Wages of Sin

by Penelope Williamson

  “I'll find you,” Rourke said.

  He waited until the door swung shut behind the reporter's back before he went to her. “Let me look at that again,” he said, taking her arm and gently turning it so that the cut was exposed to the hanging glass globe lights. “It's pretty deep. Maybe a doctor should be taking care of it.”

  Now that the wound wasn't welling so much blood, Remy could see that she'd been punctured, not slashed, by the odd little knife. It looked like it should be hurting worse than it was now. “I don't know,” she said. “It's almost stopped bleeding and the minute I walk into a hospital somebody'll recognize me and there'll be a fuss kicked up and it'll get in the papers.”

  “Yeah, okay. You'll be okay,” he said, but his hands were touching her all over, her neck, her waist, her upper arms, before settling on her shoulders.

  “He's winning, Day. I'm scared now.”

  “Jesus…” His arms tightened their grip on her shoulders, then he leaned forward until their foreheads touched. “Let's get out of here. I'm taking you home with me and you're moving into the Conti Street house until this is over.”

  They left the Saenger Theatre by a back service door onto Rampart Street. The street lamps and shop signs and awnings all dripped with the wet, but a moon haloed with rings was trying to shine through the clouds. The air, clean and sweet-smelling from the rain, was a little cool and Remy huddled under her bat cape.

  Here, around the corner from the red carpet, hardly anyone was on the street. A pair of squad cars was pulled up to the curb, their engines idling, and three uniforms were standing alongside, drinking coffee they were spiking with something illegal out of a flask.

  Hebert wasn't due to bring the Peerless back for another couple of hours, but Rourke's Conti Street house was only three blocks away, so he took Remy's hand and they began walking.

  They heard a shout behind them and turned to see another patrolman come running around the corner from Canal, holding his nightstick down at his waist to keep it from slapping his legs.

  The patrolmen yelled something and then followed it up with, “Go, go, go!” Two of the cops standing by the cars hopped into one and it peeled away within seconds, lights flashing, siren blaring.

  Rourke let go of Remy's hand and reached into his coat pocket as he started toward the two remaining cops, and Remy saw the strap of his gun's shoulder holster.

  “Evenin', Detective Rourke,” one of the patrolmen said, recognizing him before he could produce his shield. “Miss Lelourie,” the cop added, a flush staining his already ruddy cheeks. “How's the party?”

  “Swinging,” Rourke said. “So what's going on?”

  “Aw, a bunch of the Klan boys took it into their heads to go nigger-knocking over in the Dryades neighborhood. The foot patrol over there called in on the box, said they'd been mixing it up with some colored boy in a Felicity Street speakeasy and things were starting to get out of hand.”

  “Goddammit. Okay…this your car? 'Cause I'm taking it, but I want y'all riding along with me,” Rourke said. He took a half step toward the remaining squad car, then turned back to her. “Listen, I got to…The Dupre house is on Felicity.”

  He stared at her, not really seeing her, but playing scenes through in his head. She knew he wouldn't want to leave her behind with Romeo maybe still on the loose inside the theater, but he wouldn't want to be taking her with him into an unruly mob of Klansmen either.

  Before he could make up his mind, Remy went around him, opened the door to the squad car, and got in.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Rourke drove, punching up the siren as he turned onto Canal Street and headed toward the river with the gas pedal pushed to the floor. The beams of the squad car's headlamps cut through a drizzly rain that glistened like spun glass. The city's neon lights looked like ghosts in the mist.

  The Dryades neighborhood was mostly Victorian-era houses full of working-class Jewish and Italian and colored families. The area for a couple of blocks on Felicity Street between St. Charles and Baronne was where the Negro wives and mamas came to do their shopping and the men did their drinking.

  They saw the trouble the minute they turned onto Felicity from St. Charles. A loud, tough knot of about twenty men flexed and bulged like a muscle in front of a wisteria-covered brick building that had been a school in its glory years but was a low-down smoke joint now. The smoke joint was between a colored theater and a shuttered hardware store, and as soon as Rourke pulled the squad car up to the curb, siren wailing and tires screaming, the lights on the movie marquee went out.

