Wages of Sin (3 page)

“No, I'm not,” he said, although maybe he was. A little.

She let go of his hand and reached up, wrapping her arms around his neck to pull his mouth down to hers. “I do love you, Day Rourke,” she said, and she kissed him.

“Let's get out of here,” he said a bit later, when she let him.

She shook her head, her lips brushing back and forth across his. “Can't. It may not look like it, but I'm working.”

She kissed him again, though, and she seemed to be swooning, to be singing into his mouth, and he let himself go with it, even though with Remy Lelourie the fall was always so long and so hard.

A camera's flash lamp exploded in their faces, and they jerked apart, blinking in the sudden intense wash of light.

“Hey, you two lovebirds,” the reporter said, raising his camera again as he sidled back toward the gallery's outside stairs, from where he'd come. He popped another bulb into the lamp, slid a new plate into the box, and put his finger on the shutter. “Smile for
The Movies.
”

“Wait,” Rourke said. He smiled like the guy had asked, and the smile was easy. “How about a scoop to go along with that shot?”

The reporter stopped, lowering his camera. “Really?” He was coming back now. He was a scrawny fellow with a big nose and ears, and front teeth square and yellow like kernels of corn. He had a deep hitch in his stride, as if one leg was shorter than the other. “Say, did you two kids just get engaged?”

Rourke was still smiling when he grabbed the camera out of the man's hands and swung around, smashing it against the hard cypress wall of the house. The bellows tore and the wooden box shattered open. Rourke smacked it against the house one more time for good measure, and the flash lamp attachment bent like a pretzel.

He handed the mess back to the reporter. He was still smiling. “Next time you'll leave wearing it around your neck. Now, get lost.”

“Aw, jeez,” came a rough voice from behind him. “I swear I can't leave you alone for a minute.”

A big, lumbering man in a rumpled pongee suit stood filling the doorway from the front parlor. Fiorello Prankowski, Rourke's partner in homicide detection. They were catching tonight, which meant that if Fio was here then somebody somewhere in New Orleans had been murdered.

Fio raised his eyebrows at Rourke, but he didn't say anything more. His face had its perpetually tired look, deep creases lining it like the rings of a seasoned tree.

He lifted his hat to Remy. “Miss Lelourie,” he said, but his voice was flat, his eyes hard and flat as well. Fio remained convinced that the most beautiful woman in the world had slashed her husband to death with a cane knife last summer and had gotten away with it.

The reporter was still hovering at the top of the stairs. Rourke gave him his mean cop look. “Aren't you lost yet?”

“Say, Day, can I see you for a while?” Fio said, stepping between Rourke and the reporter, serious now, and Rourke sensed the tension in him. Whatever had happened, it must be bad, if Fio didn't want anyone else to hear about it.

Rourke turned to Remy. He touched her cheek with his fingertips. “I got to go, darlin'.”

“I know. You're working, too,” she said, and she seemed all right with it. Her eyes might have looked haunted a little, but then they always did. It was what the camera caught and was part of her appeal. Her seduction.

He and Fio left the gallery by the outside stairs. The wind was tossing the moss-laden branches of the huge live oaks and rattling the fronds of the tall palms. Rourke looked back up at the house, where the party went on in flashes of jazz and light. Remy Lelourie still stood where he'd left her, and he was thinking now that there had been something in her kiss, something that would worry him if he poked at it hard enough, and so he probably ought to just let it lie.

For one sweet summer eleven years ago they had been lovers, until she'd left both him and New Orleans and gone off to make herself rich and famous. Four months ago they'd gotten back together and ever since then he'd been waiting for the day when she would leave him again, looking for signs of it in everything she did and said, and if he wasn't careful, if he didn't stop, he would only end up bringing on the thing that he most feared and he'd be sorry then, uh-huh. Like picking up a stick and poking it at a cottonmouth.

Still, that kiss…there'd been something. Not goodbye yet, but something.

“Let's take the 'Cat,” Rourke said.

“Let me get the crime scene stuff from the squad car then,” Fio said, veering off down the shell drive that wrapped in a half circle around the front grounds of the house.

