Morgue Mama

by Corwin, C. R.

  Dillow invited us in the front door and led us straight through the house to the back yard, where a circle of aluminum lawn chairs and a pitcher of lemonade were waiting. It was clear from the get-go that Wayne F. Dillow was a proud and gentle man. He was dressed in a well-starched white shirt and a pair of tan polyester dress pants. His shoes were shined and his thick head of white hair was Brylcreemed and combed. His backyard was mowed short and all the flower beds were neatly mulched. “Everybody want lemonade?” he asked us.

  While he poured we engaged in small-talk about his bird houses. There must have been a couple dozen of them, all made of gourds and painted white, hanging from the branches of his lilac bushes like Christmas tree ornaments.

  Aubrey got down to business. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you everything at this point,” she began, trying to sip and open her notebook at the same time, “but there seem to be some unresolved issues concerning Buddy Wing’s murder.”

  Dillow took a long drink of his lemonade and then wedged the glass between his knees. “Everybody at church is talking about the investigation your paper’s doing. Apparently you have some evidence that Sissy didn’t do it.”

  “There’s some evidence that points in that direction,” Aubrey conceded. “But what we’re trying to do now is set the scene.”

  “Set the scene?”

  “You know—the atmosphere inside the church since Tim Bandicoot was booted out? Are people still riled up? Are there lingering suspicions? Things like that.”

  Dillow sprouted a mellow smile. “Guthrie spread the word we weren’t to talk to you. But if you ask me, that just looks like we’re hiding something.”

  Aubrey tapped her nose with her pen. “You think anybody is?”

  His smile hardened. “I know I’m not.”

  Aubrey smiled back, just as resolutely. “You gave the Reverend Wing quite a rough time after your wife died.”

  “I was angry and confused. He forgave me.”

  “And you forgave him?”

  “Nothing to forgive. It was the cancer that killed Dorothea.”

  “After she was allegedly healed.”

  The word allegedly weakened Dillow’s smile. “Dorothea believed in that sort of thing. And of course the pastor did.”

  “But you didn’t?” Aubrey asked.

  “Not particularly. But I’ve come to understand that God accepts a lot of leeway as long as you essentially believe the right things.”

  Every time I went on an interview with Aubrey that spring and summer I promised myself that I’d keep my mouth shut and let her ask the questions. And every time I broke that promise. “So you don’t believe your wife was hoodwinked by the faith healing?” I asked.

  Allegedly weakened his smile. Hoodwinked flattened it. “Hell is filled with people hoodwinked by the miracles of modern medicine. Dorothea, on the other hand, is waiting for me in heaven.”

  Aubrey scribbled down his quote—it was a fantastic quote—then jumped in to rescue both me and the interview. “After your wife’s death you harassed Reverend Wing for quite a long time. So much so that he finally had you arrested.”

  Dillow’s smile returned. “Believe me, I was mad enough to murder him. But God jumped in and wrestled me away from the devil.”

  Another good quote. “And you went back to church?” Aubrey asked as she scribbled.

  A woeful laugh wiggled through Dillow’s puckered lips as he sucked on his lemonade. “It struck me one night that I missed my church almost as much as I missed my Dorothea. I cried and prayed for hours and the very next night went to services. Everybody knew what I’d done—breaking into his house and all that—and when I walked in people just divided like the Red Sea. The reverend spotted me during his sermon. He jumped off the stage and came right up the aisle and hugged me and kissed me on the forehead. ‘Will you look who’s here tonight?’ he shouted, just as happy as he could be. ‘Will you look who’s here?’” Dillow pressed his perspiring lemonade glass against his forehead. “So that, Miss McGinty, was how it was at the church before the reverend was poisoned. And that’s how it is now. Some people are suspicious and some are afraid. But everybody loves the Lord.”

  This Wayne F. Dillow was a regular quote machine. Aubrey wrote it down and closed her notebook. “And you were there the night Wing was poisoned?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Dillow walked us around his backyard, showing us his day lilies and his rhubarb and the pachysandra he’d just planted around his evergreens. He also showed us the brick barbecue he built in the Sixties. “We used to cook out every chance we got,” he said. “Even on rainy days.”

