“You believe she was telling you the truth?”
“Of course I do! I believe she was telling me the truth about not knowing about the penalty and about believing that a person, for an adequate reason, could terminate a pregnancy within the first trimester-without sin.”
Delvecchio, arm raised, finger pointing at Koesler, said, “You know very well the Church’s official stand on abortion!”
“Of course I do. But we’re not talking about me; we’re dealing with what I believe is Lucy’s well-formed conscience.”
“Should we have gone along with Hitler’s ‘well-formed conscience’?”
“Hitler was a homicidal maniac. We’re talking about a sane, serious, and conscientious young woman. We’re talking about the supremacy of conscience.”
“Supremacy of conscience!” Delvecchio spat out the words.
“It is as John Henry Cardinal Newman said …” Koesler again invoked one of his favorite epigrams. “‘I will drink to infallibility. But first I will drink to conscience.’”
“You’re just playing with words!”
“And you were trying to intimidate your sister so she would be on the defensive if and when the media tumbled to the story of the Monsignor and his Sister the Abortion Doctor. But”-Koesler raised his hand in a stop-traffic gesture-“we’ll get back to Lucy later.
“Earlier this evening, Zack Tully asked me what made you tick. This as a prelude to taking you on about this Oath and Profession thing.
“In telling him what I knew about you, some questions came to mind. I found some answers in my own experience, as well as from a few phone calls I made here tonight.”
At any other time, or to anyone else, the bishop’s fish-eye might have been daunting. But Koesler, like a locomotive picking up steam, was not to be sidetracked.
“This steady march of yours to the conservative right wing began with Frank Morris’s suicide. You were in complete agreement that he should have no Church funeral, even though he had attended Mass regularly and tried his best to get his marriage ’fixed up.’ The denial of Christian burial dumped all the guilt of suicide on Frank. You were involved in this, even if in an innocent way. But you found a rule that absolved you. Rules could be helpful.”
Delvecchio looked as if smugly safe in his bunker barricaded by rules.
“But by far the most serious question I had concerned your mother’s death.”
For the briefest instant, Delvecchio’s eyes lost their focus. Then they snapped to attention with a snakelike fixedness.
“Specifically, I wondered about her medication for pain,” Koesler said. “The morphine bottle remained untouched even into the mid-stage of her cancer when she was in considerable pain.
“I asked her about that. She explained that she intended to join her suffering to that of Jesus on the cross. It was a heroic decision. I’m sure I couldn’t have carried it off,” he added reflectively.
“But after she explained this, I paid no further attention to the bottles at her bedside. You’ll recall the doctor wanted her to medicate herself. And so she did.”
Delvecchio gazed at Koesler unwaveringly, but wordlessly.
“When she died and the medications were being removed, I noticed the morphine bottle was empty. I assumed the pain had become so unbearable that she had begun taking the morphine. It didn’t occur to me what a coincidence it had to be that she had run out of the pills just as she had died. For surely if she had run out of them, she would’ve asked one of us to get her some more.”
Though it was cool in the rectory, especially in the basement, a thin line of perspiration had formed on the bishop’s upper lip.
“Then,” Koesler continued, “I ran back in my memory the sequence of events as your mother died.
“It was early afternoon and we were taking turns sitting with your mother. I remember you went upstairs. You stayed about twenty minutes. You were followed by your brother. Then he came down and told us he thought she was going. We all went upstairs. She was, indeed, breathing her last. She seemed to be having a most difficult time getting a breath. And then she died.
“One of the calls I just made was to Dr. Moellmann, the medical examiner.”
Delvecchio started, then seemed to regain his composure. But so attentive was he that it was as if an electrical current had switched on inside him.
“I presented it as a hypothetical question,” Koesler clarified. “I described the bottle containing the morphine and asked if a person took all the pills at one time in a suicide attempt, how long would it take for this person, already near death from cancer, to die?
“He said about twenty minutes-just the length of your visit. Allowing for you to dissolve the tablets and have your mother drink the lethal amount, and for Tony’s brief visit, that would pretty much use up the time between your visit to your mother and precipitate her death throes while Tony was with her. ”
Then there was her special difficulty breathing. The doctor said that death in such cases is caused by asphyxiation.”
Koesler paused. The bishop stood statue-silent, his gaze penetrating.
“Dr. Moellman added,” Koesler went on after a moment, “that after all these years there would be no trace left of the morphine in the body.”
He paused again. This time he gave no indication that he would continue for the moment.
“That’s not the way it was …” Delvecchio seemed to have regained total composure. “That’s not the way it was at all,” he said more firmly.
“How was it?”
“Mother was planning suicide. She wasn’t taking her pain pills. She was squirreling away the morphine so that if the pain got to be too much, she could end it. That was obvious.”
“Did you ask her about it … or talk to her about the morphine?”
“Of course not. It was obvious. She wouldn’t have told me the truth if I had asked; she’d be afraid I’d take them away from her.”
Koesler shook his head. “You just assumed all that. I talked to her about the pills and, as I told you, she didn’t take the pills because she wanted to join her suffering with that of Jesus on the cross.”
“What are you saying, Bob?” Delvecchio was now obviously on the verge of losing control.
“What I’m saying is that with a very badly mistaken intention … you killed your mother.” Koesler made the accusation reluctantly.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Delvecchio shot back. “It was the indirect voluntary-the double effect. I gave Mother some pills. The immediate effect was to prevent her suicide and save her from hellfire. The secondary effect was her death-which I did not directly want,” he added quickly. “My God, I tried to organize a prayer campaign for a miracle that would save her!”
Koesler shook his head again. “Vince, even if you could introduce the double effect principle-which I refute from the outset, since she told me why she wasn’t taking the medication, and it was not for suicide-it wouldn’t qualify. You’re torturing the concept. You didn’t give her ‘pills’; you gave her a lethal overdose of morphine. The first consequence would be her death. Only secondarily would it save her from hell.
“And anyway, she was not headed for hell. She was going to join her Savior, with whom she had already joined her suffering.”
“Believe what you want,” Delvecchio said disgustedly, as if lecturing an uncomprehending student. “I know I did the right thing.”
How can you be so blind? thought Koesler. What an impenetrable set of defense mechanisms you’ve erected!
“I suppose you’ve poisoned the mind of Father Tully toward me with your lies. What other calumnies have you invented?”
Koesler was pained that Delvecchio would accuse him of lying.
“First,” Koesler said, “this business”-he could not bring himself to call it by its proper name, murder-“with your mother is between us and no one else. For the rest of what I’ve learned tonight, all I can say is that you have usurped one of God’s functions.”