Morgue Mama

by Corwin, C. R.

  “I told you the truth.”

  “Yes you did. The old files I looked at bore that out. Your sister had been sexually molested for years by your stepfather—I’m betting you were, too—and after she took him to court, and after he was acquitted, she took her own life. I can only imagine what kind of guilt you felt. You told the social workers and the police nothing had ever happened to you, that you’d never seen nor heard your stepfather do anything to your sister. Were you afraid? Had he threatened you? Of course you’ve tried to keep your sister alive.”

  Aubrey was furious. “Psycho-babble bullshit, Maddy. You’ve got me in a lot of trouble over your stupid psycho-babble bullshit.”

  Another man joined us. It was Scotty Grant, chief detective in the Hannawa Police Department’s homicide unit. There was no need for an introduction. Aubrey knew who he was.

  “At the time,” I continued, “I figured you were looking into the Buddy Wing murder because of your mistrust of the legal system. Your sympathy for its victims. I was very impressed.”

  Aubrey’s eyes drifted back to her computer screen. She scrolled down. We all read:

  Herald-Union Managing Editor Alec Tinker confirmed that McGinty had been investigating the Buddy Wing murder since March. She had presented him with compelling evidence that Sissy James, the 27-year-old Hannawa hospital worker who confessed to the murder, was in fact innocent.

  James is now serving a life sentence at the Marysville Reformatory for Women.

  Detective Grant said police now believe James confessed to protect Wing’s former protégé, the Rev. Tim Bandicoot, who was expelled from the Heaven Bound Cathedral after a much publicized rift over the practice of speaking in tongues.

  “Lie number two came on Easter Sunday,” I said. “Right here at the paper. You and Eric were in the cafeteria going over your files. Remember when I asked why you had two copies of the church directory? You told me you went back for an older one—because former members of the church were more likely to be suspects than present ones. Quick thinking. But I’d already seen that the two directories had the same date on the cover.”

  Aubrey artfully put a look of mild shock on her face. “That can’t be right.”

  I plowed ahead. “One possibility is that someone at the cathedral mistakenly gave you a current directory when you asked for an older one. Nobody at the cathedral remembers such a visit, by the way.”

  “I did go back—”

  “The other possibility, of course, is that you already had a church directory when you asked Guthrie Gates for the first one, during that visit with me.”

  Aubrey changed her expression to one of confusion, as if I was some demented old duck. “So what point are you trying to make here, Maddy?”

  “That you lied about having two identical directories when you didn’t need to lie,” I said. “You could have said, ‘I figured since you and Eric were helping we’d need two,’ or ‘I found another one in the morgue files you gave me,’ or ‘Don’t you remember? Guthrie gave us two.’ I would have believed any of that. But you intentionally lied. Because you’d had that other directory for months. You panicked.”

  Aubrey’s eyes were drifting. I turned to see what she was looking at. Two uniformed police officers were leaning against the wall in sports. “You’re completely wrong about this,” she insisted hollowly.

  I felt my own eyes tearing up. “I spent the next two weeks trying not to think the worst—I really did—but unfortunately for you I’m one of those miserable old buttinskys who just can’t say no to her curiosities. Take that day we were watching the police tapes at my house. Matter-of-factly you said procaine was used only in hospitals. But that’s not true. Paramedics carry all sorts of emergency medicines, including procaine. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that three weeks before Buddy Wing was poisoned you decided to write a story on Rush City’s EMS unit. You rode with them for four days and wrote a wonderful story about how they rushed around the county saving kids who drank Drano and old men having heart attacks. Could it be that once you’d decided on Buddy Wing as your victim, and then chose poor Sissy James as your suspect, you researched how she might do it? You learned she worked at a hospital, and knowing as much about poisons as you do, you decided on procaine as your poison of choice. But as the big day got closer, you began to worry. Would the procaine be enough to kill him? Especially in the cruel, clever way you planned to administer it? So you added the lily of the valley.”

  Aubrey smirked, thinking she’d found something to discredit my analysis, I suppose. “Knowing as much about posions as I do? Where in that feeble mind of yours did you come up with that?”

  I smirked right back at her. “This is no time for false modesty, dear. You know plenty about poisons. But before we get to that, let me tell you about lie number three. It was the most serendipitous thing. You remember that day in May when Dale Marabout popped his cork and quit? I felt just awful about it. And after stewing about it all week I went to Bob Averill, to explain all the stress Dale had been under. Your name came up and before I knew it I was telling him about my suspicions. He thought I was crazy. But after I told him about the church directories and your EMS story in The Gazette, and the way you found the real killer in the football coach case, and how you covered the squirrel poisoning at Kent—well.”

  Before Aubrey arrived at the paper that night, Bob Averill and Dale Marabout had stationed themselves in a storage room by the elevator. Now they were standing behind us, like a couple of Houdinis materializing out of thin air.

  “I’d like to say it was my idea,” Bob said, “but it was actually Maddy’s. She thought we should secretly hire Dale to investigate your investigation—on a freelance basis.”

  Aubrey swiveled in her chair. “And you believe the crap he’s written, Bob? He’s been trying to fuck me since the day I got here.”

