Wages of Sin (35 page)

“You hardly need to ask,” Mama said, answering for her. “Like all the Lelourie women, your sister is delicate down below. You mark my words if this baby doesn't kill her.”

“Oh, surely not, Mama,” Remy said. “You're a Lelourie and yet you've managed to survive the experience twice. That we know of.”

“Don't get cute, missy. Cute does not become you.”

Remy busied herself putting sugar in her coffee so that Mama wouldn't catch her smiling. If she ever got to thinking too much of herself as the glamorous movie star, she could always trust her mama to put her back in her place.

Mama and Belle had wandered into a discussion of all the hazards of childbirth, on top of being delicate down below. Babies strangled by their umbilical cords, Siamese twins, breached deliveries, and the infamous 'Gator Baby, who had come into life with a cracked, leathery hide and a snout. They'd covered all this ground before and yet they never seemed to tire of it

“You remember Maggie, Matilda Dayries's girl?” Belle was saying. “She's the one who always had to be sitting right up in the front pew so Father could see her, and she thought she was God's gift all right, up until she had those twins. One came out white, like it should've, but the other came out black as a coal scuttle. Well,
something
had obviously being goin' on in that family's woodpile.”

“Belle,” Remy said a little too loudly. “What are you still wearing that ol' blue dress for? It looks fit to burst at the seams. Didn't you like any of those new maternity dresses I had sent over from D. H. Holmes?”

“I liked them fine. I'm only saving them, is all.”

What for?
Remy wanted to say, but she already knew they'd been added to the bulging cedar hope chest that lay at the foot of her sister's bed. Everything that had ever come Belle's way, she had put aside in her hope chest, saving it for a future that had passed her by long ago when she hadn't been looking.

Remy heard her name and realized she must have drifted into a reverie while Mama had launched herself into one of her scolds.

“…making a spectacle of yourself in City Park. You do these things without a single thought for
la famille.
”

“Mama's right,” Belle said. “You're going to be sorry if you keep on in this way, Remy. Everybody knows no nice boy will marry a girl who's gone and made a spectacle of herself.”

Remy lifted her shoulders in a small shrug, pretending that they still didn't have this power to hurt her. Knowing that they would always have the power to hurt her.
La famille.
“I doubt I'll ever marry again, anyway. No good seems to come of it.”

No good can ever come from it.

It was a Southern expression that ought to be adopted as the motto of this family, she thought. We go through the motions, we tell our white lies, we touch each other's hands and tender each other promises, and no good ever comes from it.

“I brought something for you all,” she said, taking a sheaf of brochures out of her handbag. “Information on some agencies for y'all to look at later.”

Belle took the brochures from her hand, then immediately dropped them onto the threadbare carpet and burst into loud sobs, as if she'd been saving her tears up all morning, just waiting for the right moment to let fly with them.

“You are just the cruelest thing,” she cried. “Why, all the while growing up you've always wanted what I had, and things haven't changed just because you're a movie star now with your picture in the papers all the time. You're jealous 'cause I'm having a baby and you're not.”

Mama got up and gathered up the brochures. She brought them back to her chair and sat down. She made a neat pile of the brochures in her lap, and then began to tear them up, one by one. “I'll not have the word ‘adoption’ mentioned in this house ever again,” she said.

Remy had not used the word; in fact, she had made it a point not to use the word.

“After all, there's no true shame attached to Belle's condition,” Mama went on, “for the baby's daddy would surely have done the honorable thing and married her, if not for the tragic accident that claimed his life. He was a St. Claire and blood would have told. Blood always tells.”

Remy had to turn her head aside and press her lips together to keep from either laughing or screaming, she wasn't sure which. The baby's daddy would never have done the honorable thing. Aside from the fact that Charles St. Claire hadn't had an honorable bone in his body, he happened to have already been married to another woman, namely herself. And the tragic accident that had removed him from their lives had been his murder with a cane knife out in the old slave shack in back of Sans Souci one night last July.

Belle's sobbing had stopped with the same abruptness with which it had started. The parlor fell back into its customary silence, except for the clink of Mama's spoon against her cup and Belle's knitting needles clicking in tempo with the rain against the windows.

