“Gol-darnit!” Drake exclaimed with a snap of his sausage fingers. “I don't know why I didn't think of him…Louis Toussaint. He did the odd job around the place, and the reason why I know that is because he was one of the first ones they suspected of setting the fire. Turned out he was somewhere else where a good dozen people saw him, and all of 'em white, so he was let off the hook. But some folk even all these years later still hold to the notion that he did it.”
Remy gave him the smile that had lit up the covers of a thousand magazines. “See there, Sheriff. Your astute powers of observation have led us to a clue, after all.”
Pascal Drake's chest swelled, bringing his belly with it, and the desk levitated. “Always happy to oblige, ma'am. And I expect ol' Louis Toussaint'll be obligin', as well. He's probably pushing a hundred now if he's a day—fact is, he's probably Paris's oldest citizen. But his memory's better at recollecting something that happened fifty years ago than what he ate for breakfast this mornin', and there's nothin' he likes more than to engage in a good jawin'. So if there was anything to be told about the Home, he could probably tell you more about it than you'd ever want to hear.”
Rourke put on his hat, gave the crown a tap, and smiled at Remy. “So where can we find the guy?”
The sheriff twisted around in his chair to look at the clock above his head. “What's it now? About three? Then he'd be down at T'Boys, halfway through his third jarful of white lightning.”
Chapter Twenty
T'Boys sat at the edge of the bayou, at the end of a rutted, gravel road. To get there, though, you had to park in an empty field next to an old general store that was attached to a filling station, whose pumps were rusting to their blocks, and then follow a path through a stand of cypress down to the water.
A half dozen Negro men were sitting on crates on the store's sagging gallery, playing checkers and chewing on jimsonweed and their memories. When the shiny yellow Bearcat roadster pulled up in a cloud of dust, and a white man and woman got out and started down the path to the colored honky-tonk, the gallery turned so quiet you could hear the old wood settling. It was hard to tell, though, whether they recognized Remy Lelourie or they were just in awe of a white woman passing through the neighborhood, wearing a dress made out of glass and mirrors that shone like a bucketful of stars.
Rourke took Remy's arm to help her around a puddle of stagnant water coated with mosquitoes. They crossed the field, past a big old chinaberry tree, beneath whose shade a farmer was selling fruit off the back end of his truck. The mingling odors of gasoline and overripe blackberries made Rourke nostalgic for those summer days of endless possibilities out at the lake when he was kid.
T'Boys was built long and narrow, like a railroad car. Its corrugated tin roof was rusting through in patches and it had been whitewashed once, maybe back when Louis Toussaint was a boy, but time and the sun had browned it to match the bayou at its back. Nevertheless, its purpose in life was obvious, and it hadn't done anything to change its appearance since Prohibition except to take down its front sign.
The tonk was crowded for a Sunday, but their entrance was met with the same awed silence they'd gotten from the grocery's gallery. It got so quiet you could hear the floorboards, warped from years of spilled booze, creaking beneath their feet and the groan of catgut when the fiddler laid down his fiddle. The place smelled of Saratoga chips fried in chicken fat and the juniper berries that were used to make the gin in the still out back.
A pair of alligator skins, complete with snouts and teeth, were tacked to the knotty pine wall above a bar that was little more than plank boards resting on old ale barrels. Behind the bar and framed by the alligators stood a man who looked tough as jerked meat, and who had eyes that had been around enough blocks to be able to pick out the cop on the corner.
His gaze left Rourke for a half second to take in Remy, widened a little, then came back to Rourke. He put down his glass-polishing rag and crossed his arms over his chest. “Who you lookin' for?” He waited a beat, then added, “Suh.”
Rourke put some bite into his smile, as a way of laying the ground rules: all he wanted was a conversation, not trouble, but what he wanted he would get. “Louis Toussaint,” he said.
The bartender nodded toward the back end of the long room where an ancient mulatto the color of a copper penny sat alone at a table, his gnarled hands wrapped around a jelly jar full of juniper gin.
“Thank you for your help,” Rourke tossed over his shoulder, as he guided Remy with a hand in the small of her back around the rickety chairs and water-ringed tables.
