William Kienzle - Chameleon

A good bit of the reason they had clustered together was the nature of this crowd. Most of the other mourners appeared to have some sort of religious affiliation. Many of the men wore clerical garb. Most of the women were attired in a hint of a habit. Many of those in civvies seemed so familiar with those in uniform it seemed safe to assume that nearly all of them had some sort of religious status.

In such a gathering, Tully was, for the most part, a stranger at the gates of paradise.

Then he saw him.

This room wherein Helen Donovan was lying was actually two rooms. The divider wall had been opened up. So there were two doorways. Standing just inside the other doorway was a priest Tully recognized. Koesler-Father Robert Koesler.

Tully and Koesler had been associated in a couple of previous investigations. Tully’s verdict on Koesler as a sleuth: not bad for an amateur. Tully’s guess for this moment: The guy must feel right at home in this crowd.

He did. Koesler knew just about everyone there, with the major exception of a small group of women at the rear of the room. Considering their clothing and makeup and given the fact they were much more likely to be friends of the deceased than of anyone else in the room, they had to be ladies of the evening and not ladies of the Rosary Altar Society.

As for the others, as far as he could tell without a program, nearly all-if not all-the archdiocesan department heads were here, along with many of their personnel. It figured they would be here in respect for Sister’s rank. As delegate for religious, she too was a department head. The nuns undoubtedly were friends from Joan’s religious order as well as from other orders who knew her through her office as delegate. Koesler didn’t know many of the nuns. He hadn’t expected to.

According to the obituary in today’s paper, the rosary was scheduled to be recited at 8:00 P.M., which, by Koesler’s ever-present watch, was just fifteen minutes away. He decided to wait until after the rosary to offer his condolences to Sister Joan. Meanwhile, he casually studied some in the crowd.

The first person he focused on was Larry Hoffer. Most likely, Koesler’s eye fixed on Hoffer because the gentleman was fidgeting. But then, Hoffer always fidgeted, usually jingling the coins in his left trouser pocket. Wherever Hoffer happened to be, his nervous habit always created the impression he wanted or needed to be somewhere else. So it was this evening.

Well, why not, thought Koesler. Hoffer’s burden of responsibility was great. He headed the Department of Finance and Administration, with ten subdepartments clustered in the archdiocese’s downtown headquarters, the Chancery Building.

Hoffer, seated just two rows behind Sister Joan, whispered periodically with a man Koesler didn’t recognize, probably one of Hoffer’s assistants.

“It just doesn’t make any sense, Pete,” Hoffer was saying, “no sense whatever.”

“Well, not any financial sense, I’ll grant you,” Pete Jackson replied. Jackson headed Parish Finances, one of Hoffer’s departments. “But you’ve got to consider the history.”

“Why? History is yesterday. We’re not living then. We’re living now.”

Jackson sighed. He didn’t want to get involved in a debate with his boss, but he’d been drawn into the discussion and now he was forced to differ with Hoffer. It wasn’t that Jackson was playing devil’s advocate; he spoke conscientiously. “Larry, history is real to the people who lived it. You can’t blame them for wanting to hold on to it. The people we’re talking about don’t have much else to hang on to.”

Hoffer’s leg was bouncing almost imperceptibly to the rhythm of an unheard nervous beat. He quieted the motion with the hand that had been jingling coins in his pocket. He turned slightly toward Jackson, his voice sufficiently muted that it blended into the low murmur in the room. “Do you know the actual financial condition of St. Leo’s?”

Jackson could have been offended. As director of parish finances, one of his jobs was to be current with regard to the status of parishes, particularly those in dire straits, such as St. Leo’s. However, for sake of the argument Hoffer’s question was couched in hyperbolic rhetoric. Jackson took no offense.

“Yeah, sure, I know,” he said. “They’re lucky to pull in a hundred dollars in the Sunday collection.”

“And they’ve got practically nothing in the bank.” The bank to which Hoffer referred was an archdiocesan facility. When the late Cardinal Edward Mooney had reluctantly accepted his appointment to Detroit, finances had been crippled by the great depression. Well-to-do parishes, such as St. Leo’s, were at that time lucky to pay the interest on their loans. There was little hope of reducing the principal. In perhaps his greatest coup, Mooney got his parishes out of the banks and into the chancery, thus unquestionably saving them from disastrous fiscal fates. To this day, the chancery is, in effect, the parochial bank for each parish.

“Plus,” Hoffer continued, “they have only a handful of parishioners. And the number dwindles every year.”

Jackson shrugged. “They die.”

“It’s a cinch they don’t move.” It had to be anyone’s guess how many Detroiters continued to live in the city for the sole reason that they lacked the resources to get out. But the percentage had to be high. “And those buildings! Those huge, massive buildings! They’ve got to be maintained, heated, repaired. With what? St. Leo’s hasn’t got enough money to make the repairs that are crying to be made. God! I wish these buildings had been built on wheels: We could roll them out to the suburbs where the people are.” The latter statement had been Cardinal Mooney’s oft-quoted wish.

Jackson knew that the problem, far from being as simplistic as his boss was making it, was actually quite complex and many-layered. He also knew that they were talking about St. Leo’s in particular only because Sister Joan lived there and was, as much as she was able, committed to the parish. And they were attending this wake service on her behalf. The two men could just as easily have been discussing any number of inner-city parishes.

There was a pause in their whispered dialogue while the two considered what had been said.

Finally, Jackson turned, “Larry, if this game were yours to call … if you didn’t have to answer to anyone else, what would you do? Would you really close all these parishes?”

“In a minute.”

They fell silent. But Jackson knew that this hypothetical question to his boss involved a condition contrary to fact.

Jackson-almost everyone in the archdiocesan administration-knew that the ultimate leader, Cardinal Mark Boyle, was doing all in his power to keep these troubled parishes open. And that, in this stance, he was meeting determined opposition, not only from Larry Hoffer but from many Catholic movers and shakers in the Detroit metropolitan area.

In the end, Jackson was confident that the Cardinal Archbishop would prevail. If only because everything the Catholic archdiocese of Detroit owned-land, edifices, facilities-was held, by civil as well as ecclesiastical law, in the name and person of the archbishop. So these troubled parishes probably would remain open.

Unless the Cardinal changed his mind.

Koesler was unsure whether it was his imagination, but he thought that from time to time he could hear the loose change rattle inside Larry Hoffer’s pocket.

A peculiar and somewhat annoying habit. Koesler wondered why no one ever seemed to bring it to Hoffer’s consciousness-see if the habit could be terminated. On the other hand, Hoffer was so high on the administrative ladder in this archdiocese, who would have the standing to correct him?