Morgue Mama (13 page)

She could see I was irritated by her indifference. “I’ll give the files to Eric. Maybe he can find something worth pursuing.”

I went from mild-mannered Maddy to bitch-on-wheels Morgue Mama in a hundredth of a second. “What are you saying to me? That if I wasn’t such an incompetent old fool I could check the computer files myself? Well, from now on—”

She apologetically grabbed my elbow and slowly pulled me toward her. “You want to go with Eric and me to Meri after work?”

And so that night we met for dinner. I assumed we’d go to Speckley’s, but they both wanted to go to Okar’s, a trendy new Lebanese restaurant. Instead of the meat loaf sandwich and au gratin potatoes I was craving, I had a fruit salad covered with yogurt and honey and pistachio nuts. Eric and Aubrey had grilled chicken pitas and shared a plate of lawn clippings called tabooli. For dessert we ordered one baklava and three forks.

It was just about dark when we left the restaurant. The sidewalk was filled with old gays wearing pastel baseball caps and noisy college kids covered in tattoos and earrings. I remembered the days when be-bop jazz used to roll out of the bars and give the entire neighborhood a happy epileptic fit. Now the street throbbed like a toothache from that awful rap music. Eric was begging me to join them for cappuccinos at Starbucks when Aubrey spotted the red Taurus station wagon parked along the street just a block from our own cars. I don’t know if she was frightened, angry, or simply annoyed, but she began leaking four-letter words. Quite to my surprise, Eric began leaking them, too. Then he started running, right toward the Taurus, fists tucked under his chin like a boxer.

Aubrey and I both yelled for him to stop. But Eric was in protective boyfriend mode. When he got within fifty feet of the station wagon, the man inside jumped out and ran. Eric stayed with him. They crossed the street and ran another block before disappearing around the back of an apartment building.

Aubrey wanted to follow, but I locked my arms around her elbow to hold her back. “Eric couldn’t catch a cold,” I assured her.

After a minute or two, the man reappeared, trotting, arms wrapped around his face like a babushka. He jumped into his station wagon, backed into a lime-green Volkswagen Beetle, made a clumsy U-turn and sped away. Then we saw Eric, weaving slowly across the street, oblivious to the traffic.

Aubrey and I hurried to him. There was blood on his lip and the bridge of his nose. He was staring straight ahead, acting dopey. I fished in my purse for a Kleenex while Aubrey berated him for not getting the license plate number on the Taurus. “That’s all you needed to do,” she kept repeating. “That’s all you needed to do.”

I licked the Kleenex and started cleaning the blood off his face. “Good gravy, Aubrey. He’s just been beaten to a pulp.”

Actually he hadn’t been beaten to a pulp. He told us he’d tried to tackle the mysterious station-wagon man and missed, tumbling over the hood of a Yugo.

“Could you make the guy out?” Aubrey demanded. “White, black, young, old?”

Eric fought off my dabbing Kleenex. “Middle-aged white guy.” He swung his eyes across my worried face and stared into the black sky. “I think I’m going home now,” he said.

Aubrey followed him to his truck, begging for a better description of the man. He drove away without telling her anything.

I felt so sorry for Eric. He had tried to defend the woman he loved—at least loved to sleep with—only to make a fool of himself. I knew what that kind of embarrassment was like. I once went to Dale Marabout’s apartment with a chocolate cake, to rekindle our faltering affair. Instead of knocking, I used the key he’d given me. I found him naked on his living room floor with that kindergarten teacher.

A few days after that incident in Meri, Aubrey confided in me that Eric had stopped sleeping with her. “I guess flying over the hood of that Yugo he came to the conclusion I’m not worth dying for,” she said. She said it as if she didn’t care. But I could see she did care. For years, Dale Marabout and I assured each other we were just in it for the sex. We laughed and copulated like a couple of those chimpanzees in equatorial Africa, bonobos I think they’re called, who just mindlessly screw and screw and screw. After I found Dale on the floor with the kindergarten teacher, I pretended not to care. I went to their wedding and, of all things, gave them a set of fitted flannel sheets. But I cared. And Aubrey cared. She’d been using Eric, no doubt about that, but it was for more than sex.

Chapter 14

Thursday, June 8

Thursday morning I went with Aubrey to Kent State University to see Dr. Howard Cooksey, a professor of television and radio news in the communications department. It would be a forty-minute drive across some of the most forgettable landscape in the state of Ohio.

“Were you still there when the black squirrels were poisoned?” I asked as Aubrey’s Ford Escort struggled up the long grade that divides the tiny towns of Richfield and Peninsula.

Her eyes widened. “How do you know about the squirrels?”

“Morgue Mama does not know all or see all,” I joked, “but Morgue Mama does remember all.” The fact was that after the eyebrow woman told us about students from the university working at the cathedral, I searched through the morgue’s Kent State files.

“That happened my senior year,” Aubrey said. “I covered it for the college paper.”

“So that was just three years ago.”

