Wages of Sin

by Penelope Williamson

  She'd been rehearsing that little speech all day, and it had sounded that way, stilted, overexposed. Still, she was proud of it. It was the second bravest thing she'd ever done in her life.

  She hadn't quite been brave enough to say it to his face, though, and she saw his back go rigid before he turned to look at her. His face wore his slightly cruel, smiling mask. What Albert Payne Layton really felt, he had always kept inside, showing nothing to anyone except polished manners or a balled-up fist.

  “Flo, darling. I do believe you have finally gone and lost your mind,” he said, and only by the careful way he pronounced the words did she know that he was starting to boil inside.

  Good, she thought. She wanted him boiling.

  “You murdered Father Pat,” she said.

  His mouth fell open a little and then he laughed.

  “You nailed him to a piece of wood and watched him die.”

  She watched her husband cross the room from the window back to the whiskey decanter and she saw his guilt in his step and the set of his shoulder, in the stiff way he held his head. She heard his guilt in his calculated and carefully articulated words.

  “I don't know whether I should feel astonished that you would think so,” he said, “or complimented.”

  “You were stealing money from the Church and Father Pat found out about it and so you killed him.”

  He was staring down at the bourbon in his glass, but she saw the flash of fear cross his face and she relished it. He waited just a little too long before he raised his head and met her eyes and laughed again, shaking his head. “Flo, Flo, Flo…”

  He went to the cherry wood secretary where they kept the telephone. He hesitated a moment when he saw the Catholic Charities' green leather accounts book that she had taken from his desk and so carefully placed there, but then he lifted the phone's handset and held it out to her.

  “Here, dear wife. Call up the police and tell them you've solved the case. Only, why don't we just tell them all our dirty secrets while we're about it, huh? Mine…and yours.”

  Once when she was a young girl, a friend had taken her for a sail on the lake and a terrible squall had come up. The little sailboat had groaned like a thing in agony as it bucked and climbed the waves. And as the rain lashed the deck and the wind howled and shrieked through the rigging, she, Floriane de Lassus, had believed that she was looking death in the face and as scared as she'd been in that moment, she had also been laughing with an odd and savage excitement.

  She hadn't experienced that feeling again in her life, until now.

  “What secrets of mine are you talking about, Bertie?” she said, pushing him hard now, baiting him. “Is it the one where I arise from my lover's bed flush with pleasure, wet between the legs and with my nipples still tingling. If that's your secret, darling, then you're too late because Lieutenant Rourke already knows.”

  There they are, she thought, and she felt nearly faint now with fear and that sick excitement. The first fissures in the crust covering the boiling geyser that lived inside Albert Payne Layton. His mouth turned white at the corners and a blood vessel throbbed in his temple. His freckles had darkened to the color of dried blood.

  “The whole world's going to know the truth about me soon,” she said. “About us, Bertie. Do you even need to imagine what they'll be saying in your clubs, on the exchange and the golf course, about a man who is such a poor lover that his wife turned to other women for satisfaction?”

  He set his bourbon glass carefully down on the secretary, next to the Charities' accounts book. “This time,” he said, coming at her, “this time I am going to make you sorry, bitch, that you were ever born.”

  She shrank back onto the sofa and brought her arms up to her chest like a shield, as she had learned to do over the years. He wouldn't hit her face, he never hit her face. And it seemed that she was counting the steps it took him to get to her, one, two, three, four, counting until the whole world and her place in it was reduced to one last second.

  A second is a long time. In a second you have time to regret the lies you've lived and the truths you've told. A second is long enough to see your daughter standing in the doorway and to wish it didn't have to be this way. In a second you can watch Bertie cock his fist and send it flying—for the first time in eighteen years of marriage—toward your face.

  And in a second you, Floriane de Lassus Layton, can pull out the Colt revolver that you have hidden behind the pillow on the sofa, the one that your grandfather on your mama's side took with him when he marched off to fight in the War of Southern Independence.

