Blood of Lilith

By Malachi Stone

Lawyers, drugs, sex and murder: a meth addict attorney caught up in multiple drug-fueled extramarital love affairs finds himself caught up in a series of grisly mutilation killings. Ask yourself: how well do you really know your wife or your co-workers?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Malachi Stone
• Release date: Jan 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215064351

Malachi Stone

Marlon Brando on Larry King Live quoted an unknown Louisiana woman who said, "Anybody who shows his face in public is an ass." (1) Mindful of those wise words, I created the pseudonym Malachi Stone to author my novels and short stories because, as a practicing attorney in a conservative community, my natural inclination was and still is to avoid notoriety and controversy wherever and whenever possible. That being said, my secret identity affords me a perverse Zorro-like gratification. I've been writing for more than twenty years. For a three-year period I was represented by a fine literary agent (2) in Manhattan, who tried valiantly but without success to place my novels in traditional publishing. Allegedly, objections were raised to negative protagonists and explicit sex. While I am convinced those objections are groundless, I am weary of arguing the point. I'll simply let you, the readers, decide for yourselves. I have garnered many good reviews over the years. See, for example, Elizabeth White (3). Interviews of me may be found on the web, for instance, Steve Weddle, Fiona "McDroll" Johnson, Paul D. Brazill and Ian Ayres (4-7). Please feel free to post reviews of my work, good, bad, or indifferent. Only be sure to remember that most of my books, especially the later ones, are self-published without the dubious benefit of copyediting, content editing or censorship of any kind. So if you post reviews carping about bad language or finding flaws in punctuation, paragraphing or font, I frankly don't care. I'm putting these books out there for the sole reason I wrote them in the first place - to be enjoyed by readers. As my law practice has become more active recently, I have taken a sabbatical from writing but hope to resume soon. My personal and private email is: [e-mail]. I'd be delighted to hear from you!1. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0308/02/lklw.00.html2. http://variety.com/exec/stacia-decker/3. http://www.elizabethawhite.com/tag/malachi-stone/4. http://www.spinetinglermag.com/2011/04/20/conversations-with-the-bookless-malachi-stone/5. http://imeanttoreadthat.blogspot.com/2012/01/american-banshee-by-malachi-stone.html#!/2012/01/american-banshee-by-malachi-stone.html6. https://pauldbrazill.com/2012/01/19/short-sharp-interview-malachi-stone/7. http://nigelpbird.blogspot.com/2010/09/dancing-with-myself-malachi-stone.html

Book preview

BLOOD OF LILITH

A novel by

Malachi Stone

Tenth Edition

©2022 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. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 as amended, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the author constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the author at

[e-mail]

Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental. All characters depicted in this book are over eighteen years of age.

For Maria, my peerless bride.

Table of Contents

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

Lupercalifragilisticexpialidoshus

Mineral Oil with Macanudo

Desecration Day

The Lilith Sabbat

About the Author

Connect With Me Online

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 had picked up on it, too.

Kirk’s a nice guy, he’d said to her. I’d 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 erstwhile 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 rathskeller. 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. Overhead hung the biggest 4K TV they make, seeming about the width and breadth of a highway billboard, looming above the pit in seeming levitation. I counted six semi-private alcoves all around us, each furnished with its own Hef-sized round waterbed made up with a matching red silk cover embroidered with strange black designs that I couldn’t make out in the dim 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 giggling 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 Walmart.

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, Alexa, naked.

The TV spontaneously turned itself on. The rathskeller 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 things 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.

Stout fellow. Turning back to face the massive TV, Kokker enunciated, Alexa, hard-on. He must have had the whole setup voice-recog programmed. Twin chrome cylinders rose silently out of the floor on either side of him. One held a DVD player, the other a full rack of discs. I’ve been meaning to transfer everything over to flash drive, but where does one find the time or energy? he sighed. Flash drive, another interesting term. Selecting the first DVD from the rack, he inserted it into the player.

