Wages of Sin (11 page)

“Captain Malone here. Yes, sir, Superintendent. Uh, yeah, there've been some new developments…” He pulled a God-help-me face and waved the detectives out of his office.

They filed out, only to be called back inside a few moments later.

“The papers just broke the story of the murder,” Malone said. “They're selling extras on the street corners right now and they got all the gory details: crucifixion, feet burning—everything but the fact that he is a she. The super's going to get together with the archbishop and talk over what do about this latest wrinkle in this plum-awful nightmare. He wants the meeting done on the hush-hush, and both City Hall and the cathedral chancery are swarming with reporters, so it's going to be at his house on Rosa Park, and he wants you there.”

“Oh, joy,” Fio said, turning on his heel and going back through the door. “There's gonna be enough juice in the room to fry us all.”

“Which is why,” the captain said, “the only two words you need to know are, Yes sir.”

Rourke was about to follow Fio when the captain stopped him. “And that goes double for you, Day,” Malone said. “Don't give them any of your you-can-kiss-my-caboose bullshit. Whatever they tell you to do, you do it.”

Rourke smiled and touched the brim of his hat in a mock salute.

The sawhorse barricades were still up in front of the Criminal Courts Building, but the crowd had surged out into the street to surround a flatbed truck, whose load was covered with a black tarpaulin. The truck driver was leaning on his horn to no avail, and the traffic backing up behind him was honking as well, and the constant, discordant blaring jangled Rourke's nerves.

Several of the Klan men had jumped on the back of the truck and were unrolling the tarpaulin cover. Alone in the Courts Building's brick arched entrance, Rourke and Fio paused for a moment between the stucco pillars to watch. The tarp came off to reveal a high-backed oaken chair with leather straps, and the generator to power it.

“It's not as big as I thought it would be,” Fio said.

It looked plenty big enough to Rourke. The cheers of the crowd were suddenly like hard fists beating against his temples, and then somebody set off a string of firecrackers.

He wasn't sure what made him look up to the roof of the Blue Bayou Hotel across the street. What he saw when he did look, though, was a flash of sunlight off a rifle barrel.

Rourke threw his shoulder into Fio's chest, sending them both to the ground. Firecrackers were going off all around them now, horns blasting and police sirens blaring and people chanting, “Burn, nigger, burn.” They couldn't hear the shots, but pieces of the stucco pillar exploded into fragments above Rourke's head.

Fio's hat blew off. He snatched it as it rolled away from him and slapped it back on his head.

The pop of the firecrackers petered out, although the chanting and the blare of horns went on. Rourke and Fio crouched behind the pillars with their guns drawn, scanning the hotel's rooftop.

A shadow of movement passed across a chimney.

“The bastard's getting away,” Fio shouted.

They rolled to their feet and took off running across the street, dodging cars and wagons and stragglers from the crowd around the truck with the chair. No one else seemed to have even realized that the shots had been fired.

The hotel was small, only six stories, with a fire escape that let down into an alley. Rourke went through the hotel's revolving front door, while Fio ran around to the alley to cut off an escape at the rear.

The lobby had an elevator, a small black wrought iron cage, but the car was already on the top floor. Rourke disabled it by propping open the door, and took the stairs two at a time all the way up to the roof.

The hotel roof was flat, covered with tarpaper and gravel, and it was empty. However, he could see by the chimney a place where the shooter could easily have made the leap onto the lower roof of the apartment building next door. Rourke called down to Fio, telling him to check that building as well, but he knew they were already too late.

He went to the ledge that overlooked the entrance to the Criminal Courts Building. The area was littered with .30-caliber shell casings, from a Springfield rifle, maybe. Using his handkerchief he picked the casings up and dropped them in his pocket. The Ghoul had recently bought a new invention called a comparison microscope for conducting ballistics tests. They hadn't used it much yet, but Rourke still had high hopes for it.

The door to the stairwell squealed open behind him, and he whirled.

Fio emerged, panting hard, his face red. “What in hell is going on here?”

“What are you asking me for?” Rourke said. “You're the one whose hat got shot.”

“My hat got shot 'cause you ducked.” Fio took off his hat and poked his finger through the hole in its crown. “Shit, man, this was a good hat.”

