Wages of Sin (4 page)

“I don't believe I caught your name,” Rourke said, letting a little mean show in his smile.

The other cop answered with a sneer of his own. “Jack Murphy.”

“Well, keep up the good work, Patrolman Jack Murphy,” Rourke said, tapping the cop's shiny badge with his finger. “Keep smiling and kissing ass like you're doing, and maybe someday you, too, can be a jumped-up, jackass dick.”

Fio made a harsh grunting noise when he saw the dead priest. “God almighty.”

Rourke stepped up to the body and slipped his hand inside the cassock's side pocket. He found a rosary, some loose change, a key ring with two keys, and a library card. “Father Patrick Walsh,” he read aloud.

Fio groaned. “Aw, man, don't tell me that. Why are we always the ones to catch the political hot potatoes?”

There were two hundred and seventy-five priests in New Orleans, but only one had the celebrity of Father Patrick Walsh. He'd had a book of his homilies published, which had become a best-seller, and worshippers came from as far away as Texas and Mississippi to hear him celebrate the Mass at his church, Our Lady of the Holy Rosary. He had a preaching style that was more evangelical than Catholic, with his talk of being baptized in the spirit of Jesus, and with the gospel singing, and the speaking in tongues. His flamboyance and unorthodoxy had gotten him into trouble with the Church hierarchy more than once, but he was known affectionately as “our Father Pat” to his flock and his fans. They adored him.

Or so the
Times-Picayune
had said in a story the newspaper had done on him not long ago. The article, Rourke remembered, had said Father Patrick Walsh was an orphan who knew nothing about his origins beyond a foundling home in Paris, Louisiana, a little sugarcane town sixty miles northwest on the Bayou Lafourche. This priest hadn't been anybody's brother after all.

“Are we sure it's him?” Fio said. He was setting up the grid camera on a high tripod. “A library card don't mean much. Maybe it's not him.”

“It's him.”

In life, Father Patrick Walsh had possessed the flat green eyes, wide mouth, and heavy bones of north Louisiana hill people. Rourke could make out the remnants of those features now, in spite of the beating that had been laid on him.

Fio took a shot of the body, the camera's flash lamp strobing harsh white light onto the bloodied face, the bare, burnt feet, the nails piercing vulnerable flesh.

“Where's the hammer?” Rourke said. “What did he use to drive in the nails?”

Fio studied the area around the drying rack, “A shoe, maybe.”

“Not heavy enough.”

“Yeah, you're probably right.” Fio took a slow look up and down the length of the building. “It's going to take a frigging army to canvass this scene. I'll dust for latents, but in a factory like this—there's going to be a million of 'em.”

“Concentrate on the candles and around where he drove in the nails. Who knows, we might get lucky.”

The beat cop had been swinging his stick and smirking as he watched them work, but now he snorted aloud.

“That's Jack Murphy,” Rourke said to Fio. “He doesn't like us—thinks we're jackass dicks, or something like that. Or maybe he's just in a sour mood because this time the corpse turned out to be a priest, so there wasn't any diamond stick pin or money roll for him to lift before calling it in on the signal box.”

Murphy gave Rourke a don't-fuck-with-me look but he said nothing, and Rourke thought his jab had probably not been too far off the mark. In the tradition of veteran beat cops on the pad everywhere, Jack Murphy had probably rifled through the dead priest's clothing looking for something he could steal while his rookie partner was outside puking his guts out.

Rourke stared at Jack Murphy until a tiny tremor began to jitter below the patrolman's right eye and he looked away. “So what about this kid who found the body?” Rourke said.

Murphy took his time answering, not looking at Rourke, taking another drag on his cigarette before he gestured with his nightstick at the far corner of the factory where most of the lights had gone out. Rourke could just make out the shadows of a boy sitting on an upended oil drum, one hand cuffed to a water pipe on the wall.

“Kid goes by the name of Carlos Kelly,” Murphy said. “He probably didn't do it, but you can always make him for it, being as how you homicide dee-tectives are always wanting to close the case quick to get on the good side of the brass. And a lowlife like him with a dago wop for a mother ain't gonna be no loss to society.”

He fished the cuff key out of his pocket and tossed it toward Rourke. “Unless you'd rather pin it on some wharf nigger. I got a couple names I could give you.”

Rourke snatched the key out of the air, then looked at Fio and heaved a put-upon sigh. “And here you were telling me what a tough case this was gonna be.”

