Sudden Death fk-7

by William X. Kienzle

  Koesler nodded.

  “To begin with, were you aware of anything peculiar about Hunsinger’s behavior?”

  “Peculiar?”

  “One might even call it neurotic.”

  “Neurotic. .”

  “Compulsive,” Ewing finally clarified. He was beginning to wonder about the advisability of including the priest in this investigation.

  “Compulsive! Oh, my, yes. I don’t think anyone could have been around Hank very long without noticing the repetition of one routine after another: the precise placing of his Bible, pen, pad; he even got upset if anyone disturbed anything in the apartment-and if anyone did he had better put it back in its exact position. But then,” Koesler expanded, “I’ve always thought that if a Catholic was going to become neurotic, compulsive behavior was a natural vehicle to choose, even subconsciously.” Koesler smiled as he launched into one of his favorite routines.

  “After all, we provide our people with so many numbers: one God, two natures, three persons, four cardinal virtues, five processions, seven sacraments, nine Beatitudes, nine First Fridays, Ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys, twelve promises to St. Margaret Mary, fourteen Stations of the Cross. Probably one of the most popular images for a Catholic is a rosary. And there you’ve got the Catholic carefully counting out ten Hail Marys for each decade, five decades in the small popular rosary, fifteen decades in the full rosary. And it’s the rosary that’s entwined in the Catholic’s hands when he or she is laid to the final rest.

  “Mind you, I don’t claim that all Catholics become compulsive. Only that I’ll bet the majority of Catholics who become neurotic at least go through a phase of compulsive behavior.”

  Silently, Harris hoped Koesler would be able to hold down the quantity of his responses.

  “Okay,” said Ewing, “how about the others in the group? Do you think they were aware of his compulsiveness?”

  “Oh, yes. Remember I told you about how he insisted on everything’s being in its proper place? He almost forced his guests to join him in his compulsiveness.”

  Better, thought Harris.

  “Now, here’s a second consideration, Father. Were you aware that Hunsinger had any problems with his vision?”

  “His vision? Well, I assume he had some problem; I mean, he wore contact lenses. At least I noticed one of those lens-disinfectant containers-what do they call them, cookers? — in the apartment.”

  “Would the others in that group know about the lenses?”

  “Again, I assume so. Surely his teammates would see him putting the contacts in, taking them out. . wouldn’t they? Surely his employers. . the trainer. . would know. . wouldn’t they?”

  “We’re not so sure they all knew. We do know that Hunsinger was very reserved when it came to anything that might be construed as a personal defect or deficiency. But that’s an interesting observation about the lens cleaner. Do you recall where you saw it?”

  “Yes. When I visited the bathroom, it was on a dresser in the bedroom.”

  “Then the others could have seen it?”

  “Uh-huh. Anybody who looked into the bedroom-and we all did-would be likely to see it. That is, if you could get your eyes away from all those mirrors.

  “Another thing, about the strychnine. Hank bragged about having it in the apartment. Said it was the atom bomb of rat poisons. Everyone in the discussion group would have known it was there.”

  “Okay. One final thing, Father: Were you aware of anything else that might have been wrong with Hunsinger’s vision?”

  “You mean besides the fact that he wore glasses-or contacts? No. . I didn’t even know the reason he needed corrective lenses. Was there something else?”

  “He was colorblind, Father, totally colorblind. We just visited with his eye doctor. All Hunsinger could see was white, black, and gray.”

  “Amazing!” A new light came into Koesler’s eyes. “Say, that would explain why Hank’s apartment was decorated the way it was, wouldn’t it? I never really wondered about it, just thought it was sort of. . masculine. Maybe because that’s the way I ordinarily dress: in black and white. But that certainly explains the decor of his apartment.”

  “Now, think carefully, Father: Did any of the others ever give any indication they might have known about Hunsinger’s colorblindness?”

