Wages of Sin Read online

  “Aw, Jesus.”

  Chapter Three

  They'd run out of the labeled stuff an hour ago and the champagne that homicide detective Daman Rourke now drank tasted like sugarcoated paint thinner. It was melting his teeth and making his lips go numb.

  Like almost everyone else in the crowded front parlor of the elegant plantation house, he was watching Remy Lelourie be Remy Lelourie. Beneath the blaze of the crystal chandeliers, her bare arms and legs were the same pale gold as her silky slip of a dress, and the dress was all that she was wearing. No headband or jewelry, no stockings, not even any shoes. Just the silky dress and that incredible, breath-stopping face.

  The tabloids called her the most beautiful woman in the world. It might have been the truth.

  It was deep into that cool October Friday night and in the old French colonial house overlooking the Bayou St. John, Remy Lelourie was throwing what the newspapers were calling the Party of the Century, even though the century was only twenty-eight years old. New Orleans had always been a city that relished its balls and parades, but this was something special, for Remy Lelourie was one of the world's brightest stars and yet she was theirs. A hometown girl.

  It was all happening at the film idol's ancestral home of Sans Souci, a bygone confection of white colonnettes and broad galleries that had been part of a sugar plantation a century ago, and the scene of a scandalous and brutal murder only last summer. Bright Lights Studios didn't care about that, though. Publicity, whether good or bad, was still publicity and publicity was good for business.

  Most of the guests at the party were in some way connected with the studio. For three weeks they had been shooting on location in the swampland east of New Orleans—a swashbuckling boudoir intrigue called Cutlass about a Southern belle turned swamp pirate who sailed the Caribbean searching for her lost love. Tonight they were celebrating life and love with all the extravagance and flamboyance of the movies they made.

  Chandeliers blazed in the front parlor, where a five-piece jazz band was playing “Three O'Clock in the Morning” even though it was only half past two. Negro waiters in white tuxedos served bootlegged champagne in glasses bigger than finger bowls, and the air had the crackle of a live wire, as if everyone was still waiting for the party to turn wild. So far the most exciting thing to happen had been around midnight, when a budding starlet had thrown off her clothes and danced naked on top of the grand piano before passing out underneath it.

  Daman Rourke leaned against the wall near the French doors that opened onto the upstairs gallery. He watched Remy Lelourie flirt with a skinny guy who was supposed to be some kind of writer for the studio. A scenario writer. He had patent leather hair and a little black mole on the right side of his upper lip that looked inked on with a fountain pen, and maybe was. The trousers he had on were wide enough to fit an elephant's legs. What the college kids nowadays were calling Oxford bags.

  Remy Lelourie had a reputation that was mostly sin and trouble, but this time she was playing it soft and sweet. Still, after only two minutes of her company, the writer in the Oxford bags already had the look: like he'd been smacked in the face with a ball peen hammer. Even when she wasn't trying all that hard, even when she didn't care, Remy Lelourie could do anything with any man she wanted to.

  As Rourke watched, she laughed at something the writer said, letting her head fall back so that the light of the chandelier fell full on her exposed throat. She bit her lower lip to stop another laugh and pushed her fingers through her hair, and Rourke felt a pang of pure lust laced with a little jealousy.

  “Do I look like I got a sex complex?” said a young female voice close to his ear.

  He turned, and the girl who had spoken raised a cigarette in a long silver holder up to her lips for him to light. She held his gaze a moment after he had obliged her, then averted her face, pursed her lips, and blew out smoke.

  Her mouth looked like the bow on a candy box, and her eyelids had been greased to make them shiny. The dress she wore seemed to be mostly swaying fringe with nothing underneath it. The effect was mesmerizing.

  “You look fine to me,” Rourke said.

  She blew more smoke out in one long sigh and then sucked down a long drink from the gin rickey she had in her other hand, striking just the right pose between boredom and amusement. The epitome of razz-ma-tazz.

  “Freddy told me I got a sex complex,” she said. Her voice had a bit of a pout in it that was as intriguing as her fringed dress. “But he's only sore because I wouldn't go to bed with him. I told him a girl wants a fella's full attention on her. Know what I mean?”

