Death Wears a Red Hat Page 15

  “Just fine, Marge. And how are all of you?”

  She blushed becomingly.

  Moellmann seated himself in the straight-back chair in front of his desk. Koznicki lowered his bulk onto the couch, which made a groaning sound. They stared at each other in silence.

  “Well?” Moellmann opened.

  “Well?” Koznicki countered.

  “I suppose you believe you have one more of those Red Hat Murders on your hands, don’t you?”

  “Unless you provide me with a good reason, I have no reason not to believe it.”

  “Oh, I have some reasons that may make you want to believe that this one will not fit in your red hat.”

  “Marge!” He yelled loudly enough to be heard throughout the second floor. “Marge! Bring me the Fitzgerald file!”

  Marges sigh was highly audible.

  As she handed Moellmann the file, she nodded toward the black blood pressure sleeve resting on the corner of his desk. “Have y’all tiken yore bluhd pressure with theyat thang lately?”

  “No, not lately,” Moellmann replied. Marge remained about the only person who could put him on.

  “Way-ell,” she continued as she languidly returned to her office, “if y’all don’t quee-ut usin’ theyat tone a voice with me, youre gonna haftuh tike mahn.”

  Koznicki could not suppress a chuckle.

  Moellmann, pretending it was still a scoreless tie between him and Marge, carefully studied the contents of the Fitzgerald file.

  “You were saying, Doctor ...” Koznicki returned the conversation to a professional level.

  “Ah, yes.” Moellmann used his index finger to shove his glasses back to the bridge of his nose. “Well, there are several differences between Fitzgerald’s head and those of the previous victims, namely, Ruggiero, Harding, and Strauss.”

  He paused to make certain he had Koznicki’s attention.

  “Chief among these differences is that Fitzgerald’s head has been embalmed.”

  “Embalmed!” Koznicki did not attempt to mask his surprise.

  “Yes, embalmed. I would hazard a guess that Mr. Fitzgerald died without the appropriate expression on his face. And so, to effect such an expression, it was necessary to embalm him.”

  “I don’t believe I understand—”

  “You see,” Moellmann said, “the others, Ruggiero, Harding, and Strauss, seem to have died in the grip of intense—no, intense is not a sufficiently powerful word—supreme fright. It was evident on their death masks. Do you remember?”

  Koznicki nodded.

  “Their eyes and mouths were the embodiment of stark terror.”

  “But Fitzgerald’s death mask looked just like the others,” objected Koznicki.

  “Yes, it did, my dear Inspector. But each of the first three clearly died with that expression on his face. Terror became an intrinsic characteristic of their death masks. It was their natural, if final, expression. No embalming fluid was used in their heads.”

  “But Fitzgerald?”

  “Fitzgerald evidently needed help to achieve that expression of ultimate terror. His head was embalmed and the expression was artificially formed, built, created, probably by a skilled mortician.”

  “But what if,” Koznicki protested, “what if Fitzgerald were killed by the same person who killed the first three, but for some reason he did not manage to frighten Fitzgerald as he had the others?”

  “Ah, my dear Inspector, that brings us to the manner of removing the heads!” Moellmann was enjoying this moment of drama to the hilt.

  “Yes?” Koznicki prodded.

  “You may be familiar with my findings regarding the first three heads in the series,” Moellmann rhetorized.

  Koznicki nodded.

  “It is my opinion that all three heads were removed by a very powerful, probably young, man who used the same slightly bent saw in each instance.”

  “I am familiar with those findings, Doctor.”

  “Well …” Moellmann’s denouement was handled with flair. “Fitzgerald’s head was removed very carefully with a surgical instrument. It is my opinion that a scalpel was used on the outer fleshy and muscular tissues, and then a saw—but not the flawed instrument used in the other beheadings—finished the job.”

  Moellmann settled back in his chair, extremely pleased with himself.

  Koznicki smiled. He appreciated working with someone like Moellmann. Certainly not because of his histrionic tendencies, but because he was a professional who was very good in his scientific field.

