The Exorcist

  Chris eyed her fingernails and shook her head. “When Burke let fly,” she said, “he never discriminated. But he was only mean when he drank.”

  “All right, we’re finished. We’re done.” Kinderman was dotting a final i when he abruptly remembered something. “Oh, no, wait. The Engstroms. They went and came together?”

  “No, Willie went to see a Beatles film,” Chris answered just as Karl was turning his head to reply. “She got in a few minutes after I did.”

  “Oh, well, why did I ask that?” said Kinderman. “It has nothing to do with anything.” He folded up the program and tucked it away along with the pencil in the inside pocket of his coat. “Well, that’s that,” he breathed out with satisfaction. “When I’m back in the office, no doubt I’ll remember something that maybe I should have asked. Yes, with me, that always happens. Oh, well, whatever,” he said; “I could call you.” He stood up and Chris got up with him. “Well, I’m going out of town for a couple of weeks,” she said. “It can wait,” the detective assured her. “It can wait.” He was staring at the sculpture with a smiling fondness. “Ah, so cute, so really cute.” He’d leaned over and picked it up and was rubbing his thumb along the sculpted bird’s beak, then replaced it on the table and started to leave. “Have you got a good doctor?” the detective asked as Chris accompanied him toward the front door. “I mean for your daughter.” “Well, I’ve sure got enough of them,” Chris said glumly. “Anyway, I’m checking her into a clinic that’s supposed to be great at doing what you do, only with viruses.”

  “Let’s hope they’re much better at it, Miss MacNeil. It’s out of town, this clinic?”

  “Yes, it is. It’s in Ohio.”

  “It’s a good one?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Keep her out of the draft.”

  They had reached the front door of the house. “Well, I would say that it’s been a pleasure,” the detective said gravely while gripping his hat by the brim with both hands; “but under the circumstances…” He bent his head slightly and shook it, then looked back up. “I’m so terribly sorry.”

  Her arms folded across her chest, Chris lowered her head and said quietly, “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  Opening the door, the detective stepped outside, put on his hat and turned back to look at Chris. “Well, good luck with your daughter,” he said.

  Chris smiled wanly. “Good luck with the world.”

  The detective nodded with a warmth and a sadness, then turned to his right and, short of breath, slowly waddled away down the street. Chris watched as he listed toward a waiting squad car that was parked near the corner. He flung up a hand to his hat as a sudden gust of wind sprang sharply from the south and set the bottom of his long, floppy coat to flapping. Chris lowered her gaze and closed the door.

  When he’d entered the passenger side of the squad car, Kinderman turned and, looking back at the house, he thought he’d seen movement at Regan’s window, a quick, lithe figure moving quickly to the side and out of view. He wasn’t sure. He had seen it peripherally and so quickly it was almost subliminal. He kept looking and noticed that the window shutters were open. Odd. Chris had told him they were always closed. For a time the detective continued to watch. No one appeared. With a puzzled frown, the detective looked down and shook his head, and then he opened the glove compartment of the squad car, extracted a penknife and an evidence envelope, and, unclasping the smallest of the blades of the knife, he held his thumb inside the envelope and extracted from under a thumbnail microscopic fragments of green colored clay he’d surreptitiously scraped from Regan’s sculpture. Finished, he sealed up the envelope and placed it in the inside pocket of his coat. “Okay,” he told his driver, “let’s go.” They pulled away from the curb, and as they drove down Prospect Street, Kinderman cautioned the driver, “Take it easy,” as he noticed the traffic building up ahead. Then lowering his head, he shut his eyes, and gripping the bridge of his nose with weary fingers, he breathed out despondently, “Ah, my God, what a world. What a life.”

