“Still, we've been figuring this guy is able to approach these girls because they know him. So it's raining and he comes along and offers them a ride, they get in his car, and that's it—he's got them.”
He was picturing a girl walking down the street, it's raining now so she picks up the pace a little, she's got somewhere she needs to be, and then a car pulls up to the curb alongside her, and the guy calls out her name, and she slows down now, because this guy, he knows her, and she looks over at him and she sees…
“Sweet Jesus. Remy, what you just said about Mercedes, how she'd just gotten a new bob…”
He rifled through the stuff on the table until he found what he was looking for: the framed photograph of her daughter that Ethel Bloom had given him the evening of Titus Dupre's execution. Rourke wasn't sure exactly what finger waves were, but they sounded like what Mercedes Bloom had on her head in this picture.
So on the day she'd disappeared Mercedes Bloom had changed herself, the old-fashioned, odd “jane,” with the dark knowledge in her eyes had bobbed away her old-fashioned finger waves. Mercedes Bloom, the first girl the killer had chosen, and the one they'd never found.
Remy had gotten up and come to look at the photograph over his shoulder. “She looks sad,” she said. “Her eyes are like what you see on those marble angels they put on top of the tombs in the St. Louis Cemeteries.”
The eyes, Rourke thought, of a girl who knows too young all about s-e-x and le petit mort.
Then he saw it, like a flash lamp exploding in his head. He saw the killer, saw all that the killer had done, saw all of it. And why.
“Mercy,” Rourke said aloud.
He jumped to his feet and went out into the hall, to the hook where he'd hung his suit coat when he'd first come home. He started to turn around, to go back to Remy in the dining room, but she had followed him into the hall.
“When I say ‘mercy’ what do you think of?” he said.
“That you're calling on God, or whoever, to spare you any more suffering.”
“Right, that's what I thought, too. It was what we all thought Father Pat was saying right before he died.” Rourke handed her the postcard that up until a couple of hours ago had been tucked into the mirror of Gillian Daly's dressing table. “But now look at this and tell me what you see.”
“A teddy bear.”
“No, I mean on the back. Look at the signatures on the back. She must have gone by a nickname, sometimes, with her closest friends. I heard Della Layton use it just this evenin'.”
Remy turned the postcard over and looked, and he saw the flash lamp go off in her head as she, too, made the leap. “Oh, God…”
Rourke went back into the dining room and rummaged through the carton that had all the papers on the crucifixion killing, because he had, on a whim, thank God, thank God, tossed it in there.
He dug out Father Pat's notebook and turned to the end page where the priest had written the telephone number that he was now cursing himself for not tracking down sooner. And all the while the blood was humming through him and he was thinking, I've got you, you sadistic, murdering, cocksucking bastard. I've got you.
He went into the parlor where Katie and Mrs. O. were now playing what looked like a cutthroat game of poker with real pennies, and where the telephone sat on a small ormolu-mounted desk.
He rang up the operator, gave her the number, and asked her to find out what city the exchange belonged to and to get the address of the establishment. Then he and Remy went over it all again while they waited for the operator to call back, looking for the flaws in their theory and all the while their ears were straining for the telephone's bell box to ring, so that when it did finally jangle, they both jumped.
“It's a boardinghouse in Galveston, Texas,” he said to Remy, who was hovering by his side, grabbing a piece of paper to write the address on.
He had the operator then connect him to the squad room and got his captain on the phone. He went through the whole thing with him now, hoping it didn't sound as far-fetched and flimsy to Malone as it was beginning to sound to him.
“I'm gonna fly to Galveston now,” he said, “and make sure this isn't just something I'm pulling outta my ass out of desperation. We can't know anything for a certainty until I get there, but in the meantime the Daly girl could still be alive, so we need to pick this murdering prick up now and start sweating him hard—if we break him, we just might get to her in time. Also, make sure whoever goes out to his house, that they check the garage.”
