Wages of Sin (43 page)

Paulie shrugged and spread out his hands. “How should I remember? It wasn't Father Frank, I know. So it must've been some layman, I suppose. Whoever it was, he probably didn't see the bleeding, because he would've said something surely. And only Father Pat and I were in the vestry when it got bad.”

They fell into a silence then while neither brother looked at the other, and they might each have been alone there, sitting in the bleachers and looking at an empty baseball field, and then Rourke said, “You got to leave her alone, Paulie. Otherwise no good is going to come of it.”

“I know,” Paulie said.

Rourke listened while his brother talked about the temptation of Christ and the power of prayer, and about how he was going to give up his love for Colleen Murphy and dedicate his life to being a good priest, and Rourke didn't believe a word of it.

He looked toward the stand of cypress in right field, where Paulie had hit the one and only home run of his life that had won it for them in the bottom of the ninth. Growing up, they had been taught the hard way that when things got tough you looked to yourself to get yourself out of trouble. And so they had grown into men, and he had been drawn into their father's violent and aberrant world, while Paulie had fled from it.

And so, too, they had been avoiding each other all these years, each afraid of what he would see in the other. They were too alike in their deepest places, after all—the sons of Mike Rourke. They both hid from the world their need for help, and the need they had to refuse any help that was offered to them.

Chapter Twenty-seven

F
iorello Prankowski's cheek now looked like it had a baseball tucked away inside it. He was sipping a milk shake through a straw and looking at Rourke's fried oyster sandwich with greedy eyes.

“If you did something about that tooth,” Rourke said, “you could eat chewable things.”

They were sitting in a booth with cracked red-leather seats, in the greasy spoon across from the Bright Lights warehouse where Mary Lou Trescher had last been seen alive. The studio was out filming in the swamp somewhere today, so they'd walked all over the surrounding waterfront, searching for somebody who had seen something. Nobody had.

“I did do something about my tooth,” Fio said. Or at least that was what Rourke thought he'd said. He was also talking like he had a baseball tucked in his cheek. “I went to this sadist who calls himself a dentist. The guy said he was gonna pull it, so I said I'd catch him later.”

Rourke made chicken noises and flapped his arms.

“Fuck you and your mama, too,” Fio said.

Fio took his bankroll out of his pocket, peeled off five ten-spots and pushed them across the table's gold-speckled oilcloth toward Rourke.

“What's this?” Rourke said.

“The fifty bucks I owe you. We bet on Father Ghilotti being the killer. You said he wasn't, and it turns out he wasn't.”

“We don't know that yet for sure.”

Outside an organ grinder was churning out Italian opera, and inside there was a sizzle from the steak the cook had just tossed on the grill. The red leather sighed as Fio shifted his weight. He sucked on his tooth, making a slurping sound, then shifted some more. “You gonna hit me if I say something?”

“Depends.”

“You can't start leaving case files open because you're afraid you're going to make another mistake like what got made with Titus Dupre.”

“I know. I'm not. This one just doesn't feel finished to me, is all.”

“Okay, let's talk about why Albert Payne Layton probably did it.” Fio held up a finger the size of a sausage. “One: he'd been embezzling money from the Catholic Charities, and Father Pat knew that, and so Father Pat had to be shut up.”

“Why crucify him for it, though? A bullet to the head would've been a lot more efficient and a lot less risky. I can see Layton playing with his victim, wanting to make him suffer. But I can't see the man sticking his neck out to do it.”

“Maybe,” Fio conceded. “So let's go with number two then. You said you thought Floriane Layton might've known the truth about Father Pat, about he being a she. So how would she've known that unless they'd ended up in the sack together at least once? Maybe Layton walked in on his old lady when they were doing the dirty deed.”

Rourke shook his head. “The killer crucified Father Pat with his cassock on.”

Fio snatched his napkin out from the neck of his shirt and threw it on the table. “Fuck me. I knew you'd bring up that stuff about him not being naked.”

“Sorry,” Rourke said, meaning it.

Fio lit a Castle Morro and dropped the burnt match into his empty milk shake glass. He sulked during the rest of the meal and when they went back outside, the weather was weeping again, too.

