Death Wears a Red Hat Read online

  “Nothing. Just the Latin form of your comment about Joe Cox’s failure.” The Latin must have surfaced as a result of his recent bout with nostalgia.

  “What I’m calling you about, Father, is the other story, the one in the News written by Miss Lennon …you have read it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you think of it? Specifically, I am interested in the reasons she enumerated for the placement of the heads.”

  Koesler chuckled. “I agree with her completely.”

  “Why did you laugh?”

  “Because Miss Lennon called the other day to ask just those questions. I gave her Father Clark as a source. I have complete confidence in Father Clark. Besides, after she called, I did a little research myself and came to the same conclusions. I was about to call and offer you my hypothesis when I read Miss Lennon’s story. Then I felt the call was unnecessary.”

  “It is an interesting hypothesis and I felt it had the ring of truth,” Koznicki agreed, “but, at the moment, I don’t know how it will help find the murderer.”

  Koesler hesitated. “Inspector, do you ever get the feeling that he—whoever he is—is doing Detroit a favor?”

  “Oh, he is doing Detroit a favor! I have never seen organized crime so disorganized. Most of the major crime figures are openly confused. But the day of the vigilante is over. We cannot condone murder, even of known criminals. However, our greatest problem now is that the murderer may be finished.”

  “Finished?”

  “Yes. He killed three people last week, on Saturday, Monday, and Wednesday, every other day. There have been no more, that we know of, since last Wednesday. Homicide considers it very possible that the murderer has accomplished what he set out to do—badly rattle the criminal community. And now he is done.”

  “Fascinating!”

  “But it also means we will likely be provided with no further clues. And we have precious little to go on. For one thing, I dearly would like to find the bodies that belong with those heads. Meanwhile, Father, I would appreciate your giving additional thought to those statues and that hat. It is very possible the hypothesis you and Miss Lennon have arrived at may be accurate. But we must know how it fitted into the killer’s scheme of things.

  “And thank you, Father, for your time.”

  “Not at all. Should I come across any headless bodies, I’ll let you know.”

  “Or headless statues, for that matter, Father.”

  The morning homily, due to unforeseen circumstances that caused lack of sufficient preparation, would be very brief.

  It would be inaccurate to state that Joe Cox had been humbled by his blunder. He had been, and still was, angry at himself.

  On his return to the city room Saturday evening to correct and rewrite his story, he had been well chewed out by a Nelson Kane fortified with righteous anger. Thereafter, he had conducted a one-man tour of interesting bars, each sleazier than the one before. He had gotten falling-down drunk and wakened Sunday afternoon in the bed of a female who was not Pat Lennon. By the time he returned to the Lafayette Towers apartment, Pat Lennon was not talking to him. Counting his monumental hangover, by and large it had not been a weekend worth enshrining.

  Now, this Monday morning, he did not wish to appear at work empty-handed. So, en route to the Free Press, he stopped off at Police Headquarters.

  Later, arriving at his desk, he was about to be seated when he heard a familiar voice.

  “Cox!” Kane bellowed. “You’re late!”

  The nice thing about Kane, thought Cox, is that he did not hold a grudge. If he was angry, he let you know it. But that was that. Grudges were the department of Karl Lowell and he held them as a miser holds his coins.

  However, if you were tardy arriving for work, as Cox indisputably was, Kane would not overlook it just because he’d read you the riot act at the latest previous encounter.

  Cox approached Kane’s desk warily, pinching his forehead between thumb and index finger.

  “Easy, Nellie,” he implored, “I took a Bromo this morning and pleaded with it not to fizz.”

  Kane nodded. He knew the feeling.

  “How’s Lennon?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. She is deciding whether to talk to me ever again.”

  “She did a good job with her story Sunday.”

  “Damn right,” Cox agreed. “I told you I had the feeling this was her story.”

