The Rosary Murders

by William X. Kienzle

  Thus, when the deliberate murder of a priest and then a nun became the top stories of the local news media and were even featured in the national press and TV network news, Detroit’s black mayor, Maynard Cobb, drew the line. Cobb and Police Chief Frank Tany selected Walt Koznicki to head an elite homicide task force to close this case as quickly as possible. Koznicki was to have as close to carte blanche power as was constitutionally possible. Special offices were set up on the City-County Building’s fifth floor to house the task force.

  The first person Koznicki selected for his team was Detective Sergeant Ned Harris. Harris, a black, had come up through the ranks, as had Koznicki. At one time, as sergeants, they had been teamed and discovered they were a good match. Both were thorough; both brought in solid cases for prosecution; both kept unblemished records; both had received numerous citations; both shunned publicity as being counterproductive to their work.

  Koznicki had entree to the still strong Detroit Polish community, while Harris was accepted by the evergrowing black population. Where Koznicki tended to be cautious, Harris could create the bold stroke. Where Koznicki tended to rely on his “assumptions,” Harris hung loose, always ready to change course with the prevailing wind.

  Their first course of action had been to spread the word throughout the entire department that any death of any priest, nun, minister, or religious personality under any circumstances was to be reported to them before any other action was taken. Their team, and their team alone, knew every detail of the two murders under investigation.

  But both admitted there were precious few details to be known.

  Harris had just entered Koznicki’s office. “Fallon just called from St. Mary’s Hospital,” he said as he moved to the window overlooking Jefferson Avenue, the Detroit River, and Windsor. “They’re not having much luck.”

  “Damn! I was afraid of that. But it’s still our best lead. I’m positive none of the hospital personnel was responsible for Father Lord’s death. Somebody from outside killed him, and our best bet is that somebody in the hospital saw him and can identify him.”

  “That’s if your goddam assumption is right.”

  A faint smile crossed Koznicki’s lips. Harris was forever on him about his assumptions. Outside of tips from informants, which both Koznicki and Harris relied on and checked out religiously, Koznicki knew that Harris depended on what he called hunches, which, while they were neither as dependable nor logical as an “assumption,” were more viable, if only because they could change from moment to moment.

  “You got anything better?” Koznicki asked without looking up from yesterday’s Detroit News he’d brought with him from home.

  “Hell, no. If I had, I’d be arguing with you. It’s just that you’re basing everything on those rosaries. What if they were a coincidence? What if the two murders aren’t related?”

  “Then my assumption is incorrect.” He said it with a straight face.

  “Incorrect! Goddammit, we’re on a wild goose chase if you’re wrong. We should be investigating two separate killings—unrelated—entirely differently than we’re doing now.”

  “Those rosaries are no coincidence.”

  “O.K. You’re the boss. Unless you’re wrong, of course. Then maybe I’m the boss.”

  “The only way you’re going to become boss is if the department goes crazy over affirmative action hiring.”

  “O.K., Massa.” Harris shuffled over to Koznicki’s desk. “What yo’ wan’ yo’ nigger to do today?”

  “After you get in the watermelon crop, drag your black ass over to St. Mary’s and put your expert nose to the case. See if you can smell something Fallon may have missed. He’s good, but it’s tough changing the direction of a case you’ve been investigating. And, by the way, I’m expecting a visit from Joe Cox of the Free Press at ten this morning. Know anything about him?”

  “Been in town only a few months, I think. Seems to be straight. I trusted him with a few ‘not-for-publications’ and he sat on ’em. But, ‘scuse me now, boss. I gotsa drag my black ass over to the hospital and make you a hero.”

  As Harris was about to leave, Koznicki called after him, “One more thing. We’ll know very shortly if my assumption is correct.”

  “How’s that?”

  “There’ll be another ‘rosary murder.’”

  Father Mike Dailey was having a late business breakfast with his parish “team.” A parish team was a Detroit answer to a vanishing clergy. St. Gall’s parish, on Detroit’s far northwest side, had, for most of its fifty years, been staffed by three resident priests. Even now, with its high school closed and a reduced enrollment in its six-grade elementary school, the parish was still active enough to support and perhaps need at least two priests. There just weren’t enough to go around. So, St. Gall’s, in one of Detroit’s few fairly stable white neighborhoods, had one priest—and a team.

  Dailey was the pastor, a position that no longer carried the clout it once had. Joining him at breakfast were Sister Dorothy Hoover, religious education coordinator; Sister Elizabeth Martin, in charge of pastoral care for the sick and aged; and Tony Ventimiglio, the parish liturgist.

  Ordinarily, their meeting would have been devoted mainly to the preparation of the liturgies for next Sunday, the third Sunday in Lent. But this morning was spent mostly in recovering from last night’s parish council meeting.

  Dailey, a tall, well-built redhead and former athlete, never had appreciated the purpose of a parish council. As far as he was concerned, parish councils, at least as they functioned in the Archdiocese of Detroit, were an idea whose time never would come. He had once remarked to a few clerical friends at a martini-punctuated luncheon, that if the twelve Apostles had been a parish council, the Crucifixion would have been voted down twelve to one.

