Wages of Sin (44 page)

He pulled the gun out of Murphy's mouth and lowered it to his side, taking a step back. Murphy sagged against the wall, breathing hard, retching, and rubbing the snot and tears and sweat off his face with the back of his wrist.

“Jack,” Rourke said.

Murphy looked up at him out of eyes that were wet and bloodshot and pleading. Rourke swung the gun back up again, hard, with his feet set solidly, throwing his weight into the movement, swinging and smashing the .38's two pounds' worth of metal into the man's face. Murphy's head snapped back, and Rourke felt his front teeth and the bone in his nose go like sticks.

Murphy's legs fell out from underneath him and he slid onto his knees on the cement floor. The dogs had started barking again and the din they made hit against the tin walls and was deafening. Murphy flinched even though Rourke hadn't moved again, covering his smashed and bleeding face with his arms. “Stop, please…”

“Now that you know what it feels like to get hit, you're never going to hit your wife again, are you, Jack?”

He shook his head, splattering blood and spittle, and he was crying now like a child.

“No, you got to say it. I want to hear you say it.”

He made him say it twice before they left him.

They left the speakeasy and walked down the crib-lined alley toward Chartres, where they'd parked the car. The whores were in their front windows and on their stoops, showing off their wares, but neither man was looking.

“Tomorrow,” Rourke said, breaking the silence, “I'm sending the wagon down here for those dogs.”

“Yeah,” Fio said, after another moment of silence passed. “I think maybe I'll go back to that dentist now, have him take out this tooth.”

“It won't hurt,” Rourke said. He looked down and saw to his surprise that he still had the gun in his hand, and that both the gun and his hand were wet with Murphy's blood. “He'll give you some kind of gas before he pulls it.”

A cat leaped off a windowsill onto a trash can, and the noise sent a rat scurrying along the gutter.

“Partner?” Fio said.

“Yeah?”

“Please tell me that was a blank cartridge you put in your gun.”

Rourke's smile felt like ice cracking across his face. He raised the gun, pointed it at the rat, cocked it, and pulled the trigger.

The explosion of the gunshot slammed down the alley, and the rat dropped dead in its tracks.

Fio kept casting sideways glances at his partner as he drove down Chartres toward Canal Street, paying less and less attention to the traffic in front of him until he almost sent the patrol car up onto the back of a beer wagon. He swerved, almost wiping out an old lady with a cane who was crossing the street, then he leaned on the horn and told the driver of the beer wagon to watch where the fuck he was going.

“That was all your fault,” Fio said to his partner, once the ruckus was over. “Because you are a crazy man. I have a crazy man in the car with me and that's making me crazy and that's why that accident we almost had was all your fault.”

Rourke looked out the rain-smeared window. His blood still felt like it was popping and boiling, but the violence had been some kind of cathartic, like a drug, and he thought that was probably not a good thing, but he also didn't want to think too much about that right now.

“I need to have Jack Murphy believe I'm crazy,” he said. “Otherwise he was going to do something to Paulie and I'd've had to kill him for it.”

“Christ, you nearly
did
kill him…I still don't get why you didn't use a blank cartridge.”

“Because I didn't think of it.”

They laughed and then after another moment, Rourke said, “And, besides, it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun without the real thing.”

“I am stuck in a car,” Fio said, “with a crazy man and a tooth that's gonna be the death of me.”

Rourke checked his watch. “If you're really going to get that thing taken care of today, you'd better do it now because it's almost closing time.”

Fio grunted. “I don't know whether I dare leave you to your own devices, though. The City that Care Forgot hasn't had a crime spree for at least thirty minutes now, and I'd like to keep it that way.”

“Actually, I was thinking of paying a visit to the dead,” Rourke said, serious now. “Miss Della Layton was going to be waking her daddy today.”

Rourke had driven his motorcycle to work that morning, and so Fio dropped him off where he'd parked it in the alley in back of the Criminal Courts Building.

