Wages of Sin (38 page)

Remy reached across the expanse of Peerless maroon leather seat that separated them and brushed his freshly shaven cheek with the back of her hand. “You clean up well,” she said.

The moment it was out of her mouth she wanted it back. It was only a flapper girl's way of telling her date that he was looking handsome, but from the way he'd pulled back from her touch, he must have thought she'd been talking about washing off the newspaper boy's blood.

Did you kiss your cop goodbye this morning, Remy?

Even with him sitting there safe beside her, Remy thought she still hadn't gotten over the belly-clenching fear she'd felt on hearing those words. She hadn't even bothered to hang up the phone. She'd just dropped it on the floor and walked right out of the house and asked Hebert to drive her to the Criminal Courts Building, praying that Lieutenant Daman Rourke would be at his desk, knowing that he was hardly ever at his desk, getting furious with him that he was never at his desk, and all the while thinking that if she didn't see him this very minute, in the very next second, she wouldn't be able to bear it, she would surely die from it.

She had just about decided she was maybe overreacting a little when they turned off North Rampart onto Canal and saw a truck dragging away the mangled wreckage of Rourke's fancy yellow Bearcat roadster. Police and firemen were all over the street, talking about a bomb, but Rourke was nowhere in sight and nobody had any idea where he was.

She had waited for him in the detective's squad room and if she'd been writing this as a movie scenario it would have said:
Miss Lelourie cannot sit still, she paces the floor, back and forth, back and forth, as if to stay still in any one place too long is to die. She has trouble getting a deep enough breath and the look on her face is of a woman who is about to fly apart into a million pieces.
Only this wasn't a movie and she hadn't been acting, and when he'd finally come through the door all covered head to foot in blood, she would have fainted if she'd been the type. She'd been so furious with him for making her so scared that she might have shouted at him just a little.

Did you kiss your cop goodbye this morning, Remy?

She turned her head to look at him. The shades were down over the back seat windows, but Hebert had turned the Peerless's recessed electric lamps on for them, and the soft yellow light limned the curve of her cop's cheekbone, the straight line of his nose, the arch of his upper lip. It was the dark side of ecstasy, she thought, to love another this much.

“Day…”

He turned to her, and even though she rarely cried for real, her eyes filled with tears.

“Hey.” He hooked his hand around her neck and pulled her to him. He brushed the tears off her cheeks with the pad of his thumb. “What're these for?”

“That was a stupid thing I just said. I'm sorry.”

He smiled and shook his head. “You know…” His thumb kept brushing her cheek, even though the tears were gone. “I keep going over it in my head, over what happened, and I feel sick about the boy, but I guess I was also sitting here feeling sorry for myself. Damn it, I loved that car.”

“You used to call her ‘baby.’”

They shared a smile, and then even though she had a perfectly good window on her side of the Peerless, she leaned across his lap to look out his side, pressing her palm on his thigh to brace her weight, fooling around…

“A couple of inches to the right and higher,” he said.

She laughed and raised the green silk taffeta window shade a couple of inches. They were almost at the theater, finally. She could see the red carpet, and Mayor O'Keefe standing next to a blue ribbon with a giant pair of scissors in his hand. The crowd lining the curb and sidewalk all had their heads craned way back, peering at something high into an evening sky that was being swept with giant violet spotlights.

“Good heavens, Day. I'm not sure my vanity can stand it, but there appears to be something going on out there that's more interesting than me.” She sprawled further across his lap trying to peer sideways out the window and up into the drizzle coming out of clouds the color of soot. “What are they all looking at?”

“Some fool…” His breath hitched as she wriggled some more, pretending that she was trying to get a better look. “Some fool who hasn't got the sense to get down off his pole and come in out of the rain.”

They laughed together and then couldn't stop, and because, Remy thought, you couldn't live on the knife edge every second, they were able to let some of it go.

She pulled apart from him to touch his face with her fingertips, tracing the planes and angles as if she would sculpt him again later from memory. “I guess I'm not so tough. When I saw what he'd done to the 'Cat, when I thought I'd lost you…”

“Sssh. I'm here, baby.”

He cradled her face in his hands, but before he could kiss her the car door opened to the chant of Re-my, Re-my, Re-my Le-lourie and the explosions of dozens of flash lamps.

