I started making my own notes on the Buddy Wing murder: Was Sissy James really innocent? Or had we just talked ourselves into believing she was? And what about all that evidence right there in Sissy’s garbage can? Yes, somebody who knew Sissy inside and out could have framed her. But Sissy was also troubled enough to frame herself, either intentionally or through her own stupidity.
I scribbled all sorts of crazy things in that notebook that night. I was lonely and frightened and just plain unsure.
***
Monday, April 24
“Well, did you make it home yesterday?” I asked Aubrey. I was so glad it was Monday and that horrible Easter weekend behind me.
She leaned across the counter and answered “Yeah,” as if she was angry with herself.
“Everybody has to go home once in awhile,” I said.
She asked, “And why is that?”
***
Friday, April 28
I hardly saw Aubrey that week. She was busy doing interviews for her series on the ghastly lives of the city’s street prostitutes. The idea for the series, of course, had grown out of her story on the body they found on Morrow Street. Aubrey wanted to explore the lives of these women while they were still alive. She had no trouble finding women still working the streets, and no trouble getting them to talk. What she wanted, and couldn’t find, was someone who’d escaped and built a new life for herself, on a better street.
Friday morning she asked if I wanted to go back to the Heaven Bound Cathedral with her, that evening, to see how easy it would be for a stranger to sneak in and kill someone.
I wasn’t crazy about the idea. But I went along.
The televised Friday night services continued after Buddy Wing’s murder without missing a week. For a while, in fact, more people attended, and more people watched, than had before Buddy gave his Bible that fateful kiss. In the story we ran on that ironic fact, Guthrie Gates said it was a tribute to just how much people loved their martyred pastor. If you ask me, it was the same morbid fascination that sends hundreds of thousands of teary-eyed tourists to Graceland year after year, even though they didn’t give a rip about Elvis when he was alive. Anyway, attendance and viewership dropped off after a couple of months.
We left the paper at six and drove in my Shadow to Aubrey’s apartment. It was my first visit and I was appalled. Her living room furniture consisted of an old kitchen chair with a ripped vinyl cushion, a big yellow ceramic lamp sitting on a folding TV table, and a pyramid of cardboard boxes.
Some of the boxes were marked SHIT FROM COLLEGE and some were marked SHIT FROM HOME. Coats and sweaters and newspapers and magazines and God only knows how many shoes were strewn everywhere. “How can someone own nothing and still live in a hovel?” I asked.
Aubrey was in her bedroom changing into a dress so she could fit in with the Christians. “I’m a young and carefree writer with a brilliant mind,” she called out. “So leave me the hell alone.”
When she came out in a dress I couldn’t stop laughing. It was not a bad looking dress—a loose-fitting, below-the-knee A-line with a sailor collar and pleats—but I’d never seen her in anything but jeans or chinos and she looked about as comfortable as my brother the dairy farmer looks in his polyester wedding-and-funeral suit from Sears. “All you need is a white purse and pearls,” I managed to get out.
Aubrey was laughing harder than me. “I just don’t want to look out of place in church.”
I opened my arms and turned in a circle. “What about me looking out of place?”
She studied me. I was wearing my usual work uniform: loose-fitting slacks, even looser sweater, penny loafers, and a cheap necklace. “You look fine,” she said.
I knew what she meant by fine: women my age never look out of place because we never look in place. We are as unintrusive as beige walls.
Aubrey’s plan was to sneak into the Heaven Bound Cathedral without sneaking. “I think it’s safe to assume that the killer knew his way around the church,” she said as we drove toward South Ridge. “So we’re going to act like we belong there. We’re going to chat and smile and be friendly. You think you can pull that off?”
