century, Marabout. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about those words anymore.”
“Then why not print them without the dashes?” Dale wondered. Even the sports guys were gathering around the metro desk now.
Tinker continued to commiserate with the lights. You just knew he was wondering why on earth he’d accepted the transfer from our paper in Baton Rouge. In his three years as managing editor down there, he’d not only stopped the paper’s horrible slide in circulation, he’d helped the paper win a Pulitzer Prize. He’d done all the usual things papers do when panic sets in-he redesigned the paper to look like USA Today, created trendy new sections to appeal to people’s active lifestyles, and put pictures of the paper’s columnists on the sides of buses. But the biggest thing he did was spice up the reporting. The Business Week feature on him recounted a pep talk he gave reporters one afternoon: He stood on his desk and told them to start writing like the novelists they all really wanted to be. “Treat the truth just like it’s fiction,” he was quoted as saying.
Tinker wasn’t up on his desk now, but he was joyously giving the same sort of speech. “From now on,” he said, “when profanity is pertinent to a story, we dash it and run it.”
Dale, to his credit, didn’t back off. “And how is it pertinent here, Tinker? Everybody knows cops have garbage mouths. All you’re trying to do is sell papers.”
Tinker’s head lowered as slowly as my automatic garage door. “And you’re not trying to sell papers, Marabout? I’m not so happy to hear that.”
Well, that’s how it went. Dale lost the argument and on Saturday the story ran with the dashes. Dale called me at home on Sunday. He tried to sound carefree and chatty, but I knew he was worried. “People do need to know what kind of bastard Lionel Percy is,” he admitted, “and maybe Aubrey’s story will do some good. But she’s going to pay for it. She’s made one of their own look bad. They’ll close ranks, freeze her out for a couple of months until it looks like she’s sloughing off, then feed her bad information on some big story to make her look incompetent.”
“She’s hard as nails,” I said.
That made him laugh. “You used to tell me I was hard as nails. Now I’m just another worn-out lump on the copy desk.”
It was the first sexual innuendo between us in years-if you want to call anything that blatant an innuendo. I let it go by. “You’re a good copy editor,” I said.
I spent the rest of the day kicking myself for that good copy editor remark. What a horrible thing to say. It was like praising some old geezer architect for the log cabin he was building out of Popsicle sticks at the rest home. At least I knew he was probably kicking himself for his hard as nails crack. We’d been lovers once. But Father Time and that damned kindergarten teacher had put an end to that. Now we were friends. That was enough.
Saturday, April 15
Letters to the editor started pouring in on Monday. By fifty to one they lambasted us for sinking to such a new low. The girls in circulation were busy all day with people calling to cancel their subscriptions. At Tuesday night’s City Council meeting, several of the backbenchers used language they wouldn’t have dared using in public before, presumably in the hope of finally being quoted in the paper. On Wednesday, Charlie Chimera, afternoon drive-time host on WFLO, ranted all four of his hours about what he repeatedly called the Herald-Union’ s, “disgusting descent into the murky mire of irresponsibility.” Every caller agreed with him.
Our circulation started climbing back up on Thursday.
Finally it was Saturday again and Aubrey and I were on our way to see Tim Bandicoot.
At first we discussed the weather-the first thing all Ohioans discuss when they crawl into a car-and then why Tim Bandicoot would agree to talk to us about Sissy James. “It sure can’t be for the free publicity,” I said. “Sissy’s name all over the front page could destroy him.”
“I’m the enemy,” Aubrey said. “He wants to take my measure.”
“Take your measure? Somebody’s been watching too many old movies.”
She knew I was joking. She also knew I was taking her down a few pegs. “Then how about this?” she asked. “He knows Sissy will be all over the front page with or without his cooperation. So he might as well appear helpful.”
“ Appear being the key word?”
She repeated my question as a declarative sentence. “Appear being the key word.”
“Which raises all sorts of possibilities?”
“Which raises all sorts of possibilities.”
Tim Bandicoot’s New Day Epiphany Temple was located east of downtown, on Lutheran Hill, at the corner of Cleveland and Cather, an old commercial district that once served the city’s German enclave. By the Fifties those Germans had been absorbed by other ethnic groups and other neighborhoods. Today Lutheran Hill is populated by South Koreans, Pakistanis, poor blacks and even poorer Appalachian whites. Three-quarters of the storefronts are empty.
The temple was housed in an old dime store, a single-story orange brick building sandwiched between two used car lots. The fat red letters that once spelled W-O-O-L-W-O-R-T-H’S across the front of the building were long gone, but you could still see their dirty silhouettes.
Aubrey found a parking spot in front just big enough for her Escort. We checked twice to make sure the doors were locked and went inside. What a difference from the Heaven Bound Cathedral. The New Day Epiphany Temple was a single room. The floor was covered with peel-and-stick tile. The walls were covered with cheap maple paneling. The lights were on but nobody was home.
We stood by the door for a few minutes, wondering what to do, then walked down the rows of metal folding chairs to the stage at the back of the room. The stage was carpeted with red shag. There was a modest pulpit up front and a row of ugly, throne-like chairs across the back. The monstrous cross on the wall was wrapped with hundreds of miniature Christmas lights. “You suppose they’re the twinkly kind?” Aubrey asked.
“Of course they’re the twinkly kind,” I said. We each chose a throne and sat.
Tim Bandicoot arrived maybe five minutes later. He came through the front door, three tall Styrofoam cups of coffee balanced on a box of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. “Comfortable, aren’t they?” he called out when he spotted us in those ugly chairs.
I felt like a royal fool and started to get up. But Bandicoot motioned for me to stay put. He came up the center aisle with the coffee and doughnuts, snaring a pair of folding chairs as he went. He set the coffee and doughnuts on one and himself on the other. And so our visit began, Aubrey and I on our thrones, Tim Bandicoot on a folding chair, debating between creme sticks, glazed crullers, and cinnamon twists.
I don’t know what Aubrey expected, but I expected Tim Bandicoot to be some kind of icky egomaniac. I figured that, more than likely, he was the real murderer. I figured that after he’d gotten all the sex and mindless adoration he wanted from Sissy James, he set her up to save his own neck. And now here we were having doughnuts and coffee with this nice, down-to-earth young man. Maybe under that pleasant facade he really was icky and egomaniacal, and maybe even the real murderer, but I felt surprisingly comfortable that morning, sipping coffee, nibbling on a cruller, looking into those chocolate-brown cow eyes of his.
When we’d gone to see Guthrie Gates, Aubrey got right to the skinny: Did he think Sissy did it? This morning was different. She let Tim Bandicoot go on and on about his growing congregation and his plans to build a new temple right there in that rundown neighborhood, with a day care center, soup kitchen, and food bank for the city’s poor. He also talked about building his electronic church. Currently his services were only broadcast on the local community-access channel, but he was determined to be on a regular local cable channel within a year and on cable nationally within five years. He had plans for saving millions of souls in Africa and China and the former Soviet Republics.
By the time Aubrey asked him about Sissy James, we’d eaten half the doughnuts in the box. “Did you really love Sissy?” she asked. “Do you still love her?”
He was clearly embarrassed. And clearly nervous. “I did not love her the way I love my wife,” he said. “I let my flesh take over.” He searched the box for the plainest doughnut he could find. “I’ve already admitted all this to my wife.”
“Has she forgiven you?” asked Aubrey.
“I did not ask her for forgiveness. I want her to be disappointed in me for the rest of my life. I’m weak. I’m a