My true specialty was chasing personal injury cases for Mark Kane all over hell’s half acre—a euphemism for the Metro East. I could always be counted on to settle any and every case for Mark Kane, no matter how many bugs were in them, and all the cases in Mark Kane’s office had bugs in them. Usually the same bugs. As a matter of fact, at the moment I was staring at the back of the beetle-bald head of one frequently encountered bug. I needed eighty thousand dollars to cover the major credit cards alone. I was two months behind on all four mortgages. Sitting beside Kokker in his weirdo-engineered rec room, I pondered life’s injustices. Hell, yes, I wanted high definition and surround sound. I wanted the quiet life, and I wanted Sandra and Janis in a three-way. I wanted all the crank I could snort or slam and more money than I could ever spend.

Sandra Pulls the Train began with a gimmick: a silent-movie steam locomotive heads down the track straight for the audience. Animated titles spring from the iron horse’s cowcatcher. Twinky digital rendition of Casey Jones. Dissolve to Sandra in action.

Kokker stood and addressed me, blocking the screen. Ricky, as you might have suspected, I didn’t bring you all the way out here merely to show you adult videos. What I want to know is, do I have enough?

The on-screen scene had shifted. Men and women of all ages crowded around watching Sandra coupling with a powerfully built black man. From the looks of things onscreen, the man’s prepotent equipment threatened Sandra with an imminent size-related injury.

For a divorce, Kokker added. Do you think I have enough grounds for one?

Why do you ask, Doctor?

Because you’re looking at the videographer. I’m the one who took these amateur videos. I read somewhere on the Internet that that law says you can’t connive to procure your own wife’s adultery and then use it as grounds to divorce her. Is that true, Ricky?

Not any more; all Illinois dissolution of marriage—what used to be called divorce—is no-fault now, I explained, The point is, it’s easy to obtain a dissolution of marriage these days, maybe even too easy. There’s only one ground anymore: irreconcilable differences. The trick for a man in your financial position is hanging onto your assets. Did you have her sign a prenup? Kokker’s dismal change of expression told me he hadn’t.

Sandra’s pink tongue in extreme close-up now, clear enough to show her taste buds. Kokker, his back to the screen, moved a half-step stage left. Like an actor hitting his mark, he precisely superimposed his body between me and the central action onscreen. Kokker’s positioning was perfect; Sandra’s mouth seemed about to engulf the shining crown of his head.

Try as I might, I couldn’t crane my neck far enough around Kokker to see what followed. Kokker kept up his defensive moves, strutting around, posing more and more questions as he did. Won’t Sandra’s video adultery deny her a property settlement? No. Would it help if she signed a prenup now? No, that horse is already out of the barn. What about the fact that the holdings—the string of chiropractic clinics, the shopping malls, the gaming boats—are all closely held corporations? No, none of it would protect him from a potentially ruinous divorce settlement.

Then he asked me one that gave me pause. What if one spouse knew the other had some connection to a murder? Not one of your most frequently asked questions in my area of practice.

Go on, I said.

The onscreen image of Sandra seemed to flash me the same little-girl, cutesy-poo expression I’d seen that day in the chiropractic office. As she did so, I heard Kokker whine on the audio track, Don’t look at the camera.

Kokker stepped aside at last, revealing Sandra conjoined with the others. Of one flesh, as the Apostle says, although I didn’t think Kokker wanted to hear my sermon right then. Watching the tape, it was hard not to visualize one huge, fleshy snowball of humanity—red and yellow, black and white; painted and unpainted faces, fingernails, and toenails; heads, legs, pits, and pubes, shaven and unshaven; big and small, pierced, clipped, or nature’s own; probing fingers and prying eyes—rolling downhill, gaining momentum, all the while grabbing up others in the irresistible gravity of its hurtling, hell-bent juggernaut.

That world had already claimed me as its own. I resolved then and there never to allow any of it to touch my family. And yet, I was drawn in like a lost soul by the snare of something akin to familiar curiosity as I witnessed Sandra re-applying her lip-gloss. Kokker must have sensed me getting excited. He stared down at me with inseam-measuring eyes. The moment for any more talk of murder had passed, I thought. I was wrong.

