The Cross Kisses Back mm-1

by C. R. Corwin

  Dale started twirling his felt-tip through his fingers like a majorette’s baton. He was perplexed. “Didn’t she think solving two almost identical cases would make somebody suspicious?”

  I watched his felt-tip fly across the aisle and land under a table of old women who’d already gotten their food. He looked at the tangle of support-hosed legs and winced. I gave him a ballpoint from my purse. “That’s why she killed Buddy Wing before she got to Hannawa,” I said. “How could she be a suspect if the victim was dead several months before she arrived in town?”

  Dale clicked my pen and sheepishly wrote STEP THREE. “After she’s got her schmucks in a row, she starts on the fun part, figuring out how to kill her victim and how to plant the evidence.”

  ***

  By the time I reached Mansfield snowflakes as big as nickels were freezing on the pavement. I slowed to thirty-five. I wanted a mug of tea to calm my nerves but there was no way I was going to drive with one hand while I poured it. I wrapped my hands around the top of the steering wheel and plowed on. My Thermos was right there on the seat beside me. It might as well have been a thousand miles away.

  ***

  His hypothesis-in-progress finished and folded, and tucked in his shirt pocket, Dale Marabout set out to prove Aubrey killed Buddy Wing.

  His first stop was Tinker’s office. He learned that on the last Saturday in August, Tinker had driven to Rush City, and over a quick lunch at Wendy’s promised Aubrey a job after the first of year.

  Two weeks later Aubrey checked into a Quality Inn just two miles up the road from the Heaven Bound Cathedral. She stayed Friday and Saturday night. Over the next three months she would spend five more weekends at that motel, putting nearly $1,500 on her Visa and Discover cards.

  At the time of Dale’s investigation there was no way to prove Aubrey had spent those weekends planning Buddy Wing’s murder. Yes, we could surmise that she was learning her away around the Heaven Bound Cathedral, selecting Sissy as her patsy, and all the rest, but there wasn’t one whit of proof she was doing anything more evil those weekends than shopping for shoes at the Brinkley mall.

  Later, of course, we’d learn everything about those weekends from her written confession, which, by the way, she typed out herself on a borrowed laptop in the city jail.

  From that confession, we learned she’d already chosen Buddy Wing as her victim by the time Tinker promised her a job: “I also was considering WFLO’s Charlie Chimera. He was both hated and loved. His show was a lightening rod for nutballs. He had three angry ex-wives. But Buddy Wing ultimately had the most going for him. He was famous nationally as well as locally. He was on TV all the time-so the whole world could watch him die. He had enemies that could be exploited. And in the final analysis, he was infinitely more evil than that idiot on the radio.”

  As soon as Tinker promised her a job, she started to investigate Buddy Wing in earnest. She wrote: “I taped his broadcasts and watched them over and over. He always kissed his Bible approximately halfway through his sermons. Dropping dead at his pulpit would be very dramatic and make the police think his murder was for religious purposes.”

  During her first weekend in Hannawa, Aubrey attended services at the Heaven Bound Cathedral. She walked the back hallways and saw the list of Kent State television students in the bulletin. On one of her visits she appropriated a copy of the church directory. “I knew from my first visit to the cathedral poisoning Buddy Wing was going to be easy,” Aubrey wrote in her confession. “Security was almost non-existent. There were faceless college students running around. I’d only been out of school for two years. All I needed was a Kent State sweatshirt and an eager look in my eyes.”

  She also spent several hours that weekend at the city library’s main downtown branch, reading microfiche copies of the Herald-Union’ s many stories on Buddy Wing and his controversial church.

  So Aubrey learned early on about the nasty split between Buddy and Tim Bandicoot over speaking in tongues, and the rivalry it spawned between Tim and Guthrie Gates. “My first inclination was to make Gates look like the killer,” she wrote. “I could easily plant some kind of evidence to get him arrested. Then during his trial, or maybe after he was already in prison, I could prove he didn’t do it.”

  But that all changed, Aubrey confessed, during her second weekend in Hannawa. Early Saturday morning she drove to Tim Bandicoot’s house in Hannawa Falls. She parked at end of the cul-de-sac, just as she did that Friday night in May when we followed him to Borders with his family. When Tim left his house, Aubrey followed him first to his church on Lutheran Hill and then to the rundown house in the city where Sissy James lived. She saw Tim and Sissy kiss at the door. She hid in the overgrown shrubbery and watched through the bedroom window as they pulled each other’s clothes off. “I could see immediately that Sissy James would make a much better killer than Guthrie Gates,” she wrote. “Sex always makes for a better story.”

