The Rosary Murders

by William X. Kienzle

  In the lower right-hand corner, the spot at which Irene was pointing a repentant finger, was a single column story, headlined, “Abortion Condemned Again by Holy See.” The story’s lead began, “To avoid any misconception…” Sometimes small blunders like that simply escaped everyone’s attention until they appeared in print.

  Koesler helplessly raised his eyes to heaven, sighed, and said to no one in particular, “I think they should make a movie about printers’ devils to rival The Exorcist in horror.”

  Sergeant Ned Harris knocked perfunctorily but did not wait for an invitation before entering Lieutenant Koznicki’s office. “We got a break!” he announced triumphantly.

  “It’s about time.” Koznicki was beginning to think that if they hadn’t had bad luck on this case, they wouldn’t have had any luck at all.

  “Fallon broke down the stories of two of the hospital people.” Harris was so elated he ignored the chair and began pacing in a tight little rectangle to the right of Koznicki’s desk. “The orderly and the practical nurse—you know, the ones Fallon didn’t believe from the beginning. He finally got them to admit they were in the sack together the afternoon of the priest’s murder. Actually, they hit the bed every time either of them finds an empty room. Horny bastards!” Harris added, admiringly.

  “It’s nice they’re sexually active,” Koznicki interrupted, “but where’s the break?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Harris discarded his irrelevance. “Well, after Fallon broke their alibis, they got to be very cooperative. Especially after Fallon agreed to keep their sexual Olympic games a secret in return for all the information they could give.”

  “And… ?”

  “Well, after they got done havin’ a piece of each other, they left the room. But they always leave the scene of assignation cautious, you know.” Harris obviously relished this part of the story. He was so pleased with it he began to strut. “They look around, you know, man, to see if there’s anyone around to notice they’re both comin’ out of the same empty room.”

  Even Koznicki was smiling.

  “So,” Harris continued, “they both notice this guy dressed in hospital whites, only neither one of them has ever seen this guy before—or since. If he works at the hospital, it’s not on that floor.”

  “How about the time?” Koznicki asked. “Were they able to establish the time?”

  “3:12 on the afternoon of February twenty-third.”

  “3:12?”

  “Yup, 3:12. They entered the available room promptly at three, when most of the staff was settled in the chapel, and it always takes them twelve minutes.”

  “It always takes them twelve minutes?”

  “That’s right. That’s what they said.”

  Both men were impressed, first, that the two could perform at the drop of an available bed and, second, that they had an inflexible twelve-minute routine.

  “That’s the damndest thing I’ve ever heard!”

  “Me too. But by the time they got to that detail they were too scared to lie.”

  “You’re right. Nobody could make up something like that. Well, their timing puts our suspect at the scene at the right time. Where are our lovebirds now?”

  “They’re with Sundell, the artist. He’s getting up a composite. And that reminds me, that’s the end of the good news.”

  “Oh?” Koznicki was too confirmed a believer in Murphy’s Law to doubt the existence of bad news in any situation.

  “Our witnesses didn’t get too good a look at the suspect. But from what they were able to observe, and according to the description they gave Fallon, he’s mister average guy. Which means he’s not a member of the Pistons or a sideshow midget. And…” Harris paused for effect.

  “And?” Koznicki responded.

  ‘He’s not a member of my esteemed race.”

  “Caucasian, eh? O.K., that lets him blend in well with the hospital personnel but makes him more easily identifiable in the convent neighborhood.”

  “If it’s the same guy in both cases.”

  “It’s the same guy.” Although there was some subtle pressure from a few of his superiors of late, Koznicki was unwilling to abandon his assumptions. There had been ten days between the two murders. Today was only a week after the nun’s death. There was time.

  “That’s not the end of the bad news.”

  Koznicki leaned forward. “There’s more?” Murphy was working overtime today.

  “That guy from the Free Press, Cox, he’s got the story.”

  “Cox? How?”

