Wages of Sin

by Penelope Williamson

  “Do we? Yes, I suppose we do.” Remy took a block of ice out of the box and began to scrape it with the shaver. “Shall I make you one?”

  “Why, I don't mind if I do.”

  Remy made a pitcher's worth of the cocktail: bourbon, sugar, a splash of water, and finally some crushed mint. She put shaved ice into two tumblers and poured the julep over it.

  “Have a taste and tell me if it needs more sugar,” she said, handing one of the glasses to Beulah.

  “Don't need no taste to know it's just right, honey. You make juleps like you were born to it.”

  “I was,” Remy said, laughing. “I'm going upstairs for a bath. I've got that wretched ball to go to later on this evening.”

  “The studio done sent over your costume. I hung it up in your wardrobe in the bedroom…You want I should bring up a tray when that chicken's done fryin'?”

  Remy went back out onto the gallery, carrying her julep and waving at Beulah over her shoulder. “I'll come back down and eat with you later.”

  Sans Souci had been built in the French Colonial plantation house style, and so to get from the kitchen to the upstairs, where the parlors and bedrooms were, Remy had to go outside onto the lower gallery and climb the stairs. As soon as she set foot on the upper gallery and saw the open doors, she knew he'd been in her bedroom.

  Was maybe still in her bedroom.

  Once, she had been so proud of her nerve that she would fashion deliberate tests for it, just to show off her own courage to herself. She hated that he could do this to her now, that he could make her feel vulnerable and polluted with fear. That he could make her so aware of the beat of her own heart, the pumping of air through her lungs, aware of all the veins and organs, the muscles and bones of her body and how they could all, in an instant, be reduced to a piece of meat on a slab in the morgue.

  “Go to hell, you bastard,” she said, loud enough for him to hear, and then she strode through the doors.

  It was as if a whirlwind had gone through her things. Or a ravaging beast. Clothes, papers, cosmetics strewn everywhere, figurines and perfume bottles shattered into pieces. Bloody smears glistened on the cypress floor. God, the blood was still wet. While she'd been down in the kitchen, he'd been up here with her things, touching her things, bleeding…

  The worst, though, was what he'd done to her bed. He'd ejaculated all over her bed.

  Rage, terror, disgust—they all imploded inside her at once and with such force that she swayed on her feet.

  Lord, Remy. Will you for God's sakes get ahold of yourself.

  The bell box for the telephone rang, and she jumped as if a live wire had been touched to her chest.

  The box rang again, jangling on her exposed nerves as she waded through the mess on the floor to her desk. She snatched up the phone and spoke before he could: “I think you're the one who's scared, Romeo.”

  She heard his surprise, a little hiccup of a caught breath in the crackling static on the line.

  “Remy,” he said, and she felt again that little flash of familiarity at the way he said her name. There was something, something…an accent maybe. “I've been trying to warn you, but you just aren't paying attention. Anytime, anywhere I want to take you, I can.”

  “Only in your dreams, Romeo.”

  He laughed, a little stuttering heh-heh-heh that sounded even more familiar to her than his voice had. The open line crackled with a strained silence, but she could hear his breathing. She thought he was about to hang up and then he laughed again, heh-heh-heh.

  “Did you kiss your cop goodbye this morning, Remy?”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Lieutenant Daman Rourke had been invited by the Ghoul to take another look at the body of Mary Lou Trescher where she lay on a slab in the morgue, and so he stuffed his hands in his pockets, set his jaw, and made himself look.

  The chimney sweep's rope had left a deep furrow around the girl's neck. Finger marks from open-handed slaps had left bruises on both cheeks. Her nose had bled, and the blood was caked black now around her nostrils.

  Christ, he thought, but she'd been so young.

  “The rapes were multiple and particularly violent,” came the Ghoul's voice from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. “There is evidence of petechiae on the face and blood hemorrhaging at the corners of the eyes, and the cricoid cartilage in the neck was fractured in two places—all consistent with death by strangulation, as was to be expected.”

