Morgue Mama (4 page)

For the longest time we made cracks about the crazy things different people were wearing. Then out of the blue Aubrey asked me if I thought Guthrie Gates could be the real murderer.

“Heavens no,” I said. “He worships Buddy Wing like he was God.”

“Like he was God or like Buddy Wing was God?”

I finished my noisy sip. “I see what you’re saying.”

And I did see what she was saying: When Tim Bandicoot was tossed out over that speaking in tongues business, Guthrie Gates became heir apparent. When Buddy Wing was killed, Guthrie Gates became the
new
Buddy Wing. “Maybe he stirred up that speaking in tongues business to get Bandicoot out of the way,” I said. “Then, feeling his Wheaties—”

Aubrey squinted at me like I was the one speaking in tongues. “Feeling his Wheaties?”

“You know, feeling strong and confident? Don’t tell me Wheaties doesn’t use that in their ads anymore?” I could see Aubrey didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. I dropped it and continued: “So, after Guthrie successfully secured his position as heir, he figured, why wait for Buddy to die on his own?”

I thought she was going to choke on her pretzel. “You sound like what’s-her-name on
Murder She Wrote
—the one who played the teapot. Anyway, Guthrie Gates is a puppy dog. No way in the world he killed Buddy Wing.”

“You just said he did.”

“No no, Maddy. I only asked if you thought it was possible—assuming that Sissy didn’t do it.”

Now I was the one without a clue. “You don’t think she’s innocent?”

Aubrey nibbled and nodded and shrugged at the same time. “I think she’s innocent. But even if I can prove it—and get her to admit it—I’m not sure I want to investigate any further than that.”

“You wheedled Gates into giving you a church directory. That’s not for our files. That’s to run background checks on the membership.”

“Maybe it’s for that.” She filled her cheeks with pretzel. “God, Maddy, I’ve so much to do. I’ve got to learn the police beat. That’s a big department. Rush City had eleven goofy cops. And Chief Polceznec is gearing up for this major internal reorganization. And as soon as spring gets here people will start killing each other left and right. The paper took a big risk on me. I’ve got to do well. And I’ve got so much personal shit to do. I don’t own anything except a futon and an old Radio Shack computer. I’m an adult now. I need a sofa. Table and chairs. A hutch full of fancy plates I never use. A real bed. Somebody to put in it.”

There was something about sitting in that food court full of twitchy kids that made me feel young and wicked myself. “That last part ought to be easy enough.”

Aubrey groaned and rested her forehead on the cold Formica tabletop. “Don’t even go there,” she said.

I suddenly felt hot and silly. I’d gone too far. She was one of the paper’s reporters, the enemy, an overly ambitious kid I didn’t know and didn’t particularly want to know. I quickly got back on safe ground—the murder of Buddy Wing. “So it’s down to three then? Sissy James, Tim Bandicoot, or Guthrie Gates?”

Aubrey had finished her pretzel. Now she was harvesting the salt crystals on her paper plate, dabbing them up with her index finger, licking them off. “If only it were three.”

“Good gravy—who else?”

“Who benefits from a dead TV evangelist, Maddy?”

“Well—me for one. But I guess you mean specifically.”

She giggled deep in her throat, the way Beelzebub might. “From what I’ve read, some of these TV preachers have no problem living as kingly on earth as they expect to live in heaven.”

“You think maybe Buddy Wing was killed for his money? From what I gather, he lived fairly modestly.”

We shook off our trays in a trash can shaped like an open-mouthed frog. “My first week at
The Gazette
I did a story on a school custodian who’d lived his entire life in a ramshackle house without running water or electricity,” Aubrey said. “He left a half-million dollars to the local ornithological society.”

“You’re making that up.”

“Have you ever been to the new Wyssock County Wild Bird Museum, Maddy? It’s really something.”

I still didn’t know if she was joking or not. But I got her point. “So Buddy Wing might have left somebody a bundle?”

