St. Agnes' Eve

by Malachi Stone

  “I want us to do something that’ll really piss him off, you know? Make him hate the both of us.” She nodded eagerly.

  “Such as?”

  “Come on, it’ll be fun. I need some aerobic activity to take the place of my workout. I was puking so much from a hangover that I couldn’t even do my Nautilus routine this morning. Kirk had to give me a Compazine shot in the ass to straighten me out. Now it’s your turn to give me a shot in the ass.”

  “He’s not licensed to give injections,” I protested.

  “The guy worships Satan, Ricky. He’s killed people—street people, mostly derelicts—experimenting with something he calls the Kokker maneuver. You think he’s scared over some bullshit chiropractor license violation? There’s only one way to handle a man like Kirk Kokker.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Out-Kokker him. Show him you’re not afraid of anything he’s into. Take last night, for instance. You showed him you’re not afraid to drive right into his house, get down and dirty with a little hot tub action, then rip him off on his own turf. Now it’s time to go one step further and butt-fuck his old lady right here in your office. The time for sneaking around is over. You’ll earn his respect, believe me.”

  “Why would I want his respect?”

  “Why not?” she shrugged. The leather skirt squeaked like a fart on the naugahyde couch. “Why would anybody lie down with the devil? Money? Power? Sex? Valet parking? I don’t know. You tell me.”

  She released the lonely button that had been fighting the Battle of Thermopylae against the onslaught of her breasts. They heaved when she sighed and looked at me expectantly, challenging me. Out peeked the mole—the one like Janis’s. I knelt and reached for it, but she turned slightly and my knuckles brushed against the pendant instead. It felt greasy and cold when I rubbed it between my thumb and forefinger. I thought I heard women’s voices cry out in alarm. One of them was Diane’s. Strange and lurid urgencies stirred within me.

  “Saddle up, cowpoke.” She positioned herself as though for a proctologist’s exam over the end of the coffee table and fetchingly twitched her bare butt at me. She was right. A Stairmaster ass was something money couldn’t buy. Or could it?

  Sandra came fully equipped with a pastel assortment of Tex-Ass brand novelty rubbers and a tube of K-Y jelly. She directed me where to find it all in her purse. I reared up behind her. The loamy effluvium when I entered her opened up my nostrils like a fed horse in the morning. I cupped my hands under her heavy breasts; my wedding band tap-tapped in rhythm against the glass surface of the coffee table with my every thrust.

  “Casual sex on casual Friday,” I said, my own voice unfamiliar to me, quavering with pure lust. “I think you may be right, Sandra, about your being a sex addict.”

  “Takes one to know one,” she grunted.

  As soon as I came, all passion fled from me like a dream upon awakening. I despised myself for mounting this woman whose tallow ass had drained me like a vampire.

  The intercom sounded. “Your wife’s in the lobby, Mr. Galeer. Shall I send her on back?”

  “Di’s meeting me here for lunch,” Sandra explained. “Girls’ day out, no spouses.” She watched with amused detachment as I leaped to my feet.

  “Why don’t I go out and head her off at the pass?” she said. “Looks like you’re a tad indisposed.”

  By the time I made it outside, the suite elevator doors were closing behind the two of them. The last thing I saw was Sandra’s triumphant secret smile. I’d run out so quickly I hadn’t noticed Diaz standing in Janis’s cubicle. His hand rested on Janis’s shoulder as she sat at her computer, wearing a SLU sweatshirt over faded blue jeans. She looked like she was on her way to a pep rally. When I passed by Janis’s glass house without making eye contact, he followed. I tried to ignore his steps closing on me in a leisurely foot pursuit down the wide corridor. I reached my office door before turning to face him.

  “Look, if it’s about you wanting to reinforce what you said last night—”

  He extended his hand in a handshake. “No hard feelings, okay? Everybody’s engine was running a little hot last night.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “Thanks, John. No hard feelings. We both want the same thing here.”

  “We both want Madeleine home.”

  “That’s what I meant, yeah. How’s Janis doing?”

  “Hanging in there. How’d you expect her to be after something like this happens?”

  “Any leads?”

  “You sound like a damn reporter. No, no leads yet. You have any ideas? Pertinent to the case, I mean.”

  “Look, John, I’ve known both of you for years. I’m not interested in Janis,” I lied. “I just work here, all right? I’m one of the enlisted men just like you. So lighten up, will you?”

  He looked away down the hall toward Janis’s cubicle but said nothing. I didn’t think he believed me. To change the subject, I asked, “You made any headway in that other disappearance? You know, Gwendace Fox?”

  “Now that you mention it, we did get an unusual call from one of the local no-tells outside of Belleville about three o’clock this morning. Seems one of their guests checked out without ever leaving the room. Only this one wasn’t your ordinary DB pickup.”

  “Let’s talk in here.”

  He walked into my office and flopped down in the client’s chair. “The Fox broad checks into the Sandman Motel just after dark a few nights ago, alone. No baggage. Last night the clerk gets notified her credit card’s declined. Exceeded her limit.”