  The coroner paused in his dry recitation and looked down, shuffling his feet through the cigarette butts on the stained tile floor. His face was sallow and shiny with sweat. “The bites on the thighs were made postmortem,” he went on. “It is the same killer, Lieutenant. Or rather, I believe so. I am sorry.”

  “So am I,” Rourke said after a moment. “Unfortunately we can't make our apologies known to Titus Dupre.”

  “Physical evidence does not lie,” the Ghoul said, “but it can mislead.”

  This time Rourke said nothing.

  The Ghoul stuck his cigarette back in his mouth and used both hands to gently lift the girl's wrist. “The bruises here show impressions of heavy links and there are flakes of rust on the skin. Her hair smells faintly of gasoline, and I found a smear of grease on her right buttock and small pieces of grit embedded in her back and shoulders.”

  He laid the girl's wrist with care back onto the slab and squinted up at Rourke through the smoke. “My assessment is he kept her chained in an automobile garage somewhere while he was raping her and then killing her. And perhaps for a while after-ward—lividity was consistent with the body having been moved some time after death.”

  Rourke let out a deep breath as if he'd been holding it. “Thanks, Moses.”

  “The bites,” the Ghoul said. “I took the trouble of examining them more closely this time. Among the more savage tearing I found small, what you might call, love nips. As if he regretted killing her and so he began by kissing her there, where he'd hurt her before, perhaps to make her better, but then the kisses turned to nibbles and then something snapped inside of him, and he quite literally tried to consume her. He hated her, but he also—I cannot say loved…” The Ghoul shrugged, for once at a loss for words.

  “Urge colliding with resistance,” Rourke said.

  A steady rain dripped from weighted clouds and the temperature felt like it had dropped twenty degrees by the time Rourke left the morgue in the Criminal Courts Building. He'd arranged to meet Fio at his car at eleven o'clock, so they could catch up on their cases before he headed out to the Girod Street Cemetery for Titus Dupre's funeral.

  He walked through the rain down to Canal, where he had parked the Bearcat near the Saenger Theatre. The theater was all gussied up with banners and bunting and balloons in honor of its grand opening this evening. A work crew was out front erecting a flagpole for the world-renowned flagpole sitter Shipwreck Kelly.

  Shipwreck Kelly was just a publicity stunt, though, arranged as entertainment for those not fortunate enough to have been invited to the masquerade ball that would follow the theater's first screening later this evening. The film they were showing was a first-run print of Remy Lelourie's Lost Souls, and because she was so fortuitously in town, she'd been invited to assist the mayor with the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

  Shipwreck Kelly wasn't due to start his flagpole sitting for hours yet, and so Rourke wondered why there were so many people hanging around outside the theater, hunched under their umbrellas and raincoats and huddling under the shelter of the marquee. Then it occurred to him that they were already lining up just to watch Remy Lelourie take a ten-second walk down a red carpet. The encroaching enormity of her fame, and the burden of it, still kept surprising him.

  Rourke stood at the curb, studying the fans gathered in front of the theater and wondering if one of them might be Romeo. He was waiting, also, for a break in the traffic, and breathing deep to get the stench of the morgue out of his nose and throat.

  A taxicab rolled up to a stop alongsid
e him, the Model T's fresh wax job beading in the wet. Otis Bloom rolled down the window and leaned his head out into the rain. His bald pate was as shiny as the Ford's hood. “Are you waiting for a taxi, Detective Rourke?”

  “No, thanks. I've got my car.”

  Bloom looked down the street, then back at Rourke. He put on his hat and got out of the cab, buttoning up his black duster against the rain. He stared at Rourke, his throat working to dredge up his words. Rourke knew what was on the man's mind; he just didn't want to hear it.

  “You'll never believe who I gave a ride to the other night,” Bloom said. He was trying to sound normal, even cheerful, but it just wasn't in him anymore, if it ever had been. “Your Remy Lelourie was actually in my cab. Look here…” He bent over and reached inside the car, rummaged around for something on the front seat, and came up with one of the cab company's advertisement flyers that they tacked onto telephone poles. “Look at this. She was kind enough to give me her autograph, and as soon as she did I thought of my Mercedes, of how thrilled she's going to be when she hears how I'd given Miss Lelourie a lift in my cab, because she's such a fan of the lady, and then I remembered…” He looked away, swallowing hard, choking the words back down now.

