my absolutely worst-fitting pair of khakis and a T-shirt with a Canada goose on the front that I’d bought 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.”
It was a cautiously worded bit of corporate boilerplate that Aubrey simply couldn’t let stand. “Of course, when a newspaper publishes any story, it’s our duty to put things in context,” she added.
Tim Bandicoot frowned sourly. “Context can mean a lot of things,” he said.
“We’d like whatever assurances you can give us that Miss McGinty won’t dredge up any more than’s necessary,” Guthrie added.
Bob shifted from his left buttock to his right. “We don’t dredge, gentlemen, we report.”
It was the appropriate thing for an editor-in-chief to say, of course, but dredge is what newspapers do, and should do.
Guthrie was repentant. “I shouldn’t have said dredge.”
Tim was not. “Your paper, Mr. Averill, has a history of treating religion like it belongs on the sports pages. Hallelujah City. All that stuff.”
Bob set himself square on both buttocks. “We did not coin that phrase, Mr. Bandicoot. That was that radio guy-Charlie Chimera.”
“You’ve certainly repeated it enough times,” Tim Bandicoot said.
Bob pawed the air. “Everybody’s repeated it-but the point is, the Herald-Union is not anti-religion.” He then explained our earlier coverage of the split between Tim and Buddy Wing. “Buddy was a very public figure, not only locally but nationally. And when a very public figure does very public things, like casting an assistant pastor out of his congregation during a live television broadcast, that is going to be reported.”
Bob had hit a nerve with Guthrie Gates. “Pastor Wing did not cast Tim out. He merely said that the gift of tongues was about to come over him and that all who might be offended should listen elsewhere.”
Tim Bandicoot leaned forward and clasped his hands together. He closed his eyes. But he did not pray. He growled slowly like a Doberman strapped into a muzzle. “Guthrie, I was never offended when Buddy spoke in tongues. We simply had a difference of opinion.”
Guthrie held up his hands and spread his fingers in surrender. “Sorry. I’ve gotten us off track.”
I can’t say if Tim was prepared to let the matter rest. But Aubrey sure wasn’t. She leaned back and crossed her legs like a man, wrapping her hands around her pointing knee. “It’s more than a difference of opinion, isn’t it? It’s a fundamental difference in belief. Buddy believed that speaking in tongues was proof of being baptized in the Holy Spirit. And those who didn’t, weren’t. That’s what you believe, too, isn’t it, Guthrie?”
He nodded nervously. “But it has nothing to do with Buddy’s death.”
“Whether it does or it doesn’t,” said Aubrey, “it’s part of the big picture that we have to report.”
Guthrie pushed back his bangs. They were beginning to turn dark with perspiration. “I don’t see why.”
Tinker was about ready to say something diplomatic to keep the conversation dull and businesslike. Bob, however, did his Richard Nixon impersonation, dropping his eyebrows and shaking his jowls, a signal to let Aubrey keep going. Which she did.
“Well,” she said, “the woman now in prison for Buddy’s murder was one of those two hundred people who followed Tim out of the cathedral. And the one Tim was sleeping with, to boot.”
“There’s no reason to go there,” Guthrie pleaded. He seemed oddly more uncomfortable with Tim’s carnal sins than Tim himself.
Aubrey ignored him. “So, if Sissy James is innocent, then somebody set her up. Somebody who knew about the affair. Somebody who knew his or her way around the cathedral. Somebody with a most wicked sense of humor-big glob of poison right on Buddy Wing’s wagging old tongue. How can we not print all that?”
Guthrie came out of his leather chair like a jack-in-the-box. “You are not a police officer, Miss McGinty. You are not judge and jury. You’re just some damn little-”
Aubrey’s lips thinned and tightened. “Reporter?” she asked. “Or were you going to say girl?”
I was sure Bob or Tinker would say something now. But neither did. They let Aubrey say whatever she wanted.
“We are not going to point fingers, and we are not going to pass judgment on anyone,” she said. “We are just going to report.”
“And embarrass a lot of good people,” Tim said softly.
“If people in your congregations are embarrassed,” Aubrey answered just as softly, “it will be from the embarrassing things other people in your congregations did.”
Guthrie, still standing, issued a mean-spirited “A-men.” Tim knew it was aimed at him. He sprang out of his leather chair and pushed Guthrie back into his.
Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates had come into Bob Averill’s office as brothers and were now acting like it. They crashed into each other like two bull walruses competing for a dewy-eyed cow on a rocky beach in the North Atlantic. There wasn’t any punching or swearing, just pushing and an occasional growl from deep inside their straining guts.
Bob Averill, the veteran of so many heated discussions in his office, went to his phone and called security. Tinker, a managing editor who someday hoped to be an editor-in-chief just like Bob Averill, pulled the coffee table out of the way, saving the aloe plant and the neatly folded copy of that morning’s paper. Aubrey and I stayed put in our leather chairs and tried not to pee our pants laughing.
The hatred between Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates was understandable. They were both bright and ambitious young men. They’d found themselves under the same roof, climbing the same ladder. Two heirs, one throne. What good was going to come of that? So if that speaking in tongues business hadn’t erupted, something else would have come along to drive one of them out. But the tongues business did erupt. And it turned a nasty sibling rivalry into an even nastier battle between an aging father and an errant son.
That rift between Buddy and Tim was hardly small potatoes. It was a big, big deal. When Aubrey first started looking into the murder, I went to Nanette Beane, the paper’s religion editor, and asked her what she knew about speaking in tongues. Well, naturally, she didn’t know diddly. Before becoming religion editor she’d been the food editor and before that she’d covered suburban school board meetings. But she did have a number of reference books strung across the back of her desk and she found one called The Fundamentals of Fundamentalism and it contained a chapter on the subject.
Buddy Wing was a Pentecostal.
