St. Agnes' Eve

by Malachi Stone

  “Or even a knife, let’s say.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  I tried to change the subject. “What about a dead snake?”

  “Dead snake? You sure you haven’t been snorting some of Artie’s home-brewed crank, Counselor? You’re hallucinating.”

  “Madeleine had a pet snake, Samael, remember? She never went anywhere without him. Even took him with her when she ran away. He had to have been in the trailer with her when it went up.”

  “No,” he said, “no snake remains. But nobody was looking for any, either.”

  “What about in the hearse?”

  “Artie must have left the keys in the ignition. One of the trailer-park burnouts evidently tooled off in it. Shouldn’t be hard to spot a customized hearse with a lit-up undercarriage, though. We’ll catch up with it before long.”

  I circled around to the subject again, trying for casual. “What’s the drill if, say, you had found any weapons at the scene of the explosion?”

  “They’d be inventoried,” he said after a long pause. “But there weren’t any. Why all this sudden interest in serpents and daggers?”

  “Daggers? I don’t recall mentioning anything about a dagger.”

  He held up both hands and chuckled derisively. “Okay, Counselor, you got me. Yeah, we were searching for a dagger. That’s because your girlfriend Cheryl took one in the aorta... about a five-inch curved blade according to the wound impression that was taken. It was Madeleine’s bloody fingerprint on that holy card found in the victim’s mouth and also on the holy card we found on Gwendace Fox. Our little Madeleine definitely had some mental problems. I guess there’s no harm in telling you now that she was also a double murderer. Artie saved the county taxpayers the expense of two trials and umpteen psychiatrists by blowing them both to hell.”

  “What about the AFIS match linking her to a murder before she was born?”

  He shook his head with disdain. “Computers,” he muttered. “I rechecked the results this morning. There was no match to that other crime. Not even close. Must have been some kind of glitch. Or maybe I’m working too many hours, after all.” The last statement, coming from him, was a stunning admission. “Madeleine must have heard talk of the Carla Tremayne murder and copied the holy card and such.”

  Maybe it was the effects of the Crankenstein, but I wanted to get back to work. “So I guess you’ll close what, four case files with this explosion? Gwendace Fox, Cheryl the stripper, Artie’s multiple felonies, and Madeleine’s disappearance.”

  He nodded in weary assent. “Hell of a way to do it,” he said. “Only one thing always bothers me about these head cases, and that’s how nobody ever saw it coming. In time to stop it, I mean. Janis is an intelligent woman, after all. You’d think she would have seen the signs in her own daughter—got her some professional help before it was too late. I guess, as a parent, there’s bound to be a lot of denial going on there.”

  “Maybe you can be too close to a person to appreciate that they’ve got a serious mental disorder.”

  “I know,” he said, “but let’s face it, Mad was pretty far gone. That thing with the hands? I mean, yeesh.”

  That brought me up short. “What thing with the hands?”

  “Oh, that’s right. You didn’t know about that. That’s the other detail aside from the fingerprints that we kept secret from the public about those crimes. Guess it won’t make any difference if I tell you now.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Madeleine cut off the hands of both victims at the wrists. Surgical precision, too, even though she’d never dissected anything bigger than a frog in school. Must have paid attention in biology class. Looking at her work, you’d have thought she was a doctor.”

  “Or a biologist,” I said.

  I had a lunch break coming. Rather than eating—the idea revolted me—I used it to pay a call on Liz Hare at her shop on East Main. I broke the news to her about Madeleine and held her as she cried against my shoulder over the tragedy and the butchery that had ended Gwendace’s life. She seemed almost relieved, as though the fact that the perpetrator had been a child somehow made it more understandable, more acceptable. A piteous, disturbed child had killed and mutilated Gwendace. And now that child herself was dead. The news media would have called it closure.

  “It terrifies me,” I told her, “when I think of her in our home so many evenings, left all alone with our children.”

  She looked at me curiously. “How’s your latest house guest making out?”

  I described the Saturday night fireworks after Sandra had taken off the medallion. Liz seemed doubtful.

  “What became of the medallion after she threw it in the cat’s water?” she asked.

  I didn’t know. It had been gone the next morning. I’d looked for it after the women left for church. “Maybe Sandra deep-sixed it while my back was turned.”

  “Get rid of it, Ricky,” she cautioned, staring down at her wrists. “In the wrong hands, it’s very dangerous.”

  “More so than the dagger?”

  Wide-eyed, she met my gaze. “What about the dagger?”

  “Madeleine must have taken it with her when she ran away, but Diaz didn’t find it when he sifted through the debris of the explosion. And he was looking for it as a probable murder weapon.”

  “It must be found,” Liz intoned with fear, “before the powers of darkness use it again to purify the Blood.”

  “What’s all this about ‘purifying the Blood,’ Liz? I held the thing in my hands. Who’s to say it’s not a fancy antique dagger and nothing more? Faith has a lot to do with how you look at things.”

