by C. R. Corwin
“What happened to me ain’t important,” Sissy told Aubrey. Her head was bent over her knees now, and her arms wrapped around her waist, as if she had a bad case of menstrual cramps. “All that matters is that Satan got the best of me and I killed Pastor Wing.”
If I’d been the one asking the questions, I would have been rocking Sissy in my arms. But Aubrey pulled back, making sure there wasn’t a whit of compassion in her voice. “I don’t think you killed Buddy Wing,” she said. “And I don’t think Tim Bandicoot killed him either, though I’m sure that’s what you think.”
Sissy almost screamed it: “I killed Pastor Wing. Why don’t anybody believe that?”
Aubrey put her notebook back in her purse. She hadn’t written a word. “Well, the police believe it. The judge believes it. So you’ve got them on your side. But me, I’m not on your side. I’m going back to Hannawa and I’m going to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Tim Bandicoot didn’t do it, even if he’s the world’s biggest asshole in every other way. And then I’ll come back and we’ll have another talk.”
Sissy James walked out of the room before another word could be said. Her arms were still wrapped around her waist. She was crying.
Aubrey and I drove into Marysville and had an early lunch in a restaurant that looked a lot like Speckley’s. The specialty of this place was fried bologna sandwiches. We were both intrigued. The bologna was a half-inch thick, smothered in cheddar cheese. The bun was soaked with grease. They were absolutely wonderful. After lunch we checked out the antique shops. I bought an old Lassie novel for Joyce, my niece back in LaFargeville. Like every collie owner I ever met, Joyce collects anything Lassie. Then we started for home.
In the hilly part of Richland County traffic stopped. Both lanes north, both lanes south, thousands of idling cars and trucks spewing blue exhaust. It was raining so hard you’d of thought we were in a car wash. We couldn’t see a thing. Aubrey punched the radio buttons for the right song to soothe her growing anxiety. Finally she squealed “Shit!” and jumped out of the car. She disappeared up the berm.
I was antsy, too. Not so much about the traffic jam-sooner or later we’d start moving again-but about the lie Aubrey told me that day we went to see Guthrie Gates at the cathedral. One of the first lessons new reporters at the Herald-Union learn is that you don’t bullshit Morgue Mama. Heap all the bullshit you want on your sources or on the editors. On Morgue Mama, not even a teaspoonful. But now there I was, being bullshitted by Aubrey McGinty and afraid to confront her about it. I was simply furious with myself.
Aubrey was gone for a half hour. She jumped into the car soaking wet. “Remember Maddy,” she said even before the door was closed, “pneumonia-virus.”
She took her cellphone from her purse and punched in a flurry of numbers with her little finger. Somebody picked up right away. “Metro,” she said. And so I learned about the accident up ahead at the same time the desk did. A skidding semi full of Florida grapefruit had been broadsided by another semi hauling steel I-beams. Bouncing, flying, rolling grapefruit had caused six separate accidents. Nobody was dead, but several had been seriously injured, among them 25th District congresswoman Betty Zuduski-Lowell. “Her nose is broken and she’s screaming at the top of her lungs that she’s a member of the U.S. Congress,” Aubrey told the desk. “There must be fifty or sixty people standing in the rain eating grapefruit-God, I wish I had a camera.”
It was exciting to see Aubrey in action like that. She was thorough, detached. For some reason it gave me the courage to confront her about the lie. As soon as she was off the phone I dove in. “Forgive me,” I said, “but I have to ask you about that fleece jacket you bought at Old Navy.”
She reached for the radio knob, unconcerned and probably not listening to what I was saying. I softly pushed her fingers away. “You told me the gift certificate was from your sister. Your sister is dead.”
Her eyes froze on me. “You been snooping, Maddy?”
“I don’t snoop,” I said. “I get intrigued.”
She slid down and rested the back of her head on the seat. “It’s all there, isn’t it. In print forever and ever. Everybody’s dark secrets. I’m sorry I lied to you.”
“It’s not that you lied to me,” I said. “I’m concerned why you lied to yourself like that.”
She started to cry, the way Sissy James had cried when Aubrey pressed her. “I just miss her, Maddy.”
We didn’t discuss it any further. There was no need to. I knew all that I needed to know from the stories in the files. She knew all she needed to know from having lived it. The poor lamb. It was a horrible thing:
Aubrey’s older sister had committed suicide fifteen years before, when she was thirteen and Aubrey just nine. She’d sprinkled an entire bottle of her mother’s antidepressants inside a peanut butter and banana sandwich. She made that sandwich three months after their stepfather was tried and acquitted for repeatedly having sex with her. Was Aubrey abused like that, too? Probably. I did find her mother’s divorce listed in the courthouse news, eight months after the suicide. If Aubrey was molested, it ended when she was ten.
So, of course Aubrey gave herself a Christmas gift from her sister every year. She missed her sister. She needed to keep her alive any way she could. And of course she lied to me, if you really want to consider it a lie. Why would you explain something like that to a stranger? I was angry at myself for bringing it up. Angry for snooping. Yet it seemed to explain why she wanted to help Sissy James. Why she went looking for the truth back in Rush City when the football coach was murdered. Cops screw up. Courts send innocent people to jail. Courts set guilty people free. Somebody has to care.
Chapter 7
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.”
