Requiem for Moses

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.

“I am certain that without Sophie’s intervention, and if your husband had not yet recovered, you would have injected the Narcan probably after the wake service when everyone was getting ready to leave.

“And that takes care of the so-called ‘miracle.’”

“And”-Margie had not changed posture-“the purpose of the miracle?”

Koesler shrugged. “Seems to me the purpose was to buy time and suggest a reason for a dramatic change. Moses would be, and indeed to a great number of people he became, a living legend. His victims, if they did have murder in mind, would want to at least wait and see what this ‘new’ Moses Green would become and do. Having visited the ‘next world,’ maybe he could have changed. He could withdraw his demand that Cameron be ousted from the Virago organization he’d created. Moses could have at least called off his threat to ruin Bill Gray’s incipient law career. He could have released his son from involuntary servitude.

“It might have taken a long time to convince them he had really changed-partly, because in reality he hadn’t changed at all. It was just that in trapping them he had trapped himself. And he was frightened.

“And that,” Koesler concluded this part of his admitted hypothesis, “takes care of everybody except Claire McNern and Stan Lacki.”

“I don’t know them,” Margie stated. “Oh, I knew the McNern woman. I made it a point to keep pretty close tabs on Moe’s lady loves. After all, the diseases they were putting themselves at risk for were communicable.”

“I would be willing to believe you didn’t know Stan Lacki up to maybe a week ago,” Koesler said. “But then two things happened. One was the media coverage given this story. If you had done nothing more than read Pat Lennon’s reports, you would have been very much aware of Claire and Stan and what your husband had done that affected both of them so cruelly. Of course the accounts only hinted at the extent of the doctor’s actions; it was ‘alleged,’ ‘claimed,’ ‘inferred,’ and the like. But knowing your husband as you did, you could read past the disclaimers and come to your own stronger conclusions.

“Then you found the check made out to GOB Company and signed by your husband. You realized then that your husband was responsible for murder-not only the murder of his own child, but the murder of his ex-mistress and her fiance.”

Her expression changed for only a moment. One would have to have been looking for the flicker to catch it. Koesler was looking. “You were Jake Cameron’s cashier. You were the brains of his and your husband’s business. You guided your husband’s finances and business. Surely you would have access to his financial records, including his checkbook. Especially since he must have been recovering slowly from his coma.

“I can only imagine your shock when you discovered the payment to GOB Company.

“My guess is that you confronted him and accused him. At which time, Moses would have had to admit what he had done. He had read the stories in the paper. He knew that he had taken motherhood from Claire. He had never expected Claire to learn what he had done to her-the abortion and the unnecessary hysterectomy. Nor had he considered how that knowledge would affect anyone who married her. Now he knew that Stan and Claire knew he was to blame for it all. What he had done to Cameron and David and Judith was reparable; all he had to do was stop threatening and manipulating them. The concomitant hope was that they would no longer threaten him. That was the point of the whole charade. Moses had pushed them too far. Now he was trying to retreat.

“But there was no retreat when it came to Claire and Stan. It was not just a case of dumping a mistress-though that would be provocation enough. Moses had aborted their child and destroyed her otherwise healthy reproductive organ. There was no going back. Claire and Stan would always be his enemies; he would always have something to fear from that quarter. His reputation was already lost; there was nothing he could do about that. But now he faced probable lawsuits-both civil and criminal. He could lose all his money and-if he lived that long-be sent to prison, where he would undoubtedly die without benefit of decent medical treatment and without drugs to ease his agony.

“So-what did he have to lose by trying to rid himself of Claire and Stan, who were now the only real threat to his life and his lifestyle.

“Under normal circumstances, he would have stonewalled when you confronted him with the telltale check stub-but now he was in no condition-physical or mental-to do that. Also, circumstances being what they were, he was in no condition to stand up to you. He had to tell you what he’d done-the extent of his abominable acts.

“You had to be furious. You might not have known the full extent of your husband’s relationship with Claire when it was going on. But you had to discover it from the media and when you learned of his payment to GOB Company, an organization that the media has described as ‘the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.’

“One wonders,” he went on,” how a man of your husband’s savvy-a man with his cunning, amoral mind-came up with such an incompetent mob. This part is pure speculation, but this was fresh territory for him: I’ll bet GOB was referred by a colleague Moses thought he could trust, someone who was eager to lead him astray-to settle a score maybe?

“In any case, you now knew that your husband had gone way too far. It was as if my seminary priest’s glasses had spun off the desk and were lying broken on the floor. Moses had gone off the deep edge. He had operated without your control and in a debilitated state. But there was no going back; he had left a trail that could be followed by a Cub Scout. He might have done a much more effective job had he planned it before his induced coma. On the other hand, his mind might have been clouded by pain-or drugs-even then.

“But now your husband was headed for prison. And your life was on the brink of being shattered to smithereens. Much, if not all, the money you could have inherited would be spent on lawyers, trials, and appeals. Everything you controlled would be out of control. Your social standing would be a matter for ridicule. Your plans would have been frustrated.

“There was only one avenue open to you, as far as you could see. You carried through on what had been begun that Monday morning. You gave your husband a massive overdose of morphine. To further confuse the issue, you got your children and Bill Gray over and offered them the empty bottle so their fingerprints would be there along with yours and your husband’s.

“It is ironic to think that the only way you and your husband could have hatched this plan in the beginning was that he was Jewish. That way he would escape embalming. As long as the coma operated as it was programmed, you were home free. So you used your knowledge of the secret in a negative way. Even though you knew he was really Catholic, you let him go through the funeral process as a Jew.”

