Morgue Mama (10 page)

Aubrey wadded her napkin and wiped the paint off his finger. “There’s nothing much about anything in the police reports,” she said. “As soon as they found the stuff in Sissy’s garbage, and she confessed, the investigation pretty much ended. But you’re right, Eric. Buddy would’ve gone nuts if he couldn’t find his daddy’s Bible. He would’ve said something to somebody.”

It simply popped out of my mouth. “Unless he poisoned himself.”

Eric looked at me like I was crazy. Aubrey, however, smiled slyly. “What if he wanted to kill himself but didn’t want Tim Bandicoot to replace him as the prince of Hallelujah City?” she said.

“And why would he want to kill himself?” Eric asked.

Aubrey took another mouthful of ice. “The autopsy didn’t show any terminal diseases or anything. But maybe he was suffering from depression. Maybe he’d lost his faith. Or never really had any.”

The cross on the Bible was seducing me just like it had seduced Eric. I touched it with my pinky. “If that’s the case, why would he frame Sissy and not Tim Bandicoot?”

Aubrey dutifully wiped the gold circle off my pinky. “Maybe framing Tim Bandicoot would be too obvious.”

This suicide thing seemed utterly bizarre to me. “Wouldn’t setting up Sissy to set up Bandicoot be too obvious, too?”

She laughed. And started singing: “I was looking back to see if you were looking back to see if I was looking back to see if you were looking back at me— Maddy, we’re talking about real cops here.”

I was having a hard time keeping all of the possible scenarios straight. “So if Buddy or somebody else was trying to make Sissy too obvious a suspect, to set up Tim Bandicoot, then I guess that all fell apart when Sissy confessed.”

Eric tried to check the paint again but Aubrey slapped his hand away. “That’s right,” she said.

We waited a long fifteen minutes for the pizza to come and then ate it like it was our last meal. Every few minutes Eric or I poked the cross and held up a shiny gold fingertip. Aubrey never once touched the cross, leading me to gather she already had a pretty good hunch how long it would take. Only after the pizza was gone, a full forty-five minutes, did Eric’s finger come up dry.

“So,” I said, sucking the gooey tomato sauce out of my teeth, “the poison had to be painted on the cross during that little window of time after all.”

Aubrey was pleased with herself. “And that means the killer had to be there right before the service started.”

“Which leaves us where?” I asked.

“Which leaves us with a bazillion suspects. Sissy. Guthrie Gates. Tim Bandicoot, assuming he was dumb enough to set up Sissy so clumsily. Maybe Bandicoot’s wife. Maybe the eyebrow woman. Maybe Elaine Albert or that Dillow guy, or Buddy Wing himself, or somebody else on the TV production staff, or any member of the church past or present, or somebody we’re not even aware of.”

“Good gravy,” I said.

“Still we’ve made big-time progress today,” Aubrey said.

Knowing the shaky financial condition of those two, I dug into my purse to pay the bill. Neither objected. “We have?”

“Absolutely. The paint proves the killer was there right before the service. All we’ve got to do now is prove that Sissy wasn’t. Which shouldn’t be too hard at all.”

“That’s right,” I said as we slid from the booth, “the mysterious baby girl.”

Having been assigned to scrounge up the Bible and gold paint, Eric was totally in the dark. “Mysterious baby girl?”

Aubrey wrapped her arm around his. She was almost giddy. “I almost peed my pants when the eyebrow woman told us that.”

***

In the parking lot Aubrey and Eric behaved like a couple of deer in rut, poking and pushing and giggling, squeezing each other’s backsides. I wanted to knock them in the head with my purse. I liked them both. But I did not like them together. Oh, I’m sure the sex was more than Eric could ever have hoped for. And I couldn’t blame him for taking advantage of his good fortune. I’d once done that myself with Dale Marabout. But Aubrey McGinty was way out of Eric’s league. She was worldly and ambitious, and more than a little self-centered. I couldn’t picture her staying in any relationship very long. Certainly never long enough to get married and have kids. Once the sex wore off, Eric’s penchant for losing things and forgetting things would start driving her crazy. She’d start finding fault with his Mountain Dew drinking and the careless way he dressed. Little by little he’d go from love monkey to lapdog to road kill.

