Morgue Mama (21 page)

***

I got off the interstate at Mt. Gilead and pulled into The Leaf. It’s a wonderful little restaurant right off the exit ramp that serves breakfast 24 hours a day. I had a quick half-mug of tea in the car then went inside for a three-cheese omelet. Every waitress in the place reminded me of Sissy James—bone-tired working-class women dedicated to survival no matter how much crap the world throws at them.

Sissy has survived more than most, hasn’t she? With Buddy Wing’s help she crawled out of the sewer of prostitution, only to be enslaved in an illicit love affair with a weak-willed married man—Tim Bandicoot—an equally odorous predicament. Then Aubrey McGinty chose her as Schmuck Number One. Given her excellent training in victimhood, Sissy immediately confessed to a murder she did not commit, which I’m sure delighted Aubrey to no end.

Now with my help, and Dale Marabout’s help, and ironically Aubrey’s help, Sissy James is free of the sewer again. After Aubrey’s confession, the city prosecutor hurried back into court. The judge dismissed the charges against her and she was freed. What happened to Sissy was tragic. But all in all, things have worked out well for her: Nine months in Marysville for stupidity is a lot better than life without parole for murder.

After returning to Hannawa last fall, Sissy returned to the Heaven Bound Cathedral. “Our sister has come home,” Guthrie Gates announced from the pulpit during his televised Friday night service. She was applauded and cheered.

Guthrie, by the way, has put Sissy in charge of the cathedral’s new outreach ministry to the city’s prostitutes. Guthrie told me he got the idea from Aubrey’s series on the women who work along Morrow Street.

Keesha, the prostitute Aubrey used in her lead, is not one of the women Sissy is trying to save. Keesha is dead.

I left my waitress a $5 tip and coaxed my Dodge Shadow back onto the interstate.

***

During the first week of November, Aubrey rode with the Rush City paramedics and stole two bottles of procaine and a syringe from their drug box. She went to a crafts supply store and bought several little bottles of gold paint, and some tiny brushes. She practiced painting crosses on an old Bible she bought for a dollar at a yard sale. She timed how long it would take the paint to dry. “I knew procaine was a lethal drug,” she wrote in her confession, “but I began to worry whether Buddy would ingest enough to kill him. So I looked in my textbook for another drug, as a backup. In the appendix, right below the procaine entry, I found lily of the valley. I discovered that even the water in a vase can be fatal if swallowed. I knew from my visits to the Heaven Bound Cathedral that Elaine Albert always put a pitcher of water on the pulpit. It was perfect. I found a greenhouse in Akron that grew lily of valley and I bought five live plants. I soaked the stems and leaves until I had a very lethal quart of water.”

Thanksgiving night Aubrey drove to Hannawa and checked into the Quality Inn. She spent all day Friday in her motel room watching television. At six, she put on one of her old Kent State sweatshirts and drove to the Heaven Bound Cathedral with her duffel bag of tricks. She walked right in. She went to the kitchenette in the nursery and filled a water pitcher with the tainted lily of valley water. When Buddy Wing left his office for the make-up room, she scooted in. She closed the door and painted the cross on his Bible. She took the Bible and the water and Buddy’s notes to the pulpit. She drove back to the motel and watched Buddy Wing die. At midnight she drove into Hannawa and planted her evidence in Sissy’s garbage cans.

In March, Aubrey came to work at the
Herald-Union
. She immediately sucked me into her madness. For weeks I followed her all over Hannawa. I thought I was helping her prove that Sissy James didn’t kill Buddy Wing.

What I was doing, of course, was helping Aubrey find the perfect person to set up—that poor soul whom Dale Marabout aptly labeled on his napkin hypothesis as her second
schmuck
.

By the end of June it was clear to me just who that schmuck was going to be. It was going to be Annie Bandicoot.

Annie Bandicoot not only had a basketful of motives for poisoning Buddy Wing—revenge for his kicking Tim out of his church, getting Sissy James out the picture, clearing the way for the Bandicoots to become the king and queen of Hallelujah City—she also had the opportunity. Friday night was Family Night at the New Epiphany Temple. But that particular Friday night was Father and Son Night. While Tim and his sons were in Cleveland watching the Cavaliers beat the Knicks, Annie was waiting at home.

