Death Wears a Red Hat Page 4

  There, Marge, the Chief's attractive, red-haired, recently-transplanted-from-Texas secretary, asked him to wait in the corridor.

  Harris sat on a plain bench in the circular antechamber. Seated around an extremely large rectangular table pushed against the curved wall, a group of pathologists was discussing recent autopsies. One doctor looked as if he had escaped Nazi Germany just before final defeat; another, a middle-aged woman, appeared to have a similar background. There were also two very ordinary-looking WASP types; two Orientals and two East Indians, one light, the other dark, rounded out the group. They referred to their cases by four-digit numbers. Harris could discern little of their conversation, which was punctuated by laughter. Maybe, Harris thought, if you spend your days carving up rotting bodies, it helps to laugh.

  His distraction ended when he peripherally caught sight of a sparrowlike figure staring at him from the adjacent doorway. It was Willie Moellmann, faintly resembling a Teutonic scarecrow, his glasses halfway down his nose.

  “Do I know you?” asked Moellmann.

  Harris sighed inaudibly as he stood. “Harris, Homicide, Squad Six.”

  “Have we met?” Moellmann persisted.

  “Frequently.”

  “Then why don’t I know you?”

  “I’m black. We all look alike.”

  “That must be it.” Moellmann led the way past Marge’s desk into his office. Without formal invitation, Harris followed.

  Moellmann sat behind his desk and looked up at Harris.

  “Well …?”

  “Lieutenant Harris.”

  “Well, Lieutenant Harris, what can I do for you?”

  “I’m here about the head—Stud Harding’s head. Were you able to determine the cause of death—or the time of death?”

  All four of Moellman’s extremities shot outward. For a moment, he resembled a Russian doing the kazatska. “Head!” he shouted.

  Harris sighed again, this time audibly.

  “Head!” Moellmann repeated. “What is this new custom with Squad Six of Homicide sending me heads!” He continued in a voice that could be heard throughout nearly the entire building. “It used to be you would send me more. But now? Just heads! I know what you’re trying to do! You’re trying to make me grateful for that inevitable day when you send me an entire torso!”

  Harris fought back a sarcastic reply. Actually, he had always found it difficult to become angry with the Chief Medical Examiner. He believed that when Moellmann had not taken to the stage, he had missed his true vocation.

  “Then you don’t know anything about that marvelous clue we gave you?” Harris asked, baitingly.

  “Know anything? Know anything?” Moellmann began pacing between his large desk and the credenza that took up one entire wall behind the desk. “Marge!” he yelled. Marge could have heard him had she been standing on the corner of Brush and Lafayette, perhaps even farther. “Marge, bring in the folder on Harding!”

  Marge ambled in. As she handed the folder to Moellmann, she remarked in her Texas twang, “Calm die-own, nay-oh, or yu’ll jes’ mike yorese’f ee-yul.” She sauntered out.

  Moellmann opened the file and consulted several typed pages. “The head—as was the case with Ruggiero’s—was drained of blood. There was no mortal wound—to either head. Making it pretty well impossible to determine the cause of death. Your Mr. Harding died, as best we can determine, between four and eight P.M. yesterday.” With an impish look, he added, “There’s something more I can tell you.”

  His tone caused Harris to look up from the notes he was taking.

  “I have ascertained that both heads were detached by a saw—a small handsaw—the same saw.” Moellmann paused for effect.

  “The same saw?” Harris straight-manned.

  “The same saw. It has a defect. It is bent near the center. The same saw removed both heads. And one more thing … ”

  “Yes?” Harris wished Moellmann would drop the melodrama, at least occasionally.

  “Your headsman is remarkably powerful. He needed only four to five strokes to cut through all that flesh, muscle and bone. And with a small, bent saw. Probably you’re looking for an extremely well-built young man.”

  “That’s it?” Harris closed his note pad.

  “That’s it! Oh …”

  Harris assumed this device of a delayed reaction was borrowed from the “Columbo” TV series.

  “Oh … one more thing: bring me a whole body sometime, and I’ll tell you even more interesting stories.”

  “Thanks, Doc.”