The automatic doors deposited us in the parking lot. “Maybe, maybe not,” she said. “We do know from the morgue files that his wife died of cancer, and that they didn’t have any kids. But certainly he had other family. Brothers. Sisters. Greedy nephews and nieces. Who knows how much money he had? Who knows who has it now? I’ll have to make nice with the gnomes at probate court.”

Chapter 4

Monday, March 13

Nine-o’clock Monday morning Police Chief Polceznec announced his department’s reorganization plan. It set off the biggest political row of the winter. The police union filed suit at noon, claiming too many white officers were overlooked for promotions. An hour later the
NAACP
filed its suit, saying exactly the opposite was true. The local chapter of
NOW
held a press conference at two and demanded that at least one of the new district commanders be a woman. City Council called a hurry-up hearing at four. Some members of Council chastised Mayor Finn for not exercising enough control over the police department. Some charged that he exercised too much. Aubrey didn’t even have time to wave
Hi
across the newsroom. “The poor lamb’s working her pants off,” I whispered to Eric Chen.

“If only it were true,” he answered.

The police reorganization story dominated the news all week. Aubrey covered the police department angle while Sylvia Berdache covered the bickering and back-biting at City Hall. A couple of junior metro reporters were sent into the neighborhoods to gauge public reaction. On Thursday the paper ran a rare front-page editorial chastising all parties concerned for their selfish behavior. “The first thing Council should do,” we sarcastically wrote, “is change the city’s motto from Building A Beautiful Life to What’s In It For Me?”

Friday morning I found a Post-it on my screen:

***

Saturday, March 18

Aubrey was already in a booth by the door when I got there. She was wearing the hood from Old Navy. Her hair was a mess and her eyes looked like yesterday’s bagels. It was ten-thirty and Speckley’s Saturday breakfast crowd was already thinning out. French toast was enough for me. Aubrey got the Big Meri: scrambled eggs, bacon, home fries, two buttermilk pancakes. “You’re going to explode,” I said.

“I’m going to will the calories to my breasts,” she said.

“Be thankful they’re small. Look where my big beautiful tits ended up.”

“They still look pretty perky.”

“The wonderful world of wire,” I answered.

We laughed and then she told me the great news: She’d talked the police department’s PR officer into giving her copies of their Sissy James videotapes—the interrogation, arraignment, even stuff from the crime scene. “It’s all public stuff, of course,” she said, “but they can be real tight-ass about it if they want. You’ve got to employ just the right psychological crowbar.”

I wanted so much to keep my distance from her. But how can you not like someone that earthy? “And what crowbar did you employ?”

Aubrey’s eyes were following our waitress as she much-too-slowly made her way up our aisle with the coffee pot. “The grateful-dumb-girl-way-over-her-head-that-someday-just-might-sleep-with-you crowbar.”

“I’ve heard of that crowbar,” I said.

She explained the police-beat facts of life to me: “Once the cops get sick of your reporting they’ll shut you out all they can. But I’m new, so they’re in their buddy-buddy seduction mode, trying to make me like them, so later when the poop hits the propeller, I’ll dutifully report it’s milk chocolate. Two months from now it might take a court order to get those tapes. You have a VCR at home?”

“Of course I have a VCR at home—not that I know how it works.”

And so we drove to my bungalow on Brambriar Court. She in her old Escort. Me in my old Dodge Shadow.

I call my house a bungalow because it makes living in a shoebox sound cozy. There’s hardly enough counter space in the kitchen to make a sandwich and the closet in my bedroom only holds one season at a time. I bang my hip on the bathroom sink every time I get out of the shower. I’ve got bruises so old you’d think they were birthmarks.

“It’s really cute,” Aubrey said.

What could I do but give her the grand tour? “This is my bedroom—”

“I love that old iron bed.”

“—and this is the guest room. As you can see it’s sort of a catch-all—”

“Where’d you get that dresser? It’s fantastic.”

“It was my grandmother’s. There’s a gash in the side from the U-haul.”

“You can’t really see it.”

“And this is the bathroom—and we’re back in the living room.”