And I’d be the one with the shovel scraping him up.

Chapter 11

Monday, May 8

Monday afternoon, at exactly four, Dale Marabout pushed himself away from his desk, stood up, swung his chair once around his body like a giant discus and slammed it into his computer. He yelled out the three words I’d been dreading for some weeks now: “
I. FUCKING. QUIT.
”

Before the elevator door closed he shouted a single word at Aubrey, who had her knees on her desk and the Hannawa white pages in her lap: “
HAPPY
?”

I hurried down the stairwell as fast as I could and intercepted Dale on the parking deck. He was crying like a baby. While we hugged I reached into his pants pocket for the handkerchief I knew he carried there. I dabbed his eyes and whispered “It’ll be okay” I don’t know how many times.

Dale was ripe for a mid-life crisis no matter what was going on at the paper. He was in his late forties and his kids were grown. Whatever secret dreams he carried inside him were simply dreams now, defeated by the limits of his talent and his metabolism. So in my mind Tinker’s transferring in from Baton Rouge, or Aubrey McGinty waltzing in from Rush City, had very little do with Dale’s anger. He was angry with himself.

“Wait an hour,” I told him, “then go back to your desk with a mug of coffee and a cookie and nobody will say a thing.”

He tried to unlock his car but I strategically squashed my backside against the door. “There’s no way in hell I’m going back in there,” he said.

“Yelling ‘I quit’ is not the same as writing ‘I quit.’ Until you give Tinker a written resignation, you haven’t officially resigned. You’ve just gone a little crazy. You’re allowed. All will be forgiven.”

“Move your ass,” he said.

I moved and he drove off. He didn’t show up for work the next day and Sylvia Berdache told me Tinker had an e-mail waiting for him when he got to work. It said: “In case you haven’t heard by now,
I. FUCKING. QUIT
.”

So Dale’s resignation was official and I felt just awful about it. I stewed about it all week and on Friday afternoon sneaked upstairs to see Bob Averill. He smiled and shook my hand with both his hands. “Maddy, why is it we don’t get a chance to talk anymore?” I’m sure he figured his horrible week was going to end on a high note, the long-prayed-for retirement of Dolly Madison Sprowls. Instead I dumped Dale Marabout’s resignation in his lap.

His smile sagged. “I heard about that.”

“Not my version, you haven’t,” I said.

He listened to what I had to say. Then he called Tinker upstairs and had me repeat the whole thing to him.

***

Saturday, May 13

Saturday morning, Aubrey, Eric and I were supposed to drive down to Mingo Junction to check out Sissy’s mystery baby. But at eight Aubrey called me. She was absolutely furious. “They smashed out my windows. Went right around my car with a goddamn sledgehammer or something. Right in the goddamn garage.”

“Who’s they?” I asked.

“Take your pick. Those Nazis cops in the 3rd District who don’t want me writing about their asshole commander. Those crazy Christians who don’t want me to free Sissy. Those pimps who don’t want me talking to their meal tickets. That wacko pal of yours.”

“I think we can rule out Dale Marabout,” I said.

“Do you? I think we can put him at the top of the list.”

“Stop talking crazy.”

“He blames me for his lousy life, Maddy.”

Now I was the furious one. Dale did not have a lousy life. He had a good life. I came very close to telling her that she was the one with the lousy life. I twisted my bangs until I was under control. “I gather this means we’re not going to Mingo Junction today.”

“It means that Eric’s driving. Unless you want to drive.”

I did not want to drive. I did not even want to go.

But I did go.

And I did drive, Aubrey next to me with her knees propped on the dash, Eric sprawled in the back seat with a big bottle of Mountain Dew.

