Morgue Mama (15 page)

Aubrey was too busy to go to Speckley’s for lunch. So we walked up to the Mr. Hero in the Geisselman Building. The temperature was in the eighties and that meant the downtown sidewalks were as hot as a waffle iron. We shared a foot-long ham and Swiss with brown mustard and tomato. We both bought pink lemonades. We sat in a window booth with closed Venetian blinds.

My stomach was so queasy I was just nibbling my half of the sandwich. “I have to tell you, Aubrey,” I said, “this Doddridge thing really scares me.”

She was chomping like a horse. “You don’t think it was suicide? Come on—just by looking at him you could tell there was a lot of bad stuff going on inside his head.”

“That’s exactly my point, Aubrey. Maybe he knew something about Buddy Wing’s death. Or had some strong suspicions he was sharing with others at the church. And maybe that worried the real killer. Somebody clever enough to poison Wing the way he did, and pin it on Sissy with all that evidence, easily could’ve made Doddridge’s death look like a suicide.”

“And you think maybe the murderer will keep killing. Ronny Doddridge. Aubrey McGinty. Dolly Madison Sprowls, maybe?”

“It’s crossed my mind.”

She dismissed my fears by taking another enormous bite from her half of the sandwich.

“I’d think it would cross yours, too. You’re being followed. Your car windows have been—”

“And I’ve been slapped around and threatened. But this really looks like an honest-to-God suicide.”

“You’re awfully nonchalant about all this.”

“What I am is awfully hungry,” she said.

I let the subject drop and watched her chew. She was not only hungry. She was exhausted. She’d spent all morning trying to follow up on the Doddridge story, with little success. The police were still freezing her out over the ruckus her stories on the chief’s reorganization plan caused. I’m sure whatever information she was getting was coming from disgruntled officers far down the food chain, information that had to be checked and double-checked. “Any idea what the suicide note said?” I asked.

“I can’t confirm it yet,” she said, “but Doddridge apparently apologized to the congregation for not protecting Buddy Wing better.”

I wrapped my half of the sandwich and wedged it into my purse. I’d try to eat it later. “This is all getting so complicated.”

Aubrey took a long, noisy drag on her lemonade. “So, Maddy, tell me about that new sofa.”

Chapter 16

Thursday, June 22

On Tuesday, the county coroner ruled Ronny Doddridge’s death a suicide. On Wednesday, Aubrey came back from police headquarters with a copy of the suicide note. It was written directly to the Reverend Buddy Wing:

A powerful note. Unfortunately we could not run it word for word, not while the case was still open. And even though the coroner had rendered his expert judgment, the police would take their good time—six months or more—before officially proclaiming that Doddridge took his life without undue or illegal interference of another person or party. So for her Thursday story Aubrey had to paraphrase:

It was another good story. Having encountered Ronny Doddridge herself, on those two occasions, she was able to describe his appearance and mannerisms to a tee. She talked to his neighbors again about his daily habits, getting a measure of his friendliness. “He was something of a loner,” said the woman who lived across the street, “but when you waved at him he’d always wave back.”

Aubrey also talked to the eyebrow woman, who confirmed, off the record of course, that Doddridge, like herself, was indeed a secret smoker.

Aubrey also talked to Guthrie Gates.

Well, Gates had to talk to her, didn’t he? The security guard at his church had not only killed himself, he’d also pried open two old cans of worms: Buddy Wing’s murder and the rift between Buddy and Tim Bandicoot.

Aubrey interviewed Gates on the phone, long after I’d gone home for the day, so I have no way of knowing exactly what she asked him. But given his answers, she had clearly asked him what he thought Ronny Doddridge meant by “when the devils came back to get you.”

“We preach belief in a literal devil,” she quoted Gates as saying, “though I can’t say by the note whether Ronny was speaking literally or metaphorically. But there’s no doubt Pastor Wing’s murderer was possessed by the devil in some way. I only wish I’d known brother Ronny was hurting so.”

Before work on Thursday morning, I met Aubrey at Ike’s. We got our coffee and tea to go and walked up to the reading garden at the main library. We sat across from the pink metal monstrosity by the famed Cincinnati sculptor Donald Raintree Tubb, a blindfolded pig gleefully riding a bicycle made entirely of sausage links. “So, are we still buying the suicide note?” I asked.

“I think we are,” she said. “The handwriting comparisons and the motive all seem to add up.”

I sucked a tiny of taste of tea through the slit in the plastic lid on my paper cup. “Then assuming the note is legit—what exactly does it tell us?”

