Mary Lou didn't want to leave, but of course nobody was going to invite her to watch any dailies, and so she wasn't either surprised or disappointed to find herself back out on the docks, among hogsheads of sugar on flat wagons and oystermen unloading their luggers.
Reggie was going to a speakeasy to celebrate the end of the day's shooting with some of the other electricians. Mary Lou gave him a big hug and kiss as a thank-you for so special a morning and then she walked alone to the corner where she could catch a streetcar going toward home. The riverfront was crowded with traffic this time of day, but Mary Lou was still caught up in the magic and she floated down the sidewalk with stars in her eyes and a head full of dreams.
It took her a moment to realize that someone was calling her name and another moment to figure out where the shout was coming from. Then she noticed that a man was waving at her from a car that was idling at the red streetlight. She recognized him right off and so she waved back at him and smiled.
He stuck his head out the window and motioned her over. “Can I give you a lift somewhere?”
Mary Lou looked down the block, but the streetcar was nowhere in sight. She was afraid the light was about to change, and so she made up her mind fast, stepping off the curb and almost into the path of a bicyclist who bellowed at her to get out of the way.
She had to run then to dodge an oncoming beer truck, even though her mama would have probably died to see her only daughter running across the street like a hooligan. The man got out of the car to open the door for her, and she used her best smile on him, the one everybody said was so much like Remy Lelourie's. “This is swell, thanks.”
It was his silence, the strange rudeness of it in the face of her own courtesy, that made her pause as she was climbing into the car, and turn half around to look at him. Which was why she saw, for just that split second, the edge of his hand slicing through the air, before it slammed into the side of her neck.
Her legs buckled and the world blurred, and he caught her beneath the knees and slid her onto the car's seat. His mouth brushed against her ear, whispering.
“It's going to feel good, baby. So good.”
Chapter Twelve
I did some thinking,” Fiorello Prankowski said, “while that goon in a white coat was digging the bullet outta my arm with something that felt like a shovel. I decided the guy was shooting at you. Yeah, it was you he was after and all's I did was get in the way.”
They were having lunch at the soda fountain in Kress's Five-and-Dime, sitting before a marble-topped counter, on swivel stools, beneath a canopy of hanging ferns. Since Rourke had said he was treating, Fio had decided they ought to splurge and go to some place classy for a change.
“Go ahead and figure it that way,” Rourke said, “if it makes you feel any better. And since you're the guy with his arm in a sling and a hole in his hat, I can always console myself with the thought that whoever he is he's a hell of a bad shot. So as long as I keep you alongside me, give him something to hit when he's aiming at me, then I'm safe.”
Fio had finished off two cherry cokes, a muffaletta, and a plate of soufflé potatoes, and now he was eyeing the banana cream pie. “Yeah, well what you got to do is look at the big picture, and in the big picture, in the grand scheme of things, so to speak, you're the one who's always getting shot at. You had them Chicago outfit guys after you all last summer. Tossing pineapples around and ripping up the place with machine guns. Maybe they've come back down for a second go at you.”
Rourke washed down the last of his oyster sandwich with a swig of coffee so hot it burned the roof of his mouth. “You done eating?” he said to Fio, reaching for his money clip. “Because if you're done—”
“Nobody said done. Done is after I have dessert. Done is after the piece of banana cream pie I deserve on account of all the blood I lost when my arm got in the way of that slug meant for you.”
Rourke drank more coffee while the soda jerk brought Fio his pie. He started eavesdropping on the conversation of the two young women sitting on the stools next to them. One had just gotten engaged and she was telling her friend all about it. Her fiancé had stuck the ring in a chocolate ice cream cone and she had almost swallowed it.
Remy Lelourie, he thought, wasn't ever going to marry him, and he had been a fool ever to entertain the fantasy. She was scared of almost nothing in this world, but she was terrified of that. He had asked her once. Her answer had been to cry and then to make love to him and then to give him no real answer at all.
