“Yes.” Janet sighed. “I’m afraid so.”
The man has ways of impressing others, thought Koesler, with his celebrity, his wealth, his importance. His clothing-the finest cut; the most expensive material. Guido Taliafero-a lackey, present whenever needed; performs tasks, even leaves, with only the slightest signal to indicate the command. The liquor-the finest labels in more than adequate supply. And now, a stretch limo-two people in a vehicle easily large enough for an entire wedding party. What next, Koesler wondered.
The trio walked along the corridor. As they entered the Denk Chapman room, Martha Benbow spoke. “You know,” she confided, “I thought Reverend Krieg rather charming.”
“But then,” Koesler said, “you really don’t know much about the man, do you?”
“You mean watching his program on TV, or reading any of his publications.” She was a bit defensive. “No, I don’t know all that much about him.”
“Judging from the reaction of the others, to know him is not necessarily to love him.” Koesler wondered how much Martha’s opinion of Krieg was predicated upon his professed interest in publishing her work sight unseen. “But I must admit that I can’t quite fathom the intensity of feeling I sensed in the dining room. Do you have any clue?”
She thought for a moment. “No, I can’t say I have. But I must admit I’m troubled by it. It’s not like David to think or speak that way. I mean, I’ve seen him in ecumenical and like groups. He’s always been the very model of a most understanding Christian gentleman. The type whose bottom line is, ‘Well, I guess we agree to disagree.’” Her brow furrowed further. “But not with Reverend Krieg.
“I must agree with you, Father Koesler. It’s not only David; the others seem to manifest the same inexplicable animosity toward the Reverend Krieg. I simply don’t understand it. And it troubles me.”
A sudden roaring clap resounded.
“Good God!” Martha exclaimed. “What was that?”
“An automobile?” Koesler hoped it was, but knew it wasn’t. “A backfire?”
“A gun!” Sister Janet shuddered. “Gunfire! It’s on this floor! The dining room!”
They turned and raced back toward the dining room.
It was the dining room, no doubt about that; high-pitched screams were emanating from within.
As Janet, Martha, and Koesler entered the room, a hysterical waitress was being calmed by another waitress.
Koesler saw the body immediately. Crumpled on the floor, it looked like a pile of laundry that had been carelessly dropped. That is, if you could believe a laundry bag of expensive pin-striped blue silk.
In seconds the first three were joined by Benbow and Winer and then Marie, who dashed breathlessly into the room. She gasped at the sight of the inert figure. Almost prayerfully, she breathed, “Oh, my God!”
Koesler was first to approach the body. Krieg’s white-on-white shirt was now almost completely red. Koesler could discern what appeared to be a small dark hole on the upper chest. Blood was trickling from Krieg’s mouth and nostrils. The priest stood frozen.
Not so Janet. Quickly she knelt next to Krieg and placed her fingers against his carotid artery. She looked up at the others and said, wonderingly, “He’s dead! My God, he’s dead!”
At that moment, a young woman burst into the dining room. “It’s Father Augustine,” she gasped. “He’s dead!”
7
“She couldn’t help it; she thought he was dead,” Sister Janet said.
It had been only about fifteen minutes since seemingly everyone in the building had heard the single shot. Almost simultaneously, the student facilitator assigned to Father Augustine had entered his classroom to find him slumped in a chair, mouth hanging open grotesquely, face ashen. It had all happened so quickly, she assumed he’d had a heart attack. She thought he was dead.
She ran to the dining room and blurted out her news before she realized that something catastrophic had happened here also.
Coming only moments after Krieg had been pronounced dead, the announcement brought a second wave of shock to the participants. Everyone followed the all-but-hysterical facilitator upstairs to the classroom to see if Augustine was beyond all possible aid.
They found Augustine just as the young woman had described him. They were as shocked as she had been.
Then Augustine snored. One outrageously loud snore.
They roused him. He became extremely sick at his stomach. They had no way of knowing that between the drinks in his room and the freewheeling mixture of drinks he’d had before and after dinner, he had ingested a significant amount of alcohol.
All they really knew was that, for one reason or another, he was not well.
Several students who appeared on the scene volunteered to mop up, get Father to his room, and summon a doctor.
Unsure what to do next and bewildered by all that had happened in so brief a time, the room’s other occupants moved, or, rather, were led by Sister Janet, into an adjoining classroom. None seemed eager to return to the scene in the dining room. Some sat, some stood; all were stunned.
Janet was first to speak. “We were together,” she said. “Father Koesler, Martha, and I were together when we heard the shot.”
Her statement hung in the ensuing silence. Evidently she intended to exclude the three of them from any possible suspicion of involvement in the death of Klaus Krieg.
Sister Marie was the first to grasp her implication. “What did you mean by that?” she demanded, obviously appalled.
“Nothing.” Janet was apologetic. “Only that the three of us were together when it happened.”
“So none of you could have done it!” Marie charged.
“Well, yes: None of us could have done it.”
“Meaning one of us did do it?” Clearly, Benbow was angered.
“Oh, David, I’m sure the Sister didn’t mean to imply-”
“On the contrary, Mrs. Benbow, I’m afraid Sister Janet meant precisely that,” interrupted Winer.
“Janet,” said Marie, “how could you!”
“Marie, I’m not accusing anyone,” Janet protested. “How could I? After all, we are religious people. But somebody shot Reverend Krieg. And whoever it was, it couldn’t have been Father Koesler, Martha, or me. We were together.”
“So you have an alibi. .” Benbow was becoming angrier.
“Just a minute, Father Benbow,” said Winer, “the Sister has a point.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Think,” said Winer. “We, the four of us-” He interrupted himself: “Make that the three of us; Augustine is out of this entirely since he was unconscious at the time of the shooting.” He returned to his premise, “-we were united by two things: We are writers and we hated Klaus Krieg.”
“Hate might be too strong a word,” Marie protested.
Winer shook his head. “I hesitated initially to use the word, Sister,” he said. “As Sister Janet noted, we are people given to religion and hatred should not be part of our makeup-”
“But it is,” Benbow cut in. “It just flat out is. Think back on our conversation earlier this evening. Think of what each of us had to say about Krieg. It wasn’t a case of ‘not a kind word was said’; we were. . taken in by an unscrupulous charlatan and we were angry about it. I can’t see that ‘hatred’ is too strong a word for how we felt about Klaus Krieg.”
“You actually think that one of us killed him?” Marie was incredulous.
Benbow responded simply. “Somebody did.”
“Somebody who had a motive,” Janet added.
“I guess we all had that,” Benbow said.
“This is preposterous,” Martha Benbow cut in. “Perhaps-just perhaps-all of you had reason to dislike the man. But anger and murder are not the same. All of us are angry at people from time to time. That’s no more than human. We get angry all day long at checkout clerks, at other drivers, at parking, at bureaucracies, at government. We get angry at relatives, coworkers, spouses. Some of this anger comes and goes momentarily. Some of it lasts a lifetime. But just because we get angry with people doesn’t mean we’re going to kill them. Good heavens!”