Wages of Sin

by Penelope Williamson

  And the world would find out about Cassandra Poule's latest “companion,” and Floriane de Lassus Layton would be destroyed. Father Pat might not have intended for it to happen, but he had given his Flo the strength and self-knowledge to come to this house, and then he had left her to face the consequences alone.

  Father Pat. Rourke wondered if he…if she…had felt desire for either of these women, and if either one or both had felt desire in return. He had asked Flo Layton once if she and Father Pat had been lovers; to ask it of her again now would be a revelation he wasn't prepared to make to her just yet.

  It was a road he might have to go down eventually, though, with both Mrs. Layton and Cassandra Poule, but Rourke had had another thought that he wanted to pursue first. Something that had almost come to him while he'd been talking to that doddering old priest, Father Delaney, on the rose-framed kitchen stoop of the rectory on Saturday. Something that had just come back to him now while Flo had been talking about the club and her role in it.

  “The Catholic Charities yearly accounts book that Father Pat came to collect from your husband that day—what's it like?”

  She'd picked up her coffee, cold by now, but she wasn't drinking it anyway. She was staring down into the cup as if it contained her salvation, and at his question she looked up at him, blinking in confusion. “What? Oh…why, it's bound with expensive green leather and has these pretty gilded pages. Father Ghilotti gave it as a gift to the Charities last Christmas.”

  Old Father Delaney had talked about devil's bargains and he'd kept asking Rourke if he'd come for the book. But it wasn't Father Pat's appointment book he'd been talking about; it was the accounts book for the Catholic Charities.

  It helps to know where the bodies are buried, Father Ghilotti had said. Somehow he had found out about the club, and it would have been his duty as Holy Rosary's pastor to shut it down. The Church could never countenance an organization that was for all intents and purposes fostering the dissolution of the blessed sacrament of marriage. But Father Pat had discovered a buried body in turn, something in the Catholic Charities' accounts. And so they had made a trade, he and his pastor, a body for a body.

  Only Father Pat had been the one to turn up on a slab in the morgue.

  Out in the street a woman strolled by, singing the delicious praises of her banana fritters just as the cathedral's bell began to toll, calling the faithful to the daily morning Mass. And as if the bell had been a tocsin for all her coming pain, Flo Layton uttered a little cry and bent over, clutching at her belly while harsh sobs racked through her, for a minute, two, then she seemed to grab hold of herself from within.

  She straightened slowly, rubbing the tears from her eyes with her fists like a child. “Heavens,” she said. “What you must think of me, Detective. Every time we are in each other's company, I end up falling into utter pieces. It's just…I shall miss him so. He had this way of listening that was a gift, like a beautiful singing voice, or an artist's eye. He could make you believe that not only did he forgive you all your trespasses, but that he loved your soul. And the way he loved you, it made you feel chosen and sheltered.”

  She turned to Rourke. Her face was soft in the morning light. “You are a lot like he was, Detective. In the way you have of prying open the human heart. It must make you good at what you do.”

  It was sometimes what solved the toughest cases, Rourke thought, when you started prying open the secrets of the guilty and you found the heart of a murderer. Sometimes, though, on the way to catching your killer, you had to rip open the hearts of innocent bystanders along the way. And because everyone lives behind a tissue of lies and secrets and illusions, and even though you don't want it to happen, you sometimes can end up destroying the innocent simply through your own ruthless efficiency.

  Sometimes, Rourke thought, truth can kill just as effectively as a bullet or a knife.

  It was an image he didn't like remembering, but he deliberately called it to mind now: the priest hanging by the spikes through his wrists, the beaten face, the burned feet. Usually when a killer killed he was being driven by a need or a compulsion to wipe his victim's existence off the face of the earth. Father Pat's killer, though, hadn't only been after ending Father Pat's life. He'd been trying to break the priest open, to get at his secrets.

  The damn, persistent, and crazy-making question, though, was still: which secrets?