They spent a few more precious minutes ironing out logistics, before Rourke hung up and turned to Remy, who was looking tired now. “That poor girl,” she said.
He hooked his arm around her waist and pulled her to him, kissing her forehead. “Listen, don't go out again today, okay? Stay here with Katie and Mrs. O. I need to know all my guys are safe.”
She snuggled into him, ducking her head so that it fit into the crook of his neck. “You be safe, too.”
Rourke changed into his flying clothes: the whipcord britches, knee-high boots, and brown leather jacket that would keep him somewhat warm five thousand feet up in the open cockpit of a biplane made of wood and wire and fabric.
Then he jumped on his motorcycle and drove it at a tearing speed out of town and down the St. Bernard Highway, to a small airfield that had been converted from an old dairy barn.
When Remy Lelourie had left him the first time, the summer he was nineteen, Rourke had—in the time-honored tradition of brokenhearted men everywhere—gone off to war to show her good. In his case it was the Great War, and he had joined a French flying squadron of American volunteers, the Lafayette Escadrille, where he'd learned how to pilot a SPAD mounted with a pair of machine guns that fired eight hundred rounds a minute, and then he'd learned how to hunt his enemy down with it and shoot him out of the sky.
He'd loved the flying too much to give it up after the war, and so when one of his bets at the track had paid off big, he'd bought a surplus SPAD—without the machine guns.
The rain had stopped and a weak sun was trying to push through the clouds by the time Rourke turned off the highway, onto the track that cut through a pasture toward the dairy barn. He checked the sock that hung from a pole at the end of the field and saw that the wind was picking up.
He rolled the SPAD out of the hangar, which had once housed milking cows. He had plenty of daylight left to get there, but he'd be coming back in the dark, and so he made himself take the time to do an extra careful preflight check, even though he was so jazzed he could have flown to Galveston without the plane.
As he ran his hands over the struts and tested the tension of the flying wires, he was thinking that it was a good thing he'd done an overhaul of the engine only a couple of weekends ago: replacing a cracked cylinder, cleaning valves and piston rings that were starting to stick a bit, tightening bolts, and mending any tiny rents that he'd found in the fabric.
He finished the preflight check, topped off the fuel tank, and five minutes later he was airborne. He banked high on the turn and headed west, following the soft shine of the struggling sun on the water of the Bayou Lafourche.
The faltering and sinking sun was etching the Gulf's rolling breakers silver and turning Galveston's sandy beaches a rosy orange when he set the SPAD down at a barnstormers' airfield on the north end of town. He borrowed an old jalopy from the owner of the field and asked directions on how to get to the address the telephone operator had given him.
He found the boardinghouse—an aging three-story Victorian fronted by a deep wooden porch—with little trouble and good timing, for a girl in the black skirt and white blouse of a grocerteria clerk was walking down the sidewalk from the streetcar stop, coming his way. He waited until she was abreast of him, and then he got out of the jalopy and stepped into her path.
“Evenin', Miss Mercy Bloom.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Gillian Daly lay naked in the dark with the rats.
She would go away for a whi
le, off to a soft white nothingness, where she was alone and nothing could hurt her, and she would stay there for as long as she could. She would stay there until something jerked her back: a cramp, thirst, hunger, a bite of pain, the click of rat claws on brick. A bad memory.
Once, she had come back to the sounds of screaming and she thought there was another girl in here with her, being hurt along with her, and then she realized the screams were hers and they were coming from inside her head, because she couldn't scream out loud, not with the rag stuffed in her mouth. She could barely breathe with it there, and so she lay in the dark, her lungs straining for air and her ears straining, straining, listening for the little squeak the bay doors made in the darkness when they slid open on their tracks, and for the crunch of shoes on the oiled gravel floor.