  The phone rang. In a moment, Marge stood in the doorway. “It’s for yew, Inspectah.”

  It was Harris, calling from St. Frances Cabrini rectory.

  “Walt, we’re uncovering a bunch of details here that don’t seem to fit into the established M.O.”

  “You tell me your good news,” Koznicki said, “and I’ll tell you mine.”

  Taken slightly aback, Harris continued. “First of all, this was not a clean entry like the other three. This was a clear case of breaking and entering. The lock on the side door of the church was jimmied.”

  “Go on.”

  “Then, the head of the statue was not cleanly removed like the other two. This one was smashed off and pretty well demolished.”

  “Is there more?”

  “Yeah, one more. There are some pretty clear prints on the door, on the plinth and on the statue itself.”

  “That it?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Either our killer got awfully sloppy for some reason, or this is just not one of The Red Hat Murders.”

  “The latter, Ned.”

  Koznicki related the Medical Examiner’s findings. As he finished, Harris gave a long, low whistle.

  “I’ll be damned, Walt, some damn fool turkey has tried to get in on The Red Hat Murders! I think we’re gonna burn some asses.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

  The phone conversation concluded, Koznicki turned back to Moellmann. “I think very shortly I will be able to present you with something you’ve wanted and deserved for too long a time.”

  Moellmann looked up at Koznicki quizzically.

  “A body,” said Koznicki, “to go with the latest head.”

  As it happened, only Pat Lennon’s account of the murder was correct. But no one in the news media knew this until a hastily called news conference was held at Detroit Police Headquarters at 8:15 Saturday evening.

  At this gathering, Koznicki and Harris, without revealing any of the details they wanted kept from the public, explained that Garnet Fitzgerald’s apparent murder was not another in the series of Red Hat Murders. They admitted there was a resemblance to the other murders and that the resemblance had undoubtedly been intended. However, they concluded, there were enough discrepancies in the method of operations that there was no doubt that Fitzgerald’s head had been placed in the church by someone other than whoever had placed the first three heads.

  This information had surprisingly little effect on the television and radio newscasters. They had been incorrect at 5:30 P.M. They would be correct at the eleven o’clock wrap-up. Perhaps their relative indifference was due to the ephemeral nature of their media. News was carried over the air and promptly became equally invisible.

  This was not the case with the print medium.

  Joe Cox had written an erroneous story. It was too late to catch the first Sunday edition. He returned to the city room to rewrite the story for a later edition, but his initial error was there in black and white. Neither he nor his editors would quickly forget the error. Should there be a chance they might forget, the other news media would find subtle ways of reminding them.

  Pat Lennon returned to the News to add details to her story, which was not only accurate, but filled with many more particulars than the police had disclosed at the news conference.

  She returned to the Lafayette Towers apartment about 10 P.M. and waited for Cox.

  He did not come home Saturday night or Sunday morning.
<
br />   It had been a most busy but satisfying weekend. Now, late Sunday evening, three large men sat around Inspector Koznicki’s kitchen table reminiscing and eating the sandwiches and beer snack prepared by Koznicki’s wife, Wanda.

  “I can think of a few reasons, but not many,” Harris said, “why anybody would go on playing the numbers when there are legal lotteries in Michigan.”

  “Especially,” Koznicki added, “when the lotteries are on the up and up. If you win, you win. There is no shifting the winning number if too many hit on it.”

  Inspector Frank Thompson, head of the DPD’s Organized Crime Division, sighed. “Well, there’s lots of reasons.” Thompson, black, with a seemingly perpetual quizzical expression, was the only one of the three in uniform. “First and foremost for lots of these people, it’s a habit. They’ve been doing it for years, sometimes doing business with the same runner, and they’re simply not going to break it. Some establish such a close relationship with the runner that they’d sooner leave home than stop doing business at the same old corner.”

  “Then too,” Thompson added as he applied horseradish liberally to a colossal corned beef, roast beef, ham, and chicken sandwich, “in the numbers, a person can invest as little as a nickel.”

