Morgue Mama (7 page)

Aubrey found a parking spot in front just big enough for her Escort. We checked twice to make sure the doors were locked and went inside. What a difference from the Heaven Bound Cathedral. The New Day Epiphany Temple was a single room. The floor was covered with peel-and-stick tile. The walls were covered with cheap maple paneling. The lights were on but nobody was home.

We stood by the door for a few minutes, wondering what to do, then walked down the rows of metal folding chairs to the stage at the back of the room. The stage was carpeted with red shag. There was a modest pulpit up front and a row of ugly, throne-like chairs across the back. The monstrous cross on the wall was wrapped with hundreds of miniature Christmas lights. “You suppose they’re the twinkly kind?” Aubrey asked.

“Of course they’re the twinkly kind,” I said. We each chose a throne and sat.

Tim Bandicoot arrived maybe five minutes later. He came through the front door, three tall Styrofoam cups of coffee balanced on a box of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. “Comfortable, aren’t they?” he called out when he spotted us in those ugly chairs.

I felt like a royal fool and started to get up. But Bandicoot motioned for me to stay put. He came up the center aisle with the coffee and doughnuts, snaring a pair of folding chairs as he went. He set the coffee and doughnuts on one and himself on the other. And so our visit began, Aubrey and I on our thrones, Tim Bandicoot on a folding chair, debating between creme sticks, glazed crullers, and cinnamon twists.

I don’t know what Aubrey expected, but I expected Tim Bandicoot to be some kind of icky egomaniac. I figured that, more than likely, he was the real murderer. I figured that after he’d gotten all the sex and mindless adoration he wanted from Sissy James, he set her up to save his own neck. And now here we were having doughnuts and coffee with this nice, down-to-earth young man. Maybe under that pleasant façade he really was icky and egomaniacal, and maybe even the real murderer, but I felt surprisingly comfortable that morning, sipping coffee, nibbling on a cruller, looking into those chocolate-brown cow eyes of his.

When we’d gone to see Guthrie Gates, Aubrey got right to the skinny: Did he think Sissy did it? This morning was different. She let Tim Bandicoot go on and on about his growing congregation and his plans to build a new temple right there in that rundown neighborhood, with a day care center, soup kitchen, and food bank for the city’s poor. He also talked about building his electronic church. Currently his services were only broadcast on the local community-access channel, but he was determined to be on a regular local cable channel within a year and on cable nationally within five years. He had plans for saving millions of souls in Africa and China and the former Soviet Republics.

By the time Aubrey asked him about Sissy James, we’d eaten half the doughnuts in the box. “Did you really love Sissy?” she asked. “Do you still love her?”

He was clearly embarrassed. And clearly nervous. “I did not love her the way I love my wife,” he said. “I let my flesh take over.” He searched the box for the plainest doughnut he could find. “I’ve already admitted all this to my wife.”

“Has she forgiven you?” asked Aubrey.

“I did not ask her for forgiveness. I want her to be disappointed in me for the rest of my life. I’m weak. I’m a sinner.”

Aubrey took a doughnut oozing raspberry. “And your congregation? Do they know how weak and sinful you are?”

“A few. I suppose they all will after you’re done with me.”

Tim Bandicoot clearly was trying to manipulate Aubrey—make her feel guilty if he could manage it, at least a little sympathetic if he couldn’t—but Aubrey wasn’t falling into that trap. “We went to see Sissy at Marysville,” she said.

“I heard.”

Aubrey had her doughnut clenched in her teeth while she dug in her purse for her notebook. “I get the impression Sissy loves both you and the Lord about the same.”

When she couldn’t find a pen, Bandicoot gave her the Bic from his shirt pocket. “I hope that isn’t the case,” he said.

What a nifty little Kabuki dance that was. By pulling out her notebook at that very touchy moment, Aubrey was openly challenging his rectitude. She was telling him that the questions were going to get really tough now, and that from now on everything would be on the record, that anything he said would be judged in the court of public opinion, and maybe even a court of law. And Bandicoot, by handing her his Bic the way he did? Well, you didn’t have to be a theologian to interpret a Jesus-like act like that.

