Chase shrugged wearily. “I don’t know. But it’s a good question. Whatever it was, it must have been pretty compelling.
“Maybe they were just unwilling to put their money on me. Maybe Hoffman promised them something special in the deal. Maybe they just thought Hoffman would beat me out. Maybe,” he shook his head, “maybe after what happened today they’re right.”
“The bastard!”
Ordinarily, Louise did not use such epithets. “If I ever see that hypocrite in church again, I’ll be physically ill! At least we’ll never have to see him socially again.”
“Afraid we will, Lou—at least one more time.”
She placed a finger against her lips and carefully considered their schedule. She could see their social calendar in her mind’s eye. But she couldn’t find on it an event they Would have to share with the Hoffmans.
“It happened rather suddenly the other day . . . and I forgot to tell you about it. The Company is hosting a combination birthday and bon voyage party for Frank Martin at the Collegiate Club Monday evening. Our calendar was open on that date,” he hastened to add, “and I accepted.”
Her memory affirmed that the date was, indeed, open. “Oh, Frank . . . must we?”
“Afraid so. It will be a rather wide open party. I’ve invited Bishop Ratigan and Father Koesler. And—while we were still speaking—Hoffman told me he had invited his sister and brother-in-law. I’m afraid our absence would be noted. And not only would our absence be noted, it would be a tacit admission of something I am not yet willing to admit—that I’m through. It looks bad now—very, very bad. But at least I know who the enemy is . . . finally. And I’m going to do my damndest to come back from this.”
Louise silently resolved that she would be there. She would remain at her husband’s side, proudly, no matter what.
“Well, well,” she said, finally, “the whole cast will be there. The clergy, the Hoffmans, the Mercurys, and the Chases. There should be enough friction to start a pretty good fire.”
All in all, he thought he would get along very well with Father Dowling.
Koesler had only recently chanced upon the Father Dowling series of murder mysteries. One by one, he had checked them out of the public library. He enjoyed them so much, his only fear was that their author, Ralph McInerny, would run out of either ideas or patience. In Koesler’s opinion, with the exception of J.F. Powers and those authors who were or had been priests, McInerny was the only creator of a fictional priest who truly captured what it was like to be a priest.
Koesler was about the same age and disposition as the fictional Father Dowling. Both were in their mid-fifties; neither cared for canon law; both got along ably in the modern Church, but both thought the good old days really were the good old days more than less, and neither understood the very young new Roman Catholic clergy.
Of course, since Father Dowling existed only in fictional murder mysteries, he was, naturally, McInerny’s sleuth. At the denouement of each book, it was always Father Dowling who solved the mystery.
But, oddly, Father Koesler himself had become involved in several murder investigations in the Detroit area. Investigations that had comprised a strong Catholic element. As a result, Koesler had come to know not a few Detroit homicide detectives. Not the least of these was Inspector Walter Koznicki, the head of the homicide division. Over the years, Koesler and Koznicki had become fast friends.
And that, in turn, was interesting. Because the fictional Father Dowling’s best friend was named Keegan. And he was chief of detectives in the Chicago suburb that was the setting for their mysteries. Life, thought Father Koesler, imitates art.
At present, Father Dowling and friends were keeping Koesler company while he sat in his confessional with plenty of time to read. If the numbers coming to confession were not what they used to be—and they weren’t—Saturday night was about the slowest time of all.
From time to time, Koesler considered discontinuing Saturday evening confessions. But then he would think of the lonely soul, perhaps someone who’d been away so long he or she didn’t know there were no more long lines of penitents. Such a person deserved an opportunity to go to confession while the inclination was there. Not infrequently, with the small numbers at daily Mass, at Lenten devotions, at convert classes, Koesler was forced to renew his faith in the value of just one immortal soul.
Seated in the confessional, thinking of one immortal soul brought to mind an incident that had occurred in his first parochial assignment at St. David’s. The hour of 9:00 p.m. had been approaching and even though those had been the good old days of wall-to-wall penitents, none remained that particular Saturday evening. At exactly 9:00, Koesler had stepped out of his confessional to discover he was alone in the church.
He had stopped at the communion railing to pray for a few moments. When all of a sudden he had heard such a clatter in the rear vestibule! Head still bowed, but no longer in prayer, he had attempted to figure out what was going on.
They were young boys and they were apparently trying with vigor to get one of their number to go to confession. Just in case they might succeed, Koesler thought it well for him to return to his confessional.
All the way down the side aisle they struggled and shouted. The shouts were muted for the benefit of church decorum, but they were shouts nonetheless.
“Come on, Louie, get in there! It ain’t gonna hurt ya!”
“Whaddya mean, it ain’t gonna hurt me? If it don’t hurt, YOU go!”
“I went!”
After much of the same, plus evident attempts by Louie to escape, at long last a small body came hurtling through the curtain at one side of Koesler’s confessional. The body hit the wall and collapsed appropriately on the kneeler.
“Do you want to go to confession?” Koesler asked.