“What's the ol' fool done?” the bartender called after them, but Rourke didn't answer.
Louis Toussaint looked up from under a straw hat stained with age and sweat and watched them come with turquoise eyes set deep in a face as wrinkled as dried snakeskin.
“Lord Gawd,” he said, in a voice that sounded surprisingly robust to be coming out of that face. “I'ma too old to be goin' to jail. What I done, anyways?”
“Nothing, as far as I know,” Rourke said, keeping the edge on his smile for the moment. “We'd just like to ask you a few questions about the old orphanage that burned down. The St. Joseph's Home for Children.”
The old man's lips stretched open to reveal gray gums and a scattering of teeth that were brown and worn to the nub. “So y'all back to thinking this nigger done it, huh?”
“I'm a New Orleans cop, Mr. Toussaint. I don't have jurisdiction here. How about if I fetch some more 'shine from the bar and some food, and my woman and I sit down and we talk?”
The lips stretched open again. “S'long as you buyin', this chile is easy.” His gaze shifted over to Remy. “You Remy Lelourie?”
This time her smile was the one she shared with friends. “That I am, Mr. Toussaint.” She shook the old man's hand and then sat down in the chair Rourke held out for her. “I don't believe I've ever met anyone who's lived a century before.”
Louis Toussaint looked both embarrassed and pleased. “Aw, shucks. It ain't no great accomplishment. I reckon with me, livin's just got to be a habit I can't seem to break.”
Rourke went up to the bar, bought a jug of moonshine, and brought it back to the table along with two more jelly jar glasses. He went back to the bar for the food: plates of alligator smothered with sauce piquant and three slices of tarte a la bouille. By the time he'd brought it all back to the table, Remy was filling up her jar again with more moonshine, and Louis Toussaint was looking considerably more blurred around the edges.
“It's only fair that I warn you, sir,” Rourke said as he pulled out his own chair and sat down, “that as experienced as you no doubt are, there isn't a man alive who can claim to have matched Miss Lelourie jar for jar and lived to tell of it. She's getting on in years now, but in her younger days, she could outdrink a hillbilly at a rooster fight.”
Louis Toussaint looked Remy over carefully, then he sucked on his gums and nodded slowly. “I had me a lil' gal like that once. A high-yeller gal from over in New Iberia, and, man, was she prime. She ate me up like I was a peach—meat, skin, and juice. Ever'thing but the pit. Lord, I loved that lil' gal more than life an' pride an' everlastin' glory…What can I do for y'all?”
“We want to know about a Patrick Walsh who might've been in the orphanage sometime during the nineties, give or take a few years.”
“You talkin' about right befo' the fire. I could name you ever' chile livin' in the Home then, and not one of 'em was called Patrick Walsh.”
“How about a girl called Patricia, and with a different last name?” Remy said. “And she might have had a brother.”
Rourke, growing mellow from the moonshine, alligator, and custard pie, looked over at his woman and decided that she was prime.
“No'm. No Patricia,” the old man said. “Was a Miss Patrice, though. Patrice LaPage, and she had a brother, sure 'nuff. Swamp chillens, they was, from out in the Lafourche Basin. Their mama died young and for a time they lived alone in the wetlands, in an old
log shack, they and their daddy. I don't know what-all their daddy done to get on the bad side of the law, 'sides poachin' a few 'gators, but he got himself shot and killed stone dead. No kin would take them chillens in, so they ended up being brought to the Home. That poor lil' gal, Miss Patrice, she was no more'n thirteen if she was a day, but she was carryin' a chile of her own. Ever'one thought it was her own daddy knocked her up, but I'd of put my money on her brother. That Mister Henri, he always had a look 'bout him. You a po-liceman, so you'd know that look.”
Rourke filled up the old man's glass with more lightning, then took care of Remy's and his own. “Like he'd enjoy sticking a pin through a fly just to watch it squirm.”
“Mmmm-huh. Mean down to the bone.” The old man drank the booze down, smacking his lips with the pleasure of it. “That lil' gal of mine that I was tellin' you about…?”
