Body Count

by William Kienzle

  “But” —Dunn was grinning from ear to ear—“we know the whole story! We know the priest has been killed! We know who did it! We even know where the body is buried, for God’s sake!”

  Koesler regarded the other priest intently for a few moments. “And what do you suggest we do with all this knowledge?”

  Dunn thought seriously. “Well, ” he said finally, “I don’t suppose we can just tell anybody—the police … the media.” He looked at Koesler as if the statement were a question.

  Koesler slowly shook his head.

  Dunn continued to think. Then, “Wait a minute. You can do something about this even if I can’t.”

  “I can?” Koesler’s tone was skeptical.

  “Sure. For one thing, I’ll bet the cops are going to ask you for help again. Just like you said yesterday, they come up with a case that has a peculiarly Catholic background, they need help with the Catholic angle, and they call on you—tried and true. Except this time you already know which closet the skeletons are in. So you just sort of steer them to the answer. They will be amazed. You will never have been better!”

  Koesler shook his head with deliberateness. “You must, you really must have studied the seal of confession in the seminary. And since you’re out only three years, it wasn’t all that long ago.”

  “So?”

  “So you must know that the confidentiality of information learned through the confessional is inviolable. There are no exceptions.”

  Dunn shook his head. “What I do know is that there aren’t any rules that don’t have exceptions. All those absolutes of the pre-Vatican II Church are gone.”

  Koesler well remembered the long string of absolute rules that he had grown up with, that he’d learned, that he had pretty well observed, for not to observe them was to sin. He remembered them far better than Dunn possibly could. Dunn had heard of the absolutes. Koesler had lived them.

  “Yes, I’ve watched the absolutes crumble …” Koesler almost sighed. “It was a cultural shock for most of us old geezers. I doubt you’ll ever know what it was like living in those days that stretched back for centuries. I think it was McAfee Brown who wrote that if the Catholic Church ever changed a doctrine radically—say, that birth control was good instead of bad—the official statement would have to begin, ‘As the Church has always taught …’ Simply because we have no way to say ‘oops.’”

  Dunn chuckled.

  “Not being able to say ‘sorry’ means for one thing that you’re dealing with a bunch of absolutes. However” —Koesler’s voice took on an uncompromising tone—“the absolute protection of secrecy in the confessional is one of the absolutes that stuck around.”

  “Come on” —Dunn’s tone was cynical—“no exceptions?”

  “Okay, ” Koesler responded after quick reflection, “one exception: If the penitent comes to the confessor afterward—if the penitent takes the initiative—the two of them may discuss what was confessed. No–one more exception: If the penitent releases the priest from the confidentiality. But that, Father Dunn, is that!”

  Dunn recognized the implication of Koesler’s use of his title, especially since it was Koesler who had suggested they operate on a firstname basis. It took him back to when he was a misbehaving boy and his mother would address him as “Nicholas!”

  “To be perfectly frank, ” Dunn said, “I don’t see it. I don’t agree. Look, that guy yesterday—what’s his name?—Guido Vespa—I heard him use the word ‘contract.’ This was a contract murder. Now I know I don’t have as much experience in this stuff as you do, but I’ve seen my share of Godfather movies. And contract killings are committed by hit men. Men who kill for money, or just because they are employed to kill people.

  “Look at the opportunity you’ve got! You can single-handedly put a hit man out of business, help send him to prison. You’ll be saving lives, all the lives that guy would have taken if you hadn’t put him away. I think that’s ample reason to at least … fudge … the seal of confession.

  “Besides, you wouldn’t have to just come out and tell the cops that you heard this in confession. You wouldn’t have to even mention the confessional. If they ask you for help … you help them. Just sort of steer them in the right direction.” He turned his hands palms upward on the table. “Simple?”

