Stranger things had happened.
Gratitude for technical advice to:
Inspector Robert Hislop (Homicide), Sergeant Roy Awe (Homicide), Sergeant Mary Marcantonio (Office of Executive Deputy Chief), Inspector William Brandimore (Fifteenth Precinct), Sergeant Judy Dowling (Fifteenth Precinct), Patrolman Robert Kosinski (Fifteenth Precinct), Detroit Police Department
Robert Ankeny (staff writer), The Detroit News
Ramon Betanzos (professor of humanities), Wayne State University
Harry Ford (vice president), First Independence National Bank of Detroit
Jim Grace (detective), Kalamazoo Police Department
Sister Bernadelle Grimm, R.S.M. (Pastoral Care Department), St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital
Lee Hersey (sommelier), Ren Cellar, Renaissance Center
T. G. Litka, life underwriter
Tom Mathes (superintendent), Eric Wolff (crematorium manager), Woodmere Cemetery
Neal Shine (managing editor), Detroit Free Press
In memory of Jim Andrews, and for Fiona, sine qua non semper
Mind Over Murder copyright © 1981, 2012 by Gopits, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.
Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC
an Andrews McMeel Universal company,
1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106
This is a work of fiction and, as such, events described herein are creations of the author’s imagination. Any relation to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental and accidental.
ISBN 978-1-4494-2489-3
www.andrewsmcmeel.com
William X. Kienzle died in December 2001. He was a Detroit parish priest for twenty years before leaving the priesthood. He began writing his popular mystery series after serving as an editor and director at the Center for Contemplative Studies at the University of Dallas.
The Father Koesler Mysteries
1. The Rosary Murders
2. Death Wears a Red Hat
3. Mind Over Murder
4. Assault with Intent
5. Shadow of Death
6. Kill and Tell
7. Sudden Death
8. Deathbed
9. Deadline for a Critic
10. Marked for Murder
11. Eminence
12. Masquerade
13. Chameleon
14. Body Count
15. Dead Wrong
16. Bishop as Pawn
17. Call No Man Father
18. Requiem for Moses
19. The Man Who Loved God
20. The Greatest Evil
21. No Greater Love
22. Till Death
23. The Sacrifice
24. The Gathering
Here is a special preview of
Assault with Intent
The Father Koesler Mysteries: Book 4
Several teeth were missing from the skull. The gaps gave the skull an even more eerie appearance. Not that it needed anything to amplify its stark and fearsome impact. The mere sight of a human skull is usually enough to make a reflective person more thoughtful. Not only does it punctuate mortal life; together with crossbones it signifies lethal poison. And the skull provides both home and protection for the brain, that organ which distinctly makes us human. Just whose brain had been enclosed in this skull was a mystery. For years, it, along with its accompanying male skeleton, had been the property of the Biology Department of Sacred Heart Seminary. However, when the seminary had discontinued teaching biology more than a decade before, the department’s various properties had fallen into the hands of a few vulturine students and faculty members.
Father Leo Ward had gotten the skull. He had plans for it. For nearly fifty years, he had taught English to seminarians in all four years of college. His favorite subject was Shakespeare. He saw to it that the students who survived to college graduation had sampled all Shakespeare’s plays and most of his sonnets.
But until he had managed to pluck the skull from the moribund biology lab, Ward had never had a Yorick. Which is not to say he had a desperate need for a Yorick: along with no Yorick, he also had no other props called for by Shakespeare’s plays. But Ward enjoyed keeping students off balance. Few undertakings were better suited to achieving this goal than compelling a young man to recite the wonders of Shakespeare’s English—virtually a foreign tongue to late twentieth-century American college students—while clutching a skull.
Yorick was on Ward’s crowded desk today because tomorrow the senior class was scheduled to begin reading act 4, scene 5 of Hamlet. Yorick did not appear until act 5, scene 1. But that was only a few pages away, and even if they didn’t reach Yorick tomorrow, it would be delightful to have Yorick in the classroom so the students could contemplate the agony that would shortly befall one of them.
The only illumination in Ward’s room came from a directional desk lamp. Against all four walls, from floor to ceiling, were wooden shelves filled with books. The faint light shed by the small lamp reflected off the glass doors fronting each shelf. Nearly every inch of floor space was heaped with books. This was the case not only in his sitting room but also in his bedroom: wall-to-wall volumes with a narrow, mazelike path cleared for walking. Only Ward’s bathroom was nonbooked. However, there was a stack of magazines near the toilet.
It was 9:00 p.m., October 31—Halloween. A party was in progress in the gymnasium. Faculty, students, employees, those who worked in the myriad organizations housed within the seminary walls, even some of the seminary’s neighbors were at the party. But not Father Leo Ward.
He had been a recluse nearly all his life. Now, as he neared his eightieth birthday, his existence had become even more solitary. He lived almost exclusively for his students and his beloved Bard.
