Wages of Sin (20 page)

And the best day, maybe, a perfect summer's day, the kind of day made by God just for playing baseball, when Paulie had won the game for them in the bottom of the ninth by hitting one into the stand of cypress trees that marked the “she's outta here” line in right field. Paulie rounding third base and trotting home, his fist pumping in the air and a big grin cracking his face wide open. Looking like someone had just named him king of the world.

A wicked, wicked bargain
…That doddering old priest, Father Delaney—hadn't he said something about a bargain? A devil's bargain.

Rourke put Father Pat's notebook back in his pocket and shuffled through the newspaper clippings, looking for one that he'd only glanced at earlier. It was a
Morning Tribune
article on a proposed renovation project for the roof of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary. The story was accompanied by a photograph of the four priests standing on the church's red-brick steps. It had been a sunny day then, too, the kind of day that would have been perfect for playing a game of baseball. They were all smiling wide for the camera, the priests of Holy Rosary, except for his brother.

The heart has a will and it guards itself well.

Rourke had just given the crucifixion killing case file back to the desk sergeant when the man and woman came through the door into the squad room, and he felt his heart sink even more.

“Mr. Bloom. Mrs. Bloom,” he said as they came up to him. “What can I do for y'all?”

Otis Bloom was a big man, flamboyant in his dress and fussy in his mannerisms. His handlebar mustache and his bald head were both waxed, and today he sported a polka dot tie and a pink carnation boutonniere. He drove a taxcab for a living and ever since Rourke had met the man six months ago, he'd never seen him when he wasn't wearing a long, freshly laundered black duster.

He had an unusual and expensive hobby for a cab driver, though, Rourke remembered. He collected books, in particular signed first editions. Rourke had been in the Blooms' modest shotgun house a couple of times, working on the case of their missing daughter, and he'd envied the man his library, alphabetically arranged on handmade shelves lining the parlor walls.

Rourke had been impressed, too, by Otis Bloom's claim that he'd read all his books, cover to cover. By contrast his wife, Ethel, had always made Rourke think of the little brown wrens that flitted through the oaks at City Park, and Rourke saw now that in the months since the loss of their daughter she had shrunk even more. It was as if whatever had been inside her had gone away, and all the bones and muscle and sinew had collapsed in upon themselves. Her face was as gray as wet ash, and her eyes looked hollow, and a little unhinged. She had reached that place, thought Rourke, where she no longer cared about anything.

Otis Bloom was looking slowly around the squad room and his jaw flexed hard, as if he chewed on his unspoken words. From the little Rourke knew of him, he seemed to be a man who tamped his emotions deep and he'd always had to work at getting out what he wanted to say.

“Mr. Bloom,” Rourke said. “It's hours yet before the execution. Maybe you all should—”

“Has he told you yet?”

Rourke put his hand on the man's shoulder and steered them back to his desk beneath the window. He settled them into chairs and then sat down facing them, leaning over to brace his elbows on his spread knees.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “Titus Dupre hasn't told anyone what he did with your daughter. And the truth is I don't think he ever will now.”

Ethel Bloom's face flinched as though he had slapped her. Otis Bloom stared at his lap, where his gloved hands gripped his black bowler so hard he was crushing the felt.

When he looked back up at Rourke, his eyes were dark with emotion, but his voice remained low and controlled. “Please, Detective, she was our only child. You've got to do something, you've got to make him tell you…because after tonight it's going to be too late. We'll never know what he did to her, where he's put her. We'll never see our little girl again and we'll have no peace the rest of our days.”

Rourke could have told them that they didn't want to see her again. Six months dead, and after what had probably been done to her, no parent should ever have to look at that. Or rather that was what the cop in him thought. The father in him understood that the Blooms had to know what had happened to their daughter, even if that knowledge only brought them pain. Their lives were already one long road of pain, anyway. Everything they'd lived for, everything they'd hoped for, everything that had brought them joy—it had all gone away with their child.

