Mind Over Murder

by William X. Kienzle

  As he entered his office, Neiss turned on the light. That which he did not wish to see on his desk, he saw. A neat bundle of envelopes and a note from his pastor encircled with a rubber band. He yanked the note out from beneath the band.

  Father Neiss, the note began. The pastor never used Neiss’s first name. Please address these envelopes to the parish council members, first removing the enclosures and then, after addressing the envelopes, replacing the enclosures. Place a stamp (first class) on each envelope. Seal the envelopes. Mail the envelopes. It was signed meticulously, Father Leon Cavanaugh.

  Damn him, thought Neiss; why can’t he treat me like an adult?

  Mercifully, the front doorbell interrupted the priest’s increasingly homicidal reverie. It was Neiss’s late-afternoon appointment, one Harry Kirwan, public relations manager at Michigan Bell. Kirwan had visited with Neiss several times. The two had taken an almost instant liking to each other.

  Kirwan, a Lutheran, planned to marry Mary Ann McCauley, a Catholic. In addition to the red tape normally involved in a mixed religious marriage—an impediment requiring a dispensation from the Tribunal—further measures were required: Kirwan had been previously married.

  Catholic canon law presumes that all attempted marriages are true and valid and lasting until death unless they are proven otherwise.

  Kirwin’s case was, by far, the easiest to pursue among the red-tape-choked procedures of the Tribunal. It was this point Neiss wanted to explain at this session.

  He pushed several items, including the envelopes with their careful explanation, to either side of his desk, thus clearing the center. “Did you bring the documents?”

  “Yes, Father. Here’s a recent copy of my first wife’s Catholic baptism certificate. Her maiden name, Ruth Kukulski, is recorded on it. And, as you told me to get from the priest at her old parish, there is a notation on the reverse that there is no mention of a marriage in her baptismal record. Then, here’s a certified copy of our wedding certificate signed by the justice of the peace. And, finally, here’s a copy of our divorce decree.

  “Is all this satisfactory?”

  Neiss, who had studied the documents, one by one, as Kirwan handed them to him, nodded. “Yes, this will do very well.”

  “Can you explain exactly what this is all about?” asked Kirwan.

  “Of course. This is a defectus formae case. In other words, we are asking for a declaration of nullity in your first marriage because there was a ‘defect in the form’ of marriage required by the Church.

  “You see, your first wife was a baptized Catholic. By Church law, she was required to have her marriage witnessed by a Catholic priest and two witnesses. If she attempted marriage in any other way, it would not be recognized by the Church. It would be null.

  “What we are proving with these documents is that she was, indeed, a baptized Catholic and, at the same time with the same baptismal statement, that she has never been validly married in the Catholic Church.

  “How’s that?” Kirwan interrupted.

  “Because when a Catholic is married in the Church, the marriage is entered in that person’s baptismal record and, from that time on, whenever a baptismal statement is issued, the record of marriage is noted on the statement.”

  “I see.”

  Kirwan’s jaw was setting. But Neiss didn’t notice. “So you see,” he continued, “we have proven with a recent copy of Ruth’s baptismal certificate that Ruth was required to have her marriage witnessed by a priest and, by the same record, that she apparently did not.

  “Then, we show how the two of you did get married—not by a priest but by a justice of the peace. And, finally, that your civil marriage has ended in divorce.

  “With all of this we prove that your marriage to Ruth Kukulski is not recognized by the Church. It is null and void. Thus, both you and she will be free to marry in the Catholic Church once the decree is granted. She, because she was required to be married by a priest and was not. You, because you married her, who was required to be married by a priest and was not.”

  Neiss leaned back with a sense of satisfaction similar to that which accompanies the imparting of a carefully constructed syllogism.

  Kirwan leaned forward intently. “Now, I want it understood clearly, Father, that neither my first wife nor any of her family is to be contacted on this matter. My visitation rights with my children are chancy enough as it is.” He made a wigwag motion with one hand. “Any time anything out of the ordinary occurs, there’s the devil to pay, and the children are the prime ones to suffer. If she were to be contacted regarding our marriage, it would be disastrous.”

