Morgue Mama (16 page)

He nodded nervously. “But it has nothing to do with Buddy’s death.”

“Whether it does or it doesn’t,” said Aubrey, “it’s part of the big picture that we have to report.”

Guthrie pushed back his bangs. They were beginning to turn dark with perspiration. “I don’t see why.”

Tinker was about ready to say something diplomatic to keep the conversation dull and businesslike. Bob, however, did his Richard Nixon impersonation, dropping his eyebrows and shaking his jowls, a signal to let Aubrey keep going. Which she did.

“Well,” she said, “the woman now in prison for Buddy’s murder was one of those two hundred people who followed Tim out of the cathedral. And the one Tim was sleeping with, to boot.”

“There’s no reason to go there,” Guthrie pleaded. He seemed oddly more uncomfortable with Tim’s carnal sins than Tim himself.

Aubrey ignored him. “So, if Sissy James is innocent, then somebody set her up. Somebody who knew about the affair. Somebody who knew his or her way around the cathedral. Somebody with a most wicked sense of humor—big glob of poison right on Buddy Wing’s wagging old tongue. How can we not print all that?”

Guthrie came out of his leather chair like a jack-in-the-box. “You are not a police officer, Miss McGinty. You are not judge and jury. You’re just some damn little—”

Aubrey’s lips thinned and tightened. “Reporter?” she asked. “Or were you going to say girl?”

I was sure Bob or Tinker would say something now. But neither did. They let Aubrey say whatever she wanted.

“We are not going to point fingers, and we are not going to pass judgment on anyone,” she said. “We are just going to report.”

“And embarrass a lot of good people,” Tim said softly.

“If people in your congregations are embarrassed,” Aubrey answered just as softly, “it will be from the embarrassing things other people in your congregations did.”

Guthrie, still standing, issued a mean-spirited “A-men.” Tim knew it was aimed at him. He sprang out of his leather chair and pushed Guthrie back into his.

Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates had come into Bob Averill’s office as brothers and were now acting like it. They crashed into each other like two bull walruses competing for a dewy-eyed cow on a rocky beach in the North Atlantic. There wasn’t any punching or swearing, just pushing and an occasional growl from deep inside their straining guts.

Bob Averill, the veteran of so many heated discussions in his office, went to his phone and called security. Tinker, a managing editor who someday hoped to be an editor-in-chief just like Bob Averill, pulled the coffee table out of the way, saving the aloe plant and the neatly folded copy of that morning’s paper. Aubrey and I stayed put in our leather chairs and tried not to pee our pants laughing.

***

The hatred between Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates was understandable. They were both bright and ambitious young men. They’d found themselves under the same roof, climbing the same ladder. Two heirs, one throne. What good was going to come of that? So if that speaking in tongues business hadn’t erupted, something else would have come along to drive one of them out. But the tongues business did erupt. And it turned a nasty sibling rivalry into an even nastier battle between an aging father and an errant son.

That rift between Buddy and Tim was hardly small potatoes. It was a big, big deal. When Aubrey first started looking into the murder, I went to Nanette Beane, the paper’s religion editor, and asked her what she knew about speaking in tongues. Well, naturally, she didn’t know diddly. Before becoming religion editor she’d been the food editor and before that she’d covered suburban school board meetings. But she did have a number of reference books strung across the back of her desk and she found one called
The
Fundamentals of Fundamentalism
and it contained a chapter on the subject.

Buddy Wing was a Pentecostal.

Pentecost—I have to admit I didn’t know this—was the seventh Sunday after Jesus’s resurrection, when he appeared before his disciples. They were so filled with the Holy Spirit they began to speak in tongues, the Bible says. So that’s what Pentecostals still do today: They fill themselves with the spirit and say things no one but God understands.

Some Pentecostals believe different people are given different gifts—so if you don’t speak in tongues, that’s okay, you can still get into heaven. Others are not so forgiving: If you don’t have the gift of tongues you aren’t really saved. Buddy Wing apparently fell into that second group. So when Tim Bandicoot came back from Bible college, his head brimming with theological flexibility, and started suggesting that the Heaven Bound Cathedral might do better in the here-and-now, television viewer-wise, if Buddy toned down a few of his more controversial practices, like healing people through the television screen, like handling rattlesnakes every year on his birthday, or like speaking in tongues, well, you can only imagine what Buddy thought.

Tim had grown up in the church. His parents were original members of the Clean Collar Club. He was the son Buddy never had. I’m sure Buddy tried everything he could to correct Tim’s errant thinking. At some point he must have realized it wasn’t going to happen and he brought in Guthrie Gates and began grooming him.

