Wages of Sin (25 page)

It wasn't long before he had grown bored with the man in the purple suspenders and so he'd ducked into a nearby speakeasy for a drink, but the gin they served had tasted sour and he'd never taken much pleasure from drinking alone. He'd left the glass on the bar still mostly full and went back into the night. He prowled the empty neighborhoods for a while, which were deserted except for near the prison where the party looked to be lasting until dawn, and when the first brush of daylight was painting the river water gray and washing out the neon lights on Canal Street, he went on home to bed.

To bed and into the arms of Remy Lelourie.

Romeo loved Remy Lelourie to death, but she wore him out at times. She could be wild and wicked one night, soft and loving the next. Some nights she could be cruel. She'd tease him until he'd almost be coming and then she'd pull back, again and again, until his balls were blue and his cock was raw, and then she would threaten to leave him in that state, making him whimper and beg. Sometimes she would go on and leave him anyway, and he'd hate her to death then.

He wasn't feeling particularly charitable with her tonight, in any event. The notes that he'd written her, in his blood, in her lipstick—they were supposed to make her see that she had to change her ways if there was to be any hope for them. All those lies of hers, all those betrayals and broken promises…Why couldn't she see that they had to
stop?

“Don't make me do it, Remy,” he shouted at her. “Don't make me do it.” And then that little voice deep in his head, the one he couldn't shut up now no matter how much dope he shot in his veins, began to chant:

“
For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
”

The voice made him so mad he swung at her face with his balled-up fist. Only he caught himself up at the last minute, shifting his weight so that he punched the wall instead. Punched a big hole through the plaster.

He fucked the hell out of her after that. Pounded into her until the bed shook and more pieces of plaster crumbled out of the wall. Pounded into her so hard his butt lifted off the bed, and when he came he hooted like a loon. Romeo lay on the bed, running with sweat, his chest heaving, his cock twitching and slowly dying.

When he could catch enough of a breath, he got up. He wiped off his belly and hands with a ragged towel and then tossed the towel on top of the pile of dirty clothes in the corner. As he tucked his wet, limp penis back into his trousers, for some reason an image came into his head of that colored boy they'd fried tonight. When two thousand volts of electricity shoot through your body, do you get a hard-on?

Hey, he should've asked that know-it-all asshole with the purple suspenders, Romeo thought, and then laughed at himself.

“Jesus, you're one sick bastard,” he said, and then the laughter fell off his face. Melted off his face, as if it had been burned off. “Fuck it,” he said to that, and then he shouted it, nice and loud, drawing out the vowels. “Fuuuck iiiiit!”

He made a halfhearted attempt to straighten the bed. The sheets were gray and reeked of sex, and the bottom one was starting to rip at one corner. He hadn't noticed that before and he felt suddenly ashamed. She was used to better, used to the best, and yet she hadn't complained. He'd pick up some new sheets tomorrow and maybe some of those nice, sweet-smelling soaps they sold in drugstores.

“I'll do right by you, darlin',” he told her. “But you also got to do right by me.”

He picked up her photograph and put it back on the bedside table, but not before kissing her first.

“Soon, Remy,” he said.
Soon.

But not yet.

In the meantime, though, a new day was dawning and he had places to go.

Someone to see.

Chapter Seventeen

E
arly every Sunday morning for the last fifty-seven years, Tornado Jones had gotten up with the sun and gone on down to the river to catch himself a mess of catfish to fry up for breakfast. It had gotten harder lately; what with the way the rheumatism was twisting up his old bones into sailor's knots, it had gotten hard just dragging his sorry ol' ass out of bed. He kept on doing it, though, even on the Sundays when he wasn't much hungry for fish. Habits made a man dependable and Tornado Jones prided himself on being a man of habit. Tornado Jones liked to say that come Sunday mornings, you could
depend
on finding him down at the riverbank cleaning up a string of fresh-caught mudcats.

Tornado's mama hadn't given him such a name when he was born, of course. Tornado liked to tell folk he couldn't remember what his given name was—he'd been called Tornado for so long. He'd been a champion prizefighter in his younger days, and the newspapers had taken to calling him Tornado because of the way he windmilled his punches and danced around his opponent in the ring. Hunh. He hadn't been dancing, he'd been ducking, only he'd never told anybody that. Lord Gawd, he'd been fast in those days, though. Everything about him had been fast, including his patter. He'd had a patter that could charm the peaches off the trees, in those days.