In tomorrow’s reading of Hamlet, Ophelia, as she went mad, would croon her nonsensical ramblings. Ward plotted his own peculiar scenario. He wanted to make certain that William Zimmer, prime macho man of the senior class, would read the mad Ophelia role. Since readings were assigned daily in the order of the students’ alphabetical seating arrangement, and since Ophelia would be the fourth character to speak in scene 5, Michael Totten would have to be the queen and Andrew Umberg the Gentleman; then Francis Wangler, Horatio and Mr. Zimmer, Ophelia. What fun!
Father Ward suppressed a smile. Any incipient laugh was always thus inhibited. His teeth, victims of determined neglect, were all but rotted. As a result, he tried never to let them show. On the rare occasion he was caught by surprise, usually by a ridiculous statement from a student, he would smile, but his lips, which he would shield with his hand, never parted. Occasionally, he would reflect that when it came his time to shuffle off this mortal coil, his skull would not look nearly as good as Yorick’s.
All was now prepared for tomorrow, and he was an hour late for bed. He usually retired about eight so he could rise at five and prepare his usual side-altar Mass, the earliest by far in the seminary.
Daylight-Saving Time had ended the previous Sunday; it was now very dark. He had only one task remaining before sleep. He would deliver Yorick to the classroom where the students would find him bright and early tomorrow. He extinguished his cigar—his fifteenth of the day—stood, and arranged his simple black cassock so it was not bunched on his fragile frame.
With Yorick in his left hand and a large flashlight in his right, he managed to exit his quarters and close the door behind him. The corridor was long, narrow, and deserted. It was illuminated only dimly by the outside spotlights that shone on the seminary in hopes of discouraging break-and-enterers.
Ward switched on his flashlight and, in an enchanted mood, directed its beam onto Yorick. He began, softly, to intone Hamlet’s monologue. “Alas,” Father Ward recited from impeccable memory, “poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times: and now, how abhorred in my imaginatio
n it is! My gorge rises at it.”
Ward, as was his wont, was being carried away by the stunning beauty of Shakespeare’s language. “Here hung those lips that I have kist I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now — uh-oh, I’m there already!”
Lost in Shakespearean declamation, Ward had reached the end of the rear corridor. To his right was the hall that led to the front of the building and then, immediately, a stairway that he intended to take down to his first-floor classroom.
Suddenly, a figure stepped from the shadows near the porch at his left.
The presence so startled him that only later could Ward fix such details as the person’s height—approximately five-feet-five; voice—male, but rather high-pitched; and attire—a black cloak and hat and something—perhaps a stocking— over his face that distorted his features.
But right now, Ward was mainly conscious of the long, menacing knife in the figure’s upraised hand. The blade caught and reflected an edge of Ward’s flashlight beam.
“Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Ward exclaimed. “What’s going on here?”
Instinctively, in an attempt to keep his assailant at a safe distance, Ward had begun to paw the air in a dog-paddle motion while backing away from the fray. Each time Ward’s hands passed each other in midair, the beam of the flashlight in his right hand shone full upon the skull in his left.
As he advanced on the retreating Ward, the assailant caught sight of Yorick. “What the hell! What in hell! WHAT THE HELL!” The man’s voice rose in pitch with each intonation. Now, mirroring Ward’s gestures, his gloved hands began to paw the air. In the fluctuating flashlight beam, the two appeared to be engaged in some sort of hitherto uninvented disco step.
Actually, the assailant was trying to knock the flashlight and the skull from Ward’s hands. After some dozen pawings, he succeeded. The flashlight plunked down and the skull flew up.
Ward lost his balance and toppled backward. The flashlight, Ward, and the skull hit the floor in that order. However, as Ward spun heels over head, one foot caught the assailant’s knife hand, catapulting the weapon into the hall’s darkness. The knife thunked into the soft wood of a lavatory door and stuck there. Out of sight but not out of mind.
“Now, where the hell did the damn thing go?” wailed the assailant, looking at his now empty hand. “What the hell! You’d think I could at least...” The sentence trailed off as the figure turned abruptly and disappeared, stumbling noisily down the unlit staircase.
“Great Caesar’s ghost!” Father Ward sat upright on the floor, rubbing his head and trying to slow his rapidly beating heart and bring down his blood pressure.
No doubt it had been a student.
But which one? Ward hadn’t a clue. Well, he pondered, Halloween pranks were all well and good in moderation, but this was going a bit too far, thank you!
As his adrenal glands settled, he assessed the damage. Nothing in or on his person seemed broken. He retrieved his spectacles. The wire frame was bent, but that was easily straightened. He picked up his sturdy flashlight and shone it about. The beam found the knife, imbedded in the door not three feet above his head. He shuddered.
Finally, the flashlight found Yorick. He had lost two more teeth. Ward briefly contemplated the loss. It made Yorick definitely more rakish, he concluded. And, after tonight’s brush with injury, possibly death, definitely more fearsome.
Mind Over Murder Page 37
