Chameleon (7 page)

“Makes sense, I guess.” Once again Tully felt overwhelmed with the amount of detail in Catholicism—in all of organized religion, for all he knew—and how little of it he understood or was aware of. At this point Koesler was his only guide to a vast unknown area that might be important to this case. He fervently hoped there was no connection. Mostly, he hoped this homicide was not a case of mistaken identity. For if the real intended victim was the nun, Tully could be drawn into this maze of Catholicism he so little understood. “You’re not goin’ on vacation anytime soon, are you?”

Koesler chuckled. “It seems as if I just got to my new parish,” he said. “No, I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere soon.”

“New parish?”

“St. Joseph’s—old St. Joseph’s downtown.”

“Near police headquarters?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Nice.”

“The cut on your lip looks okay now, but I don’t know about that bruise on your cheek. You could end up with a mean shiner.”

“How many stitches, you figure?” Arnold Carson asked.

Dwight Morgan, right index finger about an inch from Garson’s face, began counting. “Three … four … five. I figure five or six. Hard to tell, Arnie. There might be some more inside your lip.”

Carson tenderly touched his lower lip. “It hurts.” He ran his finger inside the lip. “At least all the teeth are still there.”

“You gonna sue?” Angelo Luca wanted to know.

“The cops?” Carson said. “I been down that road. No future in it,”

“Geez, I feel like it’s my fault,” Luca said.

“Forget it,” Carson replied. “It ain’t your fault. You just saw the write-up in the paper. I’m glad you told us about it.”

“But, geez,” Luca insisted, “if I’d just kept my mouth shut, you wouldna got roughed up.”

“Forget it,” Carson insisted. “It’s just the price we have to pay every once in a while.” He spoke with all the pride a martyr might express.

In this instance, as in so many others, he did consider himself a martyr—a martyr for the good cause of truth, justice, right, and the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Arnold Carson, a U.S. mail clerk in his early fifties, was, much of the time, an angry man. It had been Carson’s good or bad fate to convert to Catholicism just before the time when, in his opinion, Catholicism was converting to Protestantism.

Carson had been born into a committed Episcopal family. In his youth, he had been an eager participant in all manner of church functions, youth programs, etc. He had even considered the priesthood, But he was not an achieving student. He received and accepted excellent advice from teachers and counselors to lower his academic sights.

When he graduated from high school, Carson became a member of the postal service, first as a part-time flexible employee (PTF), then as a regular employee. Almost by accident he had found his niche in life.

He felt at home, compatible, with things that had specific answers, bottom lines, absolutes. He didn’t admit it to anyone, but he liked addresses. When he worked as a carrier, all he had to do was line up envelopes in numerical order, find the house with the matching number, and the job was done. Stamps were comforting too. One had either sufficient or insufficient postage. And the good old scale would provide that answer. Sufficient and one put it on its way to delivery; insufficient and one returned it.

It was that philosophical attitude which disenchanted Carson with regard to the Episcopal Church—all of Protestantism, for that matter, revealed by his investigation: Too many questions did not have absolute answers.

For instance: Could one be married more than once, more than twice, in the Episcopal Church? It depended.

Then, in I960, at age twenty, he had stumbled onto Catholicism. Catholicism was crammed with absolutes and comfortable numbers. One God, two natures, three persons, four purposes of prayer, five processions in the Trinity, seven sacraments, nine first Fridays, ten Commandments, twelve promises, fourteen Stations of the Cross, and so forth.

Could one marry more than once in the Catholic Church? Of course not. Not unless the petitioner could prove to scrupulous curiosity that a previous marriage was so null and void that it had never happened—or unless one’s spouse died.

Carson searched and studied and investigated and questioned until he thought he had found heaven without benefit of death.

Home! Home was the compulsive, home from insecurity.

Then what to his wondering soul should occur but Vatican II. He couldn’t believe it: They had a perfect system and they fixed it.

Carson didn’t take it lying down. He studied the new monster to the best of his limited ability.