  Later that evening, while Dr. Klein was injecting Regan with fifty milligrams of Sparine to assure her tranquility on the journey to Dayton, Ohio, Kinderman stood brooding in his office with the palms of his hands pressed flat atop his desk as he pored over fragments of baffling data with no other light in the room but the narrow beam of an ancient desk lamp flaring brightly on a clutter of scattered reports. He believed that it helped him to narrow the focus of his concentration. His breathing was adenoidal and heavy in the darkness; his glance flitted here, now there, and then he took a deep breath and shut his eyes. Mental Clearance Sale! he instructed himself, as he always did whenever he wished to tidy up his brain for a fresh point of view. Absolutely Everything Must Go! Then he opened his eyes and reexamined the pathologist’s report on Dennings:

  … tearing of the spinal cord with fractured skull and neck, plus numerous contusions, lacerations and abrasions; stretching of the neck skin; ecchymosis of the neck skin; shearing of platysma, sternomastoid, splenius, trapezius and various smaller muscles of the neck, with fracture of the spine and of the vertebrae and shearing of both the anterior and posterior spinous ligaments…

  He looked out a window at the dark of the city. The Capitol dome light glowed in signal that the Congress was working late, and once again the detective shut his eyes, recalling his conversation with the District pathologist at 11:55 P.M. on the night of Dennings’s death.

  “It could have happened in the fall?”

  “Oh, well, it’s very unlikely. The sternomastoids and the trapezius muscles alone are enough to prevent it. Then you’ve also got the various articulations of the cervical spine to be overcome as well as the ligaments holding the bones together.”

  “Speaking plainly, however, is it possible?”

  “Yes. The man was drunk and these muscles were doubtless somewhat relaxed. Perhaps if the force of the initial impact were sufficiently powerful and—”

  “Falling maybe thirty, forty feet before he hit?”

  “Well, yes, that; and if immediately after impact his head got stuck in something—in other words, if there were immediate interference with the normal rotation of the head and body as a unit—well maybe—I say just maybe—you could get this result.”

  “Could another human being have done it?”

  “Yes, but he’d have to be an exceptionally powerful man.”

  Kinderman had checked Karl Engstrom’s story regarding his whereabouts at the time of Dennings’s death. The show times matched, as did the schedule that night of a D.C. Transit bus. Moreover, the driver of the bus that Karl had claimed he had boarded near the front of the theater went off duty at Wisconsin and M, where Karl had stated he’d alighted at approximately twenty minutes after nine. A change of drivers had taken place, and the off-duty driver had logged the time of his arrival at the transfer point: precisely nine-eighteen. Yet on Kinderman’s desk was a record of a felony charge against Engstrom on August 27, 1963, alleging he had stolen a quantity of narcotics over a period of months from the home of a doctor in Beverly Hills where he and Willie were then employed.

  … born April 20, 1921, in Zurich, Switzerland. Married to Willie nee Braun September 7, 1941. Daughter, Elvira, born New York City, January 11, 1943, current address unknown. Defendant…

  The remainder the detective found baffling:

  The doctor, whose testimony was deemed a sine qua non for successful prosecution, abruptly—and without explanation—dropped the charges. Why had he done so? And as the Engstroms had been hired by Chris MacNeil only two months later, the doctor had given them a favorable reference.

  Why would he do so?

  Engstrom had certainly pilfered the drugs, and yet a medical examination at the time of the charge had failed to yield the slightest sign that the man was an addict, or even a user.

  Why not?

  With his eyes still closed, the detective softly recited the beginning of the Lewis Carroll poem “Jabberwocky”
: “ ‘ ’Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe…’ ” It was another of Kinderman’s mind-clearing tricks, and when he had finished the recitation, he opened his eyes and fixed his gaze on the Capitol rotunda. He was trying to keep his mind a blank, although, as usual, he found the task impossible. Sighing, he glanced at the police psychologist’s report on the recent desecrations at Holy Trinity: “… statue … phallus … human excrement … Damien Karras,” he had underscored in red. His breathing slightly whistling in the total silence, he reached for a scholarly work on witchcraft and turned to a page that he had marked with a paper clip:

