St. Agnes' Eve

by Malachi Stone

  Celestal and Misty. I peered over the cop’s shoulder and past the sunken green marble tub. Kokker’s prize obsidian dildo lay in pieces beside a chalk outline that, going by body type, could have been Celestal’s less-than-final resting place.

  “Heads up, bub,” one morgue attendant said. I stepped aside to let them trundle the gurney past me out the bathroom door. Something—call it drunkard’s intuition—told me Celestal had greased his last zerk.

  “I was told Mrs. Kokker might be bathing,” I said. “I need to speak with her.”

  “I need a million dollars, tax-free,” the cop observed. “I guess a second ID of the body couldn’t hurt, though. Step in here and tell me if you recognize the lady of the house.”

  Sandra’s face, leering from strangulation, floated just below the surface of the bathwater. Her mammoth breasts broke through the bubble-bath flume like twin volcanic islands in some South Pacific paradise. Her piddies had been in the water too long, fingers and toes gone pruny.

  “That’s Mrs. Kokker,” I said. “How did it happen?”

  “Perp must have been some kind of sick weirdo,” the cop elucidated. “Set off three silent alarms getting into the house. Rent-a-cop found him standing over the body, ordered him to freeze, but the goofy nut grabs this big stone dick and wields it like a bludgeon. Saying some crazy shit like, ‘She killed my daddy.’ Refused a direct order to drop his weapon, so the kiddie cop discharged his right through the suspect’s ay-orta. Looks like a righteous kill to us.”

  I stood over the body and crossed myself, feeling like I was in the way. The lady of the house’s bedroom was stage left. When the cop wandered off, I slipped in and had a quick look around.

  Sandra’s suitcase stood just inside the walk-in closet, probably right where she’d left it. I grabbed the suede handle, turned, and carried it out past the crime scene as though nothing was amiss. For all the attention anyone paid me, I could have carted off the silver, then made a second trip for the good china.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Mineral Oil with Macanudo

  I threw Sandra’s suitcase into my trunk and took off. Let Kane handle it from here. The cops would never ask him to show them his Missouri bar card. They’d be as impressed as everybody else by the privilege of talking to a TV commercial celebrity like Mark Kane—the Cal Worthington of the legal profession.

  I parked a few car-lengths down from the gates of the Kokker estate with the engine running and waited until the second coroner’s wagon arrived and then departed with its grisly passenger. I followed it at a respectful distance all the way to the county morgue in Clayton. Plenty of free parking so late at night; all the Pucci and Gucci upscale boutiques had closed down hours ago. I sat in my car deciding what to do until the first pink shot of dawn began to glow over the Metro east beyond the river.

  I didn’t really believe Janis’s threats about the children. In particular, her claim that Liz might be willing to assist her didn’t wash. If I called the house now, I’d only wake and terrify the kids by my absence. I couldn’t call and ask anyone to check on them, either, without arousing suspicion that I’d negligently left them alone in the first place. And if Janis was telling the truth, there was nothing to do but return the talisman and save them.

  There’s never any security in hospital operating rooms. A guy could charge into an OR and spray silly string into an appendectomy before anyone would have the presence of mind to stop him. Morgues are no different. No one at the desk, the door at the far end of an official-looking corridor left propped open. Nothing worth stealing here, bub. Move along.

  Under Illinois law a corpse is property of the next-of-kin but has no intrinsic monetary value. So try suing a funeral home for damages if they happen to lose Aunt Tillie’s mortal remains. I hadn’t had occasion to research Missouri law on that point but assumed it was the same. For all the care that had been taken to keep me out, I might as well have wandered into a public rest room at the bus terminal.

  The female attendant already had Sandra laid out on a gleaming stainless-steel autopsy table without so much as the covering of a winding sheet. Sandra looked yellow under the harsh halogen light overhead, even though after being fished out of the tub she wore more makeup than the attendant, whose picture ID badge pinned to her white lab smock read Medical Examiner.

  “Friend of the bride or friend of the groom?” she asked.

  I reached for Diaz’s wallet and flipped his badge at her without speaking. She barely glanced at it, but asked, “Why’s Illinois interested?”

  “Perp’s an Illinois resident,” I said. “We’re checking out a conspiracy angle. It’s probably nothing.”

  “Any questions, then?” She stood there amused, a museum docent looking for a show of hands.

  I shifted uneasily on my feet before asking her the one that had been harrowing me for weeks. “Well, like for instance, can you tell us whether or not she was pregnant at the time of her death?”

  “Think this was an abortion the hard way, maybe?” Her sense of humor was already beginning to grate on me, but I affected a cop’s hard exterior and nodded.

  The medical examiner snapped on a pair of latex gloves from a roll in a wall dispenser. She pulled a black penlight from her lab coat pocket and stuck it in her mouth, shifting it around in there like a Macanudo while she used both hands to spread Sandra’s vulvar folds more brusquely than the most insensitive of gynecologists.