  Rourke slammed the gearshift into neutral and was jumping out of the car while it was still moving. The other two cops were only a couple of seconds behind him and pulling their nightsticks out of their belts.

  The knot of men in front of the smoke joint, if they were Klansmen, weren't wearing their white hoods and robes. A couple were armed with fence slats and one guy looked like he had a baling hook, but most just had green quart bottles of beer in their hands. They hadn't scattered, though, when the squad car pulled up, and the beat cops who'd called in the disturbance and the first squad car were all strangely nowhere in sight. Trouble was hanging in the air like a bad smell.

  Rourke took a couple of steps toward the trouble, then he came back to the car and stuck his head in the rear window. He had seen Remy Lelourie stare death in the face and laugh, so he shouldn't have been surprised now to find her staring into one of those little round mirrors that women carried around with them everywhere and putting on lipstick. She had, he saw, removed her fangs.

  “Remy—”

  “Don't worry, Day,” she said, running the pad of her little finger along her lower lip. “My timing is impeccable, I never miss my marks, and I certainly do know how to steal a scene.”

  “Right,” he said, straightening and backing away a couple of steps, and wondering what in hell she was talking about.

  The knot of men in front of the smoke joint let out a collective noise that sounded like a growl. Rourke unsnapped his holster and took out his gun, but he carried it with his arm hanging down at his side, the gun's muzzle pointed toward the ground.

  The two patrolmen walked a pace or so behind him and he said to them low and soft, out the corner of his mouth, “I'm probably going to have to run a bluff you could drive a truck through, so don't y'all go shooting or swinging your sticks at anybody. Not unless I'm hollering and going down.”

  As they got closer to the smoke joint, Rourke saw that a chimney sweep's paraphernalia was scattered along the gutter: brooms, brushes, weights, coils of rope, and bundles of twigs. The black silk top hat was crushed flat and smelling like it had been peed on.

  Rourke passed by a street lamp and his shadow leaped forward ahead of him, onto the sidewalk. The men on the back end of the knot saw him, or felt him, coming and they melted out of his way without resistance.

  Cornelius Dupre was in the middle of the knot. He had put up a fight, by the looks of him, and he was still fighting. He bucked and heaved and kicked out against the two men who had him by each arm. One was a big old redneck-looking guy with a pot gut, jowls hanging down to his chin, and eyes the color and sheen of wet mud. The other man had one eye that was dead and receded into the socket, and dried spittle whitened the corners of his mouth.

  Cornelius Dupre had a rope around his neck, and the eyes he turned to Rourke were feral, like those of a cornered cat. “You comin' to join the lynching party, Mr. Po-liceman? This your way of evenin' up the—”

  The rest of it was stopped by the redneck burying his fist in the boy's belly.

  “Let him go now,” Rourke said gently. “Y'all don't want to be doing this.”

  He'd expected the defiance to come from the two men holding Cornelius. Instead, it came from behind him, in a voice that was big and booze-roughened.

  “You burnt the wrong nigger.”

  Rourke didn't turn his back on the men holding the boy, just shifted his weight a little so he could tak
e in the owner of the voice. It was the damn buck-toothed man in the yellow shirt and purple suspenders.

  The man took a menacing step toward Rourke. He wasn't armed with anything more than his fists, but he was big and mean and full of too much hate to stop. “We're done with having our women kilt and defiled by these chimney sweep niggers,” he said. “Tonight we're doin' what needs doin'.”

  Rourke raised his gun and pointed it between the man's eyes. He didn't say anything, just pulled back on the hammer with his thumb, and the sound of the gun cocking was loud in the sudden silence.

  The buck-toothed man spit out the corner of his mouth, then cuffed it dry. “You can't shoot all of us.”

  Rourke smiled. “I don't have to. Just you.”

  The silence now was like after a bell has stopped tolling. Rourke could smell the sweat on the other man's skin, hear the suck and grate of the man's sawing breaths. From out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the patrolmen take a tighter grip of his stick.