“Before you got shot at,” Fio was saying, “when you were coming to the gallant rescue of that Humanitarian Cult woman, I thought I saw Cornelius Dupre hanging back on the fringes of the crowd.”
“He's just a kid, Fio.”
“He's only two years younger than his brother, and that Titus is old enough to have raped two girls, then strangled them and dumped their bodies in the river…or wherever he put the first one. That boy is probably thinking his brother wouldn't be getting electrocuted tonight, if it weren't for you. I was up at the lake, fishing and getting a bad case of sunburn on the back of my neck when all that was going down, so the Dupres can't be blaming me for all their troubles.”
Rourke drank more coffee and let it go. Fio's way of working through a case was to rattle off at the mouth, while his brain percolated and sifted through the details. He was one of the best homicide detectives New Orleans had, even though he'd been born and raised and had spent most all of his years on the job in Des Moines, Iowa. He'd come to New Orleans on a case seven years ago, met the woman who sold hats in Maison Blanche, married her, and tried bringing her home to Iowa. New Orleans girls didn't transplant well, though, and so last year he'd ended up coming back here for good.
Maybe, Rourke thought, he should just go ahead and buy Remy a ring and give it to her in an ice cream cone.
“What I don't want to be thinking,” Fio went on after a few moments of blessed silence had passed, “is that the shooting had squat-all to do with our crucifixion killing, because that case is already so balled-up it's making my head hurt. And everybody is behaving like they're trying to run a shuck on us. I don't know if I want to be the first to say it out loud, Day, but just who are the bad guys here? A bunch of priests? I'm having a hard time getting my head around the notion that the Church found out Father Pat was a woman, panicked at the thought of the scandal, and put a hit on her. Him.”
“You ever heard of the Borgias?”
“They some old New Orleans Mafia family?”
“Some old Italian family,” Rourke said, hiding a smile. “In the fifteenth century one of them became Pope. Poison was his preferred method of doing a hit, but sometimes he had his enemies tortured to death in a dungeon he had built for that purpose. He was also maybe screwing his own sister. Our archbishop is another tough old bird, who didn't get where he's at making nice. Contracting for murder is a big line to cross, though. And, besides, it wouldn't make sense to take care of the kind of problem Father Pat presented for the Church in such a way that the problem called attention to itself. It wasn't until he turned up dead and an autopsy was done that Father Pat's secret came out.”
“Aw, man. Don't start in again with that stuff about him not being naked.” Fio pushed back his clean pie plate, belched, and patted his gut. “What we need to do is have a heart-to-heart with Tony the Rat. Call me a cop, but I don't believe the man went into that confessional for the good of his immortal soul.”
“Yeah. Probably not. Anyway, I already called down and had him picked up, so let's let him sweat some more. I want to have another look around that factory in the daylight.”
Back outside, beneath the shade of Kress's fancy mosaic tile arcade, Fio paused to light up a cigar. “Did you ever think about it?” he said to Rourke. “About becoming a priest?”
“Sweet Jesus, no. You?”
“My Polish old man liked to say he was an atheist just to get a rise out of my Italian ma, who was as devout as they come. She was all the time prayi
ng to God to make one of her sons a priest. Growing up, I got this picture in my head of God's arm reaching down from heaven to smack me in the face with a vocation, like it was a pie. It got to where I was scared even to set foot in a church in case her prayers were answered.”
“So you became a cop instead.”
Fio grinned around the Castle Morro clamped between his teeth. “Yeah. I guess the joke was on me.”
Rourke laughed and then he started down the street. Fio stayed where he was and so Rourke turned back around. “What?”
“I don't want to ask this, partner, but I got to. Do you think your brother—”
“No,” Rourke said, and then, “I don't know. Maybe.”
Fio gave him a long, hard look, but said nothing more.
“I would say it's not in Paulie's nature to kill,” Rourke said after a moment. “My brother hasn't got it in him to either hate or love that much. He hasn't got the intensity.”
“I don't know, man…People commit murder for other reasons besides hate or love.”