“I guess so.”
Koesler had long considered the incident a prime example of Catholic action.
His reverie was interrupted by someone entering the confessional. Koesler was startled. He hadn’t heard anyone enter the church. He decided he must have been deeply lost in thought. Whoever had come in knelt on the other side of the screen. Koesler turned out the light on his side.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been two months since my last confession.”
This was a no-nonsense lady and, in all probability, an old-timer.
“I lost my temper with my husband, oh, four to five times. He’s retired, you see, and he’s always underfoot. I wish he’d go out once in a while. He could get a part-time job, maybe do volunteer work. But all he does is sit around the house making one mess after another. He just sits around and watches TV—soap operas—and smokes one cigar after another. God, how that house stinks after all those cigars.”
She went on for several minutes enumerating her husband’s sins. It had been a long time since Koesler had heard this type of “confession,” although at one time it had been quite common. Experience had taught him there was no correcting her method of “confessing.” There was really nothing to do but listen, give a penance, and absolve.
“And,” she concluded, “we practiced birth control seven times. That’s because he’s home all the time with nothing to do.”
Koesler almost laughed aloud. She must be well beyond menopause. Birth control for them must be no more than a habit describing their sex lives.
He said a few words, very few, calling her attention to the necessity of evaluating her own relationship to God rather than her husband’s peccadilloes, gave her a penance of five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys, and absolved her.
After she left, he recalled her confessing birth control and was reminded of the story of the very elderly couple planning to be married. As they sat in the rectory, making arrangements, the priest asked where they intended to live. Looking lovingly at each other they said they weren’t sure but wherever they would go they agreed they had to live close to an elementary school. Whereupon the priest told them that while they might be heir m
inded, they probably were not heir conditioned.
Koesler flipped on the light again and resumed his Father Dowling mystery. It was titled, Second Vespers. Odd title. So few would know what it meant . . . certainly very few of the younger clergy. Put a breviary in their hands and they wouldn’t know what to do with it. Much less would they be familiar with the hour of prayer called Vespers, still less the recondite Second Vespers.
As far as Koesler knew, only a few of the older clergy still prayed, or “read” their breviaries. Basically a monastic choir prayer, the breviary was a prayer book that divided each day into canonical hours, eight in all, from morning until evening.
Following a gradual evolvement over centuries, Pope Saint Pius V had carried out the will of the Council of Trent and in 1568, he had obligated the daily recitation of the breviary for all the clergy in major orders in the Western Church.
And that was pretty much the way Koesler had found things when he received his first major order, the subdeaconate, in June of 1953.
It was one of the stereotypes. Catholics ate fish on Friday, went to Mass on Sunday, and priests read their breviaries every day. Usually, the priest could be found, breviary in hand, pacing back and forth, lips moving rapidly and noiselessly—it was one of the rules: Lips must move.
One of the jokes that emerged from this practice involved two priests returning from a day off and realizing at 11:30 p.m. that neither had finished reading the day’s breviary. So the driver stopped the car on the highway shoulder and left the headlights burning. Each priest took his breviary and, each sitting in front of one headlight, began to read. At which point, a passing trucker leaned out of his cab window and shouted, “That must be one hell of a book!”
Koesler continued to read his breviary daily, even though most other priests used a scaled-down vernacular version, or had long since quit . . . or had never begun. He still did not understand every Latin word. But he understood enough to be able to make the recitation an authentic prayer.
He had just returned to Second Vespers when another penitent entered the confessional. The penitent settled in on the kneeler. Another traditional confession. That was perfectly all right with Koesler. Before turning off his light, he glanced at his watch. A quarter to 9:00. This would be the final penitent of the evening—unless somebody decided to throw Louie in.
Koesler leaned toward the screen, quite unconsciously assuming the classic position of the confessor, head slightly bowed, elbow on the arm of the chair, palm cupping chin.
Nothing happened. Not that the silence was unusual. Many times the priest had to speak first to let the penitent know it was all right to begin. But there was something out of the ordinary about this particular situation, although Koesler could not identify exactly what was wrong. Perhaps it was the total lack of sound. The penitent, once he or she had entered the confessional, had made no sound at all. No shifting about to try to discover something comfortable about this position of kneeling upright. Not even the sound of breathing.
Whatever, it was making Koesler a bit nervous. More than once he had thought about how vulnerable a priest was in a confessional, especially in an otherwise empty church. Anyone could enter for any reason. As long as a screen or curtain separated them, the priest could not tell who was there.
“Yes,” Koesler said at length, “you may begin now.”
Silence.
“It’s all right to begin now,” he said, a little more loudly. It was possible the penitent might be hard of hearing. And Koesler supposed there was no reason to worry about volume. He was quite certain there was no one else in the church.
Still, silence.
“How long has it been since your last confession?” This might be one of those instances wherein information had to be extracted like teeth.
“Oh . . . a long . . . long time.”
The voice sent a shudder through Koesler. It was like nothing he’d ever heard. Whoever was on the other side of the screen was not whispering, but speaking in a very soft tone. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.