Aubrey knelt in front of my VCR and in a few seconds the blinking 12:00 was gone. “I’ll know not to listen to Doreen Poole from now on,” she said.

I was straightening up the seed catalogs on the coffee table. Once, about fifteen years ago, I ordered some daffodil bulbs from some seed company or the other and now every winter I get a wheelbarrow full of catalogs. I look them over, see if there’s anything I want, and then go three miles down the road to Biliczky’s Garden Center. “Doreen Poole? What did that lunatic tell you?”

Doreen Poole is the reporter who started the Morgue Mama thing, or so I’ve always suspected. Even if she didn’t start it, she sure perpetuates it. I’m sure that’s where Aubrey got it from.

Aubrey was lining up the videotapes on the floor. “She said every room of your house was filled with rusty old filing cabinets. I’m sort of disappointed.”

I laughed. I just love the rumors people spread about me. “The filing cabinets are all in the basement.”

Aubrey got saucer-eyed, as if I’d just admitted having those little spacemen from Roswell, New Mexico locked away down there. “Can I see them?”

“They’re filing cabinets. Gray rectangles of sheet metal.”

“And filled with a hundred years of history.” She pulled me off the sofa and led me by the arm toward the basement steps.

At the time I must have had fifty filing cabinets in my basement. I’ve added several since. Every time Eric Chen finishes putting a cabinet of old files on microfilm, the files and the cabinet go directly into the backseat of my car.

“It smells wonderful down here,” Aubrey said.

“If you like mold,” I said.

She pulled six or seven drawers open, marveling at the manila treasures inside. Then we went back upstairs. I made popcorn, of all things, as if we were going to watch an old Bette Davis movie, and not the police tapes on a murder.

I made the popcorn the way I always do, like I made it back in LaFargeville when I was a girl: I melted a dollop of Crisco in my big iron kettle, plopped in a coffee cup of popcorn, shook it on the electric stove until the lid lifted. I poured it in two aluminum mixing bowls and gave the bigger to Aubrey. I offered her a glass of Pepsi but she wanted milk. That made me smile. That’s the way I eat popcorn, too. Glass of milk, a small sip with every mouthful.

Aubrey sat on the floor in front of the TV. I thought about doing that myself. But I was sixty-seven years old. I’d never get back up. So I sat on the couch and Aubrey pushed the
PLAY
button on the VCR.

The first tape she played was the newspaper’s own copy of the murder, the one I gave her that day she called me Morgue Mama to my face.

The Hour of Everlasting Life started with a peppy song by the Canaries of Calvary Choir called So G.L.A.D. I’m Saved. There was a live band heavy on drums and electric guitar, and a stage full of dancers, The Sweet Ascension Dancers, twirling like Sufi Dervishes. Cameras kept searching the audience. Then there he was, the Rev. Buddy Wing, dancing up the center aisle, clapping his hands over his head.

Aubrey clapped her own hands, just once, and pointed at the screen. “There, see that, Maddy? He’s not carrying his Bible. That’s why he didn’t notice that the gold paint was wet. The Bible was already on his pulpit.”

I knew what she was getting at. One of the two poisons used to murder Buddy Wing—the heart drug called procaine—had been mixed into the paint that was used to repaint the gold cross on the Bible’s old leather cover.

Wing danced up the stage steps and did a couple of fancy Temptations-like steps with the Sweet Ascension Dancers. “Pretty limber for a man in his seventies,” I said.

Aubrey answered sarcastically through a mouthful of milk and popcorn. “He was a faith-healer. Every time he got an ache or pain he could ask Jesus to make it better.”

It was my turn. “Too bad he couldn’t get the Lord’s attention before the poison got him.”

Oh, we were being cold. It’s just the way newspaper people get. They see so much pain and hear so much crap. They’re as soft inside as anybody else. Maybe softer. When they were kids they read novels and poetry and let flies and spiders out the window rather than squish them. The sarcasm is just a cover, a way to cope. Nurses and cops are the same way.

