Wages of Sin (34 page)

When they had first sat down, Rourke had positioned his chair so close to hers that their knees were almost brushing. Now he leaned closer as if he would touch her or hold her in comfort, although he did neither. “The heart has a will of its own, though,” he said, “and it guards itself well.”

She smiled a little. “That sounds like something Father Pat would say.”

“It was something he wrote. Or close to it anyway.”

She smiled again, then looked away, toward a pair of mockingbirds who were squabbling among the fallen crushed husks of a pecan tree. “I kept my promise, though, Lieutenant Rourke. For many years.”

She had not been able, though, to stop her thoughts, or the little flashes of desire she would feel for a shop girl or the mama of her daughter's playmate. She confessed these sins to her priest, Father Pat.

“They were sins against the Holy Catholic Church—he never said they weren't. But somehow when we talked about it, I stopped feeling so ugly inside. He showed me how God loves each of us just as we are. That He wouldn't have made it possible for us to be a certain way and then despise us for it.”

The morning light was gentle on her mahogany hair and the round, smooth paleness of her face. It was easy, Rourke thought, to imagine God creating such a creature and being pleased with and forgiving of his creation. And then you remembered that He had also made the creature who had nailed one of His priests to a crossbeam.

“I think for a time I even found contentment,” she was saying. “I thought, This life is what you have, Flo, and there is no point in grasping for something other.”

“And then you joined Father Pat's club and met Miss Poule.”

“Oh, yes…” The face she turned to him held both wonder and sadness, as if a mystery she'd carried inside was finally working its painful way out. “It happened in an instant. And it was then that I realized I had not been holding true to a promise, I'd only been waiting, and one look at her dear face and the waiting was over.”

Inside the house the telephone rang, and Flo's hands, which had been making little pleats in the lap of her lounging pajamas, spasmed into a fist.

“Tell me about the club,” Rourke said.

“One day a few weeks back…” She paused to smear the tears off her cheeks, then looked at her fingers as if surprised to find them wet. “One day Father Pat came over to the house to fetch back the Charities' yearly accounts book and he saw…Mr. Layton can be mean sometimes, and Father Pat saw the evidence of that on my arm. He told me about the club then and asked me if I wanted to help out with it. I think he was hoping that I'd make use of it myself someday, but that was never to be.” She tried to laugh, but the sound she made popped like a wet bubble. “I've never been a particularly courageous person.”

“It must have taken some courage, surely, to work with Father Pat and his club.” He leaned into her again and this time he took her hand. “That was what y'all were doing the night he was killed, wasn't it?” he said, holding her hand but putting just the hint of the cop in his voice. “Helping some woman to escape her man.”

She started to pull her hand free of his and then stopped. “I didn't exactly lie to you, sir. Father did leave my house at ten that night, but I was with him. We met a woman with a baby under the clock at D. H. Holmes's and we brought her here for a while, before we put her on a train for…put her on a train, and then we went our separate ways. The last I saw of Father Pat, he'd just crossed the street to catch the streetcar back to the rectory.”

“Who was the woman you put on a train?”

“I can't tell you.”

Rourke leaned into her, closer still, intimidating her a little with his size. “Mrs. Layton, you are going to have to. The woman's husband may be Father Pat's killer.”

“No, I truly mean I cannot tell you. We volunteers are never told their names, or where they're going. We just help them with changing clothes and feeding them and calming their nerves. Cassie…Miss Poule knows what their final destination will be, because she makes all the arrangements—getting them jobs and places to live, coming up with their new names, and getting things like the made-up birth and baptismal certificates. But only Father Pat ever knew
who
they were.” She tried for another laugh. “He was always calling them all by the same name. Mary. He would say, ‘Don't be afraid, Mary. This is the first day of the rest of your life.’”

While they'd been sitting in the courtyard the morning sky had started to cloud over. A breeze had come up, smelling of the coming rain and of omelets and cush-cush cooking in the kitchen. Rourke gave her hand a final squeeze, then let it go. He leaned back into his chair, putting space between them again.

“What will become of us now?” she said.

“You'll be all right,” he lied.

