MoM - 2

By David Quinn

"Another confession, Matt," the on-duty sergeant announced from the door of the captain's glass-lined office in the San Francisco precinct station right between Embarcadero and Chinatown. "Shall I tell her to wait?"

The interstate had just collapsed, the sky was still glowing orange to the north, and it was for sure that people there in the Marina District were having their entire lives burned out from under them. And on the Boob Tube, every thirty minutes, Art Agnos's image would appear appealing for calm and stability. So with the real world of day-in and day-out living falling apart all around you, who cares about the freaky frills at the edges; the murder and mutilation of unidentified seaman in run-down hotels on the Embarcadero?

Captain McCloth was about to tell her to go away; to find a priest for her perfidies, or whatever, but he never got that far. He looked up and, peering through a haze of cigarette smoke to the front desk, took in the contours of what the latest seeker of confessional salvation looked like.

When you work in this part of The City you see sleazy prostitutes day in and day out, and they all look the same: hungry hollows for eyes; bras pointing to Brazil; tight-fitting skirts with no more material in them than is necessary to wrap a baby's bottom, and high-healed shoes that would make a midget taller than Wilt The Stilt. All of them, too, douse themselves with an air of being on stage at Rockefeller Center so as to disguise the internal smell of the sties they actually live in. This sixth...or was it the seventh confessor, though, was a little different. Younger than most, reasonably well-dressed, and the captain knew, even from a distance, that she'd smell like violets or some other flower you have to get right up on before you can actually capture its essence. Before it could capture you.

Captain Matt McCloth, happily married for twenty-three...twenty-four years, wasn't the least bit interested in other women. But... But this "confessor" seemed to be different. And that was what interested him—turned on, almost—about the woman waiting at the front desk.

"Bring her in," he ordered, self-consciously checking and signing still another overtime sheet. Feigning indifference, he kept his eyes lowered as the ink dried. Distinctly he felt her presence before actually seeing it.

"Captain McCloth," the sergeant introduced. "And you’re...?"

"Monica," she answered low and sweet like a dove.

"Monica? Monica? Monica?" Matt questioned. "How 'bout a last name?"

"For you I'll be different," she agreed. "Monica Mommusen. Everybody calls me by my first name 'cause when they want anything else, I’m outta there. Got me?"

"Matt," he answered, standing up and shaking hands. "McCloth," he added quickly, sensing that this was a situation he wanted to keep on equal terms.

You don't do that with every John Doe or Suzie Cuezie who darkens your doorway, but in this case he inexplicably wanted another dimension. The one of feel. A touching of the flesh. A real pulsing of the pants.

Even before the invitation was made, Monica sat down, demurely crossing her legs. But that was where the difference stopped. Monica looked him right in the eyes and spoiled the illusion by saying the same thing they all say: "I killed all the johns and I wanna confess."

"Tell me about it," Matt asked, following the rules of the confessing game. For the three or four deranged women who had already owned up to doing the same thing, telling how and why they killed their clients, at least three of them had read in the Chronicle about the five-inch long hairpin in the nape of the victim's neck. But what they didn’t know was that other details were suppressed, and it was at that point they were sent back to their upside-down world of make-believe. Some of the purported perps, in fact, couldn't even read. One Jane's version of how she killed her john was with a baseball bat and another's was that she did it with a pair of scissors in the ribs.

The least you can do before confessing to a murder, Matt came to conclude over and over again, is find out ahead of time how it really went down.

"Want me to start with the last or with the first?" Monica asked politely.

"This's your story," he answered, feigning indifference. The truth of the matter, though, was that the M.O. was the same with all of the victims, and except for the public info about the hairpin in the back of the neck, all the rest of the gory details never made it to the public.

"They were all the same," Monica Momusson began slowly. "They want sex like the rest of us want bread and butter, but there are certain things you can’t buy with money."

"Things like...?"

"Like souls" Monica answered without even a moment’s hesitation.

"Of course not," the captain agreed mmediately. "Penetration never gets deep enough to reach your soul."

But despite the earthquake, the collapse of the Interstate and the burning of the Marina, the overtime forms to fill out and the dispatcher's "urgent" messages that only he could handle, Matt knew everybody has a price; everybody can be bought so, for time’s sake, he went immediately for the bottom line. "But we've all got clay feet that one day’ll crumble and humble us," he added. And then seemingly out of the blue: "What kind of cherry makes you a perfect Manhattan?"

"What's my what?" Monica asked with a raising of her eyebrows.

"How much of yourself are you willing to give up to get what you want?" Matt clarified.

Monica kept staring at Matt like somebody speaking another language.

"What I mean is, do you let them score or not?"

The coroner's report about semen on all the victim's upper legs and on their lips wasn't printed in the Chronicle either, and the first two confessors flunked that test immediately, claiming they killed their victims without "suffering the humiliation" of having had sex with them.

Monica uncrossed her legs and then refolded them, riveting her eyes on her interrogator like a quiet Quaker at a prayer meeting experiencing a moment of revelation and not finding the right words to express the epiphany. And then the outpour started coming: "I'd arch my body, quickly removing the pin from the back of my hair, and then..." She hesitated a moment, catching her breath that was now coming in spasms. "And then we'd both score at the same time. Exactly at the same time."

Like a child in a show-and-tell situation, Monica acted out the quick extraction of her dagger-like hairpin, and in a flash the point of almost five inches of pointed metal was only a fingertip away from the captain's face. And lethal—very lethal—it looked.

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