  “You don’t understand. The talisman confers the power to kill in secret. It’s said to be charmed so the victim can’t see it coming until it’s too late. Although it will not harm a virgin member of the Sisterhood.

  “Remember I told you the purebloods hate men? The purebloods are a kind of self-appointed genetic police force. Whenever a member of the Sisterhood royally screws up and bears a human male child, the purebloods are supposed to use the talisman to assassinate her as the ultimate punishment. Each sacrifice to the Demon Mother recharges the talisman’s batteries for another twenty years. The twenty-year cycle is renewable over and over, as long as no more than twenty years pass by without the talisman taking the life of an errant Sisterhood member. And the sacrifice always follows the same brutal ritualistic pattern. You saw it with Gwendace.” She shuddered.

  “But wait—that makes no sense,” I said. “How would Madeleine have known all this? She couldn’t have been a purifier of blood, right? She was just a mixed-up kid with a mental problem.”

  Liz shook her head sadly. “I don’t know, either. Maybe she picked it up on the internet.”

  I returned to the office and got to work. The phone rang and I was unexpectedly called out to trial the following morning on the Weegers case.

  The call to trial is an invitation I always RSVP with a yes. Mark Kane wouldn’t have it any other way, even though it generally consumes my every late-night hour in feverish trial preparation. There are only two ways a firm like ours makes money: trying cases and settling cases. Any continuance delays a case for months. That costs the firm time and money while the injury itself becomes stale. I’ve always believed a whiplash or back strain has a limited shelf life with a jury, regardless of how adroitly the Dr. Kokkers of the world can testify as to permanency, pain-producing residuals, and the like. So I announced the Weegers case ready over the phone.

  As soon as I hung up, I called Janis in. “Do me a big favor, will you?”

  “Bigger than Saturday night?”

  “Not that kind of favor. I need somebody to call Kokker. He’s not depped up for the Weegers case so I’m going to need his live testimony at the trial.”

  She sighed. “You know how much I don’t like talking to Hairless. Can’t you do it yourself?”

  It wasn’t like Janis to be insubordinate. My heart died within me when I thought a
bout Madeleine. Obviously Diaz hadn’t gotten around to telling her yet.

  “I don’t like talking to him, either. I have my own reasons.”

  “Is one of them that you’re living with his runaway wife?”

  Her remark took me aback, although I knew Janis had a preternatural ability to know all office gossip first. “If you must know, yes. Diane invited her. And she’s not his runaway wife, by the way. If Kokker thinks he’s rid of her, he’s mistaken. She told me only last night she thinks she still loves him.”

  “Lovely,” Janis sneered. For a split-second, the set of her jaw looked hard as any man’s. I thought to myself that she obviously wasn’t a woman who honored the sacrament of marriage.

  “What about you, Ricky?” She interrupted my thinking with a haughty, condescending tone—a gloating and perfidious gleam in her eye I found absolutely predatory.

  “What about me what?” I managed.

  “How do you go about honoring the sacrament of marriage?”

  Dumfounded, I stammered, “What in the—”

  “What, Ricky?” she taunted. “What in the hell? Or, for emphasis, what in the fuck? Which impotent expression pops into your transparent mind for the occasion? I’ve always preferred the F-word myself for a masculine exclamation of consternation—especially when said with just the right amount of chest-thumping bravado. Calculated to make all us little girlies swoon, while the air around us positively crackles with testosterone energy, don’t you think?”

  “Janis—”

  “You silly, self-deluded fool! I could have you inside me Saturday night or any other night I care to choose. I could do you right under little wifey-poo’s nose.”

  “Don’t call her that! Diaz did, and I almost called him out for it.”

  “I know,” she laughed with scorn, her cobra eyes never leaving mine, seeking out my reaction. “Where do you think he picked up on the expression? That man never had an original thought in his life. He and I often talk about your wife while we’re making love. He’s hot for her, you know. Fantasizes all the time about how he’d like to—what’s that word again? Oh, yes—how he’d like to fuck her.”

  “You lying bitch!”

  She mimicked astonishment. “Why, Ricky! Don’t tell me you haven’t suspected. The poor man’s been so lonely since his dear, dead Ellen was consigned to the ground. She lies there still, making her own gravy as the saying goes. John so wants to ‘put it to Diane’—his very words. I oblige him any way I can, but every time I take him to the brink of paradise, I know it’s Diane’s face he sees under him. Her mouth receiving him, moving and working on him. Her ass cheeks obediently parting—”

  Blame it on the Crankenstein. I must have charged her then; I don’t remember anything until the two of us fell sprawling onto my couch. My hands bound her wrists and stretched her arms over her head. It was like one of those dreams where an impossibly powerful adversary brushes off all your fight with amusement. I kept whispering shut up... shut up... shut up—livid yet still mindful of being overheard—while she only smiled and murmured back one fantasy after another, all so hurtful and so specific that I knew she had to be telling me the truth after all. John Diaz had designs on my wife.