  In a second you can pull your grandfather's gun out from behind the pillow and shoot your husband in the heart.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Lieutenant Daman Rourke went first to the man lying sprawled on the rose and green Oriental carpet with a bullet hole in his chest. He pressed his fingers to the man's throat, where the pulse would be if there was one, but the flesh was already cooling.

  He went next to the girl. She was folded up against the wall in a corner between a secretary and a potted palm, her arms wrapped around her chest, her thin batiste nightgown pulled down tight over her bent legs to cover her toes. There was, he saw, a smear of blood on the hem.

  Rourke had just been falling into the unconsciousness of sheer exhaustion when the telephone jarred him awake. His head was so thick with sleep he felt drunk with it, and it took him a while to make sense of Della Layton's hysterical sobbing that Mama had shot Daddy. She was beyond that hysteria now, though; her body had shut down into shock.

  He picked her up and carried her out into the hall, set her down on a padded bench, found a raccoon fur coat hanging in a closet and wrapped her up in it.

  He went back into the parlor and covered the body with a throw he found laid over the back of a chair. And only then did he go to the woman sitting on the green and cream silk sofa that was splattered now with tiny droplets of her husband's blood.

  He crouched in front of her. “Mrs. Layton.”

  “He was going to kill me this time. I saw it in his eyes.”

  Rourke thought that was probably true. Only for the sake of the trial that was coming, he wished that she had waited to fire the gun until after her man had hit her.

  She still held the gun in her hand. He covered her hand with his own and tried to take it carefully away from her. “Let go now,” he said softly. “You'll be all right, but you're going to have to let go of the gun.”

  Her rigid fingers relaxed. He kept hold of her hand while he took the weapon away from her with his other hand and slipped it into his coat pocket. “He laughed,” she said. “When I told him what he'd done, he didn't even bother to deny it. He laughed.”

  “Mrs. Layton. Flo…listen to me.” He gave her hand a little squeeze. “You have the right not to say anything that may incriminate you. I don't want you to tell me anything more until I've taken you downtown, and you've called your lawyer and talked with him first.”

  She waved her free hand as if she were brushing away a bothersome mosquito. “No, no. I've shot my husband dead and now I must pay for it. Deeds have consequences, as my mama, may God bless her soul, was fond of saying.”

  She straightened her spine, pulling herself up tall and lifting her head. She looked dressed for tea at the Roosevelt Hotel in a soft gray wool suit and pearls. He didn't see any blood on the suit, but there were tiny droplets of it on the peaches-and-cream skin of her face.

  “Family is everything,” she was saying. “My mama always used to tell me, ‘Flo, la famille is what matters most in this life. You have obligations and to disgrace yourself is to disgrace la famille.’”

  Rourke pushed himself to his feet and looked around for the telephone. He found it on the secretary, along with the Catholic Charities' accounts book. He called the precinct and asked for a patrol car, an ambulance, and the coroner.

  He picked up the accounts book and ran his hands over the expensive green leather, but he didn't open it. He lo
oked up and caught Floriane Layton watching him, caught an expression on her face he didn't trust. Under any other circumstances he would have thought it was suppressed exultation.

  “I'm almost as smart as you are, Lieutenant,” she said, and this time he was sure he heard the exultation in her voice. “When you asked about the accounts book, it took me only moments to figure out what Bertie had been doing, and to guess that Father Pat had somehow found out about it.”

  He came back to her, where she sat on the green and cream silk sofa splattered with her husband's blood.

  “But did he kill him for it, Flo?” Rourke asked putting a little steel into his own voice. “Did your husband really confess to you that he'd killed Father Pat?”

  “He laughed,” she said. Her face had sharpened, wary now. “You need to know him, to know what he was like. He'd been caught in an act of embezzlement, and exposure would have ruined his perfect, New Orleans society life. If you knew him at all, then you would know that he would do anything to prevent that from happening.”

  “And that's all there was to it?”

