Sunday, April 2
The next day I worked on my tomato and pepper plants. It’s an annual ritual that always leaves me hating myself. The process actually starts in September when I take four or five of my best-looking green peppers and a couple of my fatter tomatoes and rip them open for the seeds. I spread the seeds out on pieces of newspaper and let them dry. Then I roll the papers up and put a rubber bands around them and write TOMATOES on one and PEPPERS on the other.
Then the first week of April I plant the seeds in a tray and put them on a card table by the window in my bedroom that faces south, so they get a full day of sun. I keep the trays watered and watch the tiny sprouts pop through the potting soil. They come in thick as grass. When they get so big, I pluck out the scrawny ones, so the healthier ones have plenty of elbow room. I water them and talk to them and when they’re three or four inches high they shrivel up and die. Then Memorial Day weekend, I drive to Biliczky’s Garden Center and buy a half-flat of tomato plants and a half-flat of pepper plants, and plant the damn things in my garden. The rabbits whittle the leaves off three-quarters of them, but the rest survive. I get enough peppers to cut into my summer salads and enough tomatoes to get my fill of BLTs. Right after Labor Day I pick a few of each and rip them open for the seeds. Spread them out on newspaper to dry.
Monday, April 3
Monday morning I got on the elevator with Nanette Beane, the religion editor. She was cradling another cactus for her desk. She already had a dozen of them, some of them two feet tall. The newsroom joke is that they thrive on Nanette’s dry prose. Instead of making my usual beeline to the morgue, I meandered through metro to Aubrey’s desk.
Aubrey was busy putting a human face on the half-naked female corpse found over the weekend in the parking lot of an abandoned factory on Morrow Street. Morrow runs parallel with the interstate, in the southern end of the 3rd District. There are lots of abandoned factory buildings there. They find lots of bodies there.
“Prostitute?” I asked. The female bodies were almost always prostitutes, the male bodies almost always drug dealers.
She gave me an of-course-she-was shrug while looking for her coffee mug among the clutter. “Mother with three little kids, too. She had their pictures in her purse. Among the needles and condoms, and the wad of lottery tickets.”
“You want me to pull any files for you?” I asked.
“Eric’s already on it,” she said. She took a gulp from her mug-I could tell from her expression that the coffee was cold. “Just stay on him, Maddy. He’s got the attention span of a snowflake in Honolulu.”
I squinted toward the morgue. Eric was at his computer, eyes six inches from the screen, arched hands attacking his keyboard like tap-dancing tarantulas. “He looks sufficiently motivated,” I said.
She knew what I meant. “Don’t even go there-he’s the world’s biggest geek.”
“A geek in heat,” I said.
She dismissed me with a long “Puh-leeze” and another gulp of cold coffee.
I circled through the morgue to hang up my coat and get my mug, and then went to the cafeteria to fix my first dose of Darjeeling tea. When I returned Doreen Poole was waiting for me at my desk. “I need some stuff on the mayors’ wives,” she said.
“The mayor has more than one wife? Now that’s a story.”
Doreen started nibbling at her lower lip. I love to piss her off. And it’s not just because she’s the one who started the Morgue Mama thing. It’s the way she floats through her day like a soggy cloud, oblivious to all the parades she’s raining on. “The wives of past mayors,” she said. “I’m thinking of doing a story about how their role has changed over the years.”
“Thinking of doing a story?” I asked. This is the part of my job I’ve always hated. Reporters are always thinking of doing a story on something. What it means is that they don’t have anything important to write about at the moment, so they try to pull some flimsy feature story out of thin air. They’ll have Eric or me work for hours finding stuff about the story they’re thinking of writing. Then something important does happen on their beat and they’re off on that and all our work was for nothing. “Let me guess, Doreen,” I said. “You saw that documentary on A amp;E last night about the presidents’ wives and you thought it might be interesting to localize it.”
“I think it would be interesting.”
I fished the tea bag out of my mug. At home I always add a couple squirts of skimmed milk and honey to my Darjeeling tea. At work I drink it straight. Darjeeling is one of the famous black teas from northern India, grown in the shadows of Mt. Everest, which has always been my favorite mountain. When reporters come to the morgue begging for my files on this or that, I want them to go away feeling they’ve just climbed Everest. “My guess is that the lives of mayors’ wives haven’t changed much over the years,” I said. “They slowly turn into alcoholics waiting for their husbands to come home at night.”
