Wages of Sin (45 page)

Her father, Sean Daly, was the head of the local stevedores' union, and a certain portion of the money in any union's war chest was always automatically earmarked for the police department's pad. So he had, as Fio had said, “a lotta juice.”

In the snapshot of the Fantastics that Rourke had been carrying around in his pocket for the last three days, Gillian Daly was the fourth in line and the tallest of the nine girls. He had already thought she was the prettiest, even though in the black and white photograph you couldn't tell that her hair was the red-gold of a sunset and her eyes were an unusual jade green.

“What else do y'all need to know?” Daly was saying. “She was wearing her school uniform—the St. Francis of Assisi Academy for Girls. They only had a half day today, because of some senior pageant they were supposed to be getting ready for. That's why she was going shopping.”

A tall colored woman with beautiful bones and dark, liquid eyes came into the room bearing a massive silver tray loaded with a steaming
cafetière,
milk, and three sets of cups and saucers. “I told that chile,” she said, as she set the tray down on a chrome and glass coffee table. “I told her be sure to take your umbrella, Miss Gilly, 'cause it's been threatenin' rain off and on out there all mornin'.”

Sean Daly looked at the woman as if it couldn't be possible that just a few hours before their world had been so normal, so sane, and then he said, “Thank you for thinking to make us some coffee, Mrs. Jousett,” and she straightened from arranging the cups and saucers and looked at him with such tenderness in those liquid eyes that Rourke thought,
hunh.

They all watched in silence while Mrs. Jousett poured the café au lait and left the room. Then Daly sat down on the modern white-leather sofa and looked at the coffee as if he ought to be doing something with it, but he didn't know what. “What can I do?” he said “There's gotta be something I can do.”

Rourke had gone back to the painting, thinking out loud now, “She's standing there under the clock,” he said, and Daly looked up, surprised, because it was the first time Rourke had spoken since their introduction. “And her aunt is late, and she knows what's been going on with the other Fantastics, so she gets scared, or maybe she just gets smart, and decides she wants to go home…” He turned and crossed the room, coming to Daly where he sat on his expensive art deco sofa. “What you can do is make a list of everybody she trusts well enough to go off with in those circumstances.”

The two men stared at each other, assessing and challenging. The labor leader had penetrating gray eyes and a tough-looking face, the kind of toughness it took to control a union of several thousand strong. Sean Daly had the power to bring the city to its knees and he'd been known to use it.

“Gilly's a tough little fighter,” he said. “She would've made it hard for some stranger to come along and snatch her off a Canal Street sidewalk in broad daylight. So, yeah, I can do that list.” He stood and went back to the window. “I was just thinking…”

“It could be a cop,” Fio finished for him.

And then Rourke said, “Or a priest.”

He went back again for one last look at the painting. There was something about her smile, he thought, that on any other day would have made you want to smile, too, just looking at it. “Do you mind if I take a look at her bedroom?” he said.

Daly spun around, sweeping out his hand in a welcoming gesture. “Christ, no. Do whatever you got to do…”

Sean Daly took Rourke up to his daughter's bedroom while Fio went back in the kitchen to talk some more with the housekeeper.

He'd been in too many bedrooms like this one lately, he thought. Gilly's was pink and yellow satin and white lace. She had a collection of teddy bears sitting on a wooden shelf that ran along three walls, but one, a polar bear, lay snuggled up against the pillows on her bed: one-eyed, mangy white fur, well loved.

“That missing eye got eaten by her collie dog when he was a pup,” Daly said. He was in the doorway, one shoulder braced against the jamb, holding himself up. He wore an expensive gray flannel lounge suit, but he had his tie and coat off and had rolled his sleeves up, and Rourke could see the faded tattoo of an anchor under the black hair on his right forearm. The gold watch on his wrist gleamed in the light. “This year for her birthday her girlfriends gave her a new polar bear, but she couldn't bear to part with the old one…You got kids?”

“A daughter. She's seven.”

“Then you've got all the real scary stuff still ahead of you.”

Rourke grunted a half laugh. “I've had a few hairy moments already.”

