Wages of Sin (31 page)

Louis Toussaint looked Remy over carefully, then he sucked on his gums and nodded slowly. “I had me a lil' gal like that once. A high-yeller gal from over in New Iberia, and, man, was she prime. She ate me up like I was a peach—meat, skin, and juice. Ever'thing but the pit. Lord, I loved that lil' gal more than life an' pride an' everlastin' glory…What can I do for y'all?”

“We want to know about a Patrick Walsh who might've been in the orphanage sometime during the nineties, give or take a few years.”

“You talkin' about right befo' the fire. I could name you ever' chile livin' in the Home then, and not one of 'em was called Patrick Walsh.”

“How about a girl called Patricia, and with a different last name?” Remy said. “And she might have had a brother.”

Rourke, growing mellow from the moonshine, alligator, and custard pie, looked over at his woman and decided that she was prime.

“No'm. No Patricia,” the old man said. “Was a Miss Patrice, though. Patrice LaPage, and she had a brother, sure 'nuff. Swamp chillens, they was, from out in the Lafourche Basin. Their mama died young and for a time they lived alone in the wetlands, in an old log shack, they and their daddy. I don't know what-all their daddy done to get on the bad side of the law, 'sides poachin' a few 'gators, but he got himself shot and killed stone dead. No kin would take them chillens in, so they ended up being brought to the Home. That poor lil' gal, Miss Patrice, she was no more'n thirteen if she was a day, but she was carryin' a chile of her own. Ever'one thought it was her own daddy knocked her up, but I'd of put my money on her brother. That Mister Henri, he always had a
look
'bout him. You a po-liceman, so you'd know that look.”

Rourke filled up the old man's glass with more lightning, then took care of Remy's and his own. “Like he'd enjoy sticking a pin through a fly just to watch it squirm.”

“Mmmm-huh. Mean down to the bone.” The old man drank the booze down, smacking his lips with the pleasure of it. “That lil' gal of mine that I was tellin' you about…?”

“The one that spit you out like a pit?” Remy said.

“Mmmm-huh. That the one…She did some midwifin', my Sally Blue, mostly for colored folk, but they called her up to the Home the night Miss Patrice had her baby, and she told me afterward there were things goin' to stick forever in her mind after that night. She said that Mister Henri came in after the baby was borned, and the snake-eyed look that passed 'tween the two of them, brother and sister, woulda made the hair roach up on the back of a peeled egg. But that wasn't the oddest of it…”

The old man paused to eye the bottom of his glass as if surprised to find it empty.

“More lightning, Mr. Toussaint?” Rourke said.

“Is she havin' more?…Then, don't mind if I do.”

“Fill them up, Day,” Remy said, pushing her empty jar up to the jug, to join the old man's. “And don't be parsimonious about it.”

“There you see, Mr. Toussaint,” Rourke said. “Most people couldn't say that word sober without twisting their tongue into knots.”

For a moment Rourke thought Louis Toussaint was having a heart attack, the way he was choking and shaking, but then he realized the old man was laughing.

Rourke waited until Louis Toussaint had calmed himself down and applied himself to the lightning again before he said, “What was the oddest of it?”

“The oddest of it,” Louis Toussaint said, “happened during the birthing. That Miss Patrice, she sweated blood…Man, I'ma tellin' you no lie,” he protested, even though no one had suggested that he was. “They drops popped out on that lil' gal's forehead, like they was sweat, only they was red and my Sally Blue said they had the blood smell to 'em, like rustin' nails. My Sally Blue said…”

His voice drifted off and his gaze turned inward, and Rourke thought he was probably back in the moment, listening to his woman tell the tale of a girl who sweated blood, listening and being with his woman, whom he'd loved more than life and pride and everlasting glory.

Louis Toussaint blinked the wetness out of his eyes and cleared the lump out of his throat. “My Sally Blue said that lil' gal's palms sweated, too, and worse'n her head. They'd tied ol' twisted-up pieces of sheets to the bedposts for her to hold on to while she was laborin', and my Sally Blue said they sheets were soaked bloody by the time she was through. Uh-huh. Sweated blood, and you can believe me or not. That's yo' privilege.”

