The Rosary Murders

by William X. Kienzle

  Damn! His stream of consciousness carried him on. When he had publicly thanked the ladies for their marvelously prepared dinner, and the priest guests were wildly applauding and whistling, the ladies simply crowded around the doorway of the kitchen, too shy to come all the way out into the gym, and so Mrs. Bullingin had never gotten out of the kitchen at all. From experience, he knew he would not hear about that. Mrs. Bullingin would erect a wall of silence for the next couple of weeks. If only he had thought to insist on a parting of the ladies so that Mrs. Bullingin could’ve emerged for her special share of the accolades!

  Well, sufficient for that over the next couple of weeks. He wasn’t going to let that spoil the afterglow.

  Sklarski’s eyes strained to pierce the halo of smoke that hovered over the poker table.

  “Five-card draw. Jacks or better to open. Ante two bucks.” Father Darin O’Day intoned the game’s description as if it were a flat form of Gregorian chant. O’Day resembled a bald and paunchy Robert Taylor, the late screen actor.

  “The trouble with you, O’Day, is you got no imagination.” Father Donald Curley. Tall, overweight, bald, hard of hearing, with bad eyesight; he was organized religion’s response to Don Rickles.

  “You mean because he hasn’t named five wild cards?” asked Father Joe Marek.

  “Exactly,” said Curley.

  There was no response from O’Day. Nor was any expected.

  “Got any extraordinary ministers at St. Henry’s yet, Pat?” asked Sklarski. The question, as everyone knew, was loaded. Father Patrick McNiff, who resembled Carroll O’Connor physically and Archie Bunker ideologically, clearly would be the last to allow the laity to distribute Communion.

  “No, and we ain’t gonna have any!” McNiff carefully arranged his five cards.

  “Why not?” asked Marek, a slightly built inner-city pastor whose parish bordered on Steele’s.

  McNiff tapped his cards on the table and peered myopically through thick glasses at his confrere. “Ain’t gonna have no married man who’s been foolin’ with his wife handlin’ my Communion!”

  “Make up your mind, McNiff,” demanded Curley, “is it good or bad?”

  “What?”

  “Marriage!”

  “Good, I guess. So what?”

  “He could always wash his hands.”

  “That ain’t the point.”

  “McNiff, you belong in the Old Testament!”

  “I can open,” said Father Felix Lasko, delightedly. Lasko taught Latin at the local high school seminary, where the students had long ago dubbed him “Bubbles.” He wore a smile most of the time for no apparent reason. Seated, his feet barely touched the floor. When he became excited, his feet wiggled. Thus, he was not a particularly effective poker player. His four opponents could hear a steady clatter of rhythm coming from beneath Lasko’s chair. Each decided he would not stay in this pot unless he had an exceptional hand.

  “Cards?” asked dealer O’Day.

  “Can I get anybody something from the bar?” Sklarski was ever the solicitous host.

  McNiff flipped three of his cards onto the discard pile. “I’d like another beer,” he said flatly.

  Curley discarded one of his cards. “McNiff, when are you gonna lose some weight?”

  “What makes you think I have to?”

  Curley reached over, grabbed two handfuls of fat that bulged over McNiff’s abdomen, pulled the mass forward and placed it on the poker table. “Anybody got a knife and fork? I didn’t have any dessert.”

  McNiff sat back, the fat falling back in place. “Keep your hands to yourself. You some kind of weirdo?”

  “You really should, Pat,” said Marek. “You’re inviting a heart attack. Don’t forget what happened to Fred Palmer.”

  O’Day’s fist bit the table with a thud. His index finger snapped at Lasko.

  “Oh-oh, is it my turn?” Lasko looked bewildered.

  “Bet.” O’Day’s voice was emotionless.

  “Oh,” said Lasko, his toes beating furiously against the tile floor. “Oh, I think I’ll just bet thirty dollars.” Ordinarily, Lasko considered a five-dollar bet a risk that approached sinfulness.

  One by one, the others threw their cards in.

  “Doesn’t anybody want to see what I’ve got?” asked Lasko, plaintively.

