Wages of Sin (9 page)

“Jesus. What happened to your hair?”

She laughed, a little girl laugh full of ruffles and bows. “I bobbed it. Just like Miss Remy's.”

“She bobbed it,” Remy said, laughter in her eyes. “All by herself.”

It looked as though his child had taken a pair of sheep shears to her head. God, he could see the pink of her scalp in places.
It'll grow back,
he told himself. He wanted to weep.

“Don't you like it, Daddy? I think it looks spiffy.”

He bent over and kissed the top of his daughter's ravaged head. “It's the bee's elbows,” he said.

Laughing, she punched his belly lightly with her fist. She loved the slang she picked up on the radio and she used it whenever she could. “You're being goofy. And you're getting it all wrong. It's the bee's
knees.
”

“You're sure it's not the monkey's banana?”

She punched him again, harder this time. “Mrs. O'Reilly says it's a good thing I got a hat.” She threw a scowl in the direction of the kitchen, where the latest nanny was bustling about behind the green jalousied windows. “I don't like Mrs. O'Reilly.”

Rourke could have predicted this was coming. Mrs. O'Reilly was a forty-year-old widow from County Kerry with a way about her that was as soft as an Irish morning, and so he'd had high hopes for her when he'd hired her only three days ago. Lately, though, his daughter had been going through nannies so fast the sheets on their bed didn't get changed before they were gone. Katie, who had been waging campaigns of annihilation against these women, had proven herself to be a real little Napoleon.

He had an uncomfortable idea why she was doing it. He had no idea what to do about it. Katie's mother, his wife, had died six years ago, only a year after Katie was born, and most days it seemed to Rourke that being a father was the most terrifying challenge he'd ever faced in his life.

Katie had taken his hand and was trying to pull him toward the bench by the fountain where there lay a box kite patterned in the Stars and Stripes. “Let's go now, Daddy, before all the wind goes away.”

“Katie.” He gripped her shoulders and turned her around, then squatted down in front of her so he could look her in the eye. They'd made plans to fly her new kite in Congo Square this morning and now he was going to have to disappoint her. Again. “I can't do it today, after all, baby. I caught a big case last night, and I'm probably going to be working on it all this weekend.”

Her lower lip trembled and she pulled away from him.

“Katie, how would you like to be my guest on the set of
Cutlass
later on this mornin'?” Remy said, taking her hand. “We're going to be shooting the big sword fight.”

Katie jerked her hand free and crossed her arms over her chest. “No. I'm flying a kite with my daddy.”

Rourke brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. “We'll do it another Saturday soon, I—”
Promise.
He caught back the word before it could come tripping so lightly out of his mouth. Katie had a tendency to keep a strict accounting of his promises, and so far he was deeply in the red.

“Tell you what, though,” he said instead. “I can't catch any bad guys on an empty stomach. What do you say we go get us some waffles from Buglin' Sam?”

He smiled and hoped she'd send a Katie-smile back at him, but it didn't come.

Buglin' Sam put his regulation Army bugle to his lips and blasted the brassy notes of reveille out over Jackson Square. Katie, laughing with delight, ran up to the horse-drawn wagon and by the time Rourke and Remy got there she already had her face buried in a sugarcoated hot waffle.

Buglin' Sam, the waffle man, had parked his wagon across from St. Louis Cathedral, alongside the iron fence that surrounded the square, in order to entice the worshippers on their way home from Mass into breaking their fast with his delectables. He had some competition, though, for the air was rich with tempting smells: of coffee, bread, and strawberries from the nearby French Market stalls, of
boudin
and cheese from the Central Grocery. Right next to Buglin' Sam himself, a woman in a red turban was frying oysters, ham, and eggs over a fire in an oil drum.

Rourke bought more waffles for him and Remy. They strolled slowly hand in hand, looking at the watercolors and charcoal sketches that hung on the fence near Buglin' Sam's wagon, put there by aspiring artists. This early on a Saturday morning only a few people were about, but they all had noticed the movie star in their midst and they were staring and pointing and whispering. Rourke hated this about their lives together, but he didn't see how there was ever going to be an end to it.

