all your desires come true.” He chose Monique over the other illicit masseuses after consulting the Rand McNally Cleveland Street Guide and confirming her address was a residential property far away on the other side of the city.
Spencer’s parents had bought him a brand new Mercury Comet as a high school graduation gift—this was still several years before his father would lose all his savings in a series of bad investments and declare bankruptcy—but he left the car in the college parking lot and instead opted for public transit. He had grown into a cautious man—perhaps because of so many years of waiting for the police to knock on his door and haul him off for the murder of Genevieve—and he was determined not to leave any evidence that could point back to him.
After getting off the bus at Detroit Avenue and West Fifty-eighth Street, he started along a quiet tree-lined street, his head down, his face hidden by his hoodie. The masseuse’s home-cum-workplace was a bungalow with a knee-high stone property fence. A white sign on the front lawn read, “Oasis Massage Clinic,” and below that in handwritten letters, “Please use side door.”
Spencer turned down the driveway. A placard on the side door invited him inside. The reception was dimly lit and smelled of lavender incense. A cash register and a telephone and some pamphlets sat on six-foot-long counter. Given that it was unmanned, Spencer figured the masseuse was with another customer. He was about to leave when Monique pushed through a beaded doorway. She was indeed black, but she was only busty because she was twenty-five pounds overweight. She wore a short skirt and tight top that did little to cover or support her braless breasts. She was definitely older than twenty-four, maybe early-to-mid thirties. Spencer, however, didn’t care. This wasn’t about what she looked like. It was more intimate than that.
“Hi,” she said pleasantly though with little enthusiasm. “I’m Monique. You can come this way.”
She led him to a dark room and told him to take off all his clothes and lie facedown on the table. Spencer never had a massage before, but he didn’t think Monique was adequately skilled at what she professed to do. She mostly trailed her fingernails across his back and along his legs like a bored student doodling in her notebook. The massage was advertised as an hour, but fifteen minutes into it she tickled her fingers up and down the inside of his thighs and said, “Time’s up, hon. Do you want something extra?”
He didn’t and told her so. She seemed surprised by this, but then shrugged, replied curtly that it was his loss, and left the room. He got dressed again and pulled on a pair of leather gloves he’d kept in his pocket until then. Monique was behind the reception counter waiting for him. He walked up to her, ignoring her protests that he was on the wrong side of the counter, and seized her around her plump neck. He was still skinny then, having not yet discovered weight training, and it took all of his strength to wrestle Monique to the ground. He pinned her shoulders with his knees and continued to squeeze her throat, preventing her from breathing or screaming for help.
Throughout this he stared into her eyes and saw in them the same understanding she was dying as he’d seen in Genevieve’s eyes, and once again this brought him a great satisfaction. Afterward he took a Polaroid of her lifeless face, so he wouldn’t forget it as he had Genevieve’s, then left her for someone else to clean up.
After earning his MD, Spencer wanted out of Cleveland and chose to perform his residency at UCLA. While in his first year there a friend invited him to a party in San Francisco. The venue turned out to be a strange little black house in which the owner, a man named Anton LaVey, kept a lion and a leopard as household pets. Spencer had no idea who LaVey was then, but according to the other guests he was a local eccentric: ghost-hunter, sorcerer, organist, psychic. He was also an intellectual who spent much of the evening ranting to those gathered about the stagnation and hypocrisy of Christianity. In place he argued for a system of belief, or black magic as he called it, that emphasized the natural and carnal instincts of man without the nonsensical guilt of manufactured sins.
Spencer left the party that evening a different man, for