“There are those who don’t think Sissy did it,” Aubrey said.

Bandicoot answered slowly, watching her scribble his quotes as he talked. “There are those who think she didn’t, those who think she did. There are those who think I put her up to it. There are those who think I did it myself, and framed her. There are those who think somebody else did it.”

Aubrey tapped the Bic on her nose. “Who do you think did it? There was a lot of physical evidence supporting Sissy’s confession.”

“I don’t want to believe she did it. But I don’t know.”

“How about somebody like Guthrie Gates?”

“I absolutely do not think Guthrie did it. He loved Buddy too much.”

“Interesting. You’re absolutely sure your rival didn’t kill Buddy, but not so sure about the woman you were screwing?”

If Tim Bandicoot was going to pop his cork and beat us to death with a folding chair, that was the question that would do it. He just smiled sadly. “Sissy has a lot of problems. I’m sure you know all about that stuff.”

Aubrey nodded as sadly as Bandicoot smiled. “How about you? Did you love Buddy too much to kill him?”

“I did love him. I just didn’t agree with some of his—”

He couldn’t find the right word. Aubrey could: “Theatrics?”

“I wouldn’t call them theatrics. He truly believed in those things. I didn’t.”

“You’re putting a pretty mild spin on it, aren’t you? Your break with the Heaven Bound Cathedral was pretty nasty. And very public.”

Bandicoot took several slow sips of coffee. His chocolate eyes, for the first time, focused squarely on Aubrey’s blue eyes. “It was your paper that made it very public. But I could have handled it better. I caused a lot of pain.”

Aubrey now turned to the murder itself, wondering how someone could have moved through the Heaven Bound Cathedral unnoticed, filling Buddy Wing’s water pitcher with poisoned water, painting a poisonous cross on his old family Bible. “Sissy told police she pulled her coat collar up around her ears and walked right in. Did her dirty business and walked right out. Given what you know about the Heaven Bound Cathedral, do you think that’s possible?”

Bandicoot shrugged. “I suppose anything’s possible.”

“The police talked to a lot of people who were there that night. Nobody saw her.”

“I’ve read that.”

“But that doesn’t prove she wasn’t there.”

“I guess not.”

“Nor does her saying she was there prove that she was.”

“I guess that’s right.”

“Now let me ask you this,” Aubrey said. “Could anybody else from your flock—including yourself—have walked around the cathedral without wearing a disguise?”

“No more than Satan could have.”

“How about with a disguise?”

“Satan maybe. I doubt anyone else.”

The Krispy Kreme box was empty when we left Bandicoot’s storefront church. Aubrey’s car was still out front. “You know,” she said as we pulled away, “we never should’ve pigged out on those doughnuts.”

“Don’t I know it,” I said. “We’ll have to fast for a week.”

Aubrey U-turned through an abandoned Sinclair station. “Screw the calories. Think about who gave us those doughnuts. A man who, maybe, poisoned Buddy Wing twice. Maddy—we have got to be more careful.”

***

Even after all those Krispy Kremes Aubrey wanted to go to Speckley’s for lunch. The place is as busy Saturday mornings as it is weekdays, so we had to wait in line. Aubrey bought a
Herald-Union
from the box outside and read it standing up. I got a menu from the counter and looked for something light that might counteract any slow-acting poison. When we finally got a table—in the smoking section—I ritually ordered the meat loaf sandwich and au gratin potatoes as usual. Aubrey got a house salad and tomato soup.

I started our debriefing session: “Tim Bandicoot was nice enough, wasn’t he?”

“Too nice.”

“Think so? Other than the doughnuts I don’t think he spread it on too thick.”

My appraisal angered her. “These TV preachers manipulate people for a living. They get perfectly sane people to jump up and down and roll around on the floor and then hand over the grocery money. And when they get caught with some bimbo in a motel room? They simply trot out their
God’s already forgiven me—won’t you?
shtick and everything’s hunky-dory until the next time they get caught. Remember Jimmy Swaggert? ‘I have sinned! I have sinned!’ I think we just got Swaggert-ed, Maddy.”

I wasn’t so sure. Tim Bandicoot had seemed sincere to me. “He told us he didn’t want forgiveness,” I said.

