Morgue Mama (2 page)

In 1961, Lawrence was lured away from the paper by the local office of the United Auto Workers to handle their public relations. It was irresistible money and we bought the bungalow on Brambriar Court where I still live. In 1963, Lawrence was lured from our marriage by a secretary with irresistible tits.

So Lawrence got the irresistible money and the irresistible tits and I got the bungalow. Over the years Lawrence moved from city to city doing PR for unions and banks and phone companies and race tracks. He would divorce and marry three more times before dying of a heart attack at age fifty-seven. I stayed right here in Hannawa. Stayed divorced. Stayed in the morgue. I was named head librarian in May, 1970, the same week those four students were shot by National Guardsmen at Kent State University, not thirty miles down the road from here. Every time I run across those
KENT, MAY 4 SHOOTINGS
files I just boil inside.

Hannawa is a lot different today than it was in the Sixties. The good union jobs are pretty much gone. Almost anybody with money has fled to the suburbs. City Council keeps launching various redevelopment schemes, but the downtown remains a canyon of empty storefronts and the neighborhoods continue to crumble. Only on the west side, in the hills surrounding Hemphill College, are there still some safe and tidy middle-class neighborhoods, including mine.

I’d say the city has lost a good seventy thousand people over the last couple of decades, some to jobs in the New South—Atlanta, Houston, Charlottesville, places like that—but mostly to the city’s own suburbs—Greenlawn and Brinkley, North Hannawa and Hannawa Falls—once beautiful rural townships now choking with strip malls and big showy houses with adjustable mortgages.

While a lot of the factories have closed, Hannawa has one industry that just keeps growing and growing: Evangelism.

Hannawa has more evangelists per capita than any city north of the Mason-Dixon Line. I’m not kidding. Several years ago we ran a six-part series on the phenomenon. It seems that all those southerners moving up here in the Fifties and Sixties—whites from Appalachia, blacks from the delta states—brought their own brand of Bible-believing Christianity with them. Preachers in need of flocks made the move north, too, setting up shop in vacant breweries and bowling alleys, anywhere they could put up a row or two of folding chairs. Buddy Wing was one of them. He was a high school dropout from Webster Springs, West Virginia, a young man with a knack for healing both spiritual and physical ailments. He also understood early on that God had permitted the invention of the cathode ray tube for one reason and one reason only: to save souls.

Before tumbling into the fake palms, Buddy Wing was the most well-known TV preacher in Hannawa. But he was hardly the only one. Today, I bet there are a dozen preachers here with their own shows on cable.

Anyway, Hannawa is known for its evangelists. So much so that ever since the paper’s series brought the phenomenon to light, Hannawa has been known as “The Hallelujah City.” I think it’s a hoot, but Mayor Kyle Finn sure doesn’t like it. Of course he can’t say so publicly, but Sylvia Berdache, who covers city hall for us, says hearing that nickname literally turns his orange Irish freckles maroon. She does a wonderful impression of him: “We’re workin’ our arses off trying to build a progressive city here—attractin’ high-tech jobs and foreign investment dollars—and what are we known for? Faith-healin’ hillbillies!” Sylvia claims she actually overheard him say that to a Catholic priest once, at the Feast of the Assumption carnival at St. Patrick’s on West Molamar.

Sylvia didn’t say what the priest’s reaction to the mayor’s blasphemy was, but I’ll tell you mine: People can believe anything they want and worship any way they want—just as long as they stay the hell away from me.

***

At four that afternoon, I saw Aubrey McGinty heading toward my desk with the envelopes I’d given her. Her youthful bounce made me nibble on my bottom lip. I’d been much too helpful earlier. Much too friendly. I needed to re-establish my witchiness. “You sure you’re done with those?” I asked sourly. “I don’t like digging out the same stuff twice.”

“I’m pretty sure I Xeroxed everything I need.”

“Only pretty sure?”

“If it’ll make you sleep better tonight I could go Xerox some more,” she said.

I’d wanted to see her wilt. But she’d only bloomed. I motioned for her to put the envelopes on my desk. They slid in every direction, one nearly capsizing my end-of-the-day mug of Darjeeling tea.

Before waltzing back to her desk she said something that was going to upset my applecart for months to come: “Maddy, I don’t think Sissy James did it.”

Chapter 2

Wednesday, March 8

Speckley’s is a wonderful little restaurant about a half-mile west of downtown in the Meriwether Square district. Dale Marabout and I pulled in at the same time.

Meriwether, I suppose, is Hannawa’s Greenwich Village. In the Fifties there were a handful of jazz clubs there, and an assortment of all-night diners and serious drinking bars. In the Sixties the city’s small contingent of Hippies hung out in “Meri” and in the Seventies it was the Disco set. Nothing happened there in the Eighties. In the Nineties it became a trendy area again with coffee and bagel shops, art galleries and antique stores. Speckley’s has been there all along, serving the same famous meat loaf sandwiches, huge gob of au gratin potatoes on the side.

