Wages of Sin (17 page)

“Aw, man. Don't start in again with that stuff about him not being naked.” Fio pushed back his clean pie plate, belched, and patted his gut. “What we need to do is have a heart-to-heart with Tony the Rat. Call me a cop, but I don't believe the man went into that confessional for the good of his immortal soul.”

“Yeah. Probably not. Anyway, I already called down and had him picked up, so let's let him sweat some more. I want to have another look around that factory in the daylight.”

Back outside, beneath the shade of Kress's fancy mosaic tile arcade, Fio paused to light up a cigar. “Did you ever think about it?” he said to Rourke. “About becoming a priest?”

“Sweet Jesus, no. You?”

“My Polish old man liked to say he was an atheist just to get a rise out of my Italian ma, who was as devout as they come. She was all the time praying to God to make one of her sons a priest. Growing up, I got this picture in my head of God's arm reaching down from heaven to smack me in the face with a vocation, like it was a pie. It got to where I was scared even to set foot in a church in case her prayers were answered.”

“So you became a cop instead.”

Fio grinned around the Castle Morro clamped between his teeth. “Yeah. I guess the joke was on me.”

Rourke laughed and then he started down the street. Fio stayed where he was and so Rourke turned back around. “What?”

“I don't want to ask this, partner, but I got to. Do you think your brother—”

“No,” Rourke said, and then, “I don't know. Maybe.”

Fio gave him a long, hard look, but said nothing more.

“I would say it's not in Paulie's nature to kill,” Rourke said after a moment. “My brother hasn't got it in him to either hate or love that much. He hasn't got the
intensity.
”

“I don't know, man…People commit murder for other reasons besides hate or love.”

Rourke shook his head. “Not this killing. In spite of all the planning it must have taken, this one was done with the heart.”

The macaroni factory looked even seedier in daylight.

It took up most of the block, except for a decaying old flophouse on the corner that was on the last legs of its existence. A couple of months ago, Rourke remembered, a body four days dead had been found there, strangled and stuffed under a bed. They'd been renting out the room through all that time and either the guests hadn't noticed the smell or had been too wasted to look and see what was making it.

Rourke parked the car across the street, in front of the raided hot car farm. The Victory Gasoline sign that hung by chains over the gate was still creaking in the wind, but something about the place seemed different today. On the other side of the chicken wire fence, a couple of pumps stood in an island in front of the garage's bay doors, their hoses dragging in the dust. The doors were well boarded up, though, and it didn't look as if anybody had been near them since the riot squad had broken through with axes and crowbars.

The wind gusted and the gasoline sign squealed on its chains, but it seemed to Rourke that he'd heard something else, something that sounded like a faint cry, and the back of his neck prickled. Then he heard the click of claws on pavement, and a mangy black dog appeared from the back of the building, growling and baring its teeth at them.

Rourke turned and started to follow Fio across the street. They walked past a tamale cart that nobody seemed to be tending. “Middle of the day, not a lot happening 'round here,” Fio said.

Rourke looked back over his shoulder at the hot car farm. The dog stood guard at the fence watching them, the wind ruffling its fur. When the wind blew just right, you could smell the river from here.

An old bum had taken up residence in the macaroni factory's arched stone portico. He seemed to be sleeping, but as they came up he lifted his head off his chest and looked up at them. His face was creased like an old leather glove and one of his eyes was dead. An old sailor's hat testified to something he once might have been.

“Y'all don't want to go in there,” he said. “It's a bad place.”

“Yeah?” Fio said. “What makes you say that?”

A sly grin short of a few teeth spread across old bum's mouth. “'Cause it's the doorway to hell.”

“Is that why you chalked those hobo marks on the door?” Rourke said.

“I got something for y'all,” the bum said. He pulled open his filthy, buttonless trousers and took out a limp penis, flopping it up and down on his hand. A string of saliva drooled from one corner of his mouth.

“Aw, man,” Fio said. “We got us a weenie wagger. Put that pathetic thing away before we arrest it.”

