Sudden Death fk-7

by William X. Kienzle

  “Yes, and-please don’t take offense-I know you need your rest. But Sunday you got home from Mass, read the paper, watched the game on television, listened to some records, then had dinner. . correct?”

  “Just what we do every Sunday, except for the game. Sometimes Henry’s team doesn’t play on Sunday. And sometimes it isn’t televised because, I think, not enough fans would come out to see it.”

  “Yes, that’s right. And probably during that long morning and afternoon you took some naps.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. I need them.”

  “And some of those little naps could go on for an hour or more?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

  “Mrs. Quinn, every time I’ve seen you napping, you’ve never awakened spontaneously. Someone has always wakened you. Don’t you think you might be able to nap for an hour or more?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so.”

  “And if, indeed, you had taken a nap and had awakened to find that Grace was not in her chair, where would you have assumed she might be?”

  “Oh, probably out to the kitchen to prepare dinner, or something like that.”

  “So, with all this in mind, do you think you could testify that Mrs. Hunsinger was actually here with you all day Sunday?”

  “Well, I suppose not really. I mean, I didn’t keep my eyes on her all day like some kind of watchdog.”

  “So much then for the alibi. Mrs. Hunsinger, you could have gone out almost any time Sunday for an hour or so, confident that your friend would either be asleep or suppose that you were somewhere in the house.”

  Grace did not react. Relaxed, smiling slightly, she continued to gaze steadfastly at the priest.

  “And finally,” Koesler said, “one more time when I foolishly viewed an event through my eyes and not yours-during the funeral Mass, at communion time, you broke down in tears. I projected my own feelings and figured that it was this highly emotional moment of sacramental union with our Lord that caused your emotional reaction. Whereas it more likely was the fact that you hadn’t had a chance to go to confession. And you were receiving communion in the state of mortal sin. That’s what caused the outburst!”

  There was silence for several moments.

  “Little Bobby Koesler,” Grace murmured at length, “how proud your mother must have been of you. You were always so faithful. And on your ordination day, how proud she must have been of you-a priest of God, forever!”

  “Mrs. Hunsinger,” Koznicki said, “before you reply to all the things Father Koesler has said, I am required to inform you of your rights.” He then removed a well-worn card from his wallet and read the Miranda warning to her. When he had completed the warning, after a slight pause, Grace spoke.

  “Oh. . it’s true.” She smiled tiredly. “All except the part about confession. Father should have remembered that confessions are heard very frequently at Holy Redeemer, even during morning Masses. I had been to confession Monday morning. But, mortal sin? How could that be? The plan came to me during prayer. Our dear Lord told me Henry must be stopped. How could a command given to me by our Lord Himself be a sin, much less a mortal sin? Henry had hurt enough people and more. And he would go on-just as Father Koesler said. No one would stop him.

  “I prayed before I opened my Bible that our Lord would show me the way. And I opened the Bible to that very passage in the Book of Maccabees. That brave woman witnessed her sons’ torture and death. She encouraged them to die rather than sin! That was what had to be: Henry had to die and it had to be at my hand.

  “Father was right about everything but my tears at the funeral. I thought I had shed all the tears I possessed. When our Lord told me I must kill my very own son, I wept until I was sure I had no more tears. But I was wrong. At the moment of sacramental union with our Lord, I found there still were more tears to come. That was the reason.”

  Inspector Koznicki shook his head slowly, sadly. “This is one of the times, one of the very rare times, when it is not good to be a police officer,” he said, almost to himself. And then, more loudly, “Mrs. Hunsinger, I am going to have to take you downtown with me. But take your time and gather all you need for a stay away from home. Perhaps Mrs. Quinn would help you.”

  “So, Father, it all happened the way you envisioned it.” Koznicki took a small sip from his glass of cream sherry.

  “I guess it did,” said Koesler, “but with the wrong cast of characters.”

  The priest and the inspector had met at a small restaurant near St. Anselm’s late the same afternoon on which Grace Hunsinger had been arraigned on the charge of murdering her son, Henry. Neither felt like eating. In fact, neither felt like drinking. What each needed was the other’s company.