We slid into a window booth. The waitress immediately descended on us and, without asking, turned over our coffee cups and started to pour. I waited for my cup to be full before telling her I wanted tea. The waitress apologized with feigned sweetness and stormed off to find a pot of hot water.

My orneriness made Dale chuckle, as it always did. “So what’s up, Maddy?”

“I told you yesterday—nothing.”

“That you did. So what’s up?”

Dale Marabout knows me too well. He came to the
Herald-Union
in 1975, when he was twenty-four, after two years at the
Elwood Telegraph-Review
. I’d already been divorced for ten years and he was sixteen years younger than me. But somehow we started having an exhausting sexual relationship. I’d never been with any man other than Lawrence, and Dale, pudgy and bland and timid as a mole, had never been with any woman. We were exactly what the other needed.

The sex lasted for five years, until I was forty-five. By then Dale had lost some weight and gained a modicum of self-confidence, and I was in full-blown menopausal decline, every part of my body with sexual application going south.

Our nights together dwindled to once a month and then stopped completely when a young kindergarten school teacher named Sharon moved into his apartment building. I missed the sex but understood Dale’s needs. He needed someone he could have a family with, someone to share a mortgage and car payments. He and the teacher married. Twenty-two years later they have a nice house in Greenlawn, a daughter working on her master’s in psychology, and a teen-age son who wants to be a professional wrestler.

Maybe the sex between Dale and me stopped, but our friendship didn’t. Every once in a while I’ll call him, or he’ll call me, and we meet at Speckley’s.

“What’s your take on Aubrey McGinty?” I asked.

It took some real
cojones
for me to ask him that. Aubrey was Dale’s replacement on the police beat. Dale had covered the cops since Eddie Nogolo retired in 1974, and he loved it. But our new managing editor, Alec Tinker, decided Dale was too cozy with Police Chief Donald Polceznec. So Dale was shuffled to a deputy copy editor slot on the metro desk.

“I’ve edited a couple of her stories already,” Dale said. “She’s good.”

I watched him stir a packet of sugar into his coffee. “Well, you were plenty good, too,” I said. “It still pisses me off the way—”

Dale reached across the booth and patted my knuckles. There were granules of sugar on his fingertips. “It’s okay. Nobody stays on the same beat forever.”

I couldn’t help but think about those fingers. We never loved each other, not in an ooey-gooey way, but it was still a blow when he broke things off, even though I totally understood it. I blew the sugar off my knuckles and told him about Aubrey calling me Morgue Mama to my face. I told him she wanted everything we had on the Rev. Buddy Wing.

Dale stopped stirring. “Really?”

“So she hasn’t been assigned to look into it?”

“Not that I’m aware of. Though I’m not exactly in the loop these days.”

“She doesn’t think Sissy James did it,” I said.

“Sissy James confessed,” he said, sipping. Bitterness was spreading across his face. “There was a shitload of evidence.”

“You think Sissy did it then?”

“Well—sure. The cops found the poison in her garbage. She confessed, for christsake.”

Dale’s bitterness had bloomed into anger and I felt terrible for bringing it on. Being replaced by a kid from a podunk newspaper couldn’t have been easy for him, even though I’m sure he was sick to death of the beat. It wasn’t that Dale was too cozy with the police chief. Dale was too cozy with being cozy. He was forty-nine. He’d written hundreds of murder stories, fatal car-crash stories, kids-fried-to-a-crisp-in-rundown-apartment-building stories. I love Dale Marabout to death, but he was burned out, and he knew it. Still, getting exiled to the copy desk is a real ballbat in the ribs. I’ve seen it happen too many times over the years. Reporters of a certain age just wilt.

“Maybe there’s something new with the story,” I said.

“Like I said, I’ve been de-looped.”

When I got back to the morgue I found a Post-it on my computer screen:

***

Thursday, March 9

Twenty-four hours later I was back in Meri, back at Speckley’s, two booths down from where Dale and I sat. “Go crazy,” Aubrey said, “I’m buying.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said.

“No, I’m buying—I want to thank you for your help with the Buddy Wing files.”

“If every reporter I helped bought me lunch, I’d weigh four hundred pounds.”

We both ordered the meat loaf sandwiches, au gratin potatoes on the side.

“By the way,” I said after the waitress was gone, “you could have e-mailed me about lunch—I’m not the high-tech dodo everybody thinks.”

Aubrey’s lips contorted into her laugh-preventing pucker. “I did e-mail you,” she said, “about an hour after you got the files for me. You never answered.”

“Oh.”

Now the conversation turned to my name, which conversations with new people always do. “So,” she asked, “were you named after Dolly Madison the president’s wife, or Dolly Madison the pickle?”

“Both,” I told her. “If it hadn’t been for the pickle jar in the refrigerator, my parents never would’ve known there was a president’s wife named Dolly.”

“Then is Madison your middle name or your maiden name? I don’t even know if you’re married.”