  As Harris left, he nodded at Marge.

  “Yawl have a nahss die,” she drawled.

  “You don’t understand, Cox,” Nelson Kane was explaining with dwindling patience, “I am trying to keep you two on separate assignments. Not make you into a team.”

  Kane, Joe Cox, and Pat Lennon were standing at one end of the city room near the oval slot desk, which, at this early time of the day, was unoccupied. Thus, the three enjoyed relative privacy.

  “It’s all right with me, Nellie,” said Lennon. "Basically, this was Joe’s idea—”

  “Damn right,” Cox interrupted.

  “Now listen,” said Kane, “years ago, it was Free Press policy that married couples couldn’t be employed here together, even if they worked in separate departments. Now I know the policy isn’t enforced anymore, and I know you two aren’t technically married. But you might just as well be. And there was a good reason for that rule.”

  “It’s not like that with us. We’re not tied by a piece of paper,” said Cox. “Look at it this way, Nellie: I’m already on the story. But I’m convinced Pat has a better feel for it. Right off the bat, she realized the hat was more important than the head.”

  “The what?”

  “The hat is more important than the head,” Cox repeated.

  “What I mean,” Lennon explained, “is that the indication Joe gets from the police is that they’re going after suspects who would be likely killers of both Ruggiero and Harding.”

  “And?”

  “And I think a short cut is to look for some reason why the heads are found in a Cardinal’s hat and on a saint’s statue. After the reason comes the person who placed them there, and at that point if you haven’t got your murderer, you’re probably breathing on him.”

  Kane mulled over the matter. “Well… O.K., we’ll try it a while and see how it turns out. But I’m warning you, if I sense any foul-up or lack of progress you two will suffer a journalistic divorce.”

  Cox and Lennon departed almost as excited as kids. They liked living together, and they liked working together. They liked it all.

  Kane watched them return to their desks. Shortly after arriving at the Free Press, Lennon had sealed her dead-end fate by rejecting the casting couch routine of Executive Manager Karl Lowell. From that moment, she knew she would do well merely to survive in the city room. There would be no promotions or merit increases even though she had proven worthy of both. Her moving in with Cox had rubbed salt on Lowell’s raw id. Even with a Pulitzer in his pocket, Cox would be doomed by Lowell to tread water at the same level as Lennon.

  Kane shook his head. He wondered how long he could keep them at the Free Press. A good paper with a fine history, but one that was being slowly destroyed by the infantile ego of a two-bit hatchet man. On second thought, Kane wondered how much longer he himself would last.

  Once into September, it was never certain how much reasonably good golfing weather remained in Michigan. Today’s was splendid. Sunny, warm, yet with just a hint of a breeze.

  Two priestly foursomes had just gathered at the first tee of the course at St. John’s Provincial Seminary. Located near the township of Plymouth, the institution was Michigan’s major seminary offering theological studies to future diocesan priests.

  The priests played this course because it was reserved for the seminarians and Catholic clergy and thus relatively uncluttered. In addition, there was no fee. And, while a few private clubs as
ked no greens fees of the clergy, St. John’s held the special attraction of being exclusively for the clergy. And if there was anything most of the clergy—at least the celibate Roman type—preferred, it was the company of fellow priests.

  The eight swung their drivers, unlimbering muscles. With little conversation at the moment, the only sounds were the hum of the clubs moving through the air and the swish as the club heads passed through the grass.

  “Did you fellows hear what they found in old St. Cecilia’s this morning?” Monsignor Jasper Max, now in retirement at St. Norbert’s parish in Inkster, was, though elderly, still powerfully built. Formerly one of the more active of jocks, he was truly a hail-fellow-well-met.

  “Of course,” Father Koesler responded. “By this time you’d have to be cloistered not to know.”

  “What?” asked Father Pat McNiff, who was not cloistered, just not very well informed.

  “Another head!” Father Donald Curley answered. “To go with the one they found in the Cardinal’s hat the other night. A matched pair.” Curley, tall, paunchy, bald, myopic, acid-tongued, rummaged through his golf bag and discovered a new Spalding Dot. By the end of golf season, he had few if any unused balls. The source of the Spalding puzzled him.