Aubrey, of course, owed that particular piece of information to Sandra Leigh Swain, the make-up woman we’d jokingly called the eyebrow woman. What a fruitful source she turned out to be: she not only told Aubrey that Annie didn’t have an alibi, she told her that Sissy did! “Prior to my conversations with Sandra Swain, I did not know about Sissy’s Thanksgiving weekend trip to Mingo Junction,” Aubrey wrote in her confession. “I was thrilled. I knew I could prove Sissy’s innocence.”

Another thing Aubrey didn’t know beforehand was that Sissy had a daughter. Maybe I’m letting my own heart get the best of me, but I think that revelation played heavily on Aubrey’s conscience. So, at the same time she was coldly looking for a second person to frame, she was frantically trying to free Sissy for all the right reasons.

***

I’d been back on the interstate a good fifteen minutes when flashing blue lights suddenly filled my rear-view mirror. It was daylight. I had hundreds of cars and trucks for company. But those lights sent a shiver from the back of my eye sockets to the tip of my tailbone. It’s something how fear stays with you, isn’t it? I’ve been away from LaFargeville for fifty years but every time I see a pasture of cows I feel the hoof of that old Guernsey breaking my toes again, the way it did that afternoon long ago when my father was teaching me to milk. And now those flashing lights were filling me with the same panic I felt that rainy night in July when Aubrey followed me home from Ike’s.

Of course I knew it wasn’t the Taurus Man following me that night. The Taurus Man was Dale Marabout. And I knew it wasn’t any of the other suspects Aubrey had concocted. But I did fear it might be Lionel Percy again. It had only been four nights since he’d scared the bejesus out of us on West Apple, and he did not seem like the kind of man who could be satisfied scaring someone just once. You don’t know how relieved I was to hear the pathetic beep of Aubrey’s little Escort.

Which is funny. During all those months I suspected Aubrey of killing Buddy Wing, I never once feared for my own life. Maybe I was just too full of my own cleverness. My own deceitfulness. Maybe I was so fond of the
good
Aubrey that I couldn’t believe the
bad
Aubrey would hurt me.

Which was ridiculous. Looking back now with a clear head, I doubt Aubrey would have hesitated two seconds if she’d discovered I was onto her. She’d already sacrificed two decent men and a lot of squirrels for her brilliant career, hadn’t she? Why wouldn’t she sacrifice a squirrelly old librarian?

Anyway, the terror sparked by those blinking blue lights quickly fizzled. I pulled over. A baby-faced State Highway Patrol officer walked up to my open window. “Your turn signal’s been blinking for many many miles, ma’am,” he said.

***

Dale Marabout’s secret investigation did not always go as smoothly as I’d hoped. My first scare, of course, came that Tuesday in late May when Aubrey started drilling me in the morgue about Dale’s new freelance job. When she’d surprised him at the library the night before—where he was busy researching the poisons she’d used to kill Buddy Wing, by the way—he’d told her he was working on a project for a local company. Aubrey assumed he’d “descended into the dark, slimy world of corporate PR,” as she put it. I let her go right on thinking that. The next scare came a week later in Meri when Eric Chen’s chivalry got the best of him. Luckily Eric was humiliated into silence. Then just two weeks after that, when police found Ronny Doddridge’s body, I was sure Aubrey had killed him. I can’t tell you how relieved I was when the coroner ruled it a suicide. That poor, big-eared lamb was dead but at least I wasn’t responsible for it.

My fears returned right after the Fourth of July when the windows on Tish Kiddle’s Lexus were smashed. No mystery who did the smashing. “What’s Aubrey going to do if Tish stays on the story?” I worried to Dale.

“There’s not a chance in hell Tish Kiddle will stay on the story,” he said. He was right. Forty-eight hours later Tish Kiddle was broadcasting from sunny Orlando.

TV 21’s report on Tim Bandicoot’s public confession about his affair with Sissy James did bring matters to a head, however. Tinker told Aubrey to start writing her series and Bob Averill put in a call to Detective Scotty Grant. Bob Averill made me go to police headquarters with him. “Sorry we didn’t tell you about this earlier,” Bob told Scotty Grant. “We weren’t sure of our facts yet and we didn’t want to get you folks involved in a crazy goose-chase.”

Grant was surprisingly grateful. “Nobody likes chasing gooses,” he said.