Not so quick anymore, though, uh-uh, he thought, as he picked through a web of dried algae and river trash on his way across the mud flat to the river. Certainly wasn't moving like any tornado this morning. Done lost his patter, and his ducking and dancing, and his windmill punches, too. He was going on eighty-three now, and it had been a long time since he'd swatted at anything bigger than a mosquito.

His old bones creaked and his old joints cracked as he squatted on the bank and dipped a tin pan into the water. He pulled a mudcat off the string and slit its belly, enjoying the heat of the morning sun on his back. It had been cool lately, but today it looked like it was fixing to be hot. The sky was white as bone.

He paused in his fish cleaning for a moment to take in the morning. He watched the mud daubers fly around and the crawfish peep above their mud holes. Around a bend upriver it looked like there was a dead garfish lying on the gray mud beach, adding to the stink. The Mississippi, he thought, was one big mess of smelly mud.

He went on with his chore, but his gaze kept going back to that dead garfish upriver. Finally, he creaked and cracked back to his feet, wiping the drying fish scales off his hands on the seat of his britches. He walked along the bank, toward the bend in the river, squinting against the sun.

Wasn't no dead garfish, after all, thought Tornado Jones as he got closer. Not unless garfish had figured out a way to grow hair.

Daman Rourke found a parking place two blocks from Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, just as the bell began to toll for the eight o'clock Mass. He shut off the Bearcat's engine and turned to look at his daughter, who was in the passenger seat next to him.

She didn't look as if she could ever cause her daddy a day of misery, sitting there in a yellow dress all frilled up with ruffles and lace, little white cotton gloves on her hands and her First Communion missal in her lap. Her straw hat covered most of her massacred hair, but she still smelled strongly of lye soap, thanks to Mrs. O'Reilly, who'd had her on her hands and knees in the kitchen earlier this morning, scrubbing up frog slime.

She turned just then and looked up at him, and Rourke had to work hard to keep from melting beneath the power of her smile.

He cleared his throat and tried to look as a responsible daddy ought. “And while we're sitting there in church, young lady,” he said, “I want you to be thinking about nothing but frogs and the wages of sin.”

She heaved such an exasperated sigh that the brim of her hat flapped. “Sweet Jesus,” she said, in a dead-on imitation of Rourke himself. “I just don't know why you're making such a big fuss over a few frogs in the kitchen. I bet you did lots worse when you were my age.”

“Watch your mouth, and my sins are not under discussion here. Besides, boys are allowed to do worse. It's part of the grand scheme of things.”

“Sweet…” She caught his eye and changed her mind. “…mercy. Who made up that rule? I bet it was a boy.”

“Hunh.” Rourke tried to sell her an I-got-your-number look, but she wasn't buying.

Instead, she tried to sell him a little-miss-innocent look in return. “It's supposed to be a really big sin, isn't it, Daddy? To miss Mass on Sunday?”

“You'd better not be going with this where I think you're going…”

“I'm only saying that, shouldn't Mrs. O'Reilly be setting a good example for me? If she's going to be my nanny, and all?”

“Mrs. O'Reilly's relationship with God and the Holy Catholic Church is her own business. And you might as well give it up, Miss Katherine Elizabeth Rourke, because she's not only staying, she's going to end up reforming us both.”

Bells rang and incense drifted in a heady cloud above an altar draped in white silk. From his knees, Daman Rourke watched his brother raise the golden chalice above his head for all to see and adore. “
His est enim calix sanguinis mei…
”

If you were a Catholic who still believed, then what you were witnessing was a miracle: where bread and wine
became
the body and blood of Christ, and if you partook of Him, then your salvation was possible.

His est enim calix sanguinis mei
…Take this, all of you, and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant.

If you still believed…If you were who you were, though, and always thinking of yourself as so damn tough, doing what you had to do and relying only on yourself, then you would long ago have turned away from the faith of your childhood and gone looking for your own brand of salvation in the arms of a woman or the bottom of a bottle, or in a betting slip or a
bourré
pot, and you would have learned not to pray for favors or forgiveness until eventually there came that day when you realized that you had forgotten how.