Rourke got out first and turned to give her his hand. Remy Lelourie gathered her cape around her shroud and emerged from the Peerless. She paused at the end of the red carpet, turning in a slow half circle to let the cameras get their shots, and she could feel the acceptance, the admiration, the worship coming at her from the screaming crowd in pulsing waves, like blood pumping through a heart.

And then she smiled, showing her fangs.

The Saenger Theatre was being hailed by those who'd built it as the “Florentine Palace of Splendor,” but Remy had been a guest in a real Florentine palace once, and it had nothing on this. This was like walking into a fairy-tale piazza at night. Statues lined the tops of the loges that were decorated with friezes and columns. Water cascaded from marble fountains, and above their heads the azure ceiling twinkled with stars.

The owner of the theater made a speech up on the apron of the stage and Remy made a speech. Then, just as she was about to push the button that opened the thick red-velvet curtain, another vampire bat emerged from behind it and swooped Remy up, wrapping her in his black satin cape. He bent her over his arm and sank his fangs into her neck, and the audience erupted into sighs and screams.

“Lord, I can't believe it's you,” Remy said as they ran off stage right on a thunderous wave of applause. “You about stopped my heart, you wretch.”

Once in the wings, the vampire bat whirled to face her, his cape flaring. “Remy, love,” he said. “I forgot how deliciously fun it is to suck you.”

Laughing, Remy took a mock swing at his head. “You are worse than a wretch. You're a vulgar…” She couldn't think of a word. “Wretch.”

Hugh Granger spat his celluloid bat teeth out into his hands and rubbed the mouth that had set the hearts throbbing of thousands of women across America. “Dammit. I forgot how much these bloody things hurt.”

“So what are you doing in New Orleans?” Remy said. “I thought you were in Mexico making a Western.”

“No, I finished with that three weeks ago, and when the studio asked me to make an appearance at this tedious affair…” He lifted his shoulders in an elegant shrug. “I decided to be obliging for a change.” He gave a sudden start, widening his eyes. “Good God, do you think I've turned over a new leaf?”

“Fat chance,” Remy said, laughing again.

She took his hands in hers, squeezing them, then leaned back to look him over. The expression “tall, dark, and handsome” seemed coined for Hugh Granger. His looks were so classically aristocratic—the high forehead and pronounced cheekbones, the wide mouth and thin nose—that he was almost always cast in the “bloody duke roles,” as he called them. His haughty demeanor with the press and his fans had only added to that image.

It had taken Remy the first month of making
Lost Souls
to get to know him, but once she did she realized that what had seemed to be vanity and aloofness was really a deep reserve, and after he warmed up to you he could be charming and funny and sweet. Still, Remy had sensed—perhaps because she had one herself—that there was an opaque barrier he'd put up between himself and the world, and beyond which even the closest of his friends were never allowed to penetrate.

“Oh, Hugh,” she said now. “It's so
good
to see you. When this ‘tedious affair’ is over, I'm bringing you home with me and we can catch up on old times over some of my world-famous mint juleps.”

“Well, I, uh…”

“Got a hot date tonight?”

“Yes,” he said, and to Remy's secret delight he actually blushed a little. “Sort of a date, anyway.”

Remy smiled and leaned into him, standing on tiptoe to kiss him lightly on the cheek. “Never mind. We'll do it later,” she said, whispering now, because the lights were dimming and such a hush of anticipation had fallen over the house that you could hear the leader film clicking through the projector.

Then the organist struck the first chord of the eerie cemetery music that had been composed especially for
Lost Souls,
just as the first title card appeared on the screen:

In a castle deep in Transylvania…

After the screening they went out into a lobby that was all gilt and mirrors, where a jazz band was playing “Dixie.” Waiters carried around trays of fruit punch, and within seconds flasks had emerged from pockets, sashes, garters, even hats, to spike it with. Buffet tables groaned beneath the weight of spiced baked beans, fried chicken, Saratoga chips, and coconut cake.

Almost everyone was in costume: harem girls and their sheiks, cowboys and Indian maidens, matadors and flamenco dancers. Once Remy saw a Romeo arm in arm with a Juliet, and her stomach clenched with a residual of that morning's fear, but this Romeo seemed too young to be the owner of the voice on the telephone, and he was making puppy-love eyes at the girl on his arm.