“Shtick. He gave me his Bic for christsake. What was that all about?”

“You needed a pen?”

“That was my shtick. I’ve got a purse full of pens.”

The waitress brought our food. Aubrey used her little finger and thumb to fish out the curls of raw onion from her salad. She deposited them in the ash tray. “Did you hear what he said when I told him we’d been to visit Sissy at Marysville? ‘I heard.’ How did he hear? Who told him?”

“Sissy?”

“Of course, Sissy.”

“So they’re still communicating.”

Aubrey filled her mouth with Romaine lettuce. “So he’s still manipulating.”

Maybe she was right. Maybe Tim Bandicoot was the icky egomaniacal murderer I thought going in, before the Krispy Kremes, the chocolate-brown cow eyes and that big dose of contrition. “So where do we go from here?”

“Shopping.”

Chapter 8

Sunday, April 23

I planned to spend Easter cleaning out my raspberry bed. But it was raining when I got up, and it continued to rain all morning. At noon I gave up and drove to the paper, to catch up on my work. Not that I had any work to catch up on. As empty as the newsroom was on holidays, it was a lot less empty than my bungalow.

There were just eight cars in the parking deck, including Aubrey’s Escort and Eric Chen’s little pickup truck. They were parked side by side in the Handicapped Only slots by the elevator. When I got to the morgue I tossed my raincoat on the counter and went to my desk for my tea mug. Everywhere in Hannawa families were setting down to baked beans, Jell-O salad, and spiral-cut ham. I’d be having a mug of Darjeeling tea and a package of stale oatmeal cookies from the vending machine. I cut through sports to the cafeteria. That damn sign was still taped to the back of Chip McCoy’s computer:

Those signs used to be stuck everywhere. Now there are just two, that one on Chip’s computer, and the one I framed and put on my kitchen wall at home.

I found Aubrey and Eric sitting together in the back. Aubrey was eating yogurt out of a plastic cup. Eric was eating potato chips and sucking on a can of Mountain Dew. Good gravy, how odd finding those two together. I just stood there in the doorway with my empty mug.

Which made Aubrey laugh. “You caught us together in the cafeteria, not in bed,” she said. “You can come in.”

I looked at Eric. He was as stunned by what she said as I was. “Are there any cookies in the machine?” I asked.

Eric leaned back and checked. “Nada. But there’s some of those indigestible cheese cracker things.”

I bought the crackers, filled my mug with hot water, and started for the door.

Aubrey called out, “For christsakes, Maddy, sit down.”

I sat.

Eric didn’t say a thing—I’m sure his brain was full of dirty pictures of Aubrey and him in bed—but Aubrey launched into a nervous explanation of their togetherness. “Eric’s going to help me with the computer searches for other possible suspects. Just some quick checks for strange behavior, criminal or otherwise. I knew you wouldn’t have time.”

What she meant, of course, is that I wouldn’t have a clue on how to do it.

It was about then that Eric regained the use of his brain and remembered that he had to be in Youngstown for Easter dinner in a half hour, about eighty miles away. He got three cans of Mountain Dew from the vending machine—fuel for the road—and left. Aubrey took a cleansing breath and rolled her eyes. “What a
boy
that boy is.”

“You’re not going to your mother’s?” I asked.

“She’s having dinner at five and I’m going to point my car in that direction about three. But am I actually going to go to my mother’s? God only knows.”

While Aubrey cleaned up Eric’s mess, I gathered up her folders. Her
SISSY
folder was already an inch thick, and her
T. BANDICOOT
folder not much thinner. The folder marked
HEAVEN BOUND CATH
had two copies of the church directory rubber-banded together. “Two copies?” I asked. “Didn’t Guthrie give us just one?”

“I went back later for another one,” she said. “An older one. I got thinking about Tim Bandicoot breaking with Buddy Wing and realized that former church members were more likely to be suspects than present members. You know? Somebody mad enough at Buddy Wing to quit his church might also be mad enough to kill him.”

I handed her the folders. “Smart. How old is the other directory?”

Her faced scrunched with disappointment. “Just three years. But we might find somebody interesting. You don’t mind Eric doing this for me, do you? I should have asked.”