  She was looking up at him, but he didn't think she was seeing him. She was deep in that place where lived the Flo Layton who could point a gun at her husband's heart and pull the trigger.

  “Does the why of it really matter anyway, Lieutenant? Father Pat became my salvation and for that reason alone, Bertie would have felt he had to crucify…him.”

  It was possible that he'd imagined it, but Rourke didn't think so. That little instant's hesitation when the mind filters out the truth while going for the lie.

  Floriane de Lassus Layton had been about to call her priest her.

  Father Frank Ghilotti opened the door to Rourke's knock even though it was four o'clock in the morning. The pastor was already dressed in slacks and sweater, and he didn't comment on the ungodly hour as he led Rourke into the rectory's comfortable parlor, where a fire burned against the chilly damp.

  An open breviary lay on the seat of a brown leather winged chair, and a half-empty glass of milk sat on a scalloped-edged maple table nearby. Father Ghilotti picked up the breviary and sat down. He marked his place in his reading with a cigarette wrapper, and then lay the breviary down on the maple table.

  Rourke had brought the Catholic Charities' accounts book with him, and he laid it down on the table so that it and the breviary were side by side. He took a seat in a matching brown leather wing-backed chair on the other side of the fire. He hadn't realized he was cold until he felt the fire's heat.

  A piece of coal hissed in the grate, and a clock ticked on the mantel. An orange cat jumped on the priest's lap and began purring loudly beneath his kneading fingers. Rourke had decided to let the silence stretch until Father Ghilotti chose to break it.

  “Has another priest been crucified?” the other man finally said.

  “Why would you think that?”

  Lamplight flashed off the lenses of his eyeglasses as he leaned his head back and smiled. “I don't know. Maybe because you've come here at four in the morning, and presumably it was to see me, since you haven't asked after your brother. Who is, by the way, upstairs and sound asleep in bed. Unless he snuck out through the window in the middle of last night when I wasn't looking.”

  “It's been a bad night,” Rourke said. “A colored boy was almost lynched from a lamppost outside a Felicity Street smoke joint. And now I've just come from putting Mrs. Floriane de Lassus Layton in jail for shooting her husband point-blank in the chest.”

  Father Ghilotti sat in stunned silence a moment, and then his own chest collapsed in upon itself with a soft ahhh. He closed his eyes, praying, and hiding maybe any thoughts that might be revealed in them.

  Rourke waited him out, and when the priest opened his eyes again, Rourke said, “She'll probably end up doing some jail time.”

  “God,” Father Ghilotti said on a sharp expulsion of breath. “I can't help thinking about their poor kid. We all knew that marriage was in trouble, despite appearances, but there seemed to be so little we could do. There was a devil in Albert Payne Layton…I don't suppose you brought the accounts book here to save me the trouble of fetching it?”

  Rourke had to laugh. “No. In fact, I'm going to have to take it with me when I leave. It's evidence.”

  A small smile pulled at the corners of the priest's mouth. He turned his head and looked out the parlor's bay window, at a new day untouched yet by the sun. “You probably aren't going to believe this,” he said, “but on the morning of my ordination, when I lay prostrate before the altar and received the Holy Spirit, I truly believed that I would spend my life serving the poor, the elderly, the abandoned, the unloved. That I would help lead people back to the loving God and bring hope to the hopeless. Most of the time I still believe I can do those things.”

  He pulled his gaze away from the window and looked at the fire now, and Rourke saw that the skin around his eyes and nostrils was white. “Father Delaney had been going senile for a long time before I took over here as pastor. He'd run the parish into a couple hundred thousand dollars' worth of debt. The archbishop sent me to Our Lady of the Holy Rosary expecting a miracle, and so I tried to produce one.”

  “By playing the stock market with the Charities' money,” Rourke said. “And with Albert Payne Layton as your broker and partner in crime.”

