“Mr. Galeer, everybody knows who’s doing this.” Celestal resisted my every attempt to get him to drop the backwoods formality and call me Ricky.
“So tell me.”
“Don’t you read the paper, Mr. Galeer? It’s that bunch a devil-worshippers over yonder in Missourah. Ain’t it obvious? Daddy was a suicide. They want his body to use in some kind of desolating sacrilege.”
“Celestal, go to the police if you know something. As a private practice law firm, we can’t help you at all with this until somebody has actually been charged with a crime.” I left out the part about our not being the least bit interested even then.
“You know how it goes, Mr. Galeer. Daddy was a poor man. We’re all just poor country folk. The police reckon we’re no ‘count. They won’t do nothing, just you wait.” Celestal set his jaw. Misty pursed her lips, nodding in mute agreement. They both looked at me for help.
In my heart, I always knew I owed some cosmic debt to these people. I hadn’t exactly mishandled Pete’s case, but I’d let it slide, overburdened by the workload of a junior associate, never suspecting the psychic torment my neglect would bring Pete and his family. Too long waiting for the work comp disability checks to start, too much intractable pain, and too few answers must have finally pushed Pete over the edge. I came back from a deposition to find Pete’s brand-new widow and his whole fatherless brood waiting for me in the lobby with the news.
One thing led to another. Alcoholic blackouts astonish the mind, even years later. My drinking had telescoped. I couldn’t seem to enjoy myself for an evening without losing a friend or becoming unwelcome at one club or another.
One sympathetic colleague—a refugee from a chemical dependency of his own—started me going to meetings. The same colleague recognized my self-destructive implosion for what it was: self-pity. He earned my eternal gratitude by introducing me to one of the parishioners in his church. She turned out to be my Diane.
I got rid of the Weegers after enduring another of Celestal’s “five-minutes-to-live-bys,” and hustled to get across town for depositions. They went until six, when I dragged back to the office wearing my tension headache like a neck brace of my own. I dumped my briefcase and slid open my lap drawer, looking for a post-it note to tell my secretary I’d be doing a motion to limit discovery. Then I made a discovery of my own, Artie’s zip-lock bag half-filled with Crankenstein.
I took down my framed law license, lay it on my desk, used the glass and one of my deactivated credit cards to make two lines, and then vacuumed up first one, then the other, line. My nostril burned like I’d just inhaled half a swimming pool worth of chlorine. An inopportune moment later, my office door swung open. Through watering eyes I saw Janis enter.
“Inspecting your license? Hasn’t expired, has it?” she asked, hesitating in my doorway before entering. She wore a black, tailored wool suit and a white blouse with a high, lacy collar.
I slammed my lap drawer shut.
“Looks like you have a heavy date tonight, Ricky.” She held steady eye contact. “I mean, I’ve checked your calendar. You’re having dinner tonight with Dr. and Mrs. Hairless Krishna.”
“Is that tonight already?” I remained standing. Janis slid silent as a cat into the nearest of the client’s chairs facing my desk, ladylike, knees pressed together and to one side, ankles crossed. I stood there like a dummy, ogling her.
“You still have plenty of time. They’re not expecting you until eight o’clock.”
Purple highlights in Janis’s raven hair set off her translucent complexion, smooth as candle wax yet radiantly alive. Her breasts seemed to strain against the conservative bonds of the suit and the pure white of her blouse. Her calf muscles, defined by years of faithful exertion at the health club, called out for the massage of my exploring fingers. I felt weak in the legs, so I sat on the corner of my desk and pretended to listen while she vented about Mad’s rebelliousness—her running with a wild crowd, sneaking out to after-hours clubs—and her consequential grounding. Mad’s isolation in her room for hours, with only her laptop for company. Hypnotized by its glow, Mad’s fingers tapping away on the keyboard like wind-whipped rain. The mundane give-and-take of the conversation seemed unbearably erotic to me in my drug-manic state. Yet I persisted in an everyday conversational tone, wondering where my excitement would take both of us.
“Well, Mad’s been a good baby-sitter for us,” I said, by now visibly aroused. A vein in my temple began to leap and jump to the point I thought Janis must be able to see it herself.
“I’m sorry, am I making you late? You probably want to go pick up your wife and go to his house, don’t you? I just needed a shoulder to cry on, I guess.” Janis sighed, circled my desk to where I was seated, and stood over me. I seized the soft flesh of her shoulders and drew her close enough to kiss.
The Crankenstein kicked in. My knees began to quiver then jerked in big, uncontrollable, electric-chair spasms. My chest was pounding, and I couldn’t catch my breath. A rashlike burning sensation climbed up my neck and beat into both temples.
Janis said, “Let me get the lights.” She threw the wall switch, plunging the office into near-darkness, then returned to kneel on the carpet in front of me like a shoe salesclerk. She slipped off her white headband, unloosing the jet-black wimple of her hair, then undid the top button of her tailored blouse, continuing to undress until she knelt there topless.