  From the direction of her yearning look, Rourke figured the Freddy with the wandering eye must be Alfredo Ramon, the silver screen's latest Latin lover sensation. At the moment Freddy was having something of an argument with Cutlass's director, although most of his attention was on his own reflection in the gilt mirror above the yellow Italian marble fireplace.

  “She's the biggest box office draw the studio has,” the director was saying. He wore a monocle in his left eye and had a reckless taste in old-fashioned spats. His beard, clipped to a dagger's point, jabbed the air, punctuating his words. “Without me you wouldn't even be in this picture, so quit giving me grief.”

  For an answer, Freddy pushed out his sensuous lower lip and flared his nostrils in a Rudolph Valentino moue. His hair, hard and shiny with brilliantine, glistened like lacquer in the refracted light of the mirror.

  “Freddy thinks he wants Remy,” the girl was saying. “But then everybody thinks he wants Remy.”

  The big bangles on her arms jangled as she took another long pull on her gin rickey. Ice clicked in her now empty glass. She turned and searched Rourke's face with drooping, glazed eyes. “Are you somebody famous?” she said.

  Suddenly the razz-ma-tazz was gone, and Rourke saw that she was even younger than he'd thought. Young and hard and naive and hungry, and he felt sorry for her. “No, I'm just a cop,” he said.

  Her gaze moved up and down the length of him, from his black suede-topped shoes back to his mouth, and stopped. “You look like you ought to be famous.”

  Rourke laughed and shook his head. “I think Freddy just glanced your way.”

  It was only after she had walked away from him without another word that he realized he'd never learned her name.

  The musicians had been passing reefers back and forth among themselves all night, and their horns were now hitting some wild and ragged notes that burst through the open door in shards of sound.

  She stood alone on the upstairs gallery, with her back partly to him and her hands resting on the balustrade, looking out at the vanishing night where a wafer of a moon seemed to be jittering over the bayou and the black sky was popping with stars. He could just make out the line of her jaw curving out from beneath her ear, limned by the light spilling out of the house. Her short-cropped hair exposed the white nape of her neck and that delicate protrusion of bone that always made a woman seem so vulnerable, and Daman Rourke thought, Jesus, I've got it bad.

  “Do you want something, Detective?” Speaking into the night, she'd kept her back to him.

  “Uh huh.” He'd brought a fresh glass of champagne out with him and he swallowed down a big swig of it. “I've been thinking about your behavior earlier this evenin', before the party, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to arrest you for soliciting sex from a cop.” He took a couple of steps, coming up behind her, close enough to touch her now, although he didn't. “Drag you downtown,” he said, “and give you the third degree.”

  She turned around and leaned back, resting her elbows on the balustrade while she looked him over. A smile touched her mouth, and she did something with her eyes. Made them go hot and droopy. She wasn't sweet Remy anymore, but the red-lipped, black-souled vamp who picked up men, bled them dry, and threw them away.

  She did a little shiver. “Oooh. The big, tough cop. Should I be scared?”

  “Very scared.”

  “Tell me again what y
ou're arresting me for, Detective,” she said in a whisper. “I just love to hear you say the words. They make me shiver.”

  “What words?”

  She made him wait for two beats and then she said it, low and sultry, “Soliciting sex.”

  “Lord, if you aren't at it again. You're a one-woman crime wave.”

  He'd gestured with his hand to make his point, and the champagne sloshed over the rim of the glass. She took his hand and licked the drops off his fingers. “You shouldn't waste it like that,” she said.

  “It's awful stuff. It deserves to be wasted.”

  She laughed, and he felt the warmth of her breath on the wet skin of his hand. “You're swacked on it, though.”

  “No, I'm not,” he said, although maybe he was. A little.

  She let go of his hand and reached up, wrapping her arms around his neck to pull his mouth down to hers. “I do love you, Day Rourke,” she said, and she kissed him.

  “Let's get out of here,” he said a bit later, when she let him.

  She shook her head, her lips brushing back and forth across his. “Can't. It may not look like it, but I'm working.”

