Morgue Mama

by Corwin, C. R.

  Aubrey handed me her notebook and took Jeanie in her arms. She guided her down to the first step and sat next to her. “Who was at your house for Thanksgiving dinner then? Sissy? Your parents? Your kids and your husband?”

  “Just me and Sissy and the girls. I don’t have a husband no more and I don’t see my parents any more than I have to.”

  “And now you don’t have Sissy anymore,” Aubrey said.

  My but Aubrey was good. I was beginning to feel my own eyes water up. I kneeled in front of Jeanie and patted her hands. “Why did you lie for her, dear?”

  “Because she was in trouble and I knew she didn’t want that trouble spreading to Rosy. And I guess I figured if Sissy confessed to killing that preacher it was for a reason. I figured she must have been mixed up in it some way.”

  None of us said anything for a long time. We just rubbed our eyes and watched Eric play with the cat. The warm May sun was sprinkling across the steps. “Just to get it all straight,” Aubrey finally whispered, “Sissy was here that Friday night?”

  “She was.”

  “And when the police came to see you, you told them she wasn’t?”

  “That’s right.”

  “They didn’t press you? The way we did?”

  “They was here about five minutes.”

  “We know they talked to your father. Do you know if they talked to anybody else? Other relatives? Your neighbors?”

  “They just got in their car and drove off.”

  “Fucking boneheads,” Aubrey hissed.

  This time Jeanie laughed. The weight of the world was off her shoulders. At least some of it was.

  We talked with Jeanie for another half hour or so. We told her what we knew of Sissy’s new life at Marysville. She told us about Sissy’s childhood in Mingo Junction. It was not a childhood anyone would want. Sissy was eleven when her mother died. Her mother was with her latest boyfriend, driving home fast and drunk from a bar in East Liverpool, on a black November night, when a bend in a road that had always been there sent them into the Ohio River. Sissy went to live with her aunt and uncle, Jeanie’s parents. It was not long before her uncle started cornering Sissy in dark corners of the house when no one else was around. It went on for years. “He used to bother me like that, too, until Sissy came to live with us,” Jeanie said. At fourteen Sissy started drinking. Got into drugs. Got into beds and back seats with any boy who wanted to. When she was seventeen she escaped to Hannawa, to its strip bars and its by-the-hour motels, finally finding her way to the Heaven Bound Cathedral. “I think having Rosy is what finally turned her around,” Jeanie said. “Even if she couldn’t raise her baby herself, she could behave better for her.”

  “Being the girlfriend of a married preacher isn’t exactly behaving,” I pointed out.

  “It was an improvement over what she was,” Jeanie said.

  ***

  We headed for home, taking the same zig-zag route we came on. In the town of Wellsville, Eric made us stop at a convenience store for Mountain Dew and Doritos. I bought a little bag of cashews and Aubrey bought some M&Ms. The chewing got us talking.

  “I can’t believe how easy that was,” Aubrey said, putting one little circle of candy in her mouth at a time.

  “Buying snacks is not a difficult thing,” Eric answered. He was putting one handful of Doritos in his mouth at a time.

  “I mean how easily Jeanie opened up to us,” Aubrey said, playfully throwing an M&M at him. “It makes you wonder who’d be in prison if the detectives who drove down here hadn’t been so eager to get back to Hannawa.”

  Eric found the M&M in the folds of his shirt and ate it. “What blows me away,” he said, “is that Jeanie lied for Sissy in the first place. Usually relatives lie to keep somebody out of jail.”

  “That is odd,” I agreed.

  Aubrey threw another M&M at Eric. “What’s odd? She owed Sissy that lie.”

  Eric retaliated for that second M&M by smashing a Dorito on Aubrey’s head. There is nothing worse in the world than young people in heat. “Owed her?” I asked.

  Aubrey picked the orange bits from her hair. “You heard what she said—her father stopped molesting her when Sissy moved in. She didn’t suffer because Sissy did. How’d you like to carry guilt like that around?”

  Eric wasn’t buying Aubrey’s analysis. “She’s already raising the kid for her. How much guilt could she have?”