Maybe Martin Luther was right! Maybe “Father Martin,” as he was respectfully treated by the hated new breed, was a saint! What happened to the ordinary magisterium? What happened to actions and thoughts that were evil to their very core? What the hell was situation ethics? What in hell was liberation theology? What happened to the enveloping, mesmerizing Latin? When did nuns start wearing miniskirts? Where did the priest’s lifetime commitment go? What happened to all the goddam absolutes?

Carson had found heaven on earth, and as a result of a four-or five-year meeting in Rome it had been demolished.

Arnold Carson was not amused.

Indeed, he was fighting angry.

He could have taken several tacks. He could quit Catholicism by a simple act of will. Or he could join one of the organizations spawned by and because of Vatican II, organizations for conservatives upset by the council and determined to, in effect, save the Church from itself.

There was Catholics United for the Faith (CUF). Most of the members of this organization were reasonable people, though vigilant and active. They actually pretty much played by the rules set up by the hierarchy.

One program the Catholic Church has wrestled with for the past slightly more than one hundred years is what to do with an infallible Pope when he’s not being infallible. Which is most of the time. Infallibility was defined and adopted (some would say rigged) by the First Vatican Council in 1870. Since then, arguably, there has been only one infallible pronouncement, and that was Pius XII’s regarding Mary’s Assumption into heaven.

All the other thousands of pronouncements by Popes and Popes-with-bishops fall into the category of the ordinary magisterium, or ordinary teaching office of the Church. What to do with that?

Liberal Catholics tend to regard papal pronouncements as being extremely important messages from a unique and well informed source. Only for a most serious reason would such a Catholic eventually disagree with the Pope. But such disagreement is possible.

Not so in the eyes of CUF, or, for that matter, Church law. In effect, if a Catholic disagrees with the ordinary magisterium, he’s not excommunicated; he’s just wrong. And he is advised to go away and pray a while until he sees the light.

Arnold Carson gave CUF a shot and found it inadequate. All very well to write letters to newspapers, call radio talk shows, and argue at meetings. But Carson found such comparative inaction frustrating. He had always believed one had to hit something to get its attention.

So Carson joined the Tridentine Society, so-named for the Latin word for Trent, as in the Council of Trent, Catholicism’s legislative response to the Reformation. Trent (
A
.
D
. 1545-1563) was the precursor to Vatican I.

The Tridentines were so much in sync with Carson’s makeup that in no time he became their leader. Under him they became, though small, yet, as they say in sports parlance, a force to be reckoned with.

Arnie Carson was not the type of general to position himself at the rear of the troops and send orders to the front. He was always in the vanguard—as he had been this evening at the funeral home.

On short notice, only Carson and his two most faithful lieutenants, Dwight Morgan and Angelo Luca, were able to assemble less than peaceably outside the Ubly Funeral Home, wherein Helen Donovan’s wake was to be held.

The Tridentines had carried hastily and crudely made signs communicating the general theme that the archdiocese of Detroit equated whores and nuns. And that Cardinal Boyle’s message to his flock was to “Live it up and whore.”

They had done their very best to be obnoxious to the clergy and religious, who tried without much success to ignore them. Father Cletus Bash had phoned his civic counterpart, the spokesman for Maynard Cobb, mayor of Detroit. That intercession had attracted several blue-and-white police cars whose officers had orders to find some lawful way of moving the troublemakers out.

Thus when the small contingent of hookers arrived and gave as good as they got, the Tridentines—mainly Carson—transformed picketing to a contact sport, in which the police joined. The result: Morgan and Luca heeded the police invitation to “Drag ass outta here!” Carson chose to challenge the order and thus capped the evening in Detroit Memorial Hospital with a banged-up cheek and a cut lip.

Carson had been stitched up and left in the cubicle for a while to make certain there were no unforeseen complications. He now sat on the gurney, feet dangling over the side, as his companions offered moral support.

Carson moved gingerly, stretching his legs to touch the floor.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be getting off the bed so soon, Arnie,” Morgan said.

“Yeah, there’s no hurry; why don’t you wait a while?” Luca agreed.

Carson slid back onto the gurney. “Maybe I will wait just a couple more minutes or so. You know, if I get a concussion or something like that, I will sue. Did you get the badge number of that cop that hit me with his nightstick?”