Inside, the factory smelled of dust and blood and feces. It didn't seem so hellish a place in the light of day, though. The large vats, the wheels and pulleys and giant fan belts were just heaps of rusting machinery. The only evidence left of Father Pat's terrible ordeal were the bloodstains on the drying rack's crossbeam and the globs of melted candle wax on the floor.

Rourke climbed up onto the catwalk and walked around it until he found, half hidden behind a pile of rotting cardboard boxes, the door that let out onto the fire escape. The padlock had been busted, and recently, judging from the raw marks on the wood.

The killer could have been up here on the catwalk that night, Rourke thought, when Carlos Kelly had come through the door below, looking for a place to hide from Tony the Rat's goon. Whatever had been going on that night between the murderer and his victim, it had the feel of an act interrupted. And so whatever Father Pat's tormentor had wanted from him—the thrill of listening to him beg for mercy, maybe, of watching him die an agonizing death—the killer's desire had been denied.

At least, Rourke thought with a wry inward smile, that was his own theory of the moment. To test it, he covered his hand with his handkerchief, pressed down on the door's latch and pushed it open. It squealed on its rusted hinges like the scream of a bat.

Across the street from the macaroni factory and down an alleyway that smelled of old brick and beer piss was a speakeasy called the Crazy Cat, known for its exotic dancers whose act was to take off all their clothes and do the bump and grind. The Crazy Cat was where Carlos Kelly had run for help after finding the crucified priest.

To get there you had to walk along a row of filthy cribs, where prostitutes stood naked or nearly so in the doorways and behind the slatted blinds in windows and called out to potential customers as they passed on by.

This time of day most of these ladies of the night were still sleeping, but one was sitting on her stoop, wearing a faded pink silk wrapper, smoking a cigarette, and working on a jug of sour mash.

She looked really young, no older than sixteen, and she hadn't been on the street long enough to have lost all her looks. She had long flaxen hair gathered into a thick braid that hung over her shoulder and curled around one breast, and a pixie face with freckles sprinkled across her cheekbones and nose.

Rourke stopped to talk to her, maybe because at the moment she looked as though she needed somebody to recognize her existence in this world. “Were you working last night?” he asked.

She looked him up and down, and then her lip curled into a beautiful sneer. “You cops ever think of spreading it around?” she said, in the slack-jawed slur of the addict. “I already gotta give one blow job on the house pret' near every night to that bastard bull cop Jack Murphy.”

“So in between your tricks last night, freebies or otherwise,” Fio said, “did you see or hear anything naughty or nasty going on?”

She pressed a hand to her breast, widened her eyes and opened her mouth in feigned shock. “What, you mean somebody was up to no good? Honey, how many law-abiding citizens you seen around here lately?”

Rourke gave her a dollar for her time, and Fio shook his head at him.

The speakeasy's door was shut, but its Judas eye was open, and with no bouncer on duty they were able to walk on in. They didn't see any exotic dancers doing the striptease, just a man behind the bar and a lone drinker occupying a table up against the back wall.

The air was thick with the nauseating smell of muscatel, stale smoke, cracklings, chewed tobacco, the jar of picked hogs feet and sausages that sat open on the bar, and the damp sawdust rotting on the floor. The tin-shaded lights were turned off, making it cool and dark, but a few bands of greasy sunlight spilled through the shuttered windows. It was the kind of dive where you fought with knives and bottles.

A man with milky eyes and a nose that looked like it had been smashed flat long ago by something the size of a baseball bat was wiping down the bar with a wet rag. He took one look at Rourke and Fio and turned his back on them.

Rourke had started for the bar when he got a better look at the lone drinker sitting along the back wall. The kid had a greasy, pocked face, mangy black hair, and shoulders so bony his shirt hung off them like off a wire hanger.

The kid spotted Rourke at the same time, and he bolted up from his chair, heading for the back door. Rourke chased him into a toilet that was little more than a hole in the floor and snagged his coat as he was about to crawl through the window.

“What'd I do? What'd I do?” the kid kept crying as Rourke hauled him out of the toilet, back into the speak, and threw him hard into the chair he'd been warming. His head banged on the greasy wall. “Ow. Jesus, Lieutenant. I didn't do nothin'. What'd I do?”

“You made me chase you, Eddie. You shouldn't have made me chase you.”

