Requiem for Moses (35 page)

“How many people were in on that secret?”

“As few as possible. My parents and me, of course. Some of our close relatives. It got to be a solemn pact. When he married the first time, it was to a Jewish girl. We all felt the marriage wouldn’t last. She didn’t have a clue as to how to handle Moe. And, just as we expected, it broke up before long.

“When he married Margie, it was like history coming full circle. She was Catholic—just like his birth parents. Our family disowned him, for all practical purposes. I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. All his life I tried to protect him—as nasty as he could be.

“Anyway, this girl—Margie—looked like she could handle him. As time went by, I gave it a real good chance of lasting. So, eventually, I told her.”

“You told Margie about Moses! She knew he wasn’t Jewish! And still
he
didn’t know?”

Sophie sat further back in the chair and nodded more vigorously.

“This verges on the incredible.”

“Believe me,” Sophie said with utmost seriousness, “if I had known Margie as I do now, I would never have let her in on the secret. Oh, no!”

“What do you—”

But Koesler’s question was interrupted by the announcement that the memorial service was about to begin.

There was a shuffling of chairs, and Sophie rose to join the others. Her parting words to Koesler were, “Be careful.”

The memorial ceremony largely escaped Koesler’s awareness. Ordinarily he liked to compare liturgies of Catholic and non-Catholic denominations. Often he was able to pick up useful insights.

But this afternoon, his mind was numbed by Sophie’s revelations. All he could think of was Moses and Margie and all that had happened to them and their relationship.

Then, as if by magic—a magic that Koesler had experienced occasionally in the past, all the pieces seemed to fall into place.

He knew.

Chapter Thirty

The memorial service concluded. It had been conducted by a clergyman of some Protestant denomination. Koesler could not identify the denomination, nor could he have recounted what the service had been about.

There were only thirty-some mourners. Nowhere near the crowd that had gathered in St. Joseph’s Church for the first of these services. Nor, aside of the widow, were the principals here. Not David or Judith Green, or Bill Gray, or Jake Cameron. Claire McNern and Stan Lacki were dead.

Besides Sophie and Margie, Koesler knew no one else. He guessed that many of those attending were Moses Green’s medical colleagues and their spouses.

Koesler hung back as the guests began to leave the funeral home after a parting word with the widow.

As Sophie left, she gave Koesler a supportive wink.

At the end, Koesler and Margie were alone. There was no need to repair to the alcove for privacy. They had all the seclusion they needed here in the viewing room.

Margie seated herself in an upholstered chair at the front of the room. She gestured to a nearby chair and Koesler took it.

“Did you have a good visit with Sophie?”

“It was very revealing,” he said. “Do you know what she told me?”

“If I had three guesses, I think I would get it on the first try.” She looked completely washed out. It was understandable that she be exhausted.

“I do want to talk with you,” he said. “But if you’d rather not right now, I understand.”

She took a lace-fringed handkerchief from her bag and touched it to her forehead. If there was perspiration there, the makeup absorbed it. “To be perfectly frank, Father,” she said softly, “I would just as soon not go over this with you ever. But … I do owe you. You played a necessary part in this. You wouldn’t let me give you money. If conversation is what you want, you shall have it. But, before we begin … I believe there is some coffee in the lobby. Would you get me a cup?”

“Of course. You take yours black?”

She nodded.

He returned with two cups of coffee.

“Hot,” she said after tasting it.

“Good,” he said after tasting his. “But not up to your quality.”

She smiled faintly. “Let’s get this over with.”

Koesler wrapped both hands around the mug as if to warm them. His hands didn’t need to be warmed. “Sophie said she told you about Moe’s real parents sometime after your marriage because by that time she had decided your relationship would last. I believe her. The proof that you didn’t know before that is obvious to me.”

She looked at him without expression.

