St. Agnes' Eve Read online

  “I think he was married at the time.”

  “Yeah, I guess she hadn’t gotten around to dying yet. Anyway, I don’t think he’d ever been on a waterbed before. I even had to ask him to turn over. Most of the stiffs would be laid flat on their backs with their legs spread wide and their dicks waving in the breeze before I ever walked into the room. With John, I remember I made a big deal out of admiring his thing, like it was this huge hothouse orchid he’d brought me to wear to the prom. He turned red as fire, but kept asking, you know, speaking his little entrapment piece. Finally, to get him to clam up and quit embarrassing both of us, I decided to make him a vague promise and charge him top dollar. I said something like, ‘Baby, slip me a hundred and I’ll give you the thrill of your life.’ Slam, bam, boom—I’m busted. Offer of sex for money. Moral turpitude. Forget about qualifying for a law license anywhere.”

  “So how did you and John get together?”

  Her expression darkened. “Who says we ever did? Oh, John was sweet and all, even offering to ‘lose’ my fingerprints and records so they wouldn’t go into any national law enforcement databases, but I couldn’t let him endanger his own career that way. To tell you the truth, when Kokker offered to get me this other position—the one with Mark Kane—I leaped at the opportunity. You don’t have to pass a criminal background check to work as a paralegal in this state. Plus, I think I’ve done okay at it.”

  “Sounds like Kokker did you a favor, then.”

  “Hairless never did anyone a favor without getting something in return.”

  “Such as?”

  Janis sighed as though she’d held in all her regrets for the past twenty years like spirits of the dead and was only now exorcising them.

  “Touch can corrupt. Touch can be morally corrosive, more so than any of the other four senses. I thought what I’d had to touch at the Salome Spa was corrupting enough, until Kokker had me touch something of his.”

  “What was it?”

  “Something to corrupt the blood,” she said. “A kind of antique dagger, a key missing piece of evidence in an old unsolved murder. Only he tricked me into touching it. Now my fingerprints are on it, hidden away somewhere in his mansion under lock and key.” She looked away toward the west, then turned to me, eyes imploring, and said, “There. Now you know my deepest and darkest secret: I’m innocent.”

  “But what does he want in exchange for not framing you?”

  “Kokker delights in capturing others’ secrets and keeping them just out of their reach. He loves making people go through private hell when they can’t get those damning secrets back. By now, he’s probably collected a veritable pervert’s museum of personal defilements, spilled blood, and wayward seed. He’s the hater of men’s souls.”

  “Come on, Janis,” I said. “He’s a chiropractor, not the devil.” But Janis didn’t seem too sure.

  I crystal-gazed into the deep blue of her eyes, now dark as midnight tide pools, and took both of her hands in mine, wanting to exorcise all the coarseness—all the fear men’s uses had instilled in her.

  “I’ll take a look around,” I said. “If the knife’s there, I’ll find it.”

  Janis hugged me so tightly I couldn’t breathe, let alone shrug, when she said, “You’d do that for me?”

  “I’d do anything for you, Janis. All you have to do is ask.”

  “I love you, Ricky. I think I’ve always loved you.” She laughed a sobbing, relieved kind of laugh and kissed me once again. There were no tears.

  “But what exactly am I looking for?”

  “You’ll know it when you hold it in your hand,” she said. “It’s a dagger, impossibly old, and encrusted with old blood. Human blood.”

  “I’ll try to find it, but don’t you think it would make it easier if maybe I knew where to look?”

  “Keep your third eye open, Ricky. Remember everything I’ve told you tonight. Write it on the insides of your eyelids, if you have to.” The phone chirped, making me start. It was Diane again.

  “Honey, what’s going on? What are you still doing at the office?”

  “Getting a few last-minute things squared away. I’m done now, though, just setting the security system.”

  “Do you know how to get hold of Janis?”

  At the sound of her name from Diane’s lips, the speed in my system made my heart jump and race like a lizard running for cover. “Why?”

  “Why? Because Madeleine may be stuck here after midnight now and I want to make sure I don’t do anything to worry her mother, that’s why. I need to let Janis know where her daughter is. Nobody answers her home or her cell phone. Mad thinks she may be working late, too. She isn’t there, is she?”

  “No,” I said. “Keep trying. I’ll be home soon.”

  “What’s up her twat?” Janis asked after Diane had hung up again.

  “Madeleine being out past midnight on a school night,” I said. “Diane wants to check with you about it, so you’d better turn on your cell phone and play innocent.”

  Janis’s eyes narrowed to lustful slits.

  “Fine by me,” she said, “as long as you’re the one who drives Mad back home tonight. Alone. With the dagger.”

  Chapter Eight

  Bitch Lips

  On my return home, I smelled fresh popcorn and heard female voices. I walked the gauntlet of Eastern Orthodox icons that lined the hallway off our foyer. St. Seraphim of Sarov, the Passion-Bearers Boris and Gleb, St. Sergius of Radonezh, St. Alexander Nevsky, and a host of others glared down at me, their dour Russian faces reproaching my every hidden and unconfessed sin. Their knowing eyes followed my uneasy progress toward the family room. Would I appear a guilt-ignited living torch to Diane’s all-seeing eyes? Down the hall, I heard Diane asking Madeleine something about her lipstick shade.

