Morgue Mama (9 page)
Saturday, May 6
Aubrey and I called her the eyebrow woman, but her name actually was Sandra Leigh Swain. She was forty-one, a divorcee with two adolescent daughters. She worked full-time cutting men’s hair. On Fridays, she did make-up for the Heaven Bound Cathedral’s televised services. She was listed in the directory as a member.
I wasn’t at all surprised that Aubrey had learned these things about her. A few minutes on a computer and you can learn all kinds of things about people these days. I was surprised, however, that Aubrey knew that the eyebrow woman would be grocery shopping at Artie’s on Saturday morning.
“It was a no-brainer,” she explained as we drove to the supermarket for the ambush. “She works full-time days. She has two daughters in middle school who have to be driven like sled dogs on school nights to stay off the phone and do their homework. She spends Friday nights working at the church and Sundays attending. So she simply has to do her grocery shopping Saturday morning.”
She was probably right. Saturday is the worst time in the world to go for groceries, yet two-thirds of the women I know do exactly that. They have no other time. “But how do you know she goes mornings? Maybe she goes—”
“Afternoons? No way. She’s a single mother with an ex-husband who doesn’t pay his child support. She goes mornings for the hamburger and the chicken and whatever other specials she can get to keep down her bill. By afternoon, everything good’s picked over.”
Aubrey could see the skepticism on my old face, apparently. “I know these things because—as you remember from your own snooping—my mother was often without a man’s paycheck.”
“And with two daughters just like the eyebrow woman,” I added without thinking.
The pain of her childhood worked across her face. Then she smiled wickedly. “I also know these things because I followed her last Saturday.”
“Why didn’t you ambush her then?” I asked.
“Because I wanted to know more about her first.”
“Why are we ambushing her at all? Why don’t you just call her on the phone?”
“I tried all week. She kept hanging up.”
“You found out where she did her shopping first and then you tried to call her?”
Aubrey’s impatience was bubbling into anger. “Why the third degree here? After that scene with Gates in the make-up chair, and what you told me about her lighting up, I was curious right away. And I wasn’t only interested in seeing where she did her grocery shopping. I also wanted to see if she’d sneak over to Bandicoot’s church, if she really was a spy.”
“But she didn’t?” I asked.
“She just went to Artie’s and Wal-mart and home. And she didn’t go out Saturday night. At least by nine o’clock she hadn’t.”
“Did you?” I asked.
“You’re asking if I went out with Eric?”
“It’s none of my business.”
“You’re right. It’s not. But so you don’t have to ask the next question that isn’t any of your business, as of last night, Eric and I have entered the post-cusp phase of our relationship.”
We pulled into Artie’s. Aubrey spotted the eyebrow woman’s car and parked in the next row. We went inside and found her in the dairy aisle, lifting gallon jugs of two percent milk into her cart.
Aubrey descended immediately. “Do you buy your cigarettes here, too?”
The eyebrow woman’s eyebrows shot up like the mushroom clouds of two atom bombs. Her pupils froze on Aubrey then drifted toward me. I was several feet behind Aubrey, by the I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Butter display. I gave her one of those stupid finger-wiggle waves.
“I’m not talking to you two,” she said. She put a fourth jug in her cart and started for the meat department. Aubrey followed her. I followed Aubrey.
“You know we don’t think Sissy James killed Buddy Wing,” Aubrey said while the eyebrow woman waited for her turn at the hamburger. “And we don’t think it was you, either. So don’t be afraid of that.”
“I’m not afraid of that,” the eyebrow woman answered.
Aubrey was almost touching shoulders with her now, getting inside her private space. “You are afraid Guthrie will find out you’re one of Tim Bandicoot’s spies though.”
“I am not one of Tim Bandicoot’s spies.”
“Of course you are. That cigarette you just had to have gave you away.”
The eyebrow woman put the biggest package of hamburger she could find in her cart. We were off to the chicken.