I told Doreen to make me a list of some specific mayors’ wives and I’d see what I could find. After she threw back her head and stormed off, I threw my teabag in the trash and went to work finding everything we had on Tim Bandicoot, his wife Annie, and his rival, Guthrie Gates.
Friday, April 7
Aubrey’s story on the dead prostitute was terrific. It turned out she’d been an outstanding basketball player in high school. The sports department had even run a feature on her. “For all her physical gifts it’s her heart that puts her head and shoulders above the rest,” her coach said at the time. Aubrey re-ran that old quote from the coach and added this new one: “If she hadn’t gotten pregnant and dropped out, she could have gotten a full-ride from any number of colleges. Now she’s just another dead girl from the inner city.”
The rest of the week Aubrey concentrated on her investigation of the 3rd District. She got several officers, some retired and some still on the job, to talk off the record about Commander Lionel Percy. She compiled all kinds of crime figures, contrasting the 3rd to other districts in the city. Eric and I pulled together all the old stories on past corruption we could find. By Thursday she’d interviewed Chief Polceznec and Mayor Flynn-neither of whom had much of anything to say-as well as several members of City Council and a number of self-appointed community leaders-all of whom had plenty to say.
By Friday afternoon, Aubrey’s story was pretty much finished except for an interview with Lionel Percy himself. He called her back at six-thirty and told her she had exactly one minute to ask her “worthless questions.” So she started rattling off various facts and accusations. He answered, “Same old tired shit” to every one of them. Before hanging up he said this: “If those dumbfucks on City Council think they can do a better job cleaning up the 3rd, let them gather up their shit shovels and come on down.”
Aubrey put the quotes in her story and sent it to the desk, knowing they’d never get past Dale Marabout.
Which they didn’t. Quotes like that wouldn’t get by any copy editor on any newspaper. So Dale told her to kill the quotes and paraphrase, the tried-and-true trick for circumventing profanity. When Aubrey refused to paraphrase, Dale rewrote the story himself, which sent Aubrey straight to Tinker.
People in the newsroom still debate whether Aubrey intentionally set up a confrontation between Tinker and Dale. I can go either way. One thing was sure, Aubrey knew Tinker’s mind better than the rest of us. Tinker told Dale to put the quotes back in and dash the bad words, s-t, dumbf--s.
Dale shouted, “You’ve got to be kidding!”
Tinker shouted back that he wasn’t: “Lionel Percy had the opportunity to answer our questions any way he chose. Readers have a right to know how he chose.”
Dale filibustered about the Herald-Union being a family paper, about our never using language like that before, not even with the appropriate dashes.
Tinker threw back his head and shared his disbelief with the fluorescent lights. “This is the twenty-first century, Marabout. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about those words anymore.”
“Then why not print them without the dashes?” Dale wondered. Even the sports guys were gathering around the metro desk now.
Tinker continued to commiserate with the lights. You just knew he was wondering why on earth he’d accepted the transfer from our paper in Baton Rouge. In his three years as managing editor down there, he’d not only stopped the paper’s horrible slide in circulation, he’d helped the paper win a Pulitzer Prize. He’d done all the usual things papers do when panic sets in-he redesigned the paper to look like USA Today, created trendy new sections to appeal to people’s active lifestyles, and put pictures of the paper’s columnists on the sides of buses. But the biggest thing he did was spice up the reporting. The Business Week feature on him recounted a pep talk he gave reporters one afternoon: He stood on his desk and told them to start writing like the novelists they all really wanted to be. “Treat the truth just like it’s fiction,” he was quoted as saying.
Tinker wasn’t up on his desk now, but he was joyously giving the same sort of speech. “From now on,” he said, “when profanity is pertinent to a story, we dash it and run it.”
Dale, to his credit, didn’t back off. “And how is it pertinent here, Tinker? Everybody knows cops have garbage mouths. All you’re trying to do is sell papers.”
