Wages of Sin (32 page)

He had her braced up against the hood of the car and he was wrestling, tugging, bunching her dress up around her waist, and scratching the hell out of his hands. “Christ, what is this thing made out of—tiny knives?”

“Careful with it, Day. It belongs to the studio and cost a fortune.”

“I only want to…”

Her knees fell apart and he came between them. He worked two fingers into the open leg of her silky French panties, found the soft nest of hair, and slid his fingers inside of her. She was wet, quivering, ready for him. Her hands clutched his shoulders, and she arched her spine and her head fell back, her mouth open.

He worked her with one hand while he undid his trousers with the other, and he entered her as she was coming, and she was so hot, so tight, so incredibly fine. It was as if God had made her just for him. He knew it was irrational, but it seemed that no other woman had ever
fit
him the way Remy did.

He let himself go, let himself be held by her, until he was drunk with her and drunk with loving her, more than life and pride and everlasting glory.

Chapter Twenty-one

A
s soon as he walked in the joint, Fiorello Prankowski felt an uncomfortable itch between his shoulder blades. It took a moment for him to realize that the feeling came from being the only white man in a speakeasy full of colored folk.

It wasn't that he was the object of stares; rather the opposite, since everyone was taking care not to meet his eyes. He could feel their fear, though, because he was white and a cop, and with white cops the Negro was always only a word or a look or a bad moon rising away from jail or the lynching tree.

And he could feel their hate, which came from having the white man's boot on their necks for all their lives and their daddies' lives and
their
daddies' lives and so on back, so that the hate got bred into the blood. At least that, thought Fio, was how his partner had put it to him once, but then Day Rourke had this thing about the Negro race that Fio didn't understand. Although he had, after a fashion, learned to live with it.

The speak was just one big old room with a bandstand at one end. The air was thick with the smell of muscatel, cheap perfume, hot grease, reefer, and years worth of God-knew-what-all that had been soaked and ground into the rubber tile floor. Feathery smoke curled in and out of the open rafters and seeped through the cracks in the knotty-pine walls.

Fio looked for Daman Rourke among the men standing hipshot at the bar and the couples dancing in front of the bandstand, pressed closed together, doing that slow dip and drag. Some whores were plying their trade among the joint's few tables, wearing not much but big bolo knives strapped around their waists to keep their johns in line.

Fio was beginning to think the beat cops had steered him wrong, when he finally spotted his partner up among the Negro musicians on the bandstand. They wore John B. Stetson hats, purple silk shirts, and the pointed high-button shoes called Edwin Clapps; all but Rourke, who was still in the suit he'd had on that morning. At the moment only a tall, skinny guy was doing any playing, blowing a deep, moaning bass on a harmonica. Rourke stood next to him in utter stillness, his saxophone idle in his hands, lost to the music and probably high on more than just booze.

Still, Fio felt the ache in his chest ease out in a breath of relief. He'd expected to find his partner on a path of self-destruction, but this was mild compared to what the man could be doing. What he'd been known to do. When Daman Rourke got one of his moods on him, he craved and fed off danger and edgy excitement, and if it didn't come his way naturally, he went out looking for artificial stimulation.

Now, as Fio watched, Rourke lifted the sax to his mouth, licked his lips, took a tight breath, and then he hit a note that would have left an impression on bone.

Fio knew his partner played a jazz horn, but this was the first time he'd ever heard him. What he played on this night was dark music, and deep, like the ocean, and you felt it in your liver as well as your heart. You heard things in it you'd never heard before, things you weren't sure you wanted to go near.

Fio didn't want to imagine what a man had to be feeling to play like that. You let music like that take hold of your guts, he thought, and you could end up at two in the morning putting your gun in your mouth.

Fio watched his partner wend his way across the smoky room, carrying a tin lard bucket full of beer, two glasses, and a bottle of something that would probably leave them paralyzed and blinded if they were only lucky, and dead if they were not.

“Hey, partner,” Rourke said. He hooked a chair away from the table with his foot and set down the booze and glasses.