Only if you were a priest…

If you were a priest, you not only must believe in miracles, it is you who must make them happen.
I am a priest.
Father Pat had written those words in his notebook. Written them emphatically, pressing the lead hard into the paper, digging three deep lines under the words. Father Pat. He. She. Even as he wrote those words, she had to have seen the lie in them. The woman who called herself Father Patrick Walsh could never be a priest in the eyes of the church he had vowed to serve. But if so, then had all her miracles been false ones?

And what about Paulie? As he performed his miracle on this Sunday morning, as he changed the wine and bread into the living blood and flesh of Jesus Christ who died on the cross so that all God's children could know eternal life—what lies was Father Paul Rourke living even now?

We are each of us two people, Rourke thought, the one you see and the one nobody sees. And it is often those we love the most and should know the best, who most elude us. He did know, though, that in order to unmask Father Pat's killer, he was going to have to rip the masks off the souls of the priests in this parish.
All
of their souls, including his brother's, and if Paulie broke under the exposure, then so be it.

A man relied only on himself, and he did what he had to do.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: misere nobis.
Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world: have mercy on us.

One by one the communicants knelt at the chancel rail and took the body of Christ into their mouths and they were saved. At least until they sinned again.

Domine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum, sed tanum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea.
Lord, I am not worthy that You should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.

Katie went, but Rourke did not, because he had sinned plenty since his last confession. Too many sins, he thought with a smile that should've been ashamed of itself, but wasn't—the most recent being last night, when he'd made love to a sex goddess three times, out of wedlock.

Rourke watched, though, as Floriane de Lassus Layton and her own daughter knelt and received the Host. The woman teetered on her high-heeled shoes a little as she stood up, and the man who'd preceded her turned back to take her arm, and it seemed to Rourke for a flash of an instant that she'd cringed beneath his touch, and Rourke thought,
hunh.

As if he felt Rourke watching him, the man looked up just then and met Rourke's gaze, and he smiled. A challenge there, perhaps, and Rourke thought,
hunh,
again.

Father Paul Rourke ended the Mass by bending over and kissing the altar, and as he turned, Rourke searched his brother's face for signs of joy or even of wonder, but he didn't see any.

The closing hymn had a dying fall in it, a musical swoon, and as the last notes floated up to the vaulted ceiling, Rourke turned to his daughter and said, “Sit here and wait for me, honey. And think about frogs.”

Katie made a face at him, but then she laughed. He kissed the top of her straw hat and then made it out of the pew in time to intercept the Laytons as they were coming down the aisle.

Flo Layton looked pretty in a yellow linen cloche hat with a white silk rose, but she still had that shame going on deep in her eyes. “Mornin', Lieutenant,” she said softly, and then looked over at her husband as if she were drowning and she thought him more likely to push her under than save her.

Albert Payne Layton had light red hair, the color of orange peel, and a smooth, heavily freckled face. He toyed with a Phi Beta Kappa key dangling from the thin gold chain that stretched across his brown and yellow checked wool vest, and Rourke saw that he even had freckles on the backs of his fingers.

“A terrible thing, Detective,” he was saying. “What was done to Father Pat. I trust you all are close to apprehending the murderer. Otherwise, one shudders to think that simply no one is safe and we could all be slaughtered in our beds.”

“I shouldn't worry if I were you,” Rourke said. “It seems to have been a selective killing.”

“A personal vendetta, then, you think? And not the act of a madman?” A secretive little smile seemed to be playing around the corners of the man's full mouth. “All the more reason then, surely, to hope that everyone…” And he paused to give his wife a look that served to underline the word. “That
everyone
has been cooperating fully with the police in their investigation. I'm willing to oblige, too, of course, but I don't know what I can tell you. As Holy Rosary's accountant, I had some dealings with the Father, but we weren't particularly close. My wife, on the other hand…” He turned to her again and touched her arm, and this time Rourke was sure he saw her flinch. “Y'all were especially fond of each other, weren't you, darling? You and your precious Father Pat.”