Morgue Mama (19 page)

Chapter 20

Tuesday, July 11

I went to bed Monday absolutely certain I’d call in sick the next day. Aubrey’s series on the Buddy Wing murder was starting on Wednesday and that meant Tuesday would be frantic, like the day before a space shuttle launch or a military invasion. There would be a million last-minute changes. There would be unavoidable arguments and ugly fits of egomania. All day long the twin demons of anticipation and dread would be going at each other like a couple of barnyard roosters. Yet the second my eyes popped open, I knew I’d not only be going in, I’d be going in early and staying late. I didn’t want to miss a thing.

When I got to the paper Aubrey was already at her desk. Tinker was already in his office. I collected my mug and headed for the cafeteria. Eric was already there, drinking Mountain Dews with a couple of the boys from sports. I took my tea back to the morgue and started marking up the paper. I couldn’t keep my eyes off Aubrey. Her hair, not washed for a day or two, was pulled back into a ponytail. Her knees were propped against her desk and her keyboard was on her lap. She’d type a bit, then think a bit, and then yawn and take a sip of coffee, and then check her watch.

At noon I went to the cafeteria and stared at the vending machines for a while, coming pretty close to buying one of those dreadful ham and cheese sandwiches wedged in the slot like a warped piece of drywall. I went to Ike’s instead. “Morgue Mama, what’s wrong with you today?” he asked when I walked in. “You look like you’re going to corkscrew yourself right out of your pantaloons.”

“Aubrey’s series on Buddy Wing starts tomorrow,” I said. He’d already poured water for my tea and I pointed to a huge peanut butter cookie in the dessert case.

“From everything you’ve told me, it’ll all go fine,” he said.

“It’s what I haven’t told you that worries me,” I said.

Ike handed me the cookie and waved off my money. “Why you always keeping secrets from me, Maddy?”

In the afternoon I stayed as busy as I could. Occasionally Aubrey would look at me and pretend she was pulling out her hair. I’d just nod and we’d exchange a tired smile.

Shortly after five, I saw her hang her purse on her shoulder and head for the elevator. I grabbed my purse and followed. I slipped in just as the door was closing. “Sorry about lunch,” she said.

I watched her punch the parking deck button. “Going home?” I asked.

“Shopping,” she said.

“For anything in particular?”

“Tranquillity. But I’ll end up buying shoes.”

And so Aubrey and I drove to the mall in Brinkley, in my Dodge Shadow. The shops were already filled with clothes for fall and winter. I didn’t buy a thing. Aubrey found a sexy pair of pink mules on the clearance table at Payless. I dropped her off at the paper at seven-thirty. “Go home and relax,” I said.

She squeezed my arm and slid out. Before slamming the door she bent down and wiggled her fingers. I wiggled back. I watched her go inside. We’d been gone all that time and not once did either of us mention her Buddy Wing stories. What a relief that was.

***

At home I tried to eat a tuna fish sandwich and tried to watch TV. I washed my face and brushed my teeth and got into a baggy pair of pajamas. By now Wednesday’s front page was ready to go on the press. Unless something big broke, the press would start rolling precisely at midnight.

At eleven the phone rang. It was Tinker. “It’s really necessary that I be there?” I asked.

He just said, “Maddy,” the slow, stern way my father used to say “Maddy” when I tried to buck my chores or listened to my radio too late at night.

I drove back to the paper.

Except for a sprinkling of copy editors in metro and sports, the newsroom was empty. I went to Tinker’s office but he wasn’t there. So I got my mug and headed for the cafeteria. The last thing I needed at a quarter to midnight was a hot mug of Darjeeling tea. But I made some.

I slowly sipped my way back to the newsroom, my pinkies sticking out from my mug like tiny airplane wings. I was standing in the no-man’s-land between the morgue and sports when the elevator doors parted and Aubrey stepped out. As bad as she looked all day, she looked even worse now. Her hair was hanging like broomstraw from a Cleveland Indians ballcap. She was wearing a baggy tee shirt and even baggier sweatpants. She also was wearing the new pink mules. She walked straight for me. “Tinker called you in, too?”

I sipped and nodded.

“Christ—I wasn’t asleep five minutes.”

“That’s five minutes more than I had. Any idea what he wants?”

Her hands were tucked under her armpits. She was twisting nervously. “Some question about my story—I can’t believe he called you in, too.”

“I wish he hadn’t.”

We stood there, Aubrey twisting, me sipping. Finally Tinker popped out of the elevator. Another man, middle-aged and bald, was with him. They walked straight to Aubrey’s desk on the fringe of the metro department. It was a minute before midnight but both were wearing business suits. Tinker motioned for us to join them.

Tinker introduced the other man. “Aubrey, Maddy, this is Stan Craddock, his firm does legal work for the paper.”

Aubrey pulled back her hand after one short nibble of a shake. “So there’s a legal problem with my story?”

“Unfortunately,” Tinker said. “That’s why I wanted Maddy here. She was with you most of the time.” He asked Aubrey to call up her story for Wednesday.

She sat at her desk and clicked on her monitor. “It’s still running tomorrow, isn’t it?”

Said Tinker, “That’s why we’re here at midnight.”

