Monday, May 15
Aubrey was summoned to Bob Averill’s office as soon as she got to work Monday. She was up there for two hours. When she got off the elevator, she gave me a thumbs up. The paper was going to let her proceed with the story.
I wasn’t a bit surprised. Proving that Sissy James didn’t kill Buddy Wing would be a great story. It would be a nasty, tantalizing drama that would keep the city spellbound for months. Murder. Sex. Police ineptitude. Religious hypocrisy. It would be Hannawa’s O.J. story.
Aubrey and I sneaked out of the newsroom at four and walked down the hill to Ike’s Coffee Shop. Ike’s was the only remaining tenant in the eight-story Longacre Building, a beautiful old art nouveau palace that once housed many of the city’s most prestigious doctors and lawyers. The faded sign in the window of the empty storefront next to Ike’s had been announcing a major renovation of the building for at least a decade.
But Ike hangs on, selling lattes to-go to harried white office workers and mugs of regular coffee to the retired and under-employed blacks who like to linger at the little round tables. I buy my tea bags there, in bulk, not because I get a better price, but because Ike needs the money, and, well, I just like his company.
Ike was at the sink washing mugs when we came in. He sang out: “Morgue Mama!”
I wriggled my fingers at him. “Tea and a regular coffee, Ike.” We sat at the empty table by the cigarette machine.
Aubrey was surprised. “You let him call you that?”
“Ike has earned the right,” I said.
“I’m jealous-how has he done that?”
“Driving me home a hundred winter nights when my car wouldn’t start. Always making sure I’m having a good day.”
Ike brought our mugs. “Morgue Mama ever tell you why everybody calls me Ike?” he asked Aubrey. “Even though my real name is Leonard?”
Aubrey gave me a playful glower. “I’m afraid Mrs. Sprowls keeps lots of secrets from me.”
“Well-It’s because I was the only black man in Hannawa anybody knew who voted for Dwight D. Eisenhower.”
Aubrey looked at me for help.
“You’ll have to forgive Miss McGinty,” I said to Ike. “She is very, very young.” I leaned toward Aubrey and whispered. “Ike was Eisenhower’s nickname.”
Ike laughed and went back to his dirty mugs. Aubrey and I started making plans for her now-official investigation of the Buddy Wing murder.
“You don’t look too happy about Bob and Tinker giving you the go-ahead,” I said.
“Every word I write they’ll be perched on my shoulders like a couple of big-nosed parrots. Can’t say that! Awrrrak! Can’t say that! ”
“That’s the way big papers work,” I said. “It’s your reporting but their reputations.”
She sarcastically toasted me with her mug. “Well, just so you can sleep nights, I’m going to play by the rules.”
“Which are?”
“That I simply try to prove Sissy couldn’t have done it-which we’ve pretty much done already-and, if I can manage, get her to admit it on the record.”
“But not try to find the real killer?”
She imitated Bob Averill’s slow, dry Midwestern voice: “That is the police department’s responsibility.”
“And it is,” I said.
She returned to her own voice: “But they do want a series-five or six parts-so we can still do lots of snooping. Background on the atmosphere that led up to the murder. History of the church. Bandicoot’s split with Wing. The anger and the rivalry. How easy it would be for someone else to paint that cross. How the police rushed to judgment. Whatever we can put together to paint the big picture.”
I sipped my tea and waited for one of Ike’s regulars to rattle a pack of Kools out of the cigarette machine. “You still want this to be we? Even after I let the cat out of the bag?”
“It’s still we, Maddy. You, me and my wild, Asian-American sex toy.”
We laughed and sipped and ducked the cigarette smoke wiggling toward the ceiling.
The paper-rightfully-did not want Aubrey looking for the real murderer. But I knew Aubrey would keep looking. She not only wanted to free Sissy James, she wanted an arrest and a trial. She wanted a story that would go on for months. She was as interested in advancing her career as Bob Averill and Alec Tinker were about advancing theirs. The Herald-Union was not going to be her last stop. She had her eyes on the Washington Post or The New York Times. And why shouldn’t she?
“What happens,” I asked, “if we do stumble onto the real killer? Would you go to the police, like you did with the football coach at The Gazette?”
“I suppose.”
We passed on the free refills Ike offered us and started back. Central Avenue, pretty much empty all day, was filling up with rush hour traffic. “Did you tell Bob about your car windows?”
“Am I out of my mind?” she asked.
