Wages of Sin

by Penelope Williamson

  “My,” she said, as she gave Rourke another look-over. “You sure do look wrapped up in some misery tonight, honey. Which for you is saying something.”

  Rourke was standing at her bar with one foot on the rail and his elbows on the polished wood, and the warm, smooth taste of her whisky still tingling on his tongue, and he had to laugh. “I'm just tired is all.”

  She held the joint out to him pinched between nails she'd painted pink to match the zebra. “Here, honey. Smoke a little dope and let that bad ol' day float away in the wind.”

  He wanted it, but he shook his head.

  She shrugged and took another toke on it herself. “Since you wouldn't be coming to Miss Fleurie with jelly roll on your mind, it must be about murder and bourré.”

  Rourke gave her the smile he sometimes used in the bedroom.

  Miss Fleurie tossed back her head and laughed, and her long, straight black hair flowed over her shoulders like liquid silk. “Oooh, daddy-o, let's get it on.”

  Four hours later Miss Fleurie stood up from the bourré table and stretched her tall, sensual body. She lifted the heavy fall of her hair off the back of her neck and worked the kinks out. The skin of her throat was the color of butter cream, but when she swallowed you could see her Adam's apple. That and her big hands were what gave away her sex, but she was still beautiful.

  She'd already sent the other players away, who'd been invited into the game to enliven the pot. It was just the two of them now.

  The Pink Zebra's bourré parlor didn't have the chichi class of the saloon up front, but then you shouldn't be looking around at the decor when you played the game, unless you enjoyed the pain of losing. The green felt-covered table was lit by a tin-shaded lamp that swung from an old anchor chain, lost in floating layers of cigarette smoke. The walls were bare except for a sign that said there'd be a five-dollar pot with a fifty-cent limit, but that was meant for the amateurs. They'd just been playing for stakes forty times that much.

  The game bore some resemblance to poker, except that the loser of a hand got bourréd and had to fill the pot with the ante for all the players' next hand. It seemed to Rourke that he'd been stuffing the pot all night. He'd lost a lot, lost too much. He'd always gambled for the risk, though, and risk had no bite to it, and no joy, if you only played with what you could afford to lose.

  Miss Fleurie had produced another cigarette case from some-where—this one silver, encrusted with rhinestones. She flicked it open, took out a pinch of white powder, put it on her wrist, and sniffed it up her nose. She shuddered and Rourke almost shuddered with her; he almost thought he could taste the cold, white bite of the cocaine on his tongue.

  When she came back from the rush, she looked at Rourke and made a little tsking sound in the back of her throat. “That was no game when Miss Fleurie ends up feelin' like she just picked your pocket.”

  “I warned you that I was tired.”

  “You didn't play tired. You played like your heart wasn't in it. Miss Fleurie doesn't like that. It makes her cranky.”

  Rourke felt a flash of anger that he deliberately let show on his face. “Now you're making me cranky, and trust me when I tell you that you don't want that.”

  She pushed her red mouth into a perfect pout. “Hunh. Be like that then. But since you paid, after a fashion, I'll go ahead and say. Ask me what you want to know.”

  “Father Patrick Walsh. Tell me what you've heard about him.”

  She batted her lashes at him, and they swept her high cheekbones like feather dusters. “Miss Fleurie is a pagan, not a Catholic. She does, however, read the newspapers. How else would she know which are the latest boring fads and fashions to avoid?” She swept her hand down the length of herself, and then posed, showing off her gown of silver lamé and purple sequin swirls. “I mean, really, darling…that dreary black cassock alone would stop one from taking holy vows. One priest, however, is not just like any other.”

  Rourke sat in silence a moment, digesting that last bit, trying to divine how much she really knew. He framed his next question carefully. “Do you know a reason someone might have had for killing this particular priest?”

  Miss Fleurie always played bourré with an open bottle of champagne icing in a silver bucket and a crystal flute close at hand. She went to it now and poured herself a glass of the sparkling wine, while Rourke studied her face, trying to read if she was really thinking over the question, or only sifting through the pieces of the truth in order to choose which ones she would tell.