  Aubrey threw an entire handful of M&Ms at him. “Quit having opinions about things you don’t understand!”

  Aubrey hadn’t just thrown those M&M’s. She’d thrown them hard. Her rebuke hadn’t been playful. It had been loud and angry. In the mirror I watched Eric slide back into the seat and stuff his cheeks with Doritos, already accustomed to her mood swings after only a few days of love. “If Jeanie lied to the police because she owed Sissy that lie,” I asked, “why did she tell us the truth?”

  Aubrey pressed her face against the side window. She stared at the passing sky. “She owed her the truth, too.”

  We drove along in silence, the playfulness wrenched right out of us from the sadness we found in Mingo Junction. “At least now we know Sissy didn’t kill Buddy Wing,” Aubrey said after several miles. “I can go to Tinker and start working on the story above ground.”

  My fingers tightened around the steering wheel. “Tinker already knows about your investigation.”

  Aubrey wasn’t at all pleased to hear that. “Who told him? Marabout?”

  I could feel my head shrinking down my sweater like a turtle. “I told him.”

  She said, “Shit, Maddy!” But it sounded like “Et tu Brute?”

  I confessed in full: “Yesterday I went to see Bob Averill about Dale’s quitting—”

  “Averill knows too?”

  “He knows, too. I was explaining why Dale went off his rocker.”

  “That he’s jealous of me? Good God.”

  “That is not why he quit.”

  Aubrey was an inch from screaming. “That’s exactly why he quit.”

  “No it’s not, Aubrey. He’s simply afraid you’re biting off more than you can chew.”

  Aubrey put an M&M on her outstretched tongue and flicked it in like a lizard devouring a fly. “That sounds like jealousy to me.”

  Eric laughed at her. “You are so full of yourself.”

  “I am not full of myself.”

  “Of course you’re full of yourself,” I said. “If you weren’t you couldn’t be doing what you’re doing. There’s nothing wrong with being—confident.”

  Aubrey surrendered. “So if Dale wasn’t driven mad by my brilliant reporting, then what was it?”

  I wasn’t about to share my mid-life crisis theory with her. No one her age could possible understand an excuse like that. So I put it in journalistic terms. “You work all those years as a reporter convinced that the editors on the copy desk are a bunch of drooling old doofuses. Then suddenly you’re on the desk. You’re the drooling old doofus. You panic. You embarrass yourself. Anyway, that’s sort of what I was telling Tinker and Bob when I let the cat out of the bag about the Buddy Wing thing.”

  I thought I was getting through to her but I was wrong. “This is the most important story of my life,” she said. “I can’t afford this relentless busybody crap of yours.”

  She glared at me and I glared back. The car drifted and I almost clipped a mailbox. “You should have told them yourself,” I said.

  Aubrey swung her head around and waited for Eric to defend her. But Eric didn’t defend her. He offered her his last Dorito. “Okay,” she said, “maybe I should have said something. But I wanted to be sure about Sissy first. I didn’t want them to think I was some chicky-poo air-head off on some wild goose chase.”

  “Believe me,” I said, “nobody thinks that.”

  Chapter 12

  Monday, May 15

  Aubrey was summoned to Bob Averill’s office as soon as she got to work Monday. She was up there for two hours. When she got off the elevator, s
he gave me a thumbs up. The paper was going to let her proceed with the story.

  I wasn’t a bit surprised. Proving that Sissy James didn’t kill Buddy Wing would be a great story. It would be a nasty, tantalizing drama that would keep the city spellbound for months. Murder. Sex. Police ineptitude. Religious hypocrisy. It would be Hannawa’s O.J. story.

  Aubrey and I sneaked out of the newsroom at four and walked down the hill to Ike’s Coffee Shop. Ike’s was the only remaining tenant in the eight-story Longacre Building, a beautiful old art nouveau palace that once housed many of the city’s most prestigious doctors and lawyers. The faded sign in the window of the empty storefront next to Ike’s had been announcing a major renovation of the building for at least a decade.

  But Ike hangs on, selling lattes to-go to harried white office workers and mugs of regular coffee to the retired and under-employed blacks who like to linger at the little round tables. I buy my tea bags there, in bulk, not because I get a better price, but because Ike needs the money, and, well, I just like his company.

