Chameleon (5 page)

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?

The Cardinal, of course. But he was such a gentleman—a gentle man; it would be completely out of character for him to be so personal.

Koesler had never met Hoffer’s wife. But surely, he thought, she must be aware of this peculiar habit—much imitated in jest by underlings. Why hadn’t she corrected it? Subservient to her lord and master? Afraid of him? Deaf? Maybe
she
rattled coins in
her
pocket.

Koesler’s attention was diverted by a person who had just entered the room, brushing by him as if he weren’t there. The newcomer marched—yes, that was the word for it—marched up the narrow center aisle to the fourth row from the front, where he took a sharp right and marched past a series of hastily withdrawn knees. He lowered himself into a folding chair that had obviously been saved for him by an assistant.

Father Cletus Bash, director of the Office of Communications.

The Office of Communications dispensed information, provided one asked the right question. It produced ambitious television programming—although reception depended on one’s TV set’s ability to pick up a less than powerful signal.

More than anything, the communications office was a public relations operation, and Father Cletus Bash was the designated official spokesperson for the archdiocese.

No such office had existed in the local Church until the 1960s. At that time, having been newly established, it took neither itself nor its function very seriously. While other major organizations, such as the auto companies, financial institutions, and the like, were very concerned about their public image, the Catholic Church, by and large, was content that God knew all was well. In a system where the Pope gave the word to the bishops, who passed it on to their priests, who preached it to the laity, who did what they were told, whatever image was projected by this efficient procedure just didn’t seem very important.

Then, once more due to the Second Vatican Council, things changed. Now, under regular siege not only by the ACLU but even by Catholics who could be and were critical, the Church began to get serious about its image problem. Accordingly, the Office of Communications steadily grew in importance. But the growth of the office was no match for the self-importance of its official spokesman, Father Cletus Bash.

He had two lay assistants who kept him informed and did menial tasks. They were made to understand that they were not to approach even the neighborhood of becoming spokespersons. In this department one alone talked to the media. One alone appeared in close-ups on TV newscasts. One alone spoke on the record for radio reporters.

It brought to mind one of Detroit’s most famous priests, Father Charles Coughlin, whose name in after-years was scarcely ever mentioned without the descriptive phrase, “Controversial radio priest of the thirties.” Now it was, “Father Cletus Bash, official spokesman of the Archdiocese of Detroit.”

If this distinction got to be a bit tiresome—and it did, for everyone but Bash—Father Koesler, a tolerant person, tended to understand and forgive. What he understood particularly were the difficult years Cletus Bash had spent as an army chaplain during the Korean War. And especially the injury he had suffered when, his group under fierce bombardment, a shell had exploded nearby. Of the men in that area, Bash alone had survived. In a series of operations, surgeons were able to form what, for that time, came close to being a bionic man. Still, he had little movement in his left arm. And he had lost the sight in his left eye.

But he came back. And if he was somewhat more macho than most of the other priests of his generation, he had, thought Koesler, some right to be.

Yet most of the other priests, as well as all who had to deal with Bash, would have agreed that Koesler understood and forgave a tad too much.

“Kind of warm in here, isn’t it?” Bob Meyer commented.

Bash nodded curtly. He looked around the room. “Too small. Way too small. That’s why it’s so hot. Too many people crammed in here. This whole affair has been badly run. Shows what happens when you let amateurs run things.”

“Amateurs?” Bob Meyer had been assistant director of communications for many years, through the terms of several directors. He had survived partly by keeping most negative opinions to himself.

“The nun,” Bash elaborated, “Sister Joan. She’s handled this thing badly from the beginning.”

Amateur?
thought Meyer. My God, she’s the dead woman’s sister, the only close relative! Who else would anyone expect to make final arrangements?

That’s what Meyer thought. What he said was, “It is a small mortuary. Perhaps she should have picked one of the major parlors.”

Bash shook his head. “No, not a larger home. A smaller crowd.” Was he the only one who saw the big picture? Was there no one else who thought clearly?

He would have fired Meyer shortly after meeting him except for Meyer’s extended tenure, which gave the assistant a unique background. He knew where all the bodies were buried and whose closets the skeletons were in. He knew every inch of the maze of bureaus and departments in the archdiocese. Besides, Meyer was good at nitty-gritty and detail work. And Bash, dealing with the big picture, had little time to go around crossing t’s and dotting i’s.

“I’m sorry, Father,” Meyer said. “I thought you said the room—the funeral home—was too small.”

“It is too small—for this crowd. The thing is, the crowd shouldn’t be here. There shouldn’t be this much of a crowd.”

Not infrequently, Meyer found Bash confusing. This was such a time. “The crowd shouldn’t be here?”

“This whole story should have been buried. It doesn’t do the image any good to have a nun with a sister who’s a prostitute. And not just any nun: a department head.”

“Oh.”

“No one—or practically no one—knew Sister Joan even had a sister, let alone one who was a whore. Then she gets herself murdered and everything hits the fan. If this story had been killed, no one would have been the wiser. This would have been the proper size mortuary for this funeral because almost no one would be here.” There was exasperation in his tone. The tone of an irritated teacher dealing with a backward student.

Meyer’s more practical judgment told him to let the subject drop and to simply agree with his boss. His curiosity betrayed him. “But, Father, this was a homicide, with far-reaching complications. Helen Donovan wasn’t a streetwalker or an ordinary lady of the evening. Some of her clients are among the most prominent men in southeast Michigan. The police haven’t named any names, but the gossip columnists are having a field day with rumors and innuendo.”

“I could have killed the story!” Bash spoke so forcefully that, for a moment, the low murmurs stopped, and there was complete silence in the room. Heads turned toward Bash and Meyer. But only momentarily. Then the whooshing sound began again.

Bash’s statement startled Meyer. Partly because of its force, but more due to the presumptuousness and arrogance it revealed.

“The story should have been handled by us in the first place,” Bash said, returning to a semi-whisper. “Why didn’t we get the story?”

Meyer was tempted to just tell the truth: that this was not at any time an archdiocesan story. It was a homicide. It deserved to be where it had landed in the beginning—in the secular news media.

But the desire for longevity won out. “It just got away from us, I guess.”

“The nun,” Bash said. “She should have come to us at the outset. How in hell are we supposed to keep our fingers on everything newsworthy that happens in the diocese if we can’t even trust our own department heads to channel everything through us? How many times at staff meetings have I warned the department heads of what can happen when we are not on top of all media events!? Well, this is what happens! You can damn well bet your bottom dollar they’re going to hear about this incident as a prime example of how fouled up things can get.”

Meyer breathed a prayer of thanksgiving that assistants were not invited to staff meeetings. He wouldn’t have to witness Cletus Bash browbeating some pretty nice people. The ironic thing was that due partly to Bash’s pomposity and partly because the people he would be talking down to were some fundamentally decent human beings, they’d probably not challenge any of his ridiculous opinions.