Wednesday, June 28
As soon as I got to my desk Aubrey motioned for me to come to hers. I hurried across the newsroom, tea bag still soaking in my mug. “Can’t you wait until a woman’s awake?” I complained.
She wanted me to hear the message on her phone. She handed me the receiver and punched the replay button. The voice was precise and sweet in the phoniest way:
Aubrey…this is Annie Bandicoot. Something really important is going to happen Sunday at Tim’s church. And I thought you might want to be there. Services start at ten…bye-bye.
Aubrey put her hands behind her head and swiveled back and forth in her chair. With her elbows sticking out like that she looked like an angel ornament swinging from a Christmas tree. Her smile was absolutely Satanic. “What do you make of that?” she asked me.
“Assuming it was really Annie Bandicoot?”
“Yeah. Assuming that.”
“Then I’d say something important is going to happen. Something they want reported.”
“They? Or just Annie? Remember what she said: ‘I thought you might want to be there.’ I thought, not we thought.”
Dangling tea bag or no, I took a sip from my mug. “It’s probably innocent enough. But it does make you wonder why Annie made the call and not Tim, doesn’t it?”
“So many possibilities, Maddy: Tim is so distraught after his little shoving match with Guthrie Gates that wifey-poo has to do his dirty work. Or wifey-poo, tired of seeing her man muck things up, takes matters in her own hands. Or maybe the Bandicoots are in cahoots, going on the offensive together to cover their guilt.”
“Bandicoots in cahoots,” I said. “I like that.”
She ignored me. “Maybe that wasn’t Annie Bandicoot on the phone at all. Maybe that was someone from Guthrie’s church, wanting me to show up at Tim’s church, so Tim would see me and go off on me and look like a complete jerk, which I would dutifully include in my series.”
I had a possibility of my own: “Maybe somebody’s going to spike Tim’s water pitcher.”
Aubrey turned her wings back into arms and silently applauded my deductive powers. “Whatever’s going to happen, you and I, Dolly Madison Sprowls, are going to church Sunday.”
Friday, June 30
Eric finally came out of his funk and completed the computer search on Edward Tolchak, the neighbor who kept shooting out the Heaven Bound Cathedral’s parking lot lights. Unfortunately, as Aubrey already had surmised, the search came up with nothing useful. After getting out of jail for the third time, Tolchak had filed a civil suit against the Heaven Bound Cathedral. The cathedral settled out of court, removing two of the light poles, installing Venetian blinds on Tolchak’s windows, planting a row of blue spruce along his property line and paying him $25,000 for the mental anguish he’d suffered. I gave the findings to Aubrey.
Sunday, July 2
Sunday morning Aubrey and I drove to Lutheran Hill. So did the man in the red Taurus station wagon. We spotted him behind us shortly after Aubrey picked me up. “Do you think Annie Bandicoot left a message on his phone, too?” Aubrey asked. She was neither angry nor afraid. Not even anxious. She was enjoying all this.
When we reached the New Epiphany Temple and pulled into the gravel parking lot, the man in the station wagon made a quick turn onto a side street and parked. He was protecting his license plate number like it was the secret formula for Coca-Cola.
The old Woolworth’s store was filled to the gills. We found a pair of empty chairs near the back. Aubrey nudged me and pointed at the huge cross behind the pulpit. It was twinkling.
A quintet of musicians took their positions in the corner and started playing-two guitars, trumpet, drums and an electric piano. People started clapping in time. Many were rocking their shoulders and bobbing their heads. I noticed I was tapping my toes. Then Aubrey took a camera out of her purse and put it in her lap. “Good gravy,” I whispered, “you’re not going to take pictures, are you?”
“I was asked to come and cover an important event. Of course I’m going to take pictures.”
“You start snapping that thing during the service and they’ll descend on us like a plague of locusts.”
No sooner said, the back door swung wide and a muscle-bound man with a backwards baseball cap and a television camera on his shoulder slid inside. Behind him was Tish Kiddle. Aubrey hissed “television whore” loud enough for half the congregation to hear.
The thrones on the stage suddenly filled up with elders. A couple dozen people from the congregation filtered to the stage and sang this absolutely wild hymn that sounded an awful lot like the Isley’s Brothers’ Do You Love Me?