She waved at Freddy Ramon, who was dressed as a harlequin, and then she saw a Bright Lights cameraman, a sound technician, and an assistant director all in harlequin costumes as well—black and white diamond-patterned shirts and fat-legged pantaloons, floppy shoes, and silly pointed hats with red pompoms on top. Apparently the studio's press agents had decreed that everyone involved with
Cutlass
except herself was to have come as a harlequin.

“What do harlequins have to do with Louisiana pirates, though?” she wondered aloud, but her lover hadn't heard her. Daman Rourke's gaze searched through the crowded lobby, as if he would know Romeo right off when he found him, and there was almost a
heat
radiating off of him, of violence barely held in check.

He stuck to her side like a cocklebur while she signed autographs and made nice to all the dignitaries and distinguished guests. Yet she, too, could still sense Romeo's presence nearby, in the way that she could feel the air on her bare skin.

Then a man's hand clasped her arm beneath her elbow from behind, and she nearly jumped out of her skin.

“Why so nervous, darling?” Peter Kohl said as he slipped around in front of her.

“Peter…” She smiled to hide the hitch in her breathing. She thought she could actually feel her pulse beating in her neck. “You shouldn't sneak up on a girl like that. Especially one with such long, sharp teeth to bite you with.”

She held out her hand to the director, palm side down. With his jutting beard and monocle, he looked just a little ridiculous in his harlequin costume.

He took her hand, turned it over and kissed the palm. “Remy, darling. You look like the living dead.”

“Why, Peter. Darling. Your words are like a stake in my heart,” she said back at him. From beside her, she thought she heard her cop snort under his breath.

Her director nodded at her cop. “Rourke.”

Her cop nodded at her director. “Kohl.”

The first time she'd introduced them, they'd circled each other like curs in an ally after the same bone, and they would probably be doing that here again, she thought, if there had been room to perform the maneuver.

The band was playing “Runnin' Wild” and quite a few couples were trying to dance the Charleston among the press of people. Her name was being shouted at her from all directions.
Hey, Remy…Smile, Remy…Over here, Remy
…And flash lamps were popping with her every breath. The theater lobby was awhirl in flashes of color, light, and sound, like a merry-go-round spinning wildly out of control.

Her director was feeling in the pocket of his harlequin suit for his cigarette case, all the while keeping his eyes on her cop. He had his cigarette lit and smoking by the time he turned back to her. “Have you talked to Max yet tonight?” he asked, then went on without waiting for her answer. “He's got the perfect vehicle for you, Remy. A gangster flick about a beautiful moll who falls for the G-man who's hunting her brother. And if
The Jazz Singer
isn't laughed out of the theaters this month, he was saying we might even use the Vitaphone process for a few feet of film. Maybe have you sing a number draped over a piano or something.”

“God, Peter,” Remy said on a laugh. “You know I'm practically tone deaf.”

“Nonsense, darling. There isn't a scenario written that you can't pull off beautifully.” He turned as another harlequin came up to them, too perfectly timed not to have been arranged. “Isn't that right, Max?”

Remy had never seen Max Leeland in anything other than a cheap suit bought off the rack, but the harlequin costume he had on tonight looked as if it could have been worn to a fancy dress ball at Versailles by the Sun King. The black and white diamonds were fashioned of jacquard silk and embroidered with gilt thread. The buttons that ran down the front were the size of plums, and they looked like they'd been carved out of black jade and then studded with real pearls.

It must have been by Max's orders, then, that everyone from Bright Lights had come to the party dressed as harlequins, and she wondered what point he was trying to make with it. That the world was full of clowns? That the movies he made were entertainment, not art? That he had the power to make an entire film crew dress to his whim?

The studio boss stared at Remy from beneath the thick shelf of his eyebrows. He didn't have any natural charm, and as long as she'd known him he'd never tried to fake it. “You know where I'm staying, Miss Lelourie. The Roosevelt Hotel. I'll be there until the end of the week. I trust you'll be bringing me the signed contract before I leave. A word, Kohl,” he said and walked away without even a “so long” or “good evening.”