“Don’t you have to find some miracles that you can attribute to Clem?” McNiff asked.
“Getting all that money donated might be one of them,” Marvin said. The others found this humorous.
“I don’t care what you guys think,” McNiff said. “This is exciting. Imagine: Having a priest we all knew so well become a saint!
“But Mo, how come you’re going to be public with your job now? What’s the occasion?”
“Actually, we have no choice. We’ve got to make what we’re doing public. It’s the next step in the process. We have no alternative. It’s at this stage that we are bound by the rules to make certain of his identity. We’ve got to make certain that, when we get done with this business, we’ve got the right person.”
“You mean …”
“That’s right,” Mulroney completed Marvin’s thought, “we’re going to exhume the body.”
“Bob! Bob! Are you all right?” McNiff began once again pounding Koesler’s back.
Once again a liquid had gone down the wrong way and Koesler had begun to choke. In a few moments his struggle for air seemed successful; his wheezing subsided.
“Be careful, Bob,” Marvin admonished, “your food is not supposed to kill you. At least not that suddenly.”
“Anyway,” Mulroney continued, “the bottom line is that I’m going to be able to invite just a few people to witness the exhumation and the ritual surrounding it. It may very probably be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So how about it? You guys game?”
Marvin and McNiff accepted enthusiastically. Koesler, tears streaming down his cheeks from the choking fit, was able only to nod. Just try to keep me away from that one! If you think the money pouring in is a miracle, wait till you see who, uninvited, is sharing Clem’s final resting place.
15
This was where it had all started. The cataclysm known as the Detroit Riot of 1967 began in a building just a few doors north of St. Agnes Catholic Church.
At that time, Zoo Tully had lived in this neighborhood. He recalled the event very clearly. He remembered how the police had reacted to the rioting. Some were able to relate and more were incapable of relating to the black community that inhabited the fringes of the New Center area, which encompassed the golden-domed Fisher Building and General Motors headquarters, as well as bordering on Harper Hospital and the Cultural Center. That experience had cemented his resolve to join the police force and make a difference.
Now Zoo Tully and Phil Mangiapane were standing on the sidewalk outside St. Agnes Church on Twelfth Street, now better known as Rosa Parks Boulevard.
The street was all but deserted. But Tully could well imagine what it had been like when, a little more than a week ago, a riotous situation had occurred right here. Though much less far-reaching than the, ’67 conflagration, still it had been a riotous scene nonetheless.
“This is where the guy was standing, Zoo … right here.” Mangiapane indicated the spot. He had done yeoman’s work in catching up with the department’s investigation to date. And coming off the time spent looking for Father Keating, there was a lot of catching up to be done.
“The church was packed,” Mangiapane continued. “Of course there isn’t a hell of a lot of room in there. So the crowd spilled out down the steps and onto the sidewalk here. It was sort of a semicircle with the biggest part of the crowd right here-right in front of the center doors. They had a loudspeaker rigged so the crowd could hear what was going on inside. It was in the middle of all this that Salden bought it.”
Tully was struggling to pay attention. He had decided to start from scratch with his investigation of the killing of Harold Salden, religion writer for the Detroit News. Familiarizing himself with work already accomplished by Homicide detectives would provide him with a shortcut. Mangiapane and several other members of Tully’s squad had absorbed all they could of the progress of the investigation so far. If anything, the officers were a bit surprised that Tully was not already far ahead of them, but then they marveled too that he was not putting in his usual twelve to sixteen hour days.
The reason Tully had not been devoting himself as usual was the same reason he was having difficulty concentrating on Mangiapane’s briefing: trouble at home.
Neither Tully nor Alice normally bothered reading Lacy DeVere’s column. But when a co-worker had twitted her on the subject, Alice had checked the column and read the item linking Tully with Pat Lennon.
She was not amused.
Initially, Tully couldn’t blame Alice. It was a shot out of the blue and it had hit her hard. He agreed that she deserved an explanation. So he had explained-or tried to. He and Lennon had worked on the same case; he to solve a killing, she to write what proved to be an exclusive story. Their parallel efforts had thrown them together. Probably they had been seen together. But, nothing had happened. Where DeVere had come up with that outrageous tidbit was anybody’s guess. Nonetheless, it was pure fantasy. Under ordinary circumstances he would have mentioned it to Alice as part of their normal everyday conversation pertaining to what each was doing at work. But Alice had been so ill at the time that normal conversation had become a rarity. And since there had been nothing to it, after Alice had recovered it had simply slipped his mind.
All of which was true, but not totally believably true. Their relationship was scarred by Alice’s lingering doubt and Tully’s impatience with that doubt.
At long last, Alice said that she believed him. But it didn’t take a psychic to detect the incredulity.
The situation was affecting his work, and that was intolerable. His work came first. That was a given. He was growing angry with Alice’s suspicions. It was blossoming into a full-blown dilemma for him.
He put extra effort into absorbing what Mangiapane was telling him, “What was the beef again?” he asked. “The meeting was …?”
This would be the second time Mangiapane explained the reason for the meeting. He was becoming concerned. “See, Zoo, this priest, the pastor of St. Agnes, announced the Sunday before that he was leaving the priesthood to get married.”
“Sounds simple enough. Why the problem?”
“The people who go to church here got really upset. For one thing, there’s a pretty good chance that the archdiocese can’t or won’t send a replacement. Which means they’d probably close the parish. See, they’re running out of priests. And the ones they got don’t want to take a core-city parish. So the parishioners called the meeting. But then a whole bunch of outsiders showed up, and that’s when the trouble started.”
“Outsiders?”
“Some of them belong to an organization that wants priests to be able to get married, and the rest are real conservative right-wingers.”
The Catholic Church! Tully couldn’t seem to get away from it. If this continued, one of these day she would probably become a Catholic by default. “With a crowd like that, weren’t there any cops here?”
“Yeah. They even beefed up the personnel when things started getting nasty. But all the action was inside the church. Those two groups got here early, so they were pretty much all inside. The people outside, on the street, were mostly parishioners who got here late, and some gawkers who were attracted by the loudspeakers and the crowd. Salden got here just about on time but everything was jammed. I guess he was trying to get in when he got it.”
“Trying? Maybe that’s what happened: He pushed some hopheaded trigger-happy dude. It doesn’t take much anymore.”
Mangiapane shook his head. “Six rounds, all in Salden. The two people who got wounded were hit by slugs that went through him. I suppose it could have been spur-of-the-moment, but it looks premeditated. Some of the people around him said he was just part of the crowd trying to get as close as he could. But he wasn’t physical about it at all.”