“About how long?” Koesler pressed.
“Oh, so long, so long . . . ago. I just can’t . . . remember . . . oh
He tried to place the voice. Tried to compare it to anyone he’d heard. It sounded just a bit like Truman Capote’s voice. The pitch was high enough that it could be a woman, yet low enough that it could be a man. There was a sing-song quality to it as if it might have been a child, yet it certainly wasn’t a child. And there was an odd pausing between words, as if the speaker were slightly unfamiliar with the language and was searching for what in reality were quite common words.
“All right,” Koesler said very softly. At least there was no hearing problem evident. “Let’s forget about how long it’s been. Do you have any sins to confess?”
“Sins? Oh, my, yes!” There was a soft little chuckle, an odd chuckle, as odd as the voice. “I think you are . . . describing my . . . life.”
“Your life?”
“Oh, yes.” A pause. “Do you . . . think . . . Father . . . that the devil can take . . . over a person’s . . . life?”
Koesler suspected a verbal trap, but quickly decided to answer as if the question had been seriously put.
“Diabolic possession or obsession? It’s happened and is pretty well documented. Yes, I believe it can happen.”
“I believe it . . . happened to me . . . Father.” The person said it as matter-of-factly as if announcing that he or she had contracted a cold.
“Happened to you?” Though the church was chilly, Koesler felt very warm.
“If . . . I’m right, you are talking . . . to Satan.” A fiendish little chuckle. “You didn’t ever . . . think that you . . . would talk . . . with the devil?”
Whoever it was, Koesler decided it was a very disturbed person who needed a level of professional help that was far beyond his capabilities. Although he had never dealt with anyone as obviously divorced from sanity as this person evidently was, Koesler had referred disturbed parishioners to a few trusted professionals in the past. The special problem in a situation like this was the situation itself. How to get this out of the internal forum into the external? How to get it out of the confessional and into an office?
“Would you make an appointment to see a very good therapist if I told you how to get in touch with him?”
A soft, odd laugh.
“Would you come and see me outside of confession sometime?”
“Oh, I . . . will see you outside . . . the confessional.” Another soft laugh. “I . . . have some . . . mischief planned. I will see . . . you at the scene of . . . the mischief.”
Koesler tried to stall for a bit more time. The person seemed to be making a move to leave. “But you see, if you don’t confess any sin and express your sorrow for it, I can’t absolve you.”
The laugh was loud and utterly mirthless. “The fool,” the person shouted, “thinks he can . . . absolve the devil!”
With that, the person was gone.
Koesler heard the church door close. He did not frighten easily . . . but he was genuinely frightened.
16.
Father Koesler thought he might be one of the last guests to arrive for Frank Martin’s combination birthday and bon voyage party. Judging by the number of cars in the Collegiate Club’s parking lot, it indeed did not seem possible for many more guests to squeeze in.
Koesler ordinarily was not late for functions. If anything, he had an unhappy habit of being early. He was tardy this evening because he had scheduled more appointments than he should have. He had done this because he had been distracted and disturbed over the past two days by that very odd confession from the person who claimed to be the devil.
All day Sunday and today he had tried to figure out who it might be. Was it possible Koesler knew the person? If whoever it was had tried to conceal his or her identity by creating a strange sounding voice, the effort had been a smashing success.
The Collegiate was one of a
surprisingly large number of private clubs Koesler had never visited. On the one hand, he did not particularly care for private clubs, and on the other, to be frank, he was rarely invited to any.
He found the unattended cloakroom to the left of the entry. Next to that was the men’s room. Next to that—since no one was impeding him he decided to investigate a bit—was the locker room. He could hear in the distance the thud of rubber balls. Must be handball or racquetball courts, he decided.
Retracing his steps, he found himself in a long hallway. If there was any doubt the Frank Martin party was going on in the large, well-lit, noisy room at the end of the hall, the question was settled by a sign midway down the hall announcing that very fact.
Because he fully expected to find some, Koesler was amazed at the seeming absence of security measures. No one had checked his identity or questioned his presence. True, he was wearing his clericals. But anyone could dress as a priest.
From the door, he had an excellent view of the room, several steps below the hall level.
Several yards into the room, against one wall, a table had been set up for guest registration. On the other side of the doorway, against the same wall, was the bar, busily manned by three bartenders. From the number of filled glasses lined up at the bar’s edge, Koesler guessed they were pre-filling orders. There were so many waiters—no waitresses—moving about that Koesler gave up trying to count them. In the center of the room was a huge table heavy with hot and cold hors d’oeuvres.
The guests, as was usual at such affairs, were clustered in tight groups, large and small.
At the extreme opposite end of the room from where Koesler still stood at the doorway, were Mr. and Mrs. Frank Martin. He couldn’t decide whether they were both using makeup or standing under a special spotlight, but they somehow appeared set apart from everyone else. Perhaps, he thought, it might be the nimbus resulting from being chairman and first lady of The Company.
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