“Are you sure you're okay?”
Her hair brushed his cheek as she nodded. “I just feel so stupid now, for behaving like such a hysterical little ninny.”
“Jesus, baby. He tried to strangle you.”
“I don't think he was going to choke me dead, Day. He's still trying to scare me, and he was just upping the stakes.” She laughed, pushing a little away from him, and then coming right back into his arms. “I gave him a good ol' jab in the belly with my elbow, though. I hope it's aching now.”
“Jesus.” She was trying to sound so tough, but he'd heard the little catch in her voice. She'd been more frightened than she would ever let on.
After Rourke had reunited the lost little girl with her frantic mama, he had taken Remy to the Bearcat and driven deeper into the park, away from the bandstand and the dance marathon that had turned out to be more of an exploitation stunt than either of its sponsors had ever wanted. He'd pulled off the road again and parked beneath a couple of oaks, where once, almost a hundred years ago, Creole men had fought duels of honor in the dawn mist over women and cards.
Yellow light was splashing now through the moss-draped branches and onto her face. He smoothed a damp wisp of hair off her forehead with the backs of his knuckles. He, too, had been more frightened than he was letting on.
“You sure you didn't get any feel at all for who it was? Did you notice anybody familiar hanging around you right before it happened?”
She started to daub at the scratches on her neck with her fingers, and he gave her his handkerchief. “There were a lot of people, most of them running around like headless chickens,” she said. “But they were all strangers to me. And after I fought loose from him and turned around, I would swear there wasn't a soul behind me either. It was as if he'd just disappeared into the air.”
She made a sudden, jerky movement and turned into him, pressed into him hard, and as awkward as it was, with the gearshift sticking up between them, he pulled her even tighter to him, as if he would never let go. As if he were trying to disappear into her, or she would disappear into him.
He turned his head to rub his mouth in her hair.
“My big, strong policeman,” she said. “I'm sure not complaining that you're here, Day, but I don't think you came to watch me dance. It's something bad, isn't it?”
He told her about the girls. About Mary Lou Trescher and Nina Duboche and Mercedes Bloom, and what they all had in common.
By the time he was done, she was back in her own seat. The fitful wind, gone for most of the morning, had come back up. It lifted the moss on the branches of the oaks and ruffled the short shingled locks of her hair.
“I met her at the studio yesterday,” she said. “Mary Lou Trescher. She—” She pushed her fist against her lips and shut her eyes. “I was going to say she reminded me of myself…Oh, God, Day. I feel like it's all my fault. Do you think it's Romeo doing it? That he's warming up to killing me by killing them?”
“I don't know what to think. Except that whoever the killer is, he sure as hell isn't picking them at random.”
He took the photograph of the Fantastics out of his coat pocket and held it cupped in his hand. He rubbed his thumb over their faces, but he was seeing them dead.
And he was seeing someone else dead, too.
She stilled his restless hand with her own. “Titus Dupre,” she said, reading his thoughts.
“Yeah.”
“Day, it wasn't your—”
“Yes, it was.”
Rourke started up the car and pulled out from beneath the oaks and back onto the road. He drove in silence to his father-in-law's house and found Katie out by the swimming pool, sailing paper boats with her cousins. He told her he had to work a while longer and that she was going to be having Sunday supper with her nana and paw-paw. He hugged her tight, and she must have felt his need for comforting, because she hugged him back and said, “I love you, Daddy,” her breath soft and warm against his neck.
He crossed the Mississippi River by car ferry and drove, with Remy in the passenger seat next to him, through the wetlands and along the sugar country of the Bayou Lafourche. Getting away from New Orleans, away from himself and the image of Titus Dupre on fire and the guilt he felt over that. The guilt that was like a fist squeezing his heart.
Out here, the land and water were at war with each other, with the water mostly winning. Rows of sugarcane would lay claim for a while, only to give way to the swamp and cypress and saw grass.