  “Nothing to fear.” Neiss waved both hands as if signaling a runner safe. “We have all the documents we need. I’ll see your mother and brother tomorrow and get their testimony that you and Ruth never had your marriage convalidated by later having it witnessed by a priest. Believe me, that’s more than the Tribunal needs.”

  Kirwan now prepared to leave, relaxed.

  Neiss braced his hands against the arms of his chair preparatory to rising. “Well, Harry, what do you think?” The priest was rather pleased with himself in both his careful preparation of the case and with his detailed explanation to the most attentive Kirwan.

  Kirwan hesitated. “We’re friends, aren’t we, Father?”

  “Why, yes. At least I consider us friends.” Neiss was mildly surprised.

  “Well,” said Kirwan, “then I’ll tell you: I consider this whole process to be a crock. I think if it’s possible to insult God with a bunch of ecclesiastical red tape, we’re doing it.

  “Ruth and I didn’t ‘attempt’ marriage; we were married. It proved a mistake. We didn’t grow in our relationship. It stagnated. Over the years we began destroying each other. That’s not a marriage. And it’s not because there was a Catholic baptism or a missing priest. It’s because what we thought was a marriage wasn’t. The relationship disintegrated. It self-destructed.

  “And, to continue to be frank, Father, if it weren’t for Mary Ann’s strong wish to be married in the Catholic Church, I wouldn’t have participated in even phase one of this operation.”

  Neiss felt terrible. His pastor treated him like a child. The coach had put him between a rock and a hard place. And now, this man he had quickly come to respect had punctured his Church’s balloon.

  Seeing his discomfiture, Kirwan smiled and extended his hand. “But we can still be friends. Can’t we, Father?”

  Weakly but gratefully, Neiss took the hand and shook it with some enthusiasm.

  Joe Cox picked up the loaf of Sinai Rye in one hand and hoisted the jug of Gallo Mountain Chianti in the other. He looked soulfully at Pat Lennon and pleaded, “Please pass the Thou.”

  Lennon giggled briefly but appreciatively. “I think it’s sweet of you,” she said, “to keep on making passes at me after all these years.”

  “That’s right,” Cox agreed, “if we had had a wedding ceremony back in the beginning of all this, we’d be old married geezers by now. Sort of like that couple in ‘I Do, I Do.’”

  “Well,” Lennon demurred, “not that old! What’s it been for us—about five years?”

  “I guess.” Cox spread the red-and-white checkered tablecloth on the ground.

  It was the Fourth of July. What better way to celebrate, especially if you lived in a downtown Detroit apartment, than with a picnic at scenic Belle Isle, that gem of an island that rests in verdant lushness between Detroit and Windsor.

  Cox and Lennon had met a little more than five years before as fledgling reporters at the Detroit Free Press. Shortly thereafter, they had begun living together. The arrangement continued. An enormous amount of interdependent chemistry flowed between the two.

  Each had experienced a disastrous marriage. Neither had children. From time to time they talked of children. Perhaps later. Both were in their late twenties. There was time.

  Periodically, Cox—never Lennon—would introduce the topic of marriage. Always Lennon shi
ed from it. Sometimes she would treat the subject with lighthearted sarcasm. Sometimes with an emotion nearing panic. Usually, they agreed that, for them, in all probability, a marriage license would also prove to be a death certificate to their relationship.

  Cox, sandy-haired, heavily mustached, of moderate height, powerfully built, had become the ace of the Free Press reportorial staff. He had begun primarily as a religion writer. But then, in connection with the Detroit religious scene, he had helped solve a series of murders of priests and nuns. For that feat he had received the coveted Pulitzer Prize and rightly won the admiration of the local news media. At least of those who were not frankly jealous of his achievement.

