Sudden Death fk-7

by William X. Kienzle

  “Well, look at it this way: You said the poison used was strychnine and that it was found in the Hun’s apartment. I can tell you it wasn’t there when I was. . seeing him. And you probably know that. So, how would I know there was strychnine available in the apartment?”

  “You had a key-”

  “I had a key! I had a key! Of course I had a key! But when we broke up I gave it back to him … I threw it at him!”

  If that was a lie, or if she had the key duplicated before she returned it, thought Ewing, that would be a very interesting lie.

  “Of course,” said Harris, “we’d have no way of knowing whether you returned the key, would we?”

  “I assume you’re having the apartment searched. You should find an extra key among his belongings.”

  Unless, thought Koesler, he’s given it to another woman. .

  “We may find more than one key. But that would not necessarily indicate one of them was from you.”

  “I returned it! “ She said it defiantly.

  “Maybe you did. But what if you had the key duplicated before you returned it?”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “No one has said you did. This is just the first round of our investigation.”

  Unexpectedly, she relaxed and appeared quite confident. “I think the rule of law is that I am presumed innocent. The burden of proof- of proof-is on you.”

  Harris nodded acknowledgment of her correct assessment of the situation.

  “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Galloway.” Ewing rose and, as if it were a signal, so did Harris and Koesler. “As Lieutenant Harris indicated, we will very probably be needing more information from you.”

  “Anytime.” Her response held no indication of sincerity.

  She showed them to the door. As they departed, she called out, “Oh, by the way, Father. I guess I’ll be seeing you tomorrow night.”

  “What?” Koesler was nonplused. “I don’t understand.”

  “The so-called God Squad is meeting here tomorrow evening.”

  “Here?” said Ewing. “I thought-”

  “That I was separated from Jay? You’re right. But I still hostess for him on occasion, and this is one of those occasions. . part of the rather complex deal we’re working out.” She smiled at Father Koesler. “Although this will be the first time I’ve served the God Squad.”

  The door closed, leaving the three men standing awkwardly on the porch.

  “Did you know there was to be a meeting here tomorrow night?” Harris asked Koesler.

  “Yes.”

  “Interesting.”

  “We’ll have you home in no time,” said Sergeant Ewing, as their car rapidly moved south on Telegraph Road.

  “Will you be off duty then?”

  Ewing chuckled. “No way. We’ve got lots more to do before we call it quits today.”

  “Where to next, if I may ask?”

  “For starters, we’re going to talk to Mrs. Hunsinger.”

  “I didn’t know he was married.”

  “He wasn’t. Well, he was. Then, divorced. Long time ago. Remained single ever since. No, I meant his mother.”

  “Oh, that’s right; you mentioned her. But isn’t that a bit farfetched? His own mother?”

  “She did have a key, remember?”

  “Oh.”

  “Have to touch all the bases.”

  Koesler fell silent. He tried to picture Hunsinger’s mother, not knowing what she looked like. Not aware that he had known her in the distant past.

  Whoever she might be, his heart went out to her. Especially since she must be quite elderly now, it would be particularly painful to lose her son. Koesler was sadly familiar with the situation. He had assisted many an elderly parishioner on the occasion of the death of a mature son or daughter. In old age particularly, one tends to accept the inevitabilities of nature, the natural progression of life and death. But one hopes for the continued love and solicitude of one’s children. One expects to be buried by one’s children. Usually, in Koesler’s experience, there is a particular poignancy when the expectations of nature are upset.

  Exacerbating this, these officers would soon be asking her some of the same questions they had asked earlier of those who might be considered suspects in Hunsinger’s murder. The detectives were only doing their job from which there was no escape. But Koesler grieved that Hunsinger’s mother would have to be subjected to this sort of questioning.

  He could not decide whether a police interrogation such as this was better or worse than the questioning by the reporter who feels compelled to thrust a microphone into a grieving parent’s face to ask, “How did you feel when you saw the truck run over your child?”

  All he could hope was that Harris and Ewing would be gentle when they met with Mrs. Hunsinger. He had every reason to expect they would.

  The car came to a stop. It was not the sort of stop made for a traffic light. An air of expectancy pervaded the car.

  They were in front of St. Anselm’s rectory.

  “Oh,” Koesler said, “we’re here. Thank you very much.”

  “Not at all,” Ewing responded. “Thank you. You’ve been a help, Father, If anything else comes to mind, give us a call.”

  They pulled away, leaving the priest suspended midway between the rectory and the church. After a moment’s consideration, Koesler headed for the church. An investigation into a deliberate murder might be the daily fare of homicide detectives, but it was a rare and deeply disturbing episode for a suburban parish priest. He felt he needed time to reflect on all he had heard this day. And after many years of searching he had never found a better place for silent, prayerful reflection than a quiet church when there were no services going on. There was something about the building’s memory of being packed with worshipers, the faint odor of incense that clung to the pews and furnishings, the present emptiness that urged Koesler to sit back and look at God and let God look at him.

  She had planned on becoming a nun. It seemed logical.

