Wages of Sin (27 page)

“Does this woman's husband know she's fucking her priest?” Rourke said.

His brother stared at him, breathing hard, and looking as if he hadn't been able to keep up with the abrupt change of subject. “God, no!” he finally blurted. “I mean, I'm not…I never said I was doing that with her. I thought you understood. We're friends, intimate friends, she and I. But we've never been intimate in bed.”

“Uh-huh,” Rourke said.

Paulie looked around the vestry wildly, as if in search of someone who would come to his defense. On a table, close to where he stood, was the gold-plated ciborium that he'd used during the Mass, the vessel that had held the consecrated Hosts. He seized it and held it out to Rourke, his arms shaking.

“I will swear on the body of Christ—”

“Don't.” Rourke took the ciborium and set it back on the table. There were apparently still enough shreds of his childhood faith left clinging to him, for him to fear such a blasphemy. “Don't do that,” he said again.

The air in the vestry felt violated. Paulie stepped back to lean against the wall, still breathing hard, but Lieutenant Daman Rourke wasn't really seeing his brother anymore. He was thinking suddenly that maybe somebody had screwed up—the woman's husband, or Tony the Rat, or maybe the killer himself. Maybe Paulie was the priest who was supposed to have been found crucified on a beam in an abandoned macaroni factory.

Paulie's head moved, looking toward the door, and Rourke realized that for the last few seconds heavy feet moving in a hurry had been pounding outside the vestry.

Fiorello Prankowski knocked and pushed the door open, both at the same time. “What is it?” Rourke said at the look on his partner's face. “Another crucified priest?”

“Another girl. Raped and strangled with a chimney sweep's weighted rope.”

Chapter Eighteen

R
ourke spotted Fio waiting for him at the top of the levee, beneath the green plumed shade of a willow tree.

He'd had to take a detour on the way to the crime scene to drop Katie off at her grandparents' house, where she often spent a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon after Mass anyway. Now he parked his Bearcat behind the Ghoul's chauffeured green Packard and got out.

Before he climbed the levee, Rourke paused to look across the street. He saw a trucking garage with signs advertising that it was for sale, a small iron foundry, a rag and bottle warehouse, and an old stable. On Sunday morning, this seedy wharf area was mostly empty, but any other day of the week it was a bustling part of the waterfront.

He turned and sprinted up the grassy slope. A wind smelling of musky Mississippi River mud pushed against his face. In the distance, he could hear a ship's horn blowing across the water. A white crane took flight from the top of the levee, into a sky the color of souring cream.

The batture—the low-lying land on the river side of the levee—was littered with a squatters' colony of flotsam houses, whose occupants scratched out a living by fishing, gathering driftwood, keeping pigs and chickens, and making wicker furniture out of the batture's willow trees. A wrecked tugboat lay among the ramshackle houses on its side in the mud, leaking rust and green slime.

The river was a lazy swell of brown water this morning, and the body lay sprawled at the edge of the tide, with the Ghoul looming over it like a vulture.

“It appears to be a dump job,” Fio said.

For a moment the dead girl on the muddy riverbank went out of focus for Rourke, as if he were trying to peer at her through water. He widened his eyes and made himself breathe. “He's thumbing his nose at us, the killer. He did her last night while Titus Dupre was being executed, and then he made sure he put her where she'd be found first thing this mornin'.”

Fio took a notebook out his pocket and flipped through the pages. “A…Mrs. Trescher telephoned the Second Precinct last night around nine to say that her daughter, Mary Lou Trescher, had gone missing. The body matches the girl's description, down to the little mole between her eyebrows.”

They scrambled down the levee, the ground giving like a wet sponge beneath their feet. Nate Carroll and his partner were interviewing an old Negro downriver, a fisherman from the look of his scale-splattered dungaree overalls.

“He's the one found the body,” Fio said.

The man had a rag tied around his coiled gray hair to keep the sweat out of his eyes, and his old man's arms were webbed with veins. He was doing a lot of talking and whatever he was saying had the two cops laughing.

The girl was naked and she'd been brutally raped. The rope the killer had strangled her with was still wrapped around her neck. Her mouth was open wide, as if in a scream that would be forever caught in her throat. Savage bite marks ripped the flesh high up between her thighs.