  It was hard to believe that at eighteen Madeleine Mezzanotte was the same studious adolescent who attended a private Catholic girls’ school. She had dressed herself for a burial. The Goth trappings could have passed for a Halloween costume. She was festooned with enough piercing hardware to set off the courthouse metal detector. Stainless steel studs glimmered from her nostrils and eyebrows. Threadlike hoops stitched her earlobes and glinted in the light, calling to mind the razor wire on top of the perimeter fences at a maximum security penitentiary. Not to mention a tongue spike, visible only when she laughed or stuck her tongue out, as she was doing now, flicking it out through blue-black lip gloss and evoking squeals from the girls every time they caught a glimpse of it. She had an unnerving habit of running it back and forth behind her teeth with her lips half-open, producing a dull rattling sound like dead men’s bones.

  Janis had told me about Samael, Mad’s pet snake, and his expensive diet of live, white mice. It was easy to picture Madeleine caressing the snake, even secreting him in her clothing or sharing her bed with him at night. I didn’t think I’d tell Diane about the snake or his appetites.

  A striking blond woman, poured into a high-necked gown beaded with points of starlight, sat with her back to me, facing Madeleine. “It looks like a dog’s lips, see?” Mad was saying. “It’s called Bitch Lips.” Mad had her fingernails lacquered a coppery brown. It was only when you looked closer that you saw designs that looked like cockroaches.

  “Why would you want to look like a female dog, Mad?” It was Diane’s voice coming from the blond woman. For a second or two, I feared the Crankenstein might be giving me hallucinations.

  “It’s how you can tell if a guy really likes you, because when he tries to kiss you, he’s kissing dog lips, see?”

  The blond woman flapped her wrist, touching manicured fingertips to her chest in a gesture of social incredulity that was pure Diane. In fact, I finally realized that it was Diane, her hair dyed Sandra Kokker-platinum blond and piled atop her head in a high-fashion coiffure.

  The girls spotted me hesitating in the archway door and came running. “Mommy looks like a movie star, and I saw her first,” Stacie cried.

  “Did
not! I saw her first. I was first one off the bus,” Teeta yelled.

  “Mad has a thing stuck in her tongue,” Wolf observed soberly.

  Diane turned to face me with the shy anticipation of a first date. There’s something about the deliberate incongruity of ash-blond hair over a brunette complexion that has always turned me on. Maybe it goes all the way back to the early sixties, when brunettes dyed blond were the forbidden fruit. My stepfather of the moment ran away with one. Don’t feel bad for my mother, though. She wasted no time finding another man to fill his shoes—one who didn’t mind beating her to a pulp every time he got drunk, whether she had it coming or not.

  “Do you like it?” Diane asked. She stood and twirled like a ballerina. Her hair had been swirled and wrapped into a turban, except for ringlets that spiraled down both temples like earrings. She wore an antique aigrette set off with blood-red rubies. I was amazed she’d taken it out of the velvet-lined case. It was one of her luckiest finds, purchased for a tiny fraction of its worth at an under-advertised estate sale. Tonight Diane was off the charts on the glam-o-meter.

  When I didn’t respond right away, she spoke to me again in a quietly reproving tone. “Your aura is red as fire, Ricky. What happened?”

  I shrugged. “Traffic.”

  She seemed to buy it.

  “Are you psychic, Mrs. Galeer?” Mad enthused. “Me too, I think. It’s like I’ve got the power, but I don’t know what to do with it. Could you maybe teach me?”

  “You mustn’t dwell on things like that, Mad,” Diane told her in a motherly tone. “The devil can come to us in a pleasing shape. He tempts us to invite him in. He appeals to our vanity when he offers us the prospect of possessing supernatural powers. It’s all vanity because it serves no useful purpose; no good can ever come of it. These powers are not a gift from God. They’re more of a Pandora’s box from the Evil One.” I could tell the Sunday school lesson was being wasted on Madeleine.

  The Crankenstein had shifted me into hyper drive. There were worms crawling around under my eyelids. I had the sudden urge to move furniture around and vacuum the entire house—a feverish early spring cleaning before dinner.

  “Sit down, Ricky. You’re making me nervous,” Diane said, watching me. I must have seemed a macarena of tics and starts by then. I thought to sit down on the couch beside Madeleine, but as soon as I took a step, Vlad rubbed up against my pant leg, smoothing his grizzled whiskers. I tried taking another step, and he did it again. It was his “feed me” signal.

  “You better watch out, Mr. Galeer,” Mad singsonged. “A black cat just crossed your path. Tonight’s an occult holiday, too.”

  Preoccupied with the state of the cat’s digestion, Diane seemed not to have heard her. “Vlad, you pig,” she cooed, “you just ate.” But soon Vlad’s stares got to be too much for her. “I give up,” she said. “Keep Mad company for me, hon. I’ll only be a second.” She hurried into the kitchen. Vlad sprang to attention a moment later, galvanized by the electric whine of the can opener.