  Koesler had been shaken to his core both by the fact that a respected Catholic matron had killed her only child and by the happenstance that it was he who had come up with the clues that led to her arrest. Koznicki, despite his many years with the Detroit Police Department, had never been more reluctant to make an arrest than he had been today.

  “Now, Father, you are always too modest about your accomplishments. It was a most clever bit of deduction.”

  “Well, thanks, Inspector. But I’m not all that proud of it. First, I embarrassed Lieutenant Harris and Sergeant Ewing as well as myself. And undoubtedly the Galloways too. And I can only feel terribly sad about Mrs. Hunsinger. You know, Inspector, she and I spent a lot of years together that I was totally unaware of. All those years she followed my career as an altar boy and seminarian and priest!” Koesler shook his head. “I didn’t even know she was looking.”

  “None of us feels good about Mrs. Hunsinger, Father. But justice has been served and this case is closed. And I still believe that it was very clever of you to have come up with the hypothesis that the perpetrator had a problem with color vision. How was it you did that?”

  “I still don’t know. It’s all jumbled in my mind. I think the seed was sown when I saw the horrible mix of colors in the Galloway living room. You see, Inspector, I started this whole thing in the wrong ballpark.”

  “But you soon moved it to the correct location.”

  “An accident, I think. As usual, whenever I’m able to be of any help to the police, it’s a matter of coming up with something that’s just not in the usual sphere of police work. This time, the most significant clues I uncovered were found in the Bible. Mostly, the incident where Christ cured a blind man, but only in stages. And, of course, that text from Maccabees. Strange, now that I think of it, the Biblical text that provided the clue that led to a solution was the same text through which God ‘told’ Mrs. Hunsinger to kill her son. And of course I goofed entirely on the reason the poor woman broke down during the funeral.”

  “An irrelevant detail, Father.”

  Koesler cupped his bourbon manhattan in his palms, assisting the ice to melt. “Did she. . I mean Mrs. Hunsinger. . did she confess. . I mean officially, to the police?”

  “Yes, she made a full statement shortly after arriving at headquarters. She said she left her home shortly after she and Mrs. Quinn returned from Mass. She said that was a particularly ‘nappy’-was the word she used-time for Mrs. Quinn. Mrs. Quinn invariably got exceptionally tired after attending two Sunday masses.

  “So, about eleven that morning, or shortly thereafter, Mrs. Hunsinger left home, drove to her son’s apartment building, entered through the basement, and took the elevator to his apartment. There she mixed the strychnine and DMSO and switched that bottle with the shampoo bottle. And, as you deduced, she was unable to tell that there was a different coloration.

  “She returned home to find that Mrs. Quinn had not awakened once during her absence. And of course Mrs. Quinn assumed that Mrs. Hunsinger had been at home with her all through the day. Sergeant Ewing recalled that when he and Lieutenant Harris asked her what she had done all that day, she had Mrs. Quinn give an account of their time. She didn’t even have to lie.”

  Koesler sipped his drink, caught one of
the rapidly melting ice cubes, and held it in his mouth to complete the melting process. “What will happen to her now?”

  “That is up to the prosecutor’s office. I assume she will be charged with murder in the first degree. No one could doubt, now, that she killed her son and that it very certainly was premeditated.”

  “And do you think she will be convicted?”

  Koznicki smiled briefly. “I never speculate about such matters. Our police work is done now, save testifying at her trial.” He looked at his clerical friend with a faint touch of amusement. “But for you, I will make a conjecture. If I were a good defense attorney-and you can depend on it, she will have one-I would love to have a client who can say with utmost sincerity, a sincerity that no prosecutor can break down, that ‘our Lord told me to do it.’ I would guess that Mrs. Hunsinger will eventually spend some time, perhaps the rest of her life, perhaps not, in some institution where she will receive psychiatric help. And with the money her son had already provided for her, the therapy ought to be first class.”

  Koesler shrugged. “What a waste; what a tragic waste! Such a good woman!”

