Wages of Sin (40 page)

Cornelius Dupre had a rope around his neck, and the eyes he turned to Rourke were feral, like those of a cornered cat. “You comin' to join the lynching party, Mr. Po-liceman? This your way of evenin' up the—”

The rest of it was stopped by the redneck burying his fist in the boy's belly.

“Let him go now,” Rourke said gently. “Y'all don't want to be doing this.”

He'd expected the defiance to come from the two men holding Cornelius. Instead, it came from behind him, in a voice that was big and booze-roughened.

“You burnt the wrong nigger.”

Rourke didn't turn his back on the men holding the boy, just shifted his weight a little so he could take in the owner of the voice. It was the damn buck-toothed man in the yellow shirt and purple suspenders.

The man took a menacing step toward Rourke. He wasn't armed with anything more than his fists, but he was big and mean and full of too much hate to stop. “We're done with having our women kilt and defiled by these chimney sweep niggers,” he said. “Tonight we're doin' what needs doin'.”

Rourke raised his gun and pointed it between the man's eyes. He didn't say anything, just pulled back on the hammer with his thumb, and the sound of the gun cocking was loud in the sudden silence.

The buck-toothed man spit out the corner of his mouth, then cuffed it dry. “You can't shoot all of us.”

Rourke smiled. “I don't have to. Just you.”

The silence now was like after a bell has stopped tolling. Rourke could smell the sweat on the other man's skin, hear the suck and grate of the man's sawing breaths. From out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the patrolmen take a tighter grip of his stick.

Somebody kicked over an empty beer bottle on the ground, sending it rolling down the street, and the noise let some of the tension out of the moment. They weren't going to jump him and tear him limb from limb, Rourke thought, but he still wasn't getting the rope off Cornelius Dupre's neck without a struggle.

The wail of sirens that had been hovering in the distance grew louder. The buck-toothed man made a small movement, more a coiling of his muscles, and Rourke saw in his eyes that he was going to make a play for the gun. And then his head jerked and he looked beyond Rourke, and never in his life had Rourke seen a man look more surprised.

Remy Lelourie floated toward them from out of the mist, like something out of a graveyard in the black flowing cape and tattered white shroud. The face, though, this was unmistakably one that they'd all seen larger than life on the silver screen.

She walked right into the middle of the trouble with wonder on that face and an aura about her of impish excitement and a shared secret. As if she were Cinderella who'd suddenly been transported by magical pumpkin to the ball.

“Gentlemen, I declare that I am fascinated,” she said, her words more heavily spiced than usual with the Creole accent she'd grown up with. “Positively overwhelmed, I am, for if this isn't just like a scenario from right out of one of my movies.”

“Jesus God,” someone said on an exhaled breath, then grunted as the man standing next to him thumped him in the belly hard with of all things a baseball mitt. As if he'd been out playing catch with his boy, Rourke thought, when he'd gotten the call to go lynching.

“Pardon his profanity, ma'am,” the man with the mitt said. “It's just…are you really Remy Lelourie?”

She focused her tilted, catlike eyes on the man with the mitt until he began to squirm, and then her wide mouth broke into a smile that was pure Remy. “Oh, you're only funnin' with me, and you can just cut it out.”

Rourke watched her turn on the power of Remy Lelourie. Her gaze went from man to man, sucking them in, before it came to rest finally on the buck-toothed man in the yellow shirt and purple suspenders.

“
Oh, Susannah!
is the movie I was talking about,” she said. “Did you see that one, sir?”

And the man—who a moment before had been facing down the muzzle of a .38 Policeman's Special—shuffled his feet and mumbled, “No'm,” to his shoes.

“Well, never you mind,” she said, laughing. “I'll tell you the plot, shall I? Susannah is this dance hall girl, you see? But one with a heart of gold, of course. And in the town where she's living there's about to be a gunfight between the wild and handsome outlaw she's in love with and this mean ol' corrupt sheriff and his six deputies, when suddenly an idea comes to her of how she can get everybody to put up their guns and thus escape disaster.”