The wake was still in the preparation stages when he arrived at the Laytons' handsome Greek Revival raised villa on Prytania Street. A wreath of white magnolias and a black satin ribbon hung on the front door, and inside all the lintels and mirrors were draped with black crepe. Vigil lights flickered in the front parlor, where the body lay in view in an open black-lacquered casket.

Albert Payne Layton's older sister had met Rourke at the door, but it was the girl Della who led him into a room in back of the house where they could talk alone. The music room, she had called it, and Rourke saw that a harp did sit next to the marble fireplace, and a piano with duet seats stood in a bay full of windows draped in thick gold velvet.

It was a pretty room, and he wondered if Flo and Bertie Layton had ever once come here of an evening to play and sing duets on the piano. Somehow he didn't think so.

Miss Della Layton was not the baby vamp today. No hibiscus red lipstick or greased eyelids, no rouged knees. She invited him to have a seat, but instead he took both her hands in his and studied her face. It was drawn and pale with shock and grief, but he saw strength there, too. The kind of strength a girl acquires fast when she suddenly finds herself handling alone the arrangements and etiquette for her daddy's wake because her mama is in the Parish Prison for having killed him.

“You're going to survive this, Miss Della,” Rourke said.

“Thank you.” Her smile was fleeting, but he could see that she'd understood the compliment and had felt pride in it.

“I was wondering if you would help me by answering a few questions. Not about what happened with your daddy, but about the Fantastics. You and Mary Lou and Mercedes and Nina, and the other girls.”

Pain darkened her eyes some more, but she nodded solemnly. As if it weren't enough that her family had just been destroyed, in the past year she'd also lost three of her good friends.

Mary Lou Trescher, she told him, was the one most involved with the fan club. She'd always been writing letters to Remy Lelourie and sending off to the studio for their giveaways. She'd devoured the fan magazines for photographs so that she could have her hair bobbed just like Remy's. She'd read all the articles to find out things like what Remy Lelourie's favorite lipstick color was, so that she'd know the exact shade to get when they next went shopping at D. H. Holmes. For the rest of them the daydream was just for fun, but for her it had been real. She'd talked all the time about going to Hollywood when she graduated from high school.

Nina Duboche had apparently thought of herself as a “hot number.” Once she'd even had a lingerie party at her house, and she was always pushing it with the nuns over the length of her skirts and the rouge on her cheeks. Right before she'd been killed, she'd started acting like she had a big secret, and the other girls had all decided that she'd finally done “it” with a boy, instead of just talking about doing it.

“Boys were always making a play for Nina,” Della said a bit wistfully. “But she liked stringing them, you know?”

Mercedes Bloom was something of an odd girl. “She was a jane,” Della said. “But with her it was more than just not being especially pretty. She dressed so old-fashioned all the time. She even wore her hair long and in finger waves. Everybody was always teasin' her about them.”

Mercedes hadn't been all sweet and innocent and old-fashioned underneath like she had seemed, though. The time they'd all tried cigarettes, she'd smoked like she'd done it before, and Della had once caught a glimpse of a whiskey flask in the other girl's handbag.

“At the lingerie party,” Della said, blushing to be talking about such a thing to a policeman, but also, Rourke thought, feeling maybe a little proud of herself for being able to do so, “we got to talking about s-e-x and what it feels like when you do it with a boy, and Mercedes said the French called it
le petit mort,
the little death. She said sometimes you could have a
petit mort
whether you wanted to or not…And the way she said it, it was like she really
knew.
”

And Rourke, a little surprised, thought,
hunh.

He took the photograph that had come from Mary Lou's room out of his coat pocket and showed it to her. “Do you remember when this picture was taken?”

“Oh, I have that one, too,” Della said. “We all do. It was Mercy Bloom's birthday that day and her folks had given her a Kodak for a present. Instead of having a party, she took us all to the movies and our picture got taken with her new camera.”

“Do you remember who took it?”

Della wrinkled her nose, thinking. “No…Mercedes was about to since it was her camera, but then this man came walking down the street and he offered to do it so that she could be in the picture, too.”

“Do you remember anything at all about the man? Had you ever seen him before?”