  Black Mass … a form of devil worship, the ritual consisting, in the main, of (1) exhortation (the “sermon”) to performance of evil among the community, (2) coition with the demon (reputedly painful, the demon’s penis invariably described as “icy cold”), and (3) a variety of desecrations that were largely sexual in nature. For example, communion Hosts of unusual size were prepared (compounded of flour, feces, menstrual blood and pus), which then were slit and used as artificial vaginas with which the priests would ferociously copulate while raving that they were ravishing the Virgin Mother of God or that they were sodomizing Christ. In another instance of such practice, a statue of Christ was inserted deep in a girl’s vagina while into her anus was inserted the Host, which the priest then crushed as he shouted blasphemies and sodomized the girl. Life-sized images of Christ and the Virgin Mary also played a frequent role in the ritual. The image of the Virgin, for example—usually painted to give her a dissolute, sluttish appearance—was equipped with breasts which the cultists sucked and also a vagina into which the penis might be inserted. The statues of Christ were equipped with a phallus for fellatio by both the men and the women, and also for insertion into the vagina of the women and the anus of the men. Occasionally, rather than an image, a human figure was bound to a cross and made to function in place of the statue, and upon the discharge of his semen it was collected in a blasphemously consecrated chalice and used in the making of the communion host, which was destined to be consecrated on an altar covered with excrement. This—

  Kinderman flipped the pages to an underlined paragraph dealing with ritualistic murder, reading it slowly while nibbling at the pad of an index finger, and when he had finished he frowned at the page and shook his head, then lifted a brooding glance to the lamp. He flicked it off and left his office.

  He drove to the morgue.

  The young attendant at the desk was munching at a ham and cheese sandwich on rye and was brushing the crumbs from a crossword puzzle as Kinderman approached him.

  “Dennings,” the detective breathed out hoarsely.

  The attendant nodded, hastily filled in a five-letter horizontal, then rose with his sandwich and moved down the hall. “Down this way,” he said laconically. Kinderman trailed him, hat in hand, following the faint scent of caraway seed and mustard to rows of refrigerated lockers, to the dreamless cabinet used for the filing of sightless eyes.

  They halted at locker 32. The expressionless attendant slid it out. He bit at his sandwich, and a fragment of mayonnaise-speckled crust fell lightly to the graying shroud. Kinderman stared, and then, slowly and gently, he pulled back the sheet to expose what he’d seen and yet could not accept: Dennings’s head was turned completely around and facing backward.

  Chapter Five

  Cupped in the warm, green hollow of the Georgetown University campus, Damien Karras jogged alone around an oval, cinder-covered track in khaki shorts and a cotton T-shirt drenched with the cling of healing sweat. Up ahead, on a hillock, the lime-white dome of the astronomical observatory pulsed with the beat of his stride while behind him the medical school fell away with churned-up shards of earth and care. Since release from his duties, he came here daily, lapping the miles and chasing sleep. He had almost caught it; had almost eased the grief that clutched his heart with the grip of a deep tattoo. When he ran until he wanted to fall, exhausted, the grip grew much looser and at times disappeared. For a time.

  Twenty laps.

  Yes, better. Much better. Two more.

  With powerful leg muscles blooded and stinging and rippling with a long and leonine grace, Karras thumped around a turn when he noticed someone sitting on a bench to the side where he’d laid out his towel and his sweatsuit jacket and pants. It was a portly, middle-aged man in a floppy overcoat and a pulpy, crushed felt hat. He seemed to be watching him. Was he? Yes. His stare always following as Karras passed.

  The priest accelerated, digging at the final lap with pounding strides and then slowing to a panting, gulping walk as he passed the bench without a glance, both fists pressed light to his throbbing sides. The heave of his muscular chest and shoulders stretched his T-shirt, distorting the stenciled word PHILOSOPHERS inscribed across the front in once-black letters now faded by repeated washings.

  The man in the overcoat stood up and began to approach him.

  “Father Karras?” Kinderman called to him hoarsely.

  The priest turned around and tersely nodded, squinting into sunlight as he waited for the homicide detective to reach him, then beckoned him along as once again he began to move. “Do you mind? I’ll cramp,” he said pantingly.

  “Not at all,” the detective answered, nodding with a wincing lack of enthusiasm as he tucked his hands into the pockets of his coat. The walk from the parking lot had tired him.