  “No,” said Curley, “that’s why you’re still celibate.”

  Sklarski left to get McNiff's beer.

  The group in the bomb shelter had thinned. Only Koesler, Steele, and Max remained. Why, Sklarski wondered, hadn’t Dalton or Scanlon said good-bye? Or had they? He couldn’t remember.

  “Dalton and Scanlon gone?” he asked.

  “Yes,” answered Max, topping off his bourbon on the rocks. “Dalton drove Scanlon home. Had a bit too much to drink. You’ll find an extra car in your driveway tomorrow.”

  “I’ll have the janitor drive it over to Scanlon’s.”

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Monsignor. It was Scanlon who drove Dalton home.”

  “Oh, whatever.”

  Koesler turned to Steele and resumed the conversation that had been interrupted by Sklarski’s entrance. “How’ve you managed to hang in there all these years?”

  “You’ve got to be programmed for failure, I think,” answered Steele. “You try something, watch it fail, try something else, watch it fail—”

  “But it must be depressing.” Max was quite depressed just by participating in this conversation.

  “On the contrary,” said Steele, “it’s just the opposite of depressing. It’s exciting. The core city is one of the few remaining places where a priest is really needed and truly appreciated. Suburbanites can and do pay professionals for what they need and want. The inner city is where the good old days have never gone away. That’s why it’s hard to understand why these murders are taking place in the city.”

  “Why?” asked Max. “After all, it’s Detroit that’s known as Murder City, not Dearborn.”

  “Oh, well, we all know some hophead can waste us anytime for a few bucks that will keep him in dope a little while longer. We simply have to live with that. But these are premeditated murders. None of us can figure out why.”

  “Maybe it’s over,” guessed Koesler. “Maybe there won’t be anymore.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” said Max.

  Sklarski popped open another can of Coors, especially imported for the occasion, and returned to the table.

  Curley, the new dealer, was shuffling cards endlessly. “Seven-card stud, the last two down. One-eyed Jacks, deuces, and eights are wild.”

  “Is this poker or a memory game?” grumbled O’Day.

  “What’s wild? What’s wild?” Lasko’s feet drummed against the floor.

  Sklarski thumped the Coors down in front of McNiff.

  “I thought you were going to go easy on the calories, Pat,” said Marek.

  McNiff adjusted the currency before him. “I won’t eat any more peanuts.”

  “McNiff,” said Curley, “you belong in the Old Testament with a muzzle on.”

  A fist hit the table, the index finger snapping at Curley. “Deal!” O’Day suggested.

  Attendance at St. Ursula’s Wednesday evening Lenten Devotions was holding up pretty well, Father Koesler reflected, as he joined Father Pompilio and Father Farmer for dinner. Each Wednesday evening so far there had been about a hundred parishioners present. This despite the fact that Farmer was preaching the series.

  Koesler guessed that Farmer had written these sermons some thirty years before, shortly after he’d been ordained, and he had not performed even minor alterations on them in the meantime. Not only was the theology pre-Conciliar, it was even bad for its time. But the sermons did display a good measure of hell fire and brimstone. Perhaps that explained the steady crowd of acceptable numbers. Koesler certainly got enough letters to the editor complaining about the lack of good old-fashioned hell fire and brimstone sermons. Undoubtedly, the writers were serious. At least a core of
critical Catholics would turn out if you tried to scare them to death. Thunder and lightning never had been Koesler’s style, and he wasn’t about to begin now.

  Last Wednesday, Farmer had even pulled the old “mountain of solid steel” out of his bag. Koesler had heard the performance as he waited in the wings to help with confessions after Devotions.

  “My friends in Christ,” Farmer had intoned, “imagine, if you will, a mountain made of solid steel, taller than the tallest mountain in the world. Now, my friends in Christ, imagine that once every thousand years, a small bird flies by that mountain and just brushes it with its wing. My friends in Christ, when that bird has that mountain worn down level with the ground…” Pregnant pause. Triumphantly, “…eternity will not…” His voice rising,”. . .even have BEGUN!”