They stood on the sidewalk in the rain, trying to decide what they should be doing next. The Fantastics killings case had gone flat, but hanging on to the edge of their every thought and word, like the distant wail of a siren, was the fear that if they didn't catch him soon another girl would get snatched up off the street, raped, and strangled, and then dumped somewhere easy for them to find.

“Well, hell,” Fio said, echoing Rourke's morbid thoughts. He shook his head like a dog, tossing raindrops off the brim of his battered, bullet-riddled hat.

“You ever going to get a new hat?” Rourke said.

“What's wrong with this one?”

“Well, for one thing, it leaks now that it's been shot. What good's a hat that lets your head get wet?”

“I ain't gonna melt.” Fio grinned, and then his eyes opened so wide their whites showed. “Goddammit. It's like somebody's driving a nail in there, you know?”

“So go to the fucking dentist.”

“I already got a perfectly good mama up in Des Moines. I don't need another one for a partner, telling me all the time what I should or shouldn't be doing.”

“Fine. Then come along with me while I have a heart-to-heart with someone. You can cover my back.”

Fio gave his partner a long, careful look. “Aw, jeez, Day, you're breaking my balls here. What're you gonna do, and who are you gonna do it to?”

Rourke didn't tell him. He started across the street toward the patrol car they were borrowing for the day, and he was thinking that he was going to have to get over the 'Cat's loss soon, so he could go shopping for a new set of wheels.

Fio was following on his heels, off on one of his riffs. “You're gonna get us fired. Only you won't be fired 'cause you got angels in high places and you're banging a movie star. So they'll fire me instead, and my wife'll have me sleeping on the couch for what's left of my miserable life.”

Rourke stopped so suddenly that Fio almost walked up his back. “You don't have to come if you don't want to,” Rourke said.

Fio gave him a look that would have curdled cream and held out his pie plate of a hand. “I'm driving, so shut up and gimme the keys.”

Rourke gave him the keys and they got in the car. Fio turned over the engine and put it in gear, but he didn't pull out.

“This guy we're going to have the heart-to-heart with,” he said. “Are you gonna kill him?”

Rourke smiled. “Odds are I won't.”

The speakeasy hadn't changed any since they'd been here the afternoon following Father Pat's murder. Damp, rotting sawdust on the floor and the stink of cheap booze and bad food. The same man with the flattened face was there tending the bar, and he still wouldn't meet their eyes, but instead occupied himself with polishing a glass on the hem of his flannel shirt.

Even Rourke's snitch, Dirty Eddie the house creep, was at the same table against the wall. He spotted Rourke and scurried off into the back toilet, and Rourke wondered why Dirty Eddie always ran away from him, because when he wanted to catch the kid he always could.

The one difference between this time and last was that the exotic dancers were dancing, and they were pretty deep into their routine, down to the pasties on their nipples and a string. The one wasn't bad, but the other had thighs and a bottom that looked like clabber.

Rourke saw the man he had come for, sitting at the far end of the bar, but turned around so that he could watch the dancers. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking a boilermaker that was sure to have been on the house.

Before coming inside Rourke had taken his .38 Policeman's Special out of its shoulder holster and put it in his coat pocket, and now he put his right hand in the pocket, wrapping it around the gun's grip.

Jack Murphy saw them coming and he grinned, breathing smoke out through his teeth. “Evenin', Dee-tectives. What brings y'all down here slummin'?”

Rourke took the gun out of his pocket and pressed the barrel into Murphy's side. “Let's go see the dogs.”

The dog fighting pit was through a back door and into an attached building made out of plywood and tin.

Rourke took his gun out of Jack Murphy's side as soon as they were through the door. The door had a heavy iron bar that could be laid down across it, and Fio used it. Then he leaned his back up against it, his hands hanging loose and ready at his sides.

Without the gun barrel poking him in the ribs, Jack Murphy's mouth had recovered its perpetual smirk. “I got nothin' I want to say to y'all,” he said.

“Good,” Rourke said. “'Cause I've been listening to one confession after another for the last two days now and I'm sick and tired of it.”

The building smelled of dog shit, wet fur, and old blood. One end of it was taken up with the pit and crude bleachers. At the other end were the dog pens, fashioned out of rusting cyclone fencing. The dogs had started barking as soon as the door had opened and the racket they made was nerve jangling. They were snarling and snapping at air and throwing themselves at the walls of their cages. When they fought in the pit, they tried to rip each other's throats out.

