Wages of Sin (23 page)

That was then, though, and this was now, and the years passed and life changed things. And she had learned the hard way that the only thing you can really own is yourself.

He came back to bed and lay down alongside her, giving her one of the glasses of booze and resting the other on his belly. He slipped his arm beneath her shoulders, cradling her against him. He played with her hair, then brushed the rounded curve of her breast with the backs of his knuckles. He liked to touch, and over the years other women besides herself had taught him how to do it well.

“How did you know it was me out there in the courtyard?” she said.

“I do got me a lot of dames,” he said, drawling the words like an Irish Channel gangster, “comin' over all the time in the dead of night to jump on my bones, this is true.”

She aimed a mock punch at his chest, but he grabbed her by the wrist and kissed her fist. “I didn't hear a car pull up, though,” he said a moment later. “How did you get here?”

“By taxicab. I had him let me off at the corner because it was easier.”

“Aw, baby…” He lay his head back against the bed's brass bars and blew a deep breath at the ceiling. “The studio gave you a car and chauffeur, why didn't you use them?”

“Because the poor man had fetched me to and fro all day, and I thought he might want to go home for a while and see his wife and babies.”

“Tomorrow I'm going to call that director—what's his name? Kohl?—and ask him to put a bodyguard on you, 'round the clock.”

“All right.”

He rolled onto his side, bracing his elbow into the mattress and leaning his head on his fist to stare at her face. “That was way too easy,” he said after a moment. “So something more must have happened today. What was it?”

“That's the reason why I came…well, one of the reasons. To tell you. Only now I got a feeling we're going to get in a big ol' fight over it.”

“Only if you don't follow orders and say, ‘Yessir, boss’…What happened?”

As she told him what she'd found in her dressing room after the shoot, he set his drink on the nightstand and got back up, shimmying into his pants. He took a couple of turns around the room, and there was a tension inside him that seemed to give off a pulse, like a blinking neon light.

“I just wish you'd called me soon as it happened,” he said when she was done. “I could've come down and taken a look. Questioned the people who were around then.”

She'd expected him to bellow, but instead he was being so reasonable that she made a face at him. “I thought we'd decided that he was just some fan trying to get my attention, and the best thing I could do would be not to give it to him. And besides, I did call you. You weren't in.”

He stopped in front of the window, looking out at the night, thinking, and she watched him. She loved the way his mind worked. Most people looked at the world head-on and full of awe, like it was a master's painting enclosed in a gilded frame. He came at it from angles no one else ever thought of, and then he made intuitive leaps until suddenly he was
inside
the frame and looking out.

“I asked the Ghoul to take a look at that letter you gave me this mornin',” he finally said, coming back to the bed.

She sat up and wrapped her arms around her bent legs and he lay down beside her, on his belly this time, touching her again, running his fingers down the length of her spinal cord as if he was counting the bones, and she thought suddenly and for no good reason that she wanted this moment to last forever.

“This guy is certifiably nuts,” he was saying. “He wrote the damn thing in human blood, and you can wipe that look right off your face. This isn't some movie where life goes back to normal after the organ stops playing and the lights go up.”

“I just find it interesting, is all. I wonder how he got the blood…Oh, all right.” She tried to hide her face from him by resting her forehead on her bent knees. “What else?”

“The Ghoul thinks he might be an old lover who never got over you. Anybody meeting that description been hanging around you lately?”

“Well, there is this one homicide detective…”

He didn't smile at her feeble joke, and when she twisted around to look at him better she couldn't tell a thing about what he was thinking or feeling. He had his cop's face on. “There haven't been that many men, Day,” she said.

“Sure…Let's start with Alfredo Ramon, though, just for the fun of it. That reporter for
The Movies
said y'all had once had an affair, and after you ended it Freddy-boy tried to slit his wrists.”

“Oh, that's an old story and it mostly isn't even true.”

“I know. They're all lies and damn lies…Tell me about Freddy.”

