Mind Over Murder

by William X. Kienzle

These considerations made it all the more difficult for Ankenazy to understand Lennon’s present reaction.

  He had just presented her with what he thought could develop into a top-notch story. The disappearance of Monsignor Thomas Thompson could be anything from an embarrassment for the good Monsignor to a gruesome homicide. But gossip or murder, it looked tailor-made for Lennon.

  Yet, unaccountably, when he had given her the assignment just a few minutes ago, she had grown ashen, and he’d noticed a slight tremor in her hands. And she had flatly refused the assignment. When he pressed her for a reason, she would give him none. She just repeated her refusal.

  And she seemed close to tears. All in all, a scene Ankenazy had trouble handling. Staff writers, particularly those of the highest rank such as Lennon, did not turn down assignments. Especially without good and adequate reason. In addition, weeping women always unnerved him. When women cried, he never knew what to do with his hands. It always seemed that his hands should be doing something. But he never knew what.

  “Pat,” Ankenazy said somewhat awkwardly, “I’ve got to know why you refused this assignment. London is going to have to know.”

  It had been Leon London, managing editor, who, through Ankenazy, had assigned the story to Lennon.

  “Tell him I’ve got female problems.”

  “Oh, come on, Pat, you know I can’t tell him that. You try to cop a plea like that, and you’ll be writing second-string obits or covering the Living Rosary on Belle Isle.”

  “Bob, I just can’t. I’m too close to it.”

  She thought a moment. In the past, she had trusted Ankenazy with confidences of varying import. To her knowledge, he had never betrayed a confidence, no matter how insignificant.

  Perhaps she could reveal at least part of the story.

  “You remember,” she asked, “back a couple of weeks ago when I told you I was going to have my first marriage annulled? What I haven’t been able to bring myself to tell you was that the whole thing fell through. And Monsignor Thompson was the main reason for the failure.”

  She paused to let that sink in.

  “I can’t be objective about Thompson,” Lennon continued. “So I know I couldn’t be objective about the story. I’d mess it up. I know it. That’s why I can’t do the story. If you need something for London, tell him I’m trying to fight off pneumonia. Besides, it’s the truth; I can’t seem to shake this cold. Even if I took the Thompson story, like as not I would probably be forced to go home and collapse in the middle of it.”

  Ankenazy looked at Lennon with greater sensitivity. Her ordinarily pert nose was swollen and red. Her eyes were barely open and carried bags. She looked as if she was close to collapsing even now. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed it before. He guessed he was so used to dealing with Lennon the professional that he simply took it for granted that she would bring in an assignment as long as there was breath in her. He had to admit that Lennon, like Shylock, was as human as the rest of humankind. Prick Shylock and he will bleed. Hit Lennon with a king-size summer cold, and she will fold.

  Ankenazy nodded agreement to Lennon’s assessment of her own condition.

  “When you finish what you’re working on,” he said, “why don’t you go on home?”

  Lennon shrugged and accepted the reprieve gratefully.

  Ankenazy returned to London, giving Lennon’s debilitated condition as the reason she could not accept the assignment. He did not mention her personal involvement with Thompson. Her ill health was ample excuse.

  From time to time, London peered around Ankenazy to confirm what he was saying. Each glance more than verified the tale of imminent disintegration. Lennon sat at her desk, blowing her nose and dabbing at her eyes. Only a minuscule portion of this was an act.

  Having convinced London that Lennon was under the weather, yet certain the Thompson story had significant potential, Ankenazy found himself doing something he rarely did. He volunteered himself for the assignment.

  “Are you sure?” London arched an eyebrow. “I don’t want you off your editor’s desk for any extended period.”

  “No chance of that, Leon. This may or may not turn into a blockbuster, but, on the face of it, it’s just a missing person who may have died or have been murdered. Seems like I’ve covered this story a million times.”

  “I don’t know…” London scratched his head.

  “Besides, it’ll give me a chance to get back in the trenches. Always good to keep your hand in.”

