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hospital workers who had gathered around Margaret Ann’s body, into an outside corridor.
    “All right, tell me,” Davison said to no one in particular, keeping careful to modulate his voice, “who’s capable of doing this?”
    “It’s the priest,” someone said.
    “They argued,” said another person.
    A few of the others concurred. Davison took notes of all their statements.
    “He liked to shake nuns,” another added. “He’d shake the shit out of them.”
    Davison knew Swiatecki. He was a great big guy, jowly, an alcoholic, a police “groupie.” Swiatecki would frequently hang with the cops on duty in the hospital, shoot the breeze, and smoke cigars. The senior priest, Gerald Robinson, a distant man, was also a drinker. He knew the answer before he asked the question, but Davison was a dedicated cop and had to ask it anyway.
    Davison asked the witnesses if Robinson was “the priest” they were referring to. They all said yes. Davison jotted all this down in his “supplemental report” that he later submitted to his departmental superiors.
    To the beat cop, it was looking pretty good. Within an hour after the commission of the murder of a nun, they had a viable suspect.

CHAPTER 3
Inside Job
    Vincent Lewandowski didn’t get kicked out of Poland by just anybody. The Franciscan priest had managed to incur the ire of the chancellor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire himself, Otto von Bismarck. That pretty much cut off being a priest on that continent. Faced with ostracism at home or going to America, he chose the latter.
    In 1874 when Lewandowski immigrated to Toledo, Ohio, he did what so many immigrants do when they come to America: he reinvented himself by becoming Toledo’s first Polish-speaking priest to minister to the city’s growing Polish-speaking, Catholic community. Lewandowski served the Polish neighborhoods at opposite ends of the city: in the north, on and around LaGrange Street, “LaGrinka” in Polish; and in the south, on and around Junction and Nebraska Avenues, aka “Kushwantz.”
    It didn’t take long for the Polish Catholics to get their first combination church and religious school. Christened St. Hedwig, it opened in LaGrinka on October 16, 1875. Six years later in 1881, St. Anthony Parish opened its doors in Kushwantz. As the century turned, the Toledo Polish Catholic community had phenomenal growth.
    St. Adalbert’s in 1907 was established and then St. Stanislaus in 1908. By then it was obvious that Polish Catholics could wield substantial control over the life of the city and its surrounding community if their political, economic, and religious clout were organized under one banner. The Vatican supplied the banner.
    On April 15, 1910, the Catholic Church established the Diocese of Toledo. Encompassing 8,222 square miles, the diocese was, and is, a combination of rural and urban areas stretching out across nineteen counties, including Lucas County. The diocese established three more Polish-speaking churches—the Nativity in 1922; St. Hyacinth in 1927; and Our Lady of Lourdes on Hill Avenue in 1927.
    Like any minorities who got smart, the Polish Catholics became a united front with the other Catholics in the city. Even with the urban upheavals of the 1960s, and the “white flight” to the suburbs in the 1970s, in 1980 Toledo had grown to a population of 354,635. One out of every four citizens, fully 25 percent of the city’s population, was Catholic. This gave the Diocese of Toledo an incredible amount of influence not just in the police department, but in the entire way that government within Lucas County functioned. The Toledo Blade would later describe the Toledo Diocese as a “social service powerhouse—an institution that urged young Catholics to seek careers in public service, including law enforcement.”
    There were enough nuns present who knew what the protocol was in case of an emergency that not to expect one or more to notify the diocese immediately would be naïve.