Fio watched Rourke sit and dip beer out of the bucket and into the glasses, then pour a jigger of whiskey into each glass of beer. On the bandstand the drummer had gone into a solo riff, making the floor vibrate beneath their feet.

“That tune you were playing,” Fio said. “What's it called?”

A smile touched the corners of Rourke's mouth, but his eyes were like two cigarettes burning in the night. “‘Black Snake Blues.’”

“Yeah, well, that snake sure did bite me,” Fio said and then wished he hadn't. He had meant it for a joke, but it had come out sounding too close to a confession.

Rourke was the one to look away. “It's not the music, Fio,” he said after a moment. “It's the memories the music evokes that makes it such a killing thing.”

There was an ache going on in Fio's chest that he didn't like. “What in hell are we talking about anyway?” he said.

Rourke laughed. “Damned if I know.” He nodded at Fio's boilermaker. “Better drink that up before it grows hair on the glass,” he said, even though his own was still untouched.

The band shifted tempo, from jazz back to the blues. A young woman joined them up by the piano. She was startlingly beautiful: soft caramel skin, long hair in tight coils with a lot of bronze in it, and a body that looked poured into the red Chinese silk wrapper she was wearing instead of a dress. She looked familiar to Fio, although he couldn't place her.

It seemed that she was looking right at him, and with such an intensity of feeling that Fio felt hot color flood his face. And then he realized that burning look was not meant for him, but for the man sitting at the table with him. Fio glanced at Rourke's face in time to see him answer her look with one of his own, and then she smiled and blew him a kiss.

“I reckon she knows you,” Fio said, a bit sourly.

“She's my sister.”

The woman was singing now, all about the men who had done her wrong, and in a voice that was as hurting and hurtful as the saxophone had been.

Sister, hunh.

It was possible, of course. White men in New Orleans had taken up colored mistresses since back in the days of slavery. Miscegenation was supposed to be against the law, but human appetites didn't always recognize the civil code, and from what he'd heard of Rourke's daddy, the man had lived by few rules anyway.

So sister, maybe, but still Fio doubted it.

The woman was lost now in her song, her eyes seeing, maybe, all the men of her own she had loved and discarded along the way. In the muted light they glinted gold like a cat's eyes, and again Fio felt that twinge of familiarity.

“A girl that pretty shouldn't be singing such a sad song,” he said, hoping, probably in vain, to get Rourke to tell him more about her.

Rourke only laughed. “That's why they call them blues, partner. They're sad and you get to make them up as you go along.”

Or maybe, Fio suddenly thought, when he called her his sister, he'd been speaking metaphorically. Fio knew that the closest friend in Rourke's life had been a colored man. Fio had watched that man die from a hail of bullets in an Angola Prison cane field and he'd thought that something of Rourke might also have died on that day. Once Fio had dared to ask him why he had made such a good friend of a Negro, and Rourke had answered, “Why do you make any man your friend? Your, I don't know…souls are in tune, I guess.”

The truth was, Fio thought, the truth was he was jealous of a dead man, maybe even jealous of that colored gal who was leaning against the piano and singing about heartbreak, jealous of her even if she really was his sister. The truth was Daman Rourke let few people get close to him and Fiorello Prankowski wasn't one of them.

And such was the man's charm that you forgave him even that.

Like he was forgiving him now…Rourke was pushing his boilermaker around in circles, drawing wet rings on the scarred table and looking like a man whose soul was being consumed by itself, and what Fio most wanted to do was take him home with him and have his wife feed him some of her special pot roast, and maybe even, Fio thought with a sudden inward laugh at both himself and Rourke, tuck the poor boy into bed and read him a bedtime story.

“Where you been at all day?” Fio said instead.

“Paris.” Rourke stopped his fiddling with the glass and looked up. “The one here in Louisiana. I found out our murdered priest was probably born Patrice LaPage, who died in an orphanage fire thirty some years ago, along with her baby boy, and then got reborn again as Patrick Walsh. It's only a feeling, but I think she set that fire, and if she did then she murdered twenty-one souls, including her baby.”

“Man,” Fio said, “that
is
something: A lot of motive for a revenge killing there.”