  On the drive back to the paper Aubrey kept checking the mirror to see if the red Taurus station wagon was following. It wasn’t.

  “So after your stories run and Sissy is cleared,” I asked, “do you think the police will put Dillow on their list of suspects?”

  “No matter how Dillow sweetens it up—all that wrestled-from-the-devil crap—he had a motive and he had the opportunity. He’ll be on the list. And he knows it. That’s why the preemptive strike. Talking openly and honestly about his past sins. Nothing To Hide 101.”

  “He seemed pretty sincere to me,” I said.

  “He did to me, too. Cool, calm and tidy. Maybe the kind of guy who could crawl back to the preacher who killed his wife, and then pretend to be lovey dovey for several years while plotting the perfect revenge. Plying us with lemonade for a half-hour would be a piece of cake for an old fox like that.”

  I rubbed my throat. “First Tim Bandicoot’s doughnuts, now Wayne Dillow’s lemonade. We’ve got to stop accepting refreshments from potential murderers.”

  By the time Aubrey dropped me off at the paper and I drove home, stopping at the new Walgreen’s for toothpaste, it was after nine. I wanted to crawl into bed and turn on the TV. But my brain was still buzzing. So I went to the basement and rummaged through the old morgue files until midnight.

  I think I’ve told you how, little by little, I’ve been pirating the old files out of the morgue. I simply love those old files: The mushroomy smell of the old newsprint. The quiet way the old clippings unfold. The bylines of reporters long retired if not dead. Stories that seem so small and innocent now, but once caused quite a to-do. I love the old file cabinets, too. Some are painted dark green but most are gray. Every one of them is exactly five feet high and 18 inches wide. Every one has four deep drawers that open begrudgingly. Every drawer contains something marvelous.

  I know it makes me sound like the most boring woman on the face of the earth, but it’s not uncommon for me to spend two or three evenings a week going through the files in my basement. I’ll pull out an armful of folders and then sit down at the old chrome-legged kitchen table I keep by the clothes dryer and just lose myself in the magic of the past.

  That night I was looking through files from the S drawers. The Heaven Bound Cathedral is located in the city’s South Ridge neighborhood. We don’t anymore, but we used to keep detailed files on all the neighborhoods, the crimes committed, church and school events, sewer and water projects, the fires and horrible traffic accidents.

  The Heaven Bound Cathedral was built in 1978. That section of South Ridge was still pretty leafy and quiet then. The land Buddy Wing bought for his church was the old estate of Ralph Haisley, founder of Haisley’s department store. Before the interstate highways and the flight to the suburbs, Haisley’s was the place to shop downtown. The grand, six-story building closed and sat empty for seven years. Now it’s the county welfare offices. Anyway, Ralph Haisley built this incredible Tudor mansion up on South Ridge in the Twenties. After World War II, the woods and fields around the mansion were sold off for housing developments. The Haisley heirs sold the remaining grounds to Buddy Wing just after the department store closed.

  My South Ridge files contained a number of stories about the cathedral’s construction. People in the surrounding developments did not like the church being built there at all. They complained about the
garish design and they complained about the impending traffic problems. They complained that the zoning code change granted to Wing would encourage other unwanted development. Which it did. Today there are fast-food restaurants and car dealerships and a huge strip mall with a Target and a Home Depot.

  Soon after the cathedral opened, residents discovered another problem. The parking lot lights. Eighteen steel poles rising over the asphalt like those Martian machines in the War of the Worlds. Each pole was topped with six balls of blinding white light. Neighborhood dogs wouldn’t stop barking and people couldn’t sleep. One man whose property abutted the parking lot started shooting out the lights with a .22 rifle. The man’s name was Edward Tolchak. Between 1979 and 1985, he was arrested and charged six times.

  ***

  Wednesday, May 31

  First thing in the morning I gave the files to Aubrey, who already had her knees propped on her desk and her keyboard in her lap, typing furiously. She tossed the file on her desk, where it immediately became lost among the rubble. “A guy dumb enough to stand in his own backyard and shoot out parking lot lights plotting a perfect murder? I don’t think so.”

