Wages of Sin (10 page)

Some of the Klan boys were engaging in ugly name calling with a woman sporting a white Humanitarian Cult sash across her chest. She was trying to distribute her abolition of capital punishment literature, and while no one was willing to take her leaflets, she was giving back with a smart mouth as good as she got.

Rourke had pushed his way through the crowd to the barricades, when he saw someone out of the corner of his eye—a tall, gangly Negro boy with long matted locks of hair, who was dressed in the top hat and black frock coat of the chimney sweep. Cornelius Dupre, Titus's younger brother.

Forty percent of the city had colored skin, but Cornelius Dupre seemed to be the only one of them in this crowd, and Rourke didn't think he'd come for an up-close look at the electric chair that was going to kill his brother. Their gazes connected, Rourke's and the boy's, and the look Cornelius Dupre gave him was flat and hard with hate.

Rourke was about to go have a word with him, but just then the Humanitarian Cult woman made the mistake of pulling one of the lynching posters off a sawhorse, and the buck-toothed man in the yellow shirt and purple suspenders turned on her with a growl. One of the foot cops grabbed the man's arm, but he threw the cop off him. The cop staggered backward into Rourke, and he would have fallen on his butt if Rourke hadn't caught him.

“Hit him with your stick,” Rourke said, pushing the cop back onto his feet.

The young cop looked around, his eyes bewildered and scared. “What?”

By now the woman had dropped the poster, but the buck-toothed man still came at her. Rourke could feel the raw energy of the crowd around them, mostly Klan men, ratcheting up and turning ugly. The buck-toothed man snatched the woman's leaflets out of her hands and began to rip them up. Spit sprayed from his mouth as he screamed at her, something unintelligible except for the words “nigger-loving bitch.” The woman spat back, a big globule that landed smack in the man's eye, as she tried to wrestle her leaflets away from him. The man roared, dropped the leaflets in the gutter, and cocked his fist.

Before he could let fly with a punch to the woman's face, Rourke had taken the cop's nightstick out of his belt and clipped the buck-toothed man behind the ear, stunning him just hard enough to send him to his knees.

“You get up,” Rourke said, “and I'll hit you again. Only this time you won't be seeing straight for a week.”

One of the Klan men took a threatening step toward Rourke, met the promise of violence in his eyes, thought better of it, and turned away. Rourke stared down the other Klan men until their gazes dropped and they began to shuffle away from the woman, who was on her hands and knees in the street calmly gathering up what was left of her anti-capital punishment leaflets.

Rourke handed the stick back to the foot cop. “Anybody causes any more trouble, you arrest his ass for assault, inciting a riot, resisting arrest, and anything else you can think of.”

The young cop's eyes widened even more and he wiped his mouth with a shaking hand before he took back his stick. Rourke looked around for Cornelius Dupre, but the boy was gone.

As Rourke passed between the sawhorse barricades and climbed the shallow steps of the Courts Building, he looked up and saw that Fiorello Prankowski waited for him at the door, wearing his long-suffering look.

“Man,” Fio said. “It's gonna be a long, ugly day.”

In the squad room Detective Nate Carroll was regaling his fellow cops with a description of his own exciting night.

“Now I'm looking at this guy and he's sitting at the kitchen table with a knife stuck in his head the size of an elephant's dick, and I hear a noise behind me. So I turn around and there's the dead guy's wife and she's got a very big fucking ax in her hands and she's got murder in her eyes…”

He paused, letting his tale dangle and waiting for a straight man to feed him a line.

The desk sergeant, grinning around the tobacco chaw he had stuffed in his cheek, obliged. “So you sweet-talked her into putting down the ax, and now the mayor's gonna give you a medal.”

Nate Carroll's cherub face was set serious and his bright red curls bounced as he shook his head. “Hell, no. I got my ass outta there fast and called the cops.”

The desk sergeant shot a stream of brown spittle into the coffee can next to his desk before he laughed. He saw Detectives Rourke and Prankowski and he stopped them on the way to their desks. “The Ghoul wants to see y'all before he does the cut on your crucifixion killing. He's got a bee up his ass about it, too. Been calling up here every five minutes.”

The stench of the coroner's laboratory hit Rourke in the face like a slap, making his eyes water and his nose burn. The Ghoul stood in floating layers of cigarette smoke, pinning the photographs of the crime scene to a large corkboard that nearly covered one of the puke-yellow walls.