  Koesler regarded the young man in a moment’s silence, then glanced at the still nearly full coffee mug. “Your coffee’s cold. Let me get rid of that and pour you a fresh cup—“

  “No!” The force of Dunn’s reply was enough to halt Koesler’s move from his chair. “No, ” Dunn repeated more composedly. “Don’t trouble yourself. I just remembered, I was going to cut back on the stuff.” Dunn leaned forward. “Well, what do you think: Doesn’t my idea sound great?”

  “Your idea …” Koesler decided to try a different approach. “There are various kinds of secrets, Nick,”

  “I know that.”

  “Just a quick review to make sure we’re talking about the same thing, okay?”

  Dunn nodded. He did want coffee. But not the hemlock in the pot on the counter.

  “Okay.” Koesler proceeded: “There is information that by its very nature is confidential. As, for instance, an individual’s sexual orientation. Somebody you know is gay but you also know he doesn’t want that revealed. Or there’s the secret that someone tells you and asks you not to tell. He’s depending on you to keep his secret; otherwise he wouldn’t reveal it to you.

  “Then there’s the professional secret—doctor-patient or attorneyclient. All of those secrets are precious to the individual who is affected by each of them and so, to varying degrees, that person’s desire that such a secret be honored and protected must be honored.

  “Anyone who is trusted with any of those secrets may have to weigh the importance of keeping the information to himself against, say, the common good. Possibly the professional secret may be the most crucial of all of them. Is there any time or circumstance when a doctor, say, is obliged to reveal the confidential information about his patient?”

  “I suppose. Sure.”

  “Maybe, ” Koesler said, “a man with AIDS is sexually promiscuous.”

  “Of course, the doctor would have to tell. His patient is risking the lives of all those people.” Dunn quickly added, “But that’s just what I was saying: The doctor has to forget about his professional restraint because of … well, exactly what you said: the common good. And you have to steer the police to this hit man or he’s going to kill again … and again. You’d even be an accessory, no?”

  “I don’t think so.” Koesler rose to pour himself another cup of coffee. If Koesler had taste buds they must have expired, thought Dunn; maybe that’s what happens as you grow old: body organs die one by one.

  “The difference” —Koesler returned to his chair and his theme– “between the professional secret of the doctor and the confessional secret of the priest is not in the nature of the secret but in the person to whom the secret is entrusted.”

  “Oh, come on now, Bob—you’re not going to pull that old cultic-character-of-the-priesthood, are you? Where the priest is somehow superhuman? Priests have come down off the mystic pedestal long ago. Definitely since the Council.”

  “Well …” Koesler smiled. “Yes and no. I know priests are off the pedestal, more or less. And that’s both good news and bad. But that’s not the point here. The point here is the person to whom the information was given.”

  “Huh?”

  “Look, Nick, I don’t want to get too doctrinaire, but I’ve got to be sure you and I are on the same wavelength. We believe that Jesus is the son of God and so He had the power to forgive sin.”

  “Don’t go too fast, Bob.” Dunn’s sarcasm was evident.

  “I know, I know … but be patient; this is going somewhere, Koesler advised.

  “Now, we also believe He gave this power to forgive sin to His apostles. He told them that when they forgave sins, the sins were forgiven. But if they would not forgive
sins, those sins remained unforgiven. Since there was a dual responsibility—to forgive or deny forgiveness—it seemed appropriate to determine the state of the penitent’s conscience and what sins had been committed. And so, there’s confession.

  “The method of hearing confession developed over the centuries. Probably it was the Celtic monks of the sixth century who incorporated the private confession to a priest with forgiveness without public penance, denunciation, or any public or legal consequences. With that, each person’s sins became a private matter.

  “A little later on, the confessional booth was introduced in Spain to get rid of some abuses. Whatever. In any case, once you got sins privately confessed and forgiven, along with a private place as the setting, you also got anonymity for the penitent—and unconditional confidentiality. And that was the practice until, in the mid-sixteenth century, the Council of Trent rejected the claim that there ever could be an adequate reason for violating the seal of confession. And that’s the way it’s pretty much been ever since—total, absolute, and unconditional.”