It was the harvest season, but at some farms the cane was still uncut, growing thick and gold and purple in the fields. At others, they were already burning the stubble. The hundreds of small fires sent up plumes of gray-brown smoke to dirty the sky. Rourke sent the 'Cat's speedometer up well past eighty, until the needle was flirting with the red zone. The wind that pushed against their faces smelled of burnt sugar.
His gaze kept cutting back and forth between the oiled dirt road and the love of his life. She was watching the miles click away, not saying anything. It was Remy Lelourie all over, though, to go driving off into the wild blue yonder without the least idea or care of where they were going.
Since he knew her enough to know she would never ask, he told her. “Paris,” he said, only he pronounced it the way the little town's natives did: Pa-ree, like the song.
Her gaze remained on the road ahead, but a smile played over her mouth. “It's always been my heart's desire to go to Paris.”
They drove on in silence for a few more miles, and then from out of the corner of his eye, he saw her hand move. An instant later, he felt her touch his thigh. Felt her stroking his thigh, up and then down, up and then down, and with each upward stroke she got closer and closer to his cock, and his cock, having enough of a mind of its own to know what was coming, got hard.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “We got trouble.”
Her hand stroked up and down some more, stroked up again and then stayed there, her fingernails lightly grazing his erection through the soft gray flannel of his trousers, and he felt huge now against her hand.
“Big trouble,” she said.
“We, uh…we gotta…”
“Go to Paris.”
“…take care of something here.”
She gripped him, gave him a little squeeze.
“Jesus.” He groaned, shifting in his seat.
She took her hand away.
He looked over at her. She looked out the window and began to whistle.
“You tell her,” he drawled in his Irish Channel gangster accent. “You tell her that no dame plays Daman Rourke for a chump and gets away wid it.”
She laughed, and then her eyes went wide. “Day, watch out!”
Rourke slammed on the brakes and swerved, swinging wide into the oncoming lane, reacting before he was even sure what it was that he was trying to avoid hitting at eighty miles an hour with the Bearcat's precious chrome grille.
He had the impression of a big knobby head with bulging eyes and a lot of teeth, and he thought, 'Gator, out for a stroll across the goddamn road, just as a truck full of cows rounded a bend, heading right at them.
He whipped the wheel back again and floored the accelerator. The Bearcat's back end fishtailed violently, and then the front end hit gravel and the whole car slid sideways toward the deep ditch that lined the road and was filled with dust-coated four-o'clocks and stagnant water left over from last week's rain.
Rourke turned into the skid and for half an instant, he felt the right rear tire spin through air, and then the other three tires bit at the packed, oiled dirt, and the Bearcat pulled out of it and settled right down, going at a reasonable speed now, and on her own side of the road just as the truck rattled past them, its horn blowing, the cows mooing.
Remy, being Remy, had been laughing wildly the whole time, and when she got it back under control, she said, “Well, I guess that's one way of taking care of your big trouble without stopping the car.”
“Hell, baby,” Rourke said. “Who sa
id it got taken care of? I'm still stiff as a pole down there,” and then he began to sing, “How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?…”
When they quieted back down again, he looked over at her, feeling wildly and hopelessly in love, and without thinking about it, just letting it happen, and for the second time that morning, he broke one of his cardinal rules: the rule that said he never talked about the job to anybody not on the job.
“That crucifixion killing that I'm working on,” he said. “The priest is supposed to have grown up in an orphanage in Paris, on the Bayou Lafourche.” And then he told her everything else that he knew about the case and Father Patrick Walsh—including that he was a she.
It was hard sometimes to get Remy to take things seriously. She carried her scars on the inside, buried deep, and then played at life to show the bastards how much she didn't care. So as he told her about the case, what surprised him, what he never expected, was how closely she listened, and the kind of questions she asked, and how she right off saw angles that he hadn't thought of yet.