One reason Eric Chen was coming along on this week’s snoopfest was that he and Aubrey had copulated into a couple. They were still in the inseparable stage. The more utilitarian reason was that he was from Youngstown, which is just north of Mingo Junction, in that impoverished southeastern slab of Ohio where nobody in their right mind ever visits.

I would have taken the Ohio Turnpike all the way to Youngstown and then followed State Route 11 down the Ohio River. Eric made me zig-zag along a series of narrow county roads. We went through one worthless town after another. We had lunch at a Dairy Queen in East Liverpool and then picked up Route 7 for our final descent into trepidation.

Mingo Junction is a suburb of Steubenville, if that tells you anything. It’s a very long town, stretched out in the floody flats along the banks of the Ohio River. Small mountains hold the town in like the walls of a prison. The steel mills where people used to work have rusted away. The chemical plants that sour the air haven’t. It’s a poor and depressing place. You understand immediately why people like Sissy James move north to Hannawa.

Aubrey had done her homework. She had a street map of the town and the addresses of the James families living there. Her plan was to go from house to house and simply ask if Sissy was there and then interpret the terror she found in her relatives’ eyes.

The first house we went to was painted the most awful blue. The window casings were painted pink. The lawn hadn’t been mowed in weeks. Aubrey made Eric wait in the car. The narrow porch was lined with plastic Adirondack chairs. A man about my age came to the door. He was wearing a yellowed T-shirt. He had a floppy slice of Swiss cheese in one hand and the piece to a jigsaw puzzle in the other. He glowered at us impatiently.

Aubrey smiled at him like a Girl Scout selling cookies. “Hi—you Sissy’s father?”

“Uncle.”

“I’m sorry—we were looking for her parents.”

“All she ever had was a mama and her mama’s dead.”

“Her mother was your sister then?”

His impatience was replaced by anger. “Go see Jeanie if you got questions. She’s the one Sissy’s thick with.”

“Jeanie?”

He pointed with his Swiss cheese hand. “My daughter Jeanie. Lives two miles down Georges Run Road there. Brown house with a swing set in front.”

“Did you see Sissy at Thanksgiving?” Aubrey asked, as if it were a friendly afterthought.

“Like I told the police when they came—I ain’t seen her in ten years.” He shut the door in our face.

We found Jeanie’s house. It was a skinny two-story, covered with raggedy asphalt shingles and surrounded with overgrown shrubs. There were actually two swing sets in the front yard, an old rusty one and a brand new one with a spiral slide. The porch was covered with green indoor-outdoor carpeting. Eric stayed in the car without being told.

A frazzled woman in her thirties opened the screen door. Aubrey asked her if she were Jeanie.

The woman was suspicious immediately. “I am.”

“Has Sissy been here since last Thanksgiving?”

Jeanie’s eyes worked back and forth like a Kit Kat clock as she tried to figure out the answer. Inside the house a television was on and children were screaming at each other. Finally she said, “Who says she was here even then?”

“She always visits at Thanksgiving, doesn’t she?”

Three girls suddenly appeared around Jeanie’s legs. One was maybe seven. The other two in the three or four range. All had red circles around their mouths and big plastic glasses of Kool-aid in their hands. Jeanie slid onto the porch and closed the door behind her. “Who are you two?”

Aubrey introduced us. She told her we were from the newspaper in Hannawa. She also introduced Eric, who had escaped from the car and was now sitting on the lawn with a malnourished cat in his lap.

“We just met your father,” I said.

Jeanie looked at me with empty eyes. “Did you?”

Aubrey got back to business. “I guess you know Sissy is in prison for murder?”

“I do.”

“Had to be a shock, huh? Your cousin arrested for murder?”

“It was.”

“And how did you first hear about it? Read about it? See it on TV?”

The children were banging on the door, wanting out. Jeanie ignored them. “I saw it on TV. I don’t get the paper.”

From the wry curl on Aubrey’s lips I gathered she was not surprised that Jeanie did not subscribe to a newspaper. “But you must have known about it before you saw it on television,” Aubrey said. “News like that would spread through a family pretty fast.”