“The one that spit you out like a pit?” Remy said.
“Mmmm-huh. That the one…She did some midwifin', my Sally Blue, mostly for colored folk, but they called her up to the Home the night Miss Patrice had her baby, and she told me afterward there were things goin' to stick forever in her mind after that night. She said that Mister Henri came in after the baby was borned, and the snake-eyed look that passed 'tween the two of them, brother and sister, woulda made the hair roach up on the back of a peeled egg. But that wasn't the oddest of it…”
The old man paused to eye the bottom of his glass as if surprised to find it empty.
“More lightning, Mr. Toussaint?” Rourke said.
“Is she havin' more?…Then, don't mind if I do.”
“Fill them up, Day,” Remy said, pushing her empty jar up to the jug, to join the old man's. “And don't be parsimonious about it.”
“There you see, Mr. Toussaint,” Rourke said. “Most people couldn't say that word sober without twisting their tongue into knots.”
For a moment Rourke thought Louis Toussaint was having a heart attack, the way he was choking and shaking, but then he realized the old man was laughing.
Rourke waited until Louis Toussaint had calmed himself down and applied himself to the lightning again before he said, “What was the oddest of it?”
“The oddest of it,” Louis Toussaint said, “happened during the birthing. That Miss Patrice, she sweated blood…Man, I'ma tellin' you no lie,” he protested, even though no one had suggested that he was. “They drops popped out on that lil' gal's forehead, like they was sweat, only they was red and my Sally Blue said they had the blood smell to 'em, like rustin' nails. My Sally Blue said…”
His voice drifted off and his gaze turned inward, and Rourke thought he was probably back in the moment, listening to his woman tell the tale of a girl who sweated blood, listening and being with his woman, whom he'd loved more than life and pride and everlasting glory.
Louis Toussaint blinked the wetness out of his eyes and cleared the lump out of his throat. “My Sally Blue said that lil' gal's palms sweated, too, and worse'n her head. They'd tied ol' twisted-up pieces of sheets to the bedposts for her to hold on to while she was laborin', and my Sally Blue said they sheets were soaked bloody by the time she was through. Uh-huh. Sweated blood, and you can believe me or not. That's yo' privilege.”
“We believe you, Mr. Toussaint,” Remy said, as she leaned forward, reaching for the jug of moonshine. She had a shine of her own on from the liquor, but it was also excitement. “Tell us about the baby. Did it survive its birth?”
Louis Toussaint looked at Remy's empty jar and compared it to his nearly full one. He girded his loins, drank his down, shuddered, and wiped his mouth. He looked at Remy cross-eyed and grinned.
“Eh? Oh, Miss Patrice, she had herself a fine, healthy baby boy. Couple nights after the birthing, that Mister Henri, he lit off for God alone knows where. And a couple of nights after he left, the Home burned down from a fire that was set. Now they some folk always goin' to have to believe it was me done it, but they others talked 'bout how that Mister Henri must've snuck in from wherever he run off to and got his own back out of pure meanness and spite. But nobody could never prove nothin', and neither hide nor hair of 'im has ever been heard of or seen again. As for Miss Patrice and her baby—they died in the fire.”
“Is that a certainty, though, Mr. Toussaint? Maybe they weren't in the house when it burned down.”
“I was there when they carried out the bodies, Miss Remy. Or what was left of 'em, and they wasn't a body short. They was all so black and twisted up you wouldn't've recognized 'em for human bein's if you didn't know 'em for what they was. But when we laid them out on the lawn, they was three of them growed-up and seventeen chillens, just like they was s'posed to be. And one of they chillens had a babe in her arms.”
Cockleburs and tar-vine leaves stuck to their clothes as they picked their way through the overgrown cemetery on the outskirts of town. A smoky light had gathered in the tops of the trees from the lowering sun and the burning cane.
The tomb they were looking for was smothered with honeysuckle vines. Rourke had to rip whole branches off it, before they could read the names etched in the stone. She was there, third up from the bottom: PATRICE LAPAGE AND INFANT LUCAS.
He let the vines fall to cover it up again and stepped back, dusting off his hands.