The service didn’t start until eight, but Aubrey wanted to arrive at seven, to be there during the final hectic hour before the cameras clicked on and the Canaries of Calvary started singing and the Sweet Ascension Dancers started dancing. When we arrived, there were already lines of cars waiting to pull into the parking lot. The big-eared security guard we encountered on our first visit was standing beneath the cement angels, directing cars toward empty slots. We smiled and waved as we drove past him. “You suppose he was out here directing traffic the night Buddy Wing was killed?” Aubrey wondered.
We parked and joined the funnel of people heading for the cathedral doors. Aubrey greeted everyone who looked at us with a happy “Good evening.”
Inside we followed the flow toward the chapel. Everywhere in the hallway choir members and dancers were mingling with their friends and families. Everyone was so happy. I felt just lousy, like a terrorist with sticks of dynamite taped to her ribs. I wanted to spin around and get the hell out of there. But Aubrey had me by the arm, squeezing a smile out me every time somebody smiled at us.
When we got to the chapel we kept going, up the hallway toward the offices. As we clicked along we looked at each other and started giggling guiltily, like schoolgirls sneaking out of gym class. The hallway was filled with people, all serenely buzzing about, arms full of hymnals or collection baskets or electric guitars.
On our earlier visit the outer door to the offices had been locked. I remembered how the security guard had knocked for us and I remembered that Guthrie Gates had unlocked the door before letting us in. Now this door was wide open and people were freely flowing in and out. We went in.
It was noisy and busy inside. Someone was whistling a hymn. Someone was laughing like Santa Claus. Just a few yards from Buddy Wing’s office Aubrey stopped at a water fountain and bent low to drink.
“No security and no suspicion,” I whispered. “Anybody could have walked right in.”
Aubrey whispered back, “Any stranger at least. But what if it weren’t a stranger? What if it were Sissy or Tim Bandicoot? Could they have just walked in like this? I don’t think so.”
I took a drink myself. The water was warm. “Sissy told the police she just walked in and went about her business.”
Said Aubrey, “More proof she’s lying.”
We walked on to Buddy Wing’s office. The open door was still blocked with the folding chair and arrangement of plastic roses. Dale Marabout’s story on the murder said that Wing used to keep his old family Bible on his desk, always within his reach. Now there was a framed, eight-by-ten photograph of the martyred pastor in the center of the desk, facing toward the door, smiling eyes fixed right on us.
“Let’s think about what we already know,” Aubrey whispered as we stood in the doorway like a pair of humble pilgrims visiting a holy shrine. “We know Buddy Wing followed the same routine every week. We know that thirty minutes before every service he left his office and went to the make-up room, and after being painted up to look twenty years younger, went to another room to pray with the church elders. Then, when it was showtime, he went to the back of the chapel and danced his way down the aisle.”
“We know all that?” I asked.
“Yes. And we can surmise that the killer knew all that, too.”
Just down the hall from Wing’s office we found a roomful of middle-aged men in suits drinking coffee and eating pastries. “I’d say those are the elders,” Aubrey whispered. We kept walking. In the next room we saw Guthrie Gates half reclined in a beauty shop chair. He was getting his hair sprayed stiff by a woman with painted-on eyebrows. We hurried by. The hallway turned right, then left, then right again. We were near the stage. We could hear the orchestra warming up. We found the main control room and peeked inside. People with headsets and clipboards were buzzing about like honey bees. “Wha
t a fancy operation,” I whispered. “You’d think they were putting on the Academy Awards.”
Aubrey gave me a nudge and we started our retreat. She reconstructed Buddy Wing’s last service as we walked: “Sometime while he was in the make-up chair or praying with the elders, the killer slipped into his office to paint that poison cross on his Bible. We know from the police reports, and from your Mr. Marabout’s stories—”
I protested. “My Mr. Marabout?”
“You know what I mean. I know you haven’t slept with him for years.”
“And who said I ever slept with him?”
Aubrey scowled at me. “Will you get your mind back on the murder? Everybody knows you and Marabout used to do the nasty—”
She called it the nasty. I knew that was just a word people her age used. But it stung. It had not been nasty. It had been good, clean, wonderful fun between two people who genuinely cared for each other. “Who told you?” I demanded. “Doreen Poole?”