“The beautiful name Sprowls came with my divorce settlement.”

She liked that. “So when Ma and Pa Madison had a girl they couldn’t resist.”

“You have no idea the crap that passes for clever in LaFargeville, New York,” I said.

“New York? You sound so Ohio.”

“Upstate New York is Ohio,” I said.

I learned long ago that it’s dangerous going to lunch with reporters. They don’t talk to you. They interview you. By the time the check comes, they know what brand of underwear you’re wearing. So, the best thing to do is go on offense. “You’re from Rush City, right?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. “Farm foreclosure capital of the Midwest.”

“And after college you went back and worked at the hometown paper?”

“Everybody’s got to start somewhere,” she said.

“It was a good place for you to start.
The Gazette
is a good paper. What’s the circulation now? Fifteen thousand?”

“They wish.”

“How old are you, anyway, Aubrey? When you get my age everybody looks about twelve.”

“Twenty-four.”

“You couldn’t have been at
The Gazette
for very long.”

“Year and a half.”

“And you worked like a maniac and got some good clips for your file—good for you.”

She smiled. “I was lucky. I got to cover some terrific stories.”

I prodded them out of her: an Amtrak derailment, the arrest of a scout master for molesting boys on a canoe trip, and best of all, the murder of the high school football coach by the cuckolded husband of the cheerleading advisor. She was right. She was lucky. Reporters on little papers like
The Gazette
rarely get to cover good stories, just car accidents, county fairs, and an occasional embezzlement by a township clerk. “Dale Marabout says you’re a very good writer,” I said.

The sandwiches came. Aubrey peeled back the bread and poked the meat loaf with her finger to make sure it was cooked thoroughly. It was and she took a huge bite. For the rest of our lunch our conversation was filtered through mouthfuls of meat loaf and potatoes.

“So, why don’t you think Sissy James killed Buddy Wing?” I asked.

Aubrey, chewing away, held up her index finger like a number one. “First, when I saw the police tape of her confession on TV, she just didn’t look guilty.” She swallowed and held up a second finger. “Two, that murder of the football coach taught me never to trust the police—I don’t mean their honesty, most cops are pretty honest—but their work. They’re human and humans fuck up.”

I’ve got an absolutely filthy mouth myself, but there are certain words that simply cannot be formed by the lips of a woman of my generation. The one that starts with F is one of them. “So how did they
screw
up the football coach’s murder?”

Aubrey put down her sandwich and folded her hands under her chin. “About a month before the coach was killed, he threw this big deal senior off the team for repeatedly peeing in the gym bags of the junior varsity players. The coach warned him a bazillion times to stop. But he kept it up. So the coach tossed him off the team. And the kid’s father went berserk at the next school board meeting. Threatened the coach and everybody else. His son wouldn’t get a scholarship now, just for kidding around in the locker room, blah-blah-blah. So when the coach was shot three times in the head, they immediately arrested the kid’s father.”

I remembered the story from our own coverage. Rush City is only forty miles south of Hannawa, right on the edge of our circulation area. Big papers love it when people in those little Norman Rockwell towns go nuts. “Then you’re that local reporter who found the real murderer?”

Aubrey stabbed the last au gratin potato on her plate. “No biggie. Everybody in the high school knew the coach was doing the cheerleading advisor. And knew that her husband knew. How much police work does it take to find something like that out? It took me about an hour.”

I felt a sudden need to confess. “I think I let the cat out of the bag.”

“Which cat is that?”

“The Buddy Wing cat,” I said. “I mentioned to Dale Marabout that you were looking into it. I figured you’d already cleared it with Tinker.”

I could see from the way she was chewing that she wasn’t pleased. “At this point I’m just trying to see if there’s a story there.”

“I was a little concerned, that’s all,” I said. “Big papers are more complicated than small papers. The pace is crazier. In order to make it work, everybody has to know what everybody’s doing.” I wasn’t trying to inflict one of my infamous Morgue Mama lectures on her. I was genuinely concerned.

“I’m not doing this at the expense of my other stories, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said. “Buddy Wing is totally on the side until I have something solid to go to Tinker with. Okay?”

I knew the
okay
meant that I should mind my own business. “Okay,” I said.

The waitress brought the check. Aubrey turned it over and winced.

I pulled it away from her. “How about you just pay the tip?”

On our way to the car she asked me if I’d go with her to the Heaven Bound Cathedral on Saturday. “Just to snoop around a little,” she said.

***

When I got back to the morgue I first helped Doris Rowe, editor of the paper’s Weekend section, search the B cabinets for our old files on the history of the Bowenville Blueberry Festival—“How hard can it be, Doris? It’s under either Bowenville or Blueberry”—then I got on my computer and called up our stories on the Rush City football coach murder.

For all that baloney about the public right to know, newspapers don’t like to mention competing papers. But we had no choice with the football coach story. We not only mentioned
The Gazette
by name, we mentioned Aubrey McGinty by name: