St. Agnes' Eve

  ST. AGNES’ EVE

  A novel by Malachi Stone

  © 2012 by Malachi Stone

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission of the author.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Snuff Film Noir

  Entertained by the Dead

  Big Artie

  Dagger of the Mind

  La Belle Dame Sans Souci

  Civil Blood

  What the Cleaning Woman Saw

  Bitch Lips

  The Taste of Sandra

  Mizzourah Hoodoo

  Skank’s Night Out

  Casual Friday

  Urine the Money

  Showboy

  The Big O

  The Flip Side of Atlantis

  Slouching Toward Belleville

  Ricky Sucks the Big One

  Pantsing in the Moonlight

  I Found My Thrill on Vatican Hill

  All We Have to Sell

  Stark Staring Mad

  The Wet Spot

  The Sound of One Hand Slapping

  The Kokker Maneuver

  Lupercalifragilistic-

  expialidoshus

  Mineral Oil with Macanudo

  Desecration Day

  The Lilith Sabbat

  ST. AGNES’ EVE

  "St Agnes! Ah, it is St Agnes' Eve –

  Yet men will murder upon holy days.”

  John Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes

  Chapter One

  Snuff Film Noir

  I’ll do anything for money. Maybe it’s the wife and four kids, or the two mistresses. But mostly it’s the drugs.

  Doctor Kirk Kokker used to be a pretty good chiropractor, to give the devil his due. That was more or less what I’d told the legions of personal injury clients I’d steered his way over the past twenty years for kickbacks and Kokker’s perjured testimony. I drove west on Route 40 out of the Metro East and toward Town and Country to pay the doctor a house call. With every passing mile, the realization that I would never be able to afford to live in Kokker’s neighborhood grew. We’d both sold our souls for money, but Kokker had gotten a better deal. The sin of envy was on me like a plague of scabs.

  Due west of Saint Louis, at the end of the rainbow, lies Town and Country, one of the most exclusive and moneyed suburbs in the greater metropolitan area, for people who care about such things. Stuck in the late afternoon stop-and-go traffic watching the sun go down, I tried convincing myself I wasn’t one of them. The winding columns of brake lights winked on and off like lanterns lighting weary pilgrims’ way to some hellish shrine.

  My car’s odometer was working on its repeat hundred thousand, well into its fifth circumnavigation of the globe. Even before I parked it on Kokker’s white flagstone courtyard, I knew it would drip oil. The engine smoked from under the hood like a barbecue grill. Head gaskets shot, or maybe the main seal on the engine, but luckily for me it still ran. My insurance carrier called it a pleasure car. My money went for other pleasures.

  The house, I was relieved to discover, proved well worth the drive. It was an imposing Tudor with garden and grounds immaculately manicured, right down to the cuticles on the fingers and toes of the nude statuary. I searched my memory for a comparison. Finally I flashed on it: the Playboy Mansion West, lifted from the slick pages of the magazine and dropped on suburban Missouri like Dorothy’s house on Oz, only with no witch to squash under it. A bronze female nude gazed down at me from the circular fountain like an unsmiling centerfold.

  “Attorney Ricky Galeer to see Dr. Kokker,” I told the poker-faced black housekeeper who answered the door and beckoned me into the foyer.

  Doctor Kokker himself sprang out of nowhere, beaming and smiling. For as long as I’d known him, Kokker had been completely bald. When we first met, he’d reminded me of a young Peter Lorre, in that movie where he’s a mad doctor reattaching lopped-off hands. Janis called Kokker “Hairless Krishna” behind his back. Remarks like that probably gave her something to talk about in confession.

  Half in earnest and half in jest, I’d offered to let paralegal Janis Mezzanotte come along and take notes or carry my briefcase after my esteemed senior partner and employer Mark Kane had volunteered me for today’s house call. She’d looked at me like I was nuts. I knew she couldn’t stand Kokker. Mark Kane picked up on it, too.

  “Kirk’s a nice guy,” he’d said to her. I waited for him to add that Kirk was a pretty good chiropractor. Mark Kane calling somebody a nice guy was all it took to set off an early warning signal in anybody who knew him as well as I did. And after twenty years I barely knew him at all. Of course, like everybody else I knew his TV ads from pro wrestling, Jerry Springer, and Saturday night line dancing programs—In Pain? Call Kane! Dial 1-800-OMYBACK or visit us online at kaneinyourcorner.com.

  But Janis had begged off—something about skip-tracing defendants. She logged back onto her computer and went to work. Janis Mezzanotte was a witch at the computer, if you can call somebody a witch who dressed like a nun in Vatican Two street clothes and probably went to Mass every morning before the office. And yet Janis could work black magic on a computer. A mouse beneath her long fingers was like a planchette on a Ouija board.

  Only two items personalized Janis’s workstation: an Oscar-sized statue of what looked like a stylized Black Madonna and a framed studio portrait of her eighteen-year-old daughter, Madeleine, a willowy raven-haired wild thing, the image of her mother.