It had been the first movie for both of them,
The Glass Slipper,
and Alfredo Ramon had been Prince Charming to her Cinderella. It had been a dark, erotic version of the classic fairy tale and their intense onscreen lovemaking had spilled over into their real lives, but their affair had ended with the picture's wrap party. And with the coming of director Peter Kohl into her life.

She'd met Peter at another party the week after the wrap and they had become lovers that first night. He was there when
The Glass Slipper
was released and she had gone from a nobody to a star in what had seemed like a single, blinding instant. The Cinderella Girl. He was there when the money and the offers started coming in, and her face was suddenly everywhere. When for the whole of her life she had felt like a gangly, ugly thing and now they were calling her the most beautiful woman in the world and she was only twenty-two, and Peter had made her feel safe.

They were together for four years, until he got on an ocean liner and went home, to make his movies in Germany. On the morning he left her, he had said, “He's a lucky bastard.” And when she didn't ask him who, he had told her anyway: “The man who finally figures out what it is you want and can give it to you.”

Until that moment she hadn't realized that she was the one sending him away, and she still didn't know what she had done wrong.

“Freddy Ramon was just a six-week fling. Peter was…He told me once that love can be the single most selfish act of a person's life. I took Peter's love and gave back only what was easy, and he was the one who left me.” She stretched out beside him, close, so that they shared the pillow and she could feel his breath on her cheek. “I admit it gives me a little thrill to know you're jealous, Day, but you have no reason to be.”

“I'm not jealous. I only hate their guts and want to kill them on principle.” She couldn't tell if he was serious or not. He still had his cop's face on. “Could either one of these assholes be behind this?” he said.

She shook her head quickly, because she'd already given it some serious thought. “I don't think either one of them have that much craziness in them, but more than that they both need this picture. I don't mean to sound all full of myself, but they can't afford to scare me into such a tizzy that I can't work. Freddy's been on the verge of being a big star for years and if he doesn't break out soon, he's never going to.
Cutlass
could do that for him. And Peter needs one of his projects to make money or he's finished in the business.”

“You're being logical, though, and I'm not sure logic has any part in this.”

She pushed herself up a little so that she could see him better. “This is scaring you,” she said.

“Yeah.” He brushed the hair back from her forehead. “Yeah, baby, it's scaring me.”

She didn't like hearing that. He wasn't supposed to have any doubts or fears, only certainties. And even though she'd never really liked being careful, when it came to reckless behavior he was just as bad and maybe worse. In that way they had never been good for each other.

“Promise me you won't take any chances,” he said.

“I promise,” she said, and in that moment she meant it.

He lowered his head to kiss her and then he stopped. “Jesus, I forgot…Did Katie see that mess in your dressing room?”

“No, she turned my invitation to come along to the shoot down flat, thank the Lord in hindsight. She said that since she couldn't fly the kite with her daddy, she was going to stay in her room all day and sulk…What? What's so funny?”

He'd buried his face in the pillow and was muffling something about frogs.

She punched him lightly on the shoulder. “What?”

He raised his head to look at her. His smile was a wicked thing. “Come here,” he said.

She must have fallen asleep after they made love the second time, because when she awakened the moon had risen and filled the room with its light and the bed beside her was empty.

She sat up abruptly, and then she saw him silhouetted before the half-open slatted blinds that covered the window. He was fully dressed. He even had his hat on.

She thought that he was looking out at the courtyard, until he took a step toward her and the moonlight fell on his face. The violent intensity of feeling in his eyes startled her, then he turned away and she felt almost bereft.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“They're executing Titus Dupre in an hour. I promised him I'd be there.”

She pushed away some thick emotion she couldn't name and didn't want to. We all live, she thought, by an act of faith: that happiness can be defined and for every
I
there is a
you,
and that every time the sun sets it will be coming back up again in the morning.

And we could all be wrong.

He came all the way up to the bed, but he didn't touch her. “Will you be here when I get back?” he said.