  Somebody kicked over an empty beer bottle on the ground, sending it rolling down the street, and the noise let some of the tension out of the moment. They weren't going to jump him and tear him limb from limb, Rourke thought, but he still wasn't getting the rope off Cornelius Dupre's neck without a struggle.

  The wail of sirens that had been hovering in the distance grew louder. The buck-toothed man made a small movement, more a coiling of his muscles, and Rourke saw in his eyes that he was going to make a play for the gun. And then his head jerked and he looked beyond Rourke, and never in his life had Rourke seen a man look more surprised.

  Remy Lelourie floated toward them from out of the mist, like something out of a graveyard in the black flowing cape and tattered white shroud. The face, though, this was unmistakably one that they'd all seen larger than life on the silver screen.

  She walked right into the middle of the trouble with wonder on that face and an aura about her of impish excitement and a shared secret. As if she were Cinderella who'd suddenly been transported by magical pumpkin to the ball.

  “Gentlemen, I declare that I am fascinated,” she said, her words more heavily spiced than usual with the Creole accent she'd grown up with. “Positively overwhelmed, I am, for if this isn't just like a scenario from right out of one of my movies.”

  “Jesus God,” someone said on an exhaled breath, then grunted as the man standing next to him thumped him in the belly hard with of all things a baseball mitt. As if he'd been out playing catch with his boy, Rourke thought, when he'd gotten the call to go lynching.

  “Pardon his profanity, ma'am,” the man with the mitt said. “It's just…are you really Remy Lelourie?”

  She focused her tilted, catlike eyes on the man with the mitt until he began to squirm, and then her wide mouth broke into a smile that was pure Remy. “Oh, you're only funnin' with me, and you can just cut it out.”

  Rourke watched her turn on the power of Remy Lelourie. Her gaze went from man to man, sucking them in, before it came to rest finally on the buck-toothed man in the yellow shirt and purple suspenders.

  “Oh, Susannah! is the movie I was talking about,” she said. “Did you see that one, sir?”

  And the man—who a moment before had been facing down the muzzle of a .38 Policeman's Special—shuffled his feet and mumbled, “No'm,” to his shoes.

  “Well, never you mind,” she said, laughing. “I'll tell you the plot, shall I? Susannah is this dance hall girl, you see? But one with a heart of gold, of course. And in the town where she's living there's about to be a gunfight between the wild and handsome outlaw she's in love with and this mean ol' corrupt sheriff and his six deputies, when suddenly an idea comes to her of how she can get everybody to put up their guns and thus escape disaster.”

  The men looked as if they weren't sure if they were supposed to be identifying with the handsome outlaw or the corrupt sheriff and his deputies, but it didn't matter anyway for she owned them.

  She was also, Rourke saw, slowly unraveling the knot of men and separating them from Cornelius Dupre. Rourke took a couple of slow and quiet steps closer to the boy.

  “What Susannah does,” said Remy Lelourie, “is she tells the men that she's going to auction off a dance with herself to the highest bidder…You, sir? Why don't you play the part of the auctioneer?” She linked arms briefly with the redneck with the jowls and pot and when she stepped away again, he went with her, mesmerized, and letting go of the boy Cornelius without an apparent thought.

  “And any money we make can go to Miss Mary Lou Trescher's mama. So why don't you”—and she held her hand out to the man with the dead eye—“start the bidding out at a nickel.”

  The man let go of Cornelius's other arm and took a couple of spastic steps toward Remy. He stuck out his head and twisted up his mouth and started stuttering so hard he was spitting.

  “Aw, jeez,” said the redneck. “You don't want him bidding anyway. He dances just like he talks.” He waved his arms in the air and hollered, “Hey, y'all. Who'll give me five cents for a dance with the beauteous Miss Remy Lelourie?”

  “Heck, I'll give you a dime,” came an old man's voice from the back.

  As soon as the two men had let go of Cornelius Dupre, the boy had whirled to run, but Rourke grabbed him by the arm and forced him down the street toward the patrol car. The two patrolmen followed, covering their backs.

  Rourke heard the redneck say, “Hey, wait a minute. What'll we do for music?” And the man with the baseball mitt answered him, “I got me a harmonica.”