Leaving the video running, Kokker sat down next to me again, this time on the side opposite the TV. Now I had a choice: make eye contact with him or watch his wife take on half the three-one-four area code. I decided to look at him. After all, he was the client.

Do you know what a snuff film is, Ricky? he asked, his voice lowered to conspiratorial level here alone together in his rathskeller with the door barred.

I have a fairly good idea. I’d seen part of a television documentary.

Do you? Kokker replied. Then perhaps you’re just the man to advise me. Confidentially, of course. Nothing we say here leaves this room. Are we on the same page in that regard? I nodded. Attorney-client privilege and the rule of confidentiality sealed my lips like the Angel of Death from a professional standpoint, and Kokker knew it. That didn’t mean I was necessarily eager to hear what followed.

What if one spouse came into possession of a snuff film? Quite by accident, mind you, but the pesky thing falling into the wrong hands could possibly lead the authorities to the perpetrator of an unsolved murder or two. And then the other spouse finds out about the snuff film. What then?

I’d need more facts, I said, basically stalling. What use does the finding-out spouse intend to make of the information? In other words, are you asking me about interspousal privilege?

Interspousal privilege, Kokker said, seeming to relish some delicate irony in the words. Just for fun, let’s pretend that I am. Can the finding-out spouse tell the police on the guilty spouse, given the scenario I’ve described?

I switched my gaze while I considered the question. In close-up, Sandra obligingly accommodated enough men to field a starting squad—and I’m talking football here, not basketball. "When did she first acquire the information? We are talking about a she, aren’t we?" I ventured.

We are indeed. Let us assume, for the sake of our little game, that Hypothetical Hubby becomes aware, after the fact, mind you, that a crime has been committed—let’s say murder, to keep it interesting.

All right.

And let us further assume that Hypothetical Hubby knows the identity of the killer, having recognized the killer from watching the snuff film. For whatever reason, Hypothetical Hubby keeps mum and doesn’t tell the police, not even anonymously. Ergo, the killer roams free to commit further atrocities. Assuming all this happens before the wedding bells chime, is there any way Hypothetical Wifey can turn around after the honeymoon and testify against Hypothetical Hubby about it?

Video Sandra was taking on the bench warmers now. My wariness had grown while Kokker had delivered his speech. He’d reminded me of a wily law professor, fond of the Socratic method, setting up some elaborate trick of logic where resort to legal syllogism threatened to lead me down a dark alley to a dead end devoid of common sense and justice.

The answer is yes, I said at last. Kokker turned pale before I could quickly add, But what you’ve described—accessory after the fact—is not a crime in the State of Illinois. I paused. "We are talking about something that happened in Illinois, aren’t we?" Why had I so easily assumed a snuff film would have originated in the Metro East? One always must be so careful making assumptions about jurisdiction, practicing law so close to the line. The state line, that is.

Has that been the law for some time? Kokker inquired.

Since before I went to law school.

And when did you happen to matriculate, if I may be so bold to inquire?

Over twenty years ago, I said.

Kokker seemed relieved until I went on. Now, there is a statute on the books making it a crime in the State of Illinois to aid or conceal a fugitive. It would constitute a crime if Hypothetical Hubby did something affirmative—for instance, performed some act that aided the killer to escape, hid him away, or furnished false information to the police.

This last seemed to trouble Kokker. What if Hypothetical Hubby removed some insignificant token from the crime scene, something that didn’t seem that all-fired important at the time? Let’s say merely as a sort of trophy or souvenir, but as time wore on and the killer was never caught, something that even today might prove crucial in solving the murder? What then?

Then I think Hubby has something to worry about, I said. Hypothetically.

In the periphery of my vision Kokker’s fingers drummed away on the crushed velvet as soundlessly as the flutter of moth wings, oblivious to the fact that Sandra had changed partners yet again. The camera scanned a restive line of bikers and accountants, millwrights and playwrights, ding-dongs and ho-hos. Like Studio 54 rejects of a bygone age, flat-footed on the wrong side of the velvet