  “It wouldn’t be so bad,” said Sister Dorothy, stirring her coffee, “if they knew what they were talking about. But they just go off to their jobs at GM or Ford or the Detroit Bank and wouldn’t recognize a book on modern theology if it were tucked between the covers of Playboy. I’m getting tired of translating for them. I mean, every time I mention the Sacrament of Reconciliation and get blank stares, I have to say, ‘That’s what we used to call confession.’”

  Sister Elizabeth pushed her chair back from the table. “Don’t be so hard on them, Dot. They don’t have to know theology. That’s our job.”

  “They ought to know something about it, if they’re going to meddle in it.” Sister Dorothy was building up steam. “How can they disapprove of the new confessional we had built, if they don’t know the theology behind it?”

  “I think they were upset,” said Ventimiglio in a conciliatory tone, “because the cost wasn’t in the parish budget.”

  “What do you mean, not in the budget?” Sister Dorothy was nearly in full stride. “There’s $5,000 in the religious education budget for needed repairs and alterations. If the Holy Roman Catholic Church orders it and the Archdiocese of Detroit says ‘Do it,’ I’d say that’s a needed repair and alteration!”

  The alteration in question was an outgrowth of Vatican II. The purpose was to offer penitents a more personalized opportunity than the traditional “box” gave. Two weeks ago, the pastoral team at St. Gall’s had authorized construction of a small lighted room to the right of where the confessor sat in the confessional. Now those who wanted to go to confession in their accustomed manner could do so by entering the confessional box at the priest’s left, while those who wanted to speak face to face with the priest could enter on his right. There was no barrier between priest and penitent in the new facility. Yet priest and penitent, on the left, were still separated by a wall, a small door, and a screen.

  “While we’re on the subject of confession,” said Father Dailey, lighting his pipe, “the council didn’t take too kindly to the new hours for confession.”

  “Sacrament of Reconciliation,” corrected Ventimiglio.

  “Sacrament of Reconciliation,” repeated Dailey. “By any other n
ame, they still didn’t like it. The ladies and gentlemen of the council were in a mean mood last night.”

  “When was the last time anyone saw them happy?” snorted Sister Elizabeth.

  “When they were blissfully in their pews in church before some damn fool ever thought up the parish council idea,” Dailey answered.

  “You weren’t actually getting that many people for confession, were you, Mike?” Sister Elizabeth addressed Dailey.

  “Hell, no. The good old days of wall-to-wall penitents are gone. Four hours for confessions on Saturdays was three hours too much. I’ve been catching up on my reading, but I could be better occupied.”

  “The thing that steams me,” said Sister Dorothy, whose fuse had definitely been lit, “is that you’re actually available for confessions more now than you were before. So, O.K., there’s an hour in the afternoon and an hour in the evening on Saturdays. But you’ve got the buzzer system installed so anytime anyone wants to go to confession, they can just press the button in church.”

  “If I’m here.”

  “Which is most of the time.”

  With that, an ear-splitting noise only slightly less raucous than that which marks a Red Wing goal jolted the four of them.

  “What in hell was that?” exclaimed Ventimiglio.

  “Speaking of the buzzer…” Dailey snapped on a white plastic collar that attached itself to his neck like a handcuff to a wrist. “I’ll get Joe to work on the volume. There’s no use letting the whole neighborhood know some poor soul wants to be shriven.

  “Why don’t you go on with the meeting,” he added, throwing a cassock on and beginning to button it, “but don’t decide to sell the rectory before I get back. And Dorothy, try to calm down, will you? For all we know, the parish council has bugged this room. And their next meeting will begin with the crucifixion of Sister Dorothy.”

  He left chuckling. Then, on second thought, he regretted having made the last statement. No one in Detroit made jokes anymore about priests or nuns being killed.

  Joe Cox got off the elevator on the fifth floor of the City-County Building. He asked the policeman in the hall where he could find Lieutenant Koznicki. Then, instead of heading for Room 504, he decided to see what else was being housed on the fifth floor. He had a hunch he’d find more cops.

  Hunch confirmed. He could not determine the exact number of offices the police had occupied, but it was impressive. Just walking through the hallway, he counted eight uniformed police plus at least four plainclothesmen he recognized. The doors to three offices were open. Two offices were clearly occupied by the police. One evidently was not. Apparently, the police had not commandeered the entire floor, but not far from it. He guessed it was a special homicide task force, and he guessed all were working on the murders of the priest and the nun. It was time to meet Koznicki.

  He had seen the big policeman before but never in close proximity. He decided if he were ever to do anything illegal, he’d just as soon not be caught by Koznicki. Being run over by a bulldozer might be a happier experience.

  As soon as he was seated, Cox took a notepad and pen from his inside jacket pocket. “Do all the cops on the floor belong to you?”

  “Yes.” Koznicki did not care for word games or unnecessary conversation that would conclude with information he was willing to give in the beginning.

  Cox liked it. He had half-expected a denial, or at least some stalling. Koznicki, on his part, appreciated Cox’s investigation of the floor. It was an indication of the reporter’s professionalism. And he’d far rather deal with a professional in any field than some jackass who would foul everything up with his own inadequacies.

