Wages of Sin (21 page)

“You're going to have to get in line.”

The coroner had tacked the crime scene photos up on his corkboard. They went over them together, but could come up with nothing new, but as Rourke was about to call it quits for the evening, the Ghoul stopped him at the door.

“I almost forgot to tell you that I was able to analyze that paper you gave to me. I am fortunate to have in my possession a book called the
International Ink Library,
which contains the chemical composition and formulation of over six thousand types of ink. I went through four thousand and seventy-six of them before a thought occurred to me, and you might have told me at the onset,” he said, at the look that crossed Rourke's face, “that the same thought had already occurred to you.”

“Jesus…” Rourke lifted his hat to push his fingers through his hair. “So it was blood, then.”

“Indeed. Human blood, type O. I performed the latest precipitin test, whereby I placed a sample of the element in question on a glass slide treated with gelatin next to a second sample of a biological reagent. When I passed an electrode through the glass, the protein molecules in the two samples filtered outward through the gelatin toward each other and a precipitin line formed where the antigens and the antibodies met, indicating that the first sample was human blood…But I am getting carried away with myself, Lieutenant. You are not interested in method, only results.”

“I'm interested in both,” Rourke said. “Truly,” he added with a sudden smile. “And thanks.”

“You are welcome.” The Ghoul hesitated, frowning.

“What?” Rourke said.

“You did not tell me what this is about, and I shall not ask. But I took the liberty of reading the contents—well, how could I not? And if I might venture an opinion: I have done some reading in the new science of psychoanalysis and it is my thought that the individual who could write such words in human blood…I believe his mental faculties are most disturbed. He might be someone with whom Miss Lelourie was once intimate, or he could be fantasizing an intimacy that was never there, but one nevertheless that he believes is most real.”

“You think Remy might actually know this guy?” Rourke said. “I kind've had him pegged as some crazed fan just looking to get her attention.”

“A crazed fan, perhaps, but crazed in a particular way. This man—he has formed an obsession with Miss Lelourie. She has become an object to him, and he is driven to possess the object. He might even have himself convinced that he already does possess her…”

The Ghoul had been staring off into space while he gathered and recited his thoughts, but now he brought his gaze back to Rourke and in the small eyes lost in their rolls of fat there was an urgency that Rourke had never seen before.

“If he were to have his illusions shattered,” the Ghoul said, “this obsessed individual…If he were to come to realize that not only does he not possess Miss Lelourie, but that he is unlikely ever to possess her, then I fear he will not be able to bear the thought of another possessing the object of his desire, either. And then, Lieutenant, the most logical step in his diseased mind will be—”

“To kill her,” Rourke said.

“Or to kill the man who does possess her.”

The sour, cheesy stink of the morgue lingered in Rourke's nose and on his hair and in his clothes, but then he figured time in a jail cell wasn't going to help him smell any better.

He didn't take the connecting hall that ran from the City Courts Building to the abutting Parish Prison, but instead went outside to where he'd parked the Bearcat and got out the fiddle that he'd been carrying around in the trunk for two days. It was a Louisiana country fiddle—made of cypress slats from some old barn, and with bones for pegs and strings from a window screen—but it had soul.

The guard in the block where they housed Titus Dupre had gnarled teeth stained with nicotine, and bushy eyebrows arched over small eyes. The eyes looked at the fiddle in Rourke's hand with hard suspicion.

“You got a piece of paper that says you can bring that thing in here?” he said through the tobacco plug he had stuffed in his lower lip.

Rourke took out his money clip and peeled off five dollars. The guard's eyes didn't change expression, so Rourke peeled off another five.

“I gotta take a good look at it, though,” the guard said. “The scut going 'round is that you're a nigger lover, so could be you're smugglin' a tommy gun inside, or sumthin'. That's why I gotta look.”

The guard took the fiddle gingerly, as if he feared it would metamorphose at any moment into a machine gun and spray bullets around the room.

He shook it, rapped on the soundboard, peered with one eye into the F-hole, and then gave it back to Rourke. “Gonna fry that darkie's ass tonight, uh-huh,” he said. “And not before time.”