Jeanie’s face wrinkled with bewilderment, or guilt, or fear, or some other agonizing emotion. Apparently she did not want to tell the truth any more than she wanted to lie. “Sissy told me herself.”

Aubrey was delighted to hear that. “Before her arrest or after?”

“I think before.”

That delighted Aubrey even more. “And she said what?”

“That she’d just killed a man. That it was likely she’d have to spend the rest of her life in prison, if not be put to death. I didn’t know it was that famous preacher until I saw the TV.”

“And she told you to watch after her child?” Aubrey asked.

Jeanie’s once-empty eyes were now cloudy with tears. I gave her the pack of Kleenex from my purse.

“That’s right,” Aubrey continued, “we know about the daughter.”

“Ain’t nobody supposed to know.”

Aubrey pointed with her chin at the children playing inside. “Which one is hers?”

“The oldest girl. Rosy.”

“She doesn’t know Sissy is her mother, does she?”

Jeanie shook her head.

“And when Sissy called you that day—she told you not to say anything about Rosy to the police, right?”

“Ain’t nobody supposed to know,” Jeanie said again.

“So Rosy thinks you’re her mother. And thinks Sissy is Aunt Sissy.”

Jeanie nodded as if she had a hundred girls to raise.

“It’s really wonderful of you,” I said.

She seemed to appreciate that. “What’s one more?” When she tried to give the Kleenex back I told her to keep it.

Aubrey kept pressing. “So, did Sissy visit all Thanksgiving weekend?”

“Just Thanksgiving Day.”

“Is that what you told the police when they talked to you?”

“It is.”

“But that’s not true, is it?”

“Just Thanksgiving Day.”

Aubrey pulled out her notebook and slipped it under her arm. A threat to start recording Jeanie’s untruths for all the world to read. “Let me get a clear picture of this,” she said. “Sissy has a daughter one hundred and fifty miles away. A daughter she aches to see, even if it’s just as Aunt Sissy. And when the four-day Thanksgiving weekend comes, she drives down for one lousy afternoon? Eats some turkey and says bye-bye? Goes home and kills a man?” She pulled out her pen and tapped it on her nose. “She stayed the whole weekend, didn’t she?”

Jeanie watched the pen bounce. “I told the police it was just the one day.”

Aubrey pulled the cap off the pen with her teeth. She held it there like a tiny cigar. “And the police accepted your lie because they didn’t have any reason not to. Because they didn’t know about Rosy. Because they wanted to corroborate Sissy’s confession as fast as they could. Because they’re boneheads.”

Jeanie was crying into her hands now. “Why can’t you believe me?”

Aubrey slipped her pen back into the cap. “Because we’re not boneheads, Jeanie. Because we know Sissy had an alibi for that Friday night. Just like you know it. Because we fucking care.”

Aubrey’s crudeness made Jeanie cry all the more. Because she was not a crude woman. Because she was a good woman caught between the truth she wanted to tell and the lie she had promised to tell. “I care, too.”

Aubrey handed me her notebook and took Jeanie in her arms. She guided her down to the first step and sat next to her. “Who was at your house for Thanksgiving dinner then? Sissy? Your parents? Your kids and your husband?”

“Just me and Sissy and the girls. I don’t have a husband no more and I don’t see my parents any more than I have to.”

“And now you don’t have Sissy anymore,” Aubrey said.

My but Aubrey was good. I was beginning to feel my own eyes water up. I kneeled in front of Jeanie and patted her hands. “Why did you lie for her, dear?”

“Because she was in trouble and I knew she didn’t want that trouble spreading to Rosy. And I guess I figured if Sissy confessed to killing that preacher it was for a reason. I figured she must have been mixed up in it some way.”

None of us said anything for a long time. We just rubbed our eyes and watched Eric play with the cat. The warm May sun was sprinkling across the steps. “Just to get it all straight,” Aubrey finally whispered, “Sissy was here that Friday night?”

“She was.”

“And when the police came to see you, you told them she wasn’t?”

“That’s right.”

“They didn’t press you? The way we did?”