He didn't know what had brought her to his house this morning, and he didn't ask. Her hand felt so fine in his. No, more than fine. This is ecstasy, he thought. The grown-up version, where contentment and tenderness are mixed with a sadness that comes from knowing that the good moments, the sweet moments, can't be held on to forever, but only felt brushing by.

“After you catch the bad guys, Daddy,” Katie said, touching his other hand with sticky fingers, “will you roast them alive?”

Startled, Rourke looked down into his little girl's face, with her sugar-rimmed mouth and the bill of her Pels cap shading her eyes. Her mother's eyes, grayish green with golden lights and as changeable as the lake on a cloudy day.

“Katie, where…” He knew where, though. Not even twenty feet away from them stood a news kiosk with a blown-up poster of the
Morning Tribune
's front page—the banner headline, ROASTED ALIVE IN A CHAIR OF DEATH, above a composograph of a Negro boy's head on the body of a man in the electric chair. The head belonged to the chimney sweep Titus Dupre, and tonight, at the stroke of midnight in the New Orleans Parish Prison, he was going to be executed for the raping and killing of Nina Duboche. For killing two girls, or so the world believed, although he'd been tried and convicted for only the one because the other girl's body had never been found.

All executions were performed in the parish where the prisoner was convicted, and so sometime this morning a portable electric chair would be arriving by truck, along with the generator needed to power it. Normally, Louisiana's condemned men met the state's executioner at the gallows, but proponents of the chair, arguing that hangings were gruesome and archaic, had convinced the legislature to give the newfangled machinery a test run on seventeen-year-old Titus Dupre.

At a loss for what to say to his daughter, Rourke looked over at Remy for help, but her attention had been caught by a Negro spasm band that was dancing for pennies beneath one of the stucco arches of the French Market, making music with a washboard and pot covers.

Katie, her question already forgotten anyway, was showing Buglin' Sam how she could make her yo-yo go 'round the world, and so he was spared for the moment having to explain to his seven-year-old daughter why the state of Louisiana was going to strap a boy into an oak chair and shoot two thousand volts of electricity through his body.

Rourke's own gaze went back to the spasm band. The dancing boys' shoes blurred over the banquette, the bottle caps on their soles striking sparks off the bricks. Behind them, a butcher under the eaves of the French Market was hacking at a bloody side of beef.

Sweet Jesus, he'd been hanging from a crossbeam, nailed through the wrists like an animal carcass. A priest. And where had God been when that was being done to him? Where was God?

Rourke pulled in a deep breath then let it out slowly, feeling tired. Katie was now feeding bits of waffle to the pigeons, and he called out to her, telling her it was time to head home.

“Wait, Day. Before we go…”

The intensity in Remy's voice raised the hairs on the back of his neck, even before she handed him the envelope. Her name was written on the outside of it, in a flowery script, but there was no address or stamp. It had been opened, and inside was a single sheet of paper.

“What's this?” he said.

“I found it on my dressing table last night,” she said. “Or rather, early this mornin'. He must have gone into my bedroom during the party. And then, after everyone had left, he rang me on the telephone and said, ‘Did you get my letter, Remy?’”

Rourke unfolded the paper and read the single, finely calligraphed line:
Are you scared yet, Remy?
And the signature, its letters larger, bolder.

“Who's Romeo?”

“That's just it, Day—I don't know. I've never heard of the name outside of the play, and that's one of the few Shakespeares I've never done. The closest I've ever come to it was an audition years and years ago, back when I was trying to break into the stage in New York. But I didn't even get a callback.”

“You didn't recognize his voice?”

She shook her head. “No…Maybe. It was muffled, like he was speaking through cotton, but there was something in the way he said my name…I don't know. It's mostly just a feeling.”

Rourke tilted the paper up to the sunlight. It had a watermark, which might make it traceable, and the ink was strange.

“Whoever he is, I think it's a game he wants me to play,” she said.

He thought he'd heard the whip of excitement in her voice, and that scared the hell out of him. In some ways he knew Remy Lelourie better than he knew himself. Together they had once played Russian roulette with a loaded revolver; they'd once tried to outrun a train. Neither one of them had ever met a dare they didn't take.

“Don't play it, Remy.”

