Chameleon by William X. Kienzle Read Free Book Online Page A

who saw the big picture? Was there no one else who thought clearly?
    He would have fired Meyer shortly after meeting him except for Meyer’s extended tenure, which gave the assistant a unique background. He knew where all the bodies were buried and whose closets the skeletons were in. He knew every inch of the maze of bureaus and departments in the archdiocese. Besides, Meyer was good at nitty-gritty and detail work. And Bash, dealing with the big picture, had little time to go around crossing t’s and dotting i’s.
    “I’m sorry, Father,” Meyer said. “I thought you said the room—the funeral home—was too small.”
    “It is too small—for this crowd. The thing is, the crowd shouldn’t be here. There shouldn’t be this much of a crowd.”
    Not infrequently, Meyer found Bash confusing. This was such a time. “The crowd shouldn’t be here?”
    “This whole story should have been buried. It doesn’t do the image any good to have a nun with a sister who’s a prostitute. And not just any nun: a department head.”
    “Oh.”
    “No one—or practically no one—knew Sister Joan even had a sister, let alone one who was a whore. Then she gets herself murdered and everything hits the fan. If this story had been killed, no one would have been the wiser. This would have been the proper size mortuary for this funeral because almost no one would be here.” There was exasperation in his tone. The tone of an irritated teacher dealing with a backward student.
    Meyer’s more practical judgment told him to let the subject drop and to simply agree with his boss. His curiosity betrayed him. “But, Father, this was a homicide, with far-reaching complications. Helen Donovan wasn’t a streetwalker or an ordinary lady of the evening. Some of her clients are among the most prominent men in southeast Michigan. The police haven’t named any names, but the gossip columnists are having a field day with rumors and innuendo.”
    “I could have killed the story!” Bash spoke so forcefully that, for a moment, the low murmurs stopped, and there was complete silence in the room. Heads turned toward Bash and Meyer. But only momentarily. Then the whooshing sound began again.
    Bash’s statement startled Meyer. Partly because of its force, but more due to the presumptuousness and arrogance it revealed.
    “The story should have been handled by us in the first place,” Bash said, returning to a semi-whisper. “Why didn’t we get the story?”
    Meyer was tempted to just tell the truth: that this was not at any time an archdiocesan story. It was a homicide. It deserved to be where it had landed in the beginning—in the secular news media.
    But the desire for longevity won out. “It just got away from us, I guess.”
    “The nun,” Bash said. “She should have come to us at the outset. How in hell are we supposed to keep our fingers on everything newsworthy that happens in the diocese if we can’t even trust our own department heads to channel everything through us? How many times at staff meetings have I warned the department heads of what can happen when we are not on top of all media events!? Well, this is what happens! You can damn well bet your bottom dollar they’re going to hear about this incident as a prime example of how fouled up things can get.”
    Meyer breathed a prayer of thanksgiving that assistants were not invited to staff meeetings. He wouldn’t have to witness Cletus Bash browbeating some pretty nice people. The ironic thing was that due partly to Bash’s pomposity and partly because the people he would be talking down to were some fundamentally decent human beings, they’d probably not challenge any of his ridiculous opinions.
    Well, come to think of it, thought Meyer, I didn’t challenge him either. Never mind that Meyer studiously avoided confrontation in order to maintain financial security and a considerable investment in a retirement fund. In the end there was no question about it: Bash got away with