Fio pulled up a chair and sat down at the table. “You shouldn't have made him chase you, Eddie. And into the can, too. You gotta be one crazy fucker to make him do that.”

The kid looked back and forth between the two cops with wild eyes. “Who the hell are you?” he said to Fio. He pointed a finger at Rourke's face. “And he's the one who's crazy.”

“I know,” Fio said sadly. “That's why you shouldn't have made him chase you.”

Rourke knocked the pointing finger away. “You make me crazy, Eddie.”

“Aw, man, I didn't do nothin'. What'd I do?”

Edward Durango had been making a living by creeping houses since he was ten, and he was either real busy or not all that good at it, because Rourke had busted him more times than he wanted to remember. The kid was known as Dirty Eddie, because he always left a pile of shit on the bed of the homes he burgled.

The one thing Eddie Durango was good at, though, was being a weasel. For the price of a bottle of muscatel, he would squeal on his own mother, if he'd ever had one. The amazing thing was that, in spite of all his squealing, Dirty Eddie had a string of sources that had proven through the years to be almost infallible.

Rourke pulled up another chair and sat down, so that they made a cozy trio around the table. “Let's have us a little conversation, Eddie,” he said.

Dirty Eddie didn't look too happy about it, but he nodded, wetting his lips. “I got a bit of a dry throat, though. A fella can't do a whole lotta conversing with a dry throat.”

Rourke called out to the bartender to bring them some boilermakers. The man tried acting like he hadn't heard him, but then he put down his rag. He took a wooden mallet from behind the bar and laid it out in plain sight, before he started jerking beer into three schooners.

“Don't mind him,” Dirty Eddie said. “He's only worried that you're here for some juice, and since he knows Jack Murphy don't share, he figures whatever he ends up paying y'all will only end up being extra to what he's already laying out to Murphy for protection.”

It came as no surprise to Rourke that the foot cop he'd met at the crime scene last night was on the pad in a big way. Usually rookie cops were the ones given the night trick on the bad beats like the Quarter, but a crooked cop would consider this a sugar post, because the pickings were so good. A beat cop's salary was three hundred dollars a month. In the Quarter, he could pocket six hundred dollars shakedown money in a week, not to mention all the free booze and poontang that he could handle.

The bartender raked the foam off the beers with a ladle and brought them over to the table. When he came back a moment later with the three shot glasses full of whiskey Rourke asked him to bring Eddie a plate of dirty rice and beans.

“Not only is that badass cop Jack Murphy on the pad here,” Dirty Eddie said once the bartender had disappeared into the kitchen behind a pair of swinging doors. “The two of 'em are in the dog fight business together. They got the pens all set up right out back.” He pulled a sad face. “Man, I hate what they do to them dogs. Y'all oughta raid the place sometime.”

He stared at the kitchen doors, watching them swing into a stillness and thinking, maybe, about the dogs. Then he sighed and poured the jigger of whiskey into the beer. He drank it down in three swallows and raised his eyebrows at Rourke, who said, “Talk first.”

Dirty Eddie wiped off his mouth with the back of his wrist. “Okay, okay, I can guess what you're down here trolling for, and I got something for you. Something big.” He looked around the joint, as if he weren't already aware that they were the only ones in it, then he leaned forward and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Word was out on the street last week that somebody wanted a priest worked over, only it didn't seem like the guy was getting any takers. I mean, a priest for God's sake. How sick do you gotta be?”

He rubbed his finger around the shot glass, picking up any stray drops, and stuck it in his mouth. He sucked and then stopped with his finger in his mouth as a thought occurred to him. “Jesus. I guess he did get a taker, after all.”

Fio's breath had left him in a grunt. “Aw, man,” he said.

Rourke stared at Eddie Durango, trying to understand why what the burglar had just said was making so much sense when it was flying in the face of everything his gut had been telling him all along.

“Who's the guy who bought the hit?” he finally asked.

Dirty Eddie shrugged his pointy shoulders. “I guess he's being careful, because nobody seems to know, and I never heard nothin' about it bein' a hit. Just whoever took the job was supposed to put a beating on the priest, and that Tony the Rat was fronting the money for it.”