something, honeybun?” I asked.
He pointed to a name on the screen. “Wayne F. Dillow, 1144 Summerhill Lane, Hannawa. Complaints. Restraining order. Conviction for breaking and entering.”
“Does not a murderer make,” I said.
“Yeah. But all these charges. Pretty pathological guy, wouldn’t you say? And a member of the flock.”
“Which church directory you working from?” I asked.
He grunted, “Huh?” and I explained that Aubrey had gotten two church directories from Guthrie Gates, a current one and one that was three years old. He used his thumb to mark his place and looked at the cover. It was the one for the current year. “So he’s still a member,” I said.
I watched over Eric’s shoulder as he e-mailed Aubrey. GOT A NIBBLE , his message said. I wrote Dillow’s name and address on the back of an envelope from Eric’s wastebasket and went to the old filing cabinets to check the D drawers. There was nothing on Wayne F. or any other Dillow. Eric had better luck. Scanning the on-line obituary files, he found a Dorothea Louise (nee Pauley) Dillow. She died in 1997 at age fifty-seven. She was a member of the Heaven Bound Cathedral. She was survived by her sons James of Hannawa and Howard of Duluth, Minnesota; her husband, Wayne; a sister, Edna Lynn Scarberry of Knoxville, Tennessee.
Five minutes to four, Aubrey hopped out of the elevator and sped to her desk like an angry ostrich. She typed furiously for about an hour then strolled to Eric’s desk like a happy swan. “What’s the nibble?” she asked. She was absolutely delighted that Eric found a church member with a criminal record. She kissed his cheek. They went out to supper. I turned down their half-hearted invitation to join them and went home.
Tuesday, May 2
The next day Aubrey got the police records on the charges against Dillow. She also called his wife’s sister in Knoxville.
Wayne and Dorothea Dillow had been members of the Heaven Bound Cathedral since 1974. According to the sister, Dorothea was more religious than Wayne-not unusual-but he was faithful enough to go along with her tithing to the church. In 1996, Dorothea started passing blood. Her doctor told her she had a cancerous kidney. Wayne begged her to have the surgery. But Dorothea had watched God cure thousands of people of their terrible afflictions through his gifted servant Buddy Wing. So she joined the healing line at the next Friday night service and walked across the stage and told the Rev. Wing of the evil growing inside her. He put his hand on her belly and told the cancer to leave. “Out, foul flesh,” he commanded. “Out! Out! Out in the name of Jesus- uh.”
After Dorothea’s funeral, Wayne stopped going to church. Stopped tithing. Then he started calling Buddy Wing at home, late at night. That Buddy felt almost as bad about her death as he did was of no consolation to Wayne F. Dillow. That God worked in mysterious ways was of no consolation either. When Buddy one night suggested that perhaps Dorothea’s faith wasn’t strong enough, that perhaps that’s why the cancer came sneaking back, Wayne called him a murderer. Call after call he called him a murderer. When the pastor no longer answered his phone, Wayne showed up at his door. Pounding on it. Screaming, “Why Buddy? Why?”
Buddy Wing repeatedly complained to the police and the police repeatedly warned Dillow to stop his harassment. Dillow didn’t stop. Wing got a restraining order. Dillow ignored it. Wing had Dillow arrested. Dillow bailed himself out and went right back to Wing’s house. He broke out a window and crawled inside. He screamed, “Why, Buddy? Why?” up the dark stairs.
Dillow was charged with breaking and entering but Wing begged police to reduce the charges to trespassing. Dillow was fined $250 and served a month in jail.
The strange thing, the sister in Knoxville told Aubrey, was that after six or seven months Wayne started going back to the church, started tithing again. He had regained his faith.
“Why am I suspicious?” Aubrey asked as we leaned against my car in the parking deck after work.
“I know I couldn’t go back to that church,” I said.
“Unless you wanted to get even,” she said. “Then you might. Then you might sit there week after week swallowing your anger, biding your time, waiting for that right opportunity to see if Buddy Wing could heal himself.”
“So Wayne F. Dillow goes on the list of suspects?” I asked.
“You bet he does.”
She talked me into going to Speckley’s for supper. That’s where she told me she was on the cusp of having sex with Eric. “If he plays his cards right, maybe tonight,” she said while I winced. She also told me of her plans to ambush the eyebrow woman. “You’ll come along, won’t you?” she asked.
Chapter 10
Saturday, May 6
Aubrey and I called her the eyebrow woman, but her name actually was Sandra Leigh Swain. She was forty- one, a divorcee with two adolescent daughters. She worked full-time cutting men’s hair. On Fridays, she did make- up for the Heaven Bound Cathedral’s televised services. She was listed in the directory as a member.
I wasn’t at all surprised that Aubrey had learned these things about her. A few minutes on a computer and you can learn all kinds of things about people these days. I was surprised, however, that Aubrey knew that the eyebrow woman would be grocery shopping at Artie’s on Saturday morning.
“It was a no-brainer,” she explained as we drove to the supermarket for the ambush. “She works full-time days. She has two daughters in middle school who have to be driven like sled dogs on school nights to stay off the phone and do their homework. She spends Friday nights working at the church and Sundays attending. So she simply has to do her grocery shopping Saturday morning.”
She was probably right. Saturday is the worst time in the world to go for groceries, yet two-thirds of the women I know do exactly that. They have no other time. “But how do you know she goes mornings? Maybe she goes-”
“Afternoons? No way. She’s a single mother with an ex-husband who doesn’t pay his child support. She goes mornings for the hamburger and the chicken and whatever other specials she can get to keep down her bill. By afternoon, everything good’s picked over.”
Aubrey could see the skepticism on my old face, apparently. “I know these things because-as you remember from your own snooping-my mother was often without a man’s paycheck.”
“And with two daughters just like the eyebrow woman,” I added without thinking.
The pain of her childhood worked across her face. Then she smiled wickedly. “I also know these things because I followed her last Saturday.”
“Why didn’t you ambush her then?” I asked.
“Because I wanted to know more about her first.”
“Why are we ambushing her at all? Why don’t you just call her on the phone?”
“I tried all week. She kept hanging up.”
“You found out where she did her shopping first and then you tried to call her?”
Aubrey’s impatience was bubbling into anger. “Why the third degree here? After that scene with Gates in the make-up chair, and what you told me about her lighting up, I was curious right away. And I wasn’t only interested in seeing where she did her grocery shopping. I also wanted to see if she’d sneak over to Bandicoot’s church, if she really was a spy.”
“But she didn’t?” I asked.
“She just went to Artie’s and Wal-mart and home. And she didn’t go out Saturday night. At least by nine o’clock she hadn’t.”
“Did you?” I asked.
“You’re asking if I went out with Eric?”
“It’s none of my business.”
“You’re right. It’s not. But so you don’t have to ask the next question that isn’t any of your business, as of