  “Are they a special homicide task force investigating the murders of the priest and nun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you say,” Cox was busier shorthanding his questions than Koznicki’s answers “your presence here, instead of at headquarters, is a political move?”

  “No, you would say that, not me.”

  “O.K., fair enough. Let’s do it a different way. The fact that you’re not at headquarters, won’t that hinder your investigation?”

  “No, not really. You see, everyone in this city, from the mayor on down, and that should be a partial answer to your previous question, wants a solution to this case. Every once in a while there is a crime that shocks even a city like Detroit, and these murders more than qualify as such a crime. Then, the city—the mayor, the council, the chief of police—takes special steps to have it solved quickly.”

  “But wouldn’t things go more quickly at headquarters?”

  “Not necessarily. Real police work is not like Kojak or Columbo on television where one policeman investigates one murder for an hour and solves it. Any real policeman is investigating any number of cases at all times. Some of them are dead ends, sometimes because there’s just not enough time to devote to the leads. We are electronically plugged in to headquarters, so we’ve got that advantage while at the same time being able to devote all our time to this case.”

  “O.K., these cases are two weeks old for the priest and six days old for the nun. How far along are you?”

  “Not far. But you must remember that until the nun was killed, we had no indication that the priest’s murder was not an isolated act. So the investigation, up to six days ago, probably was so much wasted time. The previously mentioned dead end. Since the nun’s murder, our investigation has taken an entirely different tack. So you might say, logically, that we’ve been investigating both murders for less than a week.”

  “Any leads?”

  “Nothing that looks good right now. We’ve been busy with what police work is all about—not unlike your work, Mr. Cox—painstaking investigation that may prove fruitful and may not. We have no idea just now.”

  “Can you give me any specifics?”

  “Certainly.” Everything that Koznicki would tell Cox he knew the reporter could and would discover on his own. But the detective wanted to offer shortcuts to the reporter as an act of good faith and to draw Cox into this investigation as an aide. He didn’t care who solved the case as long as the murderer was apprehended. “We have teams of police inquiring among the hospital personnel as well as among the neighbors of the convent. It’s a common experience that people see more than they readily remember. Somebody got into that hospital, and somebody got into that convent. We strongly suspect it was the same person in both instances. It stretches coincidence too far to think the murderer worked in the hospital and lived in the convent neighborhood. So, we assume the murderer was foreign to both the hospital and the convent neighborhood. It is more than likely someone at the hospital and someone in the convent neighborhood saw the one we’re looking for. If we ask long enough and repetitively enough, someone will remember. At that point, we’ll have turned a very important corner.”

  “Is that the extent of your progress till now?” Cox was taking notes furiously.

  “Well, no. You might say that’s our active phase right now.”

  “You’ve got a ‘passive’ phase?”

  “Confessors. Each well-publicized case,” he looked significantly at Cox as, admittedly, the chief publicist, “draws a number of people who are chrome confessors. They see themselves as the perpetrators of everything. Sick people, generally. They want their names in print or, sometimes, they are so pathological they actually think they’ve committed the crime in question. But, in each case, we have to check it out.”

  “How do you know one of your sickies didn’t do it?”

  “In no instance does anyone but the real murderer know every detail of the crime. Although, in this case,” again he looked pointedly at Cox, “the general public does know a great deal more than usual.”

  For the first time in his short journalistic career, Fox felt a sense of embarrassment. “You mean the rosaries. There was no way I could suppress that. It was the whole story.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t blame you. Had I been in your shoes, I’d ha
ve done the same thing. But, while news of the rosaries does complicate our job, the publicity may eventually prove advantageous. Besides, there are a few details still known only to the police and the murderer.”

  Cox smiled, knowing the reply he would get to his next question. “What did I miss?”

  Koznicki returned the smile and merely leaned back in his chair, again folding his hands across his ample middle. Cox sensed the interview was coming to an end. He had enough material for a respectable continuing story. He would head first to the convent neighborhood, then to the hospital for a little investigating on his own. He shifted forward in his chair. “One last question, Lieutenant.”

  Koznicki nodded.

  “There really isn’t much besides the rosaries that ties these two murders together, is there? I mean, this case might fall apart too, no?”

  “It might. But, unless I miss my guess, we’ll soon know.”

  “Don’t tell me. If you’re right, there’ll be another rosary murder.”

  “That’s not for publication. But you’re very perceptive.”

  “That’s my job,” monotoned Cox in his best “Dragnet” imitation; “I’m a reporter.”

  The two parted with considerable mutual admiration. Koznicki didn’t care who solved the murders as long as they were solved. Cox didn’t care who solved the murders as long as he was first to report it.

  Father Pompilio had a guest for dinner, so dinner had been delayed half an hour for preprandial drinks. Father Koesler didn’t mind that delay in the least. He enjoyed a fresh martini as well as the next man. But it did elongate an already tedious time allocated for a meal. Dinner would be longer tonight not only because of the drinks and Pompilio’s meticulous method for food consumption, but because his friend liked to tell stories. And that slowed Pompilio’s M.O. even more.