Koesler waited, but nothing broke the silence.

Finally, he spoke again. “I know your public reaction to this would be that it is all an imaginative fable, and that I have no evidence to support it. As long as your husband had, in effect, that suicide note in his statement to Dr. Fox that he didn’t want to live with such pain, and as long as no one can deny that he was capable of giving himself the overdose, this case will remain closed.

“What he did to Claire McNern cannot be proven by hard evidence. That he destroyed in the hospital. Nothing he did to the others was an actual crime. Cruel and inhuman-along with a number of other moral pejoratives it might be … but technically not a crime.” Koesler didn’t mention Green’s pandering for his underage daughter as well as blackmailing Jake, both definitely crimes, but events which the victims themselves would have preferred not be made public. “The only remaining crime in this whole tragedy-aside of his conspiracy to kill that poor young couple-is his own murder. But the official and final statement on that is that he died of undetermined causes.

“The rest is between you and your conscience.”

Margie smoothed her skirt, inhaled deeply, and sighed. “That’s right. He died of undetermined causes. If he had been killed, his executioner should have been given a medal. He was a homicidal maniac.”

As she spoke, she took from her purse a piece of paper, a pen, and a cigarette lighter. She held the lighter in her left hand as she wrote a few words on the paper, then held it over to him so that he could read it. It read, “Outside of a couple of minor details, you’re absolutely correct.” Before he could comment, she flicked the lighter and set the note on fire, then dropped the burning paper into a wastebasket. As the note became ashes, he stared at her in wonderment.

“Just in case you’re wearing a recording device.” She stood and, her bearing regal, walked out of the room.

Father Koesler remained seated.

After a few moments, a staff member came in to open the panels that separated this viewing room from the next. Apparently they had been waiting for the priest to finish consoling the widow. Now they must ready the parlor to host a larger group of mourners.

Koesler looked into the adjoining room that had been closed off during the Green obsequies. On the wall was a crucifix. There had been no sign of any religious artifact in the Green parlor. If anything, the funeral home would have hung a Star of David … but no one had requested it.

No one seemed about to ask the priest to leave. So Koesler sat and thought and prayed and wondered.

Margie Green. Seldom had Koesler met a person, let alone a woman, so in control of her life. Early on, she’d recognized the ambitions of Jake Cameron. So, she became “his woman.”

However, when Moses Green came along, she saw greater potential. So she married him. But, to set the tone for their life together, she insisted on his going to the considerable trouble of obtaining a nullity decree for his previous marriage, as well as the promise to raise their children Catholic.

Judging by the rest of her life, Margie could not have been terribly concerned about either provision. But it got the marriage off on the right foot, as far as Margie was concerned.

Within the framework of bargaining-which formed the M.O. of the marriage-everything ran as Margie wished. Until, that is, Moses slipped her control and went too far in controlling others’ lives. The final and fatal move was the stupid contract on the lives of Stan and Claire.

Even with her Catholic background, Koesler believed Margie really thought she had done the right thing in killing her husband. To have everything back in her control was worth much more to her than the medal she’d mentioned as an award to whoever killed him-which award was not going to be bestowed in any case.

As for the future, Koesler was sure Margie would get all pertinent affairs back on track. On top of all that, she was now a very wealthy widow.

Then there was Moses Green.

Koesler contemplated the urn containing the ashes of the late doctor. The urn was in the direct line of the crucifix mounted on the wall in the next room.

Jesus the Jew. Jewish to the marrow of His bone. Founder of Christianity.

Moses Green. Gentile son of Gentiles. A Jew to nearly everyone. And now, all those people, many of them Catholic, who blamed Green’s sins on his Jewishness would never know that not only was he not Jewish, but he was one of their very own.

There was a lesson there somewhere. But the media would not be interested. A confusion of races would not appeal. We have given the media its daily miracle. Almost literally.

Koesler held dearly the aphorism, When you die, you will be judged by Love.

Which also might mean that no prosecuting attorney would let God sit on a jury.

Koesler wondered if even God-even Love-could forgive Moses Green all the evil he had done, all the manipulation, the backstabbing, the misuse of medicine, the conspiracy to murder-all of it.

One thing was clear: Moses stood a better chance before God than before anyone else.

Koesler was brought back to the present by the mortician’s discreet clearing of his throat. “Excuse me, Father. The next viewing is about to begin. You’re perfectly free to stay. But I didn’t think you’d want to.”

“You’re right. Thanks for breaking up my reverie.” Koesler rose and stretched; he had been sitting too long. “By the way: What’s going to happen with Dr. Green’s ashes?”

“The cremains will be buried in the family plot.”

“Now?”

“Oh, yes. It was the wish of the widow.”

“Will no one be there for the interment?”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

Koesler paused. “Then I think I’ll go.”

“Fine. You can ride with me if you’d like.”

“Thank you. But I’d rather go alone. I’ve got some praying and thinking to do.”

The mortician almost clicked his heels. “It’ll be at Holy Sepulchre.” He left carrying the urn.

Holy Sepulchre. A Catholic cemetery. That sterling Catholic, Margie Green, had arranged this, too.

Well, if things had gone the way they pointed at his birth, Moses Green would undoubtedly have been buried in a Catholic ceremony. A requiem Mass. Requiem for Moses. It even sounded strange.

Requiem … rest. The word may have described just what Moses needed now. Rest. “Requiem aeternam,” Koesler chanted in his mind, “dona ei, Domine. Et lux perpetua luceat ei.” Eternal rest give to him, Lord. And may perpetual light shine upon him.

Amen.