Rourke shook his head. “Not this killing. In spite of all the planning it must have taken, this one was done with the heart.”
The macaroni factory looked even seedier in daylight.
It took up most of the block, except for a decaying old flophouse on the corner that was on the last legs of its existence. A couple of months ago, Rourke remembered, a body four days dead had been found there, strangled and stuffed under a bed. They'd been renting out the room through all that time and either the guests hadn't noticed the smell or had been too wasted to look and see what was making it.
Rourke parked the car across the street, in front of the raided hot car farm. The Victory Gasoline sign that hung by chains over the gate was still creaking in the wind, but something about the place seemed different today. On the other side of the chicken wire fence, a couple of pumps stood in an island in front of the garage's bay doors, their hoses dragging in the dust. The doors were well boarded up, though, and it didn't look as if anybody had been near them since the riot squad had broken through with axes and crowbars.
The wind gusted and the gasoline sign squealed on its chains, but it seemed to Rourke that he'd heard something else, something that sounded like a faint cry, and the back of his neck prickled. Then he heard the click of claws on pavement, and a mangy black dog appeared from the back of the building, growling and baring its teeth at them.
Rourke turned and started to follow Fio across the street. They walked past a tamale cart that nobody seemed to be tending. “Middle of the day, not a lot happening 'round here,” Fio said.
Rourke looked back over his shoulder at the hot car farm. The dog stood guard at the fence watching them, the wind ruffling its fur. When the wind blew just right, you could smell the river from here.
An old bum had taken up residence in the macaroni factory's arched stone portico. He seemed to be sleeping, but as they came up he lifted his head off his chest and looked up at them. His face was creased like an old leather glove and one of his eyes was dead. An old sailor's hat testified to something he once might have been.
“Y'all don't want to go in there,” he said. “It's a bad place.”
“Yeah?” Fio said. “What makes you say that?”
A sly grin short of a few teeth spread across old bum's mouth. “'Cause it's the doorway to hell.”
“Is that why you chalked those hobo marks on the door?” Rourke said.
“I got something for y'all,” the bum said. He pulled open his filthy, buttonless trousers and took out a limp penis, flopping it up and down on his hand. A string of saliva drooled from one corner of his mouth.
“Aw, man,” Fio said. “We got us a weenie wagger. Put that pathetic thing away before we arrest it.”
Inside, the factory smelled of dust and blood and feces. It didn't seem so hellish a place in the light of day, though. The large vats, the wheels and pulleys and giant fan belts were just heaps of rusting machinery. The only evidence left of Father Pat's terrible ordeal were the bloodstains on the drying rack's crossbeam and the globs of melted candle wax on the floor.
Rourke climbed up onto the catwalk and walked around it until he found, half hidden behind a pile of rotting cardboard boxes, the door that let out onto the fire escape. The padlock had been busted, and recently, judging from the raw marks on the wood.
The killer could have been up here on the catwalk that night, Rourke thought, when Carlos Kelly had come through the door below, looking for a place to hide from Tony the Rat's goon. Whatever had been going on that night between the murderer and his victim, it had the feel of an act interrupted. And so whatever Father Pat's tormentor had wanted from him—the thrill of listening to him beg for mercy, maybe, of watching him die an agonizing death—the killer's desire had been denied.
At least, Rourke thought with a wry inward smile, that was his own theory of the moment. To test it, he covered his hand with his handkerchief, pressed down on the door's latch and pushed it open. It squealed on its rusted hinges like the scream of a bat.
Across the street from the macaroni factory and down an alleyway that smelled of old brick and beer piss was a speakeasy called the Crazy Cat, known for its exotic dancers whose act was to take off all their clothes and do the bump and grind. The Crazy Cat was where Carlos Kelly had run for help after finding the crucified priest.
To get there you had to walk along a row of filthy cribs, where prostitutes stood naked or nearly so in the doorways and behind the slatted blinds in windows and called out to potential customers as they passed on by.