Why didn’t Buddy just send Tim on his merry way, to start his own church, to spread the good word in his own way? Maybe he had tried to do that. Maybe Tim wouldn’t leave gracefully. Maybe Tim had the power of his convictions and was determined to stay and fight. Maybe Tim, religiously speaking, knew a cash cow when he saw one and wasn’t about to walk away. Maybe Guthrie’s sudden appearance as a rival only stiffened Tim’s resolve. Who knows what kind of psychological stuff was going on inside, and among, Tim Bandicoot, Guthrie Gates and the Rev. Buddy Wing?

All we know is that things slowly came to a head, and one night, with the television cameras grinding away, Buddy Wing cast Tim Bandicoot from his flock.

The fancy Greek word for speaking in tongues, by the way, is glossolalia:
glossai
means tongue,
lalein
means to babble. But what believers speak is not Greek. It is a heavenly language, perhaps the language spoken by the angels, or God himself. When humans speak it, they have no idea what they are saying. When humans hear it, they have no idea what they’re hearing. They are simply in the spirit.

“
Shalbala-she-shalbala
,” Buddy cried out from his pulpit the night he cast out Tim Bandicoot. “The gift of tongues has come over me. All who might be offended better listen elsewhere.
She-shalbala-shebendula-shebendula
. Out of this holy place you who reject the gift, you who pretend to be saved.” His finger surveyed the congregation, the choir and the dancers and the orchestra, and like the jittery needle on a compass found Tim Bandicoot seated alongside Guthrie Gates in the row of huge gold chairs behind his pulpit.

Can you imagine the humiliation felt by the two hundred who retreated toward the exit signs that night? Can you imagine the self-righteousness felt by the thousand who applauded them out?

***

Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates left as they’d come—together. Except this time the
Herald-Union’
s own version of Ronny Doddridge, day shift security guard Al Tosi, who stood five-six and weighed four pounds for every one of his sixty-two years, was waddling behind them. Both Tim and Guthrie were crying.

Tim had apologized profusely after the shoving match. Guthrie had only sniffled indignantly, “I suppose you’re going to print this, too?”

Which was a good question. Was their meeting in Bob Averill’s office off the record? Or was it fair fodder for Aubrey’s series—to help give context to the rift between the tongue-speaking followers of the Rev. Guthrie Gates and the non-glossolalianites in the Rev. Tim Bandicoot’s New Epiphany Temple?

Chapter 17

Wednesday, June 28

As soon as I got to my desk Aubrey motioned for me to come to hers. I hurried across the newsroom, tea bag still soaking in my mug. “Can’t you wait until a woman’s awake?” I complained.

She wanted me to hear the message on her phone. She handed me the receiver and punched the replay button. The voice was precise and sweet in the phoniest way:

Aubrey put her hands behind her head and swiveled back and forth in her chair. With her elbows sticking out like that she looked like an angel ornament swinging from a Christmas tree. Her smile was absolutely Satanic. “What do you make of that?” she asked me.

“Assuming it was really Annie Bandicoot?”

“Yeah. Assuming that.”

“Then I’d say something important is going to happen. Something they want reported.”

“They? Or just Annie? Remember what she said: ‘I thought you might want to be there.’
I
thought, not
we
thought.”

Dangling tea bag or no, I took a sip from my mug. “It’s probably innocent enough. But it does make you wonder why Annie made the call and not Tim, doesn’t it?”

“So many possibilities, Maddy: Tim is so distraught after his little shoving match with Guthrie Gates that wifey-poo has to do his dirty work. Or wifey-poo, tired of seeing her man muck things up, takes matters in her own hands. Or maybe the Bandicoots are in cahoots, going on the offensive together to cover their guilt.”

“Bandicoots in cahoots,” I said. “I like that.”

She ignored me. “Maybe that wasn’t Annie Bandicoot on the phone at all. Maybe that was someone from Guthrie’s church, wanting me to show up at Tim’s church, so Tim would see me and go off on me and look like a complete jerk, which I would dutifully include in my series.”

I had a possibility of my own: “Maybe somebody’s going to spike Tim’s water pitcher.”

Aubrey turned her wings back into arms and silently applauded my deductive powers. “Whatever’s going to happen, you and I, Dolly Madison Sprowls, are going to church Sunday.”

***

Friday, June 30

Eric finally came out of his funk and completed the computer search on Edward Tolchak, the neighbor who kept shooting out the Heaven Bound Cathedral’s parking lot lights. Unfortunately, as Aubrey already had surmised, the search came up with nothing useful. After getting out of jail for the third time, Tolchak had filed a civil suit against the Heaven Bound Cathedral. The cathedral settled out of court, removing two of the light poles, installing Venetian blinds on Tolchak’s windows, planting a row of blue spruce along his property line and paying him $25,000 for the mental anguish he’d suffered. I gave the findings to Aubrey.