She ignored my question. “So we know—from more than one source—that it was the director’s job to take the Bible to the pulpit, along with Wing’s notes for his sermon, and make sure he had a pitcher of water for when the sweat started pouring. But the director—her name’s Elaine Albert, she’s been directing the broadcasts since they started in the early Seventies—told the police that when she went to get the Bible and sermon notes from his office, approximately fifteen minutes before the service was to start, they were both gone. She hurried to the stage and found them already on the pulpit. And the pitcher of water under it.”
“And she wasn’t a little curious?” I asked.
“She told police she didn’t have time to be curious. The service was starting in a few minutes.”
“It certainly piques my curiosity. Why wasn’t this Elaine Albert considered a suspect?”
“She was the first person they talked to. They gave her a lie detector test the next morning.”
“I gather she passed.”
Aubrey gave me one of those “Duhs” people her age employ to tell someone they’re making a fool out of themselves by stating the obvious.
“But wouldn’t a television director have to be a real cool cucumber—always in control?” I asked. “I’d think somebody like that could easily fake a lie detector.”
“I’d think so, too.”
“But the police wouldn’t think so?”
“The police stopped thinking when Sissy confessed.”
A slow, melancholy voice put an end to our snoopfest: “I thought it might be the two of you.”
It was the big-eared security guard and a minute later we were standing in the make-up room watching the woman with the painted-on eyebrows rub a natural tan into Guthrie Gates’ chalky face. He was struggling with every vein in his neck to remain Christian. “I’m guessing you didn’t come to worship with us.”
Aubrey was doing a much better job at staying calm than I was. “We wanted to see the crime scene—as it would have been the night Pastor Wing was poisoned.”
Gates lifted his chin so the eyebrow woman could squirt make-up on his neck. “Let me guess why you didn’t call for permission first—you were afraid I’d change things around?”
“I was afraid somebody might,” Aubrey admitted. “But not for malicious reasons. When people know the press is coming they tend to put their best foot forward, often subconsciously.”
Gates swatted away the make-up woman’s sticky fingers. “Like subconsciously bringing you doughnuts?”
I was flabbergasted. “You know about the doughnuts?”
Gates closed his eyes and motioned for the eyebrow woman to resume her rubbing. “Since Tim Bandicoot started that temple of his, it’s been like the U.S. and Red China between our congregations. Everything they do gets back to us. Everything we do gets back to them.” He sat silently until the eyebrow woman was finished, then checked himself in the mirror. He smiled with satisfaction. I watched his eyes shift in the mirror, to the knees peeking from the hem of Aubrey’s churchy dress. “Wasn’t I open and honest with you, Miss McGinty? Wasn’t I respectful and friendly?” He checked his watch and clicked on a small speaker box on the make-up table. The choir was already singing. “Time to go,” he said. He stood and pulled a plastic bottle of mineral water from the side pocket of his suit coat. He unscrewed the cap and took a small, quick sip. Then he smiled at us, calmly, neck veins back in place, and said, “You’re welcome to stay for the service, if you think it might do you some good. But you are not welcome to come back. Or call me. Or talk to any member of this congregation.” He gave us a quick “God be with you” and left. The security guard pointed to the door with his chin. As we left, I poked Aubrey in the arm and pointed back into the room. The eyebrow woman was sitting in the chair, nervously lighting a cigarette.
The security guard followed us to our car. Aubrey and I hardly said a word to each other until we reached Swann’s, Hannawa’s legendary drive-in restaurant where all the car hops are muscular college boys. The minute you pull into a slot and click your headlights they run to your car—not walk, but run like they were on a football field—and take your order. We both ordered double-cheeseburgers and fries. They have forty-seven different flavors of milkshakes. Aubrey got a large butterscotch-banana. I got a small strawberry.