“Something earth-shattering must have happened to Father Pat,” Rourke said, after they'd been working through it together for a while, sifting and hashing it out. “Something that sent him off down the road that eventually ended in that macaroni factory Friday night. Maybe whatever it was, happened, or at least got its start, in Paris, Louisiana.”
“Or maybe,” she said, “it happened in New Orleans an hour before he was crucified.”
Rourke grunted. “Yeah. Dammit…Still, you don't just wake up one day and decide you're going to cut your hair and bind your breasts and become a priest. You got to be driven into something like that. Or be pulled into it. And whatever is doing the driving or the pulling has to be powerful enough to make you willing to live every moment with that secret in your heart, and the fear that someday you could be found out.”
He hadn't been thinking of her when he'd said it, until the moment the words left his mouth. She went quiet beside him, and when he looked at her, he saw that her head was turned way from him, toward the burning cane fields.
“Remy…”
“You don't need to go to Paris to find out what it was like for her, Day; I can tell you. There were whole hours at a time when she forgot what she really was, but then something would happen, or somebody would say something, and the truth would come crashing in on her, making her feel afraid and sick clean through her soul and all the way down to the bone. Afraid and sick and ashamed, and hating herself so much for her shame—especially for her shame—that even the consequences of the truth coming out would seem preferable to the lie she was living.”
“I love you,” he said.
“I know.”
“And I'm never going to leave you. No matter what you do; no matter what is done to you, or to me for loving you, I'm not leaving.”
“I know that, too.”
So don't you leave me. He wanted to say that, but he didn't. Because sometimes, even with all your good intentions, life is neither fair nor gentle.
“I wonder,” he said to her half an hour later, knowing she would have followed his thoughts because she always did, “if he was ever in love.”
“Or if she was.”
Paris, Louisiana, had grown up back when sugar was king, but she was like an aging Southern belle now. Still showy on the outside, but afflicted with a melancholy that life was passing her by.
The Bayou Lafourche divided Paris in the same way railroad tracks divided other towns. On the east side ran Napoleon Boulevard, lined with cottonwoods, stately Victorian houses, and shops with false fronts and narrow spooled rail galleries. West of the bayou was the back side of town, where a dime was a fortune, and sugar mills belched smelly smoke over honky-tonks, whorehouses, and ramshackle homes.
A couple of colored boys with straw hats were fishing for bream from the drawbridge that crossed the bayou onto Napoleon Boulevard. Rourke pulled up and asked them where the orphanage was, but they said they hadn't heard of any orphanage in Paris.
“The Times-Picayune article said he grew up in a St. Joseph's Home for Children,” Rourke said to Remy. “So if there ever was such a place, it was probably near the church.”
They found St. Joseph's easily enough because its steeple could be seen from any part of town. They didn't find anything nearby that looked remotely like it could have been an orphanage, but on the other side of the church rectory was a field choked with jimsonweed and cattails, and in the middle of the field was a tall, narrow chimney of blackened, crumbling brick that pointed like a finger into the sky. The field was enclosed by a rusting iron fence, and the scrolled gate was chained shut and posted with a faded NO TRESPASSING sign.
Rourke gave the gate's chain a yank for the hell of it, but it held fast. “If it was here, then it burned down a long while ago.”
“There might've been records,” Remy said. “If they didn't go up in flames with the building.”
“Yeah. Maybe the local law would know.”
The courthouse, they discovered, was back across the bayou, but they could get there by taking a nearby footbridge. As they crossed the bridge, Rourke looked over the wrought iron railing and down into the brown water where dead leaves floated and bream fed among cattails that had long since gone to seed, and the low sweeping branches of a willow tree blew in the wind like a woman's hair.
Winter's coming…He must have caught some of the town's air of melancholy, because the thought made him feel lost and lonely.
Then he felt Remy slip her hand into his. She didn't say anything, just held his hand, and they finished crossing the bridge together.
Built out of thick gray stone and with crenellated balconies and a pair of turreted towers on either end, the courthouse looked ready to withstand the siege of any army.