  Bob Averill was shocked into silence. I was not. “If you mean in a sexual way,” I said, “God only knows what goes on inside a man’s head. But if you mean getting even with you for stealing his beat, that’s simply not true. Dale was pissed at Tinker, never you.”

  Dale couldn’t resist. “For the record, I’m still pissed at Tinker.”

  Tinker’s lips began to bubble. Before he could say anything, Bob held up his hands, like a pope calling for quiet from his balcony above St. Peter’s Square. “Now-now. We don’t need another shoving match here.”

  He was referring, of course, to the episode in his office between Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates.

  “We figured it would be wise to have Dale follow you around town,” Tinker now said to Aubrey, “not only to see if you’d give yourself away, but also in case you tried to hurt someone else. And because we were afraid you might recognize Dale’s car, Dale drove his wife’s, a red Taurus station wagon.”

  The “sssshit” that leaked from Aubrey’s lips was better than any confession.

  I continued: “We were just beginning to think it was a waste of time, when you made up that business about the man in the station wagon attacking you. Tinker thinks you did it to make your story sexier—reporter risks life and limb to get the truth—but I think you did it to get Eric back.”

  Aubrey was suddenly like a girl in junior high, denying to her friends that she liked some goofy boy with braces. “I beat myself up to get Eric back? Puh-leeze.”

  I knew everyone wanted me to get on with my story. But I also knew that Aubrey—murderer or not—had fallen in love with Eric. And I knew that Eric—world-class doofus or not—had fallen in love with her. Keeping Eric in the dark had been the toughest part of this whole affair for me and I felt the need to confess, so she could go to prison knowing that at least one person, once upon a time, had truly loved her.

  “Eric didn’t know anything about Dale following you,” I said. “He didn’t know anything about anything. That night in Meri when he chased Dale down the alley, he was truly trying to protect you. When I saw him staggering back across the street, I figured it was all o
ver. But discovering that the mysterious man in the station wagon was none other than Dale Marabout, and that Dale was following you because you very likely were the real killer, and that I was behind the whole blessed thing—well. Eric was so confused he couldn’t even talk.”

  Whatever Aubrey felt inside she was keeping inside. “That’s all so sweet. But if that was Dale in the red Taurus then it was Dale who attacked me. Because, regardless of what any of you say, I was attacked that night.”

  Dale grinned at her victoriously. “That night—Monday, June 12—the Taurus and I were staying at the Motel 6 in Rush City, after spending the day talking to your old co-workers at The Gazette.”

  Aubrey threw up her hands, as if being caught in a series of lies meant nothing at all. “So I was foolishly blinded by love, desperately trying to get my boyfriend back. So what?”

  Dale leaned over Aubrey’s keyboard and scrolled his story down a bit. “You might want to read this.”

  Aubrey swiveled back and read:

  Detective Grant refused to discuss publicly the evidence that lead to McGinty’s arrest. Nevertheless, from a variety of sources the Herald-Union has been able to piece together the chilling story of a murder painstakingly planned and meticulously carried out.

  That story actually may have begun three autumns ago on the campus of Kent State University, where McGinty was just beginning her senior year.

  McGinty, like many students in the journalism department, worked on The Stater, the daily campus newspaper. Like other students, she planned to use those stories to get her first job after graduation.

  “The better your stories the better your chance of landing on a big paper,” Dr. Edward Firestone, faculty advisor for The Stater, told his student reporters again and again.

  Three weeks into the fall semester, the university’s famous black squirrels began dying. Their carcasses were found in flower beds and at the base of the huge oaks that dot the sprawling campus.

  The carcasses of 22 squirrels were found before campus police announced that the squirrels died after eating ears of corn laced with chlordane, a powerful chemical used to control crickets and other insects.

  I don’t know how fast Aubrey was reading, but I was well into Dale’s background on how the squirrels were first brought to Kent when she started laughing. “This is some real crap reporting, Marabout,” she said.

  Dale smiled and motioned for her to read on:

  “I remember that Aubrey handed in a completed story on the squirrel deaths before the editors could assign somebody to cover it,” Firestone told the Herald-Union. “We were impressed with her initiative and gave her the green light to cover the story the rest of the way.”

  In all, McGinty wrote 16 stories about the squirrels, including one detailing the campus police department’s inept handling of the investigation.

  No suspect was ever identified and the poisonings stopped before the semester ended.

  According to college transcripts, McGinty took an elective course in criminal toxicology during the spring semester of her junior year.

  Patrick Byner, dean of Kent’s Criminal Justice Studies program, told the Herald-Union that it is rare for students not majoring in law enforcement to take what he called “such an arcane, graduate-level course.”

  Byner said the course deals with techniques for investigating deaths by poisoning.

  Aubrey smirked at what she’d read. “You can’t print innuendoes like these.”

  “We were pretty close to printing yours,” Tinker answered. “Anyway, we hope that by the time this goes to press you’ll have confirmed them.”

  Aubrey turned back to her computer screen, as anxious as the rest to read what came next, I think:

  During the spring semester McGinty applied at a number of larger newspapers, including the Herald-Union. She did not receive an offer from any of those papers, however. Three months after graduation she accepted a job with the small daily in her hometown, the Rush City Gazette.

