Morgue Mama (20 page)

Before Aubrey arrived at the paper that night, Bob Averill and Dale Marabout had stationed themselves in a storage room by the elevator. Now they were standing behind us, like a couple of Houdinis materializing out of thin air.

“I’d like to say it was my idea,” Bob said, “but it was actually Maddy’s. She thought we should secretly hire Dale to investigate your investigation—on a freelance basis.”

Aubrey swiveled in her chair. “And you believe the crap he’s written, Bob? He’s been trying to fuck me since the day I got here.”

Bob Averill was shocked into silence. I was not. “If you mean in a sexual way,” I said, “God only knows what goes on inside a man’s head. But if you mean getting even with you for stealing his beat, that’s simply not true. Dale was pissed at Tinker, never you.”

Dale couldn’t resist. “For the record, I’m still pissed at Tinker.”

Tinker’s lips began to bubble. Before he could say anything, Bob held up his hands, like a pope calling for quiet from his balcony above St. Peter’s Square. “Now-now. We don’t need another shoving match here.”

He was referring, of course, to the episode in his office between Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates.

“We figured it would be wise to have Dale follow you around town,” Tinker now said to Aubrey, “not only to see if you’d give yourself away, but also in case you tried to hurt someone else. And because we were afraid you might recognize Dale’s car, Dale drove his wife’s, a red Taurus station wagon.”

The
“sssshit
” that leaked from Aubrey’s lips was better than any confession.

I continued: “We were just beginning to think it was a waste of time, when you made up that business about the man in the station wagon attacking you. Tinker thinks you did it to make your story sexier—reporter risks life and limb to get the truth—but I think you did it to get Eric back.”

Aubrey was suddenly like a girl in junior high, denying to her friends that she liked some goofy boy with braces. “I beat myself up to get Eric back? Puh-leeze.”

I knew everyone wanted me to get on with my story. But I also knew that Aubrey—murderer or not—had fallen in love with Eric. And I knew that Eric—world-class doofus or not—had fallen in love with her. Keeping Eric in the dark had been the toughest part of this whole affair for me and I felt the need to confess, so she could go to prison knowing that at least one person, once upon a time, had truly loved her.

“Eric didn’t know anything about Dale following you,” I said. “He didn’t know anything about anything. That night in Meri when he chased Dale down the alley, he was truly trying to protect you. When I saw him staggering back across the street, I figured it was all over. But discovering that the mysterious man in the station wagon was none other than Dale Marabout, and that Dale was following you because you very likely were the real killer, and that I was behind the whole blessed thing—well. Eric was so confused he couldn’t even talk.”

Whatever Aubrey felt inside she was keeping inside. “That’s all so sweet. But if that was Dale in the red Taurus then it was Dale who attacked me. Because, regardless of what any of you say, I was attacked that night.”

Dale grinned at her victoriously. “That night—Monday, June 12—the Taurus and I were staying at the Motel 6 in Rush City, after spending the day talking to your old co-workers at
The Gazette
.”

Aubrey threw up her hands, as if being caught in a series of lies meant nothing at all. “So I was foolishly blinded by love, desperately trying to get my
boyfriend
back. So what?”

Dale leaned over Aubrey’s keyboard and scrolled his story down a bit. “You might want to read this.”

Aubrey swiveled back and read:

I don’t know how fast Aubrey was reading, but I was well into Dale’s background on how the squirrels were first brought to Kent when she started laughing. “This is some real crap reporting, Marabout,” she said.

Dale smiled and motioned for her to read on:

Aubrey smirked at what she’d read. “You can’t print innuendoes like these.”

“We were pretty close to printing yours,” Tinker answered. “Anyway, we hope that by the time this goes to press you’ll have confirmed them.”

Aubrey turned back to her computer screen, as anxious as the rest to read what came next, I think:

Dale’s story went on to recap Aubrey’s investigation into the coach’s murder. How, based on her information, police found bloody overalls and a gun at a hunting cabin in Coshocton County. How that evidence led to the arrest and conviction of the cheerleading advisor’s jealous husband. How Aubrey had spent the night following the murder at a motel just three miles from the hunting cabin.

Aubrey sighed sarcastically. “You have descended into the ooey-gooey depths of innuendo again, Marabout.”