  “Have—have we met?” asked the Jesuit.

  “No, Father. No, we haven’t. But they said that you looked like a boxer; some priest at the residence hall; I forget.” He was tugging out his wallet. “I’m so terrible with names.”

  “And what’s yours?”

  “Lieutenant William F. Kinderman, Father.” He flashed his identification. “Homicide.”

  “Really?” Karras scanned the badge and identification card with a shining, boyish interest. Flushed and perspiring, his face had an eager look of innocence as he turned to the detective and said, “What’s this about?”

  “Hey, you know something, Father?” Kinderman answered with an air of sudden discovery while inspecting the Jesuit’s rugged features. “It’s really true, you know, you do look like a boxer! Excuse me, but that scar there right over your eye?” He was pointing. “Just like Marlon Brando, it looks, in On the Waterfront, Father; yes, almost exactly Marlon Brando! They gave him a scar”—he was illustrating, pulling at the corner of his eye—“that made his eye look a little bit closed, a little dreamy all the time, a little sad. Well, that’s you,” he concluded; “Marlon Brando. People tell you that, Father?”

  “Do people tell you that you look like Paul Newman?”

  “Always. And believe me, inside this body, Mr. Newman is struggling to get out. Too crowded. Inside here is also Clark Gable.”

  Half smiling, Karras slightly shook his head and looked away.

  “Ever done any boxing?” the detective asked him.

  “Oh, a little.”

  “Where? In college? Here in town?”

  “No, in New York.”

  “Ah, I thought so! Golden Gloves! Am I right?”

  “You just made captain,” Karras told him with a sidelong smile. “Now then, what can I do for you, Lieutenant?”

  “Walk slower.” The detective pointed to his throat. “Emphysema.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Yeah, sure.”

  “Do you smoke?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “Listen, what’s this about? Could we get to the point, please, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, of course; I’ve been digressing. Incidentally, you’re busy? I’m not interrupting?”

  Karras turned a sidelong look to Kinderman again with a smile of bemusement in his eyes. “Interrupting what?”

  “Well, mental prayer, perhaps.”

  “I think you’re going to make captain soon, you know that?”

  “Father, pardon me. I missed something?”

  Karras shook his head. “I d
oubt that you ever miss a thing.”

  “What’s your meaning, Father? What?”

  Kinderman had halted them and mounted a massive effort at looking befuddled, but seeing the Jesuit’s crinkling eyes, he lowered his head and ruefully chuckled. “Ah, well, of course … a psychiatrist. Who am I kidding? Look, it’s habit with me, Father. Schmaltz—that’s the Kinderman method. Well, I’ll stop and tell you straight what it’s all about.”

  “The desecrations,” said Karras.

  “So I wasted my schmaltz,” the detective said quietly.

  “Sorry.”

  “Never mind, Father; that I deserved. Yes, the things in the church,” he confirmed. “That’s correct. Only maybe something more than that, Father.”

  “You mean murder?”

  “Yes, kick me again, Father Karras. I enjoy it.”

  Karras shrugged. “Oh, well, Homicide Division.”

  “Never mind, Marlon Brando. People tell you for a priest you’re a little bit smart-ass?”

  “Mea culpa,” Karras murmured. Though he was smiling, he felt a regret that perhaps he’d diminished the detective’s self-esteem. He hadn’t meant to. And now he felt glad of a chance to seem perplexed. “What’s the connection?” he said, taking care that he wrinkled his brow; “I don’t get it.”

  Kinderman moved his face in closer to the priest’s. “Listen, Father, could we keep this between us? Confidential? Like a matter of confession, so to speak?”

  “Yes, of course,” Karras answered. “What is it?”

  “You know that director who was doing the film here, Father? Burke Dennings?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen him around.”

  “You’ve seen him,” the detective said, nodding. “And you’re also familiar with how he died?”

  Karras shrugged. “Well, the papers…”

  “That’s just part of it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, part. Only part. Listen, what do you know about witchcraft?”

  Karras grimaced in puzzlement. “What?”

  “Listen, patience; I am leading up to something.”