an electric piano. People started clapping in time. Many were rocking their shoulders and bobbing their heads. I noticed I was tapping my toes. Then Aubrey took a camera out of her purse and put it in her lap. “Good gravy,” I whispered, “you’re not going to take pictures, are you?”
“I was asked to come and cover an important event. Of course I’m going to take pictures.”
“You start snapping that thing during the service and they’ll descend on us like a plague of locusts.”
No sooner said, the back door swung wide and a muscle-bound man with a backwards baseball cap and a television camera on his shoulder slid inside. Behind him was Tish Kiddle. Aubrey hissed “television whore” loud enough for half the congregation to hear.
The thrones on the stage suddenly filled up with elders. A couple dozen people from the congregation filtered to the stage and sang this absolutely wild hymn that sounded an awful lot like the Isley’s Brothers’ Do You Love Me?
Then Tim and Annie Bandicoot appeared at the pulpit together. The congregation seemed to shrivel. Clearly this is not what usually happened at the temple’s Sunday morning service. Annie lovingly rubbed her husband’s shoulder and then stepped to the microphone. She said this: “Tim is going to talk to you, and I want you to know that what he is going to say, he has already said to me, and to our children. I want you to know that we love him and trust him and believe in him. And we believe in you.”
Then she said this: “Jesus said to the Pharisees, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.’ So should you decide to cast stones at my husband when this is finished, I will be standing at his side.”
Aubrey looked at me and mouthed that line from the Tammy Wynette song, Stand By Your Man.
It was clear where this whole thing was going. Jesus had said that cast-the-first-stone stuff to the Pharisees after they brought a woman to him charged with adultery, and reminded him that the punishment under the old laws of Moses was death by stoning.
Tim Bandicoot hugged his wife and stepped to the microphone. “I am guilty of the sin of adultery. And it was with a woman you all know. A woman who today sits in prison, for the murder of our beloved Buddy Wing.”
Aubrey finished scribbling the quote and then snapped a series of photographs.
Tim’s confession was filled with tears and whimpering and loud prayers peppered with scripture. There was plenty of crying in the audience, too. Every now and then someone would pop from their folding chair and implore him to “Go and sin no more”-the same thing Jesus said to the woman after he’d saved her from the Pharisees’ stones.
I must say that Tim Bandicoot’s agony looked genuine to me. And I have some experience with the agony of unfaithful men: Dale Marabout’s, when I found him on the floor with the kindergarten teacher; my husband Lawrence’s, when I found him in the garage with the secretary from the labor union. I could tell from Aubrey’s frozen smirk that she did not believe Tim Bandicoot’s contrition was for real.
But then he said this: “There are those who believe Sissy did not kill Pastor Wing. There are those who believe Sissy confessed to that terrible sin to protect me. Though I surely broke Buddy’s heart, I did not stop it from beating. I did not kill Buddy Wing.”
He started to cry again, and shake. Annie took him in her arms and they swayed like wind chimes. To get a better angle, Aubrey slid into the aisle and sank to her knees, clicking off more shots.
Tim gently pushed his wife away and, with arms stiffly anchored on his pulpit, directly addressed the long- legged reporter kneeling in the aisle. “I do not know if Sissy is innocent or guilty, Miss McGinty. But I will go to her prison cell, and I will beg that if she has not spoken the truth, she speaks it now.”
Tim and Annie left the stage. Aubrey tried to follow them into the hallway behind the stage, but a large black man in a brown suit stopped her. The musicians started playing and the choir started singing. The congregation clapped and danced and the tears poured.
Aubrey and I trotted out the door like the hyenas we were. Tish Kiddle and her cameraman were right behind us.
“That sneaky bitch,” Aubrey fumed as we hurried to her Escort.
I was not sure who she meant. “Tish Kiddle or Annie Bandicoot?”
She fumbled through her purse for her car keys. “Try to keep the objects of my disdain straight, Maddy. Tish is the whore. Annie is the sneaky bitch.”