Titus Dupre's cell was at the end of the block and all the cells around him had been left empty. Their footsteps echoed on the stone slab floor. The heavy key rattled in the lock, and the cell door opened with a clatter of iron bars.

The cell was a six-by-six stone box. A rust-streaked sink and toilet hung from the wall in one corner. An iron cot with no mattress was chained against the back wall beneath a high, small window that showed only scraps of a darkening sky. The cell smelled of the toilet and boiled collard greens and sweat.

The guard locked Rourke inside and then left him alone with Titus Dupre.

The warden of the Louisiana State Prison farm up in Angola had told Rourke once that as an inmate got deep into a stretch of long, hard time his needs got whittled down to only two: something to hope for and absolution for his sins. Rourke wasn't sure if the warden had it right, but he had no hope to offer Titus Dupre this evening, and the boy was too proud to ask for absolution, even from himself.

Rourke suspected, anyway, that the one thing Titus Dupre wanted most right now was simply more time.

He had been lying on the cot, but he stood up when the door clanged open. Tall and slender and ebony black, he had cut a fine figure in the clothes of his profession as a chimney sweep: the swallow-tailed coat and silk stovepipe hat. Chimney sweeps worked in pairs and he had walked the streets of the city with his younger brother, Cornelius, singing “
R-r-ramoner la cheminée!
” Since almost all the houses in New Orleans were heated by charcoal burned in a fire grate, they'd made a good, steady living.

Nina Duboche, the murdered girl, had had hair like dark honey and dimples in her cheeks the size of dimes. She'd been good at algebra and knew the steps to all the latest dances. She'd volunteered at Charity Hospital and had told her friends she was thinking about becoming a nurse when she graduated from high school.

The evening she'd disappeared she had been on her way to a school mixer, wearing her school uniform, but she'd been naked when they'd found her. Naked and a corpse.

Only a few men had the real killer lust, and Rourke kept finding it hard to believe that Titus Dupre was one of them. He thought, sometimes, that it had probably all begun with an accident. That the first girl to disappear, Mercedes Bloom, had teased him, maybe she'd even gone so far as to offer sex, and then had tried to back out of it at the last minute and things had gotten rough and she had ended up dead.

And then something must have broken loose inside of Titus Dupre. The trip wire that's in your head and acts as a brake on all your worst impulses and desires. He might have killed that first time in a frenzy of frustrated sexual passion, but he had discovered that he liked it.

Titus Dupre waited now until the guard's footsteps had echoed away down the hall and then he pointed his chin at the fiddle in Rourke's hand. “You been to see my gran'mon? Did she get you to bring me that?”

Rourke shook his head. “It was all my own idea. Your grandmama won't let me do anything for her.” He didn't think the boy would take the instrument from his hand, so he crossed the cell and laid it down on the iron cot. “I just figured you for a fiddle player, when I noticed how the tips of your fingers were callused.”

Titus stared at the fiddle, his face set hard. Then he leaned over and picked up the bow first and then the instrument, cradling it softly in his hands. “You got a real mean streak in you,” he said, “even for a cop.”

He looked up at Rourke, and in the permanent blue dusk of the cell, his eyes were like marbles. He braced the fiddle against his chest and played a few licks, and then set it back down. The cell was hot and he had the sleeves of his prison shirt rolled up to his elbows. His muscled arms were like flats of dark steel, but when he put down the fiddle they were shaking.

“It don't got no tune no more,” he said. “Been too long without anyone to play it.”

In the six months that Titus Dupre had been in this cell awaiting execution, Rourke had come to see him a couple of times a week and yet in all that time he'd never gotten a real sense of the boy. Titus Dupre possessed a reserved dignity beyond his seventeen years, but then he was a black Creole and like their white Creole counterparts they held themselves proud and aloof from others of their own race. In New Orleans where family was everything, Titus Dupre could trace his roots back two hundred years, to when his ancestors had come over from Haiti. The Dupres had never been owned by any man. They'd been
gens de couleur libres,
free people of color.

At his trial, Titus Dupre heard all the evidence against him but had spoken not one word in his own defense. He'd preserved a haughty-faced silence about the fate of both girls—the one whose strangled and ravaged body had condemned him to the electric chair, and the one girl still missing.