The men looked as if they weren't sure if they were supposed to be identifying with the handsome outlaw or the corrupt sheriff and his deputies, but it didn't matter anyway for she owned them.

She was also, Rourke saw, slowly unraveling the knot of men and separating them from Cornelius Dupre. Rourke took a couple of slow and quiet steps closer to the boy.

“What Susannah does,” said Remy Lelourie, “is she tells the men that she's going to auction off a dance with herself to the highest bidder…You, sir? Why don't you play the part of the auctioneer?” She linked arms briefly with the redneck with the jowls and pot and when she stepped away again, he went with her, mesmerized, and letting go of the boy Cornelius without an apparent thought.

“And any money we make can go to Miss Mary Lou Trescher's mama. So why don't you”—and she held her hand out to the man with the dead eye—“start the bidding out at a nickel.”

The man let go of Cornelius's other arm and took a couple of spastic steps toward Remy. He stuck out his head and twisted up his mouth and started stuttering so hard he was spitting.

“Aw, jeez,” said the redneck. “You don't want him bidding anyway. He dances just like he talks.” He waved his arms in the air and hollered, “Hey, y'all. Who'll give me five cents for a dance with the beauteous Miss Remy Lelourie?”

“Heck, I'll give you a dime,” came an old man's voice from the back.

As soon as the two men had let go of Cornelius Dupre, the boy had whirled to run, but Rourke grabbed him by the arm and forced him down the street toward the patrol car. The two patrolmen followed, covering their backs.

Rourke heard the redneck say, “Hey, wait a minute. What'll we do for music?” And the man with the baseball mitt answered him, “I got me a harmonica.”

Cornelius twisted against the grip Rourke had on him, and Rourke gave him a little shake. “Don't you be giving me any more grief tonight, kid.”

“Where you takin' me?”

“To jail.” One of the patrolmen had run up ahead now and started up the car. Rourke opened the door to the back seat and thrust Cornelius inside. “Until we rid the world of the man who's killing those girls, jail is the safest place for you.”

Cornelius flung himself against the far window and crossed his arms over his belly. “Hunh. Tell that to my brother.”

Two squad cars peeled around the corner from St. Charles, sirens whimpering down to moans. The men, who'd been about to lynch a fifteen-year-old boy, were all laughing and whooping and clapping now in time to a harmonica wailing “Oh, Susannah!” Stars of their own scenario. The moment when it could have turned ugly had already come and then gone when Remy Lelourie, with impeccable timing, had hit her mark and stolen the scene.

Rourke asked the patrolmen to take their “material witness” and stow him out of sight in the Mid-City Precinct.

He shut the door, and the squad car pulled out into the street. Cornelius Dupre turned to stare back at him through the rear window, and Rourke had to laugh, because the boy sure didn't look grateful that the police had just saved his ass.

When Floriane de Lassus Layton heard the wail of the police sirens from a block away on St. Charles, she felt a moment's panic that they were coming for her.

It wasn't as if she'd committed any crime, unless you counted the love she'd made with another woman…Other women. But when guilt is so much a part of you that you're breathing it in and out through the pores of your skin, then you have long ago stopped needing a reason for your fear.

The sirens faded away, though, after a few minutes and she smiled at her own foolishness. Yet as she walked around the parlor, plumping pillows, straightening a book here, a painting there, she imagined she could still feel her heart thudding against her rib bones.

When the grandfather clock struck the hour, she started so violently she almost knocked over the milk glass vase of American Beauty roses that she'd been rearranging on the mantel. Then, even though she was looking right at the face of the clock and could see the time, she counted the deep bongs, counted them out loud like a ritual. He'd told her that he'd be coming home from his club by nine o'clock, but he could be late. He often was.

Still, when he came through the door, he would want his bourbon poured and the fire going in the grate because the night was cool.

She knew better than to disappoint him.

She sat on the green and cream silk sofa to wait for him, arranged herself there like a proper young lady expecting a gentleman caller. She waited while the grandfather clock bonged ten times, then eleven, then twelve. And when he finally came, his bourbon wasn't poured and the fire had died in the grate, and she sat as if the waiting had petrified her, turned her into stone.