Then Tim and Annie Bandicoot appeared at the pulpit together. The congregation seemed to shrivel. Clearly this is not what usually happened at the temple’s Sunday morning service. Annie lovingly rubbed her husband’s shoulder and then stepped to the microphone. She said this: “Tim is going to talk to you, and I want you to know that what he is going to say, he has already said to me, and to our children. I want you to know that we love him and trust him and believe in him. And we believe in you.”
Then she said this: “Jesus said to the Pharisees, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.’ So should you decide to cast stones at my husband when this is finished, I will be standing at his side.”
Aubrey looked at me and mouthed that line from the Tammy Wynette song, Stand By Your Man.
It was clear where this whole thing was going. Jesus had said that cast-the-first-stone stuff to the Pharisees after they brought a woman to him charged with adultery, and reminded him that the punishment under the old laws of Moses was death by stoning.
Tim Bandicoot hugged his wife and stepped to the microphone. “I am guilty of the sin of adultery. And it was with a woman you all know. A woman who today sits in prison, for the murder of our beloved Buddy Wing.”
Aubrey finished scribbling the quote and then snapped a series of photographs.
Tim’s confession was filled with tears and whimpering and loud prayers peppered with scripture. There was plenty of crying in the audience, too. Every now and then someone would pop from their folding chair and implore him to “Go and sin no more”-the same thing Jesus said to the woman after he’d saved her from the Pharisees’ stones.
I must say that Tim Bandicoot’s agony looked genuine to me. And I have some experience with the agony of unfaithful men: Dale Marabout’s, when I found him on the floor with the kindergarten teacher; my husband Lawrence’s, when I found him in the garage with the secretary from the labor union. I could tell from Aubrey’s frozen smirk that she did not believe Tim Bandicoot’s contrition was for real.
But then he said this: “There are those who believe Sissy did not kill Pastor Wing. There are those who believe Sissy confessed to that terrible sin to protect me. Though I surely broke Buddy’s heart, I did not stop it from beating. I did not kill Buddy Wing.”
He started to cry again, and shake. Annie took him in her arms and they swayed like wind chimes. To get a better angle, Aubrey slid into the aisle and sank to her knees, clicking off more shots.
Tim gently pushed his wife away and, with arms stiffly anchored on his pulpit, directly addressed the long-legged reporter kneeling in the aisle. “I do not know if Sissy is innocent or guilty, Miss McGinty. But I will go to her prison cell, and I will beg that if she has not spoken the truth, she speaks it now.”
Tim and Annie left the stage. Aubrey tried to follow them into the hallway behind the stage, but a large black man in a brown suit stopped her. The musicians started playing and the choir started singing. The congregation clapped and danced and the tears poured.
Aubrey and I trotted out the door like the hyenas we were. Tish Kiddle and her cameraman were right behind us.
“That sneaky bitch,” Aubrey fumed as we hurried to her Escort.
I was not sure who she meant. “Tish Kiddle or Annie Bandicoot?”
She fumbled through her purse for her car keys. “Try to keep the objects of my disdain straight, Maddy. Tish is the whore. Annie is the sneaky bitch.”
“Does it really surprise you they invited Channel 21, too?”
“This is my story, Maddy.”
“I think the Bandicoots consider it their story,” I said.
Aubrey glowered at me-as if I was guilty of something. “It’s because of my digging that they’re in this spot. You’d think they’d respect that.”
“I don’t think protecting your scoop is very high on their list of worries.”
Aubrey mellowed. She giggled at her own arrogance. “It should be.”
We sped past the church. The red Taurus station wagon pulled from the side street and followed us.
I understood why Aubrey was livid. It was her story. She’d spent weeks researching the murder, wheedling information out of one reluctant source after another. For weeks she’d seen that fat, black Page One headline in her head:
Did Sissy really kill Buddy Wing?
Now Tish Kiddle would be breaking her story on tonight’s TV news.
I did all I could to comfort her. “They’ll lead with it tonight-unless there was some terrible accident on the interstate-but they won’t have any details, or any background. After tonight they’ll just be reporting what you’ve already reported.”