Tinker’s head lowered as slowly as my automatic garage door. “And you’re not trying to sell papers, Marabout? I’m not so happy to hear that.”
Well, that’s how it went. Dale lost the argument and on Saturday the story ran with the dashes. Dale called me at home on Sunday. He tried to sound carefree and chatty, but I knew he was worried. “People do need to know what kind of bastard Lionel Percy is,” he admitted, “and maybe Aubrey’s story will do some good. But she’s going to pay for it. She’s made one of their own look bad. They’ll close ranks, freeze her out for a couple of months until it looks like she’s sloughing off, then feed her bad information on some big story to make her look incompetent.”
“She’s hard as nails,” I said.
That made him laugh. “You used to tell me I was hard as nails. Now I’m just another worn-out lump on the copy desk.”
It was the first sexual innuendo between us in years-if you want to call anything that blatant an innuendo. I let it go by. “You’re a good copy editor,” I said.
I spent the rest of the day kicking myself for that good copy editor remark. What a horrible thing to say. It was like praising some old geezer architect for the log cabin he was building out of Popsicle sticks at the rest home. At least I knew he was probably kicking himself for his hard as nails crack. We’d been lovers once. But Father Time and that damned kindergarten teacher had put an end to that. Now we were friends. That was enough.
Saturday, April 15
Letters to the editor started pouring in on Monday. By fifty to one they lambasted us for sinking to such a new low. The girls in circulation were busy all day with people calling to cancel their subscriptions. At Tuesday night’s City Council meeting, several of the backbenchers used language they wouldn’t have dared using in public before, presumably in the hope of finally being quoted in the paper. On Wednesday, Charlie Chimera, afternoon drive-time host on WFLO, ranted all four of his hours about what he repeatedly called the Herald-Union’ s, “disgusting descent into the murky mire of irresponsibility.” Every caller agreed with him.
Our circulation started climbing back up on Thursday.
Finally it was Saturday again and Aubrey and I were on our way to see Tim Bandicoot.
At first we discussed the weather-the first thing all Ohioans discuss when they crawl into a car-and then why Tim Bandicoot would agree to talk to us about Sissy James. “It sure can’t be for the free publicity,” I said. “Sissy’s name all over the front page could destroy him.”
“I’m the enemy,” Aubrey said. “He wants to take my measure.”
“Take your measure? Somebody’s been watching too many old movies.”
She knew I was joking. She also knew I was taking her down a few pegs. “Then how about this?” she asked. “He knows Sissy will be all over the front page with or without his cooperation. So he might as well appear helpful.”
“ Appear being the key word?”
She repeated my question as a declarative sentence. “Appear being the key word.”
“Which raises all sorts of possibilities?”
“Which raises all sorts of possibilities.”
Tim Bandicoot’s New Day Epiphany Temple was located east of downtown, on Lutheran Hill, at the corner of Cleveland and Cather, an old commercial district that once served the city’s German enclave. By the Fifties those Germans had been absorbed by other ethnic groups and other neighborhoods. Today Lutheran Hill is populated by South Koreans, Pakistanis, poor blacks and even poorer Appalachian whites. Three-quarters of the storefronts are empty.
The temple was housed in an old dime store, a single-story orange brick building sandwiched between two used car lots. The fat red letters that once spelled W-O-O-L-W-O-R-T-H’S across the front of the building were long gone, but you could still see their dirty silhouettes.
Aubrey found a parking spot in front just big enough for her Escort. We checked twice to make sure the doors were locked and went inside. What a difference from the Heaven Bound Cathedral. The New Day Epiphany Temple was a single room. The floor was covered with peel-and-stick tile. The walls were covered with cheap maple paneling. The lights were on but nobody was home.
We stood by the door for a few minutes, wondering what to do, then walked down the rows of metal folding chairs to the stage at the back of the room. The stage was carpeted with red shag. There was a modest pulpit up front and a row of ugly, throne-like chairs across the back. The monstrous cross on the wall was wrapped with hundreds of miniature Christmas lights. “You suppose they’re the twinkly kind?” Aubrey asked.
“Of course they’re the twinkly kind,” I said. We each chose a throne and sat.