“We believe you, Mr. Toussaint,” Remy said, as she leaned forward, reaching for the jug of moonshine. She had a shine of her own on from the liquor, but it was also excitement. “Tell us about the baby. Did it survive its birth?”

Louis Toussaint looked at Remy's empty jar and compared it to his nearly full one. He girded his loins, drank his down, shuddered, and wiped his mouth. He looked at Remy cross-eyed and grinned.

“Eh? Oh, Miss Patrice, she had herself a fine, healthy baby boy. Couple nights after the birthing, that Mister Henri, he lit off for God alone knows where. And a couple of nights after he left, the Home burned down from a fire that was set. Now they some folk always goin' to have to believe it was me done it, but they others talked 'bout how that Mister Henri must've snuck in from wherever he run off to and got his own back out of pure meanness and spite. But nobody could never prove nothin', and neither hide nor hair of 'im has ever been heard of or seen again. As for Miss Patrice and her baby—they died in the fire.”

“Is that a certainty, though, Mr. Toussaint? Maybe they weren't in the house when it burned down.”

“I was there when they carried out the bodies, Miss Remy. Or what was left of 'em, and they wasn't a body short. They was all so black and twisted up you wouldn't've recognized 'em for human bein's if you didn't know 'em for what they was. But when we laid them out on the lawn, they was three of them growed-up and seventeen chillens, just like they was s'posed to be. And one of they chillens had a babe in her arms.”

Cockleburs and tar-vine leaves stuck to their clothes as they picked their way through the overgrown cemetery on the outskirts of town. A smoky light had gathered in the tops of the trees from the lowering sun and the burning cane.

The tomb they were looking for was smothered with honeysuckle vines. Rourke had to rip whole branches off it, before they could read the names etched in the stone. She was there, third up from the bottom:
PATRICE LAPAGE AND INFANT LUCAS
.

He let the vines fall to cover it up again and stepped back, dusting off his hands.

Remy slipped her arm around his waist and leaned into him. Rourke was surprised after all the moonshine she'd consumed that she was still reasonably functioning. Louis Toussaint wasn't. They'd had to carry him back to the room he rented in a boardinghouse not far from where the Home used to stand. Rourke thought the old man would live through the night, but the hangover he was going to suffer in the morning would probably have him wishing he hadn't.

Remy stirred against him, holding him tighter. “Do you think Father Pat was ever really here in Paris?”

“Yeah, I do.” It felt right, like twisting the viewfinder on a camera until the image sharpened into focus. Father Patrick Walsh and Patrice LaPage were the same person, or at least they had been at one time.

He worked a scenario out in his mind of how it could have happened. Henri LaPage had run away from the Home, but then he came back the night of the fire, came back for his baby sister and their child of incest. Only she'd wanted nothing to do with a brother who, along with her father, had been beating and raping her for years. What she had wanted was to be shed of it all, shed of her brother and the baby, and of all the ugly memories of that house in the swamp and what had been done to her there.

Whether she had set fire to the Home that night, or Henri had, or it had gotten set by accident—Patrice LaPage had used it as a way to get free.

“She didn't die in the fire like everybody thought,” Remy was saying, echoing his thoughts. “But Mr. Toussaint said they laid the bodies out on the ground afterward and they weren't a body short. Three nuns and seventeen children. So the body holding the baby must have been her brother, Henri.”

“Yeah. Probably,” Rourke said, and that, too, felt right. “If the bodies were burned badly enough, they might not've been able to tell male from female all that easily, especially if the coroner wasn't a medical man. And people see what they're expecting to see.”

“You don't expect to see someone sweat blood.”

“No…You remember that salvation show we went to that summer when we were kids, how that preacher could bend spoons and send books flying through the air?”

“That was probably just a magician's trick, though. Are you saying you think Patrice LaPage faked her blood-sweating episode?”

“Hell, I don't know what I'm saying…except, I think there exists in the human mind and heart whole rooms behind locked doors that we haven't opened yet.”

They stood arm in arm in a silence of rasping locusts and of the wind pushing through the branches of the cypress and willow trees. A blue jay sat on top of the cemetery's scrolled iron gate and preened. Cloud shadows moved over the tombs.