They started to share a smile, then both lost it at the same time as the horrible truth of what had just been casual, polite, spacefilling conversation struck home.

Rourke saw where she had tucked snapshots around the mirror on her dressing table. She had the one of the Fantastics in front of the movie theater. And there was a picture of herself in her school uniform, standing on the steps of St. Francis of Assisi Academy for Girls, and several of her with her daddy. Riding the flying horses in the park, at a shrimp boil, sailing on the lake.

Among the snapshots was a postcard with a teddy bear on it. He turned it over to read the back.
Happy Birthday,
someone had written in a schoolgirl's hand, and then beneath the salutation, eight signatures, one for each of the other Fantastics.

Rourke turned, holding up the card so Daly could see it. “Can I keep this for a while?”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever you need.”

Daly pushed off the jamb and took a step into his daughter's bedroom, and Rourke saw the terror in his eyes break through like water splitting through the bottom of a paper bag. “Jesus Christ, God almighty, save me. What should I have done?” he said. “Kept her locked in here for the whole of her life?”

“The last girl he took,” Rourke said. “Mary Lou Trescher…She stayed alive for a while after he took her.”

“He'll be raping her.” Daly had said the words flat out, but his eyes said he was dying inside.

“You told us she was a fighter,” Rourke said.

Daly nodded, his face like stone. “Just find the son of a bitch before he kills her.”

They stood on Sean Daly's lawn in the drizzle and looked back at the house that was imitation Tudor on the outside and all expensive modern art deco on the inside.

“Poor bastard,” Fio said.

“Yeah,” Rourke said, and thought of how Daly had looked like he'd been hit with a fist in the heart.

They had every squad car and foot patrol out looking for the girl, because they had to try. Rourke had let Daly think there was a chance they'd get her back alive, but he didn't believe it.

“I got all this shit buzzing around in my head,” he said. “I gotta go somewhere quiet where I can think. Maybe go through the file, see if I can make some connections by reading papers that we haven't been able to do chasing our tails around in circles out here on the street.”

Rourke looked over at his partner's swollen face; the big guy had perpetual tears in his eyes from the pain. “And you got to get that tooth out before your head explodes,” he said.

“Yeah,” Fio said, morosely. Then, “Shit.”

Rourke had Fio drop him off at the Criminal Courts Building. He went up to the squad room, debriefed the captain, flipped through his telephone messages and made some return calls, and then picked up the case file on what the detectives had started calling the Fantastics killings, putting a label on the horror so that they could distance themselves from it.

On a whim he dug out all the paper on the crucifixion killing, too, and threw it all in a cardboard carton. He was back out on the street with the box in his arms, when he remembered that he'd left his motorcycle at the Layton house, and he had to go all the way back inside and upstairs to get a key for a squad car from the desk sergeant and arrange to have a patrolman pick up his bike, drive it to his house, and bring back the car.

Remy was waiting for him when he got home. The day's shooting on
Cutlass
had ended early because of the weather, and she told him she'd been trying to improve her mind by reading Anatole France's
Revolt of the Angels.
She was wearing one of his white shirts and a pair of denim overalls that looked like something a boy would wear fishing, only on her they looked sexy as all get-out.

He told her about Gillian Daly while she brewed a pot of coffee, and as he watched her move about his kitchen, he thought how much he loved that she was living with him now, and how he shouldn't let himself start thinking about them making it permanent.

They could hear Katie in the parlor laughing with Mrs. O'Reilly, while they listened to the amateur hour on Professor Shramm's radio show. It was a sweet moment, he thought. The sound of his daughter's laughter floating down the hall, the sight of his woman's bottom cupped by a pair of denim overalls and filling him with lust. The smell of hot coffee brewing on a rainy afternoon. It was the kind of moment you take for granted until something evil comes along and snatches it away from you.

“The guy had this look,” he told Remy, talking about Sean Daly. “Like inside he's shattering into a million pieces and nothing is ever gonna put him back together again. Otis Bloom and his wife—they've got that same look. You don't survive it, losing a kid. Every breath you take afterward, you're just marking time.”