  “‘Her story’ and twenty cents will get you a Free Press.” Kane tended to discount intuition in the gathering of news. “It doesn’t surprise me that Lennon did a good job—she’s a good reporter. And,” he reminded needlessly, “we trained her.

  “What does surprise me is that the editors at the News gave her her head.”

  “Yeah, that’s not like them. Maybe they were inspired.”

  “We could use a little of that inspiration.”

  “Maybe not.” Little by little, Cox’s head was clearing. If only he could survive the day. “I was just over at headquarters. The cops think the Red Hat murderer is finished.”

  “Really? Are you sure? Are they sure?”

  “Got it from Harris himself. They figure the guy hit three times last week on alternate days. But nobody’s heard from him since last Wednesday. They figure he’s made his statement. He set out to get the attention of Detroit’s top hoods, and he got it!”

  “So they’ll be working with the leads they’ve got?”

  “So they say.”

  “O.K. I’m going to put McNaught on The Red Hat Murders. I want you to get on the city’s Community and Economic Development Department. “

  “The C&EDD? What’ve they done wrong now?”

  “It’s what they haven’t done. I want a nice balanced series, maybe a four- or five-parter, all about the time it takes them to complete a project. This will be a good spot to highlight bureaucratic bungling.”

  “Why do I have to go all the way over to the City-County Building to do a story on bureaucratic bungling?” Cox asked. “Why don’t I just visit the neighboring office and interview Karl Lowell.”

  “Get the hell out of here,” Kane snarled.

  Pat Lennon huddled with her assistant news editor.

  In the age-old rivalry between the News and Free Press, each had had its share of awards, glory, and scoops. But when one beat the other as clearly as the News had beaten the Free Press on the latest Red Hat Murder, it was a cause for special pride. An air of exhilaration seemed to be flowing through the Old Grey Lady, even on this dark and damp September Monday.

  “But,” said Bob Ankenazy, “you said the cops think it’s all over. That the Red Hat killer is not going to hit again.”

  “That’s what Colleen Farrell told me on the phone half an hour ago,” Lennon replied.

  “But you don’t buy it.”

  “No, I don’t.” Lennon turned in her chair to directly face Ankenazy. “I’m convinced we’ve found the motives for the murderer’s putting the heads in the hat and on the statues. It makes a logical statement. But, as of now, there is no logical conclusion. And a logical statement, it seems to me, demands a logical conclusion. I don’t know what objective point we’ve reached in the plans of the killer, but I am positive we’re in the eye of the tornado.”

  Ankenazy thought a moment. He considered Lennon’s hypothesis mostly the product of intuition. And he, like Nelson Kane, thought intuition had no place in a newsroom. Yet, oddly, he was comfortable about following the course he was about to take—and play a hunch.

  “What do you want to do, Pat?” he asked.

  “I’ve got an excellent contact in Homicide’s Squad Six—Sergeant Colleen Farrell. She’s deeply into the women’s movement so she’s on my side. I want to stay in touch with the case through her and follow a couple of leads I’ve developed.”

  “O.K., follow through,” Ankenazy advised. “But there’s something else I’d like you to work on too. Edward Hines Parkway is slowly being destroyed each summer. I’d like you to start
working up a series on the Parkway. It’s the ideal time now that we’re concluding the season. You can play on the juvenile delinquency angle along with the early drinking age. Obviously, the big hook is the easy availability of drugs throughout the Parkway.”

  Lennon could spot a hedged bet when she was the victim of one. But if she were going to stay on The Red Hat Murders she saw no alternative.

  “O.K.,” she agreed. “From the sublime to the ridiculous. But when the leads get hot and/or the killer strikes again, Edward Hines Parkway gets the back seat.”

  “You got it,” Ankenazy agreed.

  Lennon parked this agreement in her subconscious. She had no experience in verbal agreements with the News, but she was willing to make an investment in trust at least this once.

