One day last April, sixteen-year-old Mercedes Bloom and her best friend, Nina Duboche, had been seen laughing and talking with the neighborhood chimney sweep on the front gallery of Nina Duboche's house, engaging in a little forbidden flirtation, maybe, with the handsome colored boy who was supposed to have known that his place was to look and want, but never, never to think of touching. That evening Mercedes Bloom had disappeared off the face of the earth. The local precinct cops had put her down as a runaway, until another evening two weeks later when Nina Duboche had started to walk the six blocks from her house to the spring hop at her school's gymnasium and had never gotten there. The following morning, Nina Duboche's raped and strangled body had been found washed up on the riverbank.
Nina Duboche had had the life choked out of her with the kind of weighted rope chimney sweeps used with palmetto fans to clean the soot out of flues, and so Titus Dupre—the boy the girls had been seen flirting with on the day Mercedes Bloom had first disappeared—be-came an early suspect. Within hours, part of their school uniforms, two navy blue tasseled tam-o'-shanters, had been found stuffed beneath the boy's mattress, and colored gossip had him bragging to his friends at a Negro smoke joint the night before about how he'd been having himself some taste of white jelly and it was sweet.
It had taken the jury less than an hour to convict Titus Dupre of Nina Duboche's rape and murder. The whole city believed he'd raped and strangled Mercedes Bloom as well, although her body had never been found.
Ethel Bloom had been sitting quietly in her shell, almost invisible, while her husband and Rourke talked, but now she jerked suddenly and began digging frantically in her purse until she found what she was looking for. She leaned into Rourke to thrust a small, framed photograph into his hands, and he got a powerful whiff of dried sweat and sour gin from her body.
“Show that boy this, Mr. Rourke,” she said, and her eyes held the bewildered horror of someone who thought she had awakened from a nightmare only to realize that the nightmare was really her life. “Show him her face one last time before he dies. If he has any heart left in him at all…Please.”
Mercedes Bloom had had wheat blond hair and a sweet, heart-shaped face that wasn't quite pretty yet, but held a promise that it might become so. Rourke had looked at this photograph often during the early days of the case, and sometimes he'd thought he could see a sadness in her smile and a dark knowledge in her eyes. As if she'd always known that bad trouble would be coming for her someday.
Rourke set the photograph down carefully on his desk. “I was going to go on over to the Parish Prison this evenin' anyway, to see Titus Dupre before I head on home. I'll show him your girl's picture, but I just don't want you all to get your hopes up.”
Ethel Bloom stared down at her hands, where they now clutched her purse with a death grip. Otis Bloom stared off into the distance, his jaw working. Then he got to his feet, gracefully for so large a man. “Come along, Ethel,” he said. “I'm sure Detective Rourke has a lot on his plate this evenin'.”
“But I had to give him the photograph,” Ethel Bloom said in her tremulous, gin-sodden voice. “We decided I should give him the photograph—”
“Yes, darlin'. And so you have.”
Otis Bloom leaned over and took his wife by the elbow, helping her to her feet. It had seemed the simplest of gestures, but for a moment Rourke thought a powerful emotion had flashed across the man's face. Horror, perhaps, that on top of having lost his only child, he was now losing his wife to grief and gin.
This kind of grief, Rourke thought, the bad kind that other people give you, that you don't see coming and never deserved—it ruins you inside. Ruins a marriage, a family, so that it is never the way it was before.
“You take your wife on home now, Mr. Bloom,” Rourke said gently. “I'll see y'all later tonight.”
Otis Bloom nodded, his eyes bright suddenly with held-back tears, his jaw working some more. “You wake up every day and you say, This can't be happening, this nightmare can't still be going on. And then the sun goes down and it's one more day she hasn't come home. She was our little girl,” he said. “Our baby.”
Chapter Fourteen
The raw, rancid smell of decomposing flesh bludgeoned Rourke in the face as soon as he opened the door to the morgue. Even with the recent addition of refrigeration in the last few years, the place always reeked. There was nothing like a trip down here, he thought, to remind you that what's left after death is a shell that rots.
