Wages of Sin

by Penelope Williamson

  “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.”

  Rourke plucked at the fiddle strings again and then let the cell fall into a heavy silence.

  The boy's next words came rough out of his throat, costing him. “This new-fangled 'lectric chair—does it hurt?”

  “They say it doesn't,” Rourke said. He didn't believe it.

  “Doesn't matter if it does, anyway, since I'll probly only be getting a head start on one long eternity of sufferin' and pain.” He turned his head, meeting Rourke's eyes, and he smiled. “I been thinking, though, that hell's goin' to be a mighty dull place without you there to rag on my ass.”

  “Yeah, I'm going to miss you, too,” Rourke said, smiling back, and then they laughed together, but the laughter sounded too raw in the cell and they both cut it off. Only now the silence that followed was worse.

  Again, the boy was the first one to break it. “You goin' be there when they do it?”

  “If you want me to be.”

  “You be there, then.”

  Rourke got to his feet and went to the barred door. He called for the guard.

  “You come in here with my fiddle,” Titus Dupre said suddenly, the words coming fast and desperate and harsh. “You come in here talkin' with me like you think I'm a man, comin' in here to talk 'bout havin' a heart. If I had a truth that you would believe, I still wouldn't give it to you, 'cause you white and a cop, and she was white, and what you all done to me can't never be forgiven.”

  His big hand slammed against the bars next to Rourke's face, as if the door was about to open and he had to hold it closed to keep Rourke inside until he was done.

  “Man,” he said, and Rourke could hear the cold hatred in his breathing, “you can't even be bothered to ask what it is you all done.”

  “I know.”

  He shook his head slowly back and forth, breathing hard. “Maybe you do. But I'm goin' to say it anyways, 'cause they murderin' me tonight and I mean for them to be my last words. An' I mean for you to be the one who hears 'em.”

  He leaned close so that Rourke could look into his eyes and see the rage that lived in him. “You made me hate what I am.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  This time, laughter and loud honky-tonk were bursting out the seams of the speakeasy on the corner, and darkness had settled in deep beneath the balconies and in the alleyways of the Faubourg Tremé by the time Rourke walked back through the carriageway of his house on Conti Street.

  He pushed open the kitchen door, calling out, “Evenin', Mrs. O'Reilly,” to his daughter's la
test nanny, who was at the sink adding soap chips to the running water.

  “I'm sorry for missing supper, I—” He stopped and did a slow take around the room. Frogs leaped from the table, to the floor, to the icebox, to the dish safe, to the butcher block, to the coal scuttle. Dozens of frogs. Dozens of wet frogs, fresh out of the bayou, and leaving behind trails of brown slime. They croaked and their splayed feet made little sucking pops every time they jumped.

  “There are frogs,” Rourke said, “in the kitchen.”

  “Frogs?” Mrs. O'Reilly said cheerfully. She dried her hands off on the towel that was tucked into her apron and turned around, her mouth falling open with mock surprise. “God save us, so there are.”

  Mary Margaret Kelly O'Reilly was a widow in her forties with a pillowy bosom and a tongue on her that was frank and furred with Irish brogue. Her hair was her best feature, thick and of a color that on a horse was called blood bay. Normally, her two eyes were a deep peat brown, except tonight one of them was purple-red and swollen shut.

  “Oh, Christ,” Rourke said. “What'd she do to your eye?”

  “She shot me with this, the wee holy terror,” Mrs. O'Reilly said, pulling a popgun out of her apron pocket. The gun was made with a piece of bamboo and a wooden plunger whittled to fit the hollow of the bamboo. An empty spool was the top of the plunger, and the ammo—Rourke knew from the experience of having beaned a nun with one once during Sunday school—would have been a cherry from a chinaberry tree.

  Frogs in the kitchen and an assault with a popgun. His daughter, Katie, was apparently waging all-out war now in her effort to drive Mrs. O'Reilly back to County Kerry.

  “Well, to be fair,” Mrs. O'Reilly was saying, “she was aiming for my bum, but I spun 'round when I felt her coming up behind me and got a smack in the eye for being so smart.”

  A frog leaped out of the sink at Rourke, landed on his shoulder with a webbed grip and clung there, burping in his ear. He plucked the amphibian off him and looked around for something to put it in. Mrs. O'Reilly handed him an empty water bucket.

  Rourke dropped the frog in the bucket, only to watch it jump back out again. “Where is the little demon-possessed brat, anyway?” he asked.

  “Where else would herself be but upstairs in her bed at this time of night? You were thinking, maybe, that she'd run away from home to join a circus and put the devil of a proper fright in you for a change?”

  Rourke's smile was evil. “She's going to be wishing the thought had crossed her mind.”

  He made his way through the bayou-slimed kitchen, dodging frogs, and went up the back stairs. The door to Katie's room was ajar and he paused within the light of the hall to look in on her. He was used to seeing her thick braids wrapped around her head on the pillow; it was still a shock to see what was left of her hair looking like ragged patches of saw grass. She slept with one hand curled beneath her cheek, though, like an angel on a Valentine card, her lips puffing little soft snores that were like sighs. The room smelled of her, of Katie.

  She was our little girl. Our baby…

  Sweet Jesus, the look on Otis Bloom's face, in his eyes. The howling desperation in his eyes that was like a man starving for food and water and air, for all the things that give you life. How many times over the years must Otis Bloom have done what he was doing now, standing in the muted light of a hushed hallway, watching his daughter sleep.

  Rourke pushed the door open and walked up to the bed on quiet feet. He leaned over and kissed his daughter's forehead, soft so that she wouldn't waken.

  Back in the kitchen, Mrs. O'Reilly had found a big milk can with a lid and she was putting the frogs in there as she caught them.