“Does it really surprise you they invited Channel 21, too?”
“This is my story, Maddy.”
“I think the Bandicoots consider it their story,” I said.
Aubrey glowered at me-as if I was guilty of something. “It’s because of my digging that they’re in this spot. You’d think they’d respect that.”
“I don’t think protecting your scoop is very high on their list of worries.”
Aubrey mellowed. She giggled at her own arrogance. “It should be.”
We sped past the church. The red Taurus station wagon pulled from the side street and followed us.
I understood why Aubrey was livid. It was her story. She’d spent weeks researching the murder, wheedling information out of one reluctant source after another. For weeks she’d seen that fat, black Page One headline in her head:
Did Sissy really kill Buddy Wing?
Now Tish Kiddle would be breaking her story on tonight’s TV news.
I did all I could to comfort her. “They’ll lead with it tonight-unless there was some terrible accident on the interstate-but they won’t have any details, or any background. After tonight they’ll just be reporting what you’ve already reported.”
Aubrey fished through her purse for her cellphone and thumbed in a number. “How do those TV people live with themselves… Tinker? Sorry to call you at home on Sunday.”
There was no time to drive me home. We went straight to the paper and Aubrey spent the next five hours writing her story. And while she wrote, Tinker, who’d rushed to the newsroom in musty jogging shorts and a Cleveland Indians T-shirt, lorded over the weekend skeleton crew on the metro desk. The story would run across the top of Page One. Tim Bandicoot’s confession to adultery would be the main thrust of the story, but it would state very clearly in the second paragraph that the public admission came in the wake of an ongoing Herald-Union investigation into the murder of Buddy Wing. We were going to be scooped by the local TV news, but we would push, and push hard, whatever advantage we had. We would let our readers know, and not in a shy way, that while TV 21 simply stumbled into the story, we uncovered the story, that Tim Bandicoot was confessing for one reason and one reason only, because of the Herald-Union ’s dogged journalistic excellence.
Aubrey’s photos came out pretty good. Tinker chose one of Tim and Annie hugging. He told the make-up editor to blow it up big. And run it in color. And crop it tight, so every wrinkle of agony on Tim’s face showed, so the wedding ring on Annie’s hand showed. The headline on the story was plain and powerful:
Preacher confesses to affair with convicted murderess
While Aubrey was writing, and frantically trying to get her sources on the phone, including Guthrie Gates, Tinker dragged me off to the cafeteria. We shared a piece of stale carrot cake from the vending machine. He asked me for my impression of Tim Bandicoot’s confession, not once but five times. He was pumped up about the story but also worried. Originally Aubrey was supposed to continue her investigation for another month, and then take another two or three weeks to write her stories. The stories would be run by the paper’s lawyers and discussed ad nauseam in editorial meetings. The graphics people were going to design a special logo to go with the stories, a Bible with a dripping cross.
But now, thanks to Annie Bandicoot, Aubrey would not only have to start writing her stories right away, we’d have to start running them right away. It was going to be a crazy couple of weeks.
Just as Tinker and I were playfully fighting over the little sugar carrot on the cake, Bob Averill poked his head in the cafeteria. He pointed at Tinker and motioned for him to follow. To me he said, “Enjoy your snack.”
At six everybody gathered around the television in the conference room to watch the news, 21 at Six. Tish Kiddle, reporting live from the dark and empty church, had almost nothing: “Members of the New Epiphany Temple remain in utter shock tonight following the unexpected confession by the Rev. Tim Bandicoot that he’d had a long sexual relationship with Sissy James, the confessed murderer of Bandicoot’s old mentor, nationally known evangelist Buddy Wing.”
After weekend anchorwoman Jamie Stokes said, “Oh my,” and weekend anchorman Bill Callucci said, “What more can you tell us, Tish?” Tish said, “TV 21 has learned-and TV 21 is the first to report this-that new evidence