The parish coroner was scrubbing blood off his hands at a gray-speckled sink, enveloped in wreaths of cigarette smoke. He looked up when Rourke entered and nodded almost happily. “Ah, Detective Rourke, what an agreeable but not unexpected pleasure it is to see you. I made a wager with myself that you would pay us a visit before the end of the day.”
Since there was no one in the morgue but the Ghoul, Rourke figured the “us” the coroner was talking about was himself and his corpses. Three of the cutting tables were occupied, their contents covered with stained shrouds.
“You will be pleased to learn,” the Ghoul said, drying off his hands on a foul-looking towel, “that I have indeed discovered a few additional things about your crucified female priest, although I do not know how useful they will be to you with your investigation.”
As the Ghoul's bulk lumbered across the room, he waved his hand at an enshrouded body. “By the by, I also managed to squeeze in the preliminary on your Mr. Tony Benato, as per your urgent request. Death was due to internal asphyxia brought about by the inhalation of cyanide through the mucous membranes, along with a considerable amount of cocaine. You will be getting a more detailed report soon, but first things first…”
Rourke joined the Ghoul at the center table, which held the body of the woman known as Father Patrick Walsh. With a touch that bordered on the reverent, the Ghoul pulled the shroud down to her waist. Her torso, cut open from pubic bone to sternum for the autopsy, had already been sewn back together with crude, black stitches.
Rourke looked down at her battered face. The flesh resembled putty, the bruises were black, the cuts bloodless. She'd been a homely woman, but there was something compelling about the nature of her homeliness. A kind of defiance in the raw, brutal structure of bone and cold flesh.
“The direct cause of death,” the Ghoul was saying, “was a coronary occlusion, no doubt caused by the trauma of the crucifixion. She had also—how do you police say it?—been worked over by somebody premortem. I would venture a supposition that the damage was done with a blackjack and brass knuckles.”
“Was the beating done before or after she was hung on the beam?” Rourke asked.
The Ghoul thought a moment, then shrugged. “I could not say. It was not the first time, though, that she had been so brutally pummeled with bone-crunching objects. During the preliminary inventory of the body, I noticed an unnatural bend in the left ulna and so I had her X-rayed. I discovered multiple healed fractures: three ribs, the clavicle, both arms, the left leg. It was hard to tell the age of the breaks, except to say that they were not recent, and they all appear to have been incurred within the same relative span of time.”
“Sweet Jesus. It sounds like she nearly got beaten to death.”
“Indeed, from the extent and degree of her injuries, I would say it must have been a close run thing…She was also suicidal during an earlier time in her life.” The Ghoul picked up the corpse's hand, turning it so that the inner wrist and forearm were exposed. “The wound left by the crucifixion nail makes it difficult to make them out, but these small scars here…they are old hesitant marks. The little cuts a suicide makes while summoning up the courage for the big cut.”
The scars, like scraps of white string, went across the priest's wrist. You couldn't, Rourke knew, kill yourself that way. You had to take the razor or knife or piece of glass, or whatever you were going to use, and slash up the forearm. Up and deep.
So either she hadn't known how to do it right. Or she hadn't, deep down inside, reall
y wanted to die.
Rourke looked at the raw-boned wrist, thinking about the scars, the hesitant marks, and the hole left by a seven-inch spike, thick as a man's thumb. “The killer chose to put the nails through her wrists, instead of her hands,” he said aloud, “but by doing it that way, couldn't he have also ended up killing her quicker? I guess I'm wondering if he could have hit an artery.”
The Ghoul lifted the sheet, laying it back over the corpse with care. “Indeed he could have. Either the radial and ulnar arteries could have been punctured, although the radial lies in the more vulnerable place within the wrist. An injury to either can be fatal if followed by traumatic aneurysm or acute hemorrhaging. In layman's terms: one may bleed to death.”
He looked up at Rourke, his small eyes blinking. “Only no such thing happened in this case. Which rather suggests, does it not, that the killer knew what he was doing.”