  “Well, O.K. But don’t get in over your head. If you need help on this, yell. I don’t want you spending too much time on this one story. There’s too much other stuff going on in this town.”

  “No problem.” Ankenazy fastened the top button on his shirt and tightened his tie. “Let’s see; it’s just noon. I’ll get over to police headquarters and get this show on the road.”

  Ankenazy picked up his notepad and headed for the door. He did not know he was about to step into a journalistic mousetrap that was baited and set to snap.

  “Let’s see; it’s just noon. I’ve got plenty of time to write this story and get it in the one-ball.” Joe Cox spread his notepad on the table and rubbed his hands together.

  He and Nelson Kane were in a booth in the Press Pantry on the main floor of the Free Press Building. They had ordered sandwiches and coffee. Cox wanted to tell Kane about his interview earlier in the day with Angela Cicero. And Kane wanted to hear about it.

  “How’d it go?” Kane blew the steam from his coffee, then sipped it.

  “Good. Not great, but good.”

  “Promise her anonymity?”

  “Yeah. That was a great move. Thanks for suggesting it.”

  Kane grunted; the coffee had burned his tongue.

  “We would never have been able to use her name anyway,” Cox continued. “There’s no way the cops can charge her with any crime, and we would have burned our ass if we had violated her right to privacy. But it really loosened her up when I promised her anonymity.”

  “Damn right.” Kane, having determined his tongue would survive, bit into his sandwich.

  The restaurant began to fill.

  “I didn’t tell her about the diary. Just that I had certain sources that linked her name with Thompson’s. I told her the police would be calling on her.”

  Kane caught Cox’s eyes with a sense of challenge.

  “I told her the cops’ sources were at least as good as mine,” Cox explained. “But then I told her this was her chance to put her side of the story on record. And then I repeated the promise of anonymity.

  “She bought it. She told me how Thompson had treated her and her family and how she had reacted to it all. Of course, as she tells the story, it’s just the reverse of the diary. Thompson is the ogre, and she is the innocent victim. Somehow I prefer her version.”

  “Motive?” Kane spoke the way he wrote, in lean prose.

  “She’s got plenty of motive. If Thompson had treated me the way he treated her, I would at very least have kicked him in the balls. Maybe worse.”

  “How about an alibi?”

  “She’s got a problem there, and the cops are going to jump on it. As far as I can see, she can’t account for her whereabouts Saturday night. But that’s her problem—hers and the cops’.”

  “Wait a minute,” Kane hesitated as he was about to bite into his sandwich, “what makes you think the cops are going to follow you through the Cicero door?”

  “I figure we’re using the same guide—Thompson’s diary. The logical thing to do is take the people mentioned in the diary in chronological order.” Cox placed his sandwich on the plate and consulted his notepad. “That would be… uh… Angela Cicero, Lee Brand, Father David Neiss, Father Norman Shanley, and, finally, Pat Lennon.”

  “What about Lennon?” Kane asked, sharply. “You sure you can treat her the same as the others?”

  “Like you said, Nellie: we’re playing hardball.”

  “Damn right.”

  “Al
l we need, Nellie,” said Cox, animatedly, “is for the cops not to find the bastard for at least a few more days. We’ve got a five-parter that’ll end with a big wrap-up for our Sunday morning edition. By then, we’ll have published the profiles of five people, each of whom has ample reason for killing the bastard.

  “We will have used none of their names. But the readers will be playing the game with us: which one of these anonymous characters had the best reason to do away with the Missing Monsignor? Then, if we’re really lucky, the cops will find the body and the murderer. And we tell our readers, see, it was number three—and identify him or her.

  “Boy, Nellie, this is going to be one helluva story. Like a whodunit that actually happened.”

  “I can see the lead now,” Kane was catching Cox’s enthusiasm, “‘While Detroit police search for a missing monsignor, they don’t have to look far for a motive behind his disappearance.’”

  “Yeah.” It did not come close to the lead Cox had planned. But since this lead had come down from the mountaintop, he knew he would have to incorporate it into his story.