She'd gotten scared, standing under the clock, when too much time passed and Aunt Judy hadn't come. It had started to rain harder and there was less traffic on the sidewalk. A streetcar had rattled by, but she was afraid to get on it, to sit among a bunch of strangers, any one of whom could be…But her mind had shied away from that thought, and just then the taxicab had pulled up to the curb, and Mercy Bloom's daddy had rolled down the window and called out her name, telling her that he'd give her a ride home, that it wasn't safe for her to be standing there alone, not even under the clock at D. H. Holmes.
It had hurt really bad when he'd raped her, and when she'd fought him he'd hit her, slapping her dizzy. Her face felt raw and swollen, and she thought she might be bleeding down there, between her legs. As bad as that was, though, it wasn't the worst. The worst was knowing that he would be back, and that he would rape her some more and then he would kill her.
Daddy, she screamed behind the gag. Tears burned her eyes, and she squeezed them shut, choking down sobs. Daddy, save me from this. Please, Daddy, I'll be good, Daddy, please, please, only you got to come get me now. Please come get me now, Daddy, please…
Oh, God. She opened her eyes, blinking, and then she realized that it must be growing darker outside, because she couldn't see the motes of spangled dust floating through the air anymore, or the open rafters of the ceiling. Only a faint glow was coming through the row of frosted windows high on the wall.
She tried to move just a little and, oh God, it hurt, it hurt so bad.
He'd chained her with her arms stretched above her head to a radiator, that was in turn fastened to a brick wall. The chain was black iron and heavy, the links thick, and he'd wrapped it around her left wrist and then her right wrist, and then he'd pulled the chain taut and padlocked it to the clawed feet of the radiator. The chain had bruised her flesh so badly, it looked pulpy. Like rotting fruit.
She tilted her head back and twisted onto her shoulder, whimpering behind the gag, trying to get a better look at the chain. She tried pulling hard against it with her arms, but it was a hopeless thought that she could break any one of those big links.
She'd made a lot of noise, though, clattering and banging the iron chain against the iron radiator, and she felt a sudden, sweet surge of hope that maybe somebody had heard. So she rattled and banged some more, until it hurt too much to bear and she fell back exhausted.
At least the noise had scared the rats away.
She didn't know this place, where she was. When it was lighter and she had been able to see better, she thought it looked like an old garage. She'd seen a pile of rotting tires in one corner and a couple of crumpled bumpers leaning against the wall, stacks of empty oil cans, a funnel, greasy rags. Most of the space was taken up with one of those hydraulic lifts used for working under cars. And there'd been tools spilling out of a box on a nearby workbench.
Tools…
She'd seen a wrench lying on the floor, close to the lift.
She looked for it again, peering into the enveloping darkness. The wrench was black iron like the chain, and rusted at the grip, but its jaws looked big and strong. Maybe strong enough to twist it like a lever around the chain and pry open one of the links. Maybe she could use the wrench to break the chain, if only she could reach it.
Gillian Daly shifted her battered and bleeding body over bit by bit, her chest bucking as she struggled to breathe, her mouth open around the gag in a scream, shifted until the chain was stretched out its full length, straining, stretching, reaching with her fingers as far as they would go, reaching with her fingers…
And they were still about four inches too short.
Remy Lelourie poured some rose oil into the flowing water and then turned off the taps. She slipped out of a red silk kimono and stepped into the tub, gingerly, for she'd made the bath extra hot.
Too hot, she thought as she sucked in her breath. She went on inching down into the water slowly, though, and by the time she was lying down flat with her neck resting on the back rim of the tub she was used to it.
She could hear Mrs. O'Reilly downstairs in the kitchen, whipping egg whites in a metal bowl. The rain had finally let up, and through a crack in the window that she'd made to let out the steam, she could hear rainwater dripping off the eaves and the banana trees, and Katie out in the courtyard, jumping rope. The rope slapping on the wet stones and Katie chanting, “I had a little puppy. His name was Tiny Tim…”
The homey sounds and the hot, perfumed water ought to be soothing her frayed and knotted nerves, but she kept thinking about that poor girl, chained up in a garage somewhere, suffering God knew what, and then when her mind would leap away from that horror, it would go right to Day. For no really good reason, she was scared for him.
