“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.
He pulled the gun out of Murphy's mouth and lowered it to his side, taking a step back. Murphy sagged against the wall, breathing hard, retching, and rubbing the snot and tears and sweat off his face with the back of his wrist.
“Jack,” Rourke said.
Murphy looked up at him out of eyes that were wet and bloodshot and pleading. Rourke swung the gun back up again, hard, with his feet set solidly, throwing his weight into the movement, swinging and smashing the .38's two pounds' worth of metal into the man's face. Murphy's head snapped back, and Rourke felt his front teeth and the bone in his nose go like sticks.
Murphy's legs fell out from underneath him and he slid onto his knees on the cement floor. The dogs had started barking again and the din they made hit against the tin walls and was deafening. Murphy flinched even though Rourke hadn't moved again, covering his smashed and bleeding face with his arms. “Stop, please…”
“Now that you know what it feels like to get hit, you're never going to hit your wife again, are you, Jack?”
He shook his head, splattering blood and spittle, and he was crying now like a child.
“No, you got to say it. I want to hear you say it.”
He made him say it twice before they left him.
They left the speakeasy and walked down the crib-lined alley toward Chartres, where they'd parked the car. The whores were in their front windows and on their stoops, showing off their wares, but neither man was looking.
“Tomorrow,” Rourke said, breaking the silence, “I'm sending the wagon down here for those dogs.”
“Yeah,” Fio said, after another moment of silence passed. “I think maybe I'll go back to that dentist now, have him take out this tooth.”
“It won't hurt,” Rourke said. He looked down and saw to his surprise that he still had the gun in his hand, and that both the gun and his hand were wet with Murphy's blood. “He'll give you some kind of gas before he pulls it.”
A cat leaped off a windowsill onto a trash can, and the noise sent a rat scurrying along the gutter.
“Partner?” Fio said.
“Yeah?”
“Please tell me that was a blank cartridge you put in your gun.”
Rourke's smile felt like ice cracking across his face. He raised the gun, pointed it at the rat, cocked it, and pulled the trigger.
The explosion of the gunshot slammed down the alley, and the rat dropped dead in its tracks.
Fio kept casting sideways glances at his partner as he drove down Chartres toward Canal Street, paying less and less attention to the traffic in front of him until he almost sent the patrol car up onto the back of a beer wagon. He swerved, almost wiping out an old lady with a cane who was crossing the street, then he leaned on the horn and told the driver of the beer wagon to watch where the fuck he was going.
“That was all your fault,” Fio said to his partner, once the ruckus was over. “Because you are a crazy man. I have a crazy man in the car with me and that's making me crazy and that's why that accident we almost had was all your fault.”
Rourke looked out the rain-smeared window. His blood still felt like it was popping and boiling, but the violence had been some kind of cathartic, like a drug, and he thought that was probably not a good thing, but he also didn't want to think too much about that right now.
“I need to have Jack Murphy believe I'm crazy,” he said. “Otherwise he was going to do something to Paulie and I'd've had to kill him for it.”
“Christ, you nearly did kill him…I still don't get why you didn't use a blank cartridge.”
“Because I didn't think of it.”
They laughed and then after another moment, Rourke said, “And, besides, it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun without the real thing.”
“I am stuck in a car,” Fio said, “with a crazy man and a tooth that's gonna be the death of me.”
Rourke checked his watch. “If you're really going to get that thing taken care of today, you'd better do it now because it's almost closing time.”
Fio grunted. “I don't know whether I dare leave you to your own devices, though. The City that Care Forgot hasn't had a crime spree for at least thirty minutes now, and I'd like to keep it that way.”
“Actually, I was thinking of paying a visit to the dead,” Rourke said, serious now. “Miss Della Layton was going to be waking her daddy today.”
Rourke had driven his motorcycle to work that morning, and so Fio dropped him off where he'd parked it in the alley in back of the Criminal Courts Building.
The wake was still in the preparation stages when he arrived at the Laytons' handsome Greek Revival raised villa on Prytania Street. A wreath of white magnolias and a black satin ribbon hung on the front door, and inside all the lintels and mirrors were draped with black crepe. Vigil lights flickered in the front parlor, where the body lay in view in an open black-lacquered casket.
Albert Payne Layton's older sister had met Rourke at the door, but it was the girl Della who led him into a room in back of the house where they could talk alone. The music room, she had called it, and Rourke saw that a harp did sit next to the marble fireplace, and a piano with duet seats stood in a bay full of windows draped in thick gold velvet.
It was a pretty room, and he wondered if Flo and Bertie Layton had ever once come here of an evening to play and sing duets on the piano. Somehow he didn't think so.
Miss Della Layton was not the baby vamp today. No hibiscus red lipstick or greased eyelids, no rouged knees. She invited him to have a seat, but instead he took both her hands in his and studied her face. It was drawn and pale with shock and grief, but he saw strength there, too. The kind of strength a girl acquires fast when she suddenly finds herself handling alone the arrangements and etiquette for her daddy's wake because her mama is in the Parish Prison for having killed him.
“You're going to survive this, Miss Della,” Rourke said.
“Thank you.” Her smile was fleeting, but he could see that she'd understood the compliment and had felt pride in it.
“I was wondering if you would help me by answering a few questions. Not about what happened with your daddy, but about the Fantastics. You and Mary Lou and Mercedes and Nina, and the other girls.”
Pain darkened her eyes some more, but she nodded solemnly. As if it weren't enough that her family had just been destroyed, in the past year she'd also lost three of her good friends.
Mary Lou Trescher, she told him, was the one most involved with the fan club. She'd always been writing letters to Remy Lelourie and sending off to the studio for their giveaways. She'd devoured the fan magazines for photographs so that she could have her hair bobbed just like Remy's. She'd read all the articles to find out things like what Remy Lelourie's favorite lipstick color was, so that she'd know the exact shade to get when they next went shopping at D. H. Holmes
. For the rest of them the daydream was just for fun, but for her it had been real. She'd talked all the time about going to Hollywood when she graduated from high school.
Nina Duboche had apparently thought of herself as a “hot number.” Once she'd even had a lingerie party at her house, and she was always pushing it with the nuns over the length of her skirts and the rouge on her cheeks. Right before she'd been killed, she'd started acting like she had a big secret, and the other girls had all decided that she'd finally done “it” with a boy, instead of just talking about doing it.
“Boys were always making a play for Nina,” Della said a bit wistfully. “But she liked stringing them, you know?”
Mercedes Bloom was something of an odd girl. “She was a jane,” Della said. “But with her it was more than just not being especially pretty. She dressed so old-fashioned all the time. She even wore her hair long and in finger waves. Everybody was always teasin' her about them.”
Mercedes hadn't been all sweet and innocent and old-fashioned underneath like she had seemed, though. The time they'd all tried cigarettes, she'd smoked like she'd done it before, and Della had once caught a glimpse of a whiskey flask in the other girl's handbag.
“At the lingerie party,” Della said, blushing to be talking about such a thing to a policeman, but also, Rourke thought, feeling maybe a little proud of herself for being able to do so, “we got to talking about s-e-x and what it feels like when you do it with a boy, and Mercedes said the French called it le petit mort, the little death. She said sometimes you could have a petit mort whether you wanted to or not…And the way she said it, it was like she really knew.”
And Rourke, a little surprised, thought, hunh.
He took the photograph that had come from Mary Lou's room out of his coat pocket and showed it to her. “Do you remember when this picture was taken?”
Wages of Sin Page 34