Aubrey fished through her purse for her cellphone and thumbed in a number. “How do those TV people live with themselves… Tinker? Sorry to call you at home on Sunday.”
There was no time to drive me home. We went straight to the paper and Aubrey spent the next five hours writing her story. And while she wrote, Tinker, who’d rushed to the newsroom in musty jogging shorts and a Cleveland Indians T-shirt, lorded over the weekend skeleton crew on the metro desk. The story would run across the top of Page One. Tim Bandicoot’s confession to adultery would be the main thrust of the story, but it would state very clearly in the second paragraph that the public admission came in the wake of an ongoing Herald-Union investigation into the murder of Buddy Wing. We were going to be scooped by the local TV news, but we would push, and push hard, whatever advantage we had. We would let our readers know, and not in a shy way, that while TV 21 simply stumbled into the story, we uncovered the story, that Tim Bandicoot was confessing for one reason and one reason only, because of the Herald-Union ’s dogged journalistic excellence.
Aubrey’s photos came out pretty good. Tinker chose one of Tim and Annie hugging. He told the make-up editor to blow it up big. And run it in color. And crop it tight, so every wrinkle of agony on Tim’s face showed, so the wedding ring on Annie’s hand showed. The headline on the story was plain and powerful:
Preacher confesses to affair with convicted murderess
While Aubrey was writing, and frantically trying to get her sources on the phone, including Guthrie Gates, Tinker dragged me off to the cafeteria. We shared a piece of stale carrot cake from the vending machine. He asked me for my impression of Tim Bandicoot’s confession, not once but five times. He was pumped up about the story but also worried. Originally Aubrey was supposed to continue her investigation for another month, and then take another two or three weeks to write her stories. The stories would be run by the paper’s lawyers and discussed ad nauseam in editorial meetings. The graphics people were going to design a special logo to go with the stories, a Bible with a dripping cross.
But now, thanks to Annie Bandicoot, Aubrey would not only have to start writing her stories right away, we’d have to start running them right away. It was going to be a crazy couple of weeks.
Just as Tinker and I were playfully fighting over the little sugar carrot on the cake, Bob Averill poked his head in the cafeteria. He pointed at Tinker and motioned for him to follow. To me he said, “Enjoy your snack.”
At six everybody gathered around the television in the conference room to watch the news, 21 at Six. Tish Kiddle, reporting live from the dark and empty church, had almost nothing: “Members of the New Epiphany Temple remain in utter shock tonight following the unexpected confession by the Rev. Tim Bandicoot that he’d had a long sexual relationship with Sissy James, the confessed murderer of Bandicoot’s old mentor, nationally known evangelist Buddy Wing.”
After weekend anchorwoman Jamie Stokes said, “Oh my,” and weekend anchorman Bill Callucci said, “What more can you tell us, Tish?” Tish said, “TV 21 has learned-and TV 21 is the first to report this-that new evidence may have surfaced suggesting that Sissy James may not be the real killer.”
Jamie Stokes asked Tish to, “Keep us posted.” To which Tish promised, “I’ll be working through the evening on this exclusive breaking story and I’ll have the very latest on 21 at Eleven.”
“We’ll look forward to it,” Bill Callucci said. Swiveling in his chair to take advantage of a new camera angle, he said, “Speaking of confessions, I must confess my weakness for blueberry pie.” It was his segue into TV 21’s coverage of the Bowenville Blueberry Festival.
When Aubrey finished writing her story, Tinker and Bob took her upstairs for another two hours of planning. It was eight o’clock before she came down, sticky with exhaustion. She apologized profusely for stranding me at the paper all day. We drove to Lipini’s for pizza and then at nine started for my house.
When I drive home at night I always take West Tuckman. It’s wide and well-lighted and the neighborhoods for the most part are safe. Aubrey that night took West Apple, which, although a much straighter shot across town, slices through some very iffy neighborhoods. It even intersects with infamous Morrow Street, where the hookers Aubrey wrote about do their business.
While her old Escort looked a lot worse than it drove, I was still nervous and checked the door locks I don’t know how many times. That got on Aubrey’s nerves. “Will you just relax?”
