Wages of Sin (14 page)

That they hadn't uncovered all his secrets yet seemed only a matter of time and serendipity, and that, Rourke reflected, was the nature of secrets. You thought you had them deeply buried, and all the while they were working their way through to the light. He could have told Floriane de Lassus Layton that. Perhaps he would before this case was through.

He wondered about her secrets as she prattled on. “Of course, Albert was there before your time, so I suppose your paths never crossed.” She rubbed her hands up and down her arms some more, as if she'd suddenly taken a chill. “Is it hot outside? It looks like it's getting hot.”

“Some,” Rourke said. “The wind's still blowing though.”

She turned away from the French doors and went to a phonograph that sat on a marble-topped console table next to a cocktail tray. She took a record out of its jacket and put it on the spindle. She lifted the needle and started to place it on the record, then set it back down again. Her eyes grew bright. She closed them to hold back the tears.

“Your husband wasn't here last night, was he?” Rourke said. “And neither was your daughter. It was just the two of you having supper, playing Gilbert and Sullivan, you and Father Pat.”

Her eyes tightened at the corners as if she was wincing deep inside herself. “Nothing happened, though. I would swear that to you on a Bible if I must. We ate supper and played the phonograph, and he left at ten o'clock. I will swear it.”

Rourke got up but he didn't go too close to her just yet. She had laid out the mah-jong game on a low table in front of the fireplace. The room smelled of the incense that had been burning in the belly of the plaster Buddha on the mantel. Mah-jong parties were all the rage now, and you could buy a cheap set made out of celluloid in any dime store, but these tiles looked like the real thing. Made in China out of the shinbones of cows.

Rourke felt her presence as she came up next to him, but he was careful for the moment not to look at her. Hunger and wanting and need can live in you, he thought, hide in you, and then come out when you least expect it, when you don't want it, and the hunger to possess another's body doesn't always come with love. When you are in love, though, then your hunger is for your other's whole being: heart and mind and soul, as well as body.

So if you are Flo Layton, wife and mother, chairwoman of the board of Holy Rosary's Catholic Charities, if you are she and you've summoned the courage at last to take your priest, the object of your love and hunger, up to your bed, and you embrace and kiss him in the dark, maybe, and you take off his clothes, touching him now, touching him all over and you reach for him like you reach for your husband, and your priest, your lover, your he, becomes a she…If you were that woman, would you fall out of love in an instant? Would you fall out of hunger?

“It's a silly thing, isn't it,” she said, “to play this game just because everybody else is doing it. Truth to tell the rules are so complicated, I'm not sure any of us even knows what we're about most of the time. Do you play, Detective?”

“No.
Bourré
is my weakness, I'm afraid.”

“That was also my daddy's game. He used to say that how a man behaves at the
bourré
table is how he behaves in life. The cutthroat play, that pure crazy courage to risk it all. The ability to bluff and detect a bluff.”

Rourke looked up from the mah-jong table, looked at her, and he saw that she was crying again.

She exhaled a deep sighing breath, like someone who had been waiting a long time for a dreaded moment and now finally it was here. “So I would be a fool to try to lie to you, wouldn't I? A police detective who plays
bourré.
We were friends, Father Pat and I. Good friends, and close in a strange way. Almost as if we were…” She trailed off, searching for a way to convey her thoughts, shrugging when she couldn't. “You could say I loved him, but it never became the worst of what you are thinking. He wasn't a priest who would ever betray his vows, and I'm not a woman who…I'm not that kind of woman.”

He didn't know if he believed her or not. His gut would have believed her, if not for that look of shame he saw in her eyes.

As Rourke was leaving the Layton house, he noticed that from the gallery you could see the octagonal tower of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, thrusting up through the trees and over the roofs of the neighboring houses. If you had a fanciful imagination, he thought, the tower's clock might seem like a large unblinking eye, a witness to all the lives, both sinful and virtuous, that went on in its long shadow.

He heard the creak of wood rubbing on wood and he turned. A young woman sat in a white wicker rocker among large terra-cotta pots of red and white hibiscus as if she was posing there.

She stood and came toward him. “Detective Rourke?”