  Aubrey spent the next two weeks researching Sissy’s life. She learned Sissy was born in Mingo Junction and still had relatives in that God-forsaken river town. She learned Sissy had been arrested several times for prostitution in her teens and twenties. She learned Sissy was one of the two hundred members of the Heaven Bound Cathedral who followed Tim to Lutheran Hill. She learned Sissy worked as a food-service aide at Hannawa General Hospital. She learned Sissy was one of those unfortunate women addicted to crafts.

  “Sissy’s hobby was perfect,” Aubrey wrote. “She had a spare bedroom filled with jars of paint and little brushes. I couldn’t believe my luck.”

  Aubrey then went to work picking the poisons she’d use. She’d taken that course in criminal toxicology and still had the textbook. She looked for a poison that Sissy theoretically could steal from the hospital. She took a liking to the heart drug procaine. She leafed through an EMS training manual at the library and confirmed that paramedics carried it in their drug boxes. She called the EMS director in Rush City. “They were thrilled to death I wanted to ride with them and do a story,” she wrote.

  Everything was falling into place for Aubrey regarding Sissy James. Sissy had a motive: she was Tim Bandicoot’s lover and one of those driven from Buddy Wing’s flock; as a hospital worker she had access to drugs; as a maker of worthless cutsie-wootsie crafts, she had the manual skills necessary to paint that poisonous cross on Buddy Wing’s old family Bible. Sissy had the opportunity: as the other woman, she would be home alone on Family Night.

  Wrote Aubrey: “I was convinced the police would immediately suspect Tim Bandicoot of the murder. They’d quickly discover he had an alibi for Friday night. But they’d discover just as quickly that he had a lover on the side, an emotionally unstable proselyte with a questionable past. They’d go to her house and find all the evidence they needed.”

  During our lunch at Speckley’s, Dale and I had assumed Aubrey chose the “real killer” in advance. But that’s not what she did at all.

  Wrote Aubrey: “I realized it would be too chancy picking my second suspect right away. Tim Bandicoot was the perfect choice-sleazeball evangelist sets up his crazy girlfriend and all that-but if I wanted to have Buddy Wing drop over dead on live TV, which I really did want, then it couldn’t be Tim. He would have that Family Night alibi. So would Annie, a perfect choice otherwise. Through my research I’d found several other potential suspects. But how could I be sure the one I chose wouldn’t produce an iron-clad alibi? So I decided to put off my decision on the second suspect until I was working at the Herald-Union , when I could investigate them all thoroughly.”

  ***

  I got off the interstate at Mt. Gilead and pulled into The Leaf. It’s a wonderful little restaurant right off the exit ramp that serves breakfast 24 hours a day. I had a quick half-mug of tea in the car then went inside for a three-cheese omelet. Every waitress in the place reminded me of Sissy James-bone-tired working-class women dedicated to survival no matter how much crap the world throws at them.

  Sissy has survived more than
most, hasn’t she? With Buddy Wing’s help she crawled out of the sewer of prostitution, only to be enslaved in an illicit love affair with a weak-willed married man-Tim Bandicoot-an equally odorous predicament. Then Aubrey McGinty chose her as Schmuck Number One. Given her excellent training in victimhood, Sissy immediately confessed to a murder she did not commit, which I’m sure delighted Aubrey to no end.

  Now with my help, and Dale Marabout’s help, and ironically Aubrey’s help, Sissy James is free of the sewer again. After Aubrey’s confession, the city prosecutor hurried back into court. The judge dismissed the charges against her and she was freed. What happened to Sissy was tragic. But all in all, things have worked out well for her: Nine months in Marysville for stupidity is a lot better than life without parole for murder.

  After returning to Hannawa last fall, Sissy returned to the Heaven Bound Cathedral. “Our sister has come home,” Guthrie Gates announced from the pulpit during his televised Friday night service. She was applauded and cheered.

  Guthrie, by the way, has put Sissy in charge of the cathedral’s new outreach ministry to the city’s prostitutes. Guthrie told me he got the idea from Aubrey’s series on the women who work along Morrow Street.