  “C’mere and look at this,” she exclaimed. “She’s got a clit like Kilroy’s schnozz. I should have such a clit.” I cleared my throat with embarrassment.

  “Where was I when these were being handed out? Or my girlfriend, for that matter?” At last, seeming annoyed, she stood and impatiently searched a tray of instruments on the counter.

  “I need a duckbill speculum for this job,” she muttered. Finding something that resembled a set of salad tongs on steroids, she plunged it into Sandra with a gusto that made me cringe, reminding me of a thousand old jokes about the whore who died with a smile on her face. None of them seemed all that funny anymore.

  She made clucking noises with her tongue. “This gal’s been used and abused,” she said. The penlight clenched in her teeth made her sound like Edward G. Robinson. Finally she peeled off the gloves and stood erect.

  “What’d you say your name was? Garcia?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Her smile widened, baring a couple of dry teeth. “Well, Diaz, you can tell your cop buddy to get off his Catholic guilt trip and quit worrying. This gal’s no more pregnant than you are.”

  The news astounded me. I couldn’t think of another fake question to keep the charade going. My mouth must have been hanging open when she reached for a bottle of mineral oil and asked me, “Wanna little goodbye ride before you hit that lonesome trail, cowboy?”

  I was already edging toward the door, badge in pocket. “N-no.”

  “C’mon. She’s all clean and pretty for you. Though I’ll bet you a month’s salary you can’t make her moan.”

  Her laughter, hard and threatening as surgical steel, pursued me down the wide, darkened corridor. My silhouette reflected off the high-gloss tile floor and lengthened ahead of me like an accusing specter.

  I sped toward the brightening dawn like Dracula was on my ass. By the time I passed the city, all the morning rush-hour traffic was headed the other way. The house seemed quiet and dark. When I tried the side door, it was unlocked.

  I raced upstairs. Checked one bedroom, then the other.

  All the beds were empty.

  I ran through the whole house, frantically calling out their names like the idiot I was. The entire place had been torn apart as if by vandals—every drawer’s contents dumped and rifled, every closet ransacked. Finally I wound up in Diane’s workroom. The computer was on, screen-saver eye rolling. I hit one key and read the one-sentence message Liz and her crew had left there for me on the word processor:

  Give her what she asks, or four little kittens wil
l lose their mittens.

  It took a few moments for the intended meaning to sink in. That Liz could be capable of cutting off my babies’ hands if the talisman were not returned to Janis filled me with horror. I don’t even remember retrieving Sandra’s designer suitcase and schlepping it up to our bedroom. When a hairpin didn’t work fast enough on the locks I tried an eighteen-inch screwdriver, jamming it behind the mechanism and tearing the expensive leather. I popped out first one then the other latch and folded the suitcase open.

  There was something undeniably prurient about fingering a dead woman’s silky underthings in the privacy of my marital bedroom. I paused to check the size of the first lacy brassiere I encountered—thirty-eight triple D—before digging deeper. In a zippered makeup case buried in designer-label dresses I found what everybody had been searching for.

  I threw myself on the bed and wept for the terror and pain I’d caused my children, for the loss of my darling Diane, and for the death of Sandra. Why had she deceived me? Had I been no more than a pawn in her game of trying to make Kokker jealous enough to abandon his divorce plans? Now Kokker had saved himself a cool million or more and made my wife his whore in the bargain.

  I called the mansion. A female voice answered.

  “Attorney Ricky Galeer to speak to Dr. Kokker,” I said in a tone I reserved for the office, even though it was well before office hours.

  “Hi, Mr. Galeer. It’s me. Madeleine. How’s it going?”

  “Madeleine? Is your mother there? Put her on, please.”

  “That’s all I ever do,” Mad said. “Put that sleaze on.”

  “C’mon, Mad, let me speak to her now. It’s an emergency.”

  “Sorry I can’t accommodate you, Mr. Galeer. They’re both in bed, her and Baldy the Slick, with a Do Not Disturb sign hung on the door. It’s sick. A girl my age needs some positive adult role models, you know?”

  “Then let me talk to my wife.”

  “Same answer. Same bed. Only now she’s shaved off, as bald as he is. Your wife must have gotten weird on you or something, Mr. Galeer. My mother’ll do that to a person—”

  “Ricky? I heard the phone. Is that you?” Janis’s voice, with an edge of urgency just below the surface.

  “Hi, Sleaze. Finally coming up for air?”

  “Hang up, Madeleine. Right now.”

  The signal got stronger. Janis said, “She’s off. Have you the article we discussed?”

  “Not on me, but I can get it. Did you have to tear up my place while you were kidnapping my kids?”

  Janis didn’t trust phones. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We must have a bad connection. Can you hear me now?”

  “I hear you. We have no connection at all, but I hear you.”