Dale was enjoying himself. “You’ll be happy to know that the police in Rush City are already taking another look at the case.”

Aubrey answered coldly. “Are they?” She resumed reading:

Can you imagine how hard it was for Dale to write that part of the story? Calmly taking notes while Tinker all but admitted he forced him off his beat? So he could replace him with a younger and more energetic reporter? I was so proud of Dale at that moment. We all kept reading:

Aubrey started nodding, the way any reader thoughtfully nods when he sees where a story is headed. “So after killing the squirrels and the football coach, I killed Buddy Wing, for the good clips?”

“Are you sure you don’t want to stop here and talk to Detective Grant in private?” I asked.

“And miss the rest of Dale’s brilliant reportage?”

She pronounced that last word,
reportage
, as if she was a snooty French cabaret singer.

She continued reading.

We all continued reading.

Chapter 21

Saturday, March 17

I left my house as soon as it was light outside and crept through rush hour traffic toward the interstate. The roads were clear but there was snow in the brown clouds rolling out of the southwest, the direction I was heading. Thank God I had a Thermos of hot Darjeeling tea.

I-491 wound through the hills south of Hannawa for several miles before connecting with I-71, the wide asphalt spine that runs down the center of Ohio from Cleveland to Cincinnati. Just north of Jeromesville it started to rain, humongous drops that overpowered my wipers and made me feel like I was driving under water. I slipped in behind a semi pulling a trailer stacked with new Jeep Cherokees. I was content to stay behind him all the way to Columbus if that’s how far he was going. I remembered how Aubrey McGinty had talked about getting an SUV someday, a bright yellow one, after she got her Visa card under control.

It was hard to believe that a full year had gone by since Aubrey first dragged me to the Heaven Bound Cathedral to start her investigation into the Buddy Wing murder. Who would have guessed it was Aubrey herself who painted that poisonous cross on his Bible, and filled his water pitcher with water laced with lily of the valley?

I might never have acted on my suspicions about Aubrey if Dale Marabout hadn’t quit the way he did. It had stirred me up something terrible. I went to Bob Averill’s office thinking my only motive was to get his job back. But I wasn’t in there two minutes before I was spilling the beans.

After I’d convinced Bob that Aubrey might be the real killer, he called Tinker up to his office, so I could convince him. At first Tinker resisted the possibility. He’d recruited her after all. But as I went through the bits of evidence I’d collected, he began to see journalistic gold. “If you’re right, we’ve got a huge story about how we brought one of our own to justice,” he said. “We’ll be up to our necks in awards.”

Tinker wanted to create a secret team of reporters to investigate Aubrey’s investigation. Bob nixed the idea immediately. “Reporters are genetic blabberers,” he said. “Aubrey would find out in five minutes.”

Dale Marabout’s name just popped out of my mouth.

So we all met with Dale at my house. After an hour of pleading over coffee and an Entenmann’s low-fat cherry cheesecake, he agreed to do the story, for an outrageous freelance fee that included the continuation of his health-care coverage.

Dale’s first task was to double-check my own suspicions about Aubrey. He went to Rush City and gathered whatever records he could about her stepfather’s molestation trial and her sister’s suicide. He talked to her old high school teachers. Despite the horrors of her home life she was a very good student. She was editor of the high school newspaper, first-chair French horn player in the band. One teacher confided that Aubrey also was rumored to be a tad bit promiscuous. That same teacher confirmed that Coach Reddincoat had quite a well-known zipper problem himself, not only with the young teachers but also with senior girls about to graduate.

Dale found no evidence that anything sexual ever happened between Aubrey and the coach, coerced or consensual. Yet she certainly was aware of his lechery, just as she was aware of her stepfather’s. So when she came back to Rush City as a reporter, and needed a worthless human being to kill, to get those good clips she needed to get a better job, well, there he was, a well-known abuser of impressionable young women, currently having sex with the cheerleading advisor. Best of all, he’d been threatened in public by the irate father of a boy thrown off the football team for urinating in the gymbags of underclassmen.

After choosing the coach as her victim, Aubrey went to work framing Darren Yoder, the hapless husband of the cheerleading advisor. She learned he owned a hunting cabin in Coshocton County. Motel records showed she made two trips to that rural county, one prior to the murder, one immediately after.