Rourke waited for Fio by his own car, a canary yellow Stutz Bearcat roadster. A group of men stood on the lawn within the black pools of shadow cast by the oaks. They were talking loudly, laughing and passing around a bottle in a brown bag. Most of them had cameras, and Rourke saw that the reporter whose camera he had wrecked had found another somewhere. The guy from
The Movies.
Rourke thought he'd seen him hanging around before this. Since the murder of her husband, the gentlemen of the press had been making Remy Lelourie's life a misery.

Rourke helped Fio dump the forensics gear into the Bearcat's trunk and then they slid into the plush, buffed Spanish leather seats. The six-cylinder, air-cooled Franklin engine caught with a low growl.

Rourke stood on the gas pedal, and the roadster leapt forward, its tires spitting out loose shells behind them. He spun the wheel, aiming the Bearcat's silver hood ornament at the knot of reporters beneath the oaks. Light from his headlamps caught them frozen in a tableau of astonishment, before they scattered, screaming and bellowing as they dove and rolled to get out of the way. Rourke smiled.

The Bearcat bounded toward a gap in the big oaks, its engine roaring, its tires clawing grooves in the soft grass, but the space between the tree trunks suddenly looked too narrow and beyond the gap another tree loomed square in their path.

Rourke began to hum beneath his breath.

He gripped the steering wheel hard as the Bearcat surged between the trees, missing the trunks on both sides by less than an inch. The oak in front of them seemed wide as the mouth of a tunnel, impossible to miss. Rourke flipped the wheel hard over and the Bearcat slewed, fishtailing violently. Moss slapped at the windshield, the tires screeched, and Rourke laughed.

He barely missed hitting two more trees before he pulled out of the skid, and then they were careening across the lawn, back onto the drive, and by the time they passed through the wrought iron gate, he had the Bearcat's roaring engine back down to a purr.

He turned up Esplanade Avenue, and they rolled along in silence a couple of ticks before he stole a look at his partner.

Fio had hair sparse and stiff as salt grass and at the moment it seemed to be sticking straight up. “Don't ever do that again,” he said.

“Okay.”

“'Cause if you do it again, I'm going to have to seriously hurt you.”

Rourke began to sing. “Let a smile be your umbrella…”

Fio gave him another wild-eyed look. “I'm stuck in a car with a fucking maniac.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Rourke's blood was strumming a high note now, as he felt the first razor-edged rush of the hunt. “So where are we going, and who's dead?”

Fio let his breath out slowly and let go of his white-knuckled grip on the dash. “Someone came upon a dead priest in an abandoned macaroni factory down on Ursulines and Chartres.” He lifted his big shoulders in a shrug. “The desk sergeant said…I don't know, I must have heard it wrong. He said the guy had been crucified.”

Chapter Four

T
he macaroni factory was in a bad block, between a hookshop and a flophouse, where you could rent a cot for two bits a night. Across the street, sagging, rusting chicken wire fenced off a hot car farm that had been raided and shut down only last week as part of the mayor's latest crusade to cut down on crime in the City That Care Forgot.

Rourke got out of the Bearcat and paused to look around. His face felt cold and his chest hurt as if someone had just beaten on him with a baseball bat. He was scared of what he would find inside this place. He told himself that there were two hundred and seventy-five priests in New Orleans, and so the victim didn't have to be his brother, Paulie.

He'd be somebody's brother, though.

A uniform cop sagged against the factory's brick wall, staring down at the puddle of vomit between his feet. As Rourke came up, he lifted his head and peered at Rourke's detective shield with bleary eyes.

“You the one called it on the signal box?” Rourke asked.

The young cop swallowed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “My partner did. He's inside. We were ordered to stay by the body until you detectives arrived, but I couldn't…” The bile rose up again in his throat and he gagged. “Oh, God.”

“Breathe through your mouth,” Rourke said.

The cop nodded and gulped down a big gobful of air.

Rourke waved his hand at Fio, who was getting the cameras, fingerprinting kit, and an electric torch out of the trunk. “Maybe if you can give my partner a hand?” he said, thinking it would give the kid something to do besides dwell on what he'd seen.

The young cop nodded again and gulped at more air. Some of the green was starting to leave his face.