  “It’s one of Fallon’s little games. Every time he breaks somebody’s alibi, he lets ’em stew a while alone and think about the value of cooperation. Well, once he broke the nurse and super-stud, he put them in the reception area just outside the office he was using in the hospital. The cop on guard in the doorway didn’t know they were in there, and he let Cox in ’cause Cox said he had an appointment with Fallon.”

  “Goddam dumb!”

  “You know that. I know that. And, believe me, now that cop knows that.”

  “How did Cox get the story from them?”

  “About the same way Fallon did. First convinced them he knew they were witnesses—which he didn’t, just a good bluff—then promised not to use the bed bit.”

  Koznicki was silent for several moments, drumming his fingers on his desk. “Dammit! It’s not the story. We’d have given it to the media anyway. Once we get a composite, we’d need them to publicize it. But this case is developing a very nasty habit of leaks. Far too much is getting to the press beyond our control. Our security stinks. And I won’t have it! Get word out to the entire team: We’ll have a meeting tomorrow morning at nine sharp. We’ve got to tighten this up.”

  “Gotcha, Walt. But, after a while, you wanna talk about that twelve-minute drill?”

  Koznicki smiled briefly. “Does something to your racial image, don’t it? Having a honkie who can perform like that?”

  “Could you?” Harris closed the door as he left.

  Father Michael Dailey and Sister Dorothy Hoover were seated in the living room of St. Gall’s rectory. They had solved all the Church’s major problems and now had turned to the field of psychology.

  “The trouble with these ‘feel good’ movements of today,” said Dailey, sucking in hard on his pipe several times to keep it lit, “is that you’re charged several hundred dollars for a weekend of self-torture just so you can tell somebody what’s bothering you. After which, you feel better.”

  “You mean like Esalen and est and the group-gropes?” said Dorothy, tucking one unshod foot beneath her on the couch.

  “Yeah, it happens every time. That’s what drives psychiatrists nuts. A patient comes in because he feels guilty or bad and as soon as he’s able to tell the doctor what’s bothering him, he feels better and doesn’t come back. And he leaves the doctor with a $35-a-fifty-minute-hour gap in his schedule.”

  “Oh, come on,” Dorothy waved a cloud of pipe smoke away from her eyes, “it doesn’t always work that way.”

  “Well, no. Not if you’ve got a really deep neurosis or psychosis. But… well, didn’t you ever have to make a really difficult or embarrassing confession—excuse me, I mean as part of the Sacrament of Reconciliation?”

  Dorothy smiled; she knew she would update even Father Dailey one of these days. But try as she might, she couldn’t recall a really difficult confession. “No, I don’t think so.”

  Dailey snorted as he thought of the confessions he’d made and the ones he’d heard. Generally, the only embarrassment in confession was in connection with sexual sins. Little boys masturbated. Strangely, if you could believe them, little girls did not. They didn’t get involved in sexual sins until premarital sex or contraception. And then, women always had a way of making their involvement in sex seem like a movie they had watched. As if a wicked man had had his way with them while they passively endured it as a way of preserving courtship or a marriage. And that was only in the good old days. The new moralit
y had taken care of all that. Nowadays, masturbation was natural, premarital sex was necessary, and contraception helped fight the population explosion. Guessing at Dorothy’s relative youth and noting her religious vocation, Dailey concluded that perhaps she had never, indeed, had to make a torturous confession.

  “Well, then, let me tell you,” he said, applying a fresh match to old tobacco, “it can be rough. But if it’s a painful process, there’s no describing the feeling of relief that follows.”

  With that, a soft, echoing buzz filled the rectory.

  “Speaking of the agony of confession, there’s some poor soul now who wants to go through it.” Dailey rose and took a light topcoat from where it lay rumpled over the back of a chair.

  “You got the janitor to fix the buzzer?”

  “Yeah. Muffled it and put speakers in every room. That way, I hear it but it doesn’t scare everyone to death. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Wait right here, and I’ll tell you more about the good old days that you missed by being born so recently.”

  They exchanged smiles as Dailey tapped out his pipe and left.

