Wages of Sin (18 page)

Fio slammed the flat of his hand down on the table so hard it jumped. “Goddammit. What'd I tell you?”

Rourke shot to his feet. He took a step, then turned around. “One other thing. Did Tony ever describe to anyone how and where the beating was supposed to be done?”

“You mean did he say to crucify the guy like Christ Jesus in a macaroni factory?” The burglar shook his head at the wonder of it. “Man, if that had been the word going through the street, even you cops would've noticed the stir it was leaving in its wake. Naw…” He belched and wiped the grease off his mouth with a grimy sleeve. “The only details I got—and it wasn't even a whisper, you know? More like a feeling you just pick up on the wind…was that Tony's client wanted this priest's ass kicked because the guy was fuckin' his ol' lady.”

“Okay,” Rourke said, and tucked five dollars under Dirty Eddie's shot glass. “You try and stay out of other people's houses for a while, you hear.”

“Shit,” Rourke said when they were back out in the alley. “We should've had that talk already with Tony the Rat.”

They practically ran back to the car, only to find Jack Murphy there waiting for them. He was sitting on the 'Cat's fender, and wearing that smirk all over his face. “Evenin', Dee-tectives,” he said.

Rourke tried to walk around the car casually, while looking for gouges in his precious wax and paint job, and he was so relieved not to see any that he almost forgot to put the mean in his smile. “Walking the beat when it isn't even your shift yet, Murphy?” he said. “Must be payday.”

Murphy pushed himself to his feet. “Nice car you got here.” He took out his handkerchief and pretended to wipe off any smudges he might have put on the pristine fender. “You shouldn't've left it all alone out here on the street, though.” He sighed and shook his head. “Leaving a nice car unattended in a neighborhood like this…” He looked around, sighing and shaking his head again. “Full of lowlifes and as used and dirty as a whore's crotch—man, anything coulda happened to it. Good thing for you I came along when I did.”

He started to walk off, swinging his nightstick, only to bring himself up short. “Oh, by the way…I heard you all called down to have Tony Benato picked up? Had cops all over town, chasing themselves looking for him.”

This, Rourke thought, was not going to be happy news. “Yeah, so what happened?” he said.

“A couple foot cops found him for you all right, in a hookshop on Basin Street. Only they were too late. Ol' Tony finally packed so much coke up what was left of his nose, he damn near blew his head off.”

Chapter Thirteen

T
he house on Basin Street was a Queen Anne that had been Aarted up to complement the hookers who worked there. Red flocked paper on the walls, black horsehair sofas and potted palms in the parlor, and a lot of lewd oil paintings and fake gilded mirrors everywhere. A sign in the foyer promised: SATISFACTION GUARANTEED, OR SECOND TOKEN GIVEN FREE.

The madam was a plain woman, wearing a black dress that looked left over from the last century, with her gray hair done up in a tight bun and a heavy iron ring of keys fastened at her waist. She didn't bother to look at their shields and her voice said she'd seen it all before. “Top of the stairs on your left. Number thirty-three.”

Upstairs a handful of uniform cops and half-dressed hookers milled outside a doorway in a gaslit hall lined with doors that for some curious reason all bore the number thirty-three.

“So what do you know, Sarge?” Rourke asked the cop in charge, a barrel-shaped man with a cue ball for a head, who sported sergeant's stripes on his blue uniform blouse.

“Tony Benato, that lowlife hophead you all been lookin' for?” the sergeant said. “He picks out a chippy downstairs and brings her up here, but then he decides he's going to snort a little flake first, before he gets down to business. The girl said he took a toot and it was wham, bam, goodbye, ma'am. She's still in there, the chippy is. They both are.”

The bedroom was what you'd expect to find in a bordello that was struggling, unsuccessfully, to look classy. A lamp with a red-fringed shade, black satin sheets on the canopied bed. The whore sat on a purple divan in front of an empty fire grate, smoking a cigarette. She went with the decor: purple silk wrapper, red corset, and black silk stockings. She had curly red hair out of a bottle; her naked breasts were the size of cantaloupes.

Tony the Rat lay flat on his back on the red and gold Turkey carpet, his arms flung out from his sides as if he, too, had been crucified. His eyes bulged wide open, staring at the ceiling, and the skin of his face was the hot pink of a blush. White powder caked his ravaged nostrils and white, foamy vomit drooled from the corners of his mouth.