  “And you must remember, Ned,” said Koznicki, his eyes riveted on Thompson’s first bite of his super sandwich, “if a person happens to hit a number, the winnings are tax-free.”

  “Yes,” mumbled Thompson as he fought through his first bite, “and, unlike the lotteries, the numbers can be played on credit.”

  “And that,” Harris said, “can lead to trouble. When the mob’s collection agency comes calling, they sometimes literally take a pound or so of flesh.”

  “Another spot of trouble,” Thompson said, “comes when one numbers king invades another’s territory.”

  “That,” said Koznicki, “brings us back to Fitzgerald.”

  “It may have been stupid of Fitzgerald to step on Yaphet’s toes,” Harris said, “but that can’t begin to touch the stupidity of Yaphet’s boys. Imagine,” Harris popped the top of a Stroh’s can, “using Sugar Lemon!”

  “Yes,” said Koznicki, “it was good of Lemon to leave his prints all over St. Frances Cabrini Church. But, then, doing unwise things like that is the way Sugar built his impressive record of arrests and convictions.”

  “Likewise,” Thompson paused in the destruction of his sandwich to swallow some beer, “it was kind of Billy Bates to hire Lemon at the funeral home. Even if he did hire him as a bodyguard and use him to plant Fitzgerald’s head because Lemon, being a felon would, of course, know how to do it right!”

  All three laughed.

  “And,” said Harris, “wasn’t Bates cooperative in telling us just where and from whom he got the head.”

  “One thing, though,” Thompson became serious, “we’ll never get Yaphet on a charge like this. We will slice nicely into his numbers game for a while and pick off a few of his prized lieutenants, but, you’ll see, when we catch up with Yaphet, he’ll have an air-tight alibi. And no one will dare squeal on him.”

  “Well,” said Harris, “at least we finally got Doc Moellmann a body complete with bullet holes.”

  “That’s true,” Koznicki scratched his head. “But we’re back to square one.”

  “How’s that?” Harris asked.

  “Who committed The Red Hat Murders?”

  The three silently finished their sandwiches.

  No doubt about it, Father Koesler thought, it was easier in the good old days. Weekdays, back when there was a daily high Mass, had involved nothing more than being sufficiently awake to sing the notes and read the words in the Missale Romanum.

  Those were the good old days, he thought. Although he had reluctantly joined the movement for liturgical reform, at one point he had found himself in the vanguard in defense of the new vernacular liturgy. As editor of the Detroit Catholic, he had written scathing attacks aimed at those who were dedicated to the preservation of the Latin Mass. In response to their argument that Latin was a sign of universality in that one could attend a Mass offered similarly throughout the world, he had written that the Mass was equally unintelligible, at least to the majority of the laity, no matter in which country one found oneself.

  However, he now had to admit, the baby had been thrown out with the bath water. Most of the English liturgical texts lacked literary quality; the mystic mystery of carefully worded Latin was gone; the glory of Gregorian Chant was a misty memory; and the music that had been composed to replace Chant was, by and large, puerile.

  As mistaken as he now thought himself to have been about liturgical change, Koesler was far more repentant over his original stand regarding Church law.

  He recalled attending a lecture given by the famous theologian, Father Bernard Häring, a few years before Vatican Council II. There had been standing room only in Sacred Heart Seminary’s auditorium. Most of the priests attending the lecture had been younger than Koesler.

  He had found Häring’s easy familiarity with the Bible most impressive. When it came to the question and answer session, one bearded young priest rose to ask Häring what connection there was between canon law and the law of Christ. After a moment’s reflection, Häring had responded, “There isn’t any.”

  The response had elicited laughter and applause from the young priests. Koesler had been infuriated. However, ensuing years of experience and thought had convinced him that it was not quite true to claim there was no connection between the 2,414 laws of the Church and the law of Christ. Actually, one was the antithesis of the other. While the law of Christ centered around selfless love, all canon law’s presumptions favored the institutional Church.