  “He’s been arrested six times, and altogether served over ninety days in jail,” I pointed out. “I’d say there has to be some real anger there.”

  She nodded impatiently and typed even faster.

  I persisted. “My files at home only go to 1987. So who knows what Edward Tolchak may have done in recent years. Things may have escalated.”

  She could see I was irritated by her indifference. “I’ll give the files to Eric. Maybe he can find something worth pursuing.”

  I went from mild-mannered Maddy to bitch-on-wheels Morgue Mama in a hundredth of a second. “What are you saying to me? That if I wasn’t such an incompetent old fool I could check the computer files myself? Well, from now on—”

  She apologetically grabbed my elbow and slowly pulled me toward her. “You want to go with Eric and me to Meri after work?”

  And so that night we met for dinner. I assumed we’d go to Speckley’s, but they both wanted to go to Okar’s, a trendy new Lebanese restaurant. Instead of the meat loaf sandwich and au gratin potatoes I was craving, I had a fruit salad covered with yogurt and honey and pistachio nuts. Eric and Aubrey had grilled chicken pitas and shared a plate of lawn clippings called tabooli. For dessert we ordered one baklava and three forks.

  It was just about dark when we left the restaurant. The sidewalk was filled with old gays wearing pastel baseball caps and noisy college kids covered in tattoos and earrings. I remembered the days when be-bop jazz used to roll out of the bars and give the entire neighborhood a happy epileptic fit. Now the street throbbed like a toothache from that awful rap music. Eric was begging me to join them for cappuccinos at Starbucks when Aubrey spotted the red Taurus station wagon parked along the street just a block from our own cars. I don’t know if she was frightened, angry, or simply annoyed, but she began leaking four-letter words. Quite to my surprise, Eric began leaking them, too. Then he started running, right toward the Taurus, fists tucked under his chin like a boxer.

  Aubrey and I both yelled for him to stop. But Eric was in protective boyfriend mode. When he got within fifty feet of the station wagon, the man inside jumped out and ran. Eric stayed with him. They crossed the street and ran another block before disappearing around the back of an apartment building.

  Aubrey wanted to follow, but I locked my arms around her elbow to hold her back. “Eric couldn’t catch a cold,” I assured her.

  After a minute or two, the man reappeared, trotting, arms wrapped around his face like a babushka. He jumped into his station wagon, backed into a lime-green Volkswagen Beetle, made a clumsy U-turn and sped away. Then we saw Eric, weaving slowly across the street, oblivious to the traffic.

  Aubrey and I hurried to him. There was blood on his lip and the bridge of his nose. He was staring straight ahead, acting dopey. I fished in my purse for a Kleenex while Aubrey berated him for not getting the license plate number on the Taurus. “That’s all you needed to do,” she kept repeating. “That’s all you needed to do.”

  I licked the Kleenex and started cleaning the blood off his face. “Good gravy, Aubrey. He’s just been beaten to a pulp.”

  Actually he hadn’t been beaten to a pulp. He told us he’d tried to tackle the mysterious station-wagon man and missed, tumbling over the hood of a Yugo.

  “Could you make the guy out?” Aubrey demanded. “White, black, young, old?”

  Eric fought off my dabbing Kleenex. “Middle-aged white guy.” He swung his eyes across my worried face and stared into the black sky. “I think I’m going home now,” he said.

  Aubrey followed him to his truck, begging for a better description of the man. He drove away without telling her anything.

  I felt so sorry for Eric. He had tried to defend the woman he loved—at least loved to sleep with—only to make a fool of himself. I knew what that kind of embarrassment was like. I once went to Dale Marabout’s apartment with a chocolate cake, to rekindle our faltering affair. Instead of knocking, I used the key he’d given me. I found him naked on his living room floor with that kindergarten teacher.