  Rourke didn't want to be rude, but he wished the man would just go away. “Mr. Bloom—”

  “I saw the papers this mornin'. The monster who took my daughter is still out there.”

  “We'll get him, Mr. Bloom.”

  “You thought you had him before.”

  A young woman, who had been waiting for the streetcar, gave up as it began raining harder and hailed Bloom's cab. He acknowledged the woman with a wave of his hand and then looked an apology at Rourke. “I do know that you're trying your best.”

  “Yeah,” Rourke said, a little bitterness showing.

  “And I know that she's dead,” Bloom said. “In my heart I know it. I just want to bring her home, Detective. I just want to know she's resting in peace.”

  “I'm sorry,” Rourke said, because that, although inadequate, was all he could say.

  Otis Bloom nodded and made an odd gesture with his hand, raising it as if in absolution. He turned away, opening the car door, and the wind caught at the skirt of his black duster, slapping it against his legs. The rain came down harder.

  Rourke started to cross the street, but the light had changed again, and then he saw Fio anyway, trotting toward him up Canal.

  Fio slowed when he spotted Rourke, tugging the hat with the bullet hole lower over his forehead and hunching his shoulders to keep the wet from running down the back of his neck. He looked like he had a golf ball tucked in his right cheek.

  “What happened to your face?” Rourke said, as Fio joined him at the corner.

  Fio gingerly touched his jaw with his fingertips. “Aw, I woke up this morning with a toothache. Son of a bitch hurts like holy hell.”

  “You ought to see a dentist.”

  “Why? So he can poke and drill and pull at it, and it'll hurt even worse.”

  “Baby,” Rourke said.

  They grinned at each other, feeling good because at least one of their cases was finally breaking. It had only been two days since Father Patrick Walsh had been found crucified in a macaroni factory, and Rourke was still running high on the adrenaline that always surged through him at the beginning of a case, so that he sometimes forgot to eat and sleep.

  Rourke had called his partner earlier this morning, as soon as he was done with Floriane Layton, catching him as he was leaving the house, and telling him about Father Pat's secret club and the Catholic Charities' accounts book. As soon as the banks had opened, Fio had paid a call on his contact at the Hibernia National Bank, where Our Lady of the Holy Rosary and her priests kept their money.

  Fio sniffed now at the air, then leaned into Rourke, sniffing some more, his broad nose quivering like a hound dog's. “You smell like the Ghoul,” he said.

  “I was in the morgue, talking to him about the Trescher girl and killing time while I was waiting for my hot date with you.”

  “Man, I don't know why you keep hanging out in that place. It gives me the fucking heebie-jeebies.”

  “Yeah, well, to each his own. Looking at those green ledgers and all those columns of numbers gives me the heebie-jeebies…Did you get anything?”

  “Uh-huh.” Fio touched his jaw again, wincing. “If Father Pat was blackmailing anybody, it wasn't for money. His deposits were all salary, which he withdrew periodically—probably to help finance his underground railroad for runaway wives. Something hinky, though, was definitely going on with the Catholic Charities. Only Father Ghilotti's and Mr. Albert Layton's names are on the accounts; Father Pat's wasn't. And, man, were those guys ever moving money around all over the place. Most of it was too fancy and complicated for me to follow, but some checks were drawn on the Charities' funds in thousand-dollar chunks supposedly for bond purchases, which makes sense. I mean you want to make money on your money, right? Except that the day after Father Pat was murdered, those debits were reimbursed to the penny by a cash deposit. Looks like somebody got busy covering his ass.”

  “More than one somebody, maybe,” Rourke said, working through it. “So Father Ghilotti finds out that Father Pat has been helping some Catholic wives to run away from their husbands and he tells him that he's crossing the line as far as the Church is concerned and that he's got to cut it out. Meanwhile, though, Father Ghilotti and Mr. Albert Payne Layton are playing patty-cake with the Charities' money. One day Father Pat gets a look at the accounts book, and something in it tips him off. So he goes to Father Ghilotti and offers to make a deal: he'll keep quiet about the financial shenanigans as long as he gets to keep his railroad going. Father Ghilotti caved, but maybe Albert Payne Layton didn't.”

