St. Agnes' Eve

by Malachi Stone

  “That’s an old one, John,” I said. “You’ve been working too hard.”

  Diaz interrupted another dry laugh to say, “I haven’t told you everything.”

  “Anyway, that case is closed by now, isn’t it?”

  His stare unnerved me with its mood-swing of intensity. “That case will never be closed until I say it’s closed. There’s no statute of limitations on murder, Counselor. You should know that better than I do.”

  “So what’s this secret clue you’ve been withholding all these years?”

  I could sense it was against his better judgment to tell me, but he was proud of his thoroughness. Too proud, maybe.

  “There was a holy card left at the scene. You know, the kind they hand out at Catholic funeral masses? Just a little paper holy card with a picture of Saint Agatha and a bloody fingerprint. Somebody thought they were funny, I guess.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you ever read Lives of the Saints? Tradition says that’s how Saint Agatha was martyred—they amputated her breasts in a whorehouse when she wouldn’t renounce her faith and put out. Finally, they killed her by stabbing her a bunch of times. Looks like the killer is a psycho who hates Catholics, or maybe some smartass who wants us to think he’s a psycho who hates Catholics. Or, maybe a psycho who thinks he’s only pretending to be a psycho who hates Catholics. Psychos always think they’re putting everybody on by pretending to be nuts. Who the hell knows?” Diaz rubbed his eyes as if trying to eradicate the specter of Carla Tremayne bathed in her own blood. “I’m tired.”

  “What about the fingerprint?”

  “You realize you’re the only person outside of law enforcement, other than the killer, who knows this particular detail, don’t you, Ricky? So, if it gets out, it won’t be hard pinpointing the source of the leak. Might even be construed obstruction of justice.”

  “My lips are sealed. It’s part of a privileged investigation as far as I’m concerned.”

  “In that case, I haven’t found a match in what, almost twenty years now. It’s like he’s arrogant, you know, leaving a print like that just to taunt us, like he believes he’s invulnerable.”

  “You keep saying ‘he,’” I said. “Why was Liz a suspect?”

  “Because rumor has it her missing roommate and the victim were thinking of setting up housekeeping together back then,” Diaz said. “Apparently Carla Tremayne grew so tired of Cootie beating the shit out of her every time he got drunk she decided that she was sick of men altogether—wanted to try the ladies for a change. We found a mash note from Gwendace Fox in the victim’s effects. Witnesses had seen the two of them together. Gwendace was recruiting her; she’d spent a few nights off and on at Tremayne’s place. How’s that rhyme go? All night long, she was on her and off her?”

  “It doesn’t work as well with two women,” I said.

  “It works even less well with three,” Diaz said. “I figured three’s a crowd, and when I interviewed Liz, she made some ironic little comments trying to play me. Trouble was, those ironic little comments implicated her, or at least I thought they did at the time. Plus, of course, the murder itself bespeaks an inordinate amount of sexual rage, don’t you agree, Counselor?”

  “So what exactly were these incriminatory little comments Liz made?”

  “I’ll never forget it,” he said. “I interviewed her at her place. She claimed to have the flu, didn’t even want to let me in at first, then kept having to run to the john in mid-sentence to take another squirt. I make like I’m really looking at Gwendace, you know, to get her to talk. But when I ask her, nonchalant-like, where she happened to be the night of the murder, she says, in this phony Irish brogue, ‘I was home by me hearth, admoirin’ me holy cards.’ I wanted to slap the bracelets on her right there and then, but that damn fingerprint didn’t match hers. Finally, I filed the print in AFIS as a John Doe. We can do that now, make computer matches of unidentified fingerprints. It’s called a ‘cold hit.’ The world just keeps getting smaller nowadays, Ricky. We’ll find the bad guy. Just as soon as a set of prints with his name on them go into the system, the little electronic synapses will make their connections and he’ll have no rock he can crawl under. It’s one of our greatest tools.”