  Koesler gave the question careful consideration. “No. There was a bit of what I considered to be just banter … the kind of thing you might expect from athletes. But no, nothing at all that had to do with color. There were some remarks about Bobby Cobb’s color-he was the only black in the group-but it seemed to be given and taken in good humor. I am rather sensitive to that sort of thing. But it didn’t trouble me. No, as far as I can recall, no one made any reference at all to colorblindness.”

  “Well, there it is,” Harris noted.

  The other two peered at the distance. The outline of the Silverdome was barely visible.

  Ewing looked at Harris. “Well, where do we begin?”

  Harris smiled. “My personal philosophy is, start at the top.”

  “The top it is.”

  In the remaining time, Ewing, consulting his notes, explained to Koesler all that Dr. Glowacki had told them about color deficiency and colorblindness.

  One of the fringe benefits of these police investigations, thought Koesler, was that he always learned something.

  At forty-four, Jay Galloway easily was the youngest owner of a professional football franchise. And he appeared even younger. Of moderate height and build, he had an oval, wrinkle-free face and a full head of dark brown hair untouched by gray, parted in the middle, and shaped in a mod cut covering the top tip of the ears and just touching the back of his shirt collar.

  Galloway was a native of Minneapolis. His father had been a successful salesman, his mother a homemaker. He had a younger brother and sister.

  Environment has its effect on the developing personality. But it is an unpredictable effect. Jay Galloway was a case in point.

  Born James Randolph Galloway, he developed in a solid, typical WASP family. Security and stability were there. The family attended a nearby stylish Lutheran church nearly every Sunday. Galloway’s father, besides being a successful ad salesman for the Minneapolis Star, was active in the Boy Scouts of America. Mrs. Galloway kept an extremely neat home; loved, humored, and obeyed her husband; was active in the ladies’ society of Mt. Olivet Lutheran Church, and tried her very best to instill in her children the virtues of piety, reverence, honesty, truthfulness, diligence, and industriousness. In this, she was sustained by her husband.

  Jay Galloway grew up in a state whose reputation for cold snowy winters was fabled. He grew up in a city that was famous as a municipality that had been carefully planned; had a well-monitored government cleaner than that of almost any other large urban area; was headquarters for many large corporations and businesses whose management demanded and got an attractive city in which their executives would be eager to live; was liberal in politics and conservative in almost everything else. The eleven lakes within the city were open to the public. No one privately owned property contiguous to any of the beautiful lakes. Taxes were high, but education took the top dollar.

  While the downtowns of other cities decayed and gurgled in death throes, downtown Minneapolis with its mall and skyways remained vibrant long after Mary Tyler Moore was done throwing her cap up in the air outside Dayton’s. General Mills, 3M, Cargill, International Multifoods, and similar corporations were generous in community donations, providing an ideal atmosphere for raising families. No branch of city government had an excess of authority without having another segment of government there to provide checks and balances. One graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School who specialized in criminal law moved to another state after passing the bar, because he did not think there was enough crime in the Twin Cities to provide a lucrative legal career.

  The Guthrie was among the very best and most famous of regional theaters. Chanhassen was
among the most successful dinner theaters in the nation. Yet both theaters regularly staged classical, tried-and-true productions.

  And that was pretty much the way Minneapolitans grew up-in relative safety, in good health, well educated, with a penchant for planning ahead carefully, proud of their city, programmed for white-collar jobs, and convinced the Ford assembly plant just outside St. Paul was an anomaly.

  Like their theaters, Minneapolitans did not take many risks. They followed their ancestors in vocations, or carefully trained for established professions. They lived well and patiently waited their turn for membership in escalatingly prestigious country clubs.

  That is how the Galloway family lived. That is how their three children developed. That is how young Jay Galloway grew. For a short time. Then he began to forge a lifestyle that was nearly the antithesis of his impressive environment.

  Environment has its effect on the developing personality. But it is an unpredictable effect. So it was with Jay Galloway.