Tim Bandicoot arrived maybe five minutes later. He came through the front door, three tall Styrofoam cups of coffee balanced on a box of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. “Comfortable, aren’t they?” he called out when he spotted us in those ugly chairs.
I felt like a royal fool and started to get up. But Bandicoot motioned for me to stay put. He came up the center aisle with the coffee and doughnuts, snaring a pair of folding chairs as he went. He set the coffee and doughnuts on one and himself on the other. And so our visit began, Aubrey and I on our thrones, Tim Bandicoot on a folding chair, debating between creme sticks, glazed crullers, and cinnamon twists.
I don’t know what Aubrey expected, but I expected Tim Bandicoot to be some kind of icky egomaniac. I figured that, more than likely, he was the real murderer. I figured that after he’d gotten all the sex and mindless adoration he wanted from Sissy James, he set her up to save his own neck. And now here we were having doughnuts and coffee with this nice, down-to-earth young man. Maybe under that pleasant facade he really was icky and egomaniacal, and maybe even the real murderer, but I felt surprisingly comfortable that morning, sipping coffee, nibbling on a cruller, looking into those chocolate-brown cow eyes of his.
When we’d gone to see Guthrie Gates, Aubrey got right to the skinny: Did he think Sissy did it? This morning was different. She let Tim Bandicoot go on and on about his growing congregation and his plans to build a new temple right there in that rundown neighborhood, with a day care center, soup kitchen, and food bank for the city’s poor. He also talked about building his electronic church. Currently his services were only broadcast on the local community-access channel, but he was determined to be on a regular local cable channel within a year and on cable nationally within five years. He had plans for saving millions of souls in Africa and China and the former Soviet Republics.
By the time Aubrey asked him about Sissy James, we’d eaten half the doughnuts in the box. “Did you really love Sissy?” she asked. “Do you still love her?”
He was clearly embarrassed. And clearly nervous. “I did not love her the way I love my wife,” he said. “I let my flesh take over.” He searched the box for the plainest doughnut he could find. “I’ve already admitted all this to my wife.”
“Has she forgiven you?” asked Aubrey.
“I did not ask her for forgiveness. I want her to be disappointed in me for the rest of my life. I’m weak. I’m a sinner.”
Aubrey took a doughnut oozing raspberry. “And your congregation? Do they know how weak and sinful you are?”
“A few. I suppose they all will after you’re done with me.”
Tim Bandicoot clearly was trying to manipulate Aubrey-make her feel guilty if he could manage it, at least a little sympathetic if he couldn’t-but Aubrey wasn’t falling into that trap. “We went to see Sissy at Marysville,” she said.
“I heard.”
Aubrey had her doughnut clenched in her teeth while she dug in her purse for her notebook. “I get the impression Sissy loves both you and the Lord about the same.”
When she couldn’t find a pen, Bandicoot gave her the Bic from his shirt pocket. “I hope that isn’t the case,” he said.
What a nifty little Kabuki dance that was. By pulling out her notebook at that very touchy moment, Aubrey was openly challenging his rectitude. She was telling him that the questions were going to get really tough now, and that from now on everything would be on the record, that anything he said would be judged in the court of public opinion, and maybe even a court of law. And Bandicoot, by handing her his Bic the way he did? Well, you didn’t have to be a theologian to interpret a Jesus-like act like that.
“There are those who don’t think Sissy did it,” Aubrey said.
Bandicoot answered slowly, watching her scribble his quotes as he talked. “There are those who think she didn’t, those who think she did. There are those who think I put her up to it. There are those who think I did it myself, and framed her. There are those who think somebody else did it.”
Aubrey tapped the Bic on her nose. “Who do you think did it? There was a lot of physical evidence supporting Sissy’s confession.”
“I don’t want to believe she did it. But I don’t know.”
“How about somebody like Guthrie Gates?”
“I absolutely do not think Guthrie did it. He loved Buddy too much.”
“Interesting. You’re absolutely sure your rival didn’t kill Buddy, but not so sure about the woman you were screwing?”
If Tim Bandicoot was going to pop his cork and beat us to death with a folding chair, that was the question that would do it. He just smiled sadly. “Sissy has a lot of problems. I’m sure you know all about that stuff.”