  I thought of Artie. My eyes drifted to Artie’s ticket lying on my desktop. The appearance date was today. I realized I had ten minutes to be in court for Artie Tremayne. I stuck Artie’s ticket and my half-page of triple-spaced notes in a manila folder, grabbed a new yellow legal pad, threw the whole works into a flat briefcase, and signed out for court. It was time to go off and earn Mark Kane his three grand.

  “Hey,” Diaz called out down the hall. “What about this Hare broad? She want candid videos of the two lezzies in fragrant delight, or just an address?”

  “Use your own judgment.” I gave him an open-hand gesture. “And your usual discretion.”

  “Just call me Allen Cunt.” Bug-eyed, he pantomimed cranking a movie camera while hanging his tongue out of one corner of his mouth.

  “On second thought,” I told him, “better check with Liz first for details.”

  Seeing Bobbi Cox, First Assistant State’s Attorney and head of the Felony Prosecutions Division in Courtroom 109, made my head ring with cognitive dissonance. Her name—and her avocation—was Cox, so the story goes, but she was also rumored to be State’s Attorney Peterson’s sub rosa girlfriend. Bobbi knew how to dress for success, right down to the tastefully understated Democratic campaign button on the lapel of her navy business suit. She stood only five feet one in heels, but her self-righteous attitude made her seem taller by inches.

  I met her clear-eyed stare, then glanced down like I was guilty of something. Her skirt was short enough to showcase her gymnast’s legs. A few years ago, she’d been a contender for the American Olympic team until she’d pulled a hamstring on a triple dismount. It was then that she’d refocused her considerable ambition from athletic competitions to law school and high-profile prosecutions. All she had to show for the gymnastics were the legs, and I had to admit that they were a great legacy—a leg legacy. Now only twenty-eight, with an even more youthful look about her, she’d already prosecuted a string of successful murder trials.

  “Waiting for Godot?” she asked.

  “More like Bozo,” I said, still staring at her legs, visualizing those smooth, muscled calves cling-wrapped around Peterson’s sacroiliac.

  “Like the shoes?”

  “What?”

  “I asked whether you like the shoes,” she said. “You seem to be staring at them. If you like, I could call your wife and tell her where I bought them.” I spotted a penny lying face down on the carpet, picked it up, and showed her Abe’s face. Nice save. I dropped it into my pants pocket. “That penny belongs to the county,” she said without smiling.

  “I’ll drop it off with the bailiff on my way out,” I said, not knowing whether she was serious.

  “I see you answered present for Arthur Tremayne, Jr.,” she said. “He here?” I gave the groundling section a bogus house-counting sweep for Bobbi’s benefit, but I already knew Artie was fashionably late. I did manage to spot three of our personal injury clients waiting for their criminal cases to be called. One of them even waved at me. “He a no-show?” Bobbi asked.

  “First he’s a flasher, and now he’s a no-show,” I said, trying to get her to lighten up. It didn’t work.

  “In here he’s a flasher,” she said. “Up on felony, he’s worse. A lot worse. He’s a no-show, all right. I’ve already managed to revoke his bond and get a bench warrant issued for him a half-hour ago. You don’t happen to know where we might find him, do you, Ricky? And by the way, will you be entering your appearance on his felonies?”

  “What felonies? You sure we’re talking about the same guy?”

  “I’ve got a few minutes before the ten o’clock show starts,” she said. “Come on up to my office. I want you to see something.”

  Bobbi buzzed us into the State’s At
torney’s office and ushered me through the secretaries’ workstation warren until we reached her own cramped and windowless office in back. Files stratified everywhere prevented my even finding a chair, much less sitting down in one. Bobbi strode behind her own gunmetal-gray desk, did a variation on the iron cross between two stacks of banker’s boxes, and lowered herself with a bump into her chair. I wondered whether she ever came down that hard on Peterson.

