offer multiple Masses and really try to deliver an interesting and meaningful homily two, perhaps three times a day. It was draining—emotionally and physically.
“So,” Kramer continued, “by early to midafternoon, I am exhausted and faced with the one and only time in the week when no one is likely to bug me. And I won’t bug myself.”
“So you drink?” Koesler easily perceived how difficult this admission was for Kramer.
“It started well over a year ago. Just something to help unwind. A light scotch, maybe. Then, more . . . into oblivion. After months of this, it took more and more to reach oblivion.”
“You were building a tolerance.”
“I didn’t admit it at first. But then it became inescapable. And then, after a while, I wasn’t getting any real rest in the way of sleep. But it didn’t matter. I needed that escape. And no one was being hurt by it. Except possibly me. And I didn’t touch a drop the rest of the week. Just Sundays.”
Kramer was an alcoholic. Koesler knew enough about the disease to recognize that. But why drop that concept on the poor man? Kramer had enough trouble as it was. Time enough to get treatment for him after extricating him from this mess.
“Well, then, if you were completely out of it on those Sunday afternoons, you couldn’t have committed those murders.”
Kramer shrugged. “Bob, what difference does it make to the police? I have no one to testify that I spent the time inside my rectory, drunk or sober. What they demand—and I need—is someone to say, ‘He couldn’t have done it. He was home. I was with him.’ And there isn’t any such person.
“So you see, as far as this problem is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether I was drunk or sober. I have no witness one way or the other.
“But I guess that’s what I meant when I said I couldn’t have done it. That was rather clever of you to pick up on that.”
“Clever or not, we’re back on square one.” Koesler grimaced. “It would help a lot if we could find the one who did it.”
“Are you good at miracles?”
Despite the gravity of the situation, Koesler smiled. “No, ’fraid not.” His smile grew more reassuring. “But I do feel I’ve accomplished something. Now we know there’s somebody out there who has been watching you pretty carefully and possibly even knows about your Sunday routine. That would make it quite perfect, wouldn’t it? Suppose the guy knew you were virtually unconscious and necessarily alone every late Sunday afternoon and early evening. Then he would know that as he went about framing you, you would have no alibi.
“And how would he know?” Koesler now seemed to be musing out loud. “Simple surveillance would tell him you never leave the rectory on Sundays. But what are you doing? He phones. But you don’t answer. Maybe he tries looking in a window. Or,” triumphantly, “the garbage! Very popular now, I hear. He rummages through the garbage and finds empty booze bottles on Mondays.” He looked at Kramer. “It wouldn’t be that hard.”
Koesler was now ascending the emotional high that accompanied the solving of another puzzle. “I’m beginning to get a sense of the person we’re looking for. I really think this visit has been a help.”
“For me, too,” Kramer said. “By God, I think there may be light at the end of this tunnel.”
The guard opened the door. “Time’s up.”
Kramer rose. “And, Bob: Thanks for the cigarettes.”
The door slammed and clicked locked behind Kramer. Then Koesler was ushered out of the building through the repetitive precaution of the locking of the door behind before the opening of the door in front. When he finally reached the street, Koesler experienced a rush of relief similar to that which he always felt after visiting a hospital. In both instances he was glad to get out and grateful he was neither a patient nor an inmate.
He retrieved his car after paying what he considered an exorbitant parking fee. Once again he fantasized that if he were mayor of Detroit the first thing he would do would be to take control of all the lots and allow free parking everywhere. Short of a good mass transit system, which the city had badly needed for decades, Detroit needed free parking to compete with the free parking amply available throughout the suburbs.
Koesler did not look forward to the drive home. He would be immersed in the ceaseless stop-and-go of rush- hour traffic. It was at times like this he questioned his choice of a stickshift model. Oh, well; at least the long slow drive would give him time to think.
Quite naturally, his thoughts revolved around Father Kramer.
Dick Kramer was a sick man. And the poor soul, in all likelihood, didn’t realize how sick he was.
There was the smoking, of course. That would take its toll as it did with all serious smokers. No one who knew Kramer was a stranger to his chain-smoking and the accompanying racking cough.
The drinking was another dimension. Koesler could readily understand how Kramer could rationalize away the drinking problem. Kramer himself had said it: He did not touch a drop Monday through Saturday. So how could someone who confined his drinking to one day a week be an addict?
The answer of course was in the compulsion and mostly in the inability to quit. Each Sunday as soon as he was alone and, for all practical purposes, abandoned for the remainder of the day, he would begin drinking. At that point, it was a repetition of the old truism: One drink was not enough and two was too many. He could not stop until he passed out. Unconsciousness was nature’s way of cutting off the irresistible urge.
Then the self-deception begins. Koesler had known so many alcoholics. Generally, they had some rules of thumb that convinced them they had no problem. Classic was the person who would abstain from alcohol until noon each day. And each day at noon he would proceed to get loaded. He didn’t have a problem because he could wait until noon. He had things under control. And Dick Kramer could wait until Sunday. He too had things under control.
But he didn’t. He himself described the situation best. It started innocently enough with a mild drink to help unwind after hard work. Then the tolerance grew until he was putting away probably a fifth or more at one sitting.
With any luck, Father Kramer had a sojourn at Guest House in his future. There, as had been the case with hundreds of priests, he could become a recovering alcoholic.
It was the unique approach of Guest House, conceived by its founder Austin Ripley, that a priest is not likely to make it in the standard Alcoholics Anonymous program. The reason had everything to do with the position accorded a priest in the Catholic community. Catholics tend to put their priests on pedestals. When a priest falls from that pedestal into an illness such as, say, alcoholism, he falls farther than the average person.
Guest House—the original located in the Detroit suburb of Lake Orion—he knew, had as its prime goal the restoration of the priest’s sense of dignity. Next it offered the very best of physical, psychological, and religious therapy. And it seemed to work outstandingly well.
If anyone needed the solicitous ministrations of Guest House, it certainly was Dick Kramer. Not only was he suffering from alcoholism, but, even though he had been convicted of nothing, he now was an inmate in a prison system. His sense of self-dignity was undoubtedly at rock bottom.
So, as Father Koesler turned off Ford Road onto West Outer Drive, he had formed two sequential resolutions: He would clear Dick Kramer of the charge of murder. Then he would make sure that Kramer had the benefit of the success-prone Guest House.
Koesler did not often make such ambitious resolutions. By far the more momentous of the two resolves was getting Kramer exonerated. But after this afternoon’s consultations with Kramer, Koesler felt some indefinable link with the real killer . . . the man who had set Kramer up.
Was it a premonition that he and the killer would soon meet and that, somehow, Koesler would recognize the man?
After parking his car, Koesler decided to visit the church before going to the rectory. He had a lot to ponder. And, to date, he had never found a better place to think than in an empty church.
31
Monsignor Meehan had seen the television reports, he’d heard of it on the radio broadcasts, and he’d read about it in the local papers. Indeed, he could have gotten the word almost anywhere in the world.
That a Catholic priest had been accused of murder was news of the first order. That a Catholic priest had