After a moment he continued. “I remember Jake Cameron’s telling me you insisted that Moe get an annulment before you would marry him. If you had known then that, far from being Jewish, he was a baptized Catholic, it would have been so much easier getting that annulment. He married a Jewish woman. Surely it wasn’t witnessed by a priest.”

“Moe didn’t know what a priest looked like before he went out with me.”

“But, as a baptized Catholic, he would have had to have his marriage witnessed by a priest for validity. That would have been so easy. Actually, by far, the easiest and quickest reason for granting an annulment in Catholic marriage law. What reason did you use to attack the validity of the marriage?”

“That he denied her the right to have children. There was a good bit of perjury in that case. It didn’t seem to bother either Moe or his first wife.”

“That’s a tough case to prove. If you’d known Moe’s Catholic connection, the annulment would have been granted with a minimum of time and bother.”

Margie sipped the coffee. “Sophie told me along about the time we were expecting David. By then she was pretty sure we were going to make it.”

“You never told Moses.”

“I held it in reserve. With Moe you never knew when you were going to need what weapon. No, I didn’t know about Moe’s antecedents before I married him. That came later. What difference does it make?”

Koesler looked around the room. No one was present or even lurking about. He and the widow would be left in peace. The staff undoubtedly assumed the clergyman was comforting the widow.

“It would have been out of character—at least the impression I’ve been building about your character—for you to have known Moses’s secret and not made use of it. On the other hand, it is entirely in character for you to wait some twenty years before using the secret—and then in a negative way.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Shall I start at the beginning?”

Margie glanced at her watch. “Look, I said I owed you. And I agreed to this chat. But can you spare me the details?”

“I think so. A week ago Monday, I met you for the first time that afternoon when you asked me to wake your husband who had died just hours earlier. Your reason for wanting the Catholic connection seemed logical enough. The immediate family and most of those who might be mourners were Catholic, you said. But still I had to check it out in Church law. You were perfectly content to let me do all the checking I needed. For a person so apprehensive about a requested favor, you seemed pretty confident of what I might find in the current Church law. Also, I found it interesting that you were aware that Cardinal Boyle was winging his way home from Rome. That was not exactly front page news.

“But when I proposed to check through the previous 1918 code, all of a sudden you became agitated—as if this was something you hadn’t expected … something that caught you unaware. Why would that be? Why would you react like that? Was it possible you had boned up on current Church law and knew the answer before asking the question?

“On a hunch, I got in touch with the downtown Catholic bookstore on Washington Boulevard. Yes, a woman answering your description had asked about the current book of canon law. You bought it. The manager thought that noteworthy since by no means has every parish, let alone every priest, bothered with the tome.”

Her nod seemed to imply “one for your side.”

“But actually,” he continued, “I got to know you better in the church before the wake was scheduled to begin. And the image of you, your personality and character, came from people who were telling me about themselves and their relationship to Dr. Green.”

Her left eyebrow arched; he had caught her interest.

“The first reference to you came from Jake Cameron. He told me you had been ‘his woman.’ And that you were not only the cashier, but the ‘brains’ of the whole operation.

“The second reference came from your daughter. She told me that in your rather constant bargaining with your husband, you always came out even or ahead. I think the phrase Judith used was, ‘Mom always gets something, while Dad thinks he won.’

“I suppose a good example might be when you insisted on Moses’s getting a very difficult annulment before you would marry him. A Catholic annulment could not have mattered less to Moses. But you set the tone for the marriage.

“Another example, among many, was when Moses insisted that Judith exclusively date her cousin, Morris. I think the word for him is—or at least used to be—’nerd.’ Moses was after an Amway franchise. You came up with a scheme better than his that got you involved in the business and, at the same time, liberated Judith from Morris.

“There were so many other examples. When I talked with you in your apartment, you revealed in a few words your true attitude toward your husband. It was utterly without either respect or love.

“Once I was able to appreciate your character and your obvious strengths, what had been going on lately became quite clear. Sophie’s revelation was no more than frosting on the cake. Shall I tell you what I believe went on behind the scene?”