Buddy Wing rocked on the balls of his feet for a good fifteen minutes, sharing the good news. He ended every sentence with that rhythmic
uh!
all the TV preachers use:

“God told Eve not to eat the fruit of that tree-
uh!
But Eve disobeyed-
uh!
Oh, that fruit looked so good-
uh!
And the serpent said it was okay-
uh!
Oh, that beguiling serpent-
uh!
And so Eve ate and ate-
uh!
And made Adam eat too-
uh!
And every day since, men and women have been eatin’ and eatin’ from the tree of sin-
uh!
And God is not happy-
uh!
No, he is not happy at all-
uh!
”

Anyway, Wing ended his sermon with his famous bit about having Jesus’s phone number. Then there was a long commercial—I guess you could call it a commercial—where he offered viewers his latest book for free, mentioning several times they also should send in their best financial gift. “Some can send $1,000,” he said. “Some $500, some only $100. Even if you can send only $20 or $10, send for this free book today-
uh!
”

The Sweet Ascension Dancers danced and the Canaries of Calvary Choir sang and Guthrie Gates brought out a wheelbarrow full of prayer requests and dumped them on the stage. While Gates sang the sourest hymn I’d ever heard, Wing crawled into the unopened envelopes and prayed his heart out, until his English was transformed into some heavenly tongue. Then there was another commercial, this one for a free videotape of his most-recent soul-saving mission to Africa. “Some can send $1,000. Some $500—”

Aubrey had already watched this tape a dozen times, I’m betting. She kept saying, “Listen to this” and, “You’re going to love this.” Now she said, “Here it comes.”

We both stopped chewing and sipping. The Rev. Buddy Wing was going to die in front of our eyes and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. Five months earlier when that church service was for real, and not magnetic impressions on a spool of tape, somebody else knew Buddy Wing was about to die.

It was the part of the broadcast where un-saved people in the audience were called to the edge of the stage. Everybody had their arms lifted over their heads. The Canaries of Calvary were soaring, the Ascension Dancers were opening and closing their arms, imitating blooming roses. Wing walked slowly to his pulpit and raised his Bible over his head. Then, tears seeping from his tightly closed eyes, he drew it to his lips. He kissed the gold cross. “Twenty seven minutes into the service,” Aubrey said.

Buddy Wing had been kissing that cross for at least forty years, in every service he’d ever conducted, on television or off. Any other time he would have folded his Bible across his heart and walked to the end of the stage, and saved those who had gathered. This time he just stood there, surprised, worried, frantically licking his lips. The camera had zoomed in for the kiss and Wing’s head was ear-to-ear across my television screen. You could see the gold paint on his lips and busy tongue.

Aubrey pushed the
PAUSE
button. “Procaine is a synthetic version of cocaine. It’s a powerful anesthetic given to people having heart attacks—to get their hearts beating normally again. It immediately numbed his lips. That’s why he started licking like that. And the licking numbed his tongue. Then the inside of his mouth and then his throat.”

She pushed the
PLAY
button. Wing was trembling now. He dropped his Bible and reached for the glass of water on the shelf under the pulpit. He drank in big fast gulps, water leaking from the corners of his quivering mouth.

Aubrey paused the tape again. “Even a tiny overdose can cause immediate convulsions and a coma. Death in a half hour maybe. But it’s iffy whether the amount of procaine the killer was able to mix into the paint would have killed Buddy by itself.”

“So the killer poisoned the water, too—a double whammy?”

Aubrey filled her mouth with popcorn. “Lily of the valley is so toxic that even the water in the vase can be lethal. It pretty much causes the same reaction as the procaine. Lungs stop breathing. Heart stops pumping.” She pushed
PLAY
and Buddy Wing continued swallowing the water. “One thing is clear—the killer wanted old Buddy’s death to be grotesque and horrible. Right there on the stage. For all the world to see.”

When Wing began to stagger back, the director, trained to follow his every move across the stage, went to another camera and a wider angle. Wing stepped backward toward the curtains, like someone retreating from an onrushing tide at the beach. He fell into the fake palms and slid to the floor, convulsing and vomiting.