Rourke looked around the entrance to the factory. The wind had blown scraps of newspapers, dead leaves, and tamale wrappings into a pile in one corner of the arched portico. Glass from the broken fan light in the transom littered the stoop. The hasp on the door's lock was broken.

“Did y'all do that to the lock?” he asked.

The boy shook his head. “No, sir. It was like that when we got here. The kid who found the body…We were in a speak around the corner, uh, taking a leak, when this kid came running in, yelling about a crucified priest. Maybe he was the one busted it.”

“Yeah, okay.” Rourke covered his hand with his handkerchief before he pulled the door open, even though the beat cops and God knew who else had already left their fingerprints all over it.

The factory wasn't so abandoned that the electricity had been cut off. Lights in wire baskets hung by chains from the ceiling rafters. At least half still had their bulbs and were burning. Rourke turned back to ask if the lights had been on when they got here, but the patrolman had already gone out to the curb to help Fio.

The factory was long and narrow and still filled with all the machinery for mixing, rolling, cutting, and drying the macaroni. Another uniform cop stood at the far end of the building, next to something that promised to be bad.

The buttons and shield on the cop's blouse gleamed in the yellow electric light. He was pulling a cigarette out of a box, but he kept his gaze on Rourke as he licked the seam and lit the end. He flicked the spent match onto the floor, and then he began to swing his nightstick in his hand.

The heels of Rourke's shoes clicked on the stone floor as he walked. His breath was coming hard and hurting now. As he got closer he smelled the blood, and something he hadn't expected—burnt flesh.

Closer now, and Rourke could see that the something hanging was indeed a priest. Or at least someone dressed like a priest in black cassock and white bands.

Rourke pushed his hands into his pockets to hide their trembling. He'd always been a betting man. He'd bought the Bearcat with gambling winnings; he'd been known to drop a C-note at the track and not feel the pain. A betting man would go with the odds. Two hundred and seventy-five to one.

It wasn't his brother.

The size of the body was all wrong—too short by at least three inches and too lean. The dead man's mother would have been hard pressed to recognize him by looking at his face, though. Both cheekbones were broken, his nose was smashed, and you couldn't see either one of his eyes. His mouth was pulpy and ringed with blood.

He hung from the crossbeam of one of the drying racks, nailed to it through the wrists. His feet were bare and bound together with rope, and burned to bloody raw blisters on the soles. The dead man had been hung so that his feet dangled just an inch or so above a cluster of votive candles.

Rourke squatted on his haunches. He took a fountain pen out of his breast pocket and pressed the tip of it into one of the candles, next to the wick. The wax was still soft.

Rourke stared at the feet. They were slender and well formed, and pale where they hadn't been burned. There was something, he thought, so vulnerably human about the sight of bare feet. He'd always hated this part of the job—looking at the dead bodies. The murdered ones.

Rourke's gaze lifted to the beat cop. The man was in his early thirties, around Rourke's own age, with ruddy good looks and Irish red hair. That deep, loamy auburn color. His blue uniform blouse strained over his deep chest and a belly that was already showing a tendency to swell with fat. He seemed to be finding Rourke's presence at the crime scene something to smirk about.

“Were these candles burning when you got here?” Rourke asked.

The cop took his time drawing on his cigarette before he answered. “Naw. The stiff was so fresh, though, you could still smell the death fart.”

Rourke looked back down, breathed. He could feel blood shooting through his hands. He wanted to hit something.

The killer, he saw, had carefully removed his victim's shoes and socks, rolled up the socks and put them inside the shoes, and then neatly set them aside. Near the shoes lay a bloody cloth that looked like a piece of ripped-up sheet. Its ends were twisted, as if they had once been tied into a knot.

“Was there a gag in his mouth?” Rourke asked.

“Jesus, we didn't touch nothin', all right? 'Cause we knew we'd get our asses chewed by you jumped-up, jackass dicks if we did.”

Rourke pushed himself to his feet, twisting half around, so that when he came up he was right in the other cop's face. When your daddy was a drunk and you have those demons inside of you as well, you know the signs of a man with a load on. The bloodshot, baggy eyes. The grip on the nightstick to hide the booze tremors. The smell of the cheap rye sweating out the pores of your skin.