  “A good woman, yes. . but,” Koznicki touched a finger to his forehead, “somewhat unbalanced.”

  “Probably if we knew her complete background, it all might make some sense. I can’t believe a good woman like Grace Hunsinger could just step outside her whole lifestyle and suddenly become a murderess. Or even that she could lead an otherwise normal, even very pious, life and then have this one psychotic episode.”

  Koesler deposited his glass on the table. This would be one of the rare occasions when he would not finish a drink. “One final point of information, Inspector. How could Grace Hunsinger know that DMSO would penetrate to the bloodstream and carry the poison with it? She hasn’t any medical or pharmaceutical background. At least not that I’m aware of.”

  “Quite true, Father. She learned in the simplest possible way. It came out in her statement earlier this afternoon. We know that Mrs. Hunsinger, the compulsive mother of a compulsive son, regularly cleaned his already clean apartment. She would be aware of everything in it. Things like the intimate feminine apparel neatly tucked away, always changing as new women entered her son’s life. And the X-rated video cassettes. And the ample supply of strychnine. And that strange bottle of DMSO in the medicine cabinet. Always concerned, if fruitlessly, about her son’s use of illegal substances, she asked him about the DMSO.

  “He explained its function, even going so far as to demonstrate. He put a drop of iodine on his hand, then, when it dried, he covered it with a drop or two of DMSO. She watched as the iodine disappeared, carried beneath the skin by the DMSO. At the time, she did no more than remind her son of the warning found on the bottle itself that the product might be unsafe, that it was not approved for human use.

  “It was not until she received her ‘divine commission’ that she formed the plan of using the strychnine in conjunction with the DMSO. It was, as Dr. Moellmann observed, a very simple plan, yet ingenious in its simplicity.” Koznicki finished his drink. “And that leads to a question that still puzzles me. Grace Hunsinger was a very, perhaps overly, religious woman. How could she take her son’s life when in all probability he would thus have died in mortal sin? In this, she would not only be killing him, but condemning him to hell as well. . would she not? This, Father, is your field of expertise.”

  Koesler shook his head slowly. “It’s a good question, Inspector. I ‘m not sure how to approach an answer.” He paused a few moments. “Perhaps you’ll remember a movie that came out about. . oh. . thirty years ago, called Night of the Hunter. Robert Mitchum played a preacher who was a psychopathic killer. He had the word ‘love’ tattooed on the back of one hand, and ‘hate’ on the other. I’ll never forget the scene where he’s alone driving a car and talking to God-praying would be a sick use of the word to describe his monologue. He admits-brags almost-to God that he is a killer. But he reminds God that there’s a lot of killing in the ‘Good Book.’ Well, Inspector, there is. The essence of the Bible, at least for the Christian, occurs when Almighty God allows His Son to be brutally executed. In fact, the execution may be said to be the fulfillment of the Father’s will.

  “When you move back into the Old Testament, killings multiply. And, not infrequently, they are in response to God’s will. It starts with Cain killing Abel. Moses kills an Egyptian. God takes the firstborn of each Egyptian family. God wipes out the entire Egyptian army in the Red Sea. Whole cities are destroyed at God’s command. And-in perhaps the most touching instance-to test his faith, Abraham is ordered to sacrifice his only son. Then, there is that rather obscure woman in the Book of Maccabees who encourages her sons to die under torture rather than sin. Grace Hunsinger was familiar with all of them. She, indeed, selected the Maccabees woman’s story as one of the readings at her son’s funeral. So she was no stranger to the phenomenon of God’s occasional use of, in effect, a divine death sentence.

  “Once she felt compelled to carry out the divine death sentence that had been passed on her son, he gave her no alternative. If we could compare his state of sin to a state of insanity, we would say he had no lucid moments. And she knew it. As you just stated, Inspector, she knew about the intimate feminine apparel, she knew about the X-rated TV cassettes. She knew about her son’s whole dissolute life. She had no choice but to go forward with her plan and, as far as her son’s soul was concerned, hope for the best.”