  On January 25, 1959, Pope John XXIII called for the convening of a Vatican Council and the reform of canon law. The Council had come and gone, but canon law remained about as welcome as the man who came to dinner.

  In practice, Koesler bent Church law as far as he feasibly could to serve the needs of individuals.

  One of the nicer things about the new liturgy, he thought as he rescued his mind from this stream of consciousness, was its fresh emphasis on the presence of God through Sacred Scripture.

  In weekday Masses, now, there were always two readings from the Bible, one usually from the Old Testament, the other always from the Gospels. The priest was urged to deliver a brief homily. Koesler enjoyed working on the three- to five-minute daily sermon. It kept his mind actively involved with the Scriptures. More than that, he enjoyed finding the connection, vague as it sometimes was, between the two Bible readings. It reminded him of the mystery novels he was forever reading. He simply enjoyed solving puzzles whether they might be the reasons some liturgist thought two readings could complete one message, or the more traditional whodunit.

  The readings for this Monday morning’s Mass were from Isaiah, Chapter 40, Verses one to eight. The Old Testament reading promised the arrival of someone who would prepare the way for another. The Gospel reading recounted the story of John the Baptizer preparing the way for Christ. The connection was clear and the message, clearly, was an invitation to prepare for the presence of Christ in our lives and in the lives of others.

  Now if only he could think of some homey illustrations in which to couch the message. But he was not to have that opportunity. The phone rang.

  Before lifting the receiver, Koesler breathed a quick prayer that the caller not be Mrs. Lester, who was one-half of a sadomasochistic couple—a twosome present in almost every parish. Mrs. Lester regularly wasted Koesler’s time with lengthy phone monologues detailing her husband’s sadistic behavior. She did not lie. Koesler had seen the bruises on her face and arms. It was useless advising her either to leave her husband or force him to move. They needed each other in very sick ways—like the cliché, Koesler thought, the rocks in his head fit the holes in hers. And neither would agree to accept the level of psychic aid that in any event was beyond Koesler’s ability to offer.

  Fortuna
tely for the 8 A.M. Mass’ chance of beginning on time, the caller was not Mrs. Lester. It was Koesler’s old friend, Inspector Koznicki.

  “Congratulations, Inspector,” Koesler greeted him warmly. “I see by this morning’s Free Press that you had a very speedy and successful investigation this past weekend.”

  “Thank you, Father,” said Koznicki. “But it wasn’t all that difficult.”

  Partly because there was a little of the Old World in both Koesler and Koznicki, each invariably accorded the other his respective title of ‘Father’ and ‘Inspector,’ even in casual conversation.

  “It’s not like you to be modest, Inspector.” Koesler took a toothpick from his shirt pocket and contemplated it.

  “It’s not modesty, Father. The executioners of Garnet Fitzgerald left a trail that could have been followed by a Cub Scout.”

  The word ‘executioners’ brought to Koesler’s mind the gory details of Fitzgerald’s death. Details that one of the daily papers, he couldn’t recall which, recounted all too explicitly. What does violent death do? It sells newspapers.

  “And did you see, Father,” Koznicki continued, “that the Fitzgerald killing proved to be an unsuccessful imitation of The Red Hat Murders?”

  “Well, yes, though it was a bit confusing. I got an early Sunday edition of the Free Press that carried a story—I think it was Joe Cox’s byline—that claimed it was another Red Hat Murder. Then I read a News story that claimed it wasn’t. This morning’s Free Press appears to agree with the News’ account.”

  Koesler pronounced Cox’s name with the reverence due a Pulitzer Prize winner mixed with the sense of amazement appropriate to the phenomenon of the prize winner’s having been dead wrong. Koesler, mostly out of habit from his editorial days, was one of some few Detroiters who read both News and Free Press daily.

  “Yes, all of that is correct, Father.” Koznicki caught the emphasis given Cox’s name. “It just proves that even the mighty sometimes fail.”

  “Quo modo ceciderunt fortes.”

  “I beg your pardon, Father?”