She played with the calendar in her mind. “Yeah.”

Kent is famous for its black squirrels and the poisonings shook the town and the campus to its roots, not as badly as the May 4, 1970 shootings, of course not, but it was amazing how worked up people became over the deaths of thirty-seven squirrels.

The black squirrel story actually began decades earlier, in the early Sixties, when the university’s grounds supervisor, a guy named Larry Woodell, went to Canada and brought back sixteen black squirrels. In Ohio you only see gray squirrels and red squirrels, so black squirrels popping across the lawns were quite a novelty, and the herd, whatever you call a group of squirrels, multiplied faster than rabbits. In 1982, the university held its first Black Squirrel Festival, complete with rock bands and a barbecue. The annual May 4 memorial commemoration and the Black Squirrel Festival in September are the yin and yang of campus life at Kent State, the sad and the silly if you will.

So, anyway, it caused quite a stir when people started finding the carcasses of black squirrels all over the place. The campus police called in the Kent city police, and the Kent city police called in the State Highway Patrol. “They never caught who did it?” I asked Aubrey.

“Nope. After thirty-seven squirrels it stopped. By Christmas break it was all over. But it was a cool story for awhile—you know what I mean by cool—it was actually pretty sickening.”

I did know what she meant by cool. Covering those squirrel poisonings when she was a senior journalism student at Kent was cool the same way covering the murder of that football coach was cool when she was a new reporter at
The Gazette
in Rush City, the same way that digging into the Buddy Wing murder now was cool. Big stories, no matter how tragic, are cool to cover. I’m sure that Aubrey’s stories on the squirrel poisonings for the college newspaper helped her get her first job in Rush City, and I know her football coach stories got her into the
Herald-Union
. Soldiers advance through the ranks by going to war. Reporters advance by covering cool stories. “How exactly were the squirrels poisoned?” I asked. “It wasn’t walnuts shot full of procaine, was it?”

She winced at my joke. “Ears of corn sprinkled with insecticide—as you well know.”

“Well, it’s still possible that’s it’s the same person, isn’t it? Psychopathic killers aren’t under any obligation to use the same poisons all the time, are they?”

Aubrey agreed that it was possible with an exaggerated, Oliver Hardy nod. “But think about the odds. In order for one of the television students to have poisoned both Buddy Wing and the squirrels, that student would’ve been at Kent three years ago, making him, at best, a sophomore when the squirrels were killed. I’ll admit that theoretically there might be a few sophomores capable of sprinkling poison on an ear of corn without poisoning themselves, but that still means there’s a three year-gap between crimes. Wouldn’t a wacko like that have moved up to a human victim right away?”

“Maybe there was someone in between,” I said.

“You’re the one with the steel trap mind, Maddy. Was anyone within a hundred miles of Kent State mysteriously poisoned in the last three years?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“And what college student carrying a full load, and working part-time, and getting loaded, and trying to get laid, would have the time to frame Sissy James? Find out she was a former member of the Heaven Bound Cathedral who’s having an affair with Buddy Wing’s old protégé? Who has a secret child in Mingo Junction? Who she visits every Thanksgiving? This is Kent State we’re talking about, not Yale.”

“If it’s that far-fetched why are we even wasting our time going to Kent?”

“You got me.”

We were going to Kent State, of course, because the regular presence of strangers backstage at the cathedral would be an important part of Aubrey’s stories on the murder. She’d explore the two possibilities: one, that the real killer was someone everybody knew; two, that the real killer was someone nobody knew. She’d play it straight, not trying to identify possible suspects, not even hinting at possible suspects. But everyone reading her series would know who all the possible suspects were. And everyone would come to the same conclusion: The Hannawa police were too hasty in accepting Sissy James’s confession.

We drove through downtown Kent to the campus. Except for a few black squirrels and a few summer students, the campus was empty. We parked in a visitor’s lot and walked past the slope where on that horrible spring day in 1970 the Ohio National Guard had turned and fired. We followed a sidewalk trimmed with beds of red geraniums to Taylor Hall.

Inside we waited for twelve minutes for Dr. Cooksey to come out of his office. He was a tall, overweight man of fifty. He was wearing faded tan Dockers and a white polo shirt. He was not happy to see us.

The walls of his office were covered with glossy publicity photos of network news reporters and anchors. All were upside-down. Perhaps to show his students what a daring iconoclast he was. Perhaps so they wouldn’t feel in awe of the on-air stars they’d encounter once they graduated and went to work at some dippy little station like the one in Hannawa.

Anyway, Dr. Cooksey was not happy to see us and told us so: “I shouldn’t even talk to you. It can’t possibly do my students a lick of good.”

I quickly turned to Aubrey, to see how she was reacting. Her eyebrows were raised. She was tapping her chin with her pen. Behind her on the wall was a grinning upside-down Dan Rather. “A story goes where a story goes,” she said.

Dr. Cooksey leaned back in his chair and neatly inserted his fingers under his armpits. “But do you have a story, Miss McGinty?”