  “Good afternoon and welcome!” Kokker’s chiropractor handshake, a legacy from his years of literally wringing the money out of his patients, captured my right in both of his and held it there. His very name spoken aloud made a sound like dislocation of the spine. I couldn’t utter his name without visualizing him with a reflex hammer playing a marimba rhythm on somebody’s backbone.

  One thing I’d learned over twenty years of practice was how distressingly unprofitable a house call could be for a lawyer. Hospital calls were the same way. Something about house and hospital calls always seemed a jinx to me, in a hundred different ways. Either the client is a pain in the ass, or crazy, or turns out to have oversold the injury to us, or he ends up jumping to one of our myriad competitors, or there’s no insurance, or there is insurance but the adjuster cashes out before our lien letter hits the mail slot. Maybe there was some cosmic law against visiting the sick or injured with money on your mind. Mark Kane would blame me regardless of what went wrong, and he was beginning to have me agreeing with him, even though I needed the next paycheck like the next breath of air.

  “You have a beautiful home, Dr. Kokker.” I felt like a lawyer in a soap opera. He slipped his handclasp from mine almost regretfully, then beckoned me into what looked like old Hollywood’s version of a baronial hall. Medieval coats of arms festooned the broad beams spanning the cathedral ceiling. The room practically swallowed up an oak banquet table big enough to seat the Saint Louis Rams comfortably even without the drop leaf.

  The heraldic designs were there merely for decoration. Kokker’s mother had bankrolled his chiropractic education running a saloon that took in most of its money on the second floor. By the time Tricky Dick was starting his first term, she had branched out into a string of protected massage parlors all over the Metro East.

  “I thought we might be more comfortable in cozier surroundings,” Kokker said. “Let me show you to my rathskellar.” I followed his Jack Benny sashay. Not a word yet about why the house call. Maybe the housekeeper had big ears.

  “Hephzibah’s been with us for years,” Kokker volunteered, as though he had read my mind. “She’s from Haiti originally, you know. Ah,
here we are.” We stood at the head of a wide, red-carpeted stairway descending into darkness. Kokker bounded down the stairs two at a time without flipping on any light. I followed, hoping his homeowner’s policy was paid up in case I missed a step.

  “Sandra and I call this our ‘rumpus room,’” Kokker said. We had reached what looked like a dungeon door. He opened it, then clapped his hands. Indirect lighting came alive in the expansive subterranean level of the home.

  Kokker’s rumpus room was bigger than my whole house and a hell of a lot nicer. An enormous carpeted crater of a conversation pit formed the room’s vortex. Plush rouge velvet sectionals curved around its circumference like the ruby iris of a predatory eye. A huge, natural gas open hearth ignited at its center. A plasma TV, about the width and breadth of a highway billboard, loomed above the pit in seeming levitation. I counted six semi-private alcoves, each furnished with its own Hef-sized round waterbed made up with a matching red silk cover embroidered with black designs that I couldn’t make out in the soft light. One thing was obvious: they were designed for making out. The Kokkers had selected a Count Dracula color scheme for their rumpus room. As far as the wandering eye could see, whatever wasn’t red was black.

  Kokker motioned for me to sit next to him on one of the sectionals.

  “Mark tells me you had some urgent questions needing answers, Doctor,” I began. It was always Mark outside the office. But Kokker waved the statement away. Too soon to discuss business. Instead, he reached for a ponderous photo album lying on the crystal coffee table two feet away from my shins. Then he sat so close our thighs almost touched. It was then I noticed something else on the coffee table: a Waterford candy bowl three-quarters filled with packaged rubbers of all sizes, textures, and flavors, every color of the rainbow.

  “You know, I felt rather self-castigatory when I realized that in all the years of our professional acquaintance, Ricky, I have shamefully neglected to invite you and your lovely wife—Diane, isn’t it?—as evening guests in our home. What an unpardonable oversight! I hope you’ll permit me to rectify my insensitivity in that regard by allowing me the pleasure of extending a heartfelt dinner invitation to both of you. How does the twentieth sound, around . . . eightish?”

  Why did every conversation with Kokker leave me feeling that my job hung in the balance? Maybe because it did. To Mark Kane, P.C., the Kokker connection represented a patient-referral jackpot, his chain of quack clinics a Xerox machine of lucrative and fraudulent personal injury insurance settlements.

  “I’ll see whether I can clear that date with Diane,” I said, trying like hell to sound sincere, secretly relieved that nobody had me on a voice-stress analyzer. “She’s very busy these days with her new antique business.”

  “Now, there’s something I never encountered before. New antiques.” Kokker had made a funny. I obliged him by laughing.

  “No, really,” he went on. “Sandra is fascinated by antiques of all kinds. After all, she married me, didn’t she?” Another obligatory laugh. “To all appearances a confirmed bachelor at my age back then, I’m sure everyone had given me up for gay.”

  I stopped laughing.

