Day.”

  “I'm okay.” Rourk's hands were shoved deep in his pockets, clenched into fists. He made himself open them, made himself breathe. Everyone was always telling him that he took each battered, butchered, and mangled corpse too personally. He was starting to believe that maybe everyone was right.

  Fio gave him another long look. “Fine, then let's talk about the case. You see a guy who's had his feet burned and you think Mafiosi, only I can't see the outfit capping a priest.”

  “They go to Mass every Sunday and baptize their babies in the faith and get the archbishop himself to deliver the eulogies at their funerals, and they'd still off the Pope if it was good for business.” Rourke shook his head. “Not like this, though. The guy who did this wasn't a mob enforcer. That beating to the face—it was personal. The killer knew Father Patrick Walsh and he was mad as hell at him.”

  “And nailing him to a fucking beam wasn't personal?”

  “No, the nails and the votive candles, they were something else.”

  Rourke had thought he could almost feel it in there, a miasma left behind by the killer, but he couldn't put a name to it yet. Fury. Frustration. Despair. Desperation…Something.

  Fio was rubbing his eyes, as if trying to wipe away the images of what he'd seen. “We keep saying he, but you'd think it would take two guys to nail a man to a beam.”

  Rourke shrugged. “It would be hard for one guy, but not impossible. If he knocked his victim out first.”

  “There was that big spread in the paper about Walsh a few weeks back,” Fio said. “Maybe the guy who did this has a vendetta against the Catholic Church and he picked the good father to be like his punching bag. Someone to be at the fist-end of all his hate.”

  “Except the body wasn't naked.”

  “Jeez. You're worse than the Ghoul. What does it matter if he left the poor bastard's clothes on or took them off?”

  “He had the nailing part right. Through the wrists. Yet he didn't strip him. If it was some kind of symbolic crucifixion of the Church, he would've followed the ritual to the letter.”

  “If you say so. It probably wasn't a sex thing then either. I had me a case back in Des Moines a couple of years back. Guy got his jollies doing nuns, but he took off their clothes before he fu—he did them.”

  Fio flipped his half-smoked cigar into the street. It landed with a shower of sparks and then it lay there, still burning, its tip glowing red.

  It would take a while, Rourke thought, for votive candles to burn the soles of a man's feet badly enough to leave charred flesh and running blisters. The killer had gathered together what he would need ahead of time and brought it with him: the candles, the nails, and whatever he had used for a hammer. Then he had brought his victim here for the purpose of doing what he had done, and he had been prepared for it to take time. “He must've known about this place,” Rourke said aloud. “Maybe he worked here before it closed down.”

  “Or he lives in the neighborhood.” Fio pushed his arms out into a stretch, popping the joints. “Oh, joy. Think of all the gin and hot pillow joints we get to visit. I'll come home smelling like sour mash and cheap perfume, and the wife'll have me sleeping on the sofa for a week.”

  The men's gazes met and they shared a smile, and the edginess that had been coiling between them all night began to loosen a little.

  “I've still got one question that's been nagging at me, though,” Fio said.

  “Yeah? What's that?”

  “How do they make macaroni, anyway?”

  Rourke had to laugh. “Beats the hell out of me.”

  He took one more slow look around. Tomorrow…no, this morning, for it was almost dawn, they would go all over the scene again. His sneering heart of hearts told him that people died all the time in obscene ways for obscene reasons and that iniquity and suffering flourished in the world, but he wanted a righteous justice for this one. He wanted it bad.

  “Why do you think,” he said aloud, “that hobos would want to avoid an abandoned factory that is dry inside and with plenty of wood to burn if the night turns cold?”

  Fio, who had started to walk away, turned back around. “Huh?”

  Rourke pointed at the graffiti chalked on the door. “Some tramp left a warning for other guys passing through that this place is unsafe.”

  Fio stared at the marks a moment, then shrugged. “Let's face it—this ain't the Ritz.”

  At the car, Rourke stopped and looked up at the infinity of the sky, where little was left to the stars, and the black holes between them were filling with light. He let his mind go, seeking a connection, and he smiled…The killer had had a plan, and the guts to see the plan through no matter how messy things got, and he was smart. Smart and careful and arrogant. Smart and careful enough that he would try to get away with this, and arrogant enough to believe that he would succeed.

  “We'll get him, Day,” Fio said, his craggy face creased with worry, for he'd seen the cruel edge on Rourke's smile and knew what it mean
t.