  After graduation from the University of Minnesota, he was employed by the Minneapolis Tribune as an advertising salesman. Following in his father’s footsteps, but not along the identical path. His father was an ad salesman for the Star. But it was an understatement to call them sister publications. They were more like twins. Readers of both papers would have been hard pressed to discern a difference in their editorial policies. They were housed in the same building. They were both properties of the Cowles Publishing Company. And when one looked high enough into the management hierarchy of both papers, the personnel was identical.

  So, young Jay began in the approved Minneapolitan fashion.

  All his life, he’d heard his father run on about the sales game. Jay had studied sales and business management in college. He was, it was universally recognized, a natural. Some salespeople counted up to seven noes before they accepted a negative answer. Jay Galloway never gave a client an opportunity to turn him down. His standard method was to make an excellent sales presentation, usually by phone, then interrupt himself before reaching the point where the client would have to accept or decline. “Don’t make up your mind now,” Galloway would say, “Think about it. I’ll get back to you.”

  Galloway had some sixth sales sense. Unerringly, he would perceive the moment the sale was made. And he would move in for the sales kill. Of course, his technique was not effective in every case. But his success ratio was extremely high. He made good money and his prospects were excellent.

  He courted and married Marjorie Palmer. In this union, he attained the carousel’s brass ring. Marjorie had been the University of Minnesota’s dream girl, the campus beauty par excellence. Jay and Marj had attended the university at the same time, she a year behind him. He had made his play for her then and found only that she did not recognize his existence. Her tastes ran to whatever football player happened to be Big Man on Campus.

  After graduation, Galloway finally caught her attention when he attained some considerable standing as a young man of means in the community. From that moment on, it was the full-court press. Dining at Charlie’s Cafe Exceptionale, the Blue Horse, Lord Fletcher’s, the Rosewood Room; dancing at the Orion Room and Chouette’s; evenings at the Guthrie or Chanhassen. Afterward, sometimes his place, sometimes hers.

  It was a society wedding. St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. Honeymoon in Hawaii. They settled into the Minneapolis suburb of Edina. They decided not to have children. It promised to be a good life. Together they would tread the path to success and fulfillment as had so many other successful Twin Cities couples. They were Beautiful People.

  But he grew restless. He found depressing the prospect of following forever in his father’s footsteps, even though Jay was certain to soar beyond his father’s achievements.

  He began to find staff meetings a crashing bore. He fidgeted through what had been routine three-martini lunches. He became distracted during sales presentations. His acquisition of new accounts slowed, then stopped dead in the water. He began losing dependable old accounts. His employers were very concerned. They sent him off to a private, company-owned retreat on the north shore of Lake Superior. They hoped that in seclusion and peace he would find himself.

  He did.

  But the self he found was new. It did not fit into the Minneapolitan mold prefabricated for him by his parents and peers. He would be his own man. No longer would he work for others. He would become an entrepreneur-the guy who gives the other guys ulcers.

  But more than anything else, he would become Somebody. No longer would people identify him as Jay Galloway, ad salesman. He would become Jay Galloway, celebrity. No soiree would be complete without him. He would have his picture in the newspapers regularly, as well as on the TV screen, as part of the news and, perhaps, the entertainment scene. He would leave behind this relative anonymity that was now his lot. He had to become Somebody.

  That was what he concluded during the first half of his retreat. Just how he would become Somebody was the subject of the final portion of his retreat.

  At length, he decided to follow the maxim, Go with what you know. He knew newspapers. He would start his own. Nothing to attempt to compete with the Star or Tribune. He hadn’t the clout to take on even a small portion of the Cowles empire. He would begin a kind of shopping guide for the thriving Minneapolis downtown.

  And so he did.

  He invested everything he owned, mortgaging up to his hairline, to start his publication. He found there was more to this business than he had realized. In the beginning he found it necessary personally to stand at the corner of the Mall and pass out complimentary copies of his tabloid to indifferent Minneapolitans. He was close to panic.