  According to Gazette Managing Editor Marilyn Morely, McGinty made no secret of her desire to move on to a larger newspaper as rapidly as possible. “She tried to make even the most routine stories seem important,” Morely said.

  One story that wasn’t routine was the murder of Rush City High School football coach Charles “Chuck” Reddincoat. A month after police charged the father of a boy dropped from the team for harassing younger players, McGinty presented evidence pointing to what police admitted was “a more likely suspect.”

  Dale’s story went on to recap Aubrey’s investigation into the coach’s murder. How, based on her information, police found bloody overalls and a gun at a hunting cabin in Coshocton County. How that evidence led to the arrest and conviction of the cheerleading advisor’s jealous husband. How Aubrey had spent the night following the murder at a motel just three miles from the hunting cabin.

  Aubrey sighed sarcastically. “You have descended into the ooey-gooey depths of innuendo again, Marabout.”

  Dale was enjoying himself. “You’ll be happy to know that the police in Rush City are already taking another look at the case.”

  Aubrey answered coldly. “Are they?” She resumed reading:

  McGinty’s coverage of the killing, and the police department’s arrest of the wrong man, were among the clippings she sent to the Herald-Union’s newly appointed managing editor, Alec Tinker.

  “I was very impressed,” Tinker said. “She was just the kind of reporter I was looking for. I promised her a job as soon as there was an appropriate opening.”

  Can you imagine how hard it was for Dale to write that part of the story? Calmly taking notes while Tinker all but admitted he forced him off his beat? So he could replace him with a younger and more energetic reporter? I was so proud of Dale at that moment. We all kept reading:

  Tinker and McGinty kept in touch for more than a year, exchanging e-mail messages and periodically having lunch. Last August he told her a police reporter’s job would be available shortly after the first of the year.

  “I had decided to reassign a number of reporters and considered Aubrey as my number one candidate for the police reporter position,” Tinker acknowledged.

  Aubrey started nodding, the way any reader thoughtfully nods when he sees where a story is headed. “So after killing the squirrels and the football coach, I killed Buddy Wing, for the good clips?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to stop here and talk to Detective Grant in private?” I asked.

  “And miss the rest of Dale’s brilliant reportage?”

  She pronounced that last word, reportage, as if she was a snooty French cabaret singer.

  She continued reading.

  We all continued reading.

  Chapter 21

  Saturday, March 17

  I left my house as soon as it was light outside and crept through rush hour traffic toward the interstate. The roads were clear but there was snow in the brown clouds rolling out of the southwest, the direction I was heading. Thank God I had a Thermos of hot Darjeeling tea.

  I-491 wound through the hills south of Hannawa for several miles before connecting with I-71, the wide asphalt spine that runs down the center of Ohio from Cleveland to Cincinnati. Just north of Jeromesville it started to rain, humongous drops that overpowered my wipers and made me feel like I was driving under water. I slipped in behind a semi pulling a trailer stacked with new Jeep Cherokees. I was content to stay behind him all the way to Columbus if that’s how far he was going. I remembered how Aubrey McGinty had talked about getting an SUV someday, a bright yellow one, after she got her Visa card under control.

  It was hard to believe that a full year had gone by since Aubrey first dragged me to the Heaven Bound Cathedral to start her investigation into the Buddy Wing murder. Who would have guessed it was Aubrey herself who painted that poisonous cross on his Bible, and filled his water pitcher with water laced with lily of the valley?

  I might never have acted on my suspicions about Aubrey if Dale
Marabout hadn’t quit the way he did. It had stirred me up something terrible. I went to Bob Averill’s office thinking my only motive was to get his job back. But I wasn’t in there two minutes before I was spilling the beans.

  After I’d convinced Bob that Aubrey might be the real killer, he called Tinker up to his office, so I could convince him. At first Tinker resisted the possibility. He’d recruited her after all. But as I went through the bits of evidence I’d collected, he began to see journalistic gold. “If you’re right, we’ve got a huge story about how we brought one of our own to justice,” he said. “We’ll be up to our necks in awards.”

  Tinker wanted to create a secret team of reporters to investigate Aubrey’s investigation. Bob nixed the idea immediately. “Reporters are genetic blabberers,” he said. “Aubrey would find out in five minutes.”

  Dale Marabout’s name just popped out of my mouth.

  So we all met with Dale at my house. After an hour of pleading over coffee and an Entenmann’s low-fat cherry cheesecake, he agreed to do the story, for an outrageous freelance fee that included the continuation of his health-care coverage.

  Dale’s first task was to double-check my own suspicions about Aubrey. He went to Rush City and gathered whatever records he could about her stepfather’s molestation trial and her sister’s suicide. He talked to her old high school teachers. Despite the horrors of her home life she was a very good student. She was editor of the high school newspaper, first-chair French horn player in the band. One teacher confided that Aubrey also was rumored to be a tad bit promiscuous. That same teacher confirmed that Coach Reddincoat had quite a well-known zipper problem himself, not only with the young teachers but also with senior girls about to graduate.