Wages of Sin (39 page)

The director looked at Remy and lifted his shoulders in a very European shrug, then he followed in Max Leeland's wake.

Rourke had gone perfectly still beside her, as if he'd suddenly been emptied of air. She was afraid to look at his face, so she grabbed a glass of punch off a floating tray. The band was doing a drum solo now, and the dancers had formed a conga line. It was wending its way through the knots of conversation and the buffet tables, getting longer and longer as it went along.

Remy flapped her hand in front of her face like a fan and laughed. “My, it smells like a bull ring in here, what with all the snorting and pawing at the ground that was going on between you and Peter.”

“What contract?”

“There isn't one, Day. I'm not going to sign it.”

She took a drink of the punch; it was so sweet she almost choked. When he didn't say anything more, she turned to look at him and got his cop face.

“You think I didn't feel a little of what you were feeling out there on that red carpet?” he said. “There isn't another rush like what you get from being on top of the world. You can't stop being Remy Lelourie because of me. You can't put that kind of burden on me, but more importantly, you can't put it on yourself.”

She looked away, blinking, swallowing down the tears that had been threatening on and off all night. “Do we have to talk about this here and now?”

“Well, hell,” he said, smiling a little. “Did you expect me to wait until after you were gone to show off to you how noble I can be?”

She tried to smile back at him, but she couldn't manage it. He was telling her he understood and had already accepted that it was inevitable she would leave him someday soon, and she wanted to throw up words of denial in the same way you would cross your fingers against a voodoo curse.

“I'm not—” she said, but she got no further. The line of dancers snaked between them, separating them as Rourke took a step back. A man in a pirate's costume jostled Remy, spilling spiked punch down the front of her shroud. Then a hand grabbed her arm from behind, and she thought the person was only trying to steady himself in the crush until she felt a sharp, stabbing pain lance into the crook of her elbow.

She cried out loud, as much from the pain—it
hurt
—as the shock.

Rourke broke through the line of dancers and was at her side in an instant. “My arm,” she paid, holding it up to see what was causing the pain—a short, deep gash near the bend in her elbow that was almost
pulsing
blood.

“Jesus…” He whipped a white silk handkerchief out of his pocket, folded it into a pad and pressed it against the bleeding cut. He held it there for about a minute, pressing hard, although after that first shock of sharp pain, the cut was only throbbing now.

He took her other hand by the wrist and put it in place of his own. “Hold that there and bend your arm up tight against your chest. That's it…” He searched her face, and she wondered what he saw. She felt oddly detached, as if she were watching herself in a film she'd made years ago. “I think you'd better breathe, darlin',” he said.

She breathed and felt so light-headed she swayed a little on her feet, and that made her angry. She was
not
the fainting type.

He brushed the hair back off her face and then trailed his fingers down her cheek and along the line of her jaw. “Remy. Jesus, baby…I hate to ask this, but can you tell me what-all you saw while it was happening?”

She closed her eyes to replay it in her mind. “It happened so fast, it was like getting a glimpse of a room by a lightning flash on a dark night. It was some kind of knife, but a strange one. It had a hooked point on it, like a can opener. And his sleeve…I got an impression of black and white.” She opened her eyes, a little surprised to realize how much it hurt to think that someone she knew could have attacked her in that way. “I think he could be one of the harlequins, Day.”

“The damn place is half full of harlequins.”

Although, oddly, as they looked around the press of people closest to them, those dancing and the others chatting and drinking in their little groups, there wasn't a single harlequin. She did see Garrison Hughes of
The Movies,
though. The reporter waved and lifted his camera for a shot, and her cop went right for him.

“Hey…” he said, retreating a couple of steps, but Rourke kept coming.

“Hey…” Hughes turned and ran, pushing his way roughly through the crowded lobby, with Rourke on his heels and Remy following close behind.

Hughes disappeared into the men's toilet facilities, and Rourke went in after him. Remy stopped outside the door, hesitating, and then she heard the reporter's voice, high-pitched and cracking on the edges. “I got a right to be here. I'm with the press. They
want
me here taking pictures, for crissakes.”

She pushed the swinging door open and went in. “Don't hurt him, Day.”