  She was raised in a large, pious German Catholic family. And she was rather plain. At least that’s how she thought of herself. Mostly because others treated her as if she were. She was the middle child of seven children. None of her siblings appeared to hold out any hope that someone someday would offer Grace Koenig a proposal of marriage. So Grace did not consider marriage as her vocational vehicle in life.

  In that state it was only natural that Grace Koenig would prepare herself for life in a convent.

  She grew very close to the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, more simply known as the IHMs, who taught in her parish school, Holy Redeemer. And they grew very close to her.

  She was not a gifted pupil, but she applied herself without stint. She earned consistently good grades. That gave everyone hope that she would be successful in the IHMs, for the nuns in that religious order were all teachers.

  Grades alone did not a teaching sister make. Grace knew that. Both priests and sisters taught Grace that a religious vocation had to be worked at. She, along with all other parochial students of the time, learned that the real heroes of life were the young boys who went away to the seminary to become priests. Next in line for heroism were the little girls who went to the convent to become nuns. Nuns, of course, were second class to priests, but then, as nearly everyone of that time knew, girls were second class to boys.

  Then there were the Great Unwashed who got married. Marriage, as anyone who studied the catechism knew, was for “the procreation and education of children.” Sex was around to propagate the human race and to relieve concupiscence. And that, pretty much, was that.

  If Grace Koenig was not to be found at home, more than likely she was in the convent, helping the nuns clean or cook, or repair their religious garb. Some of her more spiteful classmates took to calling her Sister Grace. Some who were familiar with the Latin litany in honor of the Blessed Mother aimed at Grace such high-class barbs as “mater purissima” (“mother most pure”), �
��mater castissima” (“mother most chaste”), or “virgo fidelis” (“faithful virgin”). None of this much troubled Grace. To paraphrase Irving Berlin-which Grace would never do-she had the Mass in the morning and prayers in the evening. And with the Mass in the morning and the prayers in the evening, she was all right.

  In due course, Grace graduated from high school. The brand new St. Mary’s Convent, the IHM motherhouse in Monroe, Michigan, awaited the assumed entry of Grace Koenig into religious life. Mother General was surprised when Grace did not arrive.

  After graduation, Grace’s parents took her aside for a serious talk. There was no problem with her going to the convent. There was no way they could forbid her to go, though she was an obedient girl. The commitment to religious life for most of her scholastic years had been a given. But didn’t she think she owed the family something? Her father had supported her all of her life. Even paid for her parochial school education when he might have sent her to a public school. In return, she had made no financial contribution to date. And she surely would make none after she took the Sisters’ vow of poverty.

  Would she, then, consider entering the work force for a year or two, maybe three, so she could make some fiscal contribution before entering the convent? After all, she was a very young woman, still in her late teens. She would have plenty of years as a nun. Most of them died in their eighties and nineties. You could read it for yourself in the obituaries.

  She consented, reluctantly. And that is when a small segment of history was altered.

  She got a job in Hudson’s in downtown Detroit. Since she would be a saleslady, she thought she owed it to her customers and employers to fix herself up a bit. With what her parents allowed her to keep of her first paychecks, she got a permanent, some new, if inexpensive, clothing, and some cosmetics.

  Then, a funny thing happened: Grace Koenig became pretty.

  Her thin, Germanic face hadn’t benefited by wearing her straight blond hair in a boyish bob. The permanent was a strong aid, as were lipstick, rouge, and eyeshadow. Her very attractive figure, hitherto concealed in modest, baggy dresses, was now evident.

  Her immediate superior complimented her. That was a first. She noticed other salespeople and an occasional floorwalker taking a second look at her. That was a first. Then came that memorable moment when a customer very politely asked her for a date. That, very definitely, was a first.

  She absorbed a lot of kidding at home about her dating. She blushed when her siblings poured it on. But she was determined to continue dating Conrad Hunsinger as long as he was willing. He always treated her like a lady and never tried to get fresh. About the only problem of which she was conscious was that Conrad was not a Catholic. If push came to shove, he would admit to being Lutheran. But he never went to church.

  They became engaged. They were married, at Holy Redeemer, at a side altar in the basement of the church. It was a small wedding with a modest reception and a traditional honeymoon at Niagara Falls.

  Perhaps not altogether traditional. Conrad learned that he would never see Grace unclothed, unless she was ill and he had to nurse her. She learned that he wanted no children and would always use a prophylactic. At least once, an accidentally perforated condom failed, resulting in little Hank Hunsinger.

  Although Conrad never darkened a church door, Grace continued to attend daily and Sunday Mass. She went to confession each Saturday. Among other sins, she regularly confessed birth control. Regularly she was severely chided, but absolved. Then she would go to communion every day until the inevitable night when Conrad would fit himself with a prophylactic and, in the darkness, work her nightgown up in his practiced manner and quickly reach a grunting climax. Then she would not go to communion again until she could go to confession again and be absolved.

  After many years of this frustrating vacillation from a state of sanctifying grace to mortal sin and back, she chanced upon a young Redemptorist priest, fresh from the seminary, armed with the latest in Catholic theology.

  Her confession was routine. It had been a week since her last confession. She had lost patience with a neighbor and with her husband several times. She had forgotten and tasted food she was preparing on a fast day. And she had committed birth control once.