  I glanced at the titles of the stack of textbooks that separated Madeleine from me on the couch. English literature, computers, and religion studies dominated. “What did you mean just now about an ‘occult holiday’?”

  Mad grabbed the top book off the pile and thumbed through it until she found the section she wanted. “The Eve of St. Agnes,” she said. “A pure-hearted maiden who stays up late saying her prayers tonight will be rewarded with a vision of her future husband. Better than computer dating, huh? She’s gotta be a virgin, though.”

  “You believe that stuff, Mad?”

  “What’s the matter? You don’t think I qualify?”

  “I never said that.”

  She did the saber-rattling thing against her front teeth again. “Don’t worry, Mr. Galeer. The weeping mother of the bride won’t get screwed out of seeing her darling daughter dump off a bunch of roses at the feet of the Virgin Mary when the big day arrives at last. I’m still pure, in case anybody’s interested. It’s, like, ‘duh rigueur’ for us good little ‘Cat Lick’ girls. Bizarre and primitive custom, though, don’t you think?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you kidding me? The thing with the roses. The blushing bride standing up in front of everybody at church and announcing, ‘Check me out, dudes, I saved it for marriage. Cherry nolo busto. You could play a snare drum solo on this here hymen.’”

  I started to get a little nervous right then about Madeleine watching our kids, but we were already late for dinner. Diane was still attending to the cat’s appetite. I tried one more question. “What else does Saint Agnes’ Eve mean, Mad? You weren’t talking about any romantic poem a moment ago when you mentioned the occult.”

  “You run across a lot of different things online, that’s all. Assholes pitching their weird ideas.”

  “Example?”

  “Well, for instance, you take grave dirt of an unbaptized dead baby—”

  Diane rushed into the room, shaking anxiety from her hands. I helped her on with her coat, wanting to call the whole evening off—make some excuse to get Mad out of the house and drive her over to Janis’s. But I knew Diane was excited to go. She would probably never forgive me if we cancelled, and would no doubt refuse to believe my explanation of being apprehensive about the babysitter. So we descended the porch steps leading from the back door to the driveway. The raccoons had tipped over one of the garbage cans, strewing trash all around.

  “Poor babies,” Diane cooed. “They must be hungry.”

  “You’re too good to be true, darling,” I said. But back we went into the kitchen. Diane bent at the waist to pick up Vlad’s leftovers for the raccoons. When she tried to straighten up, she winced and grabbed the edge of the sink. I saw the muscles in her jaw clench. The paper plate dropped from her hand and splattered liver-and-entrails-side-down onto the tile floor.

  “Hon, what’s wrong?”

  “Back caught,” she whispered, breathless from the pain.

  “Come and lie down,” I said. “We’re staying home.”

  “I’m all right, Ricky. Give me a few seconds, okay? I pulled a muscle the other day helping them move that big wardrobe—you know, the one Sandra bought.”

  “Darling, why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you. It’s really nothing.”

  I wanted to believe her. She winced once more getting into the car, and yet again when she tried to extend her legs in front of her. She spent the rest of the trip with her feet drawn up as far as possible and her lower back twisted to one side—smiling tightly and denying any pain whenever I asked.

  I couldn’t help thinking that, with Diane red-shirted, it was time to try out some fresh talent on the mound.

  Chapter Nine

  The Taste of Sandra

  It took about forty minutes to get there in light evening traffic. I found the front gate to Kokker’s estate open this time. We peered through the blow-by oil film on the windshield—the legacy of the smoking manifold—as the car meandered down the stately wooded lane. Glancing to my right through the moonlit leafless grove, I thought I caught the outline of a circular structure angled like the real Stonehenge. Probably a rock garden grotto commissioned by someone with more money than brains.

  Fifty thousand dollars doesn’t go as far as it used to. Despite Diane’s talk of being in the clear now, our debt had swallowed Sandra’s money up like a black hole. Setting aside enough to cover income and sales taxes, we’d paid off the note cosigned by Diane’s parents and cleaned up a few department store charge cards. That put Diane’s business in the black—barely—but didn’t leave enough to pay down any of the five major credit cards. There hadn’t been enough left for a down payment on another car, either, and our bad credit made affordable financing hard to come by.

  I know it’s vulgar to talk about money, but Kokker obviously had it and didn’t mind spending it. The house, luminous in the cold white floodlights, looked like something you only
see in movies.

  I opened the passenger door for Diane. She took my hand and stepped from the car with the fluid grace of a woman born to this life. All pain seemed to have fled away. The unnatural glow of the floodlights reflected across the snowy ground and caught the azure of her eyes as she gazed up at the house and breathed in the January air. She looked like the lady of the manor returning home after the Grand Tour.

  There was no sign of the slick black stain my engine had dripped onto the white flagstone courtyard during my last visit. Kokker must have sent the servants out with some oil-soaker. We stood under the halogen lights of the portico while I rang the bell. Diane shivered with excitement. The immense double doors—enclosed under a single keystone arch that reminded me of a castle—flung open almost immediately, and Sandra appeared wearing a little black cocktail dress. “Hieeee!” she screamed with all the reserve of a quiz-show contestant who’d just won the car.