  Cornelius twisted against the grip Rourke had on him, and Rourke gave him a little shake. “Don't you be giving me any more grief tonight, kid.”

  “Where you takin' me?”

  “To jail.” One of the patrolmen had run up ahead now and started up the car. Rourke opened the door to the back seat and thrust Cornelius inside. “Until we rid the world of the man who's killing those girls, jail is the safest place for you.”

  Cornelius flung himself against the far window and crossed his arms over his belly. “Hunh. Tell that to my brother.”

  Two squad cars peeled around the corner from St. Charles, sirens whimpering down to moans. The men, who'd been about to lynch a fifteen-year-old boy, were all laughing and whooping and clapping now in time to a harmonica wailing “Oh, Susannah!” Stars of their own scenario. The moment when it could have turned ugly had already come and then gone when Remy Lelourie, with impeccable timing, had hit her mark and stolen the scene.

  Rourke asked the patrolmen to take their “material witness” and stow him out of sight in the Mid-City Precinct.

  He shut the door, and the squad car pulled out into the street. Cornelius Dupre turned to stare back at him through the rear window, and Rourke had to laugh, because the boy sure didn't look grateful that the police had just saved his ass.

  When Floriane de Lassus Layton heard the wail of the police sirens from a block away on St. Charles, she felt a moment's panic that they were coming for her.

  It wasn't as if she'd committed any crime, unless you counted the love she'd made with another woman…Other women. But when guilt is so much a part of you that you're breathing it in and out through the pores of your skin, then you have long ago stopped needing a reason for your fear.

  The sirens faded away, though, after a few minutes and she smiled at her own foolishness. Yet as she walked around the parlor, plumping pillows, straightening a book here, a painting there, she imagined she could still feel her heart thudding against her rib bones.

  When the grandfather clock struck the hour, she started so violently she almost knocked over the milk glass vase of American Beauty roses that she'd been rearranging on the mantel. Then, even though she was looking right at the face of the clock and could see the time, she counted the deep bongs, counted them out loud like a ritual. He'd told her that he'd be coming home from his club by nine o'clock, but he could be late. He often was.

  Still, when he came through the door, he would want his bourbon
poured and the fire going in the grate because the night was cool.

  She knew better than to disappoint him.

  She sat on the green and cream silk sofa to wait for him, arranged herself there like a proper young lady expecting a gentleman caller. She waited while the grandfather clock bonged ten times, then eleven, then twelve. And when he finally came, his bourbon wasn't poured and the fire had died in the grate, and she sat as if the waiting had petrified her, turned her into stone.

  Hating his confidence, fearing it, she watched her husband walk to the bourbon decanter and pour his own drink.

  He turned to her, smiling, and lifted his glass in a toast. “Why, Flo, darling. What a sweet and loving wife you are. You've waited up for me.”

  “I'm not, Bertie,” she said.

  His smile tightened a little. “Not what?”

  “A loving wife.”

  His mouth relaxed again, but his eyes had a hard sheen on them. “I know, darling. That much has been obvious for quite some time.”

  She'd been remembering things, while sitting on the sofa and waiting for him to come. Remembering the time she'd first seen him running across a lawn with a tennis racket in his hand. The sky had been a hard, sun-washed blue behind his smiling face and a salt breeze had riffled through his bright hair, and it seemed that since he was everything she was supposed to want, she had wanted him.

  And she had remembered, too, going back to that same house only a month after they'd been married, walking across that lawn beneath another sun-washed blue sky, and wondering already to herself how they could be walking arm and arm, and still not be touching.

  “Bertie, do you know what the word obscene means?”

  He'd gone to the window, drink in his hand, to look out at a night dark and full of rain. When she'd spoken, after such a length of silence, he cast a look at her over his shoulder, then turned back to the window again. “You are behaving strangely tonight.”

  “I looked it up in the dictionary this afternoon so that I would be sure to get it right. It means disgusting to the senses, because of some filthy, grotesque, or unnatural quality. You are obscene, Bertie. You revolt me.”