Even scared and filthy, Carlos Kelly had a face that belonged on a holy card, with his full mouth, cap of dark curls, and cerulean blue eyes. The handcuffs seemed almost an assault on such beauty.

Rourke took them off before he pulled up an oil drum and sat down. He let the silence build. Over here you couldn't smell the blood and burnt flesh, just dust and rust and the oil that had been ground over the years into the floor.

The boy, who had been staring down at his wrist, rubbing it, looked up. His gaze sheared off Rourke, went to the body, then slid away.

Rourke took his hip flask out of his tuxedo pocket and held it out in a wordless offering. Carlos Kelly's hands trembled as he drank, his teeth knocking against the flask's silver lip.

He handed the flask back to Rourke and tried on a smile.

“You are sure in some kind of jam, Carlos,” Rourke said, putting an edge on it. “Man, killing a priest. The law's going to figure using our new-fangled electric chair would be going too easy on a guy who did that.”

The boy's head jerked as if he'd just been slapped. “Hey, wait a minute. What are you…? Aw, Jesus. I didn't do it. Why would I do it and then run for help, huh?”

Rourke said nothing. The boy moaned and leaned over, bracing his elbows on his knees and burying his face in his hands.

“Sometimes,” Rourke said, gentle now, “a man can wade into trouble that ends up being way over his head.”

The boy pressed his face into his hands hard, then he took a deep, groaning breath and slowly raised his head. “Do you know that sidewalk banker, Tony the Rat?”

“Yeah,” Rourke said with a smile. “He and I go way back.” Tony Benato was a loan shark who sometimes dealt a little cocaine on the side to support his own habit, and who'd gotten the moniker Tony the Rat not because he'd ever squealed on anybody, but for the hole he had in his pointed nose, damaged by years of packing anything up there that would give him a high.

“Well, my mama got sick and she needed an operation or she was gonna die, and so I borrowed a couple of Gs from Tony to pay for it, only the vig was a whole fifty percent, and I couldn't even keep up with the juice payments, let alone make a dent in the original two thou. Not even working two shifts on the docks.”

“Yeah, that's tough. And so he sent his hatchet man to make an example out of you,” Rourke said, feeding into the kid's tall, sad tale in the hope that at least some of his lies were being coated with a gloss of the truth.

Carlos Kelly's head was bobbing eagerly. “Tony's goon, he made me go with him to the Esplanade Wharf, and he had his heater, a big ol' hog's leg, pressed right up to the back of my head when this other gun went off and somebody screamed. The goon got distracted and I got away.”

Rourke didn't bother to ask if the kid knew the name of the guy with the hog's leg. Tony the Rat was a two-bit shark and weekend dealer who only had the one enforcer. Ironically, the enforcer's moniker was also the Rat. Guido the Rat. Guido had gotten his nickname as a kid, when for ten cents he would bite the head off a rat for your entertainment.

“After you got away from Tony's goon,” Rourke said, “why come here?”

The boy shrugged. “I wasn't thinking. Just running.”

Fio had found another oil drum to stand on and was dusting the crossbeam with mercury and chalk powders. Carlos Kelly watched a moment, his throat moving as he swallowed. “All I wanted was a place to lay low for a while, you know?” He shuddered, hard. “I should've vamoosed soon as I saw the fuckin' bats.”

Rourke looked up. Moths and palmetto bugs rattled around the lights, but no small furry bodies hung from the rafters. “Bats?”

Carlos Kelly waved his hand at the catwalk that rimmed the factory two-thirds of the way up the wall. “They were roosting, or whatever they do, up there. I saw their wings flapping and I heard 'em squealing. Then I noticed the fire—leastways, I thought it was a fire. That some tramps were camping out in here, boozing and cooking up a meal. But when I got closer I saw…him. Hanging there. His breath was coming out of him hard. In bloody bubbles. He said, ‘Mercy,’ like he was calling on God to forgive him, or to help him, I guess.” The boy drew in a sudden, gasping breath. “Oh, Jesus. I thought it was meat cooking, but it was his feet.”

“And so you put out the candles.”

The boy nodded, and the light glinted off the tears on his cheeks. He'd been crying for a while now. “He was alive when I ran for help, I'd swear to it. He was alive…”

“Yeah, okay,” Rourke said.