  “I have this plan that I think will work, or at least help us,” said Detective Colleen Farrell, “and Papkin here has agreed to cooperate with me on it.”

  Farrell was addressing Lieutenant Harris. Sergeant Charlie Papkin stood beside her. The three were alone in the squad room after a general Monday morning meeting of Squad Six.

  “O.K., Farrell,” Harris said, “I’m listening.”

  Harris, along with the other members of Squad Six, had to almost deliberately slow the adrenalin after the past weekend’s breakneck pace of events.

  It was by no means usual to close an investigation of a major murder case successfully in little more than a single day. But the Fitzgerald case had renewed their confidence in their ability to wrap up homicides. After a week of drifting with almost no clues to The Red Hat Murders and traveling up one blind alley after another, their self-confidence had been suffering to some degree.

  “Well,” Farrell explained, “one of our theories involves a possible conspiracy between the killer and one of the clergy-persons attached to one of the parishes involved.”

  “Yes?” Harris sat down as did the two detectives. Never as cautious as his friend Inspector Koznicki, Harris, at this point, was open to any possible lead.

  “It seems to me,” said Farrell, “that if any of our clergy-persons is involved even in a conspiracy, he or she would have to have a pretty casual attitude toward the law.”

  Harris thought a moment. “Yes, I guess I’d have to agree with that.”

  “My next assumption,” Farrell continued, “is that if we are dealing with such a person and if that person has a disregard for civil law that permits collaboration with a murderer, this same person probably will have a very similar attitude toward canon law, the law of his or her own Church.”

  “Now hold on a bit,” Harris objected. “I don’t see the connection. I can see the possibility of a priest’s thinking he was doing a good deed in a sort of passive cooperation with somebody who was killing known criminals, but I don’t see how that attitude would spill over into his own Church law.”

  “Trust her,” said Papkin, who had been smiling through nearly all the exchange between Farrell and Harris.

  Harris reflected that he might, indeed, invest a measure of blind trust in Farrell. He knew she was so deeply involved in Catholicism that she had taken courses in theology at the University of Detroit.

  “Yes, trust me,” said Farrell. “In the eyes of not a few Catholic clergypersons, there are far better reasons to respect American civil law than Catholic Church law.”

  “There are?” asked Harris.

  “Yes, indeed,” she answered. “Supposing the United States Supreme Court, some twenty years ago, had declared our whole system of civil law to be outdated and had ordered it to be revised. And then, suppose in these twenty years, nothing had been done about it.”

  Harris whistled softly. “You mean that’s the shape law is in in the Catholic Church?”

  “Yup,” she said. “So it is not all that rare to find a priest who is very discouraged with Church law and resentful of it. I think that if we are dealing with a priest who is willing to collaborate with a murderer, after the fact, for what he considers to be a noble cause, then I think we must also be dealing with a man who will be selective in the enforcement of certain laws of the Church that are badly in need of reform.”

  “Like what?” Harris asked.

  “Like the laws regarding remarriage,” she answered.

  “O. K., Farrell, what’s your idea?” Harris felt he was learning more about the Catholic Church than he had any need to know for the investigation of any case besides The Red Hat Murders.

  “This is where Charlie comes in,” Farrell said, gesturing toward the still-smiling Papkin. “Posing as a couple who want to get married, we will go to consult certain clergypersons. Charlie will pretend he has been divorced from a wife he married in the Church. Both he and his first wife will have been Catholic, and there will be no way Church law would grant them an annulment. And, of course I will be a Catholic. I might even have been married and divorced—from a bad, bad husband.

  “We’ll just get the reaction of these clergypersons to our plight. Will they ignore Church law and help us for the good reason that we need help? Or will they insist on following the letter of the law? If they enforce canon law, it should at least reduce the possibility of their being involved in a conspiracy.”

  “What do you think?” Harris asked Papkin.

  “It’s better than anything I can think of.” He shrugged. “It may eliminate some of the people we’re thinking about.”