  Romeo watched his own true love emerge from a chauffeured Peerless touring car the color of a midnight sea. Her bodyguard got out of the car's front seat and walked with her to a scrolled iron gate. She went through the gate alone, though, and the guard took up a wide-legged stance next to a fence that was all a-tangle with overgrown honeysuckle vines.

  The bodyguard was fucking hysterical. An ex-prizefighter with chewed-up ears wasn't going to save her. Only Romeo could do that. Of course the press agents would milk the bodyguard angle for all it was worth once they got hold of it. Remy Lelourie's life threatened by mystery Romeo…Yeah, he liked that. Mystery Romeo. Maybe he ought to write the copy himself.

  The Peerless was hysterical, too. A movie star's perk, courtesy of Bright Lights Studios. Romeo had taken a look inside the…hell, you really couldn't call it a car. It was an English country estate on wheels. All mahogany and leather and quadruple-plated silver trim. It even had Axminster carpeting on the floor, and cushions of Italian brocade with silk-tinseled velvet borders.

  Romeo laughed. He had fucked her on the leather and Italian brocade back seat of that car once, and he'd often wondered what Hebert the chauffeur thought when he'd found the evidence of the dirty deed later.

  Romeo stood now behind the concealing leaves of a banana tree, watching while the love of his life followed a path from the gate to a dilapidated raised cottage with flaking paint and cardboard in some of the windows. Watching her stop and turn her face up to the sky, enjoying the cool pause before the first raindrops fell.

  Her gray coat matched the sky, and he thought it made her look…He'd been about to think drab, but Remy Lelourie wouldn't look drab in sackcloth and ashes. She was looking…well, subdued. Yeah, that was the word. But then Remy always looked subdued when she visited her mother and sister.

  Romeo had to take it on faith that Remy's mother and sister lived in the house, since he'd never actually laid eyes on the women. Their neighbors up and down Esplanade Avenue claimed they were honest-to-God recluses and had been for forever, ever since old Mr. Lelourie had deserted the wife and kiddies for another woman. This trauma was always spoken about in whispers, but as if it were also possessed of capital letters. The Scandal.

  Because of The Scandal, the Lelourie women—mama Heloise and baby sister Belle—had entombed themselves alive in typical Southern blueblood fashion. Just the two of them in that ramshackle old house, alone with themselves and with all their bitter gripes and sour grapes, going on twenty-eight years.

  Just then the front door to the ramshackle old house opened beneath a mysterious hand, and Romeo strained to get a look before Remy disappeared inside, but all he saw were shadows.

  Romeo grunted with satisfaction, though. They were home—hunh, as if they fuckin' wouldn't be—but he could count on her to be staying for at least an hour now. It was probably some Creole etiquette thing going back umpteen generations, that whenever you visited la famille you stayed for at least an hour.

  Romeo smiled. He had to leave her now, but he liked knowing where she was and what she was up to when he wasn't around.

  Mama was the one to answer the door this morning, to fuss with Remy's hat and gloves and umbrella, and talk about the weather. “I was just telling Belle, it's going to be one of those long, cold, silent rains…Why don't you do the honors with the café, Remy dear? Belle's ankles are all swollen up today.”

  They took up their usual places in the parlor. Mama on the red-velvet chair next to the empty fire grate, sitting slender and straight-backed in her high-necked bodice and long black skirts from another era. Her blond hair and g
ray eyes fading some now, but her face still high-bred and timeless.

  Belle on the black horsehair settee beneath a window enshrouded in lace panels that were tattered and yellow with age, knitting a little yellow cap and resting the cap on a belly that was five months full of baby.

  Remy poured the thick black chicory coffee and hot milk together in two steady streams into the cups. She handed one to her sister, along with a smile. “You look tired today, honey. Are you sure you're getting enough rest?”

  Belle had been given her nickname as a child because of her prettiness, but in the last few months her face had turned sallow and drawn, as if the baby were sucking all the life out of her. Her hair, once the color of summer apricots, now looked so orange that Remy wondered if she was tinting it.

  “You hardly need to ask,” Mama said, answering for her. “Like all the Lelourie women, your sister is delicate down below. You mark my words if this baby doesn't kill her.”