Sunday, May 21
Before Aubrey could pursue the Buddy Wing story full-time, she had to finish her series on the city’s street prostitutes. She worked day and night all week. I dug out all the old files I had on the subject, some going back to the twenties. Prostitution is not only the world’s oldest profession, it’s one of the world’s oldest newspaper stories.
On Sunday the first story of her series ran. “ WALKING THE WALK,” the headline across the top of Page One read, “ THERE’S NOTHING SEXY ABOUT THE SEX TRADE.”
Accompanying the story was a shadowy photo of a girl with chubby, naked legs leaning into a car window. Aubrey’s story was chilling:
HANNAWA -Keesha will party with a dozen people tonight, but she will have a lousy time.
That’s because Keesha is one of an estimated 50 to 60 women selling sex on Hannawa’s bleakest streets. Like Keesha, most of these women are not women at all, but teenage girls, some still attending high school. Most, like Keesha, are black.
“I ain’t doing this forever,” Keesha said minutes after exiting a dark green Ford Explorer, where she’d performed oral sex on a big-bellied white man.
SEE WALK PAGE A6
Tuesday, May 23
Aubrey leaned on the counter where I was sorting out a month’s worth of obituaries. She was smirking. “Maddy-you’ll never guess who’s descended into the dark, slimy world of corporate PR.”
I made sure my expression was as flat as an Ohio corn field. “Dale Marabout?”
Her smirk got even uglier. “I figured you already knew about it.”
“Of course I know about it.”
She leaned on the counter. Rested her chin on her knuckles. “I ran into him at the library last night. Working away at a little table in the corner like a Franciscan monk.”
“And he told you about the job, did he?”
“Only that he was doing a freelance project for a local company. He was pretty tight-lipped about it.”
“And you figured I’d fill in all the horrible details?”
“Well-yeah.”
I did not like Aubrey taking pleasure in what she considered Dale’s misfortune. Nor did I like her drilling me for information. “Dale and I have been friends for a long time,” I said. “You and I have been acquainted for five minutes. If Dale doesn’t want you to know more, then neither do I.”
The word acquainted stung her and I was glad it did. “Come on, Maddy-I’m happy for him,” she said.
I batted the air. “Poop! You’re just happy it isn’t you.”
“True enough,” she admitted. “I think I’d slit my wrists before I sank to writing PR.”
Good gravy, Aubrey made me angry that day. Angry at her and angry at myself. I was helplessly attracted to her sassiness and her tenacity, like a mosquito to a bug zapper, as they say. But I was also helplessly loyal to Dale. “Not if you had a family to support,” I growled. I gathered up the obits and headed for my desk. She knew enough not to follow.
I wasn’t about to tell Aubrey, but Dale never would have taken that freelance assignment if it hadn’t been for me. I’d learned about the job though the grapevine and knew it would be perfect for him. It was with a prominent corporation in town. It would pay big bucks and maybe lead to a full-time job. So I’d invited him to Speckley’s and told him about it.
Freelancing always gives reporters the heebie-jeebies-even unemployed ones-so I wasn’t surprised that his first reaction was to shake his head like an oscillating fan. “No-no-no-no, Maddy,” he said. “There’ll be no have-keyboard-will-travel stuff for this boy.”
I patted his nervous hands. “I admire your standards. I really do. And I admire the courage it took to walk away from the paper. You’ve got moxie out the wazoo. But if you’re anything like other reporters I know, you’ve also got bills out the wazoo.”
Dale hemmed and hawed through several cups of coffee. But in the end he agreed to put on a suit and tie and meet with the corporate honchos dangling that big, fat freelance job. They offered and he accepted.
I was happy for Dale. And pretty damned pleased with myself. So when Aubrey started smirking at me that morning in the morgue, I guess I got a little crusty. Later in the day I made amends by sharing a pack of stale Fig Newtons from the vending machine with her. Thank God she had the good sense not to bring up Dale’s freelance job again.
Wednesday, May 24
During a little mid-week pillow talk Aubrey learned that Eric was having a birthday on Sunday. Instead of taking him to the Olive Garden and a movie, she got the bug to throw a surprise birthday dinner for him. She not only wanted to bake a cake, she also wanted to make him a lasagna. I was astonished. “This is suddenly very domestic of you,” I said. We were on our phones grinning at each other across the newsroom. “You must be either pregnant or in love.”
She cradled the receiver under her chin and playfully gave me the finger with both hands. “Those are two things I will never be. I just thought a nice dinner with the three of us would be fun.”