What would happen, he thought, was that they would get a warrant for Father Pat's club, even though there probably weren't any records anyway, except for what had been in the priest's head. So they would try to compel Flo's lover to tell what she knew, but Cassandra Poule would probably go to jail rather than betray the new identities and whereabouts of the women who'd been given a ride on her railroad. The club, though, whose existence had been dependent on its secrecy, would cease to exist.

And the world would find out about Cassandra Poule's latest “companion,” and Floriane de Lassus Layton would be destroyed. Father Pat might not have intended for it to happen, but he had given his Flo the strength and self-knowledge to come to this house, and then he had left her to face the consequences alone.

Father Pat. Rourke wondered if he…if she…had felt desire for either of these women, and if either one or both had felt desire in return. He had asked Flo Layton once if she and Father Pat had been lovers; to ask it of her again now would be a revelation he wasn't prepared to make to her just yet.

It was a road he might have to go down eventually, though, with both Mrs. Layton and Cassandra Poule, but Rourke had had another thought that he wanted to pursue first. Something that had almost come to him while he'd been talking to that doddering old priest, Father Delaney, on the rose-framed kitchen stoop of the rectory on Saturday. Something that had just come back to him now while Flo had been talking about the club and her role in it.

“The Catholic Charities yearly accounts book that Father Pat came to collect from your husband that day—what's it like?”

She'd picked up her coffee, cold by now, but she wasn't drinking it anyway. She was staring down into the cup as if it contained her salvation, and at his question she looked up at him, blinking in confusion. “What? Oh…why, it's bound with expensive green leather and has these pretty gilded pages. Father Ghilotti gave it as a gift to the Charities last Christmas.”

Old Father Delaney had talked about devil's bargains and he'd kept asking Rourke if he'd come for the book. But it wasn't Father Pat's appointment book he'd been talking about; it was the accounts book for the Catholic Charities.

It helps to know where the bodies are buried, Father Ghilotti had said. Somehow he had found out about the club, and it would have been his duty as Holy Rosary's pastor to shut it down. The Church could never countenance an organization that was for all intents and purposes fostering the dissolution of the blessed sacrament of marriage. But Father Pat had discovered a buried body in turn, something in the Catholic Charities' accounts. And so they had made a trade, he and his pastor, a body for a body.

Only Father Pat had been the one to turn up on a slab in the morgue.

Out in the street a woman strolled by, singing the delicious praises of her banana fritters just as the cathedral's bell began to toll, calling the faithful to the daily morning Mass. And as if the bell had been a tocsin for all her coming pain, Flo Layton uttered a little cry and bent over, clutching at her belly while harsh sobs racked through her, for a minute, two, then she seemed to grab hold of herself from within.

She straightened slowly, rubbing the tears from her eyes with her fists like a child. “Heavens,” she said. “What you must think of me, Detective. Every time we are in each other's company, I end up falling into utter pieces. It's just…I shall miss him so. He had this way of listening that was a gift, like a beautiful singing voice, or an artist's eye. He could make you believe that not only did he forgive you all your trespasses, but that he loved your soul. And the way he loved you, it made you feel chosen and sheltered.”

She turned to Rourke. Her face was soft in the morning light. “You are a lot like he was, Detective. In the way you have of prying open the human heart. It must make you good at what you do.”

It was sometimes what solved the toughest cases, Rourke thought, when you started prying open the secrets of the guilty and you found the heart of a murderer. Sometimes, though, on the way to catching your killer, you had to rip open the hearts of innocent bystanders along the way. And because everyone lives behind a tissue of lies and secrets and illusions, and even though you don't want it to happen, you sometimes can end up destroying the innocent simply through your own ruthless efficiency.

Sometimes, Rourke thought, truth can kill just as effectively as a bullet or a knife.

It was an image he didn't like remembering, but he deliberately called it to mind now: the priest hanging by the spikes through his wrists, the beaten face, the burned feet. Usually when a killer killed he was being driven by a need or a compulsion to wipe his victim's existence off the face of the earth. Father Pat's killer, though, hadn't only been after ending Father Pat's life. He'd been trying to break the priest open, to get at his secrets.