  “Oh, surely not, Mama,” Remy said. “You're a Lelourie and yet you've managed to survive the experience twice. That we know of.”

  “Don't get cute, missy. Cute does not become you.”

  Remy busied herself putting sugar in her coffee so that Mama wouldn't catch her smiling. If she ever got to thinking too much of herself as the glamorous movie star, she could always trust her mama to put her back in her place.

  Mama and Belle had wandered into a discussion of all the hazards of childbirth, on top of being delicate down below. Babies strangled by their umbilical cords, Siamese twins, breached deliveries, and the infamous 'Gator Baby, who had come into life with a cracked, leathery hide and a snout. They'd covered all this ground before and yet they never seemed to tire of it

  “You remember Maggie, Matilda Dayries's girl?” Belle was saying. “She's the one who always had to be sitting right up in the front pew so Father could see her, and she thought she was God's gift all right, up until she had those twins. One came out white, like it should've, but the other came out black as a coal scuttle. Well, something had obviously being goin' on in that family's woodpile.”

  “Belle,” Remy said a little too loudly. “What are you still wearing that ol' blue dress for? It looks fit to burst at the seams. Didn't you like any of those new maternity dresses I had sent over from D. H. Holmes?”

  “I liked them fine. I'm only saving them, is all.”

  What for? Remy wanted to say, but she already knew they'd been added to the bulging cedar hope chest that lay at the foot of her sister's bed. Everything that had ever come Belle's way, she had put aside in her hope chest, saving it for a future that had passed her by long ago when she hadn't been looking.

  Remy heard her name and realized she must have drifted into a reverie while Mama had launched herself into one of her scolds.

  “…making a spectacle of yourself in City Park. You do these things without a single thought for la famille.”

  “Mama's right,” Belle said. “You're going to be sorry if you keep on in this way, Remy. Everybody knows no nice boy will marry a girl who's gone and made a spectacle of herself.”

  Remy lifted her shoulders in a small shrug, pretending that they still didn't have this power to hurt her. Knowing that they would always have the power to hurt her. La famille. “I doubt I'll ever marry again, anyway. No good seems to come of it.”

  No good can ever come from it.

  It was a Southern expression that ought to be adopted as the motto of this family, she thought. We go through the motions, we tell our white lies, we touch each other's hands and tender each other promises, and no good ever comes from it.

  “I brought something for you all,” she said, taking a sheaf of brochures out of her handbag. “Information on some agencies for y'all to look at later.”

  Belle took the brochures from her hand, then immediately dropped them onto the threadbare carpet and burst into loud sobs, as if she'd been saving her tears up all morning, just waiting for the right moment to let fly with them.

  “You are just the cruelest thing,” she cried. “Why, all the while growing up you've always wanted what I had, and things haven't changed just because you're a movie star now with your picture in the papers all the time. You're jealous 'cause I'm having a baby and you're not.”

  Mama got up and gathered up the brochures. She brought them back to her chair and sat down. She made a neat pile of the brochures in her lap, and then began to tear them up, one by one. “I'll not have the word ‘adoption’ mentioned in this house ever again,” she said.

  Remy had not used the word; in fact, she had made it a point not to use the word.

  “After all, there's no true shame attached to Belle's condition,” Mama went on, “for the baby's daddy would surely have done the honorable thing and married her, if not for the tragic accident that claimed his life. He was a St. Claire and blood would have told. Blood always tells.”

  Remy had to turn her head aside and press her lips together to keep from either laughing or screaming, she wasn't sure which. The baby's daddy would never have done the honorable thing. Aside from the fact that Charles St. Claire hadn't had an honorable bone in his body, he happened to have already been married to another woman, namely herself. And the tragic accident that had removed him from their lives had been his murder with a cane knife out in the old slave shack in back of Sans Souci one night last July.

  Belle's sobbing had stopped with the same abruptness with which it had started. The parlor fell back into its customary silence, except for the clink of Mama's spoon against her cup and Belle's knitting needles clicking in tempo with the rain against the windows.