“Deader,” Fio said, “than a can of corned beef.”

The whore let out a little mewling sob. “What?” she said when the two cops looked at her. “I sorta liked the guy. Is that a crime?”

The cops exchanged looks, then Fio shrugged and said, “Musta been his inner beauty she was responding to.”

Rourke squatted down next to the crumbling cake of off-white powder that lay on the floor next to Tony's outstretched hand. The piece of paper it had been wrapped in looked like a page torn out of a hymnal.

“A lot of coke,” Fio said.

“Yeah. Probably more than Tony Benato ever saw all at once in his life before. He must've thought he'd died and gone to heaven.”

“And then he died and went to hell.”

Rourke leaned over the body and sniffed, and thought he caught a faint odor of burnt almonds. “Could've been laced with cyanide.”

“Aw, jeez.” Fio tilted his head back and looked toward the heavens, because only the good Lord could save them now. “Somebody,” he said after a moment, “went and shot this ceiling full of holes.”

“Some john did that last week,” the whore said. “There was a fly buzzing around up there and he tried to kill it with a six-shooter. He said he was a revenue agent. The john did.”

Fio snorted a laugh. Then he looked back down at the body sprawled on the floor. “Man,” he said. “Are we ever fucked.”

Rourke pushed himself back to his feet. He took a turn around the room and then pulled a spindle-backed chair with a crocheted rose seat up next to the hooker. Her gaze flickered nervously over his face, then settled on the smoking tip of her cigarette. Her breasts were enormous, with large rose-brown nipples. A man, Rourke thought, would need both hands to hold just one of them.

“Tony Benato,” Rourke said. “Did you know him?”

“You talking about the dead guy?” Her gaze did a quick flash to the body and then cut back to her cigarette. “I never saw him before today,” she said. Rourke thought she was probably lying, but more out of habit than guilt.

“So he comes in the parlor, picks you out, and y'all come up here…”

She shook her head hard, red curls bouncing. “That blow, I didn't have nothin' to do with that. He brought it with him. He offered me some, but I said no thank you, sugar.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“I'm scared of it, you know? Scared I'll like it too much. I already got a zooful of monkeys hanging on my back, without having to go out looking for another one.”

Rourke nodded; he knew. He'd done a little coke for a while after his wife had died and he'd liked it much too much. He still felt the hunger for it every once in a while.

“Did y'all talk a little before he tooted up?”

“I don't know…” She shrugged her shoulders and took a quick drag on the cigarette. She had a small scar next to her mouth that puckered and dimpled when she smoked or talked. It was sexy in a strange way. “He said he liked me, that he liked redheads with big tits. Then I kinda felt him up a little, you know, to get him going 'cause the clock was ticking and Mother Pearl gets sore when we run over. Then he sucked the blow up his nose and had a fit.”

She leaned over to knock the ash off her cigarette into a tea saucer, her naked breasts swinging round and heavy. She glanced up at Rourke through thick clumps of black lashes, looked away, then came back at him. “He might've said something else…”

“What?…Come on,” he said when she didn't answer. “Don't make me run your ass downtown.”

She squinted into the distance, biting on her lower lip, and the little scar dimpled. “It didn't make a whole lotta sense to me, what he said, so I might not get the words exactly right…He said, ‘Come on, blow a line. Hey, blow two, 'cause God's in his heaven and it's going to be snowing in hell, for as long as I can make it happen, baby.’”

“Hey, no, that's good. That helps a lot,” Rourke said, smiling at her so that she smiled back and the sexy little scar dimpled again.

He tried a few more questions, coming at her from different angles, but he got nothing more. He took another look at the corpse and then went back out into the hall and found the beat sergeant.

“Stay with the body till the meat wagon comes,” he told the other cop, “and warn everybody that there's cyanide in the coke. And make sure they believe it.” Otherwise, Rourke was thinking, that cake of cocaine could lose a few flakes on its way to the evidence locker and they'd end up with a dead cop or two.

“The way you kept staring at her tits while you were conducting that official interrogation,” Fio said, on their way down the stairs, “I thought your dick was gonna jump up and do the Charleston around the room.”

“I was only carefully observing the scene of the crime like a good detective should,” Rourke said. “She had a birthmark on the left one in the shape of a Valentine heart. You never know when that might turn out to be the important clue that cracks the case.”