“Or maybe,” Rourke said, “the killer just had beginner's luck, and all my fine theories don't mean diddly.”
“No, no,” the Ghoul said, producing one of his rare smiles. “Theories are only useless when they have no basis in fact. It is a fact that crucifixion is a slow, painful death. It is also a symbolic one. There are countless quicker, easier ways to end the life of a fellow human being, yet the killer chose that particular one. He does have a fascinating mind, your killer. I rather hope I get an opportunity to meet him.”
“You're going to have to get in line.”
The coroner had tacked the crime scene photos up on his corkboard. They went over them together, but could come up with nothing new, but as Rourke was about to call it quits for the evening, the Ghoul stopped him at the door.
“I almost forgot to tell you that I was able to analyze that paper you gave to me. I am fortunate to have in my possession a book called the International Ink Library, which contains the chemical composition and formulation of over six thousand types of ink. I went through four thousand and seventy-six of them before a thought occurred to me, and you might have told me at the onset,” he said, at the look that crossed Rourke's face, “that the same thought had already occurred to you.”
“Jesus…” Rourke lifted his hat to push his fingers through his hair. “So it was blood, then.”
“Indeed. Human blood, type O. I performed the latest precipitin test, whereby I placed a sample of the element in question on a glass slide treated with gelatin next to a second sample of a biological reagent. When I passed an electrode through the glass, the protein molecules in the two samples filtered outward through the gelatin toward each other and a precipitin line formed where the antigens and the antibodies met, indicating that the first sample was human blood…But I am getting carried away with myself, Lieutenant. You are not interested in method, only results.”
“I'm interested in both,” Rourke said. “Truly,” he added with a sudden smile. “And thanks.”
“You are welcome.” The Ghoul hesitated, frowning.
“What?” Rourke said.
“You did not tell me what this is about, and I shall not ask. But I took the liberty of reading the contents—well, how could I not? And if I might venture an opinion: I have done some reading in the new science of psychoanalysis and it is my thought that the individual who could write such words in human blood…I believe his mental faculties are most disturbed. He might be someone with whom Miss Lelourie was once intimate, or he could be fantasizing an intimacy that was never there, but one nevertheless that he believes is most real.”
“You think Remy might actually know this guy?” Rourke said. “I kind've had him pegged as some crazed fan just looking to get her attention.”
“A crazed fan, perhaps, but crazed in a particular way. This man—he has formed an obsession with Miss Lelourie. She has become an object to him, and he is driven to possess the object. He might even have himself convinced that he already does possess her…”
The Ghoul had been staring off into space while he gathered and recited his thoughts, but now he brought his gaze back to Rourke and in the small eyes lost in their rolls of fat there was an urgency that Rourke had never seen before.
“If he were to have his illusions shattered,” the Ghoul said, “this obsessed individual…If he were to come to realize that not only does he not possess Miss Lelourie, but that he is unlikely ever to possess her, then I fear he will not be able to bear the thought of another possessing the object of his desire, either. And then, Lieutenant, the most logical step in his diseased mind will be—”
“To kill her,” Rourke said.
“Or to kill the man who does possess her.”
The sour, cheesy stink of the morgue lingered in Rourke's nose and on his hair and in his clothes, but then he figured time in a jail cell wasn't going to help him smell any better.
He didn't take the connecting hall that ran from the City Courts Building to the abutting Parish Prison, but instead went outside to where he'd parked the Bearcat and got out the fiddle that he'd been carrying around in the trunk for two days. It was a Louisiana country fiddle—made of cypress slats from some old barn, and with bones for pegs and strings from a window screen—but it had soul.
The guard in the block where they housed Titus Dupre had gnarled teeth stained with nicotine, and bushy eyebrows arched over small eyes. The eyes looked at the fiddle in Rourke's hand with hard suspicion.
“You got a piece of paper that says you can bring that thing in here?” he said through the tobacco plug he had stuffed in his lower lip.