Aubrey assured her that we didn’t care if she was a spy or not, that we weren’t interested in exposing anybody, or destroying anybody, or doing anything but proving that Sissy James didn’t poison Buddy Wing.
The eyebrow woman put a huge family pack of legs and thighs in her cart.
“Do you bread and fry that for your girls?” Aubrey asked her. “At Marysville, they just boil it.”
The eyebrow woman pushed her cart up the beverage aisle, past the Coke and Pepsi sections to the cheap supermarket brands. The two-liter bottles of diet cola were only sixty-nine cents. She put eight of them in her cart. The image of bland boiled chicken was apparently still on her mind, though I’m sure Aubrey didn’t have a clue whether the prison served boiled chicken or cordon bleu. But the mental image had done the trick. “I don’t know if Sissy did it or not,” the eyebrow woman said, “but I do know she more than likely had an alibi for that night if she needed one.”
Aubrey wasn’t expecting to hear that. “More than likely?”
The eyebrow woman slipped through a bottleneck of shopping carts and turned down the snack and cookie aisle. “How much do you know about Sissy’s past?” she asked.
Aubrey told her we knew about her mother’s death and the years she worked as a stripper and a prostitute, how she found God and gave that awful life up.
The eyebrow woman seemed happy to find the potato chips on sale. She took four bags, the maximum number allowed. “She didn’t find God until she found out she was pregnant.”
Aubrey wasn’t expecting to hear that either. “There’s a baby somewhere?”
“There’s a seven-year-old girl somewhere,” said the eyebrow woman.
“Tim Bandicoot’s baby?” I asked.
The eyebrow woman looked at me if I were a deaf mute suddenly healed. “Her thing with Tim came much later,” she said. “The girl belongs to some john, I suppose.”
Aubrey began thinking out loud: “So somewhere there’s a little girl she spends holidays with—and Buddy Wing was poisoned the day after Thanksgiving.”
“Like I said,” the eyebrow woman said, “I don’t know she was there for sure.”
“Where for sure?”
We were rushing through the bakery department now. The air was sweet with the smell of fresh-baked bread and doughnuts but there was no room in the eyebrow woman’s budget for any of that. “I suppose you know Sissy wasn’t born here in Hannawa,” she said.
When we reached the produce aisle Aubrey asked her if she’d seen Wayne F. Dillow lingering in the hallways the night Buddy Wing was killed.
“Wayne Dillow? Goodness no.”
“Anybody else in the office or stage area that didn’t belong there?” Aubrey asked. “Anybody that looked suspicious?”
The eyebrow woman stopped her cart in front of the cabbage and cauliflower. “Nobody suspicious—if that’s what you mean. But there are always new people back there before a broadcast.”
“New people?” I asked.
“Kids from the college, TV and radio majors.”
The thought of someone from my alma mater evil enough to kill someone made me defensive. “Not Hemphill College?”
“Goodness no,” she answered. “Kent State.” She had a head of cauliflower in each hand, weighing them with her motherly instinct.
“So why are they there?” Aubrey asked. “To see a real-live television show being taped?”
“We put them to work and pay them. Some are there week after week, for the whole year. Some can’t take our brand of religion and quit after one night. You never know.” She chose the head in her left hand and pushed on.
Next she got a big bag of Idaho potatoes and a bag of those tiny salad carrots. She thought hard about the fresh California strawberries but passed them up. We went to the canned goods aisle. Aubrey continued to press her about the college students. “Were any of these kids ever assigned the job of taking Buddy Wing’s Bible to the pulpit?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” she answered. “That Bible was sort of an important holy relic, you know? It had belonged to pastor Wing’s father, back in his coal mining days. The Bible was always Elaine’s job.”
Elaine, of course, was Elaine Albert, the director who’d passed a lie detector test the day after the murder.
“Elaine wouldn’t have gotten busy and sent one of the college kids to do it, would she?” Aubrey wondered. “And then lied about it so nobody knew she wasn’t doing her job?”
“Goodness no.”
“What about filling his water pitcher?” I asked. “Was that also part of Elaine’s sacred duty?”