  She turned and met his gaze over the rim of her champagne glass and said, “It could be he found out about the club.”

  “The Catholic Ladies Social?”

  She made a soft hooting noise deep in her throat. “Honey, that was just a front. The club I'm talking about is way, way deep underground. Kind of like what that underground railroad was, only instead of taking slaves up north to freedom, this little choo-choo is for women who want to get away from their men. You know how some men would sooner kill their woman or go on using her face for a punching bag, than let her walk out the door? So sometimes the only way for a woman to get away from a man like that is to go somewhere he can never find her. Somehow these women would hear about Father Pat and they would come to him, and he and his little club would arrange for them to disappear.”

  A frisson of excitement had curled up Rourke's spine like a chill. His cop instincts were telling him that this, at last, was the tip of the lever that was going to break the case wide open.

  An organization like what Miss Fleurie was talking about would of necessity be small, he thought, but it would eat up a lot of operating expenses. It was also something one man, or woman, couldn't run alone.

  Rourke got up and went to where she stood on the other side of the table, putting himself into the kind of close space with her that lovers shared. “Who are the other conductors on this railroad?”

  Her gaze slid away from his, and she forced a laugh. “Honey, we're not talking about the Orleans Club here, where you want to go around bragging about your membership.”

  “Give me some names. Honey.”

  She took a step back, but he stayed with her. Her gaze came back to him, then cut away again. “I only know the one name, anyway…Cassandra Poule.”

  It made beautiful sense. Cassandra Poule had been born the only and genteel child of a wealthy old Creole family, only to grow up to make a notorious name for herself in New Orleans as a rabid champion of the suffragette movement. She'd led marches for the vote at the state capitol in Baton Rouge and in Washington, where she'd been sent to jail for burning President Wilson in effigy. While in jail she'd gone on a fast and been force-fed, and got her picture in the paper for it. From time to time she'd lived in her townhouse in the Quarter with other ladies, whom polite society always insisted on referring to as her companions, and whom she always insisted on referring to as her lovers.

  Once the vote had finally been achieved seven years ago, she'd taken up the cause of free love. “I do not,” she had written in a letter to the editor of the Times-Picayune, “mean that women, any more than men, should hop from bed to bed like rabbits. I only mean that, married or not, a woman's body is her own, to give to a lover or not, when she so chooses and as she so chooses.”

  Just the words lover and bed together in the same newspaper had been enough for many New Orleans matrons to feel faint over their café au lait.

  “Were they lovers?” Rourke asked now. “She and Father Pat?”

  Miss Fleurie raised her plucked and penciled eyebrows in exaggerated shock. “A priest and a muff diver, my heavens. What have you been smoking?” She breathed a laugh, then caught it suddenly, and Rourke saw the realization dawn in her eyes. “Oh, my heavens…”

  Rourke smiled. “Miss Fleurie has a vivid imagination. The man was a priest.” He reached around her to pluck his hat off the coat tree and got a whiff of her perfume, and the musky smell of reefer smoke.

  “You ought to go home and get some sleep,”
she said. “You keep on like you're going, and you'll be dead before your time.”

  “I'm touched that you care,” Rourke said and smiled again. A different smile this time. “But if you were suddenly going to develop a tenderness for me, I wish you'd done it before you made me broke before my time.”

  She laughed and he started to leave, but then she stopped him by laying her hand lightly on his arm. “Mr. Day…Don't judge him, don't judge us.”

  “I wasn't aware that I was.”

  “You say that, and you probably believe you mean it. But when I touched you just then, you stiffened all up as if you could catch what I got like you can catch a dose of the clap.” The smile playing around her mouth deepened, became self-derisive. “You shouldn't assume, Detective, that a man dressed as a woman wants to fuck only men.”

  “Then why…?” Rourke began, but then he didn't know how to frame the question.