“I wasn't going to,” he said, looking wounded that she'd even think it. He was leaning up against the sink, his hands braced on the porcelain behind him. Garrison Hughes was standing across the room, by the urinals. Her cop was smiling, though, and his smile could be scary.

“I want you to take pictures, too, Hughes,” he said. “In fact I'll pay you a hundred bucks if you take some pictures for me tonight.”

The reporter's mouth opened as if he'd been punched, and even Remy was surprised. To pay a guy a hundred dollars for a couple of hours work was a lot of money, even for Rourke, who supplemented his detective's salary by playing the cards and the ponies and being good at it.

Garrison Hughes stared at Rourke a moment longer, then his head snapped around to Remy as his reporter's instinct kicked in. His eyes widened a fraction as he took in the way she was holding her arm and the drops of blood splattered on the white tile floor. “Holy cow…”

Rourke pushed himself off the sink and took a couple of steps toward the reporter, moving like a boxer dancing up to his opponent. “You could be a world of help to Miss Lelourie and the police if you would go around the lobby this evenin' and take a picture of everybody you see wearing a harlequin costume and then get their names, if you can.”

The reporter's gaze clicked back and forth between them, then he nodded. “Yeah, I can do that. Everybody and his brother wants their picture in
The Movies
and their names spelled right. I also want the story, though. Exclusive. And on top of the hundred bucks.”

“Sure,” Rourke said, and he smiled again. “Only I decide when you get it.” He cocked his head toward the door. “Now, beat it.”

Remy could almost see the gears and wheels turning in the reporter's head. He could trust that they were playing square with him and maybe get the scoop of a lifetime. But with every moment he held back what little story he already did have, he risked getting scooped by someone else.

He finally nodded, a bit reluctantly. “Okay. But how and when do I—”

“I'll find you,” Rourke said.

He waited until the door swung shut behind the reporter's back before he went to her. “Let me look at that again,” he said, taking her arm and gently turning it so that the cut was exposed to the hanging glass globe lights. “It's pretty deep. Maybe a doctor should be taking care of it.”

Now that the wound wasn't welling so much blood, Remy could see that she'd been punctured, not slashed, by the odd little knife. It looked like it should be hurting worse than it was now. “I don't know,” she said. “It's almost stopped bleeding and the minute I walk into a hospital somebody'll recognize me and there'll be a fuss kicked up and it'll get in the papers.”

“Yeah, okay. You'll be okay,” he said, but his hands were touching her all over, her neck, her waist, her upper arms, before settling on her shoulders.

“He's winning, Day. I'm scared now.”

“Jesus…” His arms tightened their grip on her shoulders, then he leaned forward until their foreheads touched. “Let's get out of here. I'm taking you home with me and you're moving into the Conti Street house until this is over.”

They left the Saenger Theatre by a back service door onto Rampart Street. The street lamps and shop signs and awnings all dripped with the wet, but a moon haloed with rings was trying to shine through the clouds. The air, clean and sweet-smelling from the rain, was a little cool and Remy huddled under her bat cape.

Here, around the corner from the red carpet, hardly anyone was on the street. A pair of squad cars was pulled up to the curb, their engines idling, and three uniforms were standing alongside, drinking coffee they were spiking with something illegal out of a flask.

Hebert wasn't due to bring the Peerless back for another couple of hours, but Rourke's Conti Street house was only three blocks away, so he took Remy's hand and they began walking.

They heard a shout behind them and turned to see another patrolman come running around the corner from Canal, holding his nightstick down at his waist to keep it from slapping his legs.

The patrolmen yelled something and then followed it up with, “Go, go, go!” Two of the cops standing by the cars hopped into one and it peeled away within seconds, lights flashing, siren blaring.

Rourke let go of Remy's hand and reached into his coat pocket as he started toward the two remaining cops, and Remy saw the strap of his gun's shoulder holster.

“Evenin', Detective Rourke,” one of the patrolmen said, recognizing him before he could produce his shield. “Miss Lelourie,” the cop added, a flush staining his already ruddy cheeks. “How's the party?”

“Swinging,” Rourke said. “So what's going on?”

