Morgue Mama

by Corwin, C. R.

  “Could we sit down?” I asked.

  “Sure, please,” Elaine said.

  I lowered myself into the corner of a fat moss-green loveseat. “The both of us,” I said.

  She studied me quizzically and lowered her full hips next to me. I think she was afraid I was going to faint or be sick or something.

  I pulled down one of the yellow pillows from the top of the loveseat and cradled it in my lap. I started telling her the biggest string of lies I’d ever told in my life. “I do need a sofa,” I began, “but I’d also like to talk to you. You see, I’m Marcie Peacock’s grandmother—she was one of the Kent State students working for you at the cathedral the night the Reverend Wing died.”

  Elaine started hugging her clipboard the way I was hugging the pillow. “And?”

  “Well, she’s scared to death. The newspaper is digging into the whole thing again, it seems, and they think maybe one of the students is the real killer. Apparently the paper has some proof that the woman who confessed really didn’t do it. That reporter has my Marcie simply frantic.”

  A sympathetic smile stretched across Elaine’s wide German face. “You know, your Marcie is the first African-American student we’ve ever hired.”

  I could have just died. Elaine Albert had recognized me the moment I walked in. I apologized and tried to explain myself. Why she didn’t toss me out I don’t know. Maybe it was my obvious agony. Maybe she wanted to see what kind of information she could wheedle out of me. “I am genuinely concerned about those students,” I said. “Once the paper starts running its series, they are going to come under suspicion.”

  “Along with a lot of people,” she said.

  As we sat on that sofa and talked, I was not the least bit afraid that she might be the real murderer. And it wasn’t because she’d passed the lie detector test the police gave her. There was just something about her. A strange mix of icy confidence and serenity. If she’d wanted Buddy Wing dead for some reason, in my estimation she was the kind of woman who’d just pull out a pistol and shoot him.

  Anyway, Elaine told me all about the college students who worked there—not about them individually so much—but about the kinds of jobs they did and where they would be at any given time before, during and after the broadcasts. She didn’t believe for the world one of them poisoned Buddy Wing.

  “What about someone disguised to look like a college student?” I asked.

  “It gets pretty crazy back there,” she said. “Sure.”

  I actually bought the sofa we were sitting on, $885, yellow pillows included. “Does it surprise you that Sissy James may not be the killer?” I asked as we walked to the door.

  “After your visit here today,” she said, “nothing surprises me anymore.”

  I went home and said good-bye to that scruffy beige monstrosity in my living room. Then I called the newsroom. “Aubrey,” I said. “You’ll never guess who sold me a new sofa.”

  “I can’t talk. They just found Ronny Doddridge, deader than a doornail.”

  ***

  Friday, June 16

  Ronny Doddridge was the big-eared security guard at the Heaven Bound Cathedral. Aubrey and I had encountered him on our first visit there. He had showed us the way to Guthrie Gates’ office. On our second visit he’d showed us the door. Because it was a suspected suicide, Aubrey’s story was only nine short paragraphs:

  Cathedral security guard found dead after 9-1-1 call

  HANNAWA—Police responding to a 9-1-1 call early yesterday morning found the body of 47-year-old Ronald “Ronny” Doddridge in his home on the city’s near east side.

  Police said it appears Doddridge made the emergency call himself before taking his own life. The West Virginia native had worked as a security guard for the Heaven Bound Cathedral since 1992.

  Neighbors said Doddridge was not married and lived alone in the small, frame house he rented on Pulver Court.

  Police said Doddridge died of a massive head wound. A 9 mm Smith & Wesson semi-automatic pistol was found next to his body, they said.

  Police spokesman Lt. Benjamin Wiley said dispatchers received the 9-1-1 call at 3:22 AM Thursday. The caller, believed to be a middle-aged male, repeated three times that “A man’s been shot,” then hung up.

  Dispatchers traced the call to Doddridge’s home and officers arrived on the scene at 3:55 AM Wiley said Doddridge’s body was found on the kitchen floor.