  It might not have been much, but this was one place where Bobbi presided over her domain. She leaned back and crossed her ankles on top of her desk. Her skirt rode up, defying me to steal a glance at where she’d so often straddled that gymnastics horse. I was about to score her a 10 in the private peep show event when she found what she’d been searching for and slid it across the desk at me. A PSI: presentence investigation report.

  “They often call him Speedo, but his real name’s Arthur Tremayne, Jr.,” she said. “Public defender’s office has been representing him on this one. By not showing up today for his own sentencing, you could say he’s managed to flag himself as something of an asshole in our eyes.”

  I scanned down the PSI under “educational background.” This particular Arthur Tremayne, Jr. had graduated with high honors from U of I Champaign with a double major: chemistry and folklore. It hardly seemed possible. Artie a folklorist? “You sure we’re talking about the same asshole, Bobbi? The Artie Tremayne I represent is a doofus, puts up drywall with his old man.”

  “Keep reading,” Bobbi said. Her Artie’s “employment history” drifted without ambition through the fast-food industry and into the building trades, finally winding up at his father’s doorstep like a foundling. The age was right, too. Mistaken identity not an option. “How’d he get the public defender’s office?”

  “My very question, Ricky. How did he afford a private attorney on a chickenshit misdemeanor and yet still qualify for a freebie lawyer on the agg sexual assaults and kidnapping? And how’d he get recogged on all those felonies? Do you suppose our boy has friends in high places?” Bobbi tossed the file midway across her desk in disgust. A black-and-white police photo enlargement slid partway out. It looked like a teenage girl stripped to the waist. One corner of the manila folder still modestly obscured the face, but I could see the attitude of mortification in the positions of her hands. Something like dark liquid had spattered over her breast buds in patterns. “Yeah, I’d like to ask him about that when they pick him up on the latest warrant. Right after I tell him that ‘blue-light special’ plea bargain we’d worked out with the PD is revoked.”

  “What plea bargain?” I asked. The “aliases” section of the PSI caught my eye: “Speedo” and “the Candleman.”

  “And why do they call him the Candleman?” I glanced once more at the picture on Bobbi’s desk. This time she caught me and slid it back inside the folder with a flick of her finger. She studied me like one of her files for the time it takes to say “guilty as charged.”

  Reading further down the report, I caught disturbing references in the “psychological evaluation” section: sexual sadism, paraphilia, even vampirism. There’s a combination you don’t see every day. The county-appointed psychologist had also picked up on the fact that Artie used crystal, maybe because a drug screen of Artie’s blood sample contained enough methamphetamine to jump-start a catatonic army. Yes, Artie had a few problems, all right, but I told myself that morning that I wasn’t about to make them my own.

  “He was ready to roll on some people we’ve been real anxious to meet,” she said at last. “At least we thought he was.”

  “What people?”

  “A sex-and-murder cult going back for years. We believe it involves some of our most prominent civic leaders. We think your boy is some kind of ‘lord high procurer’ for these degenerates, that he does his recruiting thing over the Internet and is extremely well paid for his services. I’ve prosecuted gang-bangers and multiple murderers—people who’d take a life the way you or I might take a drink—but this Artie thing scares even me. This is not some teenage Satanist gang knocking over gravestones or sacrificing cats. Ricky, have you ever heard of ritualized abuse of a child?”

  I had to admit I hadn’t.

  “Look it up sometime,” Bobbi said. “There is a statute on the books in Illinois making it a Class X felony to, among other things, have sex with or physically injure a child; or make the child drink blood, semen, or urine while conducting an occult ritual; or marry a child to a demon. Now, you know as well as I do that a statute is a response to a perceived need. Things like this really exist or there wouldn’t be a law against them. There’s no law saying a man can’t marry a tree, for instance, but there is a law against what Artie and his mover-and-shaker friends are up to. I intend to enforce that law and put away whoever’s responsible. I don’t care how important they think they are.”