“The three of us?”
“You can’t possibly think I could tackle cake and a lasagna by myself.”
“And here I thought it was because we’d become something of a family.”
Again she gave me the fingers. This time I gave them back.
So the secret birthday dinner for Eric was set: I’d go to her apartment early Sunday afternoon and help her make the lasagna and the cake and then when Eric showed up that evening, expecting Dominos pizza and sex, he’d get crepe paper, balloons, and Dolly Madison Sprowls in a pointy paper party hat.
Thursday, May 25
All week Aubrey worked the phones. All week people hung up on her.
The one person who did talk to her-and talk and talk-was the eyebrow woman. Having spilled the beans about Sissy’s child in Mingo Junction, she now freely rummaged through her brain for anything Aubrey might find useful. “And of course you know about Family Night,” she said matter-of-factly during one of their conversations.
“Family Night?” Aubrey asked.
Five minutes later Aubrey was standing in front of my desk, telling me everything that the eyebrow woman had told her. “It appears we have a few loose ends to tie around the Reverend Bandicoot’s neck,” she said.
Friday, May 26
Aubrey drove. The insurance company had replaced the windows in her old Escort two days after they were smashed, but there were still tiny shards of glass everywhere in the car. So all the way to Hannawa Falls, I sat in the back fishing out the glass between the seats, and Eric sat in front fishing them off the dashboard. It became a game, like seeing how many out-of-state license plates you can spot.
Hannawa Falls is a tidy blue-collar suburb just east of the city. It’s where many of the area’s autoworkers settled in the Fifties and Sixties. The endless acres of Cape Cods and ranches had been paid for with years of sacrifice. The owners of those tiny palaces were not about to allow the teeniest bit of sloth, by themselves or their neighbors, to eat into their hard-won equity. Every lawn was mowed. Every shrub was trimmed. We wound our way through a series of concrete streets named after deciduous trees until we arrived on the cul-de-sac where Tim Bandicoot lived. We parked and waited.
At six-fifteen, the garage door went up and a dark green minivan backed out. Four heads were visible through the windows: Tim Bandicoot, his wife, Annie, and their two sons. Aubrey waited until they reached the end of the street and then followed. We wound back through the deciduous tree streets pretty much as we’d come in, until we reached East Tuckman, the wide, four-lane street that runs through the suburb like a barbecue spit. The Bandicoots turned left and drove to Eastfield Centre, the gargantuan shopping strip that has sucked most of the retail out of downtown Hannawa.
They pulled into Arby’s. We parked across the street at a Burger King. They went inside to eat. Aubrey sent Eric inside for carryout. It took the Bandicoots forty minutes to eat. Then they drove to the book store next to the mall. “How boring is this,” Aubrey moaned as we parked five rows behind them. “Friday night at Borders.”
I told her I thought a family outing to Borders was actually a pretty nifty thing.
“Putt-Putt golf for the mind,” she said.
“To each his own,” I said. Aubrey was already heading for the door and Eric and I were walking like quick little penguins to catch up.
We lingered by the magazine racks while the Bandicoots browsed the tables of just-published non-fiction. After a few minutes they split up. Annie headed for the children’s section with the boys. Tim wandered into the history section.
We followed Tim, hiding by the books on World War II while he worked his way down the long aisle of Civil War books. When he opened a large gray-covered volume on Robert E. Lee, Aubrey slid beside him and turned sideways, resting her elbow on the top of the shelving. “Civil War buff,” she said. “How ironic.” She was referring, of course, to his famous split with Buddy Wing over speaking in tongues.
Tim raised his head only slightly. His eyes drifted from Aubrey to Eric to me-by now we were awkwardly hovering behind her-then back to the book. “I thought you hung out in the dairy aisle,” he said. He, of course, was referring to our ambush of the eyebrow woman at Artie’s supermarket.
“Wherever I can learn something,” Aubrey said.
Tim closed the big book on Robert E. Lee and cradled it across his chest. Psychological armor, I suppose. “I knew Sissy had a daughter, if that’s what you want to know.”
Aubrey curled her index finger under her thumb and flicked the portrait of Lee on the cover. “Do you consider the great Robert E. a hero or a traitor?”
He put the book back on the shelf. He was struggling to remain calm. And failing. “You’re insinuating that I knew Sissy was in Mingo Junction the night Buddy was poisoned.”
“Did you know?”