  “Sounds good in theory,” Fio said, distracted because he was digging in the inner pocket of his wrinkled pongee suit coat for something. “Only to prove that's how it went down we're going to need to get a look at the Charities' accounts book.”

  “Yeah, but if we go for a warrant, we'll give the archbishop fair warning and whatever's been going on there will get buried so deep nobody will ever find it.”

  It might not be quite as bad as having the world learn that one of his priests was really a woman, Rourke thought, but neither was the wily Archbishop Hannity going to want it exposed that one of his priests had been embezzling charity money.

  “I can think of a way we can get a look at that book without a warrant, though,” Rourke said. He saw that Fio had found what he'd been looking for. A Baby Ruth candy bar. “If the chairwoman of the board invites us to have a look-see of her own volition.”

  They thought about it, trying to see if they were missing any angles. Fio thought about it while trying to tear open the wrapper on his candy bar. His thick blunt fingers weren't doing the job, so he used his teeth.

  “I'll give Mrs. Layton a call and set it up for sometime tomorrow morning,” Rourke said. “It's going to take some careful thought to figure out how we're going to finesse this.”

  And there was also Remy's theater opening to go to later this evening. What Rourke would rather have done was go home and spend a few hours with Katie, eat Mrs. O'Reilly's home cooking, and catch up on some much needed sleep, but he had a really strong hunch that Romeo was going to pull another stunt at the masquerade ball, just like he'd done at the dance marathon, and he wanted to be there when it happened.

  “You know, if you think about it,” Fio was saying, “maybe Father Ghilotti was only pretending to go along to get along for the meanwhile. A guy whose daddy is in the racketeering business wouldn't cave to a little blackmail…So, want to make a bet on which one of them did it? I'll give you ten to one it was Father Frank Ghilotti.”

  “Five bucks to your one it wasn't,” Rourke said.

  Fio grinned. “You're on.”

  “Because I'm leaning toward the third possibility,” Rourke said.

  “Aw, man, two possibilities are more than enough.
Don't go messin' with any third possibility.”

  “That a husband of one of those Marys Father Pat made disappear was trying to pay him back for it, or make him talk about it.”

  “You see? That's what happens when you get involved with a third possibility. All of a sudden you got suspects coming back out your ears again.”

  “And we also shouldn't lose sight of the fourth possibility.”

  “Aw, man.”

  “That there was some kind of love triangle going on with Father Pat and our ladies of the club.”

  Fio gave Rourke his long-suffering look. “Gee, let's make sure now that we don't leave the lesbians off our list. We'll put them down right between the archbishop and the town of Paris. Other detectives, they go out detecting and the possible who-done-its are all nicely whittled down until there's only the one left. But you, you gotta go digging and poking and turning up rocks until the whole damn world's a suspect and only then are you happy.”

  Fio glared at the end of his candy bar a moment, thinking about all their suspects, then he bit it off.

  “You really are eating that thing with your aching tooth,” Rourke said, wonder in his voice.

  “I'm hungry…Want some?”

  Rourke laughed and shook his head.

  Fio said something else, but he was drowned out by the streetcar rattling down the tracks in the neutral ground. The streetcar braked with a screech and a smell of scorched metal, and then Rourke heard someone calling his name and he turned.

  The kid who sold newspapers on the corner and was in love with Rourke's Bearcat came running up to him so fast he had to hold on to his cap.

  “Hey, Lieutenant,” the kid said half out of breath, as he skidded to a stop. “You comin' for the 'Cat? Why don't I drive it around for you. That way you won't have to cross the street in the rain.”

  Rourke's car was parked on the uptown side of Canal Street, and he and Fio were standing on the downtown side, with the neutral ground between them and the car. For the kid to bring the Bearcat to Rourke, he would have to drive it all the way around the block.