  Wiley would not confirm that a suicide note was found, al-though a neighbor told the Herald-Union that officers responding to the 9-1-1 call told him they had found a note pinned to Doddridge’s bathrobe.

  The Rev. Guthrie Gates, pastor of the Heaven Bound Cathedral, issued a statement calling Doddridge “a good and decent man who took great honor in serving the Lord.”

  Aubrey was too busy to go to Speckley’s for lunch. So we walked up to the Mr. Hero in the Geisselman Building. The temperature was in the eighties and that meant the downtown sidewalks were as hot as a waffle iron. We shared a foot-long ham and Swiss with brown mustard and tomato. We both bought pink lemonades. We sat in a window booth with closed Venetian blinds.

  My stomach was so queasy I was just nibbling my half of the sandwich. “I have to tell you, Aubrey,” I said, “this Doddridge thing really scares me.”

  She was chomping like a horse. “You don’t think it was suicide? Come on—just by looking at him you could tell there was a lot of bad stuff going on inside his head.”

  “That’s exactly my point, Aubrey. Maybe he knew something about Buddy Wing’s death. Or had some strong suspicions he was sharing with others at the church. And maybe that worried the real killer. Somebody clever enough to poison Wing the way he did, and pin it on Sissy with all that evidence, easily could’ve made Doddridge’s death look like a suicide.”

  “And you think maybe the murderer will keep killing. Ronny Doddridge. Aubrey McGinty. Dolly Madison Sprowls, maybe?”

  “It’s crossed my mind.”

  She dismissed my fears by taking another enormous bite from her half of the sandwich.

  “I’d think it would cross yours, too. You’re being followed. Your car windows have been—”

  “And I’ve been slapped around and threatened. But this really looks like an honest-to-God suicide.”

  “You’re awfully nonchalant about all this.”

  “What I am is awfully hungry,” she said.

  I let the subject drop and watched her chew. She was not only hungry. She was exhausted. She’d spent all morning trying to follow up on the Doddridge story, with little success. The police were still freezing her out over the ruckus her stories on the chief’s reorganization plan caused. I’m sure whatever information she was getting was coming from disgruntled officers far down the food chain, information that had to be checked and double-checked. “Any idea what the suicide note said?” I asked.

  “I can’t confirm it yet,” she said, “but Doddridge apparently apologized to the congregation for not protecting Buddy Wing better.”

  I wrapped my half of the sandwich and wedged it into my purse. I’d try to eat it later. “This is all getting so complicated.”

  Aubrey took a long, noisy drag on her lemonade. “So, Maddy, tell me about that new sofa.”

  Chapter 16

  Thursday, June 22

  On Tuesday, the county coroner ruled Ronny Doddridge’s death a suicide. On Wednesday, Aubrey came back from police headquarters with a copy of the suicide note. It was written directly to the Reverend Buddy Wing:

  Dear pastor,

  I am so sorry I let you down. Surely I am going down to hell where I deserve to be. When the devils came back to get you I was hiding like a school boy to smoke a cigarette, as I am sure both you and Jesus already know. I was born no good and remain so.

  Ronald James Doddridge

  A powerful note. Unfortunately we could not run it word for word, not while the case was still open. And even though the coroner had rendered his expert judgment, the police would take thei
r good time—six months or more—before officially proclaiming that Doddridge took his life without undue or illegal interference of another person or party. So for her Thursday story Aubrey had to paraphrase:

  Doddridge out for smoke night Rev. Wing poisoned

  HANNAWA—Before putting a pistol to his head last Thursday, Heaven Bound Cathedral security guard Ronald “Ronny” Doddridge wrote a note apologizing for taking an unauthorized cigarette break the night the Rev. Buddy Wing was fatally poisoned.

  According to sources close to the police investigation, the note was addressed directly to Wing and began with the salutation, “Dear pastor.”

  SEE NOTE PAGE A9

  It was another good story. Having encountered Ronny Doddridge herself, on those two occasions, she was able to describe his appearance and mannerisms to a tee. She talked to his neighbors again about his daily habits, getting a measure of his friendliness. “He was something of a loner,” said the woman who lived across the street, “but when you waved at him he’d always wave back.”