She leaned forward, elbow on knee, chin in the palm of her hand. “It’s your little hypothesis. Go ahead and play with it.”

Koesler noted she had not consulted her watch since her earlier glance.

“Moses Green has been wheeling and dealing from God knows how early in his life. He did pretty well before you came on the scene. Since then, he has done spectacularly. You have steered him down facile paths and away from gross excess as far as you were able. Actually, he has become pretty much a figurehead. As Jake Cameron noted,
you
are the brains of the enterprise.

“But it hasn’t been easy. He escaped your control from time to time. More frequently lately.

“The elderly priest who was in charge of my seminary training had a clever and effective device when he wanted to show us how angry he was with us. He would remove his glasses and fling them on the desk in front of him. There, the glasses would spin toward the edge of the desk. But they never went over the edge. It was an impressive spectacle. And it taught me something about human nature.

“There are people who enjoy pushing others to the full limit. To do that effectively, they have to know exactly when and where to stop. Sadists, for example, seem to sense just how much abuse their masochist partners can tolerate. If such a sadist makes an error in judgment and goes too far, he or she may very well kill that partner, unintentionally.

“That, I think, is what happened to your husband. As I listened at the wake to one after another of these horror stories of what Dr. Green was doing to these people, it became clear that he was out of control: He no longer knew where or when to stop. At the end of each account I remember thinking it was a good thing that Moses died of natural causes. Because Jake Cameron and the others had been pushed into such a tight corner that each of them would have very strong motivation to kill him.

“I believe that was when you stepped in—when everything was coming apart. It so fits your personality to intervene at that point.

“It must have occurred to your husband as well. It had come to a point where either Moses would have to kill his victims because he had pushed them too far, or one of them would have to kill him.

“The next move had to be yours. It was too brilliant and daring to be anyone else’s. It was the concept that kept eluding me, bumping against the back of my consciousness.

“The most prevalent hypotheses had it that either one of the victims attempted the murder, but failed—or, that if Dr. Green had attempted suicide, he had failed.

“There was another possibility: He could have attempted to put himself into a coma—and succeeded.

“But I don’t think he could—or especially
would
—try it by himself. It would be far too risky. He had to have help. And that’s where you came in.”

Koesler paused, waiting expectantly for Margie to join in this narrative. She gave no indication of doing so.

“Well,” he went on, “it’s my guess there was a good deal of experimentation. In effect, the goal was somewhat the same as in that movie,
Flatliners;
Moses would place himself at the edge of death and, as planned, return. He had gone too far now; in his flawed frame of mind he saw this—bizarre as it was—as his only chance. And you, of course, encouraged him—after all, what did you have to lose?

“The way I see it, you didn’t come in and find your husband ‘dead.’ You very carefully monitored his condition until he stabilized in the coma. At all times, you had a supply of Narcan available. If something went radically wrong, you had only to inject that drug to reverse the effect of the morphine.”

Margie opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it, closed her mouth, and shook her head.

Koesler, after a moment, continued. “Of course, in all this, timing was extremely important. For one, you had to be sure that no matter what happened that you, not your son, would be your husband’s heir. You couldn’t allow him to die during a period when he had named David as his sole heir. Moses knew this, so he made sure that when his bogus ‘death’ occurred, his will did name David. He felt that would insure your complete efforts toward reviving him. Later, after ‘coming back to life,’ the will was rewritten to name you as sole heir.

“As for your husband’s coma, a doctor I met at Police Headquarters, Dr. Price, I believe, addressed that question without having access to Moses—thus, necessarily hypothetically. Based on what little we knew, her opinion was that he had progressed to the most shallow stage of his coma when Sophie entered the picture. Sophie couldn’t have been part of the original scenario. But she jostled the casket around, stimulating in Moses, according to Dr. Price, a series of anxiety reactions that brought him to a recovering edge of the coma.