  “Leave her to him,” she spoke into my ear. “The woman has no imagination beyond color schemes and menu planning. She’d make a perfect cop’s wife. You know in your heart it’s true. She’s no intellectual match for a man like you. You and I were meant for each other—we’re soul mates, the two of us. I feel as though I’ve known you all my life, ever since you were born. I know you feel that way, too.”

  She began gently moving her hips under me in undulating waves like a snake.

  “Give me the dagger, Ricky,” she said at last. “You know it’s me you’ve always wanted. I can see into your heart as though it were made of crystal. Give me the dagger and you can have me, do anything you want with me. I’ll be yours and yours alone. Every time will be like our first time together.”

  I peered into Janis’s sky-blue eyes, and saw my own silhouetted reflection there like a depraved stereopticon. It took all I had in me to break that clinch. I stood up and began straightening my clothes.

  “And what about my four kids?” I said, sickened by her arrogant smile and enraged that she still played me. “Am I supposed to walk out on them, too? I don’t have your damn dagger, and even if I did, Diane’s worth ten of you. No, I take that back. It’s an affront to Diane even mentioning you in the same sentence with her. You’re not in the same class.”

  “Are you so sure?” She wore an ironic, self-possessed expression while reclining on the couch—languid as Cleopatra.

  “You’re the one who’d make a good cop’s wife, not Diane,” I said, raising my voice. “So go on, get out of here, I’m busy. Go be a cop’s wife!”

  Diaz opened my office door and stared at me. “Problem?”

  Janis stood up, slinked to his side, slipped her arm around his waist, and let her hand fall to caress his wallet pocket as she steered him back out the door.

  “No problem at all, John,” she cooed. “Ricky wants to marry me off to the police department, that’s all. Interested?”

  His deep voice took on a tremolo of excitement. “That’s not a bad idea.”

  I focused on the retreating high-water cheeks of his ass and saw them out the door. Janis’s manicured hand seemed at ease riding there, but all I could see was my Diane’s hand in its place.

  Chapter Twenty

  I Found My Thrill on Vatican Hill

  I was not feeling like myself when I called Kokker, fearing that somehow even over the telephone he would pick up on what I’d been doing with Sandra. But if he did, Kokker gave no indication. He sounded pleasant and affable, readily agreeing to appear and testify on such short notice without a subpoena. With all the equanimity of a man who has shared his wife with many men and many women, he made no mention of Sandra other than to inquire politely after her welfare. Could we discuss the Weegers case? He hadn’t yet eaten. Wondered whether I had. Preferred to meet over lunch. How about Bullock’s?

  Bullock’s was the kind of steakhouse where they offer Sunday brunch and book a harp player to remind you what day it is. Even though it was centrally located in Belleville, Diane and I had never been there—except one anniversary—because the place was so pricey. Kokker probably had lunch there every day from the way the staff greeted him, bowing and scraping. We were ushered past linen-draped tables set with leaded crystal water glasses, thick napkins in monogrammed holders, and gleaming silver into a private room with a fireplace and a bay window, one that overlooked a vista of rolling lawn and a lake in the distance. It looked like another country: a long way from brown-bagging it. Kokker ordered the chateaubriand. I’d only heard it ordered in movies and wasn’t sure whether it was a steak or a drink. I told him I wasn’t hungry but wouldn’t mind a cup of espresso. Kokker seemed disappointed.

  “Never ignore the appetites,” he cautioned. “As a practicing physician, I’m acutely aware that in cases of internal derangement, the appetites are the first things to go.”

  I tried to steer the conversation to the Misty Weegers case, but Kokker wasn’t having any. “How’s my dear wife enjoying her fugue state?” he asked with an amused air. He eyed me over the single fresh-cut rose standing like a cautionary finger in the crystal bud vase between us.

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t be the one to tell you.”

  “Nonsense! Who better than you, Ricky? After all, you’ve been fucking her for years. Right under your loving wife’s Russian nose, too—with your four little Soviet Pioneers all snug in their beds. I’m odd man out in your little troika.”

  I looked out over the polo field of a lawn. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I was about to explain that Sandra should be the one to tell you that she seems deeply committed to her marriage now. I think you ought to bear that in mind before you start condemning her.”

  “Condemn her? Why, quite the contrary,
Ricky. Surely by now you realize that I’m hardly the jealous type. I’m gratified to find that you’re quite the same as I. As I explained to you during our afternoon meeting in my rathskeller, you and your lovely wife hold an open invitation to our soirees. Why, Lupercalia is just around the corner. I’m sure Diane would appreciate the diversion. The opportunity to hobnob with many of the movers and shakers in the greater Saint Louis area. The business and local governmental leaders. The judiciary.” Kokker arched an eyebrow.

  “Now when I call you to testify in the Weegers case—”

  “Hang the Weegers case!”

  “Doctor, that’s exactly what I’m afraid you’re likely to do, given the events of the past few days.” The waitress brought a cutting board laden with fresh-baked bread, whipped butter, and a huge serrated knife.