Aubrey nodded as sadly as Bandicoot smiled. “How about you? Did you love Buddy too much to kill him?”
“I did love him. I just didn’t agree with some of his-”
He couldn’t find the right word. Aubrey could: “Theatrics?”
“I wouldn’t call them theatrics. He truly believed in those things. I didn’t.”
“You’re putting a pretty mild spin on it, aren’t you? Your break with the Heaven Bound Cathedral was pretty nasty. And very public.”
Bandicoot took several slow sips of coffee. His chocolate eyes, for the first time, focused squarely on Aubrey’s blue eyes. “It was your paper that made it very public. But I could have handled it better. I caused a lot of pain.”
Aubrey now turned to the murder itself, wondering how someone could have moved through the Heaven Bound Cathedral unnoticed, filling Buddy Wing’s water pitcher with poisoned water, painting a poisonous cross on his old family Bible. “Sissy told police she pulled her coat collar up around her ears and walked right in. Did her dirty business and walked right out. Given what you know about the Heaven Bound Cathedral, do you think that’s possible?”
Bandicoot shrugged. “I suppose anything’s possible.”
“The police talked to a lot of people who were there that night. Nobody saw her.”
“I’ve read that.”
“But that doesn’t prove she wasn’t there.”
“I guess not.”
“Nor does her saying she was there prove that she was.”
“I guess that’s right.”
“Now let me ask you this,” Aubrey said. “Could anybody else from your flock-including yourself-have walked around the cathedral without wearing a disguise?”
“No more than Satan could have.”
“How about with a disguise?”
“Satan maybe. I doubt anyone else.”
The Krispy Kreme box was empty when we left Bandicoot’s storefront church. Aubrey’s car was still out front. “You know,” she said as we pulled away, “we never should’ve pigged out on those doughnuts.”
“Don’t I know it,” I said. “We’ll have to fast for a week.”
Aubrey U-turned through an abandoned Sinclair station. “Screw the calories. Think about who gave us those doughnuts. A man who, maybe, poisoned Buddy Wing twice. Maddy-we have got to be more careful.”
Even after all those Krispy Kremes Aubrey wanted to go to Speckley’s for lunch. The place is as busy Saturday mornings as it is weekdays, so we had to wait in line. Aubrey bought a Herald-Union from the box outside and read it standing up. I got a menu from the counter and looked for something light that might counteract any slow-acting poison. When we finally got a table-in the smoking section-I ritually ordered the meat loaf sandwich and au gratin potatoes as usual. Aubrey got a house salad and tomato soup.
I started our debriefing session: “Tim Bandicoot was nice enough, wasn’t he?”
“Too nice.”
“Think so? Other than the doughnuts I don’t think he spread it on too thick.”
My appraisal angered her. “These TV preachers manipulate people for a living. They get perfectly sane people to jump up and down and roll around on the floor and then hand over the grocery money. And when they get caught with some bimbo in a motel room? They simply trot out their God’s already forgiven me-won’t you? shtick and everything’s hunky-dory until the next time they get caught. Remember Jimmy Swaggert? ‘I have sinned! I have sinned!’ I think we just got Swaggert-ed, Maddy.”
I wasn’t so sure. Tim Bandicoot had seemed sincere to me. “He told us he didn’t want forgiveness,” I said.
“Shtick. He gave me his Bic for christsake. What was that all about?”
“You needed a pen?”
“That was my shtick. I’ve got a purse full of pens.”
The waitress brought our food. Aubrey used her little finger and thumb to fish out the curls of raw onion from her salad. She deposited them in the ash tray. “Did you hear what he said when I told him we’d been to visit Sissy at Marysville? ‘I heard.’ How did he hear? Who told him?”
“Sissy?”
“Of course, Sissy.”
“So they’re still communicating.”
Aubrey filled her mouth with Romaine lettuce. “So he’s still manipulating.”
Maybe she was right. Maybe Tim Bandicoot was the icky egomaniacal murderer I thought going in, before the Krispy Kremes, the chocolate-brown cow eyes and that big dose of contrition. “So where do we go from here?”
“Shopping.”