  Keesha, the prostitute Aubrey used in her lead, is not one of the women Sissy is trying to save. Keesha is dead.

  I left my waitress a $5 tip and coaxed my Dodge Shadow back onto the interstate.

  ***

  During the first week of November, Aubrey rode with the Rush City paramedics and stole two bottles of procaine and a syringe from their drug box. She went to a crafts supply store and bought several little bottles of gold paint, and some tiny brushes. She practiced painting crosses on an old Bible she bought for a dollar at a yard sale. She timed how long it would take the paint to dry. “I knew procaine was a lethal drug,” she wrote in her confession, “but I began to worry whether Buddy would ingest enough to kill him. So I looked in my textbook for another drug, as a backup. In the appendix, right below the procaine entry, I found lily of the valley. I discovered that even the water in a vase can be fatal if swallowed. I knew from my visits to the Heaven Bound Cathedral that Elaine Albert always put a pitcher of water on the pulpit. It was perfect. I found a greenhouse in Akron that grew lily of valley and I bought five live plants. I soaked the stems and leaves until I had a very lethal quart of water.”

  Thanksgiving night Aubrey drove to Hannawa and checked into the Quality Inn. She spent all day Friday in her motel room watching television. At six, she put on one of her old Kent State sweatshirts and drove to the Heaven Bound Cathedral with her duffel bag of tricks. She walked right in. She went to the kitchenette in the nursery and filled a water pitcher with the tainted lily of valley water. When Buddy Wing left his office for the make-up room, she scooted in. She closed the door and painted the cross on his Bible. She took the Bible and the water and Buddy’s notes to the pulpit. She drove back to the motel and watched Buddy Wing die. At midnight she drove into Hannawa and planted her evidence in Sissy’s garbage cans.

  In March, Aubrey came to work at the Herald-Union. She immediately sucked me into her madness. For weeks I followed her all over Hannawa. I thought I was helping her prove that Sissy James didn’t kill Buddy Wing.

  What I was doing, of course, was helping Aubrey find the perfect person to set up-that poor soul whom Dale Marabout aptly labeled on his napkin hypothesis as her second schmuck.

  By the end of June it was clear to me just who that schmuck was going to be. It was going to be Annie Bandicoot.

  Annie Bandicoot not only had a basketful of motives for poisoning Buddy Wing-revenge for his kicking Tim out of his church, getting Sissy James out the picture, clearing the way for the Bandicoots to become the king and queen of Hallelujah City-she also had the opportunity. Friday night was Family Night at the New Epiphany Temple. But that particular Friday night was Father and Son Night. While Tim and his sons were in Cleveland watching the Cavaliers beat the Knicks, Annie was waiting at home.

  Aubrey, of course, owed that particular piece of information to Sandra Leigh Swain, the make-up woman we’d jokingly called the eyebrow woman. What a fruitful source she turned out to be: she not only told Aubrey that Annie didn’t have an alibi, she told her that Sissy did! “Prior to my conversations with Sandra Swain, I did not know about Sissy’s Thanksgiving weekend trip to Mingo Junction,” Aubrey wrote in her confession. “I was thrilled. I knew I could prove Sissy’s innocence.”

  Another thing Aubrey didn’t know beforehand was that Sissy had a daughter. Maybe I’m letting my own heart get the best of me, but I think that revelation played heavily on Aubrey’s conscience. So, at the same time she was coldly looking for a second person to frame, she was frantically trying to free Sissy for all the right reasons.

  ***

  I’d been back on the interstate a good fifteen minutes when flashing blue lights suddenly filled my rear-view mirror. It was daylight. I had hundreds of cars and trucks for company. But those lights sent a shiver from the back of my eye sockets to the tip of my tailbone. It’s something how fear stays with you, isn’t it? I’ve been away from LaFargeville for fifty years but every time I see a pasture of cows I feel the hoof of that old Guernsey breaking my toes again, the way it did that afternoon long ago when my father was teaching me to milk. And now those flashing lights were filling me with the same panic I felt that rainy night in July when Aubrey followed me home from Ike’s.