As Aubrey expected, the Rush City police arrested the football player’s father. She waited patiently for a month until Yoder went to his hunting cabin. That’s when she called the police. When they searched the cabin they found a .45 in the attic and a half-burned pair of bloody overalls in the woodburner.

Why did Aubrey use her real name at the motel in Coshocton County? The same reason she used her real name at motels in Hannawa before poisoning Buddy Wing. She was a newspaper reporter. She didn’t have any money. She had to use her credit cards. Considering her self-confidence I’m sure she saw very little danger in it.

***

The days Dale Marabout spent in Rush City were fruitful. He not only figured out how and why Aubrey killed Coach Reddincoat, he developed a hypothesis—a hypothesis-in-progress at least—of how and why she killed Buddy Wing. He explained it to me over lunch at Speckley’s, on a napkin:

“
STEP ONE
,” said Dale as he scribbled, “Aubrey chooses a victim—somebody well-known whose death will rile people up. Coach Reddincoat in Rush City, Buddy Wing here in Hannawa.”

He scribbled
STEP TWO
. “Then she looks for the two schmucks she’s going to frame. The obvious one who gets arrested right off the bat and then the less obvious one she’ll uncover later.”

I was nodding like one of those bobble-head dogs some people feel compelled to put in the back window of their cars. “It’s anybody’s guess what goes on inside the noodle of a killer,” I said, “but you can see her progression. She poisoned the squirrels and got some pretty good clips. But nobody got arrested and the story fizzled out. The only job offer those dead squirrels got her was from the Rush City
Gazette
. She’d fix that with the football coach. And when that worked to a tee she figured, what the hell, do it again in Hannawa.”

Dale started twirling his felt-tip through his fingers like a majorette’s baton. He was perplexed. “Didn’t she think solving two almost identical cases would make somebody suspicious?”

I watched his felt-tip fly across the aisle and land under a table of old women who’d already gotten their food. He looked at the tangle of support-hosed legs and winced. I gave him a ballpoint from my purse. “That’s why she killed Buddy Wing before she got to Hannawa,” I said. “How could she be a suspect if the victim was dead several months before she arrived in town?”

Dale clicked my pen and sheepishly wrote
STEP THREE
. “After she’s got her schmucks in a row, she starts on the fun part, figuring out how to kill her victim and how to plant the evidence.”

***

By the time I reached Mansfield snowflakes as big as nickels were freezing on the pavement. I slowed to thirty-five. I wanted a mug of tea to calm my nerves but there was no way I was going to drive with one hand while I poured it. I wrapped my hands around the top of the steering wheel and plowed on. My Thermos was right there on the seat beside me. It might as well have been a thousand miles away.

***

His hypothesis-in-progress finished and folded, and tucked in his shirt pocket, Dale Marabout set out to prove Aubrey killed Buddy Wing.

His first stop was Tinker’s office. He learned that on the last Saturday in August, Tinker had driven to Rush City, and over a quick lunch at Wendy’s promised Aubrey a job after the first of year.

Two weeks later Aubrey checked into a Quality Inn just two miles up the road from the Heaven Bound Cathedral. She stayed Friday and Saturday night. Over the next three months she would spend five more weekends at that motel, putting nearly $1,500 on her Visa and Discover cards.

At the time of Dale’s investigation there was no way to prove Aubrey had spent those weekends planning Buddy Wing’s murder. Yes, we could surmise that she was learning her away around the Heaven Bound Cathedral, selecting Sissy as her patsy, and all the rest, but there wasn’t one whit of proof she was doing anything more evil those weekends than shopping for shoes at the Brinkley mall.

Later, of course, we’d learn everything about those weekends from her written confession, which, by the way, she typed out herself on a borrowed laptop in the city jail.

From that confession, we learned she’d already chosen Buddy Wing as her victim by the time Tinker promised her a job: “I also was considering WFLO’s Charlie Chimera. He was both hated and loved. His show was a lightening rod for nutballs. He had three angry ex-wives. But Buddy Wing ultimately had the most going for him. He was famous nationally as well as locally. He was on TV all the time—so the whole world could watch him die. He had enemies that could be exploited. And in the final analysis, he was infinitely more evil than that idiot on the radio.”