Rourke shoved his hands in his pockets, rocked back on his heels, and smiled. It was the smile he'd used unconsciously on all women since he'd grown old enough to figure out how far it could get him. “Mornin', Miss Della.”

She blushed a little, but at the same time there was some kind of calculation going on behind the big hazel eyes that studied his face. “You remember me,” she said. “I wasn't sure you would.”

She looked different than she had on that afternoon six months ago, when he'd interviewed her for the Titus Dupre case. That day she'd been the picture of the Catholic schoolgirl in her wool blue plaid skirt and cardigan sweater. This morning she was all baby vamp in a peekaboo hat, long knotted beads, short pleated skirt, and nude hose rolled down to reveal her rouged knees. She'd rimmed her eyes with a black pencil and greased her eyelids to make them shiny, and painted her lips a bright red, the color of the hibiscus in the pots.

“I remember,” Rourke said, “that you think the classes they make you take at school are nothing but ‘bushwa’ and that you like tennis and going to the movies, and that your favorite film star is Remy Lelourie.”

She laughed and fluttered her greased eyelashes, flirting with him a little, trying out her newfound womanhood. “I bet everybody tells you that, though,” she said. “About being a fan of Remy Lelourie, since the whole world knows that you're her lover.”

Rourke looked around the porch, then leaned into her, lowering his voice almost to a whisper. “Most of that stuff that they put in the magazines…it's all made up.”

“I know,” she whispered back at him. She giggled, catching it with her hand, and she seemed more her age now. Not sixteen going on twenty-one. “Still, a bunch of us girls at school, we belong to the Fantastics in honor of Remy Lelourie. It's like a fan club thing? And I was wondering…I mean, since you do know her…Do you think she'd be willing to give us her autograph?”

“Sure,” Rourke said. “I'll even get y'all some signed photographs. How many of you are there?”

“There's seven of us now.”

Rourke took out his notebook and fountain pen and handed them to her. “Why don't you write down all your names and that way she can personalize the salutations.”

“That'd be swell. Thanks.” She smiled, but that calculating look was back in her eyes, and Rourke had a feeling that she wanted more from him than a little flirtation and a movie star's autograph.

As she took the notebook and pen from him, she looked back over her shoulder as if she'd felt someone spying on them from the parlor windows. Rourke could see Flo Layton, though, and she wasn't at the windows. She'd gone back to the console table with the phonograph, and as they both watched she put a record on the spindle. This time she spun the crank and let the needle touch the disc, and the brassy chords of “The Lord High Executioner” spilled out of the horn.

The girl had a strange look on her face as she watched her mama. Rourke would almost have described it as a look of horrified glee.

“I heard about Father Pat,” Della said, and her voice, oddly flat, did not go with that face. “I heard that he was murdered. Did you come here to talk to Mama about him?”

“It's part of a routine we do,” Rourke said. “Tracking the victim's last hours. I guess he was here last night, but you weren't home.”

“I ate supper at Mary Lou Trescher's, and then I slept over.” She turned away from the window, and Rourke thought he might have seen a shudder pass through her. “I don't like to have supper at home on Fridays 'cause I hate fish. Mary Lou's mama always fixes macaroni and cheese.”

“Did Father Pat come over to you all's house very often?”

She was writing in his notebook now, pretending maybe not to have heard him, but then she shrugged. “He and Mama worked together a lot on the Catholic Charities.”

She gave him back his notebook and pen and then followed him down the gallery steps out to the corner where he'd parked the Bearcat beneath the shade of an elm tree.

She walked all around it, trailing her fingers lightly over the domed hood with its flying chrome ornament and the rakish yellow fenders. “Wow,” she said, genuinely excited now, bouncing up and down on her toes with it. “Is this your car? It's a darb.”

“Yeah?” Rourke laughed. A darb. He'd have to remember that one for Katie.

When the song had fallen into a scratchy silence, Floriane de Lassus Layton cranked the phonograph and set the record to playing all over again. She didn't sing along; she really wasn't that good a singer. Not like Father Pat.