  “I know the feeling. Happened to us two years ago on vacation.”

  “Be glad the rest of this didn’t happen to you.”

  “Go on.”

  “So the clerk calls the room and there’s no answer. This is around midnight. He keeps calling the room every hour or so. Then, around two-thirty, he heads back there. It’s way at the far end of the place—all the other rooms in that whole wing vacant that night—nobody close enough to hear anything. He tries the door. Whaddya know. It’s unlocked.”

  Diaz gazed over my head toward the courthouse vista. I said, “Don’t keep me in suspense. What did he find in there?”

  “It was the Fox broad all right: nude and stone-cold dead, stretched out in bed with her eyes open, posed kind of like Marilyn Monroe in that fifties calendar shot, if you’re old enough to remember.”

  “Find anything else?”

  “Thanks for reminding me, Counselor. Yeah, there was one more little detail, now that you mention it. Somebody had taken the trouble to lop off both her tits.”

  “Like Carla Tremayne? The case you called the holy card murder?”

  “That’s right. Only this time, the victim is Gwendace Fox and the holy card on the victim’s body is Saint Agnes, not Saint Agatha like the first one. You ever read your Lives of the Saints that much? Guess not, huh? You never had a good Catholic school education inflicted on you, I bet.”

  Stunned, I shook my head no. Either I looked eager to learn, or I bore a striking resemblance to the insouciant “What, me worry?” gentleman.

  “If you had,” he went on, “you’d get the connection. Saint Agatha had her hooters hacked off just like our victim here. Both her and St. Agnes were imprisoned in brothels as persecution by the Romans. A mutilation murder with a Catholic psychosexual twist makes me think crazy, jealous lover/stalker. Liz Hare definitely leads that pack again. Only there’s just one problem. Want to know what it is? Sure you do.”

  I could see two problems. Number one, Liz was my client. I couldn’t let her talk to Diaz if she were a murder suspect. Number two, I was the one who’d put her with Diaz in the first place. I’d given him a valid non-custodial reason to talk to her about Gwendace without even Mirandizing her, using the disarming pretext that he was working for her. Hell, he’d probably already talked to her by this time—done a non-custodial interrogation for which I’d soon be sending her a bill. But talking to her wearing his civil investigator’s hat made any
conversations privileged under attorney/client. Or did it? I’d have to hit the law books on that one.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “The same damn bloody fingerprint was on both the Saint Agnes card from last night and the Saint Agatha card from almost twenty years ago, and for certain the print’s not Hare’s.”

  “So you have two identical bloody fingerprints, one at each crime scene, both unidentified, and the killer used the same M.O. each time. A good defense attorney would trash any case you tried to make against Hare and ruin Bobbi Cox’s perfect record. Even I know that, and I don’t do felony.”

  “I never said the prints were unidentified.”

  He must have seen my eyes widen. He paused before adding, “It’s just that the identification poses a certain vexing question of its own.”

  “Such as?”

  He studied his manicure. “When I scanned the Fox holy card print into AFIS, I got back two direct hits. One was for the first holy card murder case, which only confirmed my suspicions.”

  “And?”

  “The other was a match off a child Identikit that came up in conversation last night.”

  “You don’t mean—”

  “I do mean, Counselor. Without a doubt, the fingerprints on both holy cards belong to Madeleine Mezzanotte.”

  “She’s barely eighteen years old! How could her prints be at a twenty-year-old murder scene?”

  “I see you’ve begun to appreciate my conundrum,” Diaz said.

  “The identikit must have the wrong fingerprints, or else somebody switched them at AFIS.”

  “No chance. Police technicians take the fingerprints at the station and maintain chain-of-custody like any other investigation until after the prints are scanned in. And AFIS is as reliable as the FBI. I don’t know about you, but that’s good enough for me.”

  “I suppose I’d better break the news to Liz,” I offered. “About Gwendace.”

  “Not unless you want to get charged with obstruction,” he said.

  “You can’t go posing as her agent then, or this office’s agent, either,” I said. It came out sounding like a playground threat to take my ball and bat and go home, and it didn’t do a thing to him.

  “You know, that’s the second time in what, twelve hours, you’ve told me how to do my job, Counselor. I’m warning you not to call her or go to see her until I’ve had my shot at her.”

  “Bullshit! I’m her lawyer. I’ve got every right to talk to her—even tell her not to talk to you. Especially tell her not to talk to you.” My heart doing a Led Zeppelin drum solo in my ears, I picked up the phone, then realized I didn’t know the number for Fox & Hare. I pulled my drawer open for the directory, then punched in the number. Got the answering machine. Of course. With Gwendace gone, Liz had to close the shop for lunch; there were no other employees to spell her. While Diaz stared me down, I left a message instructing her not to talk to him until she called me first.

  Artie’s Crankenstein was filling me with unaccustomed Dutch courage. Even Diaz seemed impressed.

  “You got big ones, I’ll say that for you,” he said. “But you go sticking them in an ongoing murder investigation, they may get chopped off. I’m gonna interrogate Liz Hare and shove both these murders right up her ass.”