  “We,” Rourke said, “are going to nail his fuckin' ass to a crossbeam.”

  Chapter Five

  The party had flapped on until five-thirty in the morning, when the hooch ran dry and the band packed up and went home. It seemed then that everyone left all at once and Remy Lelourie was alone.

  There was no sadder sight, she thought, than a room after a party is over. The chandelier lights blazed too brightly on the silver trays littered with crumbs and on the crystal glasses with their melting ice and lipsticked rims. Wet rings marked the tables, and cigarette smoke hazed the air. The house smelled of flat champagne and sour gin.

  She paid off the hired waiters and told Miss Beulah, her housekeeper, to leave the mess for later and go on down to bed.

  Alone then, truly alone, she walked the cypress boards of the upstairs gallery for a while, where the women of her family had once walked with their hooped skirts and fluttering fans. The rising sun glazed bronze the water of the bayou. Wisps of mists writhed among the canebrakes, only to be snatched up and blown away by a strong rising wind.

  The wind felt cold on her bare arms and she rubbed them, shivering a little. Her body had the same exposed-nerve feeling that sometimes came over her after shooting a scene, when she got too into a part and lost herself. The world would get like a piece of overexposed film then: bright, jagged, raw.

  The wind gusted again, pulling the moss off the oaks and lashing at the dead black branches of the drowned cypress trees. She gripped her arms tighter, as if she were trying to hold herself together, to keep the wind from pulling her apart. Her friends and enemies both claimed that she could be more than a little crazy sometimes, and she believed that of herself. She had an emptiness inside of her that was a living thing—a yawning hunger that constantly needed filling. The emptiness made her act wild and reckless; it made her crave things, made her want to do things she knew would be bad for her.

  The devil had come into her house tonight, the devil in the form of Max Leeland, the head of Bright Lights Studios. He had taken the train all the way out from California, to tempt her with more money than God could mint and with complete creative control of whatever film she next chose to star in. Nobody had complete creative control. Not even Mary Pickford. People thought that the movies were all about fame and money, but people on the inside knew that the fame and money were only tools to bring you the one thing that really mattered: power.

  So Max had come, bearing gifts and a contract that would make her the most powerful woman in Hollywood. Because she'd been telling everybody for weeks that Cutlass would be her last picture, and because she'd come home and she had her man back and she was happy, happy, happy—they must have finally believed that she really would walk away from the movie business, if Max had come all the way out here to talk her out of it. Which was funny, because even before he'd arrived the old restlessness and craziness had already been creeping up on her once again.

  A floorboard creaked behind her, and she turned around slowly, smiling. Not scared, because a little ol' bump in the night would never scare Remy Lelourie. She'd worked hard at inuring herself to fear a long time ago, by flirting with it and embracing it, facing up to the worst that fear could do to her by spitting in its eye.

  The length of the gallery was empty, though, except for the gauzy curtains that floated out the open windows of her bedroom. For a moment it seemed that a shadow walked there, appearing in one shaft of light and then another, and then disappearing suddenly like a jump shot on a piece of film.

  Day.

  She felt a wrench of excitement and need, and yet even as it was happening she was thinking: Remember how this feels, Remy girl. Remember this for later, when you have to play a woman so in love with a man that just seeing his shadow cross her window makes her heart ache.

  She must have been wrong about the shadow, because he wasn't there.

  The bell ringer for the telephone on the desk was chirping, though, and she reached to answer it just as her gaze fell on her bed. It was a Louisiana Sheridan bed that sat well off the floor with posts ten feet high and decorated with wooden pineapples that were supposed to symbolize hospitality. The rice-patterned spread was turned down, and although the bed had yet to be slept in, the silk sheets were wrinkled and the pillow indented as if an invisible man already lay there.

  Remy Lelourie stared at the vibrating bell ringer, her breath tripping suddenly.

  Slowly, she lifted the handset and put the receiver to her ear. The line crackled, and she thought she could hear breathing, or perhaps it was only the soughing of the wind on the gallery.

  Slower still, she brought her lips to the mouthpiece. “Hello?” she said.

  The breathing quickened, as if excited, and then a voice low and muffled, “Did you get my letter, Remy?”

  She saw it then—a creamy white envelope lying on her dressing table, propped up against the round, beveled mirror. Her name was written on it in a fat script with a strange rusty-brown ink.