  She kissed him again, though, and she seemed to be swooning, to be singing into his mouth, and he let himself go with it, even though with Remy Lelourie the fall was always so long and so hard.

  A camera's flash lamp exploded in their faces, and they jerked apart, blinking in the sudden intense wash of light.

  “Hey, you two lovebirds,” the reporter said, raising his camera again as he sidled back toward the gallery's outside stairs, from where he'd come. He popped another bulb into the lamp, slid a new plate into the box, and put his finger on the shutter. “Smile for The Movies.”

  “Wait,” Rourke said. He smiled like the guy had asked, and the smile was easy. “How about a scoop to go along with that shot?”

  The reporter stopped, lowering his camera. “Really?” He was coming back now. He was a scrawny fellow with a big nose and ears, and front teeth square and yellow like kernels of corn. He had a deep hitch in his stride, as if one leg was shorter than the other. “Say, did you two kids just get engaged?”

  Rourke was still smiling when he grabbed the camera out of the man's hands and swung around, smashing it against the hard cypress wall of the house. The bellows tore and the wooden box shattered open. Rourke smacked it against the house one more time for good measure, and the flash lamp attachment bent like a pretzel.

  He handed the mess back to the reporter. He was still smiling. “Next time you'll leave wearing it around your neck. Now, get lost.”

  “Aw, jeez,” came a rough voice from behind him. “I swear I can't leave you alone for a minute.”

  A big, lumbering man in a rumpled pongee suit stood filling the doorway from the front parlor. Fiorello Prankowski, Rourke's partner in homicide detection. They were catching tonight, which meant that if Fio was here then somebody somewhere in New Orleans had been murdered.

  Fio raised his eyebrows at Rourke, but he didn't say anything more. His face had its perpetually tired look, deep creases lining it like the rings of a seasoned tree.

  He lifted his hat to Remy. “Miss Lelourie,” he said, but his voice was flat, his eyes hard and flat as well. Fio remained convinced that the most beautiful woman in the world had slashed her husband to death with a cane knife last summer and had gotten away with it.

  The reporter was still hovering at the top of the stairs. Rourke gave him his mean cop look. “Aren't you lost yet?”

  “Say, Day, can I see you for a while?” Fio said, stepping between Rourke and the reporter, serious now, and Rourke sensed the tension in him. Whatever had happened, it must be bad, if Fio didn't want anyone else to hear about it.

  Rourke turned to Remy. He touched her cheek with his fingertips. “I got to go, darlin'.”

  “I know. You're working, too,” she said, and she seemed all right with it. Her eyes might have looked haunted a little, but then they always did. It was what the camera caught and was part of her appeal. Her seduction.

  He and Fio left the gallery by the outside stairs. The wind was tossing the moss-laden branches of the huge live oaks and rattling the fronds of the tall palms. Rourke looked back up at the house, where the party went on in flashes of jazz and light. Remy Lelourie still stood where he'd left her, and he was thinking now that there had been something in her kiss, something that would worry him if he poked at it hard enough, and so he probably ought to just let it lie.

  For one sweet summer eleven years ago they had been lovers, until she'd left both him and New Orleans and gone off to make herself rich and famous. Four months ago they'd gotten back together and ever since then he'd been waiting for the day when she would leave him again, looking for signs of it in everything she did and said, and if he wasn't careful, if he didn't stop, he would only end up bringing on the thing that he most feared and he'd be sorry then, uh-huh. Like picking up a stick and poking it at a cottonmouth.

  Still, that kiss…there'd been something. Not goodbye yet, but something.

  “Let's take the 'Cat,” Rourke said.

  “Let me get the crime scene stuff from the squad car then,” Fio said, veering off down the shell drive that wrapped in a half circle around the front grounds of the house.

  Rourke waited for Fio by his own car, a canary yellow Stutz Bearcat roadster. A group of men stood on the lawn within the black pools of shadow cast by the oaks. They were talking loudly, laughing and passing around a bottle in a brown bag. Most of them had cameras, and Rourke saw that the reporter whose camera he had wrecked had found another somewhere. The guy from The Movies. Rourke thought he'd seen him hanging around before this. Since the murder of her husband, the gentlemen of the press had been making Remy Lelourie's life a misery.