“No, I don't think so.” She shrugged. “He was about my…daddy's age, I think. And he might've had brown hair. He seemed nice.”

He couldn't get much more out of her about what the Good Samaritan photographer had looked like, but she promised to come down to the squad room tomorrow and take a look through the Rogues' Gallery cards.

Rourke smiled at her as he put the photograph back in his pocket. “You've been a really big help, Miss Della. And, listen…if there's anything I can do…”

She looked up at him out of eyes that had lost the kind of innocence a girl should still have at sixteen. “She's going to go to prison, isn't she?”

“I hope not, but yes. Probably.”

“He was going to hit her. That's why she shot him.”

“When the attorneys talk to you about what happened, you can tell them that,” Rourke said, but he was thinking now that she'd seen more that night than she was letting on—like maybe how the gun had happened to come into Floriane Layton's hand.

She had averted her gaze from him, and he could see her struggling with the need to pass along a terrible secret in the hope that he might then take it away with him. “He told me…” She swallowed hard, choking back the tears that were now crowding her eyes. “A while back, Daddy told me that she'd once done this really sick, disgusting thing. He said that she had…that she'd done it with another woman.”

The tears were falling freely now, and she looked back around to Rourke, wanting the kind of answers you hardly ever got. “She's doing it again now, isn't she? Please…I don't understand how could she
do
something like that.”

This time what Rourke took out of his breast pocket was a small, folded piece of paper. “Here. I brought this with me on the chance that you might want it.”

“What is it?” she said, taking the paper from his hand.

“It's the name and address of her lover. If you go see her, you can talk with her about your mama. And maybe she can help you to understand.”

Rourke stood on the Laytons' front gallery, going over what the girl had said about the Fantastics, thinking about Nina and her secret, daring love affair with a colored boy, and Mary Lou dreaming of becoming the next Remy Lelourie. Both of them ending up raped and strangled and their bodies dumped by the river. And Mercedes Bloom, the “jane” with her old-fashioned finger waves, missing now for over six months and probably raped and strangled, too, her body thrown away somewhere to be found a year from now, or ten.

Something, though, wasn't quite adding up right. And there was something, too, that Della had said when they'd been talking about the photograph…

A patrol car was pulling up in front of the house. Rourke waited on the gallery while Fio got out, and as his partner started up the walk, Rourke saw that his cheek was still all swollen up. He was about to make some wisecrack about it, but by then Fio had gotten close enough for him to get a better look at his face.

“Ah, Jesus. No…” Rourke said.

Fio stopped at the bottom of the gallery steps and looked up at him with bleak eyes. “Another girl's gone missing.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

S
he was supposed to be meeting my sister under the clock at D. H. Holmes at one.”

Sean Daly stood before the mullioned bay window, staring unseeing at the green lawn bordered by a hedge of hydrangea and azalea bushes. In one hand, he had a whiskey that was not his first, and the hand was shaking.

“I drove her down there myself,” he said in a voice that was thick as wet sand, and in an accent that was blue-collar, Irish Channel. “But I had a meeting at the union hall and I was running late, and I thought, Hell, it's the middle of the day on a sidewalk crowded with people and Judith will be coming any minute now, and I…ah, Jesus.”

He looked down at the booze in his glass as if he wanted to drown in it, a big man with broad shoulders and a thick neck from a youth spent loading and unloading freight on the docks.

He turned from the window and looked at the two cops standing in his front parlor, and on his face was the dawning horror that he'd made a mistake whose consequences were going to be beyond bearing. “I should have waited there with her,” he said. “I should have waited.”

“How long afterward was it before your sister showed up?” Fio asked.

The room fell into a thick silence while Daly couldn't answer, then he cleared his throat and said, “About a half an hour. The damn fool woman had a coffee klatch at her club that ended up running late.”

An oil painting of the missing girl hung above the limestone mantel. Gillian, her name was—his partner had told Rourke on the short drive to the imitation Tudor house on St. Charles Avenue. Her mother, Fio said, had died during the flu epidemic when she was seven and her father had never remarried, and so she was an only child.