  A few days after that incident in Meri, Aubrey confided in me that Eric had stopped sleeping with her. “I guess flying over the hood of that Yugo he came to the conclusion I’m not worth dying for,” she said. She said it as if she didn’t care. But I could see she did care. For years, Dale Marabout and I assured each other we were just in it for the sex. We laughed and copulated like a couple of those chimpanzees in equatorial Africa, bonobos I think they’re called, who just mindlessly screw and screw and screw. After I found Dale on the floor with the kindergarten teacher, I pretended not to care. I went to their wedding and, of all things, gave them a set of fitted flannel sheets. But I cared. And Aubrey cared. She’d been using Eric, no doubt about that, but it was for more than sex.

  Chapter 14

  Thursday, June 8

  Thursday morning I went with Aubrey to Kent State University to see Dr. Howard Cooksey, a professor of television and radio news in the communications department. It would be a forty-minute drive across some of the most forgettable landscape in the state of Ohio.

  “Were you still there when the black squirrels were poisoned?” I asked as Aubrey’s Ford Escort struggled up the long grade that divides the tiny towns of Richfield and Peninsula.

  Her eyes widened. “How do you know about the squirrels?”

  “Morgue Mama does not know all or see all,” I joked, “but Morgue Mama does remember all.” The fact was that after the eyebrow woman told us about students from the university working at the cathedral, I searched through the morgue’s Kent State files.

  “That happened my senior year,” Aubrey said. “I covered it for the college paper.”

  “So that was just three years ago.”

  She played with the calendar in her mind. “Yeah.”

  Kent is famous for its black squirrels and the poisonings shook the town and the campus to its roots, not as badly as the May 4, 1970 shootings, of course not, but it was amazing how worked up people became over the deaths of thirty-seven squirrels.

  The black squirrel story actually began decades earlier, in the early Sixties, when the university’s grounds supervisor, a guy named Larry Woodell, went to Canada and brought back sixteen black squirrels. In Ohio you only see gray squirrels and red squirrels, so black squirrels popping across the lawns were quite a novelty, and the herd, whatever you call a group of squirrels, multiplied faster than rabbits. In 1982, the university held its first Black Squirrel Festival, complete with rock bands and a barbecue. The annual May 4 memorial commemoration and the Black Squirrel Festival in September are the yin and yang of campus life at Kent State, the sad and the silly if you will.

  So, anyway, it caused quite a stir when people started finding the carcasses of black squirrels all over the place. The campus police called in the Kent city police, and the Kent city poli
ce called in the State Highway Patrol. “They never caught who did it?” I asked Aubrey.

  “Nope. After thirty-seven squirrels it stopped. By Christmas break it was all over. But it was a cool story for awhile—you know what I mean by cool—it was actually pretty sickening.”

  I did know what she meant by cool. Covering those squirrel poisonings when she was a senior journalism student at Kent was cool the same way covering the murder of that football coach was cool when she was a new reporter at The Gazette in Rush City, the same way that digging into the Buddy Wing murder now was cool. Big stories, no matter how tragic, are cool to cover. I’m sure that Aubrey’s stories on the squirrel poisonings for the college newspaper helped her get her first job in Rush City, and I know her football coach stories got her into the Herald-Union. Soldiers advance through the ranks by going to war. Reporters advance by covering cool stories. “How exactly were the squirrels poisoned?” I asked. “It wasn’t walnuts shot full of procaine, was it?”

  She winced at my joke. “Ears of corn sprinkled with insecticide—as you well know.”

  “Well, it’s still possible that’s it’s the same person, isn’t it? Psychopathic killers aren’t under any obligation to use the same poisons all the time, are they?”

  Aubrey agreed that it was possible with an exaggerated, Oliver Hardy nod. “But think about the odds. In order for one of the television students to have poisoned both Buddy Wing and the squirrels, that student would’ve been at Kent three years ago, making him, at best, a sophomore when the squirrels were killed. I’ll admit that theoretically there might be a few sophomores capable of sprinkling poison on an ear of corn without poisoning themselves, but that still means there’s a three year-gap between crimes. Wouldn’t a wacko like that have moved up to a human victim right away?”