Rourke took out his money clip and peeled off five dollars. The guard's eyes didn't change expression, so Rourke peeled off another five.
“I gotta take a good look at it, though,” the guard said. “The scut going 'round is that you're a nigger lover, so could be you're smugglin' a tommy gun inside, or sumthin'. That's why I gotta look.”
The guard took the fiddle gingerly, as if he feared it would metamorphose at any moment into a machine gun and spray bullets around the room.
He shook it, rapped on the soundboard, peered with one eye into the F-hole, and then gave it back to Rourke. “Gonna fry that darkie's ass tonight, uh-huh,” he said. “And not before time.”
Titus Dupre's cell was at the end of the block and all the cells around him had been left empty. Their footsteps echoed on the stone slab floor. The heavy key rattled in the lock, and the cell door opened with a clatter of iron bars.
The cell was a six-by-six stone box. A rust-streaked sink and toilet hung from the wall in one corner. An iron cot with no mattress was chained against the back wall beneath a high, small window that showed only scraps of a darkening sky. The cell smelled of the toilet and boiled collard greens and sweat.
The guard locked Rourke inside and then left him alone with Titus Dupre.
The warden of the Louisiana State Prison farm up in Angola had told Rourke once that as an inmate got deep into a stretch of long, hard time his needs got whittled down to only two: something to hope for and absolution for his sins. Rourke wasn't sure if the warden had it right, but he had no hope to offer Titus Dupre this evening, and the boy was too proud to ask for absolution, even from himself.
Rourke suspected, anyway, that the one thing Titus Dupre wanted most right now was simply more time.
He had been lying on the cot, but he stood up when the door clanged open. Tall and slender and ebony black, he had cut a fine figure in the clothes of his profession as a chimney sweep: the swallow-tailed coat and silk stovepipe hat. Chimney sweeps worked in pairs and he had walked the streets of the city with his younger brother, Cornelius, singing “R-r-ramoner la cheminée!” Since almost all the houses in New Orleans were heated by charcoal burned in a fire grate, they'd made a good, steady living.
Nina Duboche, the murdered girl, had had hair like dark honey and dimples in her cheeks the size of dimes. She'd been good at algebra and knew the steps to all the latest dances. She'd volunteered at Charity Hospital and had told her friends she was thinking about becoming a nurse when she gr
aduated from high school.
The evening she'd disappeared she had been on her way to a school mixer, wearing her school uniform, but she'd been naked when they'd found her. Naked and a corpse.
Only a few men had the real killer lust, and Rourke kept finding it hard to believe that Titus Dupre was one of them. He thought, sometimes, that it had probably all begun with an accident. That the first girl to disappear, Mercedes Bloom, had teased him, maybe she'd even gone so far as to offer sex, and then had tried to back out of it at the last minute and things had gotten rough and she had ended up dead.
And then something must have broken loose inside of Titus Dupre. The trip wire that's in your head and acts as a brake on all your worst impulses and desires. He might have killed that first time in a frenzy of frustrated sexual passion, but he had discovered that he liked it.
Titus Dupre waited now until the guard's footsteps had echoed away down the hall and then he pointed his chin at the fiddle in Rourke's hand. “You been to see my gran'mon? Did she get you to bring me that?”
Rourke shook his head. “It was all my own idea. Your grandmama won't let me do anything for her.” He didn't think the boy would take the instrument from his hand, so he crossed the cell and laid it down on the iron cot. “I just figured you for a fiddle player, when I noticed how the tips of your fingers were callused.”
Titus stared at the fiddle, his face set hard. Then he leaned over and picked up the bow first and then the instrument, cradling it softly in his hands. “You got a real mean streak in you,” he said, “even for a cop.”
He looked up at Rourke, and in the permanent blue dusk of the cell, his eyes were like marbles. He braced the fiddle against his chest and played a few licks, and then set it back down. The cell was hot and he had the sleeves of his prison shirt rolled up to his elbows. His muscled arms were like flats of dark steel, but when he put down the fiddle they were shaking.
Wages of Sin Page 16