  “Well, hardly a matched pair,” said Koesler, “unless you consider white and black, the top man in the rackets, and the top pimp somehow matched.”

  “Will someone tell me what happened?” demanded McNiff. He was abstractedly studying the wheels of Koesler’s golf cart. Koesler had recently been given the cart by one of his sisters as a birthday present. Characteristically, he had not removed the plastic covering on the wheels, considering that an unnecessary gesture. Most of the plastic had worn off. The remaining clinging shreds were the object of McNiff’s scrutiny.

  “Found the head of Stud Harding on the shoulders of the statue of St. Cecilia,” said Max.

  “Was he dead?” McNiff asked absently, as he continued his study of Koesler’s wheels.

  “No,” said Curley, brightly, “they were joining the two to get a black female saint who literally marketed virtue.” He continued to study the Spalding Dot.

  “Whoever did it, it’s lucky for him he didn’t do it to my statue,” Father Ted Neighbors stated emphatically.

  “Somebody do a statue of you?” Curley asked facetiously.

  “You mean you haven’t heard of the Ted Neighbors statue?” asked Koesler.

  “It’s not a statue of me!” Neighbors thundered. “It’s a statue of St. Frances Cabrini!” Neighbors was pastor of the Allen Park parish whose patroness was Mother Cabrini.

  “What’s so special about it?” asked McNiff.

  “What’s so special about it?” Koesler repeated. “Ted, here, commissioned a local artist to do it for $50,000.”

  “$50,000!” Max whistled. “How’d you ever get your parish council to go along with that?”

  “Monsignor,” Neighbor’s tone was autocratic, “when Pope Julius commissioned Michelangelo to redecorate the Sistine Chapel, he did not conduct a plebiscite!”

  “Let’s play a little shinny,” invited Max, heading for the first tee.

  “Koesler!” McNiff shouted, finally solving the mystery. “You didn’t take the plastic covers off your wheels!”

  “Couldn’t do it,” Koesler said, “it’s against the Natural Law.”

  “There you go again, always making fool-around with holy things.” McNiff shook his head and selected his driver.

  After considering the matter briefly, Max hit his tee shot down the middle of the fairway, and short. From that position, he would tee off again. Max used tees constantly on the fairway, and picked up putts of up to twenty feet as “gimmies.”

  McNiff, after waggling his club and fanny incessantly, hit a duck hook. The ball flew powerfully from the tee, took a sharp turn to the left, and disappeared into the woods. “God, that felt good!” he said.

  Koesler, who played golf virtually as a contact sport, swung from the heels. The ball faded in a sharp slice, cleared a large tree at the right of the fairway, hit on the cement handball court and bounded within reaching distance of the green.

  “Lucky son-of-a-bitch,” commented Neighbors, who would be in the second foursome.

  Curley decided to use the new Spalding Dot. A better-than-average golfer, he teed the ball high. At the height of his backswing he remembered the origin of the Dot. Five months before, he had bought it at a novelty store, planning to slip it into Bob Koesler’s bag. It was an exploding ball. Full realization hit as his club made contact with the Dot.

  A crowd of students had gathered in the parking lot of Detroit’s Cooley High School.

  In the center of the growing ring of young people was a black girl, a Cooley sophomore. She lay prostrate on the asphalt. Kneeling next to her was a massive black police officer, who had spread his jacket over her body.

  The girl was unconscious, her frail body racked by violent convulsions. She was salivating profusely. In an attempt to prevent her from drowning, the officer turned her head to one side so the saliva drooled from her mouth. Between soothing words that he hoped would penetrate her subconscious, the officer, Patrolman Lou Jackson, questioned the girl’s frightened boyfriend, Willie Woods.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Laura … Laura Gates,” Woods blurted.

  “It’s gonna be all right, Laura,” Jackson said gently but loudly. “It’s gonna be all right. The ambulance is on the way. You’re gonna be all right.”

  He looked up at Woods. “How’d this happen?”

  “It must’ve been the pusher,” Woods pointed to the corner of Fenkell and Hubbell, “the one who works the corner. She been playin’ up to that dude for weeks,” he added bitterly.