Hating his confidence, fearing it, she watched her husband walk to the bourbon decanter and pour his own drink.

He turned to her, smiling, and lifted his glass in a toast. “Why, Flo, darling. What a sweet and loving wife you are. You've waited up for me.”

“I'm not, Bertie,” she said.

His smile tightened a little. “Not what?”

“A loving wife.”

His mouth relaxed again, but his eyes had a hard sheen on them. “I know, darling. That much has been obvious for quite some time.”

She'd been remembering things, while sitting on the sofa and waiting for him to come. Remembering the time she'd first seen him running across a lawn with a tennis racket in his hand. The sky had been a hard, sun-washed blue behind his smiling face and a salt breeze had riffled through his bright hair, and it seemed that since he was everything she was supposed to want, she had wanted him.

And she had remembered, too, going back to that same house only a month after they'd been married, walking across that lawn beneath another sun-washed blue sky, and wondering already to herself how they could be walking arm and arm, and still not be touching.

“Bertie, do you know what the word obscene means?”

He'd gone to the window, drink in his hand, to look out at a night dark and full of rain. When she'd spoken, after such a length of silence, he cast a look at her over his shoulder, then turned back to the window again. “You are behaving strangely tonight.”

“I looked it up in the dictionary this afternoon so that I would be sure to get it right. It means disgusting to the senses, because of some filthy, grotesque, or unnatural quality. You are obscene, Bertie. You revolt me.”

She'd been rehearsing that little speech all day, and it had sounded that way, stilted, overexposed. Still, she was proud of it. It was the second bravest thing she'd ever done in her life.

She hadn't quite been brave enough to say it to his face, though, and she saw his back go rigid before he turned to look at her. His face wore his slightly cruel, smiling mask. What Albert Payne Layton really felt, he had always kept inside, showing nothing to anyone except polished manners or a balled-up fist.

“Flo, darling. I do believe you have finally gone and lost your mind,” he said, and only by the careful way he pronounced the words did she know that he was starting to boil inside.

Good, she thought. She wanted him boiling.

“You murdered Father Pat,” she said.

His mouth fell open a little and then he laughed.

“You nailed him to a piece of wood and watched him die.”

She watched her husband cross the room from the window back to the whiskey decanter and she saw his guilt in his step and the set of his shoulder, in the stiff way he held his head. She heard his guilt in his calculated and carefully articulated words.

“I don't know whether I should feel astonished that you would think so,” he said, “or complimented.”

“You were stealing money from the Church and Father Pat found out about it and so you killed him.”

He was staring down at the bourbon in his glass, but she saw the flash of fear cross his face and she relished it. He waited just a little too long before he raised his head and met her eyes and laughed again, shaking his head. “Flo, Flo, Flo…”

He went to the cherry wood secretary where they kept the telephone. He hesitated a moment when he saw the Catholic Charities' green leather accounts book that she had taken from his desk and so carefully placed there, but then he lifted the phone's handset and held it out to her.

“Here, dear wife. Call up the police and tell them you've solved the case. Only, why don't we just tell them
all
our dirty secrets while we're about it, huh? Mine…and yours.”

Once when she was a young girl, a friend had taken her for a sail on the lake and a terrible squall had come up. The little sailboat had groaned like a thing in agony as it bucked and climbed the waves. And as the rain lashed the deck and the wind howled and shrieked through the rigging, she, Floriane de Lassus, had believed that she was looking death in the face and as scared as she'd been in that moment, she had also been laughing with an odd and savage excitement.

She hadn't experienced that feeling again in her life, until now.

“What secrets of mine are you talking about, Bertie?” she said, pushing him hard now, baiting him. “Is it the one where I arise from my lover's bed flush with pleasure, wet between the legs and with my nipples still tingling. If that's your secret, darling, then you're too late because Lieutenant Rourke already knows.”

There they are,
she thought, and she felt nearly faint now with fear and that sick excitement. The first fissures in the crust covering the boiling geyser that lived inside Albert Payne Layton. His mouth turned white at the corners and a blood vessel throbbed in his temple. His freckles had darkened to the color of dried blood.