She'd watched him fly plenty of stunts in the SPAD before. Loop the loops, barrel rolls, chandelles, tailspins, and one particularly spectacular and daredevil maneuver called the Immelmann turn. So a little ol' two-hour jaunt along the Gulf Coast should be nothing, but still she was scared for him. And it wasn't as if anything bad could happen to him in Galveston. Mercedes Bloom couldn't do anything to him but hurt him with words. Otis Bloom was back here in New Orleans and he didn't even know they were on to him. He might even, she hoped, be locked up tight in the Parish Prison by now.
She told herself all that, but it wasn't stopping this feeling she kept getting. It was like waking up from a deep sleep in the middle of the night, to think you've just heard the menacing footstep of someone creeping through your house.
Remy shuddered. She was suddenly feeling vulnerable, lying naked in a tub of water. She'd stood up, splashing, and reached out for the towel she'd laid on a nearby stool, when her eyes caught a flash of movement in the mirror above the sink.
She froze, staring at her own wide eyes staring back at herself, and staring behind her, where the door was half opened into the bedroom, showing just the end of the big tester bed. She held her breath, listening, and heard something—a soft whish, like cloth brushing against cloth, and a creak of the old cypress floorboards.
And then she saw him in the mirror…a hulking shadow rising up out of the bed.
Remy Lelourie had never thought of herself as the screaming type, but this time she opened her mouth wide and hit a high note worthy of an opera diva.
And the intruder ran.
He pounded out the bedroom and down the hall and front stairs, banging through the front door, while Mrs. O'Reilly and Katie came running up the back stairs to see why she had screamed. Remy snatched her kimono off the hook on the back of the bathroom door and threw it on before running out into the bedroom, slipping a little on the wet tile floor, and then screaming again, maybe just a little, when she saw what he'd written on the wall over the bed. In blood.
Not his usual message this time, though; something different, something worse:
Anytime. Anywhere.
Daman Rourke listened while Mercedes Bloom talked, and what she didn't or couldn't tell him, he filled in for himself with intuition, supposition, and his years of seeing so much of the dark and ugly side of life.
The girl had been sleeping in her daddy's bed since she was eleven. Her mama had known about it; her mama, in
fact, had moved out of her marriage bed and into her daughter's old room and left Mercy to her daddy's mercy.
Otis Bloom knew what he was doing was a sin, and so once a year, on Good Friday, he would go to a confessional and cleanse his soul of it. He went to different priests each time, though, different churches and once even to a different town.
Some of the priests had been more disturbed by the deeds he spoke of in the confessional box than others, but they'd all, once he had shown them how sorry he was, been willing to perform the sacrament of absolution and let go of it. They would tell him, though, how it wasn't enough to repent of what had gone on with his daughter, he had to resolve never to go near the sin again. He had to do penance, and when he was confronted in the future with temptation he had to pray to Christ Jesus for the strength to resist.
And perhaps in that moment in the confessional box, when the priest raised his hand for the absolution and, as God's emissary on earth, washed his soul clean, Otis Bloom might truly have believed he would change. For Otis Bloom, repenting had never been hard, and he needed his absolution. What he didn't want to do, in his heart of hearts, was to go and sin no more.
Mercedes's father had made her go with him to those Good Friday confessions, he'd sent her into the box right after him, because as he had explained to her, the sin they'd made was as much hers as his. It took two to fuck, he said. Two to experience le petit mort.
And then on this last Good Friday, out of carelessness maybe, or a growing arrogance, Otis Bloom had chosen for the first time to make their confession close to home, at Holy Rosary. But Father Pat, Rourke thought, had been in the box that day, and she was one priest who had not let go of it.
Rourke had been leaning against the rail on the boardinghouse porch while he listened to the horror that had been the life of Mercedes Bloom and watched more rain clouds build thick and black over the Gulf water.
Wages of Sin Page 36