Remy slipped her arm around his waist and leaned into him. Rourke was surprised after all the moonshine she'd consumed that she was still reasonably functioning. Louis Toussaint wasn't. They'd had to carry him back to the room he rented in a boardinghouse not far from where the Home used to stand. Rourke thought the old man would live through the night, but the hangover he was going to suffer in the morning would probably have him wishing he hadn't.
Remy stirred against him, holding him tighter. “Do you think Father Pat was ever really here in Paris?”
“Yeah, I do.” It felt right, like twisting the viewfinder on a camera until the image sharpened into focus. Father Patrick Walsh and Patrice LaPage were the same person, or at least they had been at one time.
He worked a scenario out in his mind of how it could have happened. Henri LaPage had run away from the Home, but then he came back the night of the fire, came back for his baby sister and their child of incest. Only she'd wanted nothing to do with a brother who, along with her father, had been beating and raping her for years. What she had wanted was to be shed of it all, shed of her brother and the baby, and of all the ugly memories of that house in the swamp and what had been done to her there.
Whether she had set fire to the Home that night, or Henri had, or it had gotten set by accident—Patrice LaPage had used it as a way to get free.
“She didn't die in the fire like everybody thought,” Remy was saying, echoing his thoughts. “But Mr. Toussaint said they laid the bodies out on the ground afterward and they weren't a body short. Three nuns and seventeen children. So the body holding the baby must have been her brother, Henri.”
“Yeah. Probably,” Rourke said, and that, too, felt right. “If the bodies were burned badly enough, they might not've been able to tell male from female all that easily, especially if the coroner wasn't a medical man. And people see what they're expecting to see.”
“You don't expect to see someone sweat blood.”
“No…You remember that salvation show we went to that summer when we were kids, how that preacher could bend spoons and send books flying through the air?”
“That was probably just a magician's trick, though. Are you saying you think Patrice LaPage faked her blood-sweating episode?”
“Hell, I don't know what I'm saying…except, I think there exists in the human mind and heart whole rooms behind locked doors that we haven't opened yet.”
They stood arm in arm in a silence of rasping locusts and of the wind pushing through the branches of the cypress and willow trees. A blue jay sat on top of the cemetery's scrolled iron gate and preened. Cloud shadows moved over the tombs.
“Maybe,” Remy said, “they should never be opened.”
Th
ey walked back, arm in arm, through the cemetery to the car. The drive out here to Paris had been just an excuse to get away, to burn up the hours like fallen leaves, but because he had come, he thought now that he had a better understanding of the paths taken in Father Pat's life, the choices made. And understanding her, he still believed, was the only way he was ever going to find her killer. His killer…
They stopped at the cemetery gate and looked back. They stood on a small rise, a veritable mountain for south Louisiana. From here you could look back at the town and see St. Joseph's steeple and the courthouse towers, and you could follow the lazy curve of the brown bayou as it cut through the burning sugarcane fields. He wondered if Patrice LaPage had stood here on the night of the orphanage fire and looked back at the conflagration of her old life. If that had been the moment when she had become he.
What she'd probably been too young to know then, though, was that you can run from your past, but you can't escape it. What you've done and what's been done to you, the choices you've made—it all gets carried along with you, like stones you've piled on your back. After a while the stones begin to weigh on you, they slow you down, until one way or the other and somewhere down the line, your past catches up with you.
Rourke drove back down through town, crossed the bayou, and picked up the highway heading home.
He drove lead-footed and reckless for about twenty miles and then turned off onto an unmarked lane and lurched and bumped through some farmer's fields until he couldn't see the road anymore. He braked and cut off the engine, and the wind stopped blowing through him and the world grew still and warm.
Remy got out of the car and walked down the lane some more to where it met the bayou. Purple and gold four-o'clocks grew wild along the untilled patch of dirt between the lane and the rows of sugarcane. Green dragonflies danced and darted over the cattails along the water.
Rourke sat in the car for a moment longer, then he, too, got out. The cane leaves were edged with the sun's last red lights, and clouds were piling up purple on the horizon, bringing rain with them for tomorrow morning.
Wages of Sin Page 24