  “Did Mark happen to mention to you I’m quite the amateur shutterbug?” Kokker said. I raised my eyebrows and smiled, trying to summon up some interest. “Oh, yes. I deplore digital—I can’t tell a pixel from a jpeg to save my soul. Traditional photography is still the best. I have my own professionally equipped darkroom and develop all my own pictures right here at home. Would you care to view some of my work?”

  I thought I’d rather hear what was so damned important for me to be making a house call but nodded eagerly. Kokker and I would be just like a couple of schoolgirls leafing through our class yearbook. He rested the huge album—which seemed about the size of a Gutenberg Bible—on our laps and threw open its red calfskin cover with a flourish. I heard rapids of blood rushing in my ears.

  “All pretense and condescension generally vanish whenever one of our new guests feasts his or her eyes on this one,” Kokker said with what sounded like malicious pride. I was staring at a full-page, portrait-quality head shot of Sandra performing fellatio. It was an icebreaker, all right. Kokker said, “Rather arrests the viewer’s attention, wouldn’t you say so, Ricky?”

  I made a conscious effort to close the gaping hole my mouth had become. What would Dr. Freud have made of that?

  Sandra and I had never been formally introduced. She’d been working as Kokker’s chiropractic assistant back when he’d married her at nineteen. That would put her at about thirty-eight now. For the last five of those years I’d been fucking her.

  I blamed it on her necklace. Waiting to start a deposition at Kokker’s main clinic, I saw her standing behind the bulletproof glass of the receptionist’s station. She wore a heavy black onyx pendant in the shape of an infinity symbol. How it dangled from its gold chain, drawing the wayward eye toward the furrow between her augmented breasts. Sandra leaned forward to take a call. The pendant flipped over, revealing the letters CS on the back, traced in tiny rubies. Or maybe they were garnets. I hadn’t brought along my jewelsmith’s loupe, but it wasn’t the kind of pendant you could pick up in the jewelry department at Wal-Mart.

  I kept asking her what the letters meant. Chiropractic Sandra? Captivating Sandra? Cunning Sandra? Making an ass out of myself in front of the court reporter and the opposing attorneys. Finally, she smirked, little-girl cutesy-poo. “No, no, and no,” was all she said, the first words she had ever spoken to me, leaving the rest of it to my imagination. I should have left well enough alone.

  Kokker had said something I’d missed. I said, “Sorry?”

  “I asked whether you’ve finished studying that page.”

  I nodded mutely.

  He flipped to the next page. Sandra again in the foreground, totally nude outside a St. Louis-area supermarket, pushing a shopping cart. Whatever Kokker had been going for, he’d achieved a kind of heartland Helmut Newton style.

  “Interesting logistical note, Ricky: Sandra wore a trench coat and nothing else, then whipped it off at an opportune moment in the loading zone while yours truly snapped the picture from behind the wheel.” Kokker beamed, watching my expression.

  “Looks like it was cold out that night,” was all I could come up with.

  “Have you ever given any consideration to photographing Diane nude, Ricky?”

  I had clapped cuckold’s horns on Kokker’s chrome dome more times than I could remember, and yet the idea of the two of us comparing nudie pics of our wives pissed me off.

  “Not a chance, Doctor. Diane is so busy with our four kids, not to mention her new business, that we don’t have too much time for games, adult or otherwise.”

  Kokker looked at me like I’d told him I was dying of cancer. “Oh, but you must make time, Ricky. It’s critically important that the two of you set aside time for adult play. Variety, fantasy, unusual practices, unfamiliar partners—these are the elements that make up a successful marriage.”

  I felt funny talking marriage, what with the album of dirty pictures weighing down on my lap.

  “Perhaps you prefer video images, Ricky? High definition? Surround sound?” Barely raising his voice, and seemingly apropos of nothing, he said, “Naked.”

  The TV spontaneously turned itself on. The rathskellar lights came down to an ocher gloom, the color of a dying hearth. We caught the closing credits of the Flintstones, the happy little chorus really selling it, singing of a gay old time. Kokker half-turned to me, chortling, “Do you think Fred will ever get that infernal cat to stay out for the night, Ricky?” He kept smiling at me for an uncomfortable interval, waiting for an answer. I struggled for one.

  “I guess not,” I said. The brilliant legal mind at work.

  “Cats are like women, Ricky.” Kokker continued to stare at me. I nodded sagely. “For instance, if you bring a stray cat—or a stray woman—into your house, why before you can say Jack Robinson she insinuates herself into the midst of th
ings and becomes part of the family. Then when the time comes to put her out, you find it’s well nigh impossible to do so. Don’t you agree?”

  “That a cat is like a woman, or that it’s hard to put her out of the house?”

  “A careful and judicious answer, Ricky. I should have expected no less,” Kokker said. “You know, cats were killers before they were ever pets, and they’ve been pets since ancient Egypt. There’s something wild in every cat—wild and untamable, older than history, lurking there all along, hidden, awaiting its chance. Did you know, the literal meaning of the word ‘occult’ is hidden? From time immemorial, cats have always belonged to the dark side.”

  “I like dogs myself.”