I watched Aubrey watch the carhop trot inside with our orders. “So,” I asked her, “what did we learn today?”
“Well,” she said, “we learned that sad-sack security guard isn’t the rube we thought. He recognized us when we pulled in and followed us. What we don’t know is whether it was on his own initiative or whether he was under orders from Guthrie Gates.”
“What difference does that make?” I asked.
“Remember what he said, Maddy: ‘I thought it might be the two of you.’ He didn’t follow us because we were strangers trying to sneak in and poison somebody. He followed us because it was us.”
“That doesn’t mean Gates has something to hide,” I said. “There are lots of innocent people who hate the press.”
Aubrey liked that. She laughed. “The first time we went to the church, Gates was as nice as pie. This time he couldn’t control himself. He was really p-o’d. And what was that U.S. and Red China stuff?”
“It’s no secret those two churches don’t like each other,” I said.
“Aren’t you being a wee bit charitable? They’re at war. They spy on each other. Gates knew about the doughnuts.”
“Yes he did,” I said. “It gave me the willies when he said that.”
“He wants us to be afraid. He wants us to believe that both churches are full of crazies. He’s warning us to back off. What’s done is done. Let Buddy Wing rest in peace.”
The carhop was running toward us with our food. I rolled down my window for the tray. “And let the real killer rest in peace?”
Aubrey impatiently reached across me for her bag of fries. “But we’re not going to let the real killer rest in peace. At least I’m not.”
I handed her a cheeseburger. I had the willies again. She was telling me things were going to get dangerous. I could stop tagging along if I wanted.
Aubrey peeled back the bun and delicately removed the onions. She looked for a place to put them. “Did you notice he was carrying his own bottle of water? I don’t think he’s merely being trendy, Maddy.”
I let her put the onions in my hand and then dumped them on the window tray. “You think he’s afraid somebody will poison him next?”
Aubrey nodded while she took a bite. “Or maybe he just wants people to think he’s afraid somebody will poison him next.”
“So Guthrie Gates is still a suspect?”
“Everybody is still a suspect.”
“Including Sissy James?”
This bite she shook her head. “I don’t see any way she could walk around there without being spotted. Even in disguise. Tim Bandicoot either. I think they’re out.”
I watched her eat and she watched me eat and we giggl
ed at how messy the cheeseburgers were. “So, did we learn anything else?” I asked.
Aubrey squinted at me. She knew I had seen something she hadn’t.
“The eyebrow woman,” I explained. “She lit a cigarette. I poked you, remember?”
“And?”
“Jesus Didn’t Smoke—Why Do You?”
“Ah—the signs. They’re fanatical against smoking.”
“Yet she lit a cigarette,” I repeated. “I’d say either she’s the killer or she’s one of Tim Bandicoot’s spies.”
“Because she lit a cigarette?”
“Because she forgot the rules, Aubrey. Because she was so frightened or nervous, or something, that she just had to have a cigarette.” I reminded her of something the big-eared security guard had said during our first visit: “Smoking was a manifestation of spiritual sloth.”
I watched Aubrey draw the thick butterscotch-banana shake up her plastic straw. It seemed like she was having trouble fitting a new suspect onto whatever list she had in her mind. Finally she said, “So you think we should talk to this woman with the eyebrows?”
“Yes, I do.”
Chapter 9
Monday, May 1
When I got to work Monday, Eric Chen was wearing a necktie. By all appearances a new one. By all appearances one hundred percent silk. I grilled him about it as soon as I got back to my desk with my tea.
He did not like being grilled. “I just felt like buying a tie,” he said. “And if you’re going to buy a tie you might as well wear it.”
I knew what the tie was all about. It was about Aubrey. “I think maybe you’re trying to get my job,” I teased. “Next week it will be a sports jacket and the week after that a three-piece suit. Week after that I’ll be out on my keister.”
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