Once, last night, he had tried to do a sailor's jig along with the song. He'd been clumsy on his feet, though, all knocked knees and pointed elbows, and so she had laughed at him and he'd laughed at himself, and she remembered thinking afterward, after their laughter had wound down, This is what it is to be happy.

It had been like looking at the sun through the spray of a fountain, though. Almost too bright to bear, and you think you're seeing rainbows, all dazzling prisms of color and light, but it's all only an illusion. You look away and the rainbows are gone.

An illusion, and a cruel one, in the way that you can fool yourself for one sweet moment into believing that you are not who you are, Floriane de Lassus Layton. Mother to Della, wife of Albert Payne Layton. Lover of a…

The record wound down and she cranked the phonograph and brought the needle back to the beginning again.

Lover of…She watched the record go around and around and around.

Lover…

Her hand lashed out, knocking the needle, and sending it scratching across the grooves in the vinyl with a loud, grating screech.

“Now you've gone and ruined it.”

Floriane de Lassus Layton whirled, her hand flying to her throat, as if to stop a scream. Her husband stood in the doorway. He was a tall, redheaded, freckled-faced man, and when he was angry his freckles stood out on his fair skin like flecks of orange paint.

He had stopped within the shadows of the hall, almost as if he knew how she tried to read his moods, and so she couldn't see his face.

“Bertie,” she said, hating the fear she heard in her own voice. “I wasn't expecting you home until this evenin'.”

He stood where he was for a moment longer, saying nothing, and then he came into the room. He came right at her and she stood rooted to the floor, waiting for him. He went to the phonograph instead, and he put the needle back on its arm lock, and then picked the record off the turntable with both hands.

“I'm afraid, my dear,” he said, “that if you were to try to play this now, every note would sound like a stuttering hiccup.” She watched his big hands, the sinews and muscles in the back of his hands, with their red hairs coarse and stiff as copper wires, watched them tightening until the record broke in two with a loud snap. “Oops, now I've gone and really done it.” He looked at her and smiled, and the freckles were dark on his face. “Never mind, though. I'll buy you another.”

She could feel herself hunkering down inside, even though he hadn't hurt her yet, and might not even hurt her at all. Sometimes when she expected him to hurt her, when she had herself all steeled to bear it, he would treat her so gently, as if she were made of spun glass, and that was the true horror of life with Albert Payne Layton. He was wholly unpredictable.

He dropped the pieces of record on the floor and turned toward her, and this time she would have run if there had been any place to run to, and if a part of her didn't believe that she deserved this, deserved every bit of it, because she was Floriane de Lassus Layton and she had betrayed him, and betrayed herself.

“I heard about Father Pat,” he was saying, “about how he was found murdered early this mornin', and in such a terrible way, too. Crucified on a cross like Christ Jesus himself. Knowing how fond of him you were, I thought you might need comforting.”

He said the words sweetly, but he had taken her hand and his fingers were gripping hard enough to bruise bone. He had done this once before, only that time he'd squeezed until three of the bones had broken.

He brought his face close to hers, close enough that she could have counted his freckles, dark now as spots of blood. She could see traces of talcum powder on his shirt collar. A pimply shaving rash spread up his throat like a blush.

“A homicide detective was just here,” she said, trying to sound normal, as if the tears weren't crowding the corners of her eyes from the pain in her hand. “He wanted to know what time Father Pat left after supper last night. I think he might still be out in the street by his car, talking to Della.”

Albert laughed, but he let go of her hand. “Oh, dear. Poor Flo. Was he so crass as to ask if you and your priest were sleeping together? How humiliating that must have been for you. Don't you just know it, though, that when something like this happens, people's minds always drop right into the gutter.”

He turned away from her and went to the cocktail tray. He picked up a cut glass decanter that had once belonged to Flo's great-grandmama and poured bourbon into a large tumbler. “How about a drink, darling?” he said. “You could probably use one. I know talking to the police always makes me feel like I'm about to break out all over in hives.”

She'd been too scared to notice it before, but she heard it now—the triumph in his voice. His whole body vibrated with it. “Bertie,” she said softly, and unconsciously, she put her hand to her throat again. “What have you done?”