  Ike was at the sink washing mugs when we came in. He sang out: “Morgue Mama!”

  I wriggled my fingers at him. “Tea and a regular coffee, Ike.” We sat at the empty table by the cigarette machine.

  Aubrey was surprised. “You let him call you that?”

  “Ike has earned the right,” I said.

  “I’m jealous—how has he done that?”

  “Driving me home a hundred winter nights when my car wouldn’t start. Always making sure I’m having a good day.”

  Ike brought our mugs. “Morgue Mama ever tell you why everybody calls me Ike?” he asked Aubrey. “Even though my real name is Leonard?”

  Aubrey gave me a playful glower. “I’m afraid Mrs. Sprowls keeps lots of secrets from me.”

  “Well—It’s because I was the only black man in Hannawa anybody knew who voted for Dwight D. Eisenhower.”

  Aubrey looked at me for help.

  “You’ll have to forgive Miss McGinty,” I said to Ike. “She is very, very young.” I leaned toward Aubrey and whispered. “Ike was Eisenhower’s nickname.”

  Ike laughed and went back to his dirty mugs. Aubrey and I started making plans for her now-official investigation of the Buddy Wing murder.

  “You don’t look too happy about Bob and Tinker giving you the go-ahead,” I said.

  “Every word I write they’ll be perched on my shoulders like a couple of big-nosed parrots. Can’t say that! Awrrrak! Can’t say that!”

  “That’s the way big papers work,” I said. “It’s your reporting but their reputations.”

  She sarcastically toasted me with her mug. “Well, just so you can sleep nights, I’m going to play by the rules.”

  “Which are?”

  “That I simply try to prove Sissy couldn’t have done it—which we’ve pretty much done already—and, if I can manage, get her to admit it on the record.”

  “But not try to find the real killer?”

  She imitated Bob Averill’s slow, dry Midwestern voice: “That is the police department’s responsibility.”

  “And it is,” I said.

  She returned to her own voice: “But they do want a series—five or six parts—so we can still do lots of snooping. Background on the atmosphere that led up to the murder. History of the church. Bandicoot’s split with Wing. The anger and the rivalry. How easy it would be for someone else to paint that cross. How the police rushed to judgment. Whatever we can put together to paint the big picture.”

  I sipped my tea and waited for one of Ike’s regulars to rattle a pack of Kools out of the cigarette machine. “You still want this to be we? Even after I let the cat out of the bag?”

  “It’s still we, Maddy. You, me and my wild, Asian-American sex toy.”

  We laughed and sipped and ducked the cigarette smoke wiggling toward the ceiling.

  The paper—rightfully—did not want Aubrey looking for the real murderer. But I knew Aubrey would keep looking. She not only wanted to free Sissy James, she wanted an arrest and a trial. She wanted a story that would go on for months. She was as interested in advancing her career as Bob Averill and Alec Tinker were about advancing theirs. The Herald-Union was not going to be her last stop. She had her eyes on the Washington Post or The New York Times. And why shouldn’t she?

  “What happens,” I asked, “if we do stumble onto the real killer? Would you go to the police, like you did with the football coach at The Gazette?”

  “I suppose.”

  We passed on the free refills Ike offered us and started back. Central Avenue, pretty much empty all day, was filling up with rush hour traffic. “Did you tell Bob about your car windows?”

  “Am I out of my mind?” she asked.

  ***

  Sunday, May 21

  Before Aubrey could pursue the Buddy Wing story full-time, she had to finish her series on the city’s street prostitutes. She worked day and night all week. I dug out all the old files I had on the subject, some going back to the twenties. Prostitution is not only the world’s oldest profession, it’s one of the world’s oldest newspaper stories.

  On Sunday the first story of her series ran. “WALKING THE WALK,” the headline across the top of Page One read, “THERE’S NOTHING SEXY ABOUT THE SEX TRADE.”

  Accompanying the story was a shadowy photo of a girl with chubby, naked legs leaning into a car window. Aubrey’s story was chilling:

  HANNAWA—Keesha will party with a dozen people tonight, but she will have a lousy time.