  His ultimate and not inconsiderable claim to fame was his ability to coexist, although at several arms’ lengths, with the infamous Karl Lowell, Free Press executive director. By dint of an infantile grasp for power over everyone, especially those at peer or subordinate levels, Lowell almost single-handedly was destroying a fine Free Press staff by maliciously making their work lives unbearable.

  One of Lowell’s more famous victims was Pat Lennon. She had spurned his casting couch offer, a routine Lowell gambit for all new and attractive female employees. Lennon then steadily learned that hell hath no vengeance like Lowell scorned. He had restricted her reportorial opportunities at every juncture.

  Finally, sensing that under Lowell the summit of her journalistic career would be obituary writing, Lennon graduated in opportunity and earnings to the Detroit News. In this she followed the well-worn footsteps of many Free Press predecessors.

  At the News, Lennon blossomed. She gained significant local and national prestige for her coverage of a series of murders of evil men whose severed heads were found in various Detroit Catholic churches.

  Lennon, a Titian-highlighted brunette, voluptuous, at five-feet-six almost as tall as Joe Cox, easily was Cox’s journalistic peer.

  They wore well together in complementary ways.

  Lennon began displaying the cold cuts, each variety on its sheet of wax paper. Roast beef, turkey, ham, baloney, salami, Swiss cheese, all fresh from the epicurean deli in Ye Olde Butcher Shoppe, which was housed in the shopping plaza of their Lafayette Park apartment complex.

  Cox put out the paper plates, plastic glasses, and flatware.

  With breezy sunny weather and a variety of saucy sailboats tacking the choppy water of the Detroit River, this had the beginnings of a most satisfying picnic.

  As Pat reached across the tablecloth to arrange a plate and glass for him, Cox impulsively patted her bottom. Instinctively, she knelt bolt upright.

  “Joe!”

  “Madam,” he said, suddenly a touch more seriously, “I’d like to make you a proposition.”

  “Always propositions. Never proposals.”

  “In very fact, Madam, this is by way of proposal.”

  “Joe!”

  “I’m serious.”

  “We’ve been over this a million times.”

  “This will be one million-and-one.”

  “What more is there to discuss?”

  “Has it ever occurred to you”—Cox began building a preposterous sandwich— “that it is a little odd that I am the one who, from time to time, is eager to get married? Whereas, traditionally, it is the woman who desires marriage?”

  “Or her mother.”

  “I want to make an honest woman of you, Lennon!”

  “You’ve already done that once for another happy woman.”

  Cox winced. “Everyone is entitled to one mistake.”

  “O.K., we’ve each had our quota; let’s not make it a habit.”

  “I have a theory.” Cox had difficulty getting the words out around the mouthful of sandwich he’d bitten off.

  “Yes, Sigmund?”

  Cox laboriously swallowed and washed the first massive mouthful down with a sip of wine. “It comes,” he said more clearly, “from studying you Catholics.”

  Lennon blushed.

  “With you people,” Cox continued, “it’s once a Catholic, always a Catholic. Now, it’s been, what, almost eight, nine years since you’ve been to confession and communion?”

  “About.”

  “Still, if anyone asked your religion, you would say you’re a Catholic, right?”

  She hesitated only a few seconds. “Right!”

  “Well, I think that’s the problem. You figure you can’t get married again in the Catholic Church because you were already married in the Church. Right?”

  “Ye ... yes.”

  “Well, I’ve been doing a little research, and I think you might just be able to have your wedding cake and eat it too.”

  “What difference would it make?” Lennon pulled a brittle edge of lettuce away from her sandwich.

  “Just this: I think your reluctance to get married is based on what you think is your inability to be married in the Catholic Church. If you can’t be married in the Church, you figure, why bother getting married any other way? If it can’t be ‘the right way,’ why make a mockery of it. The way you see it, nonmarriage is as good, if not better, than an ‘invalid’ marriage.”

  Silence.

  Cox’s vibrations told him he had scored heavily. Lennon could find no holes in his argument.