Aubrey had been staring at the pig on the bicycle. Now she turned her face toward me, the breeze off empty Central Avenue plastering her loose red hair across her eyes. “You read my story, right? When I asked Gates what he thought
when the devils came back to get you
meant, he immediately reduced it to one devil. But Ronny had said devils.”

“You think Ronny meant real devils?”

“Real human devils. Devils that came back—meaning they’d been there before.”

“Let me guess—the devils who’d been there before are Tim Bandicoot and his followers, the ones who pooh-poohed Buddy’s talking in tongues.”

“That would be my guess.”

“And you think Doddridge knew that for sure?”

“No way of knowing. But Ronny Doddridge wasn’t as dumb as he looked.”

No he wasn’t. Aubrey’s story on him had surprised me totally. Ronny Doddridge wasn’t just some poor sap in the church who needed a job. For fourteen years, he’d been a deputy sheriff in Mineral County, West Virginia. Six months after he was forced to resign for repeatedly drinking beer in his patrol car, Buddy Wing brought him to Hannawa as the Heaven Bound Cathedral’s first security guard. Ronny was the nephew of Buddy’s dead wife. But there was apparently more to it than family obligation. Buddy hired him just five months before the very public flap that sent Tim Bandicoot and two hundred members of his flock off to that abandoned Woolworth’s store on Lutheran Hill. Buddy Wing knew there was going to be trouble and wanted someone loyal, and maybe experienced with a gun, to watch his back.

Aubrey showed me her watch. It was almost ten. We left the bicycling pig and headed up the hill toward the
Herald-Union
. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Why would Doddridge kill himself if he was onto something? Wouldn’t he take what he knew to the police? Or Guthrie Gates? Or you? Why would he just scribble that cryptic little hint about devils coming back and then shoot himself in the head?”

“Overwrought with guilt?” she ventured.

“Not so overwrought to leave a big hint,” I said.

Aubrey put her arm around me, like I was a silly child. “You really don’t think he killed himself, do you?”

“I don’t know what I think,” I said. Then I promptly told her exactly what I thought: “The real killer has already framed Sissy James. But now you’re about to prove her innocent. That will mean an all-out investigation by a police department with egg on its face. So the killer kills again, preemptively pointing the police in the wrong direction, toward someone in Tim Bandicoot’s church. The killer has already scattered some new evidence around probably, just like he did with Sissy—probably.”

Aubrey laughed. “My oh my. Aren’t you the super sleuth.”

“You don’t think it’s possible?”

“I think it’s possible.”

We stopped at Central and North Smiley and waited for the
WALK
sign. I used the opportunity to slide out from under Aubrey’s arm. We were only a block from the paper and the last thing I wanted was for one of my many enemies in the newsroom to catch me being palsy-walsy with a reporter. To protect one’s image, one must be always vigilant.

We reached the paper and used the street entrance, something employees rarely do. We greeted Al Tosi, the day security man at the desk, and rode the elevator to the newsroom. “So what’s on your agenda?” I asked Aubrey before we went our separate ways.

Alec Tinker’s voice ambushed us. “Ladies!”

“Ladies?” Aubrey shrieked playfully. “Someone’s not reading their sexual harassment handbook.”

He pressed his palms together prayerfully and bowed apologetically.

“Or the religious practices handbook,” I added.

He told us that Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates were coming in at one, together, to discuss Aubrey’s investigation. “And you’re invited, too, Maddy.”

“Good gravy,” I said, “why am I invited?”

***

The meeting was held in Bob Averill’s office on the fifth floor. It’s a long, sterile office, huge round window at one end, display case filled with old Underwood typewriters at the other. The gray walls in between are lined with a century’s worth of important front pages: the Japanese surrender, men walking on the moon, the Kennedy assassination, the violent UAW strike of 1958 (which my Lawrence covered), the 1908 school fire that killed forty-two children, a couple dozen pages in all. Bob doesn’t have a desk, just a glass-top coffee table circled by comfortable leather chairs. The coffee table that afternoon held what it always holds: the most recent edition of the paper, neatly folded, and an aloe plant in a green ceramic bowl.

Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates were already sitting when Aubrey and I arrived. So was Tinker. So was Bob. We sat down quickly and nodded pleasantly to everyone.

