Morgue Mama (5 page)
Some members of the Canaries of Calvary Choir shrieked while others kept singing. Some members of the Ascension Dancers froze while others kept dancing. A low groan of uncertainty spread across the audience. Guthrie Gates ran across the stage and pulled Buddy Wing into his lap. The director switched to a commercial. There was Buddy Wing, alive on tape, promoting his upcoming Jesus-trip to Tallahassee. “So many will be healed,” he said.
Aubrey ejected the tape. “Weird combo, isn’t it? Procaine and lily of the valley—a sophisticated heart drug found only in hospitals and a weed that grows everywhere.”
“Sissy apparently isn’t the sharpest cheese in the dairy case,” I said, remembering Dale Marabout’s stories on the murder. “But she did work as a food service aide at Hannawa General Hospital, taking trays to patients. Theoretically she could have known what procaine was, and what it could do. She could have stolen it from an unlocked drug cabinet, just as she confessed.” I poured some of my popcorn into Aubrey’s empty bowl. “As for the lily of the valley, you’re right. It grows everywhere. I remember picking it in the spring for my mother. She loved those little nodding white bells. Who knew the water in the vase could kill you.”
Aubrey filled her fist with popcorn and fed the kernels into her mouth one at a time. “You know what really intrigues me about all this? The tongue thing.”
That’s the part that had intrigued Dale Marabout, too: Buddy Wing’s flap with Tim Bandicoot had been over speaking in tongues. And the killer had chosen a drug that instantly numbed Buddy’s lips. Surely the killer knew Wing’s first reaction to the poison would be to lick his lips. Surely the killer knew there would be a close-up on Wing’s face. Dale had asked the police about it, but their PR guy just shrugged and shook a Tic-Tac into his mouth. They already had Sissy’s confession.
“What about the lily of the valley?” I asked Aubrey. “Think there’s anything symbolic about that?”
She had the next tape in the VCR ready to go. “I’ve thought about that.”
“And?”
“Bell-shaped flowers? For whom the bell tolls? Sissy’s not that deep and neither is anybody else. More than likely, it was just a very handy poison to get down Buddy’s throat in big gulps.”
The next tape was a short one: the police department’s jerky shots of Sissy James’ ramshackle garage. The digital time and date on the tape showed that it was made on the Monday morning following the murder, shortly after they showed up at Sissy’s door to question her. The camera panned the cluttered workbench inside the garage and then showed several different angles on the garbage cans lined up on the sidewalk behind the garage. Finally it zoomed deep inside one of the cans, focusing tightly on a Ziploc freezer bag. Now we could see Hannawa’s top homicide man, Scotty Grant, examining the bag’s contents: a small jar of gold paint, a tiny paint brush, a pair of vinyl surgical gloves, a tiny glass bottle with a syringe stuck in the top.
“That’s all too convenient, isn’t it,” Aubrey said. “All that evidence in one bag in one place. The bag wasn’t even stuffed down inside a milk carton or anything. Just lying there on top. Puh-leeze.”
The next shots were of a spare bedroom in Sissy’s house where she kept her crafts supplies: jars of paint and glitter, brushes, a glue gun, shopping bags filled with feathers and plastic beads, Christmas ornaments at various stages of completion. Aubrey paused the tape. “So we know from this shot that Sissy knew her way around slow-drying paint. Too easy, don’t you think?”
I was no more impressed than Aubrey. “If Sissy was into crafts,” I said, “then everybody who knew her knew she was into crafts. And no doubt ran the other way screaming every time they saw her coming with her shopping bag full of her cutsie-wootsie crap.”
Aubrey stretched out on the floor, flat on her young straight back, chewing popcorn. “A lot of planning went into that murder, Maddy. Either the killer knew Sissy very well—all about her hospital job and her stupid hobby and her absolute worship of Tim Bandicoot—or they researched the hell out of her. They designed the murder around her. But the evidence is too perfect. A killer that methodical must have figured the police would find it too perfect, too.”
“And go arrest Tim Bandicoot?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“But then Sissy confessed.”
“Yeah.”
“But wouldn’t the killer also know she might confess to save Bandicoot’s neck?”
Aubrey sat up in one flowing motion—I hate how young people can do that—and propped her chin on her knees. “Maybe the killer didn’t care who got arrested. As long as it wasn’t him—or her.”
I went to the kitchen for more milk and came back with the most brilliant thought. “Maybe the real killer did care. Maybe the real killer knew Tim Bandicoot had a solid alibi for that night.”