Aubrey typed in her security code. The monitor’s sky blue screen filled with boxes. She called up her story. Aubrey’s back immediately flattened against her chair, as if she’d been struck in the chest by an invisible fist. She had seen the story’s byline:

Her eyes went quickly to the story’s first paragraph. So did ours. It was a straightforward, hard news lead, the kind veteran police reporters like Dale Marabout can write in their sleep. It was still in the computer format reporters write in—ragged right, an unflattering sans serif type font:

Aubrey stopped reading. She pressed her hands together, as if to pray, and then rubbed her nose. Her eyes slowly lifted toward me.

“It was your lies,” I said. I was cowering behind my mug like it was one of those long shields the Crusaders carried. “The first lie made me curious. The second lie made me suspicious. The third convinced me.”

Aubrey slumped in her chair and wrapped her arms around her waist. “What kind of nonsense have you been telling people?”

I ignored her silly effort to throw the suspicion onto me. “Lie number one was that gift certificate you used to buy that jacket at Old Navy, after we made our first visit to the Heaven Bound Cathedral.”

Aubrey rolled her eyes, and made sure Tinker and Stan Craddock could see them roll. “Maddy, I explained all that.”

“Yes you did. After I confronted you about it.”

She bristled, just a tiny bit. “After you snooped into my private life.”

“I told you then, Aubrey. I don’t snoop. I get intrigued.”

“I told you the truth.”

“Yes you did. The old files I looked at bore that out. Your sister had been sexually molested for years by your stepfather—I’m betting you were, too—and after she took him to court, and after he was acquitted, she took her own life. I can only imagine what kind of guilt you felt. You told the social workers and the police nothing had ever happened to you, that you’d never seen nor heard your stepfather do anything to your sister. Were you afraid? Had he threatened you? Of course you’ve tried to keep your sister alive.”

Aubrey was furious. “Psycho-babble bullshit, Maddy. You’ve got me in a lot of trouble over your stupid psycho-babble bullshit.”

Another man joined us. It was Scotty Grant, chief detective in the Hannawa Police Department’s homicide unit. There was no need for an introduction. Aubrey knew who he was.

“At the time,” I continued, “I figured you were looking into the Buddy Wing murder because of your mistrust of the legal system. Your sympathy for its victims. I was very impressed.”

Aubrey’s eyes drifted back to her computer screen. She scrolled down. We all read:

“Lie number two came on Easter Sunday,” I said. “Right here at the paper. You and Eric were in the cafeteria going over your files. Remember when I asked why you had two copies of the church directory? You told me you went back for an older one—because former members of the church were more likely to be suspects than present ones. Quick thinking. But I’d already seen that the two directories had the same date on the cover.”

Aubrey artfully put a look of mild shock on her face. “That can’t be right.”

I plowed ahead. “One possibility is that someone at the cathedral mistakenly gave you a current directory when you asked for an older one. Nobody at the cathedral remembers such a visit, by the way.”

“I did go back—”

“The other possibility, of course, is that you already had a church directory when you asked Guthrie Gates for the first one, during that visit with me.”

Aubrey changed her expression to one of confusion, as if I was some demented old duck. “So what point are you trying to make here, Maddy?”

“That you lied about having two identical directories when you didn’t need to lie,” I said. “You could have said, ‘I figured since you and Eric were helping we’d need two,’ or ‘I found another one in the morgue files you gave me,’ or ‘Don’t you remember? Guthrie gave us two.’ I would have believed any of that. But you intentionally lied. Because you’d had that other directory for months. You panicked.”

Aubrey’s eyes were drifting. I turned to see what she was looking at. Two uniformed police officers were leaning against the wall in sports. “You’re completely wrong about this,” she insisted hollowly.

I felt my own eyes tearing up. “I spent the next two weeks trying not to think the worst—I really did—but unfortunately for you I’m one of those miserable old buttinskys who just can’t say no to her curiosities. Take that day we were watching the police tapes at my house. Matter-of-factly you said procaine was used only in hospitals. But that’s not true. Paramedics carry all sorts of emergency medicines, including procaine. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that three weeks before Buddy Wing was poisoned you decided to write a story on Rush City’s EMS unit. You rode with them for four days and wrote a wonderful story about how they rushed around the county saving kids who drank Drano and old men having heart attacks. Could it be that once you’d decided on Buddy Wing as your victim, and then chose poor Sissy James as your suspect, you researched how she might do it? You learned she worked at a hospital, and knowing as much about poisons as you do, you decided on procaine as your poison of choice. But as the big day got closer, you began to worry. Would the procaine be enough to kill him? Especially in the cruel, clever way you planned to administer it? So you added the lily of the valley.”

Aubrey smirked, thinking she’d found something to discredit my analysis, I suppose. “Knowing as much about posions as I do? Where in that feeble mind of yours did you come up with that?”

I smirked right back at her. “This is no time for false modesty, dear. You know plenty about poisons. But before we get to that, let me tell you about lie number three. It was the most serendipitous thing. You remember that day in May when Dale Marabout popped his cork and quit? I felt just awful about it. And after stewing about it all week I went to Bob Averill, to explain all the stress Dale had been under. Your name came up and before I knew it I was telling him about my suspicions. He thought I was crazy. But after I told him about the church directories and your EMS story in
The Gazette
, and the way you found the real killer in the football coach case, and how you covered the squirrel poisoning at Kent—well.”