“What’s there to mind? Just be gentle with him.”

“Puh-leeze.”

I stayed at the paper until four, organizing my desk drawers, playing solitaire, calling my relatives in LaFargeville on the paper’s dime. Then I went home and opened a can of vegetable soup. I ate it right out of the saucepan, on the porch my Lawrence built on the back of the house the same summer he started screwing his secretary. It’s a wonderful porch, running the full length of the house, screened in to keep out the bugs, wide enough for my picnic table and a propane grill. The door opens right into my vegetable garden.

By eight I was in bed reading Jane Smiley’s new novel. Trying to read it, anyway. It was Easter Sunday and I was alone. I should have gone to church that morning. I should have stopped off at the drug store and bought myself a chocolate rabbit and some marshmallow peeps. I should have taken a week’s vacation and driven to LaFargeville to visit my brother and my niece. After Lawrence flew the coop I should have remarried somebody and had some children. I took the notebook and a pen from my nightstand and used Jane Smiley’s book as a desk. Lawrence was gone and Dale Marabout was gone and the only people I had to sponge the loneliness out of my life were Aubrey McGinty and Sissy James.

I started making my own notes on the Buddy Wing murder: Was Sissy James really innocent? Or had we just talked ourselves into believing she was? And what about all that evidence right there in Sissy’s garbage can? Yes, somebody who knew Sissy inside and out could have framed her. But Sissy was also troubled enough to frame herself, either intentionally or through her own stupidity.

I scribbled all sorts of crazy things in that notebook that night. I was lonely and frightened and just plain unsure.

***

Monday, April 24

“Well, did you make it home yesterday?” I asked Aubrey. I was so glad it was Monday and that horrible Easter weekend behind me.

She leaned across the counter and answered “Yeah,” as if she was angry with herself.

“Everybody has to go home once in awhile,” I said.

She asked, “And why is that?”

***

Friday, April 28

I hardly saw Aubrey that week. She was busy doing interviews for her series on the ghastly lives of the city’s street prostitutes. The idea for the series, of course, had grown out of her story on the body they found on Morrow Street. Aubrey wanted to explore the lives of these women while they were still alive. She had no trouble finding women still working the streets, and no trouble getting them to talk. What she wanted, and couldn’t find, was someone who’d escaped and built a new life for herself, on a better street.

Friday morning she asked if I wanted to go back to the Heaven Bound Cathedral with her, that evening, to see how easy it would be for a stranger to sneak in and kill someone.

I wasn’t crazy about the idea. But I went along.

The televised Friday night services continued after Buddy Wing’s murder without missing a week. For a while, in fact, more people attended, and more people watched, than had before Buddy gave his Bible that fateful kiss. In the story we ran on that ironic fact, Guthrie Gates said it was a tribute to just how much people loved their martyred pastor. If you ask me, it was the same morbid fascination that sends hundreds of thousands of teary-eyed tourists to Graceland year after year, even though they didn’t give a rip about Elvis when he was alive. Anyway, attendance and viewership dropped off after a couple of months.

We left the paper at six and drove in my Shadow to Aubrey’s apartment. It was my first visit and I was appalled. Her living room furniture consisted of an old kitchen chair with a ripped vinyl cushion, a big yellow ceramic lamp sitting on a folding TV table, and a pyramid of cardboard boxes.

Some of the boxes were marked
SHIT FROM COLLEGE
and some were marked
SHIT FROM HOME
. Coats and sweaters and newspapers and magazines and God only knows how many shoes were strewn everywhere. “How can someone own nothing and still live in a hovel?” I asked.

Aubrey was in her bedroom changing into a dress so she could fit in with the Christians. “I’m a young and carefree writer with a brilliant mind,” she called out. “So leave me the hell alone.”

When she came out in a dress I couldn’t stop laughing. It was not a bad looking dress—a loose-fitting, below-the-knee A-line with a sailor collar and pleats—but I’d never seen her in anything but jeans or chinos and she looked about as comfortable as my brother the dairy farmer looks in his polyester wedding-and-funeral suit from Sears. “All you need is a white purse and pearls,” I managed to get out.