Subdued lights from the courthouse across the square glowed through smoky glass, illuminating the silhouettes of two or three cleaning people laboring like indentured ghosts. I willed these shades to look up from their toil and see us together, but none did. I sat hypnotized by the rhythmic bobbing of Janis’s head, her eyes on me like a snake’s watching the snake charmer. But who was charming whom? And hers weren’t a snake’s eyes; they were the deep, crisp blue of a cloudless sky, their whites clear and cool as milk.
The lights of the traffic glided past and circled around the fountain. I asked myself why I should not enjoy tonight’s experience to the fullest? I had spent the better part of the past fourteen years, once the financial drain of home and family set in, practicing a dismal alchemy, trying to transform one dollar into three on a bimonthly basis—dreading every payday and the end of every month that passed by wasted. Why shouldn’t I savor some purloined pleasure while my blood was high?
Janis increased her tempo to a jazzercise beat. With her right hand she reached up and caressed the side of my neck below the ear.
I must have swooned.
Janis slapped me awake, two times hard across the face, then kissed me hard. The taste was all laundry starch and ammonia as she swabbed her tongue against mine. “I wanted you to be awake for that,” she said, her tone businesslike but laced with contempt. “Why don’t you give your wife a great big kiss for me when you go home to her? While you’re at it, give Hairless one, too.”
I blinked at her nude torso then focused on her familiar mole, a falling five-pointed star dwarfed by the dark full moon of her areola in the firmament of her right breast. By some remarkable coincidence, Sandra had a similar mole in the same location.
And then there was the bright and dangling medallion she always wore suspended on a delicate gold chain around her neck. Sandra wore its twin. My eyes had finally adjusted to the near-darkness. A single ray of moonlight shining from the square through a crevice in the drapes caught and illuminated the heavy medallion. I reached for it. Tiny ruby chips formed the letters CS in the loops of an infinity symbol. Janis gently removed it from my hand, sliding it along its chain until it hung behind her back.
“Are you ever going to tell me what it means?” I asked.
She gave me a demure look not unlike the one I’d seen on Sandra that time in the Kokker Clinic and slipped back into her bra.
Janis was as close-mouthed as Sandra had been about the meaning of the necklace. I finally concluded that perhaps Kokker was handing them out to his special friends and that both women were embarrassed about it so
mehow. I remained baffled by what the letters meant, though. Maybe it was an advertising gimmick—the abbreviation for ‘chiropractic secrets.’ Mark Kane’s office had once represented the parents of a high school girl threatened with expulsion for wearing a CS insignia on her high school jacket, arguing unsuccessfully before the school board that the letters meant “college sweetheart.” Use your imagination.
“What are you going to tell your little missus about tonight, Ricky?”
“What?”
“Are you going to tell her about us at last?”
The canary-mode telephone ring might as well have been the caw of a raven. I picked up, irritated. “Wrong number,” I snarled into the phone.
“Ricky? Honey, is that you?” Diane’s voice, plaintive and urgent.
I clamped my hand over the receiver. “It’s my wife. Oh, jeez! I forgot! What time is it?” What the United States Supreme Court refers to as “the leer of the sensualist” played across Janis’s face. She cupped my balls in her hand as if to weigh them like Lady Liberty’s scales.
“It’s nearly seven-thirty,” Diane said. “Do you want me to call the Kokkers and say we’ll be a little late? How long does it take to get there?”
“Forty-five minutes or less in light traffic,” I said. Janis pressed herself against me, smiling full in my face. I swallowed. Janis’s eyes mesmerized me. Her musky perfumed redolence fought to overpower my reason.
“You dressed?” I managed to get out, my voice hoarse with renewed lust.
“Of course I’m dressed. I’ve been sitting here for at least fifteen minutes making girl talk with Madeleine.”
“Madeleine?” The moment I uttered that name, Janis froze.
“Madeleine Mezzanotte,” Diane said. “Janis’s daughter. You know, Janis from the office? Our regular sitter won’t come out on a weeknight. I was lucky to get Mad on such short notice. She forgot her laptop; I had to agree to let her use our computer to do her homework. Hurry home, hon. We’re into her for something like ten dollars already.”
“Sorry, honey. I’m on my way.”
“Love you.”
“Me, too.” I hung up, tortured—or exhilarated—like a murderer at the scene of the crime.
“Me, too,” Janis parroted. “You and your honey off to Kokker’s house while Mad looks after your kiddies? I guess I’m a pleasant enough diversion to pass the time, but it’s not every day one receives a dinner invitation from Hairless Krishna and his Blonde Goddess, is it?”
“You’re the one who offered to do that in the first place,” I bleated like an adolescent as I fumbled for my clothes.
“That? Let me ask you something. Your little wifey-poo ever do that for you?”
“Leave Diane out of this.”
“You certainly have,” Janis said. The remark wounded me and she saw it. She seemed to soften for an instant, then said, “Don’t trouble yourself, Ricky. I guess there is a kind of crazy symmetry in all this. If I’ve managed to hold you up for an hour or so, with Mad’s meter running, that’s another few bucks in the till going toward her college fund. My evening’s attempt to entertain you hasn’t gone totally unrewarded.” She’d said it all without raising her voice. “I mean, one unfamiliar with the players might even have mistaken us for lovers.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Don’t lose your confidence, Ricky. Your secret’s safe, at least for now. You’d pass without objection in polite society. Too bad you’re not liable to be mixing in any polite society tonight.” Janis sat in my chair, crossed her legs and studied me, as if debating whether to say more.
