spent the entire day with Mrs. Quinn here. . isn’t that right, Mrs. Quinn?”
“Why, yes. We started off with Mass in the morning-”
“Yes, I remember,” Koesler interrupted. “Now please don’t take this amiss, Mrs. Quinn, but practically every time I’ve seen you, you were taking. . uh. . a little nap. You do take little naps, don’t you, Mrs. Quinn?”
“Well, that happens when you get older. You need it.”
“Last Sunday, for example, if I remember correctly what Inspector Koznicki told me about your interview with the police, it was a very leisurely day.”
“Older people need to rest and recoup what little strength they have.”
“Yes, and-please don’t take offense-I know you need your rest. But Sunday you got home from Mass, read the paper, watched the game on television, listened to some records, then had dinner. . correct?”
“Just what we do every Sunday, except for the game. Sometimes Henry’s team doesn’t play on Sunday. And sometimes it isn’t televised because, I think, not enough fans would come out to see it.”
“Yes, that’s right. And probably during that long morning and afternoon you took some naps.”
“Oh, yes, of course. I need them.”
“And some of those little naps could go on for an hour or more?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“Mrs. Quinn, every time I’ve seen you napping, you’ve never awakened spontaneously. Someone has always wakened you. Don’t you think you might be able to nap for an hour or more?”
“Well, yes, I suppose so.”
“And if, indeed, you had taken a nap and had awakened to find that Grace was not in her chair, where would you have assumed she might be?”
“Oh, probably out to the kitchen to prepare dinner, or something like that.”
“So, with all this in mind, do you think you could testify that Mrs. Hunsinger was actually here with you all day Sunday?”
“Well, I suppose not really. I mean, I didn’t keep my eyes on her all day like some kind of watchdog.”
“So much then for the alibi. Mrs. Hunsinger, you could have gone out almost any time Sunday for an hour or so, confident that your friend would either be asleep or suppose that you were somewhere in the house.”
Grace did not react. Relaxed, smiling slightly, she continued to gaze steadfastly at the priest.
“And finally,” Koesler said, “one more time when I foolishly viewed an event through my eyes and not yours- during the funeral Mass, at communion time, you broke down in tears. I projected my own feelings and figured that it was this highly emotional moment of sacramental union with our Lord that caused your emotional reaction. Whereas it more likely was the fact that you hadn’t had a chance to go to confession. And you were receiving communion in the state of mortal sin. That’s what caused the outburst!”
There was silence for several moments.
“Little Bobby Koesler,” Grace murmured at length, “how proud your mother must have been of you. You were always so faithful. And on your ordination day, how proud she must have been of you-a priest of God, forever!”
“Mrs. Hunsinger,” Koznicki said, “before you reply to all the things Father Koesler has said, I am required to inform you of your rights.” He then removed a well-worn card from his wallet and read the Miranda warning to her. When he had completed the warning, after a slight pause, Grace spoke.
“Oh. . it’s true.” She smiled tiredly. “All except the part about confession. Father should have remembered that confessions are heard very frequently at Holy Redeemer, even during morning Masses. I had been to confession Monday morning. But, mortal sin? How could that be? The plan came to me during prayer. Our dear Lord told me Henry must be stopped. How could a command given to me by our Lord Himself be a sin, much less a mortal sin? Henry had hurt enough people and more. And he would go on-just as Father Koesler said. No one would stop him.
“I prayed before I opened my Bible that our Lord would show me the way. And I opened the Bible to that very passage in the Book of Maccabees. That brave woman witnessed her sons’ torture and death. She encouraged them to die rather than sin! That was what had to be: Henry had to die and it had to be at my hand.
“Father was right about everything but my tears at the funeral. I thought I had shed all the tears I possessed. When our Lord told me I must kill my very own son, I wept until I was sure I had no more tears. But I was wrong. At the moment of sacramental union with our Lord, I found there still were more tears to come. That was the reason.”
Inspector Koznicki shook his head slowly, sadly. “This is one of the times, one of the very rare times, when it is not good to be a police officer,” he said, almost to himself. And then, more loudly, “Mrs. Hunsinger, I am going to have to take you downtown with me. But take your time and gather all you need for a stay away from home. Perhaps Mrs. Quinn would help you.”
“So, Father, it all happened the way you envisioned it.” Koznicki took a small sip from his glass of cream sherry.
“I guess it did,” said Koesler, “but with the wrong cast of characters.”
The priest and the inspector had met at a small restaurant near St. Anselm’s late the same afternoon on which Grace Hunsinger had been arraigned on the charge of murdering her son, Henry. Neither felt like eating. In fact, neither felt like drinking. What each needed was the other’s company.
Koesler had been shaken to his core both by the fact that a respected Catholic matron had killed her only child and by the happenstance that it was he who had come up with the clues that led to her arrest. Koznicki, despite his many years with the Detroit Police Department, had never been more reluctant to make an arrest than he had been today.
“Now, Father, you are always too modest about your accomplishments. It was a most clever bit of deduction.”
“Well, thanks, Inspector. But I’m not all that proud of it. First, I embarrassed Lieutenant Harris and Sergeant Ewing as well as myself. And undoubtedly the Galloways too. And I can only feel terribly sad about Mrs. Hunsinger. You know, Inspector, she and I spent a lot of years together that I was totally unaware of. All those years she followed my career as an altar boy and seminarian and priest!” Koesler shook his head. “I didn’t even know she was looking.”
“None of us feels good about Mrs. Hunsinger, Father. But justice has been served and this case is closed. And I still believe that it was very clever of you to have come up with the hypothesis that the perpetrator had a problem with color vision. How was it you did that?”
“I still don’t know. It’s all jumbled in my mind. I think the seed was sown when I saw the horrible mix of colors in the Galloway living room. You see, Inspector, I started this whole thing in the wrong ballpark.”
“But you soon moved it to the correct location.”
“An accident, I think. As usual, whenever I’m able to be of any help to the police, it’s a matter of coming up with something that’s just not in the usual sphere of police work. This time, the most significant clues I uncovered were found in the Bible. Mostly, the incident where Christ cured a blind man, but only in stages. And, of course, that text from Maccabees. Strange, now that I think of it, the Biblical text that provided the clue that led to a solution was the same text through which God ‘told’ Mrs. Hunsinger to kill her son. And of course I goofed entirely on the reason the poor woman broke down during the funeral.”
“An irrelevant detail, Father.”
Koesler cupped his bourbon manhattan in his palms, assisting the ice to melt. “Did she. . I mean Mrs. Hunsinger. . did she confess. . I mean officially, to the police?”
“Yes, she made a full statement shortly after arriving at headquarters. She said she left her home shortly after she and Mrs. Quinn returned from Mass. She said that was a particularly ‘nappy’-was the word she used-time for Mrs. Quinn. Mrs. Quinn invariably got exceptionally tired after attending two Sunday masses.
“So, about eleven that morning, or shortly thereafter, Mrs. Hunsinger left home, drove to her son’s apartment building, entered through the basement, and took the elevator to his apartment. There she mixed the strychnine and DMSO and switched that bottle with the shampoo bottle. And, as you deduced, she was unable to tell that there was a different coloration.
“She returned home to find that Mrs. Quinn had not awakened once during her absence. And of course Mrs. Quinn assumed that Mrs. Hunsinger had been at home with her all through the day. Sergeant Ewing recalled that when he and Lieutenant Harris asked her what she had done all that day, she had Mrs. Quinn give an account of their time. She didn’t even have to lie.”