***

Sunday, July 2

Sunday morning Aubrey and I drove to Lutheran Hill. So did the man in the red Taurus station wagon. We spotted him behind us shortly after Aubrey picked me up. “Do you think Annie Bandicoot left a message on his phone, too?” Aubrey asked. She was neither angry nor afraid. Not even anxious. She was enjoying all this.

When we reached the New Epiphany Temple and pulled into the gravel parking lot, the man in the station wagon made a quick turn onto a side street and parked. He was protecting his license plate number like it was the secret formula for Coca-Cola.

The old Woolworth’s store was filled to the gills. We found a pair of empty chairs near the back. Aubrey nudged me and pointed at the huge cross behind the pulpit. It was twinkling.

A quintet of musicians took their positions in the corner and started playing—two guitars, trumpet, drums and an electric piano. People started clapping in time. Many were rocking their shoulders and bobbing their heads. I noticed I was tapping my toes. Then Aubrey took a camera out of her purse and put it in her lap. “Good gravy,” I whispered, “you’re not going to take pictures, are you?”

“I was asked to come and cover an important event. Of course I’m going to take pictures.”

“You start snapping that thing during the service and they’ll descend on us like a plague of locusts.”

No sooner said, the back door swung wide and a muscle-bound man with a backwards baseball cap and a television camera on his shoulder slid inside. Behind him was Tish Kiddle. Aubrey hissed “television whore” loud enough for half the congregation to hear.

The thrones on the stage suddenly filled up with elders. A couple dozen people from the congregation filtered to the stage and sang this absolutely wild hymn that sounded an awful lot like the Isley’s Brothers’
Do You Love Me?

Then Tim and Annie Bandicoot appeared at the pulpit together. The congregation seemed to shrivel. Clearly this is not what usually happened at the temple’s Sunday morning service. Annie lovingly rubbed her husband’s shoulder and then stepped to the microphone. She said this: “Tim is going to talk to you, and I want you to know that what he is going to say, he has already said to me, and to our children. I want you to know that we love him and trust him and believe in him. And we believe in you.”

Then she said this: “Jesus said to the Pharisees, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.’ So should you decide to cast stones at my husband when this is finished, I will be standing at his side.”

Aubrey looked at me and mouthed that line from the Tammy Wynette song,
Stand By Your Man
.

It was clear where this whole thing was going. Jesus had said that cast-the-first-stone stuff to the Pharisees after they brought a woman to him charged with adultery, and reminded him that the punishment under the old laws of Moses was death by stoning.

Tim Bandicoot hugged his wife and stepped to the microphone. “I am guilty of the sin of adultery. And it was with a woman you all know. A woman who today sits in prison, for the murder of our beloved Buddy Wing.”

Aubrey finished scribbling the quote and then snapped a series of photographs.

Tim’s confession was filled with tears and whimpering and loud prayers peppered with scripture. There was plenty of crying in the audience, too. Every now and then someone would pop from their folding chair and implore him to “Go and sin no more”—the same thing Jesus said to the woman after he’d saved her from the Pharisees’ stones.

I must say that Tim Bandicoot’s agony looked genuine to me. And I have some experience with the agony of unfaithful men: Dale Marabout’s, when I found him on the floor with the kindergarten teacher; my husband Lawrence’s, when I found him in the garage with the secretary from the labor union. I could tell from Aubrey’s frozen smirk that she did not believe Tim Bandicoot’s contrition was for real.

But then he said this: “There are those who believe Sissy did not kill Pastor Wing. There are those who believe Sissy confessed to that terrible sin to protect me. Though I surely broke Buddy’s heart, I did not stop it from beating. I did not kill Buddy Wing.”

He started to cry again, and shake. Annie took him in her arms and they swayed like wind chimes. To get a better angle, Aubrey slid into the aisle and sank to her knees, clicking off more shots.

Tim gently pushed his wife away and, with arms stiffly anchored on his pulpit, directly addressed the long-legged reporter kneeling in the aisle. “I do not know if Sissy is innocent or guilty, Miss McGinty. But I will go to her prison cell, and I will beg that if she has not spoken the truth, she speaks it now.”

Tim and Annie left the stage. Aubrey tried to follow them into the hallway behind the stage, but a large black man in a brown suit stopped her. The musicians started playing and the choir started singing. The congregation clapped and danced and the tears poured.

Aubrey and I trotted out the door like the hyenas we were. Tish Kiddle and her cameraman were right behind us.