“Elaine did that, too. Though I suppose she might’ve given a little job like that to somebody else. Water’s water.”
“Except when it’s tainted with lily of the valley,” I said.
We headed for the front of the store. Every register had a long line. The eyebrow woman groaned and slid behind a woman with a cartful of baby food and disposable diapers. “I want you to know I don’t spy,” she said. “I love the church. I can’t imagine where’d I be without those people. But I also think Tim Bandicoot got a raw deal, the way Guthrie forced him out.”
Aubrey caught that immediately. “Guthrie forced him out? It wasn’t Buddy Wing?”
“Guthrie put the bee in Pastor’s bonnet, little doubt about that.”
“Manipulated him into getting rid of his rival?”
“Not that Tim was without sin,” the eyebrow woman said.
***
That afternoon we watched paint dry.
At Pizza Hut.
Eric Chen was already there when we pulled in. He had a window booth, facing the Red Lobster across the street. Aubrey slid in next to him. Their bodies snapped together like a couple of magnets. I slid in the other side. “You two have enough room over there?” I asked. They smiled with embarrassment and moved apart—about a half inch.
Eric had already ordered for us, a pitcher of Pepsi and a large pizza with sausage and green pepper.
We were there not only to assess our ambush of the eyebrow woman—which Aubrey and I agreed had gone better than expected—but also to conduct our paint-drying experiment. Given Sissy’s confession, the police hadn’t bothered to test how long it took the gold paint the killer used on Buddy Wing’s Bible to dry.
Eric was not only responsible for ordering the pizza. It also was his job to bring a leather-covered Bible, a tiny paint brush, and a bottle of Testor’s Gloss Enamel, the same kind of gold paint used by the killer, available in any craft store.
According to Aubrey, how long it took the paint to dry was no small matter: “In order for Buddy Wing to get the procaine on his lips when he kissed the cross, the gold paint would have to be tacky. Sissy confessed that she slipped into his office as soon as he left for the make-up chair. She said she quickly painted the cross and then took it to the chapel stage, along with the notes for Buddy’s sermon and the pitcher of tainted water, which she claims she’d already filled in the kitchenette in the nursery. Then she rushed home to watch him die on her TV. Which is doable. Her house is only a five-minute drive.”
“I gather you’ve driven it yourself?” I asked.
Eric answered for her. “We drove it six times last night. Every possible route.”
Aubrey seemed embarrassed that he told me that, as if he was describing their love-making rather than their driving experiment. She continued: “Buddy didn’t kiss the Bible until he was twenty-seven minutes into the service. Add that to the ten minutes he was in the make-up chair, and the four or five minutes he was praying with the elders. The paint would have to stay tacky for thirty-five or forty minutes—so let’s see.”
She opened the little bottle and started painting over the cross on the cover of the Bible. “The killer had to paint the cross very quickly, but also very neatly. The wet cross had to look just like the old one underneath.” Aubrey finished the job in only a minute.
The waitress brought our pitcher of Pepsi and three plastic glasses filled with ice. We sipped sparingly, knowing it was going to be a long wait, for both the paint and the pizza. “So exactly what are we trying to prove here?” I asked Aubrey. “We already know the cross on the Bible was painted during that little window of time after Wing left his office and the service started.”
Aubrey was nibbling on her ice. “Do we really know that? What if the paint doesn’t dry for an hour? Or two hours? Or ten hours? Then the cross could have been painted long before the service, maybe in the middle of the night, and the Bible put on the pulpit at any time. All we really know—if Elaine Albert’s statement is to be believed—is that when she went to get the Bible from Buddy’s desk, it wasn’t there, it was already on the pulpit.”
Eric gently touched the cross Aubrey had painted. He looked at the little circle of gold on the end of his finger and frowned. “If the cross was painted hours earlier, then the killer swiped the Bible from Buddy’s desk hours earlier. But if that Bible was as important to him as everybody says, wouldn’t he go nuts looking for it? Have everybody looking for it? There’s nothing like that in the police reports.”