“Aw, a bunch of the Klan boys took it into their heads to go nigger-knocking over in the Dryades neighborhood. The foot patrol over there called in on the box, said they'd been mixing it up with some colored boy in a Felicity Street speakeasy and things were starting to get out of hand.”

“Goddammit. Okay…this your car? 'Cause I'm taking it, but I want y'all riding along with me,” Rourke said. He took a half step toward the remaining squad car, then turned back to her. “Listen, I got to…The Dupre house is on Felicity.”

He stared at her, not really seeing her, but playing scenes through in his head. She knew he wouldn't want to leave her behind with Romeo maybe still on the loose inside the theater, but he wouldn't want to be taking her with him into an unruly mob of Klansmen either.

Before he could make up his mind, Remy went around him, opened the door to the squad car, and got in.

Chapter Twenty-five

R
ourke drove, punching up the siren as he turned onto Canal Street and headed toward the river with the gas pedal pushed to the floor. The beams of the squad car's headlamps cut through a drizzly rain that glistened like spun glass. The city's neon lights looked like ghosts in the mist.

The Dryades neighborhood was mostly Victorian-era houses full of working-class Jewish and Italian and colored families. The area for a couple of blocks on Felicity Street between St. Charles and Baronne was where the Negro wives and mamas came to do their shopping and the men did their drinking.

They saw the trouble the minute they turned onto Felicity from St. Charles. A loud, tough knot of about twenty men flexed and bulged like a muscle in front of a wisteria-covered brick building that had been a school in its glory years but was a low-down smoke joint now. The smoke joint was between a colored theater and a shuttered hardware store, and as soon as Rourke pulled the squad car up to the curb, siren wailing and tires screaming, the lights on the movie marquee went out.

Rourke slammed the gearshift into neutral and was jumping out of the car while it was still moving. The other two cops were only a couple of seconds behind him and pulling their nightsticks out of their belts.

The knot of men in front of the smoke joint, if they were Klansmen, weren't wearing their white hoods and robes. A couple were armed with fence slats and one guy looked like he had a baling hook, but most just had green quart bottles of beer in their hands. They hadn't scattered, though, when the squad car pulled up, and the beat cops who'd called in the disturbance and the first squad car were all strangely nowhere in sight. Trouble was hanging in the air like a bad smell.

Rourke took a couple of steps toward the trouble, then he came back to the car and stuck his head in the rear window. He had seen Remy Lelourie stare death in the face and laugh, so he shouldn't have been surprised now to find her staring into one of those little round mirrors that women carried around with them everywhere and putting on lipstick. She had, he saw, removed her fangs.

“Remy—”

“Don't worry, Day,” she said, running the pad of her little finger along her lower lip. “My timing is impeccable, I never miss my marks, and I certainly do know how to steal a scene.”

“Right,” he said, straightening and backing away a couple of steps, and wondering what in hell she was talking about.

The knot of men in front of the smoke joint let out a collective noise that sounded like a growl. Rourke unsnapped his holster and took out his gun, but he carried it with his arm hanging down at his side, the gun's muzzle pointed toward the ground.

The two patrolmen walked a pace or so behind him and he said to them low and soft, out the corner of his mouth, “I'm probably going to have to run a bluff you could drive a truck through, so don't y'all go shooting or swinging your sticks at anybody. Not unless I'm hollering and going down.”

As they got closer to the smoke joint, Rourke saw that a chimney sweep's paraphernalia was scattered along the gutter: brooms, brushes, weights, coils of rope, and bundles of twigs. The black silk top hat was crushed flat and smelling like it had been peed on.

Rourke passed by a street lamp and his shadow leaped forward ahead of him, onto the sidewalk. The men on the back end of the knot saw him, or felt him, coming and they melted out of his way without resistance.

Cornelius Dupre was in the middle of the knot. He had put up a fight, by the looks of him, and he was still fighting. He bucked and heaved and kicked out against the two men who had him by each arm. One was a big old redneck-looking guy with a pot gut, jowls hanging down to his chin, and eyes the color and sheen of wet mud. The other man had one eye that was dead and receded into the socket, and dried spittle whitened the corners of his mouth.