  She tried to hang up, but the handset slipped off the hook and clattered onto the desk. She went to the dressing table, floating now, as if she played a part in one of her movies. She stared at the envelope a long time before she picked it up. She slit open the seal with a scarlet nail.

  Are you scared yet, Remy?

  The last shreds of the stars had gone, and the sky was tinged on the edges by a rising saffron sun. Detective Daman Rourke drove his Stutz Bearcat along the river, past bags of coffee stacked on the wharf, past wagons piled with bananas and oyster luggers that rocked in their moorings. Tugboat horns moaned in the thick mist rising off the water.

  He thought his partner was dozing, until the big cop sat up and tapped a thick finger on the windshield. “Hey, how come we didn't turn up Canal?”

  “Because we're going to Our Lady of the Holy Rosary.”

  “No, we're not. Uh-uh. No,” Fio said, staring hard at the side of Rourke's face. “You're going to get us fired,” he went on when Rourke neither answered him nor turned back downtown toward the Criminal Courts Building, where the detectives' squad room was and where they should have been going. “Only you won't be fired because you've got an angel in high places and you're banging a movie star. I'll be fired, and the wife'll have me sleeping on the sofa for a month.”

  “If a cop was found like that, what is the first thing we'd do?” Rourke said.

  “Aw, man. I don't want to hear this.”

  “We'd see if he was dirty and then cover it up.”

  “You saying you think Father Patrick Walsh was dirty?”

  Rourke shrugged. “I'm only saying I want to get a handle on his life before the archbishop rings up the other good fathers at his rectory with the news that he's dead and everybody starts covering their asses.” Rourke cut a glance at his partner. Fio was giving him that wild-eyed look again.

  “You want me to come along with you while you roust some priests,” Fio said.

  “I'll roust them nicely.”

  “Hunh.” Fio pushed back his cuff and tried to check his watch in the intermittent light of the street lamps. “It's ten minutes of six.”

  “Priests get up with the dawn. It's only sinners like you and me who've got to sleep off what we did the night before.”

  “You want me to come along with you while you go knocking on the door of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary rectory at six o'clock in the morning and tell 'em that one of their priests has been murdered and then ask them if they did it.”

  Rourke smiled. “Well, my daddy always said if it looks like a fight is coming, be sure you get in the first lick.”

  Fio showed his teeth in an answering smile. “You said you were going to be nice.”

  “Maybe I lied.” Rourke was quiet for a while, then he added, “Did I ever tell you that I have a brother?”

  More silence filled the car and two blocks rolled by before Fio said, “Eleven months we've been partners, I've told you stuff I've never even told my wife, and this is the first time you
mention a brother.”

  “Yeah, well, he's a priest at Holy Rosary.”

  Our Lady of the Holy Rosary was on Coliseum Square in a neighborhood that was mixed like gumbo, with Negroes, Irish and German immigrants, and old American families who could trace their lineage back to before the Civil War.

  The square was actually shaped like a triangle with the Gothic-style church on Race Street anchoring its base. Holy Rosary's school was on the church's lakeside and the rectory was on the riverside, and all had been built in the middle of the last century out of the same Louisiana brick that was glowing bloodred in the early morning sunlight. A milk wagon was pulled up to the curb.

  Rourke and Fio sat in the car while the milkman ladled milk from a big tin can into a couple of glass bottles and carried the bottles through the gate in a black iron picket fence afroth with honeysuckle. He blessed himself as he passed through the shadows cast by the church's octagonal bell tower and then left the milk at the rectory's kitchen stoop.

  Fio watched the milkman; Rourke watched the priest who was cutting through the green of the square, moving fast and looking back over his shoulder. Rourke watched as the priest, almost running now, crossed the street, climbed the portal steps, and entered the church through the iron-banded wooden doors.

  “Wait for me,” Rourke said to his partner, and got out of the car.

  Rourke hurried up the root-cracked walkway, with the wind skirling yellow leaves around his feet. The knifelike fronds of the banana trees rattled above his head, and the waving knotted branches of the old figs threw shifting shadows on the red-brick walls.

  Rourke's father's mother had carried bricks in her apron to help build St. Alphonsus, the church he'd grown up with as a boy in the Irish Channel. The women who had lived in this neighborhood generations ago would have done the same thing for Holy Rosary. Today the young sons of their line would be serving at the Mass in the way that Rourke had done. The sons and brothers and uncles of these families would become their priests.