  Aubrey also talked to the eyebrow woman, who confirmed, off the record of course, that Doddridge, like herself, was indeed a secret smoker.

  Aubrey also talked to Guthrie Gates.

  Well, Gates had to talk to her, didn’t he? The security guard at his church had not only killed himself, he’d also pried open two old cans of worms: Buddy Wing’s murder and the rift between Buddy and Tim Bandicoot.

  Aubrey interviewed Gates on the phone, long after I’d gone home for the day, so I have no way of knowing exactly what she asked him. But given his answers, she had clearly asked him what he thought Ronny Doddridge meant by “when the devils came back to get you.”

  “We preach belief in a literal devil,” she quoted Gates as saying, “though I can’t say by the note whether Ronny was speaking literally or metaphorically. But there’s no doubt Pastor Wing’s murderer was possessed by the devil in some way. I only wish I’d known brother Ronny was hurting so.”

  Before work on Thursday morning, I met Aubrey at Ike’s. We got our coffee and tea to go and walked up to the reading garden at the main library. We sat across from the pink metal monstrosity by the famed Cincinnati sculptor Donald Raintree Tubb, a blindfolded pig gleefully riding a bicycle made entirely of sausage links. “So, are we still buying the suicide note?” I asked.

  “I think we are,” she said. “The handwriting comparisons and the motive all seem to add up.”

  I sucked a tiny of taste of tea through the slit in the plastic lid on my paper cup. “Then assuming the note is legit—what exactly does it tell us?”

  Aubrey had been staring at the pig on the bicycle. Now she turned her face toward me, the breeze off empty Central Avenue plastering her loose red hair across her eyes. “You read my story, right? When I asked Gates what he thought when the devils came back to get you meant, he immediately reduced it to one devil. But Ronny had said devils.”

  “You think Ronny meant real devils?”

  “Real human devils. Devils that came back—meaning they’d been there before.”

  “Let me guess—the devils who’d been there before are Tim Bandicoot and his followers, the ones who pooh-poohed Buddy’s talking in tongues.”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “And you think Doddridge knew that for sure?”

  “No way of knowing. But Ronny Doddridge wasn’t as dumb as he looked.”

  No he wasn’t. Aubrey’s story on him had surprised me totally. Ronny Doddridge wasn’t just some poor sap in the church who needed a job. For fourteen years, he’d been a deputy sheriff in Mineral County, West Virginia. Six months after he was forced to resign for repeatedly drinking beer in his patrol car, Buddy Wing brought him to Hannawa as the Heaven Bound Cathedral’s first security guard. Ronny was the nephew of Buddy’s dead wife. But there was apparently more to it than family obligation. Buddy hired him just five months before the very public flap that sent Tim Bandicoot and two hundred members of his flock off to that abandoned Woolworth’s store on Lutheran Hill. Buddy Wing knew there was going to be trouble and wanted someone loyal, and maybe experienced with a gun, to watch his back.

  Aubrey showed me her watch. It was almost ten. We left the bicycling pig and headed up the hill toward the Herald-Union. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Why would Doddridge kill himself if he was onto something? Wouldn’t he take what he knew to the police? Or Guthrie Gates? Or you? Why would he just scribble that cryptic little hint about devils coming back and then shoot himself in the head?”

  “Overwrought with guilt?” she ventured.

  “Not so overwrought to leave a big hint,” I said.

  Aubrey put her arm around me, like I was a silly child. “You really don’t think he killed himself, do you?”

  “I don’t know what I think,” I said. Then I promptly told her exactly what I thought: “The real killer has already framed Sissy James. But now you’re about to prove her innocent. That will mean an all-out investigation by a police department with egg on its face. So the killer kills again, preemptively pointing the police in the wrong direction, toward someone in Tim Bandicoot’s church. The killer has already scattered some new evidence around probably, just like he did with Sissy—probably.”

  Aubrey laughed. “My oh my. Aren’t you the super sleuth.”

  “You don’t think it’s possible?”

  “I think it’s possible.”