“I knew she always went there for holidays. And I suppose she told me she was going there that weekend. But then Buddy was killed and three days later she confessed.”
“And it didn’t occur to you that she was confessing-just perhaps-to protect you?”
“Why would that occur to me?”
Aubrey tried again. “Did it occur to you that maybe somebody else was setting Sissy up?”
Tim started pawing the books nervously. I figured any second now he was going to pull out the biggest coffee table volume he could find and beat Aubrey over the head with it. “The police were crawling all over my house and my church, trying to prove that I did it,” he hissed. “Then they found all that stuff at Sissy’s place, and she confessed. What was I supposed to think?”
Aubrey began nodding, sarcastically. “So-just so I’m clear on this-never once did you say to yourself, ‘You know, maybe I should tell the police she just might have been in Mingo Junction that Friday night.’”
Bandicoot bent over the bookshelves and pressed his forehead against his folded hands, as if praying on the back of a church pew. “You know for sure Sissy was in Mingo Junction?”
“I know for sure.”
He started to cry.
Aubrey only got tougher with him. “It’s funny you didn’t tell the police about Sissy’s possible alibi. A woman you’d been sleeping with, for what, four years? But maybe it was just sex with you. Sex that was getting stale. Maybe you just figured, she confessed, good riddance, that’s the end of that.”
“I did not think that.”
“Maybe you were just afraid that if Sissy was cleared, the police would focus on you again.”
Tim Bandicoot peeked at Aubrey through his folded hands. “I did not kill him.”
Aubrey leaned on the shelves just like him, their shoulders touching, best friends having a heart-to-heart. “Of course you didn’t. It was a Friday night. Family Night. You were having fast food with Annie and your boys. Seeing a Disney movie or something.”
This, of course, is why we’d followed the Bandicoots to Borders-to confront him about Family Night. The eyebrow woman had told Aubrey that, unlike the Heaven Bound Cathedral, Bandicoot’s new church did not hold services on Friday nights. Friday night at the New Epiphany Temple was Family Night. “A time,” he regularly told his flock, “for mommies and daddies and their children to heal the week-day wounds of secular strife, and take the Living Lord out for supper and some G-rated fun.”
“I gather you told the police about Family Night,” Aubrey said.
“They asked me what I was doing that night and I told them.”
“Did they ask you about Sissy?”
“They asked me about a number of people in my congregation.”
“Were they aware of your affair?”
“They were aware.”
“Did they ask if you knew where Sissy was that night?”
He fed a bent knuckle into his quivering mouth and bit down. “I know I should have told them about Sissy’s girl in Mingo.”
“Should have but couldn’t,” Aubrey said without sympathy. “Because that Family Night was different than most-”
His blanched face jerked sideways, the bent knuckle ripping into the side of his mouth like a fishhook.
“-Because that was Father amp; Son Night at the Gund Arena in Cleveland, where a bus load of men and boys from the New Epiphany Temple saw the Cavaliers squeak by the New York Knicks, 107 to 104. Wives stayed home that Friday night, didn’t they? And home alone is not much of an alibi, is it?”
“My Annie did not kill Buddy.” It was the loudest, most tortured whisper I’d ever heard.
Aubrey repeated herself: “Home alone is not much of an alibi.”
Tim spun around, his back digging into the spines of the books. “You are so full of shit,” he growled. He sounded just like that possessed little girl in The Exorcist.
Aubrey smiled. “And you are so full of guilt. You had to choose between betraying your lover and protecting your wife. Assuming she needs protecting, something I’m sure you still don’t know. No wonder you were drawn to that book about Robert E. Lee.”
Wasn’t Aubrey something-on the spur of the moment using that book on Robert E. Lee to drill deep into his tortured soul. Lee, if you remember your Civil War history, was forced to choose between the country he loved and the state he loved. When Buddy Wing was murdered, Tim Bandicoot had to choose between his wife and his mistress. Lee chose Virginia. Bandicoot chose Annie. Or so it seemed.
“What do you want me to do now?” Bandicoot asked. His eyes were red. His cheeks were shiny. He was shaking.
Aubrey shrugged her shoulders like some old Italian bocce ball player. “I’m going to see to it that Sissy goes free. What you do is up to you. Thanks for the interview, reverend.”
Aubrey walked away and Eric and I followed. I figured we’d be going to a restaurant somewhere, to assess what we’d learned, like we always did. Instead she led Eric and me to the coffee shop right there in the bookstore. While we were standing in line to order, we saw Tim Bandicoot herding his family across the parking lot. “A Family Night to remember,” Aubrey said.