  Impressive, especially since Farmer had prefaced all this with a vivid, if fanciful, description of hell. It was enough to drive a sinner to sobriety, if a sinner were motivated best by fear.

  Koesler, as he took his seat at the dinner table, wondered how Farmer would scare the customers tonight. He noted that Sophie had treated a standing rib roast with the respect due such a magnificent cut of meat. Its pink center gave way to darker hues and, finally, a charcoal-textured exterior. Pompilio ordinarily provided a good if quite ordinary table. But when guests were expected, he made certain Sophie had enough to buy the very best.

  Pompilio crossed himself. “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ, Our Lord.”

  “Amen!” thundered Farmer, as he whipped his napkin across his lap.

  “Say, Bob…” As the canonically appointed “Father” of this canonical family, Pompilio began slicing the roast. “…wait till you see what Joe here brought me today.”

  “I can hardly wait,” said Koesler.

  Neither could Farmer. He reached down at the side of his chair and produced a cylindrical instrument with a glass covering at one end and open at the other. Pompilio and Farmer, shameless gadgeteers, were forever giving each other strange gadgets.

  “Guess what it is,” said Farmer, brightly.

  “Damned if I know.” Koesler examined the new plaything with a casual interest as he held his plate out for a slice of roast.

  “I couldn’t get it either.” Pompilio shared in Farmer’s childlike delight both over the gadget itself and the fact that no one could guess what it was.

  “It’s for fishin’,” exulted Farmer, as he leaned over the side of an imaginary boat and submerged the cylinder, glass-covered end first, in an imaginary body of water. “You look through this and see if there are any fish around.”

  “What’ll they think of next?” Koesler observed juice ooze from the roast as he cut into it. Rectory living, he mused, had its compensations.

  Pompilio carefully carved a small corner from his slice of roast, laid his knife down and began tapping the meat in its juice. “Say, Joe, did I tell you they’re thinking of opening a porno movie house on Gratiot near Harper?”

  “That’s in this parish, ain’t it?”

  “Damn right! And so, consequently, you know what follows a new porno movie house.” Pompilio laid his fork down and began slowly chewing his piece of meat.

  “Dirty book stores, massage parlors, perverts,” Farmer chronicled, dabbing juice from his chin.

  Koesler stabbed a selection from the mixed vegetables. “And there goes the old neighborhood, eh?”

  “It ain’t Grosse Pointe,” said Pompilio, his hands raised in a gesture of helplessness, “but it’s all we got… .”

  “You know, there’s a sweet, little old lady, no, the embodiment of a sweet, little old lady,” Koesler corrected himself; “trim little figure, purple hair, who comes down to my office faithfully once each year. She always carries this large brown leather briefcase, which she opens in my office, and dumps dozens of pornographic magazines on my desk. Then she says, ‘Have you seen these?’”

  “And you take the Fifth Amendment,” laughed Farmer.

  “Something like that. No two of these magazines are alike. I don’t know where she gets them all. I think she gets her highs at Morality in Media meetings. And I’ve often thought that if she ever had a car accident, say, and the police found that briefcase in her car, they’d think they’d caught Detroit’s top smut peddler.”

  “Or a sweet little old hooker,” added Pompilio.

  “That reminds me, Pomps,” Farmer said, helping himself to a second portion of potatoes, “have you heard the one about the little old lady who killed her husband? Beat him to death. You, Bob?”

  Pompilio and Koesler shook their heads negatively.

  Farmer continued, “The cops came, took the bloody body away, and asked her, ‘Lady, why did you do it?’ She says, ‘Because he called me a two-bit hooker.’ Cop says, ‘What did you hit him with?’ She says—” Farmer began to break up. “She says… she says, ‘A sack full of quarters!’”

  As usual, Pompilio couldn’t discern the punch line. “A sackful of what, Joe, a sackful of what?”

  “Quarters,” supplied Koesler, since Farmer was too convulsed to reply. All three laughed.

  Koesler speared another slice of roast. “So, is that what you’re going to preach on tonight, Joe? Sex?”