  “But,” Koznicki said, “was there nothing the poor woman could do? Could she not have urged him to go to confession as the end neared?”

  “On the contrary, Inspector, she would not have added sacrilege to her son’s long list of sins. She would have been aware from her many years of parochial training that confession without a determination to change one’s life-she would have known it as a ‘purpose of amendment’-is not only useless but a sacrilege. Of what purpose would it be for her son to go to confession of a Saturday afternoon when he had no intention of going to Mass of a Sunday morning, no intention of ceasing his womanizing, no intention to stop manipulating others, no intention of doing anything at all about changing his life for-what she would consider-the better.”

  Upon reflection, Koznicki had to agree. He had had at least as much parochial training as had Mrs. Hunsinger, if not more. “Of course,” he said, “but a moment ago, Father, you said something about Mrs. Hunsinger’s hoping for the best?”

  Koesler smiled and spread his hands on the tabletop. “Who knows? After death, who knows the immense power of God’s forgiveness? We believe that after death there is a judgment. And, aided by Scripture and tradition, we think we know the rules under which we will be judged. But we don’t really know how much God can and will forgive, nor how much He will not. All prayers after death, no matter how holy or sinful the deceased’s life, presume nothing. They only ask mercy.

  “Mrs. Hunsinger and I spent quite a bit of time consoling each other. I reminded her of God’s infinite mercy as well as the fact that, for whatever reason, her son had freely joined a Bible study group. While she reminded me that at least he was good to her. And I would agree that filial devotion is very definitely a virtue.”

  “To know all is to forgive all?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe to know all is to understand all.”

  Drinks finished, they made ready to leave.

  “For the living, life goes on,” Koznicki said, then added, “Oh, by the way, Father, will you be able to come over for dinner on Sunday?”

  “Thanks, Inspector, but I’ve got tickets to the Cougars game on Sunday. And parking at the Silverdome makes that an all-day adventure.”

  “Well, then, have fun.”

  “With Father McNiff along, it’s always fun.”

  7

  “There’s the two-minute warning, Eddie. The referee is informing both coaches that there’s just two minutes left in the game. I know it’s a cliche, but we’ve got another cliffhanger on our hands. This contest has come down to t
he final two minutes.”

  “It sure has, Lou. And with the score New York 35, the Cougars 30, we’ll be right back after these messages.”

  “Whattya think, this is a real squeaker, eh?” Father Koesler almost shouted into his companion’s ear.

  “I think the operative word is cliffhanger,” said Father McNiff. “Besides, I can’t think very clearly. I’m trying to keep my nose from bleeding.”

  Koesler grimaced. “Patrick, that’s about all I can take of your references to how far above ground level we are. It started with your asking the usher if he issued parachutes and it has come down to nosebleeds. I’m takin’ it all too much to heart.”

  “Well, next time invest some money. I mean, I’m paying for my ticket and I don’t mind paying a little bit more to get a decent seat. After all, Robert, we only go ’round once. Why not live now and then with a little better seat for a football game?”

  “Hey, any time you want to be ticketbroker, be my guest. These were about the only seats available. The really good seats are inherited from one generation to the next. Or they are the final item in a divorce settlement.”

  “Speaking of divorces, what did I read in the paper about the owners of this team getting a divorce?”

  Koesler nodded. “If you can believe the gossip columns, that seems to be true. Funny, I had gotten the impression that the Galloways might reconcile. At least I gathered that from Jay Galloway. Apparently, Mrs. G. was having nothing to do with it; if you want to believe the rumors, it’s Splitsville.”

  “Yeah, the columnist in the News claims it’s going to be a newsy and messy divorce.”

  “Let those who like to read that stuff read it. As for me, reading about a nasty divorce is about as much fun as watching an autopsy up close and in living color.” Koesler had to nearly shout the last words, for the timeout was over, and the two teams were gathering forces to do battle again. The spectator noise rose again.

  “Well, what do you think, Lou? The Cougars have the ball on their own 20, first and ten, two minutes to go, and down by five. A field goal isn’t going to make it. They’ve got to go for a touchdown. Think they can do it?”