This time of day most of these ladies of the night were still sleeping, but one was sitting on her stoop, wearing a faded pink silk wrapper, smoking a cigarette, and working on a jug of sour mash.
She looked really young, no older than sixteen, and she hadn't been on the street long enough to have lost all her looks. She had long flaxen hair gathered into a thick braid that hung over her shoulder and curled around one breast, and a pixie face with freckles sprinkled across her cheekbones and nose.
Rourke stopped to talk to her, maybe because at the moment she looked as though she needed somebody to recognize her existence in this world. “Were you working last night?” he asked.
She looked him up and down, and then her lip curled into a beautiful sneer. “You cops ever think of spreading it around?” she said, in the slack-jawed slur of the addict. “I already gotta give one blow job on the house pret' near every night to that bastard bull cop Jack Murphy.”
“So in between your tricks last night, freebies or otherwise,” Fio said, “did you see or hear anything naughty or nasty going on?”
She pressed a hand to her breast, widened her eyes and opened her mouth in feigned shock. “What, you mean somebody was up to no good? Honey, how many law-abiding citizens you seen around here lately?”
Rourke gave her a dollar for her time, and Fio shook his head at him.
The speakeasy's door was shut, but its Judas eye was open, and with no bouncer on duty they were able to walk on in. They didn't see any exotic dancers doing the striptease, just a man behind the bar and a lone drinker occupying a table up against the back wall.
The air was thick with the nauseating smell of muscatel, stale smoke, cracklings, chewed tobacco, the jar of picked hogs feet and sausages that sat open on the bar, and the damp sawdust rotting on the floor. The tin-shaded lights were turned off, making it cool and dark, but a few bands of greasy sunlight spilled through the shuttered windows. It was the kind of dive where you fought with knives and bottles.
A man with milky eyes and a nose that looked like it had been smashed flat long ago by something the size of a baseball bat was wiping down the bar with a wet rag. He took one look at Rourke and Fio and turned his back on them.
Rourke had started for the bar when he got a better look at the lone drinker sitting along the back wall. The kid had a greasy, pocked face, mangy black hair, and shoulders so bony his shirt hung off them like off a wire
hanger.
The kid spotted Rourke at the same time, and he bolted up from his chair, heading for the back door. Rourke chased him into a toilet that was little more than a hole in the floor and snagged his coat as he was about to crawl through the window.
“What'd I do? What'd I do?” the kid kept crying as Rourke hauled him out of the toilet, back into the speak, and threw him hard into the chair he'd been warming. His head banged on the greasy wall. “Ow. Jesus, Lieutenant. I didn't do nothin'. What'd I do?”
“You made me chase you, Eddie. You shouldn't have made me chase you.”
Fio pulled up a chair and sat down at the table. “You shouldn't have made him chase you, Eddie. And into the can, too. You gotta be one crazy fucker to make him do that.”
The kid looked back and forth between the two cops with wild eyes. “Who the hell are you?” he said to Fio. He pointed a finger at Rourke's face. “And he's the one who's crazy.”
“I know,” Fio said sadly. “That's why you shouldn't have made him chase you.”
Rourke knocked the pointing finger away. “You make me crazy, Eddie.”
“Aw, man, I didn't do nothin'. What'd I do?”
Edward Durango had been making a living by creeping houses since he was ten, and he was either real busy or not all that good at it, because Rourke had busted him more times than he wanted to remember. The kid was known as Dirty Eddie, because he always left a pile of shit on the bed of the homes he burgled.
The one thing Eddie Durango was good at, though, was being a weasel. For the price of a bottle of muscatel, he would squeal on his own mother, if he'd ever had one. The amazing thing was that, in spite of all his squealing, Dirty Eddie had a string of sources that had proven through the years to be almost infallible.
Rourke pulled up another chair and sat down, so that they made a cozy trio around the table. “Let's have us a little conversation, Eddie,” he said.
Dirty Eddie didn't look too happy about it, but he nodded, wetting his lips. “I got a bit of a dry throat, though. A fella can't do a whole lotta conversing with a dry throat.”
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