  Of course I knew it wasn’t the Taurus Man following me that night. The Taurus Man was Dale Marabout. And I knew it wasn’t any of the other suspects Aubrey had concocted. But I did fear it might be Lionel Percy again. It had only been four nights since he’d scared the bejesus out of us on West Apple, and he did not seem like the kind of man who could be satisfied scaring someone just once. You don’t know how relieved I was to hear the pathetic beep of Aubrey’s little Escort.

  Which is funny. During all those months I suspected Aubrey of killing Buddy Wing, I never once feared for my own life. Maybe I was just too full of my own cleverness. My own deceitfulness. Maybe I was so fond of the good Aubrey that I couldn’t believe the bad Aubrey would hurt me.

  Which was ridiculous. Looking back now with a clear head, I doubt Aubrey would have hesitated two seconds if she’d discovered I was onto her. She’d already sacrificed two decent men and a lot of squirrels for her brilliant career, hadn’t she? Why wouldn’t she sacrifice a squirrelly old librarian?

  Anyway, the terror sparked by those blinking blue lights quickly fizzled. I pulled over. A baby-faced State Highway Patrol officer walked up to my open window. “Your turn signal’s been blinking for many many miles, ma’am,” he said.

  ***

  Dale Marabout’s secret investigation did not always go as smoothly as I’d hoped. My first scare, of course, came that Tuesday in late May when Aubrey started drilling me in the morgue about Dale’s new freelance job. When she’d surprised him at the library the night before-where he was busy researching the poisons she’d used to kill Buddy Wing, by the way-he’d told her he was working on a project for a local company. Aubrey assumed he’d “descended into the dark, slimy world of corporate PR,” as she put it. I let her go right on thinking that. The next scare came a week later in Meri when Eric Chen’s chivalry got the best of him. Luckily Eric was humiliated into silence. Then just two weeks after that, when police found Ronny Doddridge’s body, I was sure Aubrey had killed him. I can’t tell you how relieved I was when the coroner ruled it a suicide. That poor, big-eared lamb was dead but at least I wasn’t responsible for it.

  My fears returned right after the Fourth of July when the windows on Tish Kiddle’s Lexus were smashed. No mystery who did the smashing. “What’s Aubrey going to do if Tish stays on the story?” I worried to Dale.

  “There’s not a chance in hell Tish Kiddle will stay on the story,” he said. He was right. Forty-eight hours later Tish Kiddle was broadcasting from sunny Orlando.

  TV 21’s report on Tim Bandicoot’s pu
blic confession about his affair with Sissy James did bring matters to a head, however. Tinker told Aubrey to start writing her series and Bob Averill put in a call to Detective Scotty Grant. Bob Averill made me go to police headquarters with him. “Sorry we didn’t tell you about this earlier,” Bob told Scotty Grant. “We weren’t sure of our facts yet and we didn’t want to get you folks involved in a crazy goose-chase.”

  Grant was surprisingly grateful. “Nobody likes chasing gooses,” he said.

  So it came down to that final Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. While Aubrey was imprisoned in the newsroom racing to meet her deadline, Dale Marabout was at home racing to meet his, turning a dozen reporter’s notebooks full of scribbled notes into a story.

  By now Scotty Grant had advised Tim and Annie Bandicoot of the situation. They were prayerful and cooperative. Officers searched their property. Under the driver’s seat of Annie’s Saturn they found a Bible covered with hand-painted gold crosses. Under the passenger’s seat they found a curly auburn wig and pair of red-framed lollipop glasses big enough to disguise even the most familiar face. It still wasn’t enough to arrest Aubrey, however. Dale’s evidence was largely circumstantial and the items found in Annie’s car bore neither a suspicious fingerprint nor fiber.

  Sunday, after I had lunch with Dale and Sharon at Speckley’s, I drove to Bob Averill’s pricey condominium in White Lake. Tinker and Scotty Grant were there. “Okay, Maddy,” Bob said, bringing a tray of snapping highballs from the kitchen, “tell us what you’ve got in mind.”

  I told them about Aubrey’s surprise birthday dinner for Eric. “She wanted me to help her make a cake and a lasagna. Cakes are nothing. But a lasagna, that’s a pretty time-consuming dish, even when you’ve got all the ingredients handy. Lots of layers. Lots of steps. If you forget to put one of the ingredients on your shopping list-say the ricotta cheese-and somebody has to go back to the supermarket, well that just stops you in your tracks, doesn’t it?”