  “Right up whose ass, John?” In the heat of the moment, neither of us had heard Janis slip in.

  “Sorry you had to hear that language, babe,” Diaz said, a latter-day cavalier to his lady fair. “Ready for lunch?” He rose, took both her hands in his, and kissed her. It was no more than a brush on the cheek, yet it enraged me. I stood to walk out with them. “I’d ask you to join us, Counselor,” Diaz added, “but I know you always brown-bag it, what with wifey-poo and four kids at home and all.”

  The three’s-a-crowd suggestion that I couldn’t afford lunch further infuriated me. Janis told Diaz she had to get her purse and she’d meet him at the elevator. After he had started down the hall, she threw her arms around me and kissed me. I slipped my hands into the back pockets of her jeans and squeezed with an invited familiarity. She was firm and taut like Diane, but her flesh seemed cooler—longer and sleeker in the hip lines—when I caressed her there.

  Her kiss and another quick snort of Crankenstein carried me at cruising speed through the rest of the afternoon. Calls speed-dialed home every forty-five minutes or so went unanswered. Diane was incommunicado, probably having lost track of time cruising the Galleria, Plaza Frontenac, and whatever rich-lady boutiques her new best friend Sandra could steer her to.

  It was nearly seven. Before leaving for the night, I scooped up the plastic wastebasket liner and took it down the back stairs to the rear alley. The last one out as usual, I’d already locked the suite and set the silent alarm.

  More than once, Celestal and Misty had forgotten to punch in the code before cleaning the office late at night and wound up facing down the drawn .357 magnum of some zits-ablaze nineteen-year-old security guard going for his merit badge in kill-zone target shooting.

  In the alley, I separated the Tex-Ass rubber from the other wastebasket trash that might have my name on it and tossed the soiled condom into the dumpster. It made a tympanic echo that resonated like hell in the quiet alley—or maybe it was only my fevered imagination. I hurried away from it, circling around to the front of the building.

  A silver Caprice with a police aerial sat idling in the slot closest to the revolving doors in front. I walked past it, not looking up, worrying about Diane’s absence.

  Diaz tapped the Caprice’s siren. The Crankenstein exaggerated my startle reflex. I heard his laugh over the whine of the power window.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Urine the Money

  “Wanna grab a quick cocktail? You look like you could use one.”

  Diaz took East Main past Fox & Hare. The next block he turned left then flipped on his revolving red light. He sped through the Hexenbukel District, cop tires screaming like a band saw against brick streets built for horse and buggy. I cringed and stared straight ahead at every blind intersection, where German houses crowded up to the narrow sidewalks.

  “I know a place where they serve good cocktails and give a law enforcement discount,” he said. “Sphinx Lounge. Ever hear of it? Cops all call it the Sphincter Club. Then they drink there.”

  We had left Belleville behind. Diaz sped along a two-lane country blacktop through one blighted area after another. Mile after mile, we passed block-long scrap heaps and smoldering tire graveyards that glowed like the stoked fires of hell. Beyond us, in the mist, I saw a searchlight sweeping the skies with all the dramatic buildup of a Hollywood premiere. A searchlight in the middle of hell’s half acre.

  Diaz picked up speed. As though road testing the shocks in his county-issue unmarked cruiser, he flew over a dip and rise in the blacktop, treating me to a quick jolt of simulated weightlessness.

  Suddenly, there it was. A little piece of Las Vegas glitz transported into the midst of fall-plowed corn and soybean fields. The Sphinx Lounge. I’d heard rumors about the place and knew of its nasty reputation but had never been there.

  We had to walk through a metal detector just like the one at the courthouse. The ten-dollar cover seemed a bit steep, but Diaz assured me it’d be worth it. I broke a fifty and paid for both of us. The capacity crowd was noisy enough for a cockfight, but the cavernous club soaked up most of the racket.

  “So what’d you find out from Liz?” I asked. “You must have caught her at home before she checked her messages.”

  Diaz waved me off. “It’s amateur night at the Sphincter,” he said, “and I don’t feel like talking shop.”

  A waitress took our drink orders. Mine was a rum and Coke. I finished it before Diaz even got around to twirling the ice in his first C.C. and Seven.

  “This is the life, eh, Counselor?” Diaz said. “Beats the shit out of hustling barely legal girls in the back seats of cars, am I right?”

  I wanted to remind him it had been the front seat
but didn’t feel like talking shop, either. Instead, I summoned our waitress. She boomeranged over to our table, and I ordered fresh drinks for both of us. I handed her a twenty between my middle and index fingers and told her to keep the change. There wasn’t any.

  A dumb country song came on over the speakers and the first amateur took the stage. Don’t sit up close at the ballet.

  Diaz’s mouth stood agape as the dancer lay down on a mat and commenced spreading her legs for us in a series of maneuvers more gynecological than terpsichorean. He caught her eye in the midst of a partial sit-up, pointed to her, then himself, and pantomimed a drinking motion. She nodded eagerly. The rest of her number was directed only at him.

  “Just trying to be sociable,” he said. “Looks to me like she’s painfully shy.”