“Somebody like Bandicoot’s wife, maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“And why would she kill Buddy Wing?”
“To get Buddy Wing out of her husband’s way,” I said. “And Sissy out of hers.”
Aubrey covered her head with her arms, as if the ceiling were going to come down. “We are absolutely evil. And absolutely in over our heads.”
She resumed the tape. There were shots of Sissy’s closets and the shelves of junk in her basement. Nothing interesting or unusual. Then there were various angles on the house’s exterior. It was one of those old two-story frame houses built just before the Depression. Hannawa is full of them. They were once the dream homes of big middle-class families. Now they rent cheap to people on the edge.
Next came the interrogation tape. It was slightly out of focus and the voices were barely audible. Aubrey didn’t pause it once. She just let it run. It lasted about fifteen minutes.
Sissy was only twenty-six, but on that tape she looked forty-six. She was a tad plump. Her hair was ridiculously blond. Despite her blank face and sunken eyes she was pretty. She was wearing an enormous ill-fitting sweater with a Thanksgiving turkey on the front. I’d guess she knitted it herself.
Detective Scotty Grant asked her if she killed the Rev. Buddy Wing and she said yes. He asked her how and she said with a combination of heart drugs she stole from the hospital and drinking water laced with lily of the valley. Every question was more specific and so were her answers.
“Her confession sounded pretty convincing,” I said when the tape ended.
Aubrey agreed. “She did have it down pretty good. The poisons. The paint. How she got in the church. The whole deal.”
“Maybe she did do it.”
Aubrey slid in the next tape. “I wonder if she would have been so convincing if she’d been interrogated before Dale Marabout’s story on the poisons ran?”
“Dale’s story ran before her confession?”
“Three days before. You can see why I don’t trust the police. Kudos to Marabout, but they should never have given him that evidence so early.”
The next tape was from the arraignment. Sissy was wearing an orange jumpsuit now. Her hair was flat and greasy and pulled back into a makeshift ponytail. She told the judge she was guilty. She said she was ready for whatever punishment God and the state of Ohio had in mind. The judge ordered the obligatory psychological testing.
The last tape was from the sentencing. Sissy’s childhood had been horrible enough for her to avoid a death sentence but not life without parole. Deputies led Sissy from the courtroom. You could see Guthrie Gates sitting in the gallery.
Monday, March 20
Monday evening Aubrey got into a big mess with Dale Marabout and managing editor Alec Tinker. I’d already gone home for the day, but Eric Chen was still in the morgue and overhead most of it.
Chief Polceznec’s reorganization plan had reassigned all of the district commanders but one, the 3rd District’s Lionel Percy. Aubrey thought that odd, given that most of the city’s problems with police corruption came out of the 3rd District. The 3rd is a royal mess, that’s for sure. Hardly a month goes by that some cop there doesn’t get demoted or indicted for something. Sometimes a whole slew of them get in trouble at once, like the time two years ago when TV 21 reporter Tish Kiddle found eight officers moonlighting at a Morrow Avenue
show bar
where the lap dancers were completely naked and cocaine as easy to get as pretzels.
So Aubrey wanted to investigate why Chief Polceznec didn’t reassign Commander Percy. Tinker was all for giving her the green light, but Dale filibustered: It wasn’t the paper’s job to go on fishing expeditions—that, he said, was the job of the state attorney general, or the U.S. Justice Department, or the department’s own internal affairs division.
But Aubrey insisted there’d been enough crap in the 3rd to question why Lionel Percy was left in place when all the other district commanders were either given administrative jobs at headquarters or tempted into retirement.
Eric told me the argument went on for a half hour, ending with Aubrey screeching obscenities, Dale storming off to the men’s room, and Tinker wondering out loud why he’d accepted the transfer from our sister paper in Baton Rouge.
I’d have to say both Dale and Aubrey were right. A newspaper shouldn’t go on fishing expeditions. But when something already smells to high heaven? Well, that was a judgment call Tinker had to make and he gave Aubrey the green light she wanted.
***
Let me give you a little background on the
Herald-Union
, and how Alec Tinker landed here as managing editor.