  “It’s at least as good as anything I can think of,” said Harris. “O.K., Farrell, how long do you think this will take?”

  “A couple of days at most.”

  “Who do you plan to visit?”

  “Dolson, that guy at the cathedral who is so fond of guns. Sheehan, the one who heads the C. Y.O. and seems to have too flip an attitude toward regulations. And the deacon, Toussaint, whose alibis I and several others on the squad consider too pat.”

  “I didn’t know deacons could perform marriages,” said Harris.

  “Sure they can,” said Farrell. “They can do anything priests do except say Mass and hear confessions.”

  Harris stood to leave and let Farrell and Papkin finalize their plans. “One last thing, Colleen,” he said. “Make sure you and Charlie don’t bump into too liberal a clergyperson,” he emphasized the word, “or you might have to get married.”

  5

  Sacred Heart Seminar

  The squat one-story brick building stood on Antietam, a winding street on the eastern fringe of downtown Detroit. The building, bearing the sign, “Services, Inc.,” was an abortion clinic. It had been built a decade before when, as part of the women’s movement, abortion came out of the closet and began to be accepted by many as a legitimate method of terminating pregnancy.

  Those familiar with Services, Inc. knew it to be among the worst of its ilk. It was an abortion mill. There was neither consideration nor concern for the clients. It was popular—very popular—for one reason: it offered relatively inexpensive abortions while maintaining an image slightly better than the back-alley clothes hanger approach. What was lost in higher fees at Services, Inc. was more than compensated for in volume of trade.

  Diane Garson stood on the sidewalk near the entrance to Services, Inc. From where she stood she could see the blue and white sign of Detroit Memorial Hospital, where she would have received much better but higher-priced treatment. She also stood in view of Lafayette Clinic, which offered the type of psychiatric services that many clients of Services, Inc. would eventually need.

  After fidgeting with her purse for several minutes, she determined to go through with it. She entered the clinic.

  The waiting room was not large. Twelve straight-back chairs were tucked tightly against the walls with very little space between them. Only one chair was vacant.

  Diane approached the receptionist’s small desk, behind which was seated a woman in a nurse’s uniform.

  “Yes?” The woman looked up from her writing. She gave the impression of being angered by the interruption.

  “I … I’d lik
e to see about having an abortion.” Earlier in her young life, Diane would have wagered she would never make that request. It was in conflict with everything in her Catholic upbringing. But she and her boyfriend had had intercourse, awkwardly, in the back of his van, and now she was late.

  “What makes you think you’re pregnant?” the woman asked.

  Diane wished she would use a lower tone of voice. She glanced around. Several women had looked up from their magazines and were openly listening to the conversation.

  “I … I’m two weeks late.”

  A hint of a smile crossed the woman’s face. This clinic handled everyone from those who used abortion as a routine method of birth control to kids as naive as this one. A girl like this, she thought, might not even know one had to have intercourse to get pregnant.

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “So you have medical insurance?”

  “I’m covered by my dad’s insurance. He works on the line at Ford’s. But I’m going to pay for this myself.”

  “For someone at your term, that will be one hundred dollars for the procedure and twenty dollars today for the test. Both must be paid in advance.”

  Diane gulped. She had not expected there would be this much expense. She had checked with other, more reliable clinics and learned that the going rate for the procedure was one hundred and sixty dollars. So she was saving money even though this would nearly wipe out her bank account.

  “All right,” she agreed, “what do I have to do?”

  “First,” said the woman, “you pay the twenty dollars and then you fill out this form.”

  Diane laid on the desk a ten-dollar bill, a five, and five ones. She accepted the form from the nurse and took the only empty chair. She was aware that the women on either side of her were reading her answers as she filled out the form. Some of the questions were distinctly personal and she was embarrassed.

  She returned the completed form to the nurse and waited expectantly. The nurse removed a small clear bottle from a desk drawer.