  “Hell, no. I preached on that two weeks ago. You must’ve missed it.”

  “I’m afraid I did. Now, let’s see,” said Koesler, “Sex two weeks ago. That explains why you talked on hell and eternity last week. And, if you talked on hell and eternity last week, this week it must be…judgment!”

  “Now you’ve got it.” Farmer was almost finished with dinner.

  Pompilio, nearly halfway through his first slice of roast, rested his knife and fork across his plate, and mused, “I once had a lady for instructions who was fascinated by the idea of the general judgment. She couldn’t figure out how, if everyone who had ever lived was going to be there, how everyone would be able to see and hear what was going on. So I told her we’d just have to let God handle the audio and video since the whole thing was His idea in the first place.”

  “So, Joe,” returned Koesler, lighting his first after-dinner cigarette, “you gonna scare hell out of ’em tonight?”

  “You betcha.”

  “Sock it to ’em, Joe!”

  Pompilio, carving another small portion out of his slice of roast, looked up at Koesler. “You are going to help us with confessions after devotions, aren’t you, Bob?”

  Koesler could think of no good reason for helping with confessions. There never were enough penitents around to call for the multiple available confessors of days of yore, at least until Good Friday. However, it was small enough an effort to help pay for his room and board at St. Ursula’s. “Sure. I’ll be there. But I’m afraid I’ll have to skip Joe’s sermon. I know how the judgment scene comes out. I read the book.”

  Father Koesler thought he had allowed Joe Farmer plenty of time to have finished his sermon on the Last Judgment. But when he arrived at the passageway linking rectory to church, Farmer was still droning on. Koesler had to endure the sheep and the goats, the shame and the blame, the regret and the irreversibility. He waited in the passageway, smoking cigarettes, his mind flitting from editorials he must write, to sermons he must give, to the Rosary Murders that were never far from his consciousness.

  Farmer finally wound down. He was followed by Benediction. At the final strains of the everpopular “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name,” Koesler adjusted the black cape he was wearing over his cassock and entered the church.

  Good crowd. Maybe a hundred. Maybe a few more. As he walked to the rear of the church toward his confessional, he noted that a goodly number of people were, mostly from habit, leaving before the service had been officially ended. He was suddenly surrounded by a dozen or so parishioners intent on but one thing—exiting. Koesler had that odd thought that reoccurred whenever he was in a position such as this. If he just stood still, he would be floored and trampled to death. />
  But he moved along briskly with the crowd. He spotted Nancy Baldwin among those still standing and singing the closing hymn.

  He winked at her. She smiled and nodded back.

  He took a deep breath and entered his confessional. It was getting harder and harder to man the confessional because less and less was happening there. Perhaps this was a phase the Church was going through.

  He flipped both light switches. This turned on the small green exterior light immediately beneath his nameplate on the door, as well as the naked bulb in his compartment. He gathered his cape and sat down, checking the sliding doors on either side to make sure they were open. From the ample pocket in his cape, he pulled The Second Deadly Sin, Lawrence Sanders’ new murder mystery. Koesler had enjoyed The First Deadly Sin immensely and had been anticipating the new novel.

  He heard the curtain move at the confessional to his left. He flicked off the interior light, closed the sliding door to his right, and leaned toward the left panel. It was a teenage boy who had looked at dirty pictures, read dirty books, had dirty thoughts, said dirty words, and had been scared by Joe Farmer. Five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys later, all would be purified.

  The boy shuffled out of the confessional, and Koesler relit the interior and resumed reading. He was determined not to read beyond one chapter. If no one else were coming to confession by then, to hell with it, he’d take his murder mystery to the comfort of his room.

  The curtain rustled to his right. He extinguished the light, closed the small door to his left, and assumed the more naturally comfortable position, leaning against the right wall.

  Silence.

  “It’s all right. I’m here. You can go ahead,” Koesler whispered, the side of his face nearly pressing against the wire screen.

  Silence.

  Koesler thought he detected a slight sound. A kind of muffled sob.

  There it was again, more clearly. Whoever was in the confessional was crying bitterly but softly.