The
Hannawa Herald
was founded in 1855 by Elton Elsworth Newkirk, a Connecticut-born abolitionist who helped bankroll the anti-slavery crusade of John Brown, who, before achieving infamy in Kansas and Harper’s Ferry, toiled for many years right here in Hannawa. The
Hannawa Union
did not appear until 1876, late in the corrupt second term of President Ulysses S. Grant. It was an unapologetically Republican paper that championed the region’s industrial growth. It reigned as the city’s biggest newspaper until the Great Depression, when its anti-New Deal rantings cost it half of its circulation.
In 1937, the
Herald’s
then-publisher, Bix Newkirk, bought the near-bankrupt
Union
for a song. By the time I came along in the Fifties, the
Herald-Union
was a vibrant, well-heeled afternoon paper, the fourth largest in the state. Then suburbia raised its ugly head and families by the thousands moved to the cornfields. By 1972, the paper’s circulation and advertising revenues had sagged so badly that the heretofore industrious Bix Newkirk suddenly developed an interest in sailboats. In 1974 he sold the
Herald-Union
to the Knudsen-Hartpence chain, headquartered eight hundred miles away in St. Paul, Minnesota. In addition to its flagship paper there in St. Paul,
The Northern Star-Pride
, it owns papers in Duluth, Tampa, Baton Rouge and a dozen or so smaller cities.
Knudsen-Hartpence brought in Bob Averill as editor-in-chief and changed us from an afternoon paper to a morning paper. Home delivery increased by a third and the suburban malls boosted advertising revenues. We’ve been languishing lately—nobody under forty reads newspapers and everybody in America is unfortunately under forty, or so it seems—but the corporate gurus in St. Paul have plans for changing that. They’ve sent us Tinker, a thirty-two-year-old wunderkind from our paper in Baton Rouge.
At the time of his appointment the company newsletter said Tinker would make reading the
Herald-Union
“Not only irresistible but imperative.” So far he’s done that by running shorter stories and larger photographs, though he has promised to initiate what he calls “a synergistic blend of in-your-face and in-your-mind journalism.” Talk about bullshit.
Tinker’s arrival at the
Herald-Union
was anything but good news to veteran reporters like Dale Marabout. Knudsen-Hartpence sent Tinker here to get the paper’s circulation up, which meant shaking the town up, which meant shaking the editorial staff up.
Dale is certain, and I’m sure he’s right, that Tinker’s marching orders were to fill as many of the paper’s major beats as possible with as many indefatigable kids as possible. So the arrival of Tinker was a godsend to Aubrey McGinty. She’d been trying to get the
Herald-Union’s
attention since her freshman year at Kent State. She’d repeatedly applied for stringer work—to cover boring suburban school board meetings and the like—but she never got a call. Nor was she ever chosen for a summer internship. During her senior years she lobbied every department editor except sports for a job after graduation. Her stories in the college paper were good enough to get her a couple of interviews, but not good enough to get her a job. And if I know Aubrey, all the time she was trying to get our attention, she was trying just as hard to get the attention of every big-city newspaper in the Midwest. Like most journalism grads, she ended up on a small paper in a small town, covering small stories, trying to survive on a pitifully small paycheck, plotting her escape.
The way young reporters escape small papers is through the stories they write. They clip them out and stick them in manila folders. As soon as they’ve got six months or a year under their belt, they start sending those
clips
to bigger papers. The better their clips, the bigger the paper they’ll land on. So they joyfully work their brains out at those small papers, praying that the good-clip gods let something horrible happen on their beats, like the murder of the local football coach, so they can cover the hell out of it.
Tinker liked Aubrey’s clips on the football coach murder. He liked how she didn’t accept the Rush City Police Department’s verdict. He liked how she pursued the rumors of the coach’s affair with the cheerleading advisor. He liked how her relentless pursuit led to the arrest of the cuckolded husband. Aubrey McGinty was just the kind of reporter he wanted covering the cops in Hannawa, Ohio.
From what I gather, Tinker and Aubrey started wooing each other a good year before she was actually hired. Aubrey sent him her clips and he took her to lunch. There were letters and phone calls and then finally a firm commitment that she’d be hired just as soon as there was an opening.
Dale did a wonderful job covering the Buddy Wing murder in November. Everyone in the newsroom praised him to high heaven. But Tinker had already made up his mind and when Wally Kearns announced in January he was taking advantage of the paper’s early retirement program to write that novel he’d been putting off, there was suddenly a copy editing slot on the metro desk for someone with an experienced eye. For Dale Marabout.
Aubrey, as you know, showed up the first week of March, full of vinegar.