She ignored his question and asked the first of hers. “How many years have you been sending students to the Heaven Bound Cathedral?”

“I told you on the phone, seven or eight.”

“I was hoping you’d looked it up.”

“Eight.”

“And Elaine Albert came to you with the idea?”

“That’s right. She’s who you should be talking to, you know.”

“I would if she’d talk. Maybe you can put in a good word?”

“Not going to happen.”

The hostility between Aubrey and the professor was simply chilling, and embarrassing. I know there’s a natural animosity between print and broadcast people, but this was so nasty and personal. It was like Jerry Falwell and Larry Flint discussing celibacy on one of those cable talking-head shows. No respect whatsoever. No hope in the world of finding common ground.

“Do you know how many of your students were working there the semester Buddy Wing was killed?” Aubrey asked.

“Three, four, maybe five.”

“Any chance you could find out for sure? Maybe give me their names?”

“Look, Miss McGinty. This thing isn’t an official intern program where I get personally involved. All I do is post a flier that part-time jobs are available at the cathedral. The kids make the contact themselves.”

“Doesn’t the cathedral ever call you for references?”

Dr. Cooksey was losing and he knew it. “Sometimes.”

“That semester?”

“Can’t remember.”

Aubrey wrote that down and underlined it several times. “You can see how these quotes are going to come out, don’t you?” she said. ‘Cooksey refused to say.’ ‘Cooksey said he couldn’t remember.’”

“Quote whatever you want,” the professor said. “But I do not keep a written record of those kind of calls. If Elaine, Mrs. Albert, calls about a student who’s applied for a job, I check my grade book and attendance sheet and offer an opinion. I don’t keep a record.”

Aubrey, to her credit, wrote down his explanation. “So, what did you think when Buddy Wing was poisoned? You had three, four, maybe five students working there, after all.”

He smirked. “You mean did I warn my students not to kiss any Bibles while they were over there? Naturally we talked about it in class the next week.”

“Did any of them happen to tell you where they were backstage when he toppled over?”

“Gee whiz—I just don’t remember any of those conversations.”

Aubrey closed her notebook and put the cap on her pen. “Do you ever personally go to the broadcasts, to see how your students are doing?”

“I went a couple of times. Years ago when they first started hiring my kids. But I haven’t been there for ages. I sure wasn’t there the night Wing was poisoned, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

When Aubrey stood up her hair swept across the Dan Rather photo, almost knocking it off the wall. “I wasn’t getting at that. But thanks for the lead.”

We left Taylor Hall and retreated through the red geraniums. Aubrey couldn’t stop laughing. “Did you ever meet a bigger dickbrain in your life?”

“I’ve been around a long time—I’m sure I have. But he’s right up there.” I saw a tuft of wiry grass growing up through the mulch and stopped to yank it out. “You’d almost think he was covering up for one of his students, wouldn’t you?”

“What he was covering was his own tookus.”

“Oh, come on. You don’t think he killed Buddy Wing?”

Now Aubrey laughed at me. “Remember when we first got there? And he said talking to us couldn’t possibly do his students any good? What he meant was that talking to us couldn’t do
him
any good. These professors are bunny rabbits, Maddy. Frightened little bunny rabbits. Their courses are their cabbage patches. And protecting the cabbage is what it’s all about.”

I found a second tuft of grass in the geraniums. Before I could find a third, Aubrey locked her arm in mine and steered me toward the parking lot. “Any idea how you’re going to get the names of his students?” I asked.

She looked at me like I’d just told her I believed in Santa Claus. She pulled her notebook from her purse and flipped it open to a page marked with a paper clip. “Marcie Peacock, Amy Kamm, Zack Zimmerman and Kiralee Presello.”

“Good gravy, why’d you drag me up here if you already had their names?”

She gave me several reasons: “To get some background. To get some color. To get some good quotes. To see the dickbrain squirm.”

“That last one seems a bit personal.”

“You bet it does,” she said. “Newspaper people have a moral responsibility to strike a blow against television whenever we can.”

“You’re not serious—”

We’d reached the car. She fumbled in her purse for her keys. “Only half serious. This is the biggest story I’ve ever covered, Maddy. I have to be thorough. And careful.”

We drove a few blocks to a Wendy’s. I got a salad. Aubrey got a baked potato and chili. “So, where did you get the names from?” I asked.

Again she gave me the Santa Claus look. “From the church bulletin. They always list as many people as they can.”

She was right about that. Have you ever seen a church bulletin that didn’t have long lists of names, from the pastor down to the assistant baby-sitter in the nursery? “But how’d you get a bulletin from back in November?” I wondered. “I wouldn’t think their shelf life is too long.”

“Obviously I have an off-the-record source or two.”

“Obviously.”

“I wish I could tell you.”

“The eyebrow woman?”

The corner of her mouth twisted cryptically. I tried again. “The students all checked out, I gather?”

“Four little kittens,” she said.