We spent a good two hours there, sipping our cappuccinos and munching on biscotti. Eric kept going for computer magazines to read while Aubrey and I listened to the folk singer. He was so loud we could only discuss the story between songs.
“So, what do we make of Tim Bandicoot now?” I asked.
Aubrey was propping up her chin with her knuckles. Her eyes were half closed. I couldn’t tell if she was bored by the music, or enjoying it. “He wasn’t exactly the same cool and cocky cucumber who filled us full of Krispy Kremes, was he?”
The singer launched into a Beatles’ medley: Eleanor Rigby followed by Blackbird followed by Fool on the Hill and Hey Jude. It went on forever. I was one of the three or four who applauded. “I gather you weren’t moved by his tears.”
“When people cry for the right reasons I’m moved.”
I knew what Aubrey meant. It wasn’t remorse that made Tim Bandicoot cry and shake like that. It was fear. “You really think he’s protecting his wife?”
She answered right through On a Jet Plane: “A lot of these women-behind-the-throne types are real ballbusters. Let’s say Annie Bandicoot didn’t give a damn that her Timmy boy was screwing Sissy The Bimbo-as long as he wasn’t screwing her-but she was worried about his congregation finding out. Worried about Buddy Wing and their enemies back at the Heaven Bound Cathedral finding out. Maybe she was afraid Buddy already knew.”
My head was swimming. Not from Aubrey’s analysis. From the cappuccino. I’d been sipping my Darjeeling tea all day and the last thing I needed at nine o’clock at night was another strong dose of caffeine. “So she poisoned Buddy Wing and framed Sissy to protect her husband’s ministry? You think that’s possible?”
Aubrey lifted her cup with both hands and took a slow, thoughtful sip. “We’ve got to learn more about this Annie Bandicoot, don’t you think?”
“Well-I do know a little bit already.”
Aubrey squinted at me over her cup. “Been busy with your old files, Maddy?”
I made a joke of it but I could see she was not happy with my snooping on my own. “Sometimes they call out to me at night.”
“And what did they have to say about our little Annie?”
I told her what I’d found: that she’d grown up in the Heaven Bound Cathedral; that she’d won the citywide spelling bee when she was in the eighth grade and had been in the National Honor Society in high school; that she’d attended Hemphill College, dropping out in her second year to marry the church’s youth pastor, Tim Bandicoot. “Her name and picture have been in the paper a hundred times over the years,” I said, “serving on committees, hosting ecumenical lunches, taking food and second-hand clothes to poor churches in Appalachia, that sort of thing.”
Aubrey was not impressed. “Nothing important then?”
“Deciding what’s important is your job, dear.”
When we left Borders it was already dark. Eric hadn’t bought any of the magazines he’d read. I couldn’t stop humming Eleanor Rigby. About a mile from downtown Hannawa Aubrey started twisting her rear-view mirror. “There’s that damned red station wagon,” she said.
“Red station wagon?” I asked.
“Don’t freak,” she said, “but some dickwad’s been following me.”
Eric and I twisted and looked out the back window. There was indeed a red car of some description behind us, but it was too far back and the night traffic was too heavy for us to tell if it was a station wagon, let alone following us. “How do you know it’s the same one all the time?” I asked.
Aubrey squinted at me in disbelief. “Nobody drives station wagons anymore. So when you keep seeing a red one slithering up behind you-”
“You don’t think maybe you’re a little paranoid?”
She did not appreciate my skepticism. “In case you’ve forgotten, these are brand-new windows we’re looking out.”
Eric apparently got a good look at the car. “Ford Taurus. Late Nineties.”
Aubrey was encouraged. At least he believed her. “Bubbly shaped, right?”
“Yeah,” he said, “Tauruses are kind of bubbly shaped I guess.”
“So you think the same people who smashed your windows are now following you?” I asked. “Either the pimps or the cops or the Christians?”
If Aubrey was frightened, it wasn’t affecting her ready sarcasm. “A Taurus station wagon rules out the pimps, I think-even if it is a red one.”
“So it’s down to cops or Christians?”
She looked at me. Her cheeks were suddenly pale and her eyes rabbit-like. “Let’s hope it’s cops. Cops I can handle.”
We drove downtown, turning left onto North Bidwell. A block from the Herald-Union parking deck the red Taurus disappeared.