He tried to think of what that did to the case. They'd just gone from having priests and the whole damn Catholic Church as suspects, to the whole town of Paris, Louisiana. It made his head hurt.

His head had been hurting all day, anyway, what with the way they now had serious, political hot-potato murder cases coming out of their ears.

“Meanwhile, back at the ranch,” he said, “we got shit-all on the Trescher girl's murder. There's a loading dock, a greasy spoon, a sailor's speakeasy, a Chinese laundry, and a sugar refinery all around that warehouse where Bright Lights Studios is doing their filming. But nobody saw her get snatched, even though it happened in the middle of the day, which suggests she knew this guy enough to go off with him willingly.”

“He knows all the Fantastics, and they must all have a passing acquaintance with him,” Rourke said. “And he's been killing them off one by one.”

“Yeah, well, I talked to the captain like you said, and the other girls' parents have been warned. What's left of them.”

“He had to know that once he did Mary Lou Trescher, we'd right off make the connection between her and the other two girls,” Rourke said. “I can't see him going after another Fantastic now unless he wants to get caught. Or unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless it's about more than just the sex and the killing.”

“Scaring Miss Lelourie, you mean?”

Rourke didn't say anything. His thoughts had turned inward, but Fio was relieved to see the wild light had left his eyes.

“If I had any money and was a betting man like you,” Fio said, “I'd put it on someone connected with the movie studio. We talked to most everyone who was at that warehouse yesterday, and a lot of them remember seeing Mary Lou around during the filming, a couple even remember talking to her, but nobody saw her go off with anyone. Of course, it must've been like a goddamn Chinese fire drill there, what with smoke bombs and wind machines and people called grips and gaffers and extras all running around the place. And even though you're supposed to have a pass to get on the set, they had people off the street coming and going and delivering food and booze and stuff all morning. So the upshot of it is: anybody and nobody could've done it.”

The band and the singer—who might or might not be Rourke's sister—were taking a break now, passing a reefer around among themselves and drinking sour mash out of tin cups. A door, which Fio hadn't even noticed was there, opened in the wall behind him. He heard the crack of billiard balls and the rattle of dice in a cup, but by the time he turned to look, the door had closed again.

When Fio looked back around he found his partner studying him, laughter now in his eyes. “What are you doing here anyway?” Rourke said.

Fio rolled his shoulders in a shrug. “Aw, I thought I'd come try to stick a finger in your eye. That way you'd be hurting somewheres different for a change, and you'd have someone else to blame for your misery besides yourself.”

“Remy already told me not to make Titus Dupre into my cross. So I'm not.”

“Yeah, well you do have a tendency to think you're the fuckin' Second Coming, come down to earth to save us all. So when you do mess up, you—What?”

Rourke suddenly had that look on his face that he got when doors started opening for him you didn't even know were there. “What?” Fio said again.

“Nothing…It's just…Why did they crucify Christ?”

“What is this—catechism class?”

“Think about it though. It was supposed to be about taxes and treason, but mostly it was to prove to Him and to the world that He wasn't the son of God.”

“If you say so. And what does this have to do with anything?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, fuck me,” Fio said. “How about another drink?”

Rourke pushed abruptly to his feet and slid his untasted boilermaker across the table to Fio. “Here, have one on me. I'll catch you in the morning.”

“You going on home then?”

“The night's still young. I think I'll go to the Pink Zebra and see if they got a game of
bourré
going on.”

“Aw, jeez, Day. Do you got any idea what you're doing?”

He flashed that smile. That brilliant smile that made it so you just had to love him. “It's like the blues. I'm making it up as I go along.”

The Pink Zebra on Bourbon Street was the kind of speakeasy patronized by college kids who wanted to show they were hep, and by tourists who were under the mistaken impression that they were slumming.

The speak went for the exotic look, starting with the zebra skin on the wall, with its white stripes painted a cotton candy pink. The zebra shared space on the gold-flocked paper with gilded mirrors and a sign that said, NO SPITTING ON THE FLOOR PLEASE. The bar was solid mahogany with a brass railing, and the man behind it sold Manhattan cocktails and gin fizzes, and maybe a little marihuana or cocaine, but only if he knew you.