One day last April, sixteen-year-old Mercedes Bloom and her best friend, Nina Duboche, had been seen laughing and talking with the neighborhood chimney sweep on the front gallery of Nina Duboche's house, engaging in a little forbidden flirtation, maybe, with the handsome colored boy who was supposed to have known that his place was to look and want, but never, never to think of touching. That evening Mercedes Bloom had disappeared off the face of the earth. The local precinct cops had put her down as a runaway, until another evening two weeks later when Nina Duboche had started to walk the six blocks from her house to the spring hop at her school's gymnasium and had never gotten there. The following morning, Nina Duboche's raped and strangled body had been found washed up on the riverbank.

Nina Duboche had had the life choked out of her with the kind of weighted rope chimney sweeps used with palmetto fans to clean the soot out of flues, and so Titus Dupre—the boy the girls had been seen flirting with on the day Mercedes Bloom had first disappeared—be-came an early suspect. Within hours, part of their school uniforms, two navy blue tasseled tam-o'-shanters, had been found stuffed beneath the boy's mattress, and colored gossip had him bragging to his friends at a Negro smoke joint the night before about how he'd been having himself some taste of white jelly and it was sweet.

It had taken the jury less than an hour to convict Titus Dupre of Nina Duboche's rape and murder. The whole city believed he'd raped and strangled Mercedes Bloom as well, although her body had never been found.

Ethel Bloom had been sitting quietly in her shell, almost invisible, while her husband and Rourke talked, but now she jerked suddenly and began digging frantically in her purse until she found what she was looking for. She leaned into Rourke to thrust a small, framed photograph into his hands, and he got a powerful whiff of dried sweat and sour gin from her body.

“Show that boy this, Mr. Rourke,” she said, and her eyes held the bewildered horror of someone who thought she had awakened from a nightmare only to realize that the nightmare was really her life. “Show him her face one last time before he dies. If he has any heart left in him at all…Please.”

Mercedes Bloom had had wheat blond hair and a sweet, heart-shaped face that wasn't quite pretty yet, but held a promise that it might become so. Rourke had looked at this photograph often during the early days of the case, and sometimes he'd thought he could see a sadness in her smile and a dark knowledge in her eyes. As if she'd always known that bad trouble would be coming for her someday.

Rourke set the photograph down carefully on his desk. “I was going to go on over to the Parish Prison this evenin' anyway, to see Titus Dupre before I head on home. I'll show him your girl's picture, but I just don't want you all to get your hopes up.”

Ethel Bloom stared down at her hands, where they now clutched her purse with a death grip. Otis Bloom stared off into the distance, his jaw working. Then he got to his feet, gracefully for so large a man. “Come along, Ethel,” he said. “I'm sure Detective Rourke has a lot on his plate this evenin'.”

“But I had to give him the photograph,” Ethel Bloom said in her tremulous, gin-sodden voice. “We decided I should give him the photograph—”

“Yes, darlin'. And so you have.”

Otis Bloom leaned over and took his wife by the elbow, helping her to her feet. It had seemed the simplest of gestures, but for a moment Rourke thought a powerful emotion had flashed across the man's face. Horror, perhaps, that on top of having lost his only child, he was now losing his wife to grief and gin.

This kind of grief, Rourke thought, the bad kind that other people give you, that you don't see coming and never deserved—it ruins you inside. Ruins a marriage, a family, so that it is never the way it was before.

“You take your wife on home now, Mr. Bloom,” Rourke said gently. “I'll see y'all later tonight.”

Otis Bloom nodded, his eyes bright suddenly with held-back tears, his jaw working some more. “You wake up every day and you say, This can't be happening, this nightmare can't still be going on. And then the sun goes down and it's one more day she hasn't come home. She was our little girl,” he said. “Our baby.”

Chapter Fourteen

T
he raw, rancid smell of decomposing flesh bludgeoned Rourke in the face as soon as he opened the door to the morgue. Even with the recent addition of refrigeration in the last few years, the place always reeked. There was nothing like a trip down here, he thought, to remind you that what's left after death is a shell that rots.

The parish coroner was scrubbing blood off his hands at a gray-speckled sink, enveloped in wreaths of cigarette smoke. He looked up when Rourke entered and nodded almost happily. “Ah, Detective Rourke, what an agreeable but not unexpected pleasure it is to see you. I made a wager with myself that you would pay us a visit before the end of the day.”