“That sneaky bitch,” Aubrey fumed as we hurried to her Escort.

I was not sure who she meant. “Tish Kiddle or Annie Bandicoot?”

She fumbled through her purse for her car keys. “Try to keep the objects of my disdain straight, Maddy. Tish is the whore. Annie is the sneaky bitch.”

“Does it really surprise you they invited Channel 21, too?”

“This is my story, Maddy.”

“I think the Bandicoots consider it their story,” I said.

Aubrey glowered at me—as if I was guilty of something. “It’s because of my digging that they’re in this spot. You’d think they’d respect that.”

“I don’t think protecting your scoop is very high on their list of worries.”

Aubrey mellowed. She giggled at her own arrogance. “It should be.”

We sped past the church. The red Taurus station wagon pulled from the side street and followed us.

I understood why Aubrey was livid. It
was
her story. She’d spent weeks researching the murder, wheedling information out of one reluctant source after another. For weeks she’d seen that fat, black Page One headline in her head:

Now Tish Kiddle would be breaking her story on tonight’s TV news.

I did all I could to comfort her. “They’ll lead with it tonight—unless there was some terrible accident on the interstate—but they won’t have any details, or any background. After tonight they’ll just be reporting what you’ve already reported.”

Aubrey fished through her purse for her cellphone and thumbed in a number. “How do those TV people live with themselves… Tinker? Sorry to call you at home on Sunday.”

There was no time to drive me home. We went straight to the paper and Aubrey spent the next five hours writing her story. And while she wrote, Tinker, who’d rushed to the newsroom in musty jogging shorts and a Cleveland Indians T-shirt, lorded over the weekend skeleton crew on the metro desk. The story would run across the top of Page One. Tim Bandicoot’s confession to adultery would be the main thrust of the story, but it would state very clearly in the second paragraph that the public admission came in the wake of an ongoing
Herald-Union
investigation into the murder of Buddy Wing. We were going to be scooped by the local TV news, but we would push, and push hard, whatever advantage we had. We would let our readers know, and not in a shy way, that while TV 21 simply stumbled into the story, we uncovered the story, that Tim Bandicoot was confessing for one reason and one reason only, because of the
Herald-Union
’s dogged journalistic excellence.

Aubrey’s photos came out pretty good. Tinker chose one of Tim and Annie hugging. He told the make-up editor to blow it up big. And run it in color. And crop it tight, so every wrinkle of agony on Tim’s face showed, so the wedding ring on Annie’s hand showed. The headline on the story was plain and powerful:

While Aubrey was writing, and frantically trying to get her sources on the phone, including Guthrie Gates, Tinker dragged me off to the cafeteria. We shared a piece of stale carrot cake from the vending machine. He asked me for my impression of Tim Bandicoot’s confession, not once but five times. He was pumped up about the story but also worried. Originally Aubrey was supposed to continue her investigation for another month, and then take another two or three weeks to write her stories. The stories would be run by the paper’s lawyers and discussed ad nauseam in editorial meetings. The graphics people were going to design a special logo to go with the stories, a Bible with a dripping cross.

But now, thanks to Annie Bandicoot, Aubrey would not only have to start writing her stories right away, we’d have to start running them right away. It was going to be a crazy couple of weeks.

Just as Tinker and I were playfully fighting over the little sugar carrot on the cake, Bob Averill poked his head in the cafeteria. He pointed at Tinker and motioned for him to follow. To me he said, “Enjoy your snack.”

At six everybody gathered around the television in the conference room to watch the news, 21 at Six. Tish Kiddle, reporting live from the dark and empty church, had almost nothing: “Members of the New Epiphany Temple remain in utter shock tonight following the unexpected confession by the Rev. Tim Bandicoot that he’d had a long sexual relationship with Sissy James, the confessed murderer of Bandicoot’s old mentor, nationally known evangelist Buddy Wing.”

After weekend anchorwoman Jamie Stokes said, “Oh my,” and weekend anchorman Bill Callucci said, “What more can you tell us, Tish?” Tish said, “TV 21 has learned—and TV 21 is the first to report this—that new evidence may have surfaced suggesting that Sissy James may not be the real killer.”

Jamie Stokes asked Tish to, “Keep us posted.” To which Tish promised, “I’ll be working through the evening on this exclusive breaking story and I’ll have the very latest on 21 at Eleven.”

“We’ll look forward to it,” Bill Callucci said. Swiveling in his chair to take advantage of a new camera angle, he said, “Speaking of confessions, I must confess my weakness for blueberry pie.” It was his segue into TV 21’s coverage of the Bowenville Blueberry Festival.