Rourke laughed because the hat in question was ten years old if it was a day. The crown had broken down in the center even before it had gotten shot, and the brim had a tendency to curl up on the edges in damp weather.

Fio gave him a withering look. “My hat gets killed and you laugh.”

Fio placed the hat on his head with exaggerated dignity. He started to turn back toward the door, and Rourke saw that the left upper arm of his partner's beige pongee suit coat was wet and red.

“It looks like more than your hat got hit.”

“Huh?” Fio looked to where Rourke was pointing. He prodded the blood-soaked hole in the sleeve of his coat. “Ow, Jeez Marie and all the saints. I think the bullet's still in there.”

“I told you he was shooting at you.”

“Yeah, well, who is he and what did I ever do to him?” Fio said, looking around the rooftop as if he expected the shooter to leap out from behind the chimney and explain everything.

Weldon Carrigan, superintendent of the New Orleans police force, lived in a gracious antebellum mansion on Rosa Park in the uptown silk stocking district. It was a house he had acquired through marriage, along with a modest fortune that he'd long ago turned into a very large fortune. From the lowest beat rookie to precinct captain, most of the cops in New Orleans were on the pad, and as superintendent, Carrigan's pad was the biggest of them all. All the rackets in the city—bootlegging, prostitution, loan sharking, protection and extortion—they all had Weldon Carrigan, along with much of City Hall, on their payroll.

Weldon Carrigan was other things to Rourke, besides his superintendent. He was father to Rourke's dead wife, Jo, which made him Katie's grandfather, her beloved paw-paw. He was also Rourke's angel, under whose sheltering and uplifting wings Rourke had been given the plum of homicide detective and early promotion up the ranks. Theirs was an elastic relationship, though. Weldon Carrigan had once offered Rourke fifty thousand dollars not to marry his daughter, and Rourke had once let his father-in-law get away with the murder of a crooked cop in exchange for being allowed to keep his own job, and a relatively free hand at running his cases however he saw fit.

Parked in front of the Carrigan mansion was the archbishop's black Jackson Touring Car, and a uniformed chauffeur was rubbing a rag over brass trim that was already bright as a mirror. What with the shooting and then taking Fio to the hospital to get the bullet dug out of his arm, Rourke had been keeping two of the most powerful men in the city waiting for the better part of an hour.

He climbed white marble stairs to the wide, pillared gallery and rang the bell of a door that glittered with beveled glass. A butler showed him down a long hall of black and white marble tiles and into a cozy rear sitting room whose tall windows had a view of the swimming pool and his mother-in-law's splendid garden.

Weldon Carrigan struck a presence equal to his position, with his thick shoulders, his large graying head, and his contrasting black eyebrows that grew like a hedge over gunmetal-gray eyes. He stood at one of the windows with his hands gripped into a fist behind his back.

He waited until Rourke was all the way in the room before he turned. “About goddamn time,” he said.

“And here I was thinking you'd be grateful that I bothered to show up at all,” Rourke said, smiling as he shook his father-in-law's hand. Weldon Carrigan's grip was hard enough to fuse flesh to bone. Rourke took it like a man.

Archbishop Peter Hannity sat by the fireplace in a tapestry chair that had a back like a throne. He was a diminutive man with a nose hooked like a crow's beak, and hooded, piercing blue eyes. He might have been small in stature, but he held a power even greater than Carrigan's, and Rourke knew he would marshal the full extent of that power to preserve the sanctity of the Catholic priesthood, the long black line. Even if that meant protecting a killer.

Rourke bent over and kissed the ring on the fine-boned hand. “Good morning, Your Grace,” he said. He got a stern-lipped, monsignorial nod in return.

A maid in a stiffly starched cap and apron wheeled in a Sèvres coffee service on a silver-plated cart. Rourke sat down in a chair opposite the archbishop, the tufted leather sighing beneath his weight. He studied the man openly as they sipped coffee sweetened with sugar and cream. The sun shone through the tulle-curtained windows, throwing shuddering light onto the priest's face, and Rourke could see the shock there now. He looked fragile as heirloom china, older than his seventy years.