  “Oh,” Cox seemed to be looking out of the coffee shop toward the elevators, “there’s Breslin. I’ve got to see him for a minute.”

  Cox rose abruptly and hurried from the coffee shop toward the elevator area where there was no Breslin. He left behind an empty sandwich plate, a cup with a residue of cold coffee, and the bill for his lunch.

  It was several minutes before it dawned on Kane that he had been stuck with the lunch tab.

  Police headquarters was just as he remembered it. It had been almost thirteen years since Bob Ankenazy had been assigned the News police beat. But virtually nothing had changed.

  The exterior was unmistakable. A huge, square, dull gray building that created the impression of an impervious object in the midst of an area teeming with crime, suffering, despair, frightened as well as cocky juveniles, first-time offenders, and three-time losers.

  Inside, one was struck by the overwhelming presence of impersonal marble. Police officers, in uniform or plain clothes, with prominent identification tags, were ubiquitous.

  The sundries counter was familiar. A warning that a microwave oven was in use was new.

  Ankenazy entered an elevator and pushed the button for the fifth floor. Once again he was struck by the apparent utter lack of security in a building where one might expect maximum security.

  On the fifth floor, he followed the signs leading to the Homicide Division. He passed many officers he had never met, further emphasizing the time that had elapsed since he had last worked this building full-time. He almost passed an open office door, but, recognizing one of the room’s occupants, he stopped. The officer he recognized was Ned Harris. Ankenazy could not recall Harris’s rank now. He had been a patrol officer with plenty of promise when Ankenazy knew him.

  He entered the room and stood just inside the doorway until Harris looked up.

  “Yes?” Harris looked at the intruder noncommittally. Gradually, recognition dawned.

  “Ankenazy! Bob Ankenazy! What are you doing here, slumming? I mean, who are we that an executive of the Detroit News should show up on our doorstep?”

  “Easy, Ned.” Ankenazy laughed. “I’m hardly an executive. I don’t even have a key to the executive washroom. Hell, I don’t even know where it is.

  “And you—you’re a sergeant?”

  “Lieutenant, sir. You should read your own paper more often. I been in it.”

  Ankenazy felt sheepish. Undoubtedly, he had read of Harris’s promotions. Assuming their paths would not again cross, Ankenazy had not deposited in his memory bank any of the information on Harris’s advancing police career.

  “But back to square one,” said Harris. “What brings you here?”

  “I’m on the Monsignor Thompson story.”

  Harris nodded. Obviously, he was familiar with the case. Ankenazy’s spirits lifted slightly. Until this moment, since entering headquarters he had felt like a stranger in a remotely familiar foreign land. Now, he had found someone he had known fairly well. And that someone was familiar with the story on which he was working.

  “I wonder,” Ankenazy continued, “if you could tell me who’s active on that case?”

  Harris nodded again and consulted a loose-leaf binder. “Sergeants Dean Patrick and Bill Lynch from Squad Six.”

  Ankenazy wrote the names in his notepad. “And where,” he asked, “can I find Sergeants Patrick and Lynch?”

  “They’re on the street.”

  Ankenazy smiled. He recalled the first time an officer had told him a cop was “on the street.” Ankenazy naturally had pictured the officer literally pounding the bricks, walking the pavements.

  “On the street,” at least as far as Detroit’s Homicide Division was concerned, was the equivalent of Blue Cross’s or Michigan Bell’s describing one of their employees as being “in the field.” The phrase revealed the officer to be out of the station but did little to pinpoint his or her exact location. That—the simple designation that an officer was “out”—was precisely what the Police Department intended to convey.

  But Ankenazy wanted much more specific information.

  “Exactly where might I find Patrick and Lynch?”

  “Sorry,” Harris answered, “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  In the time it took to ask two questions, Harris had become professionally uncommunicative. Ankenazy had hit his first brick wall in The Case of the Missing Monsignor. There would be more.

  After an exchange of valedictions, Ankenazy found the General Assignments Unit office, which was also on the fifth floor of headquarters.