***
Wednesday, March 22
On Wednesday I took Dale to lunch at Speckley’s.
I was expecting him to be pissed off by Tinker’s decision. Instead, he was concerned only about Aubrey’s safety. “Maddy,” he said, “the 3rd District has been corrupt for decades. I don’t know if Percy is part of any illegal stuff or not. And I bet Chief Polceznec doesn’t know either. But what both the chief and I do know is that Lionel Percy is a five-hundred-pound piranha. You don’t swim in his pond. Polceznec probably figures Percy will retire in a couple years and then he can put some Spic-and-Span guy in charge and turn things around.”
I tried to get Dale to eat his meat loaf sandwich before it got cold but he just kept playing with his potatoes. “Why didn’t you tell Tinker all this?” I asked. “It looks like you’re trying to protect your pals on the force again.”
Dale wasn’t happy with that. “Again?”
“You know what I mean.”
He stuck his fork in the top of his potatoes and folded his arms. “If I tell Tinker I’m afraid for Aubrey’s safety, that will only prove her point, won’t it? If only Aubrey wasn’t so damned gonzo about everything.”
Well, Dale was right about that. Aubrey was one very determined young woman. Most reporters are emotionally detached from the stories they cover. It doesn’t matter much if they’re covering a murder trial or a Red Cross blood drive. They go where they’re assigned, gather up the who-what-when-where-and-why, come back and write the damn story, go home and feed their cats. They get whooped up about a story from time to time, sure. But when they do, it’s the
story
that gets them excited, not the reality.
From what I’d seen, Aubrey McGinty was different. With her it was the reality. Yes, she’d told Guthrie Gates she was only interested in Buddy Wing’s murder because it was a good story. But I had the feeling she really wanted to help Sissy James. And if she wanted to investigate why Chief Polceznec left Lionel Percy commander of the 3rd District, it was because the people living there deserved better.
“Now Mr. M,” I said, “It might turn out to be a good story.”
He decided to eat. “It’s not sour grapes. She really could get hurt.”
***
Friday, March 24
Aubrey not only sat on my desk, she pulled her legs up under her chin. It was one of those late March days in Ohio when the weather should have been a lot better than it was, when wet snow covers the sprouting daffodils and tulips, when people are torpid and testy, bundled up in sweaters they’d already put away for the summer. “Look around the newsroom,” I hissed at her. “Do you see anybody else sitting on the top of their desks?”
She didn’t get off, but she did lower her legs and dangle them over the side. I accepted the partial victory. “So, what brings you to the morgue on this wonderful afternoon?”
She yawned. “I finally got that stuff from probate on the good reverend’s estate.”
Suddenly it wouldn’t have bothered me if she were standing on her head. “And?”
“It seems the money trail leads straight to God.”
“You don’t think He poisoned Buddy Wing, do you?”
She was no more in the mood for my smart-assed remarks than I was for hers. “It’s really quite remarkable. Wing only had $6,400 in the bank. A $10,000 life insurance policy. A tiny paid-for colonial in South Ridge. A 1987 Pontiac Sunbird valued at nothing. All left to the Heaven Bound Cathedral.”
“What about all the white suits and loud ties?”
“God got those, too.”
“Then he wasn’t killed for his money.”
Aubrey handed me my tea mug and we headed for the cafeteria. “Do you know Wing only made $34,000 a year. You’d think he was a member of the newspaper guild.”
“And how do you know he only made $34,000 a year?”
“I goo-goo eyed one of the young studlies in homicide into showing me the church’s financial report from their files.”
“You think Guthrie Gates will settle for $34,000?” I asked.
“He was already making $60,000 when Wing was killed.”
“And now?”
“Well, that’s this year’s financial report, isn’t it? Which the police don’t have. And I’m guessing Gates wouldn’t be too crazy about sharing with us. But it doesn’t matter anyway.”
We’d just walked through sports. I took a look over my shoulder. A half-dozen sets of male eyes quickly shifted from Aubrey’s jeans, some to the ceiling, some to computer screens, some to the floor, none to me. “It doesn’t matter?”
Aubrey was looking over her shoulder, too. Making sure she was being appreciated. “Even if Gates killed poor old Buddy for the tithes and offerings, he’d have to take it easy with the church elders for a while.”
This late in the day the cafeteria was empty. I headed for the hot water. Aubrey headed for the candy machine. “So where does this leave your investigation?” I asked.
“Nowhere and everywhere,” she answered. “Just like before.”