  Dunn looked askance. “‘Celtic monks’? ‘The sixth century’? ‘Trent’? You looked those up. You don’t have that kind of detail at your fingertips!”

  “You’re right: I did look it up. Last night after this first came up and we apparently disagreed on an issue that I consider of prime importance.

  “Put it this way: I didn’t want to lose this argument on some flimsy technicality.”

  “Have we gotten where you’re going yet?” Dunn asked. “I still don’t see any compelling reason why the seal can’t admit an exception. Everything else does.”

  “I could take exception to your ‘Everything else does, ’ but for the moment, let’s stick to confession.

  “Now, a gentleman we know as Guido Vespa—thanks to your identification” —Koesler still did not wish to acknowledge that he himself had seen the man—“came to confession yesterday. He confided in me—and, although he didn’t know it at the time, to you too—that he had committed murder. He told me this not because I am a doctor, a lawyer, or any other public professional, but because I am a priest. And, in the last analysis, not even because I am a priest. You’ve heard of the expression in loco parentis?”

  “‘In the place of the parent, ’” Dunn correctly translated. “Somebody who is not the parent of a child is empowered to act as if he or she were the parent—in the place of the parent. But wait a minute—“

  Koesler smiled. “You know where I’m going now, don’t you? Mr. Vespa told me what was bothering his conscience because—as he was taught to believe—I was taking the place of Jesus. I was taking the place of God. Not in loco parentis, but in loco Dei. He definitely would not have told me—or you or any other priest—if he had not implicitly believed he was going through a person who was able to forgive his sin. Because that person had received his commission to forgive sin from Jesus, the son of God.

  “Me.

  “Vespa believed that I have that power because Jesus gave it to the apostles and they passed the power on through their successors. He believes that because that’s what we taught him. If he were really wearing his eyes of faith, he would not be confessing to me—he would not even be seeing me. He would believe he was confessing to God. If God wanted to reveal the sin, He could. But I don’t believe God ever would.

  “And that, in a nutshell, my dear Father Dunn, is why there are no exceptions to the seal. Not because there is a law against revealing a confessed sin. Although there is such a law, both in the old and the new Code of Canon Law—which, by the way, the Church is so firm about that violating the seal is one of only five remaining sins still punishable by excommunication reserved to the Holy See.

  “And, yes, I looked that up, too,” he added parenthetically.

  “But it’s not law that makes us keep these secrets inviolate; it’s because when we hear confessions, we are eavesdropping. The penitent is not talking to us. The penitent talks to God. And the penitent would not have said a word to us in that setting if he or she had not been led to believe that we were standing in for God. In loco Dei.

  “And besides all that, the rule of thumb for the confessor is that he do nothing—nothing—that would make confession odious, repugnant, offensive to the penitent. That’s why, by the way, the priest can’t even bring up outside the confessional any sins that have been confessed—unless, that is, the penitent wants to talk about them and brings the subject up spontaneously. The confessional, Nick, is a world set apart. It’s a haven for the sinner with God.”

  Koesler’s silence indicated his explication was completed and that he now awaited Dunn’s reaction.

  There was no reaction.

  “Well …” Koesler finally prompted.

  “I don’t know, ” Dunn said at last. “I’m going to have to think about it. Maybe it’s just a reaction to all those unforgiving absolutes of the past—but I’ve got a problem admitting that anything admits of no exception at all. I’m going to have to think about it. That’s the best I can tell you.”

  “Okay, you think about it. But,” Koesler admonished, “while you’re thinking, don’t do anything. Don’t speak to anyone about what you heard—not even to me anymore. Don’t do anything that would in any way link the murder of Father Keating to the man we heard confess that sin.”

  “Okay, ” Dunn agreed, after some hesitation.