“Man,” Fio said, shaking his head at the wonder of it, “I didn't think you could grow 'em that big.”

“Aw, shucks,” Rourke said, as he held the front door open. Fio had stopped at the parlor entrance for one last observation of the girls. Gathering clues. “I can grow 'em that big any day of the week.”

“I was talking about tits,” Fio said.

“Uh-huh. You say that now.”

Outside, they stood on the brick banquette in front of the whorehouse, both feeling down and lost, the case having gotten away from them. Fio had his hat off and he was playing with the bullet hole in the crown, poking his finger in and out.

“Fuckin' Tony the Rat,” he said. “Man, right now we don't even got what the little birdie left on the rock.”

Rourke didn't say anything. In the harsh afternoon sunlight the Quarter looked seedier than usual. The jalousied blinds on the houses were all rotting, the paint on the doors peeling, the stoops littered with trash. The iron lace balconies sagged. It looked like nothing had been painted or repaired in fifty years. It looked…unloved.

Fio slapped the hat back on his head. “And to think the highlight of our day is yet to come. We still get to go break this happy news to the captain.”

On the way back to the car they remembered that Tony the Rat had had an enforcer working for him. They spent over an hour looking for Guido the Rat before they found out that he was on his way to the morgue.

The five hand-rolled cigarettes lined up along the front of Captain Dan Malone's desk were all bent and twisted and leaking tobacco—a testimony to the kind of day he was having. His ear literally ached from all the telephone calls he'd been fielding on the crucifixion killing: from every newspaper in the state and a few others from as far away as New York City, from his own chief of police and the chief's assistant, from the superintendent of police and the super's two assistants, from the archbishop and his three assistants, from the mayor, and from all but one of the city councilmen. And the only reason Malone wasn't batting a thousand there was because Councilman Pellagro was in Florence, marrying off his daughter to some Italian count.

Meanwhile, the crowd outside the Criminal Courts Building had grown bigger and rowdier and noisier, even though the electric chair had long since disappeared into the bowels of the Parish Prison and Titus Dupre wasn't due to die in it for another seven hours yet.

And then to top it all off, some maniac was apparently out there on the loose, taking pot shots at his detectives. It was enough, he'd told the maniac's two targets as they'd filed into his office, to make a man want to shoot his own head off just so his ears could have a little rest.

The captain sat behind his desk now, cradling his head in his hands while he listened to a summary of how the crucifixion killing case had gone up Tony the Rat's nose. When he looked up from time to time to give his men a good glare, his hair would stick out from the sides of his head where he'd grabbed and pulled on it.

This time Rourke propped up the door jamb and Fio was in the chair, nursing his shot arm and doing all the talking. He had, Rourke noticed, put the sling back on that he'd so cavalierly taken off right after they'd left Kress's Five-and-Dime earlier that afternoon.

“Judas Priest on a sandwich,” the captain said, when Fio was done. “Did you two wake up bored this mornin'? Did you decide to conduct an experiment, maybe, to see how much misery you could bring to my day?”

Fio shot a glance back at Rourke and cleared his throat. “It gets worse, boss. Tony's goon, Guido the Rat—when he fell off that pier last night, he must've hit his head on a piling or something and drowned. An oyster lugger found him washed up on a shoal downriver. The Ghoul said he had a lump on his head the size of a tennis ball and that he'd probably been in the water for over ten hours.”

“Ye gods.” Malone snatched up a cigarette and flipped it at the wall. “While you two've been out there chasing your tails and getting nowhere, your suspects have been dropping around you like rats…” His mouth relaxed suddenly into wry smile. “If you'll pardon the pun.”

“It's all my fault,” Rourke said. “I should've gone after Tony Benato right there at Holy Rosary, him and whoever was in that box probably waiting to pass him the coke. For acting suspicious or under the influence or some damn thing.”

Malone had gotten up and fetched the cigarette he'd thrown. By the time he sat back down again and put the cigarette back in its place in line on the desk, he'd recovered his usual equanimity. “Don't beat yourself up over it, Day,” he said. “How were you to know some kind of payoff or blackmail or whatever in tarnation you want to call it was going down in that confessional? What if it really had been what it looked like it was, and you ended up rousting some innocent priest who was only going about his holy business? The good Lord forgives anyone who repents, even hophead loan sharks with holes in their noses, and the powers that must be obeyed would've been all over our cabooses if that penitent act of his had turned out to be legit.”