  The new priest asked if she intended or wanted to practice birth control. No, it was her husband’s idea. Then, Father said, all she had to do to escape all guilt was, first, never instigate intercourse when she knew it would end in illicit birth control and, second, try not to get any enjoyment out of the evil act. Then the entire burden of guilt would be borne by her husband.

  It was, for that era, enlightened advice.

  She had never been given advice easier to follow. In her entire married life, and before, for that matter, she had never initiated anything that could be described as foreplay. And she had never derived any pleasure from sex. She was not even certain she was supposed to get any pleasure from it. She had paid careful attention as a series of unmarried priests and nuns had taught her about marriage. Their instructions were always couched in vague, cautious, and circumspect terms. For most of these dedicated men and women, intercourse was an act they had read about in theological textbooks, but had never experienced. The general theme of their instructions was that men wanted sex and women were supposed to give it. Since the purpose of sex was the “procreation and education of children,” and since women could not bear children much more often than every nine months, men usually wanted sex more often than was absolutely necessary.

  In any case, as long as there was none of the hanky-panky of artificial birth control going on, should either spouse request or demand intercourse, the other spouse “owed” it, because coitus was also referred to as the “debitum,” the debt. In practice, since men were the animals who always wanted sex, the burden of satisfying the debt fell to women. Grace never associated the rendering of a debt with pleasure.

  Thus, the knowledge that she could pay the debt accompanied by birth control without sin was a heaven-sent revelation. And it was possible because a young priest had learned the principle of the indirect voluntary, a recent application of traditional Catholic theology. In effect, Grace was materially, not formally, cooperating with her husband in a sinful deed. But because her cooperation was not voluntary, but actually even against her will, she was without sin. It troubled her that this theological conclusion shifted the entire blame to Conrad. But her husband seemed to be bearing up under the burden rather well.

  It never occurred to Grace that Conrad’s decision provided her with a canonical reason for a Church annulment of her marriage. There were few enough reasons why the Church would consider a marriage null and void from its inception. Denying a partner the right to that complete action which could produce children was one such reason. Technically, it was termed “contra bonum prolis”- “against the good of children.” It never occurred to Grace to challenge the validity of her marriage because she never got over being grateful that Conrad thought she was pretty and had wanted to marry her.

  Then there was little Henry, the ever-present reminder that the better designed forms of birth control do not always work. Even the presence of Henry would not have weakened her nullity case, had she chosen to pursue it. It was Conrad’s decision to deny Grace all but birth-controlled intercourse that constituted the canonical impediment to a valid Catholic marriage. The accident had no bearing on it.

  Conrad accepted Hank much as a gambler accepts a loss at the gaming table. Grace greeted Henry as a miracle baby, which, given the odds against his happening, he nearly was. She loved the child with a chaste, carefully controlled love.

  Now she became more painfully aware of Conrad’s complete absence from church as she dragged a reluctant son to Mass every Sunday and occasionally on weekdays. When Conrad died, leaving behind a seven-year-old son, Grace was desolate.

  If anyone needed the strong influence and guidance of a father, Henry certainly did. He had his father’s large physique and gave every indication
he would grow to be an even larger man.

  The nuns were a godsend. She knew not what she might have had to do if they had not offered her work in the convent. God knows they paid little. But it was enough. And God knows they tried their best to help with young Henry. But no one could control him. She could not stop him from hanging around with a bad crowd. She worried about him constantly. But worry changed nothing.

  Although she did not understand athletics very much, she was proud of Hank’s-everyone called him Hank-accomplishments. And he was always good to her. This, she had to admit, was almost his sole redeeming virtue. Particularly when, after signing a professional football contract, one of the first things Henry-she could not stop calling him Henry-did was to offer to buy a new house for her.

  But she insisted that she wanted to live out her days in this house that held so many of her memories. And right across the street from her beloved Holy Redeemer. So Henry paid the mortgage and saw to it that the exterior and interior of the home were kept in tiptop shape. He provided her with more money than she needed or used. She gave much of it to the Redemptorist foreign missions.

  She read about Henry’s on- and off-the-field exploits, of course. It disturbed her deeply that he had acquired the reputation of being an unfair and dirty player, as well as that of a rake, a libertine, a womanizer, a playboy. On his infrequent visits, she admonished him. She left notes for him when she went to his apartment to make sure everything was clean.

  That, largely, was a waste of time. She did it only because, like many mothers, in her eyes her son would never grow up. Each time she visited his apartment, everything was in perfect order and spotlessly clean. Nevertheless, she would run a dustcloth over tables and shelves.

  In her own way, she was as compulsive as he.

  Both Grace and Hank had concluded, independently of each other, that he had “caught” his compulsiveness from her. In point of fact, though not in the way they thought, he had. During his adolescence, the conflict between what his mother expected of him and the sort of life he actually led produced an overwhelming conflict within him. Unconsciously marshaling his emotional defense mechanisms, he channeled all that conflict into an obsessive-compulsive neurosis. A relatively mild defense as neuroses go. Obsession fitted in so beautifully with all the numerical truths he was learning in his catechism, it was a natural, if subliminal choice.