“Belle, you ought to take one of those pralines,” Mama said, the soft French accent from her youth more pronounced now, as it always was when she became agitated. “You must remember you eat for two.”

“I don't know, Mama,” Belle said. “It seems anymore my tummy just rebels at the thought of sweets, as if they were Yankees.” Then she laughed softly, the storm not only over now but already forgotten, and in a strange way, forgiven.

Even though no good had come from it.

And it seemed to Remy then that this house and the women in it had become enclosed in one of those bell jars that you shake to make it snow. The tableau so frozen in place that you could change nothing about it except the weather.

Romeo had stripped naked and fucked her on her bed and now he prowled through her bedroom, touching her things, smelling her clothes. He lifted her peignoir from off a brass hook on the door and buried his face in it. The silky material snagged on his callused fingers, the feather boa around its neck tickled his nose. So fine…all of her was just so fine…

He gave a little start, shaking his head. Had he drifted off somewhere? He checked his watch…No, only a minute gone, maybe two. The horse he'd shot up was galloping through him, stringing him out, but he had it under control. Yeah, under control.

He looked for the letter he'd sent her, but he didn't see it. He yanked her dresses out of the wardrobe, emptied brassieres and panties and camisoles and stockings out of her drawers and onto the floor. Sent his arm sweeping through all the bottles and feminine things that littered her dressing table.
Bitch.
She'd thrown it away, the fucking bitch. Didn't she get it? Couldn't she see that he was trying to warn her? And she should've known the very
act
of reading the letter—the letter he had fucking
bled
over—meant that she now belonged to him.

He prowled the bedroom some more, muttering bitch, bitch, bitch under his breath, looking for the letter, looking—

Jesus fucking Christ.
Pain stabbed up through his foot, pain so bad it brought tears to his eyes. What?…He looked down and saw that he'd stepped on a piece of glass. Christ, he was bleeding like a…like a…

Bleeding all over her was what he was doing. The studio had sent over some new publicity stills and she'd been going through them. He remembered that they'd been on her desk, but now they were scattered all over the floor and he'd gotten blood on one of them. The one where her head was thrown back, and she was laughing, pushing her fingers though her hair. God, how he loved her when she did that thing with her hair…

Something startled him, someone in the house, in the kitchen banging pans. His foot hurt and he looked down, and saw the broken glass and the blood. He turned in a slow circle, looking around him.

“Whoa,” he said, shocked at the mess he'd made, and then he laughed.
How do you like them apples, Remy?

Car tires crunched on the shell drive below. Romeo limped to the window and looked out in time to see her emerge from the Peerless, along with her bodyguard. She turned around and stuck her head back inside the car and said something to Hebert the chauffeur that made him and the bodyguard laugh.

Romeo wanted to kill them.

He watched her walk out of sight and then he heard her footsteps on the downstairs gallery, going around back to the kitchen.

Time to get outta Dodge, he thought. Or…

Or he could stay and fuck her again, there on her bed, on her pink satin sheets that smelled of jasmine and sex. Fuck her good and then give her the only salvation that ever truly lasted.

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

Remy opened the kitchen door to the sizzle of chicken frying in a pan on the old-fashioned black iron stove. “Mornin', Miss Beulah,” she said. “My, it sure does smell good in here.”

The housekeeper was sitting at the round oak table, shelling pecans into a pan, and she looked up smiling. “Don't you know it,” she said. “I just got that chicken fresh at the Poydras Market, plucked and cut up already it was, and wrapped up in waxed paper—land, what will they think of next? All's I had to do was walk in the door with it and plop it right in the fry pan…Did you have yourself a nice visit with your mama and Miss Belle?”

Remy made a face. “I need to fix me a julep and the sun isn't even over the yardarm yet. So what does that tell you?”

“Mmmm-huh,” Miss Beulah said, laughing. She was an ample woman with a shelf for a bosom, but she had a fairy's tinkling laugh. “Like that, was it? Families, they are a trial sometimes. But you got to love 'em.”

“Do we? Yes, I suppose we do.” Remy took a block of ice out of the box and began to scrape it with the shaver. “Shall I make you one?”