  Koesler nodded. “Now I’m going to rest up a bit and get ready for dinner later on. Six all right for you, Nick?”

  Dunn nodded.

  “Then I’ll meet you here.” Koesler left the dining area for his room upstairs. He was exhausted, not only from his marathon of sermons this morning, but also from the extensive apologia for the sacrament of confession. As he stretched out on his bed, his last conscious thought was a wish that Guido Vespa had whispered as Koesler had more than once urged. If only Vespa had followed Koesler’s direction, Dunn would not have overheard and Koesler would have been spared this argumentation and contention. On the other hand, maybe it was a blessing that he was able to head off this young priest before he violated the seal and would have to go to the Pope himself for absolution.

  In the final analysis, Koesler did not need any complication from any other source. It would be plenty hard enough for him to keep this secret. He could not let anyone—including Dunn—know just how hard. All that Dunn said was true enough: Vespa was a career killer, and to keep silence was to leave him free to kill again.

  But there were no exceptions. There were no exceptions.

  And so, on to a troubled nap.

  4

  Inspector Walter Koznicki, long-time head of the Detroit Police Department’s Homicide Division, took the steps. The elevators at 1300 Beaubien were working, but Koznicki felt that he too needed to work.

  Koznicki was slightly over six feet tall; his weight at his recent physical examination was 250 pounds. Wanda, his wife, worried about that. He reminded her that he was big-boned. She reminded him that lately his clothes had been more than a little snug. He reminded her that it was natural to put on a bit of weight as one aged. She reminded him that was nonsense and that while his diet seemed about the same as always, he wasn’t getting the exercise he needed.

  He could not argue that point. He should have been on the street more, but lately he seemed stuck to the chair behind his desk in his office. Wanda was right; he wasn’t getting nearly enough exercise. But while he admitted this only to himself, he did resolve to hit the bricks more regularly. Do some of those exercises-while-seated workouts. At all times choose the more physically demanding course. Thus, with the choice of elevator or stairs, use the feet.

  By the time Koznicki reached the fifth floor, he was breathing hard. Proof, if he needed any, that he still had a way to go before he was as fit as he should be, as fit as he wanted to be.

  As he traversed the hallway, he greeted the few officers on duty this Sunday afternoon. They were surprised to see him. No one could question Koznicki’s dedica
tion, but he had long since been convinced that he would not catch all the criminals out there even if he worked around the clock. This conclusion made him a far happier man as well as making his wife a far happier woman.

  Koznicki arrived at the squad room and looked in the open door. In the absence of a full or even a partial complement of detectives, there was little to catch the eye other than the drabness and dinginess. It was a place of work and every inch of it stated that fact. Tables and chairs of hard wood and ancient vintage, paint dull and peeling. No suggestion of comfort or frivolity.

  Only one person occupied the office expanse. Lieutenant Alonzo Tully looked up as his boss entered. Tully, black, with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, was of medium height and build, and as fit as his inspector was out of condition. Much of Tully’s trim shape he owed to expenditure of nervous energy.

  Normally, it was as natural for Koznicki to be home on a sunny Sunday afternoon as it was for Tully to be at work. Koznicki had not been surprised when he discovered on telephoning Tully’s home that Tully was at headquarters. Not for the first time did Koznicki reflect on how fortunate it was that Tully was blessed with a most understanding and patient mate.

  Several files lay open on Tully’s desk. They represented some of the most intriguing cases his squad was working on. Open-and-shut crimes failed to interest Tully. He loved a mystery, and he felt drawn to the more complex puzzles. The enjoyment he found in his otherwise often macabre work came from unraveling the created maze and catching the bad guy. What the courts did with the perpetrator was the courts’ problem. Long ago he had found that the path to mental health lay in not being concerned with whatever was beyond one’s control. His responsibility was to catch the perp, which he did as well as or frequently better than anyone else in Homicide. What went on in court was another matter and not his concern.