So it came down to that final Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. While Aubrey was imprisoned in the newsroom racing to meet her deadline, Dale Marabout was at home racing to meet his, turning a dozen reporter’s notebooks full of scribbled notes into a story.

By now Scotty Grant had advised Tim and Annie Bandicoot of the situation. They were prayerful and cooperative. Officers searched their property. Under the driver’s seat of Annie’s Saturn they found a Bible covered with hand-painted gold crosses. Under the passenger’s seat they found a curly auburn wig and pair of red-framed lollipop glasses big enough to disguise even the most familiar face. It still wasn’t enough to arrest Aubrey, however. Dale’s evidence was largely circumstantial and the items found in Annie’s car bore neither a suspicious fingerprint nor fiber.

Sunday, after I had lunch with Dale and Sharon at Speckley’s, I drove to Bob Averill’s pricey condominium in White Lake. Tinker and Scotty Grant were there. “Okay, Maddy,” Bob said, bringing a tray of snapping highballs from the kitchen, “tell us what you’ve got in mind.”

I told them about Aubrey’s surprise birthday dinner for Eric. “She wanted me to help her make a cake and a lasagna. Cakes are nothing. But a lasagna, that’s a pretty time-consuming dish, even when you’ve got all the ingredients handy. Lots of layers. Lots of steps. If you forget to put one of the ingredients on your shopping list—say the ricotta cheese—and somebody has to go back to the supermarket, well that just stops you in your tracks, doesn’t it?”

Bob sloshed his mouthful of highball, like it was mouthwash. “Just how does this lasagna of yours help arrest Aubrey, Maddy?”

I toasted the three impatient men and after a miniature sip, bedazzled them with my shrewdness: “Dale needed everything he could get on Aubrey’s past. I’d been to Aubrey’s apartment before, and seen her cardboard boxes marked
SHIT FROM COLLEGE
and
SHIT FROM HOME
. The evidence that might be in those boxes was simply gnawing a hole in me. So when Aubrey asked me over to help her make a lasagna, I was tickled pink. I gave her a list of ingredients to buy and intentionally left off the ricotta cheese. So right when I was up to my elbows in boiling noodles, she had to run out to the supermarket. I figured that would give me time to snoop. I found her college transcripts—which listed that odd elective course she took in criminal toxicology—and I found the textbook from that course, with a number of poisons marked with a yellow highlighter, including procaine and lily of the valley.”

Scotty Grant was as excited as a thirteen-year-old finding his father’s
Playboys
. “And that stuff is still in her apartment?”

I nodded proudly. “It is. And that’s my idea. Aubrey plans to frame Annie Bandicoot. But what if she suddenly discovers, at the very last minute, that Annie wasn’t really at home that Friday night? That she had a solid alibi?”

Tinker at least was keeping up. “She’d have to frame somebody else.”

“Absolutely. And she’d have to plant some convincing evidence. And what does she have that she could grab in a hurry?”

“I’m guessing it’s not a slice of your leftover lasagna?” Bob joked.

“Her toxicology textbook,” I said.

“It would have her fingerprints all over it,” Tinker said.

“Xeroxes wouldn’t,” Scotty Grant said.

I toasted him. Everybody dutifully sipped. I told them my idea and they went for it.

So, Monday afternoon, while Aubrey was working feverishly to complete her stories, I brought Aubrey the story from the morgue files that Eric had found—the one about Annie Bandicoot being in Kentucky over the Thanksgiving weekend with a gaggle of other preachers’ wives.

It was a real story. Annie really was in Kentucky over Thanksgiving. It just wasn’t that particular Thanksgiving. It was five Thanksgivings ago. I simply had Eric alter the date on the computer file. Aubrey didn’t question that doctored story for a minute. What reporter would? If something’s in the morgue it’s the gospel truth.

Aubrey tossed the story on her desk and went back to work, as if it was no big deal. But I knew it was a big deal; at least I had my fingers crossed that it was.

Scotty Grant followed Aubrey home Monday evening. At ten-thirty she drove to an open-all-night Kinko’s. Scotty watched from his car as she copied several pages from a book. She was wearing gloves. Then she drove to a Walgreen’s drug store and bought a can of lighter fluid, a box of stick matches and a plastic bottle of Evian water.