  It was only a few yards walk over to the church. Dailey approached the confessional and noted that the small red light over the old confessional box was lit. Ah, the plastic church of today, Dailey thought, as he opened the door to his compartment of the confessional; you pays your money and you takes your choice.

  Dailey seated himself, bounced a couple of times on the chair to get comfortable, and slid back the small door to the penitent’s side. While the penitent’s box was pitch dark, the priest was clearly silhouetted by the light from the open room to his right. Dailey propped his left elbow on the small shelf under the penitent’s window and rested his head on his left hand. It was the classic pose.

  Nothing happened. Not too unusual. With some frequency, penitents were either young and had forgotten their story, or adults who were too nervous to begin without a little support from the priest.

  “May the Lord be on your lips and in your heart,” intoned Dailey, “so that you may rightly and sincerely confess your sins.” With that, his right hand traced the sign of the cross in the air.

  It was a small sound, not unlike a popping champagne cork. But the bullet crashed through Dailey’s head, scrambling much of his brain in its wake, and embedded itself in the wall. Dailey fell from his chair like a puppet whose strings had been cut. He lay on the floor of the confessional room with blood beginning to ooze from his mouth, nose, and the bullet holes in either side of his head. All was quiet in the empty church but for the involuntary sounds old buildings make.

  The man stood and detached the silencer from his revolver and tucked both in inside coat pockets. Emerging from the penitent’s box, he entered the larger confessional room where Dailey’s inert body lay, the eyes open in an eternal look of surprise. Removing a small black rosary from his coat pocket, the man bent down and carefully wound the beads around Dailey’s left wrist, then guided the opening strand of beads and the crucifix between the dead priest’s thumb and index finger. Then he left.

  In the rectory, Sister Dorothy had been reading the latest copy of the Detroit Catholic. She was startled when she realized that she had finished the entire paper and Father Dailey had not yet returned. This was a long time for one confession. Perhaps there had been more than one penitent. She didn’t know why she felt so uneasy. Maybe it was the Catholic’s front-page story on the murders of Father Lord and Sister Ann. It couldn’t hurt to just go over to the church and check.

  Later, she remembered screaming. Many, many times. She remembered fighting off nausea. She remembered struggling not to faint. She remembered somehow making her way back to the rectory and calling the police. Then she allowed herself to be human. She did faint.

  Even though it was late afternoon with the attendant problems of rush-hour traffic, Sergeant Ned Harris decided to take the Lodge Freeway from downtown out to the far northwest side. He had both the flasher and siren on, something he seldom did. But he was in a hurry.

  Seated next to him was Lieutenant Koznicki. Neither man had said anything since leaving the underground garage ten minutes ago. Both were harboring private thoughts in anticipation of what they would find in St. Gall’s church. Koznicki broke the silence.

  “Damn!” He picked up his car phone, waited a few seconds, then asked the operator to patch him through to his secretary. Another few moments of waiting and he asked her to call Father Koesler and postpone their meeting.

  “What was that all about?” asked Harris, as he ran the blue Plymouth over the curb and rode the shoulder of the freeway.

  “I just remembered, I had an appointment with Father Koesler, the editor of the Detroit Catholic.”

  “What’s he got?”

  “A lead, I think.”

  Harris shook his head and grinned, “You’d take a lead from the devil himself.”

  “Frequently have.”

  They drove a few more minutes in silence, while Harris expertly slalomed through the maze of crawling cars and trucks. Again Koznicki broke the silence.

  “Do you remember how many phone calls we got this past week on the death of nuns and priests and the like?”

  Harris thought a moment. “Four, I think. The Lutheran pastor, the old priest at the seminary, and two—no, three—nuns. How many’s that make?”

  “Five.”

  “Like I said, five.”

  “I can’t believe this order is working so well. So far, we’ve been informed first on every single death. And somebody from our team has been on the scene early enough to check out every one of them. Murphy’s Law must be working on somebody else. And that’s fine with me.”

  “Looks like you got a gusher on this one.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If this is another rosary murder, you got a convert.”