“Ah, yes, Detectives,” he said as the two cops entered through an iron-banded door that could have come from a dungeon. “Thank you for coming.” He waved his hand at a steel dissecting table upon which lay the remains of Father Patrick Walsh. A stained sheet covered the body, except for the head. “You must have another look at the
corpus delicti.
”

The two detectives followed the coroner as he made his lumbering way to the table. The tile floor had recently been hosed down, but no amount of soap and water, Rourke thought, would ever be able to scrub the blood and body fluid stains out of the grout.

The Ghoul reached for the sheet and began to pull it back, and Rourke shoved his hands deep in his pockets and set his jaw. He really hated looking at dead bodies, especially dead bodies on slabs in the morgue.

The sheet was off and Rourke looked down at the naked white corpse. “Sweet Jesus,” he said.

“Whoa, Nellie,” said Fio.

“Indeed,” said the Ghoul. “Your murdered priest is a woman.”

Chapter Eight

F
ather Patrick Walsh had been tall and raw-boned for a woman, with wide shoulders, narrow hips, and small breasts. She'd had a plain face, its features arranged in square, blunted angles. Her hair, the color of dead leaves, had been barbered close to her bony skull. Rourke could just about see how she'd gotten away with the deception, as long as she was careful never to allow anyone to see her naked.

“She had small breasts as you can see,” the Ghoul said, “but she'd also flattened them by wrapping an athletic bandage around her chest. She had on a man's undershirt and drawers beneath the priest's cassock. The drawers were undisturbed.”

“Then she wasn't raped before the killing?” Rourke said, following the coroner's train of thought.

“I've found no evidence of it, neither rape nor consensual sexual intercourse. She had been about to start her menstrual flow, though. She was a fully developed and normal woman. Physically, that is. With an apparently functional uterus and ovaries.”

Rourke looked at the juncture of her legs, at the sparse pubic hair covering what was definitely a vulva. Thin, shiny white lines veined her flat belly. “It looks like she might've had a baby at some time.”

“Ah, yes, indeed,” the Ghoul said. “Her perineum is scarred from a birth tearing, but it was not a recent occurrence.” The coroner always became engaged by his cases, but Rourke had never seen him so excited. His bulk rolled like sea swells as he rocked back and forth on his toes. “I would estimate her age to be early forties. If she had the child in her youth, he could be a grown man by now. Or grown woman, of course.”

Fio rubbed a big hand over his face. “Aw, jeez. This is bad. This is worse than a political hot potato, this is a friggin'…I don't know what. Bad.”

“Oh, I love this. I just abso-lootin'-tutely love this.”

Captain Dan Malone rested his elbows on his gray metal desk and thrust his fingers through his rumpled sandy-blond hair. He was an amicable man with Southern-gentleman good manners and a high tolerance for aggravation. None of his men had ever known him to use a foul word, not even in a squad room full of cops who couldn't make it to the end of a sentence without one.

Still, even the most easygoing of men had their limits and Malone looked as though he was about to reach his. “This crucifixion killing—a priest, heaven help us all—has already caused a real rumpus among the powers that must be obeyed. The wires between here and City Hall have been buzzing all morning, and now you tell me he is a she. Lord love a duck.”

He dropped his hands and raised his head to glare at his two detectives, as if they—by bringing him the news—were now responsible for all its repercussions.

Rourke slouched on his tailbone in the visitor's chair. Fio stood with his shoulders pressed into the door jamb, his arms crossed in front of his chest. They were inside Malone's office with the door shut and the Venetian blinds closed on the window that looked out on the squad room. The blinds were up, though, on the open window that overlooked the street below. They could hear hoots and jeers from the crowd and a lone voice with a bullhorn calling for a prayer.

“You sure y'all saw it right?” Malone said. Rourke and Fio both gave him a wounded look.

“Okay, okay. So who knows about it? Tell me the whole world doesn't know about it.”

“Just we three in here, boss. And the Ghoul,” Rourke said. “And maybe whoever killed him.”

“Her,” Fio said.

“He spent over half his life being Father Patrick Walsh,” Rourke said. “I would think that's how he'd want us to think of him.”

Fio tilted his head back and rubbed his hand over his face again. “This is nuts.”