“It makes you feel so fuckin' helpless,” Fio said.

Rourke turned and walked away, going downriver. He felt the skin of his face tighten and flex, and something popped in his head, cutting off all sound. Like last night, after they'd executed Titus Dupre.

He could see the branches of the batture willows dancing in the wind and a pair of seagulls squabbling over a mess of fish guts. A paddle-wheeled ferryboat churned across the river, but they all made no sound.

And then he caught an echo…no, not so much an echo as an
impression
of Fio saying, “Could be a copycat.”

Rourke shook his head, and the movement made his ears pop, and he could hear again. His throat, though, burned now as if he'd been swallowing sand. “The bites never made it into the papers or any of the court testimony,” he said.

“Yeah but, you know…Cops talk.”

Nate Carroll and his partner, finished with the witness, had drifted back over to the body.

“Hey, Day,” Nate called out. “You know this girl? She looks a little like Remy Lelourie.”

Rourke walked back over to take another look. “I don't know. Maybe…”

The grass in the front yard was thick with mockingbirds, and Al Jolson singing “Swanee” was coming out the open window. The house, half of a double shotgun, had seen better days. The porch stairs were spongy, and the scrollwork was badly in need of a new coat of paint.

The woman who answered the doorbell was shaped and colored like a brown hen. The precinct report had said she was a widow who worked the last shift in a Piggly Wiggly grocerteria. She was wearing her salesclerk's uniform of black skirt and white blouse, but they were stained and wrinkled, as if she'd slept in them. Her face was raw and puffy from crying.

At some time, though, during the long hours of last night, while she'd waited for her daughter to come home, she'd put her hair up in tight pin curls and pulled a pink hair net over her head. So when she opened the door and saw the two cops standing on her front porch, her hand shot to her head in embarrassment that any stranger would see her in such a state.

“Mrs. Trescher?” Rourke said.

Mrs. Letitia Trescher's idea of interior decorating was to mount a massive attack on all exposed surfaces with vases, figurines, and what-nots. A surfeit of pillows crowded the sofa and chairs in the small parlor, and numerous prints vied for attention with the gold-flocked wallpaper.

She led them with leaden feet into the parlor, and then went to the radio and turned off Jolson in mid-croon. “I just couldn't stand the silence anymore,” she said.

A vigil light flickered on the fireplace mantel before a photograph of a man in a military uniform. On a nearby pier table was another pair of photographs in matching frames: of a young man standing next to an oil rig and of the dead girl taken a few years back, on the occasion of her confirmation.

Mrs. Trescher twisted her hands in her skirt, watching Rourke while he studied the girl in the photograph, and when he looked up at her, he knew she would be able to see the horrible and unbearable truth on his face.

A sound like the cheep of a dying bird erupted from her throat. She swayed on her feet, and Fio, who was closer, wrapped his arms around her and led her to a puce mohair sofa. She clung to him, sobbing noises that were barely human. Fio looked over her head at Rourke, his face craggy and bleak.

“May I take a look at your daughter's bedroom?” Rourke said, when he couldn't bear it anymore. She lifted her tear-sodden face and nodded, but he wasn't sure she'd really heard him.

The girl's bedroom was off a kitchen that smelled of burning coal and souring milk. A bowl of soggy corn flakes sat on the table. He could hear Fio talking in the parlor now, telling the woman some of how her daughter had died.

The bedroom was only large enough for a small white iron bedstead and a maple wardrobe with matching dresser. It was cheerful, though, with yellow chintz curtains and rose-sprigged wallpaper.

Rourke hadn't known exactly what he'd come in here looking for, but he found it within minutes—propped up against a ballerina music box on the dresser. A photograph of nine young, smiling flappers in short dresses and cloche hats, standing in front of a movie theater. Mary Lou Trescher had one arm wrapped around Nina Duboche's waist and the other around Mercedes Bloom, and if his gut hadn't already been certain, this confirmed it.

The same killer had done all three of them.

“They called themselves the Fantastics,” Mrs. Trescher said from the doorway. Her face was flushed and spotted as though she had a fever, and she jerked slightly each time she breathed. “It was just a silly little club in honor of the movie star Remy Lelourie, but the girls had such fun with it.”