  We stopped at Central and North Smiley and waited for the WALK sign. I used the opportunity to slide out from under Aubrey’s arm. We were only a block from the paper and the last thing I wanted was for one of my many enemies in the newsroom to catch me being palsy-walsy with a reporter. To protect one’s image, one must be always vigilant.

  We reached the paper and used the street entrance, something employees rarely do. We greeted Al Tosi, the day security man at the desk, and rode the elevator to the newsroom. “So what’s on your agenda?” I asked Aubrey before we went our separate ways.

  Alec Tinker’s voice ambushed us. “Ladies!”

  “Ladies?” Aubrey shrieked playfully. “Someone’s not reading their sexual harassment handbook.”

  He pressed his palms together prayerfully and bowed apologetically.

  “Or the religious practices handbook,” I added.

  He told us that Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates were coming in at one, together, to discuss Aubrey’s investigation. “And you’re invited, too, Maddy.”

  “Good gravy,” I said, “why am I invited?”

  ***

  The meeting was held in Bob Averill’s office on the fifth floor. It’s a long, sterile office, huge round window at one end, display case filled with old Underwood typewriters at the other. The gray walls in between are lined with a century’s worth of important front pages: the Japanese surrender, men walking on the moon, the Kennedy assassination, the violent UAW strike of 1958 (which my Lawrence covered), the 1908 school fire that killed forty-two children, a couple dozen pages in all. Bob doesn’t have a desk, just a glass-top coffee table circled by comfortable leather chairs. The coffee table that afternoon held what it always holds: the most recent edition of the paper, neatly folded, and an aloe plant in a green ceramic bowl.

  Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates were already sitting when Aubrey and I arrived. So was Tinker. So was Bob. We sat down quickly and nodded pleasantly to everyone.

  I never felt so out of place in my life. Bob was wearing an expensive suit about the same shade as his walls. Tinker had worn one of his better suits for the occasion, dark blue with red pinstripes, meaning he knew that Gates and Bandicoot were coming in at least a day in advance, while only giving us three hours’ warning. The two evangelists, usually resplendent in white double-breasted suits with wide zig-zaggy neckties, were both dressed in charcoal. Aubrey, for her part, was wearing a snug pair of faded jeans and a sleeveless red blouse. I was wearing my absolutely worst-fitting pair of khakis and a T-shirt with a Canada goose on the front that I’d bou
ght years ago on a vacation to Mackinac Island. Aubrey’s jeans won out over my goose as the focal point for the four important men in suits.

  “I understand you have some concerns?” Bob said to Tim and Guthrie when our nodding was completed.

  They grinned bravely at each other, and Guthrie said, “Yes, we do.”

  Their concern, of course, was Aubrey’s upcoming series on the Buddy Wing murder. They were fearful—that’s the word Tim used, fearful—that Aubrey had mistakenly gotten the impression that the two congregations were unfriendly toward each other.

  “The fact of the matter,” Tim said, “is that Guthrie and I have been brothers in the Lamb for many years. While some feathers were ruffled, years and years ago, that is all behind us now. Relations between our congregations could not be better.”

  “Quite copacetic,” Guthrie added.

  I quickly swallowed the giggle that was suddenly dancing on my tongue. Instead I made this horrible noise, as if I was blowing my nose without a handkerchief. It was that word copacetic. Imagine that old be-bop jazz word coming out of the mouth of Guthrie Gates. Back in my college days it was big word among the Meriwether Square crowd. Everything then was either “copacetic” or “most copacetic.”

  “You okay?” Bob asked me.

  “I’m fine,” I said, wishing I’d had the nerve to say everything was copacetic.

  Tinker looked at Bob for permission, and then, apparently getting it through some telepathic process taught to the newspaper chain’s muckety mucks, reassured the two visitors that the Herald-Union’s intentions were not to stir up trouble between the two churches. “We can’t be too specific, as I’m sure you can appreciate,” he said, “but we have some evidence that Sissy James did not murder Buddy Wing. When we publish what we’ve found—if we publish—there’s been no final decision in that regard—our stories will pertain only to the murder.”