As the archbishop spoke, though, his voice betrayed nothing, and Rourke could almost see the scales tilting back and forth behind the penetrating eyes: what to give away, what to trade. And what to bury deep.

“Do you appreciate what is at stake here, Detective?” the archbishop said.

“I got an idea.”

The mouth softened a little, almost smiling. “Yes, I rather suspect you do. The question, of course, is whether you are right in your idea.” His gaze searched Rourke's face and the scales tipped some more, judging, weighing. “Tell me, then: Do you love God above all else?”

Love? Laughter welled up in Rourke's throat, but he didn't let it loose because he was afraid it was something else. Most days it seemed to him a test of faith just to go on believing in the existence of goodness.

“It is possible, you see,” the archbishop went on as though Rourke had answered aloud, “to love a thing that keeps on breaking your heart.”

“I don't want to be telling you your business, Your Grace,” Weldon Carrigan said. He'd been busying his hands with lighting a long, narrow cigar. He blew its sweet smoke out in front of him now and looked into it with amused eyes. “But if you're going to bribe a man's soul, then you need to know his price. What my son-in-law loves above all else is being a cop.”

Rourke's gaze had gone to the window, to watch a blue jay take a bath in the fountain. The bird was really going at it, flapping its wings and shaking its head, spraying water all over the place, and he wondered if a bird could feel happiness.

“Your priest was tortured,” Rourke said. “The soles of his feet were burned with votive candles and he was hung from a crossbeam in a macaroni factory, with nails through his wrists.”

The archbishop sought Rourke's gaze again and held it while he let a silence build for one beat, two. “And the one who did this evil will face a day of reckoning more terrible than any we on this earth can provide. Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord.”

“I'll concede the Lord His vengeance,” Rourke said, and that time he almost did laugh aloud at his own arrogance. “The truth is what I'm after. Had you known Father Pat was a woman?”

The archbishop's hand jerked up, as if he was reaching for his own throat. Instead, he wrapped his long, thin fingers around the large crucifix he wore around his neck. He closed his eyes and gripped the cross so hard his knuckles whitened. “Known? How could any of us have known? Known and then allowed it to go on and on, all these years. Even now it seems a thing that defies belief and acceptance.”

He opened his eyes and let his hand fall back into his lap. “Yet I should have seen that he was not a true priest. He had a way about him…her. Rebellious, flamboyant. The things he would say sometimes during those homilies of his, and that way he had of celebrating the Mass, throwing open the doors of the church and inviting Jesus on in as if the consecration of the body and blood was some kind of salvation show. He—” His lips pulled back from his teeth as if the word had suddenly burst sour on his tongue. “She…”

He. She. Until Rourke had walked into the morgue this morning and looked down on the naked body of Father Patrick Walsh, he had never truly understood before how the collection of tissues and corpuscles and bones that made a human being was so defined by a pronoun. He. She. To know Patrick Walsh as a priest was to think of him in one way. To know this priest was a woman was to think of him in a wholly different and seemingly incompatible way.

“Yet I've been told Father Pat was well liked, even loved, by all those who knew him, including yourself,” Rourke pressed, feeling a little mean as he watched the skin jump in the papery cheek, the aged hands tremble. The archbishop must have been feeling betrayed by Patrick Walsh in the same searing, elemental way a wife would feel betrayed to discover that her husband had been married to another woman for the last twenty years.

The trembling was in the archbishop's head now as he shook it. “You must stop calling her Father. Patrick Walsh, or whatever this…person's name turns out to have been, was never Father to any Catholic. Priests act in the person of Christ Jesus in the lives of the faithful, they are Christ's disciples on earth, and woman was not created to serve in this role.”

“Perhaps an exception was made.”

The archbishop's mouth tightened and he averted his eyes. “You mock what you fail to understand. If our Lord had wanted women ordained, He would have ordained his own blessed mother, Mary, who was free of sin, but He did not. Patrick Walsh was no priest.”

“And what then of the babies he baptized, the sinners he absolved? He celebrated the Mass, married the faithful, comforted the grieving, and buried the dead. He did those things for twenty years. If he was not a true priest, then in whose name were all those acts of faith and sacraments made?”