That’s about when the flashing blue lights appeared in the rear-view mirror and Aubrey hissed the f-word. She slowed down until the lights were right behind us, then pulled into an abandoned gas station. We were just two short, dark, rundown blocks from Morrow Street. “Be careful,” I said. “Two years ago some nut pretending to be a cop raped six women before he was caught.”
Aubrey adjusted her mirror and studied the car pulling in behind us. “Looks like the real deal,” she said.
“So did the rapist’s car,” I said.
“Will you just stop it, Maddy? I’ve been going through red lights since we left the paper.”
Aubrey was reacting calmly, though I did notice that she still had the car in gear, to speed off, I suppose, if it wasn’t a real police officer-not that a Ford Escort is actually capable of speeding off.
The officer was suddenly at Aubrey’s door, rapping on her window with his knuckles. She opened her window about three inches. The jibber-jabber of the police radio on his belt calmed me a little, but I still kept my hand on the door latch in case I had to go running into the night and hide in a dumpster or something. “Sorry to say you went through a couple of red lights, ma’am,” the officer said. He was young and chubby and friendly looking. “May I see your license and registration?”
Aubrey dug them out of her purse. The officer thanked her and took them back to his cruiser.
“I’ve been through this routine a billion times,” Aubrey said, finally turning off her engine. “He’ll come back in three minutes and say, ‘Ma’am, this isn’t the best of streets at night, and I know you were probably nervous. So I’m going to let it go. Take West Tuckman next time.’”
“Which you should have,” I said.
Fifteen minutes later we were still waiting and Aubrey was hissing the f-word again.
Another police car pulled in. Its lights were not blinking. The two officers conferred for a minute or two, then strolled side by side to Aubrey’s car. “Would you please step out, Miss McGinty?” the newly arrived officer said. “You too, ma’am.”
We got out. The friendly chubby officer gave Aubrey her license and registration and retreated to his car. We were alone with the new officer.
We recognized him immediately. It was 3rd District Commander Lionel Percy. He was not a tall man but he was muscular. He was wearing his hat but you could see around his temples that his head was shaved. His uniform was impeccable, as if he’d just taken it out of the dry-cleaning bag.
“How lucky can a man get,” he said, “the famous Aubrey McGinty running red lights in my district.”
“Let me guess,” Aubrey answered. “You’re going to put the fear of God in me.”
“It is good to fear God,” he said.
Aubrey smiled and tucked her fingers under her arms defiantly. “Especially when he’s in uniform?”
“Cute,” he said.
“And so are you,” she said, trumping him again.
I could see the frustration in Percy’s eyes. He’d undoubtedly been waiting for this chance to intimidate Aubrey for weeks. Her stories on the police reorganization plan, and then on his district’s prostitution problem, had caused him a lot of grief with the mayor and City Council. And now he had her trapped in an abandoned gas station, on a dark empty night, and lo-and-behold, she was giving back better than he was giving. He must have been going nuts inside.
Percy tried again. “You know Miss McGinty, I’ve been a police officer in this city longer than you’ve been alive-”
“Which ought to bring you pretty close to retirement age,” Aubrey said.
“-and I’ve suffered through my share of newspaper reporters. Squeaky clean white kids from the suburbs. For you, the inner city is just a place to play make-believe. Write about all the shitty things the degenerate city people do to each other. Prove your moral superiority. Make mama and daddy proud. Win a bunch of journalism awards you can roll up and diddle yourself with.”
“That’s pretty much why I do it,” Aubrey said.
“Write what you want, Miss McGinty. The mayor’s going to howl and the council’s going to squeal, and the chief’s going to salute and click his heels. But nothing’s going to happen. Lionel Percy is, and will remain, commander of the 3rd District. And you’ll be left dangling out there all alone, lots and lots of people mad at you.”
Aubrey slowly opened her car door and leaned on it. Even leaning she was taller than Lionel Percy. “And you won’t come riding to my rescue? How disappointing.”
I hurried around to my side of the car. Our doors slammed at the same time. Aubrey put the key in the ignition and closed her eyes. “Please start,” she said.
The Escort did start and we chugged away. “Now wasn’t that something,” Aubrey said coolly. Her long legs were shaking.