Rourke left Murphy standing by Fio and the door and walked down a short aisle between the bleachers for a closer look at the pit. It was rectangular in shape, with a dirt floor and enclosed by wooden slats. The slats were stained and splattered with blood. The cement floor between the bleachers was littered with empty Red Man pouches and decaying chicken bones.

“Hey, Rourke,” Murphy called out to him, stirring the dogs to an even greater frenzy. “You tell your cocksucking brother to stay away from my Colleen.”

Rourke went back to him, getting in close, close enough that he could have kissed the other man on the cheek if they had been lovers, and he smiled.

“What we got here, partner,” he said, “is the guy who was fool enough to put Tony the Rat up to soliciting a beating for the priest who was getting a little too friendly with his wife.”

“Man,” Fio said, shaking his head and clicking his tongue. “He must've just about shit a brick then, when a priest turns up crucified in that old abandoned macaroni factory.”

“I had nothing to do with that,” Murphy said.

“Yeah, well, you knew that,” Rourke said, “and Tony the Rat knew that, but that didn't stop good ol' Tony from trying to blackmail you over it. He wanted coke and so you gave it to him, laced with cyanide, and poor ol' Tony took a ride to the moon.”

“So who gives a fuck? The guy was swamp scum.”

Rourke took out his gun, and Murphy said, “Hey,” and took a step back, but then he relaxed again when he saw Rourke break open the loading gate and empty the cartridges into his hand. He put five of the cartridges into his pocket, keeping back the sixth one.

“Are you feeling like a lucky man today, Jack?” he said.

Murphy took another step back and then he looked over at Fio by the door. “What's he doing?”

“He's kinda unpredictable,” Fio said, his face deadpan.

Rourke loaded the single bullet, closed the gate, and spun the cylinder, once, twice, three times. He looked up at Murphy and smiled, and then he slammed the man into the wall so hard he knocked the breath out of them both and rattled the tin.

Rourke had his forearm braced up against the other man's throat, and when his lips parted, to breathe or to shout, Rourke rammed two of the .38's four inches of barrel into Jack Murphy's open mouth.

For some reason, the dogs had suddenly gone silent. In the dim light, the bluing of the gun shone with a thin layer of oil. The grip was hard and round and cool against the palm of Rourke's hand, and the hammer made a loud snap under his thumb as he cocked it.

“Five empty chambers and one live round. How do you like those odds, Jack?”

Rourke waited, though, doing nothing, letting the man's fear build until you could smell it, a gray smell. Until you could hear the breath ripping through the man's nostrils, and sweat ran down his cheeks and dripped onto Rourke's hand.

“Want to see how they'll play?” Rourke said, and Murphy's eyes bulged and crossed, watching as Rourke's finger tensed and squeezed the trigger.

The
snick
of the hammer falling on the empty chamber might as well have been as loud as a thunderclap. Murphy's eyes flinched shut and he made a gagging sound in the back of his throat.

“Four empty chambers left and one live round. Are you going to leave my brother alone, Jack?”

Murphy tried to talk, but Rourke pushed the gun barrel deeper into his throat and cocked the hammer again…waited a beat and pulled the trigger.

And the hammer fell on another empty chamber.

“Three empties left now and a live one. Are you going to stay away from him, Jack?”

Murphy sobbed as his mouth stretched wider around the barrel of the gun, trying to stretch away from it. He made a gargling noise deep in his throat, and snot blew out his nose.

“What do you think, Fio? Was that a yes?”

“Sounded like a yes to me, partner.”

Rourke cocked the hammer slowly, so that Murphy could watch the cylinder rotate, could see maybe his death coming, only the man's eyes had rolled back in his head and something like a scream was whining in his nose.

Rourke squeezed the trigger, the hammer
snicked
on an empty chamber, and then all was quiet again except for the tinkle of urine running down Murphy's legs and hitting the cement floor.

Jack Murphy was a broken man, but because he was also the kind of man who would bring his broken pieces home with him and take them out on his wife, Rourke knew that he would have to break him even more.