I never felt so out of place in my life. Bob was wearing an expensive suit about the same shade as his walls. Tinker had worn one of his better suits for the occasion, dark blue with red pinstripes, meaning he knew that Gates and Bandicoot were coming in at least a day in advance, while only giving us three hours’ warning. The two evangelists, usually resplendent in white double-breasted suits with wide zig-zaggy neckties, were both dressed in charcoal. Aubrey, for her part, was wearing a snug pair of faded jeans and a sleeveless red blouse. I was wearing my absolutely worst-fitting pair of khakis and a T-shirt with a Canada goose on the front that I’d bought years ago on a vacation to Mackinac Island. Aubrey’s jeans won out over my goose as the focal point for the four important men in suits.

“I understand you have some concerns?” Bob said to Tim and Guthrie when our nodding was completed.

They grinned bravely at each other, and Guthrie said, “Yes, we do.”

Their concern, of course, was Aubrey’s upcoming series on the Buddy Wing murder. They were fearful—that’s the word Tim used,
fearful
—that Aubrey had mistakenly gotten the impression that the two congregations were unfriendly toward each other.

“The fact of the matter,” Tim said, “is that Guthrie and I have been brothers in the Lamb for many years. While some feathers were ruffled, years and years ago, that is all behind us now. Relations between our congregations could not be better.”

“Quite copacetic,” Guthrie added.

I quickly swallowed the giggle that was suddenly dancing on my tongue. Instead I made this horrible noise, as if I was blowing my nose without a handkerchief. It was that word
copacetic
. Imagine that old be-bop jazz word coming out of the mouth of Guthrie Gates. Back in my college days it was big word among the Meriwether Square crowd. Everything then was either “copacetic” or “most copacetic.”

“You okay?” Bob asked me.

“I’m fine,” I said, wishing I’d had the nerve to say everything was copacetic.

Tinker looked at Bob for permission, and then, apparently getting it through some telepathic process taught to the newspaper chain’s muckety mucks, reassured the two visitors that the
Herald-Union’s
intentions were not to stir up trouble between the two churches. “We can’t be too specific, as I’m sure you can appreciate,” he said, “but we have some evidence that Sissy James did not murder Buddy Wing. When we publish what we’ve found—if we publish—there’s been no final decision in that regard—our stories will pertain only to the murder.”

It was a cautiously worded bit of corporate boilerplate that Aubrey simply couldn’t let stand. “Of course, when a newspaper publishes any story, it’s our duty to put things in context,” she added.

Tim Bandicoot frowned sourly. “Context can mean a lot of things,” he said.

“We’d like whatever assurances you can give us that Miss McGinty won’t dredge up any more than’s necessary,” Guthrie added.

Bob shifted from his left buttock to his right. “We don’t dredge, gentlemen, we report.”

It was the appropriate thing for an editor-in-chief to say, of course, but dredge is what newspapers do, and should do.

Guthrie was repentant. “I shouldn’t have said dredge.”

Tim was not. “Your paper, Mr. Averill, has a history of treating religion like it belongs on the sports pages. Hallelujah City. All that stuff.”

Bob set himself square on both buttocks. “We did not coin that phrase, Mr. Bandicoot. That was that radio guy—Charlie Chimera.”

“You’ve certainly repeated it enough times,” Tim Bandicoot said.

Bob pawed the air. “Everybody’s repeated it—but the point is, the
Herald-Union
is not anti-religion.” He then explained our earlier coverage of the split between Tim and Buddy Wing. “Buddy was a very public figure, not only locally but nationally. And when a very public figure does very public things, like casting an assistant pastor out of his congregation during a live television broadcast, that is going to be reported.”

Bob had hit a nerve with Guthrie Gates. “Pastor Wing did not cast Tim out. He merely said that the gift of tongues was about to come over him and that all who might be offended should listen elsewhere.”

Tim Bandicoot leaned forward and clasped his hands together. He closed his eyes. But he did not pray. He growled slowly like a Doberman strapped into a muzzle. “Guthrie, I was never offended when Buddy spoke in tongues. We simply had a difference of opinion.”

Guthrie held up his hands and spread his fingers in surrender. “Sorry. I’ve gotten us off track.”

I can’t say if Tim was prepared to let the matter rest. But Aubrey sure wasn’t. She leaned back and crossed her legs like a man, wrapping her hands around her pointing knee. “It’s more than a difference of opinion, isn’t it? It’s a fundamental difference in belief. Buddy believed that speaking in tongues was proof of being baptized in the Holy Spirit. And those who didn’t, weren’t. That’s what you believe, too, isn’t it, Guthrie?”