As soon as Tinker promised her a job, she started to investigate Buddy Wing in earnest. She wrote: “I taped his broadcasts and watched them over and over. He always kissed his Bible approximately halfway through his sermons. Dropping dead at his pulpit would be very dramatic and make the police think his murder was for religious purposes.”

During her first weekend in Hannawa, Aubrey attended services at the Heaven Bound Cathedral. She walked the back hallways and saw the list of Kent State television students in the bulletin. On one of her visits she appropriated a copy of the church directory. “I knew from my first visit to the cathedral poisoning Buddy Wing was going to be easy,” Aubrey wrote in her confession. “Security was almost non-existent. There were faceless college students running around. I’d only been out of school for two years. All I needed was a Kent State sweatshirt and an eager look in my eyes.”

She also spent several hours that weekend at the city library’s main downtown branch, reading microfiche copies of the
Herald-Union’
s many stories on Buddy Wing and his controversial church.

So Aubrey learned early on about the nasty split between Buddy and Tim Bandicoot over speaking in tongues, and the rivalry it spawned between Tim and Guthrie Gates. “My first inclination was to make Gates look like the killer,” she wrote. “I could easily plant some kind of evidence to get him arrested. Then during his trial, or maybe after he was already in prison, I could prove he didn’t do it.”

But that all changed, Aubrey confessed, during her second weekend in Hannawa. Early Saturday morning she drove to Tim Bandicoot’s house in Hannawa Falls. She parked at end of the cul-de-sac, just as she did that Friday night in May when we followed him to Borders with his family. When Tim left his house, Aubrey followed him first to his church on Lutheran Hill and then to the rundown house in the city where Sissy James lived. She saw Tim and Sissy kiss at the door. She hid in the overgrown shrubbery and watched through the bedroom window as they pulled each other’s clothes off. “I could see immediately that Sissy James would make a much better killer than Guthrie Gates,” she wrote. “Sex always makes for a better story.”

Aubrey spent the next two weeks researching Sissy’s life. She learned Sissy was born in Mingo Junction and still had relatives in that God-forsaken river town. She learned Sissy had been arrested several times for prostitution in her teens and twenties. She learned Sissy was one of the two hundred members of the Heaven Bound Cathedral who followed Tim to Lutheran Hill. She learned Sissy worked as a food-service aide at Hannawa General Hospital. She learned Sissy was one of those unfortunate women addicted to crafts.

“Sissy’s hobby was perfect,” Aubrey wrote. “She had a spare bedroom filled with jars of paint and little brushes. I couldn’t believe my luck.”

Aubrey then went to work picking the poisons she’d use. She’d taken that course in criminal toxicology and still had the textbook. She looked for a poison that Sissy theoretically could steal from the hospital. She took a liking to the heart drug procaine. She leafed through an EMS training manual at the library and confirmed that paramedics carried it in their drug boxes. She called the EMS director in Rush City. “They were thrilled to death I wanted to ride with them and do a story,” she wrote.

Everything was falling into place for Aubrey regarding Sissy James. Sissy had a motive: she was Tim Bandicoot’s lover and one of those driven from Buddy Wing’s flock; as a hospital worker she had access to drugs; as a maker of worthless cutsie-wootsie crafts, she had the manual skills necessary to paint that poisonous cross on Buddy Wing’s old family Bible. Sissy had the opportunity: as the other woman, she would be home alone on Family Night.

Wrote Aubrey: “I was convinced the police would immediately suspect Tim Bandicoot of the murder. They’d quickly discover he had an alibi for Friday night. But they’d discover just as quickly that he had a lover on the side, an emotionally unstable proselyte with a questionable past. They’d go to her house and find all the evidence they needed.”

During our lunch at Speckley’s, Dale and I had assumed Aubrey chose the “real killer” in advance. But that’s not what she did at all.

Wrote Aubrey: “I realized it would be too chancy picking my second suspect right away. Tim Bandicoot was the perfect choice—sleazeball evangelist sets up his crazy girlfriend and all that—but if I wanted to have Buddy Wing drop over dead on live TV, which I really did want, then it couldn’t be Tim. He would have that Family Night alibi. So would Annie, a perfect choice otherwise. Through my research I’d found several other potential suspects. But how could I be sure the one I chose wouldn’t produce an iron-clad alibi? So I decided to put off my decision on the second suspect until I was working at the
Herald-Union
, when I could investigate them all thoroughly.”