  Sizing up Bobbi copping her Democratic fund-raiser stance, I knew she’d come out foursquare against arborial matrimony, statute or no statute.

  Chapter Seven

  What the Cleaning Woman Saw

  Misty Weegers had a whiplash, Ee-yi, Ee-yi, Oh. Actually she’d had three, but it wasn’t any of them that drew her and her mate, Celestal Weegers, to my office that day. By the time I returned from court, both waited for me with their best bus-station demeanor in the anteroom. I was late and had left the meeting with Bobbi bearing the realization that one of my clients was not only a pervert but also a vampire. Why were defense lawyers always the last to know?

  Misty had that look of dustbowl desperation about her. Washed out at twenty, she let Celestal do all the talking while she offered a pale breast to quiet the infant she had swaddled in a worn blue blanket. She loosened her neck brace to look down into the baby’s face, teasing him with the nipple until he latched on. Tiny suckling noises seemed to draw what was left of the life out of her. I knew from working late that the two of them brought the baby with them in a carrier when they cleaned Mark Kane’s office suite twice a week. Twenty bucks a night and glad to get it. Did she take the baby with her on her thrice-weekly visits to Dr. Kokker’s office? For that matter, did he treat the baby, too?

  Celestal Weegers believed in two things: chiropractic medicine and the Pentecostal Church. I could take dubious credit for turning him on to the former. A year or so ago, Misty had been injured in a Bi-State bus collision. Like most of our clients, she’d needed, or thought she’d needed, a doctor willing to wait for payment out of the insurance settlement. I forged a couple more links in the chain I’ll drag around for eternity by referring her to the Kokker Chiropractic Clinic. Even now, Celestal still took every opportunity to witness to me, with revival-meeting intensity, about the wonders of chiropractics. I always listened to him with the same feigned interest that I showed every time he witnessed to me about his church, staring into his wide-open, fanatic eyes. Dark sideburn scimitars framed his narrow, hollow-cheeked face. Today, though, it didn’t take Celestal long to get to the point. Some tomb robber had opened his daddy’s grave and “heistesed” his daddy’s earthly remains.

  Motive was a mystery. Pete Weegers had been no King Tut when he was alive, and I was reasonably sure he hadn’t improved with age. He’d been my first worker’s comp client until an insurance company killed him off trying to cut its losses.

  Twenty years working at the Faithful Friend Dog Food Company didn’t buy much, and when Pete had blown a disc lifting a hundred pounds of the stuff, he could no longer work at all. The comp insurer’s first brainstorm was to starve him to death by holding out on his disability payments. When that hadn’t worked, they drove him to suicide. At least, that was the argument I had offered—unsuccessfully, as it turned out—before the Illinois Industrial Commission. It was Celestal who, at the age of eight, had found Pete’s lifeless body dangling from a roof beam in the shed. Maybe it was only my imagination, but I thought I could still see the reflection of it every time I looked him in the eye.

  “What’s a case like this usually worth?” Celes
tal inquired. It was a question I heard on a daily basis, but this time I was taken aback.

  “Hold on there, Celestal. A case like what? You think a case like this comes along every day?”

  “I sure hope not,” Misty said, her voice trailing off so that she barely got it out. Celestal glared at her for the interruption.

  “I’ll tell you right now,” I went on, “the cemetery association will deny liability. This is a criminal act by a third party. They’re not responsible.”

  “Who said anything about the cemetery association?” Celestal said. His eyes might have been staring out through holes cut in a sheet. For the first time that day, I felt the fear that he and Misty might, as Mark Kane would put it, yank their cases—her injury and his loss of consortium. I’d be called on the carpet to justify insulting the Weegers enough for them to wrench their cases and their one-third contingent fees from Mark Kane’s steely grasp.

  “You mean sue the perpetrators?” I said in what I hoped was a soothing voice. “They haven’t even been identified, have they?”