  “Fine. Then bring the article in question to the place where you and I last met. Do it tonight, before midnight.”

  “There are some conditions that have to be agreed to first.”

  “Is this where I’m supposed to say, ‘you’re in no position to bargain?’”

  “Let me ask you something, Janis. You and Kokker never saw eye to eye. Why are you two working together now? Madeleine says you’re even sleeping together. And what’s Madeleine doing there anyway? The police would be real interested if they knew she’s still alive and well.”

  “She’s not at all well,” Janis said. “Madeleine is a very traumatized young woman. Traumatized by the uses of men. Kirk feels she may benefit from hypnotherapy and a holistic health approach best administered on an inpatient basis.”

  “Does that include the Kokker maneuver?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “How long do these holistic treatments last? About twenty minutes apiece?”

  A pause. “Why don’t you ask your wife?” Then she added, before hanging up, “Tonight. Before midnight. It’s not nice to keep Demon Mother waiting.”

  Not even seven A.M. yet. I could have used some of Artie’s quick energy crystals about now. For lack of imagination, I left for the office after slipping the dagger and scabbard into my jacket. The talisman hung over my heart while I drove. How many lives had it taken, every twenty years since time immemorial?

  I kept my overcoat on after disarming the security system at the office. Sandra’s last will and testament file was lying on a secretary’s desk, buried in a stack of new files to be opened. A memo cross-referenced it to another file involving a contract matter. A photocopy was inside the manila folder, but not the original will.

  Belying the millions in Sandra’s estate, the will was simple indeed—only one page in length including the witness’ affidavit. Kane himself had witnessed, and Benoit, whom Sandra late in life had taken to calling “Ben Wa balls.” It had been executed that day in the office when Kane had called her in before he made his million-dollar pitch to me.

  The will was simple because it named a sole beneficiary: Celestal Weegers. No after-born children were disinherited; there was no in terroram clause. It looked like something out of a do-it-yourself kit. Why had no one feared this particular will might be vulnerable to challenge by Kokker as Sandra’s surviving spouse? Kokker could easily have renounced the will and claimed his nonbarrable share, but then he would receive only one-third of the considerable estate, all of which had been set up in Sandra’s name for tax purposes. Given the dizzying sums involved, he would certainly have contested the will in a gamble to re-acquire the remaining two-thirds. If the will were set aside and the estate rendered intestate, Kokker would have been able to claim it all. And why were there only two witnesses, when as a precaution our office and Benoit’s insisted on three, because some states required that many to prove a will?

  It was radiant malpractice, in my opinion, to draw such a rinky-dink will for a woman of Sandra’s wealth. Unless the person doing the drafting never intended the will to be probated at all and somehow knew it never would be.

  I searched for the cross-indexed contracts file and found it next one down in the stack. Inside was a photocopy of a prenup agreement signed by the same two witnesses but dated one week before Kokker’s wedding day. It limited Sandra to one million dollars regardless of the fault of the parties should a divorce occur, payable to a trustee to be designated in that event by her attorney, Duane Benoit. A separate photocopied document contained a recital by Benoit that he had thoroughly reviewed the agreement with his client, Sandra, that Kokker had made a full and detailed disclosure of his “then assets,” and that Sandra, “being fully advised,” had chosen to enter into the prenup agreement “as her free and voluntary act.”

  Somebody who didn’t like taking any chances was taking extremely good legal care of Doctor Kirk Kokker’s interests vis-à-vis his late wife’s.

  Duane Benoit was the most cautious guy I knew. There was only one problem: Sandra had never met Benoit before this year.

  Cautious guys come to the office early. The light was on, door open in Benoit’s modest suite. No receptionist was in yet. I stood in the waiting room and called out, “You guys do wills?”

  Benoit appeared almost at once in shirtsleeves and suspenders, wearing half-lens wire rims and an old-fashioned banker’s green eyeshade. I felt like telling him the Belleville sesquicentennial was long over. He smiled a greeting as he crossed toward me, then stopped short when he got close enough to read the labels on the two files I was holding in my hand.

  “Another happy customer,” I remarked. Something about his facial expression told me he knew what I meant, that Sandra was dead and Euripides sage as ever. But he said nothing. Like lawyers who’d attended the same seminar on listening skills, we each gave the other one-hundred-twenty seconds of silent attention. He lost the stare-down but bounced back chipper and banal.

  “What brings you here so bright and early, Ricky? Turning over a new leaf?”

  “Kirk Kokker didn’t have a prenup. I found that out last month when I made a house call to his mansion. In fact, his face went white when I mentioned it to him.”

  “He actually say anything to
you about that, or did you just read it in his white face?”

  “You a Freemason, Duane?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Because I think you may have been doing a little time-traveling. Sandra Kokker never met you until last month, yet you advised her and signed off on her prenup way back in 1988.”

  “She must have forgotten. Your boss will back me up, and it’s her word against his and mine.”