Since there was no one in the morgue but the Ghoul, Rourke figured the “us” the coroner was talking about was himself and his corpses. Three of the cutting tables were occupied, their contents covered with stained shrouds.

“You will be pleased to learn,” the Ghoul said, drying off his hands on a foul-looking towel, “that I have indeed discovered a few additional things about your crucified female priest, although I do not know how useful they will be to you with your investigation.”

As the Ghoul's bulk lumbered across the room, he waved his hand at an enshrouded body. “By the by, I also managed to squeeze in the preliminary on your Mr. Tony Benato, as per your urgent request. Death was due to internal asphyxia brought about by the inhalation of cyanide through the mucous membranes, along with a considerable amount of cocaine. You will be getting a more detailed report soon, but first things first…”

Rourke joined the Ghoul at the center table, which held the body of the woman known as Father Patrick Walsh. With a touch that bordered on the reverent, the Ghoul pulled the shroud down to her waist. Her torso, cut open from pubic bone to sternum for the autopsy, had already been sewn back together with crude, black stitches.

Rourke looked down at her battered face. The flesh resembled putty, the bruises were black, the cuts bloodless. She'd been a homely woman, but there was something compelling about the nature of her homeliness. A kind of defiance in the raw, brutal structure of bone and cold flesh.

“The direct cause of death,” the Ghoul was saying, “was a coronary occlusion, no doubt caused by the trauma of the crucifixion. She had also—how do you police say it?—been worked over by somebody premortem. I would venture a supposition that the damage was done with a blackjack and brass knuckles.”

“Was the beating done before or after she was hung on the beam?” Rourke asked.

The Ghoul thought a moment, then shrugged. “I could not say. It was not the first time, though, that she had been so brutally pummeled with bone-crunching objects. During the preliminary inventory of the body, I noticed an unnatural bend in the left ulna and so I had her X-rayed. I discovered multiple healed fractures: three ribs, the clavicle, both arms, the left leg. It was hard to tell the age of the breaks, except to say that they were not recent, and they all appear to have been incurred within the same relative span of time.”

“Sweet Jesus. It sounds like she nearly got beaten to death.”

“Indeed, from the extent and degree of her injuries, I would say it must have been a close run thing…She was also suicidal during an earlier time in her life.” The Ghoul picked up the corpse's hand, turning it so that the inner wrist and forearm were exposed. “The wound left by the crucifixion nail makes it difficult to make them out, but these small scars here…they are old hesitant marks. The little cuts a suicide makes while summoning up the courage for the big cut.”

The scars, like scraps of white string, went across the priest's wrist. You couldn't, Rourke knew, kill yourself that way. You had to take the razor or knife or piece of glass, or whatever you were going to use, and slash up the forearm. Up and deep.

So either she hadn't known how to do it right. Or she hadn't, deep down inside, really wanted to die.

Rourke looked at the raw-boned wrist, thinking about the scars, the hesitant marks, and the hole left by a seven-inch spike, thick as a man's thumb. “The killer chose to put the nails through her wrists, instead of her hands,” he said aloud, “but by doing it that way, couldn't he have also ended up killing her quicker? I guess I'm wondering if he could have hit an artery.”

The Ghoul lifted the sheet, laying it back over the corpse with care. “Indeed he could have. Either the radial and ulnar arteries could have been punctured, although the radial lies in the more vulnerable place within the wrist. An injury to either can be fatal if followed by traumatic aneurysm or acute hemorrhaging. In layman's terms: one may bleed to death.”

He looked up at Rourke, his small eyes blinking. “Only no such thing happened in this case. Which rather suggests, does it not, that the killer knew what he was doing.”

“Or maybe,” Rourke said, “the killer just had beginner's luck, and all my fine theories don't mean diddly.”

“No, no,” the Ghoul said, producing one of his rare smiles. “Theories are only useless when they have no basis in fact. It is a fact that crucifixion is a slow, painful death. It is also a symbolic one. There are countless quicker, easier ways to end the life of a fellow human being, yet the killer chose that particular one. He does have a fascinating mind, your killer. I rather hope I get an opportunity to meet him.”