  That’s because Keesha is one of an estimated 50 to 60 women selling sex on Hannawa’s bleakest streets. Like Keesha, most of these women are not women at all, but teenage girls, some still attending high school. Most, like Keesha, are black.

  “I ain’t doing this forever,” Keesha said minutes after exiting a dark green Ford Explorer, where she’d performed oral sex on a big-bellied white man.

  SEE WALK PAGE A6

  ***

  Tuesday, May 23

  Aubrey leaned on the counter where I was sorting out a month’s worth of obituaries. She was smirking. “Maddy—you’ll never guess who’s descended into the dark, slimy world of corporate PR.”

  I made sure my expression was as flat as an Ohio corn field. “Dale Marabout?”

  Her smirk got even uglier. “I figured you already knew about it.”

  “Of course I know about it.”

  She leaned on the counter. Rested her chin on her knuckles. “I ran into him at the library last night. Working away at a little table in the corner like a Franciscan monk.”

  “And he told you about the job, did he?”

  “Only that he was doing a freelance project for a local company. He was pretty tight-lipped about it.”

  “And you figured I’d fill in all the horrible details?”

  “Well—yeah.”

  I did not like Aubrey taking pleasure in what she considered Dale’s misfortune. Nor did I like her drilling me for information. “Dale and I have been friends for a long time,” I said. “You and I have been acquainted for five minutes. If Dale doesn’t want you to know more, then neither do I.”

  The word acquainted stung her and I was glad it did. “Come on, Maddy—I’m happy for him,” she said.

  I batted the air. “Poop! You’re just happy it isn’t you.”

  “True enough,” she admitted. “I think I’d slit my wrists before I sank to writing PR.”

  Good gravy, Aubrey made me angry that day. Angry at her and angry at myself. I was helplessly attracted to her sassiness and her tenacity, like a mosquito to a bug zapper, as they say. But I was also helplessly loyal to Dale. “Not if you had a family to support,” I growled. I gathered up the obits and headed for my desk. She knew enough not to follow.

  I wasn’t about to tell Aubrey, but Dale never would have taken that freelance assignment if it hadn’t been for me. I’d learned about the job though the grapevine and knew it would be perfect for him. It was with a prominent corporati
on in town. It would pay big bucks and maybe lead to a full-time job. So I’d invited him to Speckley’s and told him about it.

  Freelancing always gives reporters the heebie-jeebies—even unemployed ones—so I wasn’t surprised that his first reaction was to shake his head like an oscillating fan. “No-no-no-no, Maddy,” he said. “There’ll be no have-keyboard-will-travel stuff for this boy.”

  I patted his nervous hands. “I admire your standards. I really do. And I admire the courage it took to walk away from the paper. You’ve got moxie out the wazoo. But if you’re anything like other reporters I know, you’ve also got bills out the wazoo.”

  Dale hemmed and hawed through several cups of coffee. But in the end he agreed to put on a suit and tie and meet with the corporate honchos dangling that big, fat freelance job. They offered and he accepted.

  I was happy for Dale. And pretty damned pleased with myself. So when Aubrey started smirking at me that morning in the morgue, I guess I got a little crusty. Later in the day I made amends by sharing a pack of stale Fig Newtons from the vending machine with her. Thank God she had the good sense not to bring up Dale’s freelance job again.

  ***

  Wednesday, May 24

  During a little mid-week pillow talk Aubrey learned that Eric was having a birthday on Sunday. Instead of taking him to the Olive Garden and a movie, she got the bug to throw a surprise birthday dinner for him. She not only wanted to bake a cake, she also wanted to make him a lasagna. I was astonished. “This is suddenly very domestic of you,” I said. We were on our phones grinning at each other across the newsroom. “You must be either pregnant or in love.”

  She cradled the receiver under her chin and playfully gave me the finger with both hands. “Those are two things I will never be. I just thought a nice dinner with the three of us would be fun.”

  “The three of us?”

  “You can’t possibly think I could tackle cake and a lasagna by myself.”

  “And here I thought it was because we’d become something of a family.”