“Geez, no, Arnie,” Morgan said. “I couldn’t get close to him. The other cops were holding me down.”

Actually, Morgan and Luca had obeyed promptly each and every police order and thus had been nowhere near Carson, who had conducted a doomed offensive against a superior force.

“It’s okay,” Carson said. “I remember the creep. I could identify him if I have to. And if I end up with any kind of serious injury, you can bet I will.”

“You were great, Arnie,” Luca said.

“We did okay. The big thing is you can’t let these people get away with stuff like this.”

“Yeah,” Luca agreed. “They say—and of course it wasn’t in the obituary—that this hooker hadn’t been to church in ages. No way she should get a Church burial. She’s just an unrepentant whore who is roasting in hell now. But her sister’s a nun. And a big shot in the diocese. So all the rules be damned; the whore gets a Church burial.”

“By a bishop, on top of everything else,” Morgan added.

Carson started to shake his head. Then he thought better of further scrambling his facial wounds, and gently massaged his temples instead. “Yeah, a bishop!” He almost spat the word. “A retired old geezer who should be dead already. Instead, he finds a comfortable home in Detroit.”

“It’s Cardinal Boyle’s fault,” Morgan said.

“Uh-huh. The Red Cardinal,” Carson said. It was a pun popular with Detroit conservatives, particularly the Tridentines. The color peculiar to a Cardinal is the most brilliant red imaginable. But when traditionalists called Boyle, “the Red Cardinal,” they meant “red” as a synonym for Communist. That Boyle was nowhere near in the neighborhood of being a Communist would not deter Carson, who could think of no more entrenched enemy than the godless Communist.

“He should go back to Russia,” Luca said.

“Do you think it was Boyle who gave permission for the whore’s funeral?” Morgan asked.

“Good question,” Carson observed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it went right to the top with all that publicity. That’s a very good question. Dwight,” he turned to Morgan, “why don’t you draft a letter to the Holy Father and tell him that a known prostitute who hasn’t seen the inside of a church since she was a kid gets a Christian burial in Detroit with a bishop presiding.”

“Oh, boy!” Morgan brightened. “That’s a great idea.”

“We’ve done it before and nothing happened,” Luca groused. “I don’t think even the Holy Father is gonna get tough with a Cardinal.”

“Don’t sell the Holy Father short—not this Holy Father,” Carson said. “If we keep him advised about what’s going on in Detroit, eventually he’ll act. I’m positive he will.”

“What’s he gonna do,” Luca asked, “excommunicate a Cardinal?”

“Maybe not,” Carson admitted, “but how about if he kicks him upstairs?”

“Huh?”

“Calls him to Rome,” Carson explained, “Puts him in charge of something not so important—ceremonies or something. Especially after that goddam council, there’s gotta be a lot of Curia offices that don’t do much anymore. It would serve Boyle right. After all, he had a lot to do with the council. Let him stew in his own juice.”

“I still don’t think it’ll work,” Luca repeated.

Carson stretched out a hand and let it drop on Luca’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, Angelo, something is going to happen very soon that will make you very happy. In fact, it’s already in the works. And we won’t have to wait for Rome to act.”

Luca looked into Carson’s eyes hopefully. “What? What, Arnie?”

“I can’t tell you, Angelo. I can’t tell anybody. But when it happens—or when it keeps on happening—remember, you heard it here first.”

Morgan’s curiosity also was piqued. “What are you talking about, Arnie?”

“Yeah,” Luca said, “for God’s sake, if you can’t tell
us
who can you tell?”

“We’re with you, Arnie,” Morgan said. “You know that. Is it you who’s doing whatever it is you’re talking about? You need help. Who else could help you like we could? We want to help!”

Carson smiled smugly. “All in good time. As far as you guys are concerned, pretend I didn’t say anything at all. And you keep what I said to yourselves … got it?”

“Got it,” Morgan said. “But …” His brow furrowed. “… we don’t know what you said.”

“Keep it that way! Swear?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

An attendant leaned into the cubicle. “You okay now?”

“I think so,” Carson said.

“Then you better go on home. We need the space.”

They left, Carson wondering if he had said too much.