  “Good to have you aboard.”

  Harris flipped off the siren and light, turned off Wyoming and parked at the driveway entrance to St. Gall’s. For a rainy Friday afternoon, there was a considerable crowd gathered outside the church. A cluster of neighbors was at the inner core, with passersby adding to the crowd by the minute, and there were enough cops around to control a parade.

  Koznicki and Harris left the car and walked toward the church. They were an impressive pair. Despite Koznicki’s enormous bulk, he walked with an unexpected lithe grace. Almost like an elephant who’d gone to ballet school. Harris, several inches shorter than Koznicki, was, nevertheless, a six-footer. Brown-skinned, clean-shaven, with close-cropped hair, he was impeccably dressed, his trim, athletic body reminding one of a cat ready to spring.

  The two men passed through the crowd as easily as the Israelites through the Red Sea. Koznicki was pleased to see Sergeant Fred Ross, who had been borrowed from Connor Station for Koznicki’s special squad, in charge of the crowd. Ross was dependably professional, and his police procedure was letter perfect.

  “It’s clean, Lieutenant,” said Ross, as Koznicki passed him. “No one’s touched the body.”

  Koznicki nodded and proceeded into the church. Inside, it was more like a train depot than a place of worship. People, mostly uniformed police, were everywhere. And everyone seemed to be talking. Some civilians were being interviewed by the police; some of the police were being interviewed by reporters; some of the police were taking in the dimensions of the church; others were examining the confessional. Flashbulbs were popping incessantly, giving the scene an even more surreal quality. Detective Sergeant Dan Fallon, who had hurried over from St. Mary’s Hospital and had been among the first to arrive, was making sure no one approached the body.

  Koznicki and Harris spent a quiet moment just looking down at the late Father Dailey. By now, the blood had formed a halo around his head, the darkened red contrasting with the priest’s gray-flecked carroty hair.

  Both Koznicki and Harris squatted beside the body.

  Koznicki looked up at Fallon. “Have they photographed this?” he asked, pointing to the p
riest’s hand holding the rosary. Fallon nodded. “From every angle?” Again Fallon nodded. Koznicki lifted the priest’s arm, and with a handkerchief he had taken from his pocket, carefully unwound the rosary from the dead man’s wrist. He then enclosed the rosary in the handkerchief and put both in his pocket.

  Both Koznicki and Harris stood. “Wrap it up,” Koznicki told Fallon.

  Back in the car, Harris started the motor, but before putting it in gear, he turned to Koznicki and said, “I believe.”

  There was no way of missing the added member of the eight o’clock Mass congregation. Lieutenant Walter Koznicki took up a good part of the first pew left side. Father Koesler noticed him immediately on entering from the sacristy. Not only was Koznicki a very visible addition to the usual small group who attended daily Mass; the lieutenant would have stood out like a bull moose at an SRO Midnight Mass. Koesler could not help but wonder why Koznicki had come. But reasons would have to wait for ritual.

  At the Prayer of the Faithful, Koesler led a petition for the happy repose of the soul of Father Dailey. As he did so, he took particular note of Koznicki. But the policeman seemed without special reaction. He merely responded with the rest, “Lord, hear our prayer.” When Koznicki received communion, Koesler’s final question about his religious persuasion was answered. He had presumed that the policeman’s Polish name indicated Catholicism. It didn’t work with all Irish or even all Italians, but, almost invariably, to be Polish was to be Catholic.

  As soon as he had removed his Mass vestments, Koesler hurriedly left the sacristy. As he’d expected, Koznicki, seated all over the front pew, was waiting for him.

  “Welcome to St. Ursula’s, Lieutenant.”

  “Thank you. You’ve heard, obviously, about Father Dailey.”

  “Yes, last night on the radio and TV. I’m sorry.”

  “So am I.”

  “Was he really…?”

  “Yes. He was another victim of our friend who leaves rosaries. The black rosary, identical to the first two, was wrapped around Father Dailey’s wrist just as you and Miss Baldwin have described.”