She came to him where he sat at the kitchen table. She linked her hands behind his neck and pulled his head up against her so that his face was buried in the hollow beneath her breasts, and he could hear her heart beating and smell her smell. She had no words of comfort to give him, though, because they didn't exist.

When the coffee was done they took it into the dining room, along with the case files, and spread the paper on the Fantastics killings out on the walnut table that Mrs. O'Reilly had polished until it glowed like a pool of water under the sun.

“What are we looking for?” Remy asked.

“Connections. A thread. Something that's in here that shouldn't be, or something that's missing. A miracle…”

Remy spent a long time looking at the photograph of the Fantastics and when she looked back up at him, her face was drawn with pain. “In the movie business it's easy to start thinking that everything is all about you. But the biggest connection that I'm seeing between these girls is the fan club. Day, what if this
is
my fault?”

“Jesus, baby. If you are the connection, then it's all in this sick bastard's mind. You can't go blaming yourself for that.”

Rourke saw that Nate Carroll had done up extensive lists on the friends, family members, and acquaintances that the Fantastics all had in common. He looked through them carefully, but nothing clicked so he passed them over to Remy. “Look through these names and see if anything strikes you.”

She took the lists and began reading, and a few minutes later she said, “They certainly knew a lot of the same people.”

“Yeah, well, they all lived in the same neighborhood, went to the same school and the same church, ate at the same restaurants, and shopped at the same stores.”

“They came from different rungs on the social ladder, though,” she said. “The Laytons are old money, and Mrs. Trescher works at the Piggly Wiggly. Mr. Daly is a powerful union boss, while Mr. Bloom drives a taxi.”

“I guess that stuff is just not so important with kids. To hear Della Layton talk, the Fantastics shared practically everything. Lingerie, favorite lipstick colors, secret knowledge about s-e-x…”

“Boys don't share secret knowledge about s-e-x?”

“Nah. We don't have any knowledge. We just make it up as we go along and then brag about it to each other afterward.”

He was staring at her face, at the small smile that was playing over her mouth with the bantering, at the way her hair brushed the tops of her ears that were like small translucent shells, and the way the curve of her breasts pressed against his shirt. He wanted desperately to make love to her now, and he knew a good part of that want came from a need to thumb his nose at all the bad things God could do to him.

She colored a little at the intensity of his staring and looked back down at the precinct's first incident reports that she'd been reading earlier.

“This might be something here,” she said, “although I don't how important it is. The last anyone saw of Mercedes Bloom, she was leaving a beauty parlor on Canal. It had just started to rain and she was running for the streetcar, afraid that her new bob was going to get all messed up. And then here it was raining the evening Nina Duboche disappeared while walking the six blocks to her school hop. Gillian Daly disappears today and it's raining. It was sunny, though, last Saturday, when Mary Lou got taken. Drat it.”

Rourke sat up straighter in his chair, reaching for the incident reports. He felt something push against his face, like a wind had come up in the room.

“Still, we've been figuring this guy is able to approach these girls because they know him. So it's raining and he comes along and offers them a ride, they get in his car, and that's it—he's got them.”

He was picturing a girl walking down the street, it's raining now so she picks up the pace a little, she's got somewhere she needs to be, and then a car pulls up to the curb alongside her, and the guy calls out her name, and she slows down now, because this guy, he knows her, and she looks over at him and she sees…

“Sweet Jesus. Remy, what you just said about Mercedes, how she'd just gotten a new bob…”

He rifled through the stuff on the table until he found what he was looking for: the framed photograph of her daughter that Ethel Bloom had given him the evening of Titus Dupre's execution. Rourke wasn't sure exactly what finger waves were, but they sounded like what Mercedes Bloom had on her head in this picture.

So on the day she'd disappeared Mercedes Bloom had changed herself, the old-fashioned, odd “jane,” with the dark knowledge in her eyes had bobbed away her old-fashioned finger waves. Mercedes Bloom, the first girl the killer had chosen, and the one they'd never found.

Remy had gotten up and come to look at the photograph over his shoulder. “She looks sad,” she said. “Her eyes are like what you see on those marble angels they put on top of the tombs in the St. Louis Cemeteries.”