  Rourke helped Fio dump the forensics gear into the Bearcat's trunk and then they slid into the plush, buffed Spanish leather seats. The six-cylinder, air-cooled Franklin engine caught with a low growl.

  Rourke stood on the gas pedal, and the roadster leapt forward, its tires spitting out loose shells behind them. He spun the wheel, aiming the Bearcat's silver hood ornament at the knot of reporters beneath the oaks. Light from his headlamps caught them frozen in a tableau of astonishment, before they scattered, screaming and bellowing as they dove and rolled to get out of the way. Rourke smiled.

  The Bearcat bounded toward a gap in the big oaks, its engine roaring, its tires clawing grooves in the soft grass, but the space between the tree trunks suddenly looked too narrow and beyond the gap another tree loomed square in their path.

  Rourke began to hum beneath his breath.

  He gripped the steering wheel hard as the Bearcat surged between the trees, missing the trunks on both sides by less than an inch. The oak in front of them seemed wide as the mouth of a tunnel, impossible to miss. Rourke flipped the wheel hard over and the Bearcat slewed, fishtailing violently. Moss slapped at the windshield, the tires screeched, and Rourke laughed.

  He barely missed hitting two more trees before he pulled out of the skid, and then they were careening across the lawn, back onto the drive, and by the time they passed through the wrought iron gate, he had the Bearcat's roaring engine back down to a purr.

  He turned up Esplanade Avenue, and they rolled along in silence a couple of ticks before he stole a look at his partner.

  Fio had hair sparse and stiff as salt grass and at the moment it seemed to be sticking straight up. “Don't ever do that again,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “'Cause if you do it again, I'm going to have to seriously hurt you.”

  Rourke began to sing. “Let a smile be your umbrella…”

  Fio gave him another wild-eyed look. “I'm stuck in a car with a fucking maniac.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Rourke's blood was strumming a high note now, as he felt the first razor-edged rush of the hunt. “So where are we going, and who's dead?”

  Fio let his breath out slowly and let go of his white-knuckled grip on th
e dash. “Someone came upon a dead priest in an abandoned macaroni factory down on Ursulines and Chartres.” He lifted his big shoulders in a shrug. “The desk sergeant said…I don't know, I must have heard it wrong. He said the guy had been crucified.”

  Chapter Four

  The macaroni factory was in a bad block, between a hookshop and a flophouse, where you could rent a cot for two bits a night. Across the street, sagging, rusting chicken wire fenced off a hot car farm that had been raided and shut down only last week as part of the mayor's latest crusade to cut down on crime in the City That Care Forgot.

  Rourke got out of the Bearcat and paused to look around. His face felt cold and his chest hurt as if someone had just beaten on him with a baseball bat. He was scared of what he would find inside this place. He told himself that there were two hundred and seventy-five priests in New Orleans, and so the victim didn't have to be his brother, Paulie.

  He'd be somebody's brother, though.

  A uniform cop sagged against the factory's brick wall, staring down at the puddle of vomit between his feet. As Rourke came up, he lifted his head and peered at Rourke's detective shield with bleary eyes.

  “You the one called it on the signal box?” Rourke asked.

  The young cop swallowed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “My partner did. He's inside. We were ordered to stay by the body until you detectives arrived, but I couldn't…” The bile rose up again in his throat and he gagged. “Oh, God.”

  “Breathe through your mouth,” Rourke said.

  The cop nodded and gulped down a big gobful of air.

  Rourke waved his hand at Fio, who was getting the cameras, fingerprinting kit, and an electric torch out of the trunk. “Maybe if you can give my partner a hand?” he said, thinking it would give the kid something to do besides dwell on what he'd seen.

  The young cop nodded again and gulped at more air. Some of the green was starting to leave his face.

  Rourke looked around the entrance to the factory. The wind had blown scraps of newspapers, dead leaves, and tamale wrappings into a pile in one corner of the arched portico. Glass from the broken fan light in the transom littered the stoop. The hasp on the door's lock was broken.