The damn, persistent, and crazy-making question, though, was still: which secrets?

Romeo watched his own true love emerge from a chauffeured Peerless touring car the color of a midnight sea. Her bodyguard got out of the car's front seat and walked with her to a scrolled iron gate. She went through the gate alone, though, and the guard took up a wide-legged stance next to a fence that was all a-tangle with overgrown honeysuckle vines.

The bodyguard was fucking hysterical. An ex-prizefighter with chewed-up ears wasn't going to save her. Only Romeo could do that. Of course the press agents would milk the bodyguard angle for all it was worth once they got hold of it.
Remy Lelourie's life threatened by mystery Romeo
…Yeah, he liked that. Mystery Romeo. Maybe he ought to write the copy himself.

The Peerless was hysterical, too. A movie star's perk, courtesy of Bright Lights Studios. Romeo had taken a look inside the…hell, you really couldn't call it a car. It was an English country estate on wheels. All mahogany and leather and quadruple-plated silver trim. It even had Axminster carpeting on the floor, and cushions of Italian brocade with silk-tinseled velvet borders.

Romeo laughed. He had fucked her on the leather and Italian brocade back seat of that car once, and he'd often wondered what Hebert the chauffeur thought when he'd found the evidence of the dirty deed later.

Romeo stood now behind the concealing leaves of a banana tree, watching while the love of his life followed a path from the gate to a dilapidated raised cottage with flaking paint and cardboard in some of the windows. Watching her stop and turn her face up to the sky, enjoying the cool pause before the first raindrops fell.

Her gray coat matched the sky, and he thought it made her look…He'd been about to think
drab,
but Remy Lelourie wouldn't look drab in sackcloth and ashes. She was looking…well, subdued. Yeah, that was the word. But then Remy always looked subdued when she visited her mother and sister.

Romeo had to take it on faith that Remy's mother and sister lived in the house, since he'd never actually laid eyes on the women. Their neighbors up and down Esplanade Avenue claimed they were honest-to-God recluses and had been for forever, ever since old Mr. Lelourie had deserted the wife and kiddies for another woman. This trauma was always spoken about in whispers, but as if it were also possessed of capital letters. The Scandal.

Because of The Scandal, the Lelourie women—mama Heloise and baby sister Belle—had entombed themselves alive in typical Southern blueblood fashion. Just the two of them in that ramshackle old house, alone with themselves and with all their bitter gripes and sour grapes, going on twenty-eight years.

Just then the front door to the ramshackle old house opened beneath a mysterious hand, and Romeo strained to get a look before Remy disappeared inside, but all he saw were shadows.

Romeo grunted with satisfaction, though. They were home—hunh, as if they fuckin' wouldn't be—but he could count on her to be staying for at least an hour now. It was probably some Creole etiquette thing going back umpteen generations, that whenever you visited
la famille
you stayed for at least an hour.

Romeo smiled. He had to leave her now, but he liked knowing where she was and what she was up to when he wasn't around.

Mama was the one to answer the door this morning, to fuss with Remy's hat and gloves and umbrella, and talk about the weather. “I was just telling Belle, it's going to be one of those long, cold, silent rains…Why don't you do the honors with the
café,
Remy dear? Belle's ankles are all swollen up today.”

They took up their usual places in the parlor. Mama on the red-velvet chair next to the empty fire grate, sitting slender and straight-backed in her high-necked bodice and long black skirts from another era. Her blond hair and gray eyes fading some now, but her face still high-bred and timeless.

Belle on the black horsehair settee beneath a window enshrouded in lace panels that were tattered and yellow with age, knitting a little yellow cap and resting the cap on a belly that was five months full of baby.

Remy poured the thick black chicory coffee and hot milk together in two steady streams into the cups. She handed one to her sister, along with a smile. “You look tired today, honey. Are you sure you're getting enough rest?”

Belle had been given her nickname as a child because of her prettiness, but in the last few months her face had turned sallow and drawn, as if the baby were sucking all the life out of her. Her hair, once the color of summer apricots, now looked so orange that Remy wondered if she was tinting it.