They found the parish sheriff alone, seated at his desk in his office, wrapping blue luminescent thread around a fishing hook, making a fly. “It's Sunday,” he said as they came through the open door. “If you're here to confess to the crime of the century, you can damn well wait until tomorrow.”
He cast a sideways glance up, saw Remy, and lurched to his feet, his enormous belly banging so hard into his desk he nearly tipped it over. “Lord-a-mercy,” he said.
Sheriff Pascal Drake had hangdog yellow eyes and was the kind of fat man who was fat all over, even his little fingers and ears were fat. His tan wash-and-wear Sears suit looked in danger of splitting open every time he breathed.
His droopy eyes had fastened onto Remy and stayed there, all the while Rourke showed his credentials and gave an edited version of what they were after. He went on staring in a kind of gaping silence after Rourke was done, then he sighed loudly and shrugged, lifting shoulders that were as round as melons.
“I don't think I'm going to be much help,” he said. “But why don't y'all go ahead and have yourselves a seat?”
The courthouse might have looked like a fantasy fortress on the outside, but the sheriff's office was furnished the same as squad rooms everywhere. Rourke set his fedora down on a metal desk and pulled up a couple of cheap pine ladder-backed chairs, while Pascal Drake took a cob pipe out of his shirt pocket, stuck it in his mouth unlit, and watched Remy Lelourie's every breath.
“The Home, as folks called it,” he began, once they'd all settled, “burned down…oh, we're talking maybe thirty years ago. I got hired on here five years back myself, from over in East Texas, but I've heard some talk about what happened, and it was bad. Seventeen children and three nuns were inside, asleep in their beds, and none of them made it out alive. It was an old Creole raised plantation house, with two centuries' worth of varnish on its walls and floors, and it went up like a torch. By the time the fire was put out, there wasn't anything left but charcoal and ash, and that one lone chimney that still stands to this day.”
“What we're trying to find out,” Rourke said, “is if our murder victim, Father Patrick Walsh, ever lived in the Home, and if anybody around these p
arts would've known him.”
“Or known his family, maybe,” Remy said. “Before he got orphaned.”
The sheriff looked startled that Remy could talk. He stared at her mouth, scrutinized the rest of her some more, then came back to her mouth.
“Yeah, I can see where y'all are going,” he finally said. “But I can't think of who could help you. Your best bet would've been them nuns who ran the place, but they died in the fire and whatever they knew about any Patrick Walsh would've died with 'em. I can ask around for you, though. There's a bunch of real old-timers who park themselves on the benches outside the Parker Hotel billiard hall every afternoon—if there's anybody left in Paris who might've known your victim, it'd be one of them.”
Rourke took a card out of his pocket, laid it on the desk, picked up his hat in turn, and stood up, holding out his hand. “If you find out anything, I'd appreciate it if you gave me a call.”
The sheriff started to lumber to his feet and knocked into his desk with such force that the laws of physics sat him back down again. He shook Rourke's hand, but his gaze was still on Remy.
“Ma'am,” he said, “I just have to come out and say it—otherwise I'm going to be stewing about it the rest of the evening. It's the gol-darndest thing, but if you're not the spitting image of Remy Lelourie…” He laughed, a big booming laugh that shook his belly like a bowlful of clabber. “Lord-a-mercy. As if Remy Lelourie would come waltzing into the Paris courthouse on a Sunday afternoon. You sure do have the look of her about you, though, even if you do got a few years on her.”
Rourke bit the inside of his cheek.
“Why, Sheriff,” Remy said. She did a Southern belle thing, managing to pout and smile both at the same time. “I do believe that's the nicest thing anybody's said to me in all of my considerable years.” She looked over at Rourke, her dark eyes fairly shimmering with pent-up laughter. “Honey, before we go, don't you think we ought to ask this gentleman if he knows who did for the orphanage before it burned down.”
Wages of Sin Page 23