She laughed, the bright, brittle flapper-girl laugh that he didn't always like. “And this advice is coming from the man who almost drove into a tree last night? I thought Hollywood was a thrill a day with its champagne baths and tango dancing and petting parties in the purple dawn, but they got nothing on New Orleans. I come home and the first thing that happens is I get thrown in jail for murdering my husband, and now someone might have it in his mind to murder me.”

“Dammit, Remy,” he said, lowering his voice because Katie was coming toward them now, trailing pigeons and crumbs. He tucked the letter and envelope into his coat pocket. “What this guy is after is your attention, so don't give it to him. Let me take care of it.”

His last words had sounded idiotic to his own ears:
Let me take care of it.
Daman Rourke, champion cop. Remy Lelourie had spent the whole of her life taking very good care of herself and with a frightening ruthlessness; she'd never once looked for help from any man, nor needed it. He expected her to jump on him now for implying otherwise, but instead she only smiled.

He stared at her, at the face that was so otherworldly beautiful it hurt sometimes to look at it. Like staring directly into the sun.

She must have thought he was about to tell her something she didn't want to hear, because suddenly she covered his mouth with her hand to stop the words.

“I love you, though,” she said.

Though? I love you,
though.
Jesus. What in hell was that supposed to mean?

He took her wrist and held her fingers to his lips and kissed them, and then he let her go. Her hand curled around the kiss he had given her, and then she looked away and up, to the twin spires of the cathedral shining sequin bright in the sun, and she did a strange thing. Slowly, she lifted her hand into the air and uncurled her fingers, as if she was setting free a handful of butterflies.

In that instant, the cathedral clock began to chime and the flock of birds around Katie rose up in a great flap of wings, blocking out the sun.

Rourke's eyes ached from a night of no sleep, and even though he'd showered and shaved and changed out of his tuxedo and into a cream linen suit, he still felt grimy. The last few days had been cool for so early in October, but the sun seemed to be outpacing the wind now and the morning was turning hot. Beneath his coat, his shirt was already sticking to his back.

His aggravation wasn't helped by the fact that he couldn't seem to get near his office because of the mob scene at the Criminal Courts Building and the adjoining Parish Prison. Most of the noisy, rambunctious crowd was probably there out of curiosity, to see the novelty of the chair of death arriving at the prison, but an angry element was fermenting right in front of the Tulane Street entrance to the Courts Building, which housed, besides the courts, the city's police headquarters and the detectives' squad room where Rourke worked.

Rourke found a parking place on Canal Street, across from the new Saenger Theatre, and as he got out of the car a scrawny kid with freckles and elephant ears who sold newspapers on the corner came running up to him. “Watch your car for a dollar, Lieutenant,” the kid said. He was in love with the 'Cat.

“Sure,” Rourke said. “Only watch it from the outside. The last time you got something sticky all over the steering wheel.”

Rourke gave the kid four bits and started to walk away, but then he stopped and looked up at the enormous billboard on the roof. It took twenty-four sheets to cover the board and at night a powerful searchlight threw on it the illumination of “a hundred suns,” so that it could be seen from practically every downtown street corner.

Remy Lelourie larger than life.

He was losing her, he could feel it. Once they were done filming
Cutlass,
she would go back to Hollywood and to her life of champagne baths and tango dancing and petting parties in the purple dawn. And if she left him this time the way she did the last time, then it would be without so much as a so-long, darlin'.

With its rusty brick and sandstone towers and turrets, the Criminal Courts Building looked like a medieval castle and this morning it was under siege. Many of the men in the mob out front sported white, caped robes with black crosses on their breasts. Their conical hats bobbed in time with their chants and the beat of a drum. The placards they thrust into the air read “Burn, nigger, burn” and other, worse, epithets.

The Ku Klux Klan was back, and with a vengeance.

The triple-arched entrance was blocked by sawhorse barricades and ringed by a handful of nervous foot cops in wet, clinging blouses. A thick-necked, buck-toothed man wearing yellow linen shoes and purple suspenders over a yellow shirt was thumbtacking to the sawhorses crude posters of a black man hanging from a tree. None of the cops was bothering to stop him.