Carlos Kelly was probably nothing more than a mutt, a bagman for a penny-ante loan shark who had then turned around and stolen from his employer and nearly paid the expected price. It had taken some courage, though, for the kid to leave his bolt hole, knowing that Tony Benato's goon was out there searching for him.

Rourke looked from the boy's bent head to the body of the tortured priest, thinking. Fio had finished dusting the beam and was now shooting a close-up photo of the nail-pierced wrists. The New Orleans parish coroner had just arrived.

“What I can do,” Rourke said, “is have you taken all the way out to Mid-City Precinct and held incognito as a material witness for a while.”

Carlos Kelly let out a long slow breath. “How long?”

“You got family, friends? Then long enough,” Rourke went on as the boy nodded, “for them to try to make things square with Tony Benato on your behalf.” He patted the boy's shoulder as he stood up. “Only stay out of that running pinochle game those cops've got going out there. Those guys, they would cheat their own mothers.”

Carlos Kelly snorted a laugh, but it came out as more of a sob. He brushed his face then looked at his hand, as if surprised to find that it was wet. He made the sign of the cross, then flushed when he realized that Rourke had seen him do it.

“When I first came in here,” he said, “it was so dark and with the machinery and the bats and the flames—it made me think of hell. And then I saw him…hanging there. I mean, who else but the devil would do that to a priest?”

The beat cop, Jack Murphy, was ranting to Fio. “Must be a trial, having a guy like him for a partner—a pretty boy with a la-di-da college dee-ploma. Guy who just because he's got an angel in high places and he's banging a movie star, he thinks his shit smells like roses. I bet you do all the work, only he's the one all the time get-tin' his mug in the papers.”

“Yeah, well it ain't always a fair or gentle world,” Fio said. He met Rourke's eyes and he wasn't smiling. They'd been working together for almost a year now and their partnership wasn't easy. Mostly because Fio was more than half convinced Rourke knew and was sitting on the truth about who had really slashed Remy Lelourie's husband to death with a cane knife that hot night last July, and Rourke couldn't make it right with his partner because Fio was dead-on with his suspicions. Rourke did know the truth and he wasn't talking, and so distrust lay between them like a sore tooth you poked and worried with your tongue, and just couldn't let alone.

The parish coroner, Rourke saw, was peering closely at the victim's mouth and muttering to himself around the cigarette he had clamped between his teeth. He turned as Rourke came up. “Ah, Lieutenant, so this one is yours. Splendid. Splendid.”

Moses Mueller was a short, fat man who wore old-fashioned frock coats, arrived at the crime scene in a chauffeured green Packard, and spent his own money on the latest forensic lab equipment. He was called the Ghoul by everyone who worked with him because of his passionate interest in death and because of the rank odor that always hovered around him and that no amount of Lucky Tiger cologne could overcome. The Ghoul in his turn despised all cops because they were, he'd once told Rourke in his pedantic manner with its old-world accent, “ignoramuses who think a postmortem is the equivalent of a cigarette after sexual intercourse.”

Only Rourke seemed to have escaped the Ghoul's contempt and that had brought him a lot of razzing from his fellow cops, who were making bets on when the Ghoul would invite him over to his dungeon for supper.

For the moment, though, the Ghoul was straining on tiptoe for a closer look at where the nail had been driven through Father Patrick Walsh's right wrist. “Now this is indeed interesting,” he said. “I see that your murderer has done it properly.”

“What?” Fio laughed and Jack Murphy joined in. “There's a fuckin' manual for doing something like this?”

The Ghoul blew out a deep sigh, his chins rattling. “You misunderstand as usual, Mr. Prankowski. Look at many sculptures and paintings of Christ's crucifixion and what will you see? Nails through the palms. That was not how it was done, however. Usually the condemned man's outstretched arms were bound to the horizontal beam, the
patibulum,
with ropes, or nails were driven through his wrists. Between the radius and ulna bones of his wrists. Cicero considered it the most horrible of deaths.”

Rourke made himself look at the nails. They more accurately should have been called spikes, he thought, for their heads were the size of a thumbnail and their shanks had to be at least seven inches long to drive through the width of the wrist and deep enough into the beam to bear the body's weight. Where they pierced the flesh, the skin was discolored blue, and rivulets of blood ran down the priest's arms to be soaked up by his sleeves. Not enough blood, though, to indicate that he'd bled to death.