  Rourke plucked a fat, warty toad off the top of the dish safe and put it in the can. He saved another from leaping onto the stove and snatched another out of the air as it shot out of the coal scuttle. He could feel the Irishwoman's eyes on him, but she wasn't saying anything, and so after a while he said, “She was asleep.”

  “I thought as much since I didn't hear any bellowing.”

  “I don't bellow.”

  “You do.”

  “I don't—Ah, shit!” Rourke had grabbed a frog that was hop-scotching across the kitchen table, but it squirted out of his hands as he was heading for the milk can.

  It landed with a squelchy plop on top of Mrs. O'Reilly's head and she squealed “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” and then she laughed. Her laughter sounded like water spilling into a fountain, and Rourke thought he might be a little in love.

  He pried the frog out of her hair. “I'll have a talk with Katie in the morning, Mrs. O'Reilly,” he said. “A serious one.”

  She made a noise that sounded like a cat hacking up a hairball. “Och, to be sure you will. 'Tis why she's naughty. 'Cause she knows you'll be having a talk with her over it and so she'll be having her da with her for a wee bit at least, whilst he's bellowing at her. And the devil of a good it'll ever be doing the pair of you.”

  “A homicide cop can't keep banker's hours. She knows that.”

  “No doubt she does, for it's smart, she is, and she can play you easy as a pennywhistle.”

  Mrs. O'Reilly had climbed up on a stool, going after a frog dangling from the tin-shaded lamp that hung from the kitchen ceiling. Rourke held the milk can up to her so she could drop it inside.

  “That appears to be the last of them,” she said, as together they screwed the lid down tight. “The silly, slimy creatures that they are.”

  “Mrs. O'Reilly,” Rourke said, grinning up at her. “You are a gem, a peach, a rare prize. If I do the mopping up, will you promise not to quit on us?”

  “Hunh.” She tried too hard not to laugh, so that when it spilled out she snorted and that made her laugh all over again. “Will you be listening to yourself, you fool of a man?” she said. “Blathering on about fruit an' such. And it's Miss Katie herself who should be down on her hands and knees in the mornin', doing the scrubbing.”

  “Faith, now, you may have the right of it,” Rourke drawled, teasing her for her oh-so-very Irishness. “I'll make sure her little web-footed partners in crime find their way back home tonight, though.”

  He carried the milk can full of frogs out to the stoop and set it there. He stood within the open door, looking out at the night-shrouded courtyard. A brisk wind sent leaves scurrying along the paving stones, and wispy scarves of clouds floated above the trees and rooftops. The water in the iron fountain tinkled, sounding like chimes made of ice, and he felt a sudden chill.

  He was both tired enough to sleep for a week and wound up like the spring on a mousetrap. In a moment he would walk the couple of blocks down to Congo Square and let Katie's frogs loose. Then he'd come back to his garçonnière—the outbuilding at the back end of the courtyard that had once been slave quarters and was now a place where he slept and washed up sometimes, especially when he was working on a case and in and out at all hours.

  He would shower and change clothes before he went back down to the Parish Prison where he would watch tonight's execution, but he wouldn't sleep. He thought maybe he would take out his saxophone and play a little blues and then he wondered if Titus Dupre was playing his fiddle now, pulling one last tune out of that lonely, hurting place where the music lived.

  Titus Dupre, no fool, had called it right, had seen clean through him. It had been mean what Rourke had done, a mean and deliberate thing, bringing that boy his fiddle on the last night of his life, because music had a way of breaking a body in two and Rourke had wanted him broken. He'd wanted to win.

  Somewhere on the edge of his consciousness, he caught the sound of Mrs. O'Reilly's voice saying his name and he turned, and was surprised to find that she was right behind him.

  Her steady brown gaze searched his face, a little too closely for comfort. “I said, won't you be wanting some supper, then? I've some red beans and rice I could heat right up.”

  “Thank you for offering, but I've got to go back out in a bit. I'll get something later.”
>
  Her gaze narrowed a little, but then she smiled, letting him off the hook. “I've a mind to deliver you a scolding myself,” she said, “but I'll hold my tongue for now. You can be setting your mind to rest about the one thing, though. She can do her worst, your Katie, but I'll not be leaving the poor wee motherless thing.”

  Rourke smiled and reached out to take the Irishwoman's hand and bring it up almost to his lips, as if he would kiss it. “God bless you, Mrs. O'Reilly.”

  She pulled her hand from his, looking flustered. “Och, Mr. Rourke. Better you should be saying, God help me.”

  The saxophone bled blue into an indigo night.

  Remy Lelourie stopped within the shadows of the banana trees and the sagging courtyard walls to listen. It was music that sliced down to the bone, sharp as a surgeon's scalpel, cutting and healing both at the same time.

  The horn went crying up a note, and then segued into the wild and wicked growls of “I Wanna Hot Dog for My Roll.” She laughed and came out of black pools, past the fountain with its water music, and climbed the old porch steps that sagged and groaned beneath her feet as if weighted with memories.

  He stood with one leg bent at the knee and his foot braced against the wall of the garçonnière at his back. He stopped playing and leaned his head against the weathered cypress boards and watched her come.

  “Hey, Remy,” he said softly, and she smiled, for she loved to hear him say her name.

  She thought that the world might have hurt him today. Shadows lay beneath his cheekbones. His eyes, startlingly blue even in the moonlight, were bright and tired. For all the years that she'd known him, he'd had those fearless but wounded eyes. He had a need to believe in a world that should be, rather than in the world that was, and sometimes he had too hard a time bearing up under the reality.

  He tried, though; he always tried. He was the most grandly heroic man she'd ever known.

  She came into his arms, up against his chest, laying her palms there and tucking her chin into his neck, pushing the saxophone aside as if she was jealous of it, and in a way she was.