  “You know,” she said at length, “you may be right. But what’s the practical difference? I’ve gone through a Catholic ceremony, with a Catholic, witnessed by a priest. My options are over.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’ve told me before about your marriage. Let me see if I’ve got the story right.”

  “Shoot, O masterful reporter.” Pat tucked her legs beneath her and leaned back against a tree.

  Before beginning his narration, Cox decided his sandwich was too heroic. He lifted the strata apart and, with two additional slices of bread, made the whole thing into two sandwiches.

  “The multiplication of the loaves and fishes,” said Lennon, clearly amused.

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing. Forget it. Go on with ‘This is My Life,’ though I don’t understand why.”

  “The reason comes later,” Cox took a bite from one of the scaled-down sandwiches. Better. Now he could eat and talk at the same time.

  “This happened about ten years ago, when you were in your late teens,” Cox began. Lennon, sipping wine, nodded. “You were about to marry a man your parents disapproved of. And his parents disapproved of you. It was ethnic. He was Greek. Both sets of parents put on so much pressure that, just a week or so before the wedding, you broke it off.”

  Lennon grew very solemn. The memory was not pleasant.

  “Later, you started going with a guy you didn’t particularly care for. Your parents didn’t care for him either, but they were afraid to pressure you again. You became so nervous you developed a rash. You married him one year to the day after your previously scheduled marriage was called off.

  “It lasted three months. Then you separated. Five months later, you were divorced. Right?”

  Silence. “Good memory,” Pat finally commented. “But what does your accurate recollection of my tale of woe have to do with anything?”

  “Suppose you could get your Church to grant a—what do you call it?—a declaration of… uh… nullity? Suppose your Church stated what is obvious to anyone else: you got married to punish your parents… and you managed to punish yourself in the bargain.”

  Lennon bit a corner from her sandwich. She carefully thought and chewed. “I couldn’t. They wouldn’t.

  “Look, we were both Catholic. We got married in a Catholic church. It was witnessed by a priest. We consummated the thing… well, it was more like rape. But as far as the Church is concerned about marital ‘rights and duties,’ it was consummated. I’m stuck.

  “But why bring it up? You’re not the type who gets his kicks from pouring salt in wounds.”

  “It just so happens that I was doing part of a story out at St. John’s Seminary and I had some time t
o kill.” Cox started on his second sandwich and poured himself another glass of wine. “I gave an anonymous rundown of your case to Father Leo Clark. Remember him?”

  “Remember him! Indeed I do. He was a prime source for that series I did on The Red Hat Murders.”

  “Would you agree that Father Clark is a reliable expert on religious affairs?”

  “Yes, of course I would.”

  “Well,” Cox, feeling a twinge of excitement, rose to his knees, “Clark says there’s hope for someone with a case like yours. He says current interpretation of canon law would allow for the emotional strain you were under, and the Church might, after investigation, grant a decree of nullity.”

  Lennon began twisting a lock of hair around her index finger, a habit when she grew reflective. Suddenly, she looked sharply at Cox. “But what about you? You’ve been married before!”

  “Clark says no sweat. I was married to a Catholic. A judge witnessed it. Clark called it a defectus something-or-other. He said it was the easiest of all marriage cases to process.”

  Silence again for several moments.

  “Joe, I’m afraid you don’t understand. It’s one thing for me to think I couldn’t get married again in my Church and another thing to know it. If I go into this and find all the doors slammed tight, I don’t know—”

  “On the other hand, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Maybe we wouldn’t get married, but at least you’d know you could.”

  “How about you, Joe? I just can’t see you filling out forms and answering questions. Even if you do have ‘one of the easiest cases to process.’”

  “Personally, I think the whole thing is a pile of bureaucratic horseshit. But if it will help you, I’m willing to go through with it.”

  Lennon leaned forward to kiss him. She lost her balance and toppled, taking Cox with her. He glanced from side to side. No one appeared to be looking at them. He slid his hand under her sweater.

  “Joe! Your hand’s like ice!”