She nodded. She pulled the sheet up tight under her chin, as if she could hide beneath it, as if it could protect her from what she was feeling, which mostly came from inside herself. “I'm scared for us, Day,” she said. “I feel like we're about to lose something. Maybe forever.”

“If you—” She thought he'd been about to say that if she would only marry him then they could be together forever, but then he held it back. “You won't lose me,” he said.

“At least believe that I love you,” he went on, when she didn't say anything.

She knew he loved her. He wore his love in his eyes, all over his face, and he made no effort to hide it.

“I do,” she said. She wanted to reach up and take his face in her hands. Maybe feeling her hands on his face would make him understand what she was trying to say to him. “I do,” she said again. “But only if you believe that I love you.”

He leaned over and kissed her goodbye, and then he left her. She didn't go to the window to watch him on his way, but she did lie down on the bed, not moving, barely breathing, while she listened to his footsteps cross the courtyard and fade away.

Chapter Sixteen

E
ven with the big oak chair sitting up there on the platform, the room that night had the atmosphere of a Fourth of July picnic.

City dignitaries were using the waiting time for politicking and glad-handing. The gentlemen of the press were chasing sources and cracking wise. The state executioner and the electrician, who'd both come along with the chair, were laughing about something over by the generator and sharing cracklings out of a greasy paper bag.

“Hey,” one of the reporters called out. “You juice that hot seat up yet to see if it's working?”

“You volunteering to sit in it and find out?” the electrician shot back, and the reporter laughed and shook his head. Rumor had it, though, that when they'd run through the rehearsal earlier this evening, they'd had to use a tailor's dummy because they couldn't find anybody willing to sit in the chair even for pretend.

Daman Rourke looked at the chair with its thick legs and wide arms and the restraint straps and the wires running to the generator, and he felt a chill. You don't see the bullet that comes flying through the air to pierce your heart, or the flu germ that settles in your lungs and drowns you. But this chair—to have to walk up to it and sit in it and die…

A couple of other people had laughed with the reporter, but like Rourke they were drawn to look at the chair and the mood settled into a heavy silence then, broken only by the hollow, plinking sound of dripping water from the Negro toilet next door.

The room they were in had been used for storage before its conversion into a death chamber, and the bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling barely penetrated into the corners filled with file boxes, reams of paper, and a couple of broken typewriters. About twenty wooden folding chairs were lined up in rows facing the makeshift platform. Nobody was sitting down yet.

The victims' families had formed a somber little knot, though, at one end of the front row. As Rourke came up to them, Otis Bloom looked a question at him and Rourke shook his head. The cab driver looked away and his throat worked hard as he tried to swallow.

Ethel Bloom started to reach for her husband, but then she let her hand fall without touching him. She swayed so violently that Rourke had to grab her by the arm or she would have fallen flat on her face. The gin was rising off her in fumes, and her eyes wouldn't focus.

Nina Duboche's father was doing all the talking, telling the others everything he knew about the instrument of execution that would soon end the life of his daughter's killer. Clive Duboche had bootblack hair that grew into a widow's peak halfway down his forehead, and his nose and the hollows in his cheeks were sprayed with tiny acne scars. He had the slick, good ol' boy air of a politician about him, although he was in fact a fisherman of a sort. He had begun by selling catfish and frog legs off the back of his pickup truck, and now he supplied fish to most of the city's restaurants.

“A wave of one jolt will hit the murderin' bastard for about one minute and that'll be it,” he was saying, his voice a little too loud. “Two thousand volts, and they say his blood's going to literally be boilin'. Still, if you ask me, it's too easy a way of dying for what he done.”

The others all nodded but they didn't really seem to be listening. Rourke doubted even the man himself was hearing what he was saying. He was only trying to control the moment with words, filling any silent spaces that might otherwise allow someone to ask the wrong questions. Like how any of them had come to be in this place, in this moment of time.