  “Why am I the way I am?” She lifted her shoulders in a shrug that was pure female. “If I believed in God then I might say that I am how He made me. But since I don't believe in God…I only know that when I stand naked before a mirror the body I see isn't mine, and my own body feels like a voodoo doll with pins stuck all over in it. So one day, long ago, I figured out that those pins don't hurt as much when they got to go through a dress.”

  She laughed and cupped his cheek with her hand, and Rourke smiled because she had expected him to stiffen again and he had, a little. “Now yours, on the other hand,” she said, “is one naked body I wouldn't mind seeing. So now you know, Mr. Day, that sometimes your assumptions just might be right.”

  Her head came forward slowly, and Rourke had time to take a step back, but he didn't. She kissed him full on the mouth and to his shock, and her amusement, a little jolt of desire passed between them.

  Rourke only half took Miss Fleurie's advice to go home and get some sleep. He caught a two-hour nap sitting in the Bearcat in front of Cassandra Poule's porte-cochere townhouse on Royal Street near the cathedral. When arabesques of light splashed through the iron lace balcony above his head and onto his face, he awoke with a crick in his neck and a taste like swamp water in his mouth.

  He watched the house while a dog wagon rolled by, picking up strays. A coal vendor came next, the load in his creaking, mule-drawn wagon glittering like black diamonds beneath the morning sun.

  “Stone coal, laaaa-dy. A nickel a water bucket.”

  He watched the bakery open up for business across the way, spilling smells of fresh-baked French bread into the street. A newspaper boy claimed the corner and began hawking the Morning Call: “Police no closer to apprehending killer-rapist! Read all about it in the Call!”

  When the jalousie shutters on the front parlor window of the Poule house opened with the flash of a white, slender hand and arm, Rourke got out of the car, crossed the brick banquette, and mounted the townhouse's front steps.

  The woman who answered his knock had skin so pale it was almost blue, like skimmed milk, and a plain, flat-nosed face that had probably never been pretty, not even at the peak of her youth. She wore her contrasting ink-black hair unfashionably long and rolled up into a pouf on top of her head. Yet she was dressed flamboyantly in green lounging pajamas embroidered with orange and red parrots, and there was something compelling about her small, dark eyes. They glowed like two lit matches, from within.

  “Yes?” she said.

  Rourke was about to reach for his badge when another woman called out from the parlor, “Cassie, is that her already? I thought she wasn't due for another hour yet.”

  That woman stepped into the hall, wearing matching lounging pajamas with purple parrots, and looking sleep-tousled and well pleasured.

  “Mornin', Mrs. Layton,” Rourke said.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The only desire I've ever felt,” said Floriane de Lassus Layton, “was for another woman.”

  They sat in a courtyard ablaze with purple wisteria and climbing yellow tea roses. Coffee sweetened with sugar and cream sat on the green wrought iron table between them. Inside the house, Flo's lover began to play “Rhapsody in Blue” on the phonograph.

  Cassandra Poule's response—when Rourke had told her he wanted to ask some questions about “the club”—had been to suggest that he take a long walk off a short pier, and then she'd given him the name and telephone number of her lawyer. She seemed to treat her lover's need to confess, though, as her lover's own business.

  “The first time it happened,” Flo said, “was two years after I married Mr. Layton, right after the birth of our daughter. He caught us, my…friend and I, he caught us together one day and he was…furious. Of course, the Church forbids divorce, but I think his pride would have forbade it in any event. And I, of course, promised that I would never indulge in such shameful acts ever again.”

  When they had first sat down, Rourke had positioned his chair so close to hers that their knees were almost brushing. Now he leaned closer as if he would touch her or hold her in comfort, although he did neither. “The heart has a will of its own, though,” he said, “and it guards itself well.”

  She smiled a little. “That sounds like something Father Pat would say.”

  “It was something he wrote. Or close to it anyway.”

  She smiled again, then looked away, toward a pair of mockingbirds who were squabbling among the fallen crushed husks of a pecan tree. “I kept my promise, though, Lieutenant Rourke. For many years.”