  Father Ghilotti made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a groan. “We did pretty well at first, but then a couple of months ago we made some bad buys on margin. When those stocks slumped, we had to put up more margin, and we could only do that by selling off our other shares. It was like flushing a toilet and watching it all go down the drain…”

  He paused, buying himself some time by removing his eyeglasses and polishing them with the linen handkerchief he took out of his pocket. The movement disturbed the cat, who jumped from his lap and fled the room.

  “I'd just about decided to cut my losses and get out,” he went on, hooking the glasses back over his ears, “when Father Pat found my sin out, so to speak, and so we traded a body for a body.”

  Rourke didn't ask what the bodies were, since he already knew: Father Pat's secret club for Father Ghilotti's little bit of embezzlement. That a couple of Fathers had been up to that kind of dealing didn't surprise him either. In the Irish Channel some of the wildest boys he knew had grown up to be priests.

  “Also, I think—” Father Ghilotti had to stop and clear his throat. “I think we were seeking absolution from each other.”

  “In my experience, Father,” Rourke said, standing up because he was done now, “when one sinner turns to another, it isn't forgiveness he wants, so much as companionship in guilt.”

  “Yeah,” the priest said, with a sudden, grim smile. “But in the Catholic Church, guilt and forgiveness are a married couple, joined together until death do them part.”

  He pushed slowly to his feet. He picked up the accounts book from off the maple table and handed it to Rourke, and then the way he stood there, stiff, with his head up and his arms hanging down straight at his sides, he looked, to Rourke's amusement, like he was bravely facing a firing squad.

  “What will happen now?” he said.

  “Well, if you weren't pastor of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, you'd probably pull a ten-year jolt for what you did. As it is—”

  “The archbishop—”

  “Will protect your ass.”

  “Will protect my ass.”

  They laughed together, and it loosened up some the sour knot of disappointment in Rourke's gut. Despite everything, he still liked the man.

  “I'll be given a scold,” Father Ghilotti said, “and maybe a demotion and transfer.” He flashed another sudden smile, but this one only underscored the toughness in his eyes. “Or maybe not—I know where too many of His Grace's bodies are buried, too. I still intend to be archbishop myself someday.”

  The smile Rourke gave back at him had an edge in it as well. “I wouldn't bet against you.”

  Father Ghilott
i led the way into the hall. Rain was spitting against the fan light above the door. From the direction of the kitchen, they could hear a plaintive meow. “He wants milk,” the priest said, and then, “You haven't asked me if I killed him. Killed Father Pat.”

  “I asked you that early Saturday morning,” Rourke said. “You told me you didn't do it.”

  “Saturday morning. Jesus…” Father Ghilotti pinched his nose and rubbed his forehead. “What day is it today? Tuesday? It's hard to believe it's only been three days.” He dropped his hand, uncovering his face, and met Rourke's eyes. “What I told you then was the truth. That hasn't changed.”

  Rourke believed him, as much as he believed anybody.

  At the front door Father Ghilotti stopped and turned around, and said to Rourke, “It wasn't about greed, you know. I did it for Holy Rosary. Although I will admit to the sin of ambition.”

  “And you got high off of playing the game.”

  “You know the feeling.”

  “Yeah, but the difference between you and me is I don't risk what isn't mine.”

  It had been a low blow, and Rourke saw that it had hurt. The priest's mouth opened on a denial or an explanation, but then he shut it and turned back to the door.

  “Yesterday morning,” Rourke said, “you tried to cover your ass by returning what you'd taken from the Charities' accounts. Where did that money come from?”

  Father Ghilotti's back jerked as if he'd been punched, but he said, “You know where. From my father, of course. It seems I am his son after all.” He reached for the doorknob, but he still didn't open it. “Your brother told me once, Detective, that you like to think of yourself as so cynical and tough, but what you really are is the most idealistic man he's ever known.”

  Rourke shook his head, not wanting to believe it, because in a bit of irony that wasn't entirely lost on him, he thought it made him seem weak. “Paulie doesn't know me. He left home to enter the seminary when I was thirteen, and we've maybe seen each other only two or three times a year since then.”