“Maybe,” Remy said, “they should never be opened.”

They walked back, arm in arm, through the cemetery to the car. The drive out here to Paris had been just an excuse to get away, to burn up the hours like fallen leaves, but because he had come, he thought now that he had a better understanding of the paths taken in Father Pat's life, the choices made. And understanding her, he still believed, was the only way he was ever going to find her killer. His killer…

They stopped at the cemetery gate and looked back. They stood on a small rise, a veritable mountain for south Louisiana. From here you could look back at the town and see St. Joseph's steeple and the courthouse towers, and you could follow the lazy curve of the brown bayou as it cut through the burning sugarcane fields. He wondered if Patrice LaPage had stood here on the night of the orphanage fire and looked back at the conflagration of her old life. If that had been the moment when she had become he.

What she'd probably been too young to know then, though, was that you can run from your past, but you can't escape it. What you've done and what's been done to you, the choices you've made—it all gets carried along with you, like stones you've piled on your back. After a while the stones begin to weigh on you, they slow you down, until one way or the other and somewhere down the line, your past catches up with you.

Rourke drove back down through town, crossed the bayou, and picked up the highway heading home.

He drove lead-footed and reckless for about twenty miles and then turned off onto an unmarked lane and lurched and bumped through some farmer's fields until he couldn't see the road anymore. He braked and cut off the engine, and the wind stopped blowing through him and the world grew still and warm.

Remy got out of the car and walked down the lane some more to where it met the bayou. Purple and gold four-o'clocks grew wild along the untilled patch of dirt between the lane and the rows of sugarcane. Green dragonflies danced and darted over the cattails along the water.

Rourke sat in the car for a moment longer, then he, too, got out. The cane leaves were edged with the sun's last red lights, and clouds were piling up purple on the horizon, bringing rain with them for tomorrow morning.

He tilted his head back and shut his eyes. The sun was sinking out of sight behind the clouds, but he could still feel the heat it had left in its passing. It wasn't enough heat, though, to heal the hurt he felt for the world.

He heard her footsteps and he opened his eyes. She'd stopped while she was still several feet away from him. Her eyes went deep into his, and he stared back until her face blurred soft at the edges.

He understood that a part of the reason why he loved her, what rooted him to her, was because he saw in her a reflection of himself, of his own paths to both perdition and salvation. She had a hard shell of hurt and loneliness, and a gambler's need to test the limits. Of fate and of herself.

“Titus Dupre,” he said, “got framed for a killing he didn't do. And last night we killed him in turn, and I'm not going to tell you what a bad death it was.”

“I know,” she said. “But all you were ever trying to do was be a good cop. Intentions do matter, Day.”

In another moment he thought he would go to her. He would touch her and run his hand down the curve of her breast. He would bury his face in her hair, and breathe in the smell of her.

“Except that I never for a moment thought that boy wasn't guilty,” he said. “Sure, we had evidence all over the place, and it all pointed right at him, but I should have seen the frame. It was my
job
to see the frame.”

Her eyes had not left his face. She took a step toward him, but he said, “No, wait. Let me finish…The murdered ones, they need someone to speak for them, you see? To tell the world who killed them and why. Only this guy, this monster who's still out there, still raping and strangling girls—he suckered me good. And what the world got told about Nina Duboche and Mercedes Bloom was a lie and an innocent boy is dead.”

“So catch the right man this time,” she said, “and then you can speak the truth, not only for the girls he's murdered, but for Titus Dupre. What you shouldn't do, though, is go making that poor boy into your cross.”

“Well, hell,” he said, almost laughing because the two things you could always count on never getting from Remy were platitudes and useless sympathy.

Her words about not making Titus Dupre into his cross had sent a thought flitting through the compartments of his mind, though, only in the next instant it was gone. He could have chased after it, but he let it go, because while she'd been talking she'd been closing the distance between them and he was really touching her now instead of just thinking about it. He caught the back of her head with his hand and pulled her face to his. They kissed, locked together and turning in a circle, swaying, until they knocked into the Bearcat's front fender.

He let go of her mouth, long enough to groan. “I've been wanting to do this all day, wanting you all day.”