  “So, what happened?”

  “I do’ know. She been tellin’ him she used ever’thing. Tryin’ to get him to think she worth him.”

  “Did she?”

  “What?”

  “Did she use everything?”

  “Hell, man,” Woods shook his head, “she never use nothin’. She just talk big to get him to listen.”

  “It’s all right, Honey.” Jackson smoothed Laura Gates’ hair. The convulsions were increasing in number and intensity. It seemed that if they got any more violent the girl’s whole body would explode, or smash itself to pieces. Damn that ambulance, Jackson thought. Where the hell was it!

  “Did you see what happened?” Jackson asked Woods.

  “Well, from a far away. I think he gave her some horse. Shit, he had to show her how to take it. He shoulda known then that she din’t know what she was doin’. He was laughin’ when she snorted it.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then she started shakin’, shakin’ all over. Then she fell over. She’s been shakin’ ever since.”

  “Know who the pusher is?”

  “Naw, jes’ he works this corner.”

  Jackson had been concentrating so deeply on getting information from Woods and caring as well as he could for the girl that he had not even been aware of the intensifying wail of the approaching ambulance. Suddenly it was there, backing toward the girl. The crowd parted at its approach.

  The white-clad crew spilled out. Jackson removed his jacket from the girl’s body as one of the attendants wrapped a sheet around her. Two others expertly lifted her onto a gurney.

  “What’ve we got here?” one asked Jackson.

  “One Laura Gates, age sixteen. O.D.’d on heroin most probably. “

  As they lifted the girl into the ambulance she was struck by a convulsion so powerful that her body would have hurled itself from the gurney if she had not been strapped in. Then, for the first time in several minutes, she was still. Her body relaxed. She did not move.

  The attendants finished sliding the gurney into the ambulance. Two attached life support systems to her as the vehicle sped east on Fenkell. As it turned north on Schaefer en route to Mt. Carmel’s emergency ward, Laura Gates died.

  One c
ould argue whether St. Aloysius Church was part of the Chancery Building or vice versa. Each had the same easy-to-remember address, 1234 Washington Boulevard.

  The church’s architecture was peculiar, if not unique. The chancel was set off by a parapet, which curved like a wide-mouthed horseshoe around a half-moon-shaped space similar to an open orchestra pit—except that this open space looked down into the basement, which had its own sanctuary and altar immediately beneath the main-floor altar. Thus, an event taking place at the main altar could be viewed not only from the nave and the balcony, but also by those in the basement. There were occasions when two separate events took place simultaneously in view of both those sitting in the balcony and the fore of the nave and those in the fore of the basement.

  To the north of St. Aloysius, in the joined building, was the chancery, housing, among other departments, the Matrimonial Tribunal, the chancery offices, offices of the auxiliary bishops and, of course, the office of Archbishop Mark Boyle. The upper floors comprised a large dining room and kitchen, as well as residence rooms—most of which, once filled, were now empty.

  One Dearborn priest bragged periodically, generally to the laity, that he had had “lunch with the boss.” It was a feat any priest could achieve, though few cared to.

  It required only that the priest appear about noon in St. Aloysius’ dining room on the eighth floor of the Chancery Building. Far from being turned away, visiting priests were most welcome at the cafeteria-style luncheon. More often than not, Archbishop Boyle ate there at noon. And thus one had “lunch with the boss.”

  Usually, little was said at these meals. Few priests could think of anything that might interest the Archbishop conversationally. The tall, dignified, handsome blue-eyed prelate was comfortable with silence.

  One exception was Father Joe Sheehan, a particular favorite of Boyle’s.

  After Sheehan had received his doctorate in theology at the Angelicum in Rome and returned to Detroit, Boyle had Sheehan audition to be his secretary. To qualify for this position required little more than driver’s training. It was, however, a position Sheehan did not want. His first and last test occurred when Boyle was to be chauffeured to St. Mary’s of Redford for a confirmation service. Sheehan drove aimlessly and interminably. Finally, in desperation, the Archbishop turned to him. “Father Sheehan, do you have the slightest idea where you are going?”