Aubrey was laughing harder than me. “I just don’t want to look out of place in church.”

I opened my arms and turned in a circle. “What about me looking out of place?”

She studied me. I was wearing my usual work uniform: loose-fitting slacks, even looser sweater, penny loafers, and a cheap necklace. “You look fine,” she said.

I knew what she meant by
fine
: women my age never look out of place because we never look in place. We are as unintrusive as beige walls.

Aubrey’s plan was to sneak into the Heaven Bound Cathedral without sneaking. “I think it’s safe to assume that the killer knew his way around the church,” she said as we drove toward South Ridge. “So we’re going to act like we belong there. We’re going to chat and smile and be friendly. You think you can pull that off?”

The service didn’t start until eight, but Aubrey wanted to arrive at seven, to be there during the final hectic hour before the cameras clicked on and the Canaries of Calvary started singing and the Sweet Ascension Dancers started dancing. When we arrived, there were already lines of cars waiting to pull into the parking lot. The big-eared security guard we encountered on our first visit was standing beneath the cement angels, directing cars toward empty slots. We smiled and waved as we drove past him. “You suppose he was out here directing traffic the night Buddy Wing was killed?” Aubrey wondered.

We parked and joined the funnel of people heading for the cathedral doors. Aubrey greeted everyone who looked at us with a happy “Good evening.”

Inside we followed the flow toward the chapel. Everywhere in the hallway choir members and dancers were mingling with their friends and families. Everyone was so happy. I felt just lousy, like a terrorist with sticks of dynamite taped to her ribs. I wanted to spin around and get the hell out of there. But Aubrey had me by the arm, squeezing a smile out me every time somebody smiled at us.

When we got to the chapel we kept going, up the hallway toward the offices. As we clicked along we looked at each other and started giggling guiltily, like schoolgirls sneaking out of gym class. The hallway was filled with people, all serenely buzzing about, arms full of hymnals or collection baskets or electric guitars.

On our earlier visit the outer door to the offices had been locked. I remembered how the security guard had knocked for us and I remembered that Guthrie Gates had unlocked the door before letting us in. Now this door was wide open and people were freely flowing in and out. We went in.

It was noisy and busy inside. Someone was whistling a hymn. Someone was laughing like Santa Claus. Just a few yards from Buddy Wing’s office Aubrey stopped at a water fountain and bent low to drink.

“No security and no suspicion,” I whispered. “Anybody could have walked right in.”

Aubrey whispered back, “Any stranger at least. But what if it weren’t a stranger? What if it were Sissy or Tim Bandicoot? Could they have just walked in like this? I don’t think so.”

I took a drink myself. The water was warm. “Sissy told the police she just walked in and went about her business.”

Said Aubrey, “More proof she’s lying.”

We walked on to Buddy Wing’s office. The open door was still blocked with the folding chair and arrangement of plastic roses. Dale Marabout’s story on the murder said that Wing used to keep his old family Bible on his desk, always within his reach. Now there was a framed, eight-by-ten photograph of the martyred pastor in the center of the desk, facing toward the door, smiling eyes fixed right on us.

“Let’s think about what we already know,” Aubrey whispered as we stood in the doorway like a pair of humble pilgrims visiting a holy shrine. “We know Buddy Wing followed the same routine every week. We know that thirty minutes before every service he left his office and went to the make-up room, and after being painted up to look twenty years younger, went to another room to pray with the church elders. Then, when it was showtime, he went to the back of the chapel and danced his way down the aisle.”

“We know all that?” I asked.

“Yes. And we can surmise that the killer knew all that, too.”

Just down the hall from Wing’s office we found a roomful of middle-aged men in suits drinking coffee and eating pastries. “I’d say those are the elders,” Aubrey whispered. We kept walking. In the next room we saw Guthrie Gates half reclined in a beauty shop chair. He was getting his hair sprayed stiff by a woman with painted-on eyebrows. We hurried by. The hallway turned right, then left, then right again. We were near the stage. We could hear the orchestra warming up. We found the main control room and peeked inside. People with headsets and clipboards were buzzing about like honey bees. “What a fancy operation,” I whispered. “You’d think they were putting on the Academy Awards.”