  She had not been able, though, to stop her thoughts, or the little flashes of desire she would feel for a shop girl or the mama of her daughter's playmate. She confessed these sins to her priest, Father Pat.

  “They were sins against the Holy Catholic Church—he never said they weren't. But somehow when we talked about it, I stopped feeling so ugly inside. He showed me how God loves each of us just as we are. That He wouldn't have made it possible for us to be a certain way and then despise us for it.”

  The morning light was gentle on her mahogany hair and the round, smooth paleness of her face. It was easy, Rourke thought, to imagine God creating such a creature and being pleased with and forgiving of his creation. And then you remembered that He had also made the creature who had nailed one of His priests to a crossbeam.

  “I think for a time I even found contentment,” she was saying. “I thought, This life is what you have, Flo, and there is no point in grasping for something other.”

  “And then you joined Father Pat's club and met Miss Poule.”

  “Oh, yes…” The face she turned to him held both wonder and sadness, as if a mystery she'd carried inside was finally working its painful way out. “It happened in an instant. And it was then that I realized I had not been holding true to a promise, I'd only been waiting, and one look at her dear face and the waiting was over.”

  Inside the house the telephone rang, and Flo's hands, which had been making little pleats in the lap of her lounging pajamas, spasmed into a fist.

  “Tell me about the club,” Rourke said.

  “One day a few weeks back…” She paused to smear the tears off her cheeks, then looked at her fingers as if surprised to find them wet. “One day Father Pat came over to the house to fetch back the Charities' yearly accounts book and he saw…Mr. Layton can be mean sometimes, and Father Pat saw the evidence of that on my arm. He told me about the club then and asked me if I wanted to help out with it. I think he was hoping that I'd make use of it myself someday, but that was never to be.” She tried to laugh, but the sound she made popped like a wet bubble. “I've never been a particularly courageous person.”

  “It must have taken some courage, surely, to work with Father Pat and his club.” He leaned into her again and this time he took her hand. “That was what y'all were doing the night he was killed, wasn't it?” he said, holding her hand but putting just the hint of the cop in his voice. “Helping some woman to escape her man.”

  She started to pull her hand free of his and then stopped. “I didn't exactly lie to you,
sir. Father did leave my house at ten that night, but I was with him. We met a woman with a baby under the clock at D. H. Holmes's and we brought her here for a while, before we put her on a train for…put her on a train, and then we went our separate ways. The last I saw of Father Pat, he'd just crossed the street to catch the streetcar back to the rectory.”

  “Who was the woman you put on a train?”

  “I can't tell you.”

  Rourke leaned into her, closer still, intimidating her a little with his size. “Mrs. Layton, you are going to have to. The woman's husband may be Father Pat's killer.”

  “No, I truly mean I cannot tell you. We volunteers are never told their names, or where they're going. We just help them with changing clothes and feeding them and calming their nerves. Cassie…Miss Poule knows what their final destination will be, because she makes all the arrangements—getting them jobs and places to live, coming up with their new names, and getting things like the made-up birth and baptismal certificates. But only Father Pat ever knew who they were.” She tried for another laugh. “He was always calling them all by the same name. Mary. He would say, ‘Don't be afraid, Mary. This is the first day of the rest of your life.’”

  While they'd been sitting in the courtyard the morning sky had started to cloud over. A breeze had come up, smelling of the coming rain and of omelets and cush-cush cooking in the kitchen. Rourke gave her hand a final squeeze, then let it go. He leaned back into his chair, putting space between them again.

  “What will become of us now?” she said.

  “You'll be all right,” he lied.

  What would happen, he thought, was that they would get a warrant for Father Pat's club, even though there probably weren't any records anyway, except for what had been in the priest's head. So they would try to compel Flo's lover to tell what she knew, but Cassandra Poule would probably go to jail rather than betray the new identities and whereabouts of the women who'd been given a ride on her railroad. The club, though, whose existence had been dependent on its secrecy, would cease to exist.