  “Belle, you ought to take one of those pralines,” Mama said, the soft French accent from her youth more pronounced now, as it always was when she became agitated. “You must remember you eat for two.”

  “I don't know, Mama,” Belle said. “It seems anymore my tummy just rebels at the thought of sweets, as if they were Yankees.” Then she laughed softly, the storm not only over now but already forgotten, and in a strange way, forgiven.

  Even though no good had come from it.

  And it seemed to Remy then that this house and the women in it had become enclosed in one of those bell jars that you shake to make it snow. The tableau so frozen in place that you could change nothing about it except the weather.

  Romeo had stripped naked and fucked her on her bed and now he prowled through her bedroom, touching her things, smelling her clothes. He lifted her peignoir from off a brass hook on the door and buried his face in it. The silky material snagged on his callused fingers, the feather boa around its neck tickled his nose. So fine…all of her was just so fine…

  He gave a little start, shaking his head. Had he drifted off somewhere? He checked his watch…No, only a minute gone, maybe two. The horse he'd shot up was galloping through him, stringing him out, but he had it under control. Yeah, under control.

  He looked for the letter he'd sent her, but he didn't see it. He yanked her dresses out of the wardrobe, emptied brassieres and panties and camisoles and stockings out of her drawers and onto the floor. Sent his arm sweeping through all the bottles and feminine things that littered her dressing table. Bitch. She'd thrown it away, the fucking bitch. Didn't she get it? Couldn't she see that he was trying to warn her? And she should've known the very act of reading the letter—the letter he had fucking bled over—meant that she now belonged to him.

  He prowled the bedroom some more, muttering bitch, bitch, bitch under his breath, looking for the letter, looking—

  Jesus fucking Christ. Pain stabbed up through his foot, pain so bad it brought tears to his eyes. What?…He looked down and saw that he'd stepped on a piece of glass. Christ, he was bleeding like a…like a…

  Bleeding all over her was what he was doing. The studio had sent over some new publicity stills and she'd been going through them. He remembered that they'd been on her desk, but now they were scattered all over the floor and he'd gotten blood on one of them. The one where her head
was thrown back, and she was laughing, pushing her fingers though her hair. God, how he loved her when she did that thing with her hair…

  Something startled him, someone in the house, in the kitchen banging pans. His foot hurt and he looked down, and saw the broken glass and the blood. He turned in a slow circle, looking around him.

  “Whoa,” he said, shocked at the mess he'd made, and then he laughed. How do you like them apples, Remy?

  Car tires crunched on the shell drive below. Romeo limped to the window and looked out in time to see her emerge from the Peerless, along with her bodyguard. She turned around and stuck her head back inside the car and said something to Hebert the chauffeur that made him and the bodyguard laugh.

  Romeo wanted to kill them.

  He watched her walk out of sight and then he heard her footsteps on the downstairs gallery, going around back to the kitchen.

  Time to get outta Dodge, he thought. Or…

  Or he could stay and fuck her again, there on her bed, on her pink satin sheets that smelled of jasmine and sex. Fuck her good and then give her the only salvation that ever truly lasted.

  “For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

  Remy opened the kitchen door to the sizzle of chicken frying in a pan on the old-fashioned black iron stove. “Mornin', Miss Beulah,” she said. “My, it sure does smell good in here.”

  The housekeeper was sitting at the round oak table, shelling pecans into a pan, and she looked up smiling. “Don't you know it,” she said. “I just got that chicken fresh at the Poydras Market, plucked and cut up already it was, and wrapped up in waxed paper—land, what will they think of next? All's I had to do was walk in the door with it and plop it right in the fry pan…Did you have yourself a nice visit with your mama and Miss Belle?”

  Remy made a face. “I need to fix me a julep and the sun isn't even over the yardarm yet. So what does that tell you?”

  “Mmmm-huh,” Miss Beulah said, laughing. She was an ample woman with a shelf for a bosom, but she had a fairy's tinkling laugh. “Like that, was it? Families, they are a trial sometimes. But you got to love 'em.”