Malone pointed a finger at Rourke since he was closest. “And that reminds me. The archbishop was all over my caboose earlier this morning because y'all went and rousted the good fathers of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary like they were goons. And the sun was barely even up.”

“That was Fio,” Rourke said. “I was nice.”

Fio gave him an up-yours look, then grinned.

Malone pulled a battered cigarette out of his shirt pocket so that he could think. He hadn't smoked in fifteen years but every day he hand-rolled himself a few fresh ones to play with. He claimed the smell of the tobacco stimulated his brain cells. “Tell me what y'all got so far,” he said.

Rourke told him about Carlos Kelly and Tony the Rat and his goon, Guido the Rat, and the shot and scream, and the bats, and Father Pat's dying plea for mercy. “We think the killer might've once had a job at the factory,” he said. “So I got someone working on getting the payroll lists.”

“And we already checked the incident reports for shots fired in the area,” Fio added. “It turns out a sister shot at her pimp. Shot his ear off. He was the one doing the screaming.”

Malone shook his head. “Ye gods. What was done to her…him. Father Pat. You'd think he'd've been hollering like a pig caught under a gate.”

“There was a gag near the body, but he wasn't wearing it when the kid found him,” Fio said. “We'll do a canvas. See if anyone else saw or heard anything.”

Malone rolled the cigarette back and forth on his palm, not meeting their eyes now. “You think one of his own did this? Another priest?”

Fio glanced at Rourke, waiting, and when Rourke said nothing, he answered, “Something dicey is sure enough going on in that parish. They spooked soon as we even showed up.” Fio shook his head, scratched the back of his neck. “I don't know…Could be they knew this Father Pat was a woman.” His gaze slid over to Rourke, then fell to the floor, a flush staining his broad cheekbones. “Could be they were, uh, you know…doing her.”

“There was nothing in his life at the rectory to give even a hint that he was female,” Rourke said, thinking out loud. He remembered the monastic room with its plain furniture and the lack of mirrors. And she'd been about to start her monthly, yet they'd found no drugstore pads. So what had she used? Rags, maybe, that she washed out every night in secret. “To live that kind of lie for twenty years—you'd have to be committed to it. Deep in your heart committed.”

Fio made an abrupt movement of impatience, pushing himself off the wall. “Whoever did the killing knew Father Pat was a woman—I'd bet a month's salary on that. It was all about either covering up or getting even.”

“Except there was no rape. And the killer crucified him without taking off his clothes.”

Fio rolled his eyes at the ceiling, beseeching the water-marked plaster for divine assistance. “There he goes with that again.”

Malone's gaze, which had been bouncing back and forth between his two detectives, settled on Rourke. “What?”

Rourke shrugged. “Just a feeling I keep getting…People trust priests with things they would never reveal to anyone else. They let priests into the deepest part of their lives. Father Pat wasn't just killed, he was tortured. Maybe someone let him in too deep.”

The crowd below erupted into a roar. Fio went to the window to have a look. “Ol' Sparky has arrived,” he said.

Malone threw his cigarette at the wall. “Oh, swell. That's all we need.” He bent over and yanked open the bottom drawer to his desk. He produced a brown bottle that didn't have a label and three battered tin cups. He filled the cups to the brim with the bootlegged bourbon and passed them around.

Even so early in the morning, the booze tasted good to Rourke. Too good. He made himself quit after one swallow.

Malone up-ended the bottle, topping off his own cup. “This pastor at the dead priest's—Sweet mercy, should we even be calling her a priest? Anyway, this pastor at her parish…”

“Father Frank Ghilotti.”

“Isn't his daddy the Ghilotti of the laundry rackets? Maybe the dicey feeling y'all were getting is that they're all mobbed up there at Holy Rosary. Stranger things've happened, I suppose. There's that scut going 'round that some outfit from the outside is going to try to muscle in on our rackets now that the Maguires are out of the picture. We could start to get all sorts of strange hits from that.”

“We'll round up all of the known goons and jump up and down on their nuts,” Fio said. “See what shakes loose.”

“Yeah, do that. It'll give me something concrete to tell the brass.”

The bell ringer for the telephone on Malone's desk let out a shrill peel. He stared at it while it rang twice more, then he sighed and lifted the telephone's handset off the hook.