Since the conviction, Rourke had spent maybe fifty hours in this cell with Titus Dupre and in the end he'd gotten nothing of substance and precious little, even, of understanding. Maybe, he thought, the boy just wanted to be able to say that he'd both lived and died without ever crawling to the white man. Whatever the reason, Rourke had figured out long ago that he wasn't going to be able to trick or seduce or force the truth out of Titus Dupre. The boy would either tell him what he wanted to know of his own impetus and will, or not.

Still Rourke kept coming back and sometimes he found himself liking the kid. Until he remembered the dead girl's bulging eyes and the savage bite marks he'd seen between her thighs.

They stared at each other now, the cop and the boy, and unspoken between them was the knowledge that they'd come to the end of their strange road together.

“Is there anything you'd like me to see if I can get for you?” Rourke asked, putting it out there—that tonight Titus Dupre would die. “They're supposed to give you what you want for your last meal, but…I don't know. Cigarettes? A bucket of beer?”

A smile full of white, even teeth flashed in the boy's face. “Me, I don't want for nothin' but tomorrows. But you, you be lookin' tired this evenin'. Why don't you have a sit?”

Rourke moved the fiddle over and sat down on the iron cot. To his surprise Titus joined him. They both sat bent over, elbows resting on thighs, like two old men sharing a park bench.

Rourke figured it would be an insult to the both of them if he wasted time by sidling up to what he had to say. He took the photograph of Mercedes Bloom out of his pocket and held it to where Titus Dupre would have to turn his head away if he didn't want to look at it.

“Her parents came to see me a while ago,” he said. “They say they'll have no peace in their life if you go tonight without telling them what happened to their daughter. They'll have no peace anyway, but they're begging you.”

Titus Dupre didn't look away. He stared down at the photograph, not blinking. Rourke was sitting close to him, though, and he thought that somewhere, deep inside, the boy had flinched.

“And how 'bout you, Mr. Po-liceman?” he said. “Are you beggin' me?”

Rourke let a little bite show in his smile. “I don't ever beg.”

“Hunh. You got your pride, but so does I.” He took the photograph from Rourke's hands, looked at it closer, then gave it back to him. “My gran'mon would say we both of us're caught 'tween the sour pickle and the sour juice. If I dint kill that girl and stuff her body somewheres, then I can't never be tellin' you what I don't know. An' if I did do that thing, then I wouldn't be givin' a damn 'bout any sufferin' that was to come from it. I'm already in jail and fixin' to be 'lectrocuted, what more can you do to me?”

“There's what folk will think about you after you're gone. You have a chance to do a little good here, to weigh against all the bad.”

“Let people think what they big enough to think.” He pushed himself to his feet and took a turn around the small cell, and then again, and then stopped to stand over Rourke. “I know what you thinking, though.”

“Yeah? What's that?”

“That I don't got a heart. Uh-huh, uh-huh…” His head bobbed and he rocked up and down on the balls of his feet. “Well, what if I was to say the only thing a heart does is pump blood and nothin' else? You can stop it, but you can't break it.”

“Will you be saying that to your grandmama tonight, before they strap you in that chair? That her heart isn't really breaking?”

In a place like this you learn how to cry without showing a thing or making a sound, but something in his eyes gave him away, and Rourke realized that for a long time now Titus Dupre had been weeping inside, down deep in the place where he lived.

Rourke looked down at the cement floor between his spread knees, but not before he'd betrayed his knowledge. The boy whirled away from him and crossed the cell in two strides. He leaned his shoulders against the bars, his face averted now from Rourke's gaze.

“She goin' to be there?” he asked after a moment.

“Yes,” Rourke said. “And your baby brother, too.”

He tried for a smile, but didn't make it. “At least somebody'll be cryin' at my funeral.”

Rourke straightened up and reached over to pluck a couple of strings on the fiddle. They made a sound like drops of water falling down a gutter spout. “She keeps fretting about the funeral arrangements, your grandmama. But I don't think it's hit home to her yet, what all's going to happen tonight.”