“Why, I don't mind if I do.”

Remy made a pitcher's worth of the cocktail: bourbon, sugar, a splash of water, and finally some crushed mint. She put shaved ice into two tumblers and poured the julep over it.

“Have a taste and tell me if it needs more sugar,” she said, handing one of the glasses to Beulah.

“Don't need no taste to know it's just right, honey. You make juleps like you were born to it.”

“I was,” Remy said, laughing. “I'm going upstairs for a bath. I've got that wretched ball to go to later on this evening.”

“The studio done sent over your costume. I hung it up in your wardrobe in the bedroom…You want I should bring up a tray when that chicken's done fryin'?”

Remy went back out onto the gallery, carrying her julep and waving at Beulah over her shoulder. “I'll come back down and eat with you later.”

Sans Souci had been built in the French Colonial plantation house style, and so to get from the kitchen to the upstairs, where the parlors and bedrooms were, Remy had to go outside onto the lower gallery and climb the stairs. As soon as she set foot on the upper gallery and saw the open doors, she knew he'd been in her bedroom.

Was maybe still in her bedroom.

Once, she had been so proud of her nerve that she would fashion deliberate tests for it, just to show off her own courage to herself. She hated that he could do this to her now, that he could make her feel vulnerable and polluted with fear. That he could make her so aware of the beat of her own heart, the pumping of air through her lungs, aware of all the veins and organs, the muscles and bones of her body and how they could all, in an instant, be reduced to a piece of meat on a slab in the morgue.

“Go to hell, you bastard,” she said, loud enough for him to hear, and then she strode through the doors.

It was as if a whirlwind had gone through her things. Or a ravaging beast. Clothes, papers, cosmetics strewn everywhere, figurines and perfume bottles shattered into pieces. Bloody smears glistened on the cypress floor. God, the blood was still wet. While she'd been down in the kitchen, he'd been up here with her things, touching her things, bleeding…

The worst, though, was what he'd done to her bed. He'd ejaculated all over her bed.

Rage, terror, disgust—they all imploded inside her at once and with such force that she swayed on her feet.

Lord, Remy. Will you for God's sakes get ahold of yourself.

The bell box for the telephone rang, and she jumped as if a live wire had been touched to her chest.

The box rang again, jangling on her exposed nerves as she waded through the mess on the floor to her desk. She snatched up the phone and spoke before he could: “I think you're the one who's scared, Romeo.”

She heard his surprise, a little hiccup of a caught breath in the crackling static on the line.

“Remy,” he said, and she felt again that little flash of familiarity at the way he said her name. There was something, something…an accent maybe. “I've been trying to warn you, but you just aren't paying attention. Anytime, anywhere I want to take you, I can.”

“Only in your dreams, Romeo.”

He laughed, a little stuttering
heh-heh-heh
that sounded even more familiar to her than his voice had. The open line crackled with a strained silence, but she could hear his breathing. She thought he was about to hang up and then he laughed again,
heh-heh-heh.

“Did you kiss your cop goodbye this morning, Remy?”

Chapter Twenty-three

L
ieutenant Daman Rourke had been invited by the Ghoul to take another look at the body of Mary Lou Trescher where she lay on a slab in the morgue, and so he stuffed his hands in his pockets, set his jaw, and made himself look.

The chimney sweep's rope had left a deep furrow around the girl's neck. Finger marks from open-handed slaps had left bruises on both cheeks. Her nose had bled, and the blood was caked black now around her nostrils.

Christ, he thought, but she'd been so young.

“The rapes were multiple and particularly violent,” came the Ghoul's voice from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. “There is evidence of petechiae on the face and blood hemorrhaging at the corners of the eyes, and the cricoid cartilage in the neck was fractured in two places—all consistent with death by strangulation, as was to be expected.”

The coroner paused in his dry recitation and looked down, shuffling his feet through the cigarette butts on the stained tile floor. His face was sallow and shiny with sweat. “The bites on the thighs were made postmortem,” he went on. “It is the same killer, Lieutenant. Or rather, I believe so. I am sorry.”