From behind her, Fio looked a question at Rourke, and Rourke nodded. “May I keep this?” he said to the girl's mother, already slipping the photograph into his coat pocket.

“Oh, please. Please take whatever you need to…” She finished the sentence with a wave of her hand, and then she stopped, her eyes widening and filling with fresh tears. “Oh, dear God. She isn't coming home, is she? She's gone. She's gone…”

“Mrs. Trescher,” Rourke said gently. “When was the last time you or anyone saw your daughter?”

“She, uh…” She swallowed and her throat made a sound like a bubble popping. “My sister-in-law's son, Reggie, is an electrician for Bright Lights Studios and he invited her to come watch the filming yesterday. They were doing a sword fight, and Mary Lou was just so excited that she was going to meet Remy Lelourie in person. Reggie said Miss Lelourie was ever so nice to them both, so gracious, and Mary Lou had the time of her life. The last time he saw her, she was standing right out front of that warehouse where they're making Miss Lelourie's movie. She told him she was going to catch the streetcar home.”

Hundreds of rose petals and words scrawled with lipstick…Are you scared yet, Remy?

Rourke caught Fio's eye, telling him with a little flick of his head to go back into the kitchen.

“Ma'am,” Rourke said to dead girl's mother. “Do you have anybody who can come stay with you?”

She'd gone to her daughter's bed and was staring down at it, as if she still couldn't quite envision a world in which it hadn't been slept in last night. “My sister's at Mass now,” she said, “but she'll be coming to the house soon as it's over.”

Rourke followed Fio out of the bedroom. Mrs. Trescher had sat on the bed and was cradling the pillow up against her face. Her daughter's smell would be clinging to the linen, Rourke thought, as he looked back at her on his way out the door. Slowly, though, it would fade over the days, until it, too, was gone forever.

“The sick bastard who left that letter for Remy I was telling you about yesterday?” Rourke said to Fio once they were out of the woman's earshot. “He wrote the same thing on the mirror in her dressing caravan during the shoot, which puts him at the studio around the time the Trescher girl disappeared. We could be talking about the same guy here.”

“Aw, man,” Fio said. “Where's Miss Lelourie at now? Is somebody with her?”

“Christ, I don't know. She was supposed to be doing an exploitation stunt for the studio this morning, some dance marathon in City Park.”

“You better go to her,” Fio said.

“Yeah, I gotta go…” Rourke headed for the door at a near run, then stopped and spun back around. “Shit, Fio, we aren't thinking straight here. We need to get the names of all the Fantastics from Mrs. Trescher and have the captain give their parents a call. Make sure they know they gotta stick close to home until we catch this guy, and above all not to go off with anybody they don't know.”

“You go to Miss Lelourie,” Fio said. “Make sure she's all right. I'll get the other girls' names and cover for you with the boss.”

“Yowsah, yowsah, yowsah!” the master of ceremonies bellowed into the WDSU microphone. “The marathon dance is about to begin.”

The crowd hooted and hollered and stamped their feet, until Johnny Dedroit, who had played in the Cave at the Grunewald Hotel, tooted on his trumpet to get them to quiet down long enough for the radio announcer to go on with his patter.

People in New Orleans loved to dance, and on a nice evening there was always a crowd at the City Park bandstand, with its permanent octagon-shaped dancing platform and pyramid roof that offered shade from the sun. This Sunday morning's dance marathon was a first, though. A Bright Lights flack had come up with the idea of sponsoring the contest as an exploitation stunt to promote the studio's movies and its stars. And the best thing was the stunt wouldn't cost Bright Lights a cent. The press agent had talked a local soda pop company into co-sponsoring the event and footing the entire bill.

The winning dancers would get as their prize a lifetime's supply of Zip Cola and the opportunity to appear as extras in
Cutlass
's grand finale ballroom scene. They'd had to cut off the contest entries at fifty couples, for there certainly had been no lack of crazy kids who saw themselves as potential screen material. After all, if Greta Garbo could be discovered as a shop girl in Stockholm, then anything could happen.

Every girl and boy saw themselves as just one lucky break away from being the next Remy Lelourie and Alfredo Ramon.

“Well, fuck this,” Freddy Ramon said, his Bronx accent twanging through his handsome Latin nose. “I wish they'd hurry up and get this show on the road.”