I was intrigued. “What exactly do you mean, Janis? And why do you hate Kokker and his wife so much? What’d they ever do to you? I’m curious.”
She folded her arms and regarded me. Before speaking another word, she rose and walked to the full-length window I’d been awarded in lieu of an annual raise. She opened the drapes of the dark office and stood there staring out over the square, communing with the night. The aurora of reflected traffic lights played against the contours of her classic cantilevered brassiere, which was all she was wearing on top. I moved to stand behind her and caress her shoulders.
“He has something of mine,” she began. She peered down at the drained and empty fountain as though it were a witches’ cauldron. Her voice became dreamlike, fit for an incantation. “Maybe there is something you can do for me after all.” She brightened. “I know! How would you like to perform a quest for me? A quest like in olden days to win a fair lady’s heart? You’ve already enjoyed her special favors.” She touched my cheek and kissed me with a new tenderness. “I’ll tell you a bedtime story that’s no fairy tale,” she said. “Once upon a time, many years ago, I attended law school at Saint Louis University. Did you even know I’d gone to law school, Ricky?”
In fact, I hadn’t known, but this answered a lot of questions about Janis’s breadth of legal knowledge, her ease around legal concepts and terminology. It was Mark Kane’s way of hiring a lawyer without having to pay the going rate for one. “What happened?”
“You’re getting ahead of the story. My education was fast-forwarding into a bright professional future. School came easily to me, maybe too easily. I’d zapped through college in under a year and had started first year law. My career path didn’t allow for a full-time job, and everything part-time was either minimum wage or taken. Except one job. So I did a stupid thing.”
“Which was?”
“I went to work for Hairless Krishna and his mother, Old Lady Kokker. At that time they were co-proprietors of a stately pleasure dome known as the Salome Spa, nestled in an unassuming strip mall outside of Collinsville. No offense, but maybe you remember the place. It was conveniently located right next to Kokker’s first quackopractic clinic.”
I shrugged. For years I had been complimenting myself on being the only man desirable enough to seduce a devout Catholic woman like Janis and entice her out of a life of near-celibacy. And then despite myself I remembered Carla Tremayne. Janis seemed to read my thoughts. “Yeah, that’s right. It was that same joint where Carla was murdered, poor thing. Not too many people know that Carla and I had worked together the night before her death. It sounds strange to say it now, but the luckiest thing that ever happened to me was getting busted the night before she died. I guess you could say it ended my life plans and saved my life at the same time. I quit the parlor the same night John Diaz arrested me, and I never went back. The next night wasn’t supposed to be Carla’s shift, you see. She was filling in for me the night she died.”
I couldn’t see well enough in the dimness to discern tears, but Janis held herself so quietly for so long it couldn’t have been anything else. I took her hand in mine as though it were a baby bird fallen from the nest. She had opened up her most deeply guarded secrets to me and had exposed her damaged soul for my view. I asked myself how I could ever say “no” to any request of hers now.
“How many times I dirtied my hands in that place,” Janis shuddered. “It made me feel unclean, like an undertaker, only worse—having to milk every stiff that stopped by. Sanitary bloodletting, that’s all it was.”
“So why not quit?”
“Easy for you to say. I guess I just couldn’t turn down the money, if you want the truth. I told myself it was no worse than wiping and washing old men’s asses for three thirty-five an hour in some nursing home. At the massage parlor they paid tips of maybe fifty dollars a pop for the privilege to watch my face while I caught their nastiness in my hand. It was like touching an oozing bedsore with my bare skin, only I had to pretend the warm pus turned me on, that I got off whenever I popped another one. There was this endless blushing procession of horny husbands and leering drunks, too many to count, each one ready to tip me the week’s grocery money just to hear me ooh and aah over how big and hard he was, how his wife or his girlfriend didn’t know how lucky she was. Well, you’ve been to those places, I’m sure.”
I shook my head no, but I don’t think
she believed me.
“You remember fungible goods from Commercial Law, Ricky? I never got past the first year curriculum, but I can still remember the definition of fungible goods: ‘goods of which any unit is, by nature or usage of trade, the equivalent of any other like unit.’ Take it from a girl who’s spent some time in the trade, Ricky, the penis starts to look like a fungible good real fast once you’ve pulled a double shift at the Salome Spa.
“They had black light in the place, too, to make the black velvet nude bimbo paintings light up. If I got my hands close enough to it, the fresh ooze would glow a kind of sickly pale, firefly green. Some of my regulars used to get off on that, seeing their own glowing away all over my hands like leprosy.” She quivered with seeming revulsion at the memory.
“Diaz wound up arresting you?”
“Yeah, John entrapped me, pure and simple. You could tell he was shy about even undressing in front of me, so of course I made him strip and shower while I watched. That’s usually how you can separate the cops from the creeps but not always. Let me tell you, John’s always been big in more ways than one.”
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