  That was when he sensed Marjorie was beginning to drift. It began with disenchantment with Jay. In her eyes, he had blown it all. Their comfortable life had degenerated into counting coins. Dinner out had degenerated into eating at the Jolly Troll occasionally. Marjorie completely lacked her husband’s vision of a rosy future. She began to see other men.

  Galloway learned of his wife’s dalliances. He was neither terribly hurt nor surprised. But the fact that he felt neither emotion was surprising. Something subtle and subconscious had happened. He had harbored a latent feeling of contempt for her. The feeling had begun the moment she consented to marry him. It had grown steadily since then. He still was not cognizant of the contempt, only that he felt neither strong anger nor surprise.

  It was a phenomenon that would occur within him time and again throughout his life. He would court the very best-executives, staff, athletes, women-and the moment they consented to associate with him, either as employee or mistress, he would lose all respect for them. But never consciously.

  If ever he had gone into psychotherapy honestly, he might have discovered that he was simply projecting his self-loathing onto others. Unconsciously, he had no respect for himself. Thus, subconsciously, he could not respect anyone who proffered services or love.

  In any case, his downtown paper began to thrive. It was a tribute to his tenacity and talent at salesmanship. While remaining complimentary to readers, the ad sales skyrocketed. As with most ad salespersons, he was slipshod about picking up the pieces, attending to detail. Thus it was fortunate for him when he could begin hiring a staff.

  He was able to take on a full-time editor, who was given a rather generous budget for attracting freelance writers. He then hired two more salespeople. His greatest coup-a singular tribute to Galloway’s salesmanship-was in luring his old friend, Dave Whitman, from International Multifoods to become business manager of the paper.

  Whitman was such a prize that Galloway almost-but not quite-retained his respect for his friend. The others he hired he quickly but quietly began to despise. They became aware that there was something peculiar about their relationship with their employer. He noticed there was something peculiar about his relationship with his employees. But no one could identify just what was going on.

  From the paper, Galloway moved into the pizza bu
siness-a sleeper enterprise in the capitalistic society. He took with him Dave Whitman. Together they managed to garner solid, six-figure incomes. Thence they moved into the subculture of professional football. As he did with his Minneapolis paper, Galloway sold his interest in the pizza business. Now all his financial eggs were in the Cougars basket. He worried a good deal about that. The income from attendance, television, and other sources was extremely gratifying. But the expenses, particularly in players’ salaries, were enormous. And growing annually. Unlike other owners, Galloway had no resource to satisfy expenses other than the income created by the Cougars. He had cause to worry.

  One of his major worries involved Hank Hunsinger. The Hun posed a serious dilemma for Galloway. On the one hand, Hunsinger drew a crowd, not only on the playing field when he carried the ball, but in the stands. A hefty percentage of the Silverdome crowd came to see the Hun. But, on the other hand, his salary demands grew more preposterous by the year. There was a time coming, if indeed it had not already arrived, when the two would counterbalance each other and the Hun’s salary and fringe benefits would offset the crowd he drew.

  It was just possible Hunsinger stood in the way of Galloway’s master plan: to be Somebody. Galloway could not let that happen. He could brook no impediment to his goal. He had to find a solution to the problem of the Hun.

  “I understand you have to investigate this matter.” Galloway, fingers trembling slightly, lit a Camel. “But I’m a very busy man. And you don’t have an appointment.”

  “We haven’t time to make appointments during a homicide investigation,” Sergeant Ewing explained affably. “We’ve just got to go where the investigation leads.”

  “But I don’t know anything about it,” Galloway protested. “Besides, I’m trying to put this whole thing back together. I still can’t believe we’ve lost Hunsinger!”

  Koesler thought Galloway made it sound as if he had lost a prized tool.

  “Look, Mr. Galloway,” said Lieutenant Harris, “we can ask you a few questions, get a little information from you here and now. Or we can all go downtown to police headquarters, where you can make a statement.”