  Sergeant Terri Scanlon of GAU was a friend of Ankenazy’s, owed a few favors and, as luck would have it, was in. Ankenazy explained the nature of the desired information.

  “How about it, Terri; can you get me the name and address of whomever it is Patrick and Lynch are questioning this afternoon?”

  Scanlon looked ruefully at the pile of forms on her desk that needed filling out and filing. “I suppose so, but it’ll take a while.”

  Ankenazy looked at her questioningly. Her willingness to help had been his only uncertainty. Once she agreed, he couldn’t understand why the enterprise need be time-consuming.

  “If I were looking for this information for myself,” she explained, “I’d just go get it. Since you’re going to use it, eventually Homicide is going to know you got the information from somebody. I don’t want them to tie it to me. So, I’ve got to get this in a roundabout way.”

  “Be devious,” he urged as she left the office.

  Robert Ankenazy, with a full head of dark brown hair, salt-and-pepper beard, of medium height and build, in his early forties, was one of those rare people whose life was progressing almost exactly as he had planned it.

  He had a degree in journalism from the University of Michigan. He’d married a sensitive and brilliant woman with whom he had two children. He had paid his early dues doing virtually all the jobs needed to put out a newspaper at a succession of suburban journals. Almost twenty years ago, he’d landed a job with the prestigious Detroit News, working his way from the City-County Bureau to the police beat through general assignment writing to the news editor’s desk. There seemed no reason he would not continue to climb. In unguarded moments, he occasionally slipped into a smug mood.

  A good half-hour passed before Terri Scanlon returned. Ankenazy was surprised it had taken her so long.

  Wordlessly, but conspiratorially, she slipped him a piece of paper on which was printed Angela Cicero’s name and Dearborn address.

  Ankenazy, preserving the mime tone, smiled, bowed low, and left headquarters. He aimed his car at Dearborn. He was unaware of Joe Cox’s involvement in this story, nor was he aware of the existence of an important diary, from knowledge of which he was singularly excluded. So, for at least the next three-quarters of an hour, he was able to enjoy a fine summer day.

  There was a consensus. No one was comfo
rtable with the priest’s presence.

  Angela Cicero had been shocked, confused, and embarrassed when, after she had answered the door, detectives Patrick and Lynch identified themselves. She also felt a sense of humiliation. She had never experienced anything like this. She had seen police officers show their badges and identify themselves. But that was always fiction on a stage, in a movie, or on TV.

  All these negative, nervous feelings, especially that of humiliation, were intensified by the presence of Father Koesler. The detectives had explained that he was attending only in a consultative role and that the presence of a priest during their interrogation should not affect or disturb her. But it did.

  Patrick and Lynch themselves had been less than enthusiastic when Lieutenant Harris had informed them that Koesler would accompany them during their investigation of the Thompson case. At least he was expected to be present while they interrogated the suspects mentioned in Thompson’s diary.

  Harris tried to allay their objections to Koesler’s presence; however, both Patrick and Lynch could not help but feel their professional integrity was being compromised. They wanted Koesler aboard about as badly as a big brother wants his little sister around on his first date.

  Completing this negative unanimity was Koesler himself. Secretly, he was pleased that he’d been called upon as a consultant. But this feeling was moire than displaced by the sense of being an unwanted and amateur trespasser into another’s field of expertise. While they were faultlessly polite, the negative vibrations sent out by Patrick and Lynch were all but palpable. And, Koesler reasoned, why not? How would he feel if the Archbishop assigned a couple of detectives to see that the priest was offering Mass correctly?”

  After all, it was common knowledge the seminary offered no training in criminal investigation. Koesler had long been convinced there was a very definite limit to the number of ex officio appointments a person could accept while being able to contribute anything concrete to any of them. There was no doubt in Koesler’s mind that he was once again a fifth and easily disposable wheel.

  Thus, it was with a feeling of discomfort that the four—hostess and three visitors—were seated in the Cicero living room.