Thursday, March 9
Twenty-four hours later I was back in Meri, back at Speckley’s, two booths down from where Dale and I sat. “Go crazy,” Aubrey said, “I’m buying.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said.
“No, I’m buying-I want to thank you for your help with the Buddy Wing files.”
“If every reporter I helped bought me lunch, I’d weigh four hundred pounds.”
We both ordered the meat loaf sandwiches, au gratin potatoes on the side.
“By the way,” I said after the waitress was gone, “you could have e-mailed me about lunch-I’m not the high- tech dodo everybody thinks.”
Aubrey’s lips contorted into her laugh-preventing pucker. “I did e-mail you,” she said, “about an hour after you got the files for me. You never answered.”
“Oh.”
Now the conversation turned to my name, which conversations with new people always do. “So,” she asked, “were you named after Dolly Madison the president’s wife, or Dolly Madison the pickle?”
“Both,” I told her. “If it hadn’t been for the pickle jar in the refrigerator, my parents never would’ve known there was a president’s wife named Dolly.”
“Then is Madison your middle name or your maiden name? I don’t even know if you’re married.”
“The beautiful name Sprowls came with my divorce settlement.”
She liked that. “So when Ma and Pa Madison had a girl they couldn’t resist.”
“You have no idea the crap that passes for clever in LaFargeville, New York,” I said.
“New York? You sound so Ohio.”
“Upstate New York is Ohio,” I said.
I learned long ago that it’s dangerous going to lunch with reporters. They don’t talk to you. They interview you. By the time the check comes, they know what brand of underwear you’re wearing. So, the best thing to do is go on offense. “You’re from Rush City, right?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. “Farm foreclosure capital of the Midwest.”
“And after college you went back and worked at the hometown paper?”
“Everybody’s got to start somewhere,” she said.
“It was a good place for you to start. The Gazette is a good paper. What’s the circulation now? Fifteen thousand?”
“They wish.”
“How old are you, anyway, Aubrey? When you get my age everybody looks about twelve.”
“Twenty-four.”
“You couldn’t have been at The Gazette for very long.”
“Year and a half.”
“And you worked like a maniac and got some good clips for your file-good for you.”
She smiled. “I was lucky. I got to cover some terrific stories.”
I prodded them out of her: an Amtrak derailment, the arrest of a scout master for molesting boys on a canoe trip, and best of all, the murder of the high school football coach by the cuckolded husband of the cheerleading advisor. She was right. She was lucky. Reporters on little papers like The Gazette rarely get to cover good stories, just car accidents, county fairs, and an occasional embezzlement by a township clerk. “Dale Marabout says you’re a very good writer,” I said.
The sandwiches came. Aubrey peeled back the bread and poked the meat loaf with her finger to make sure it was cooked thoroughly. It was and she took a huge bite. For the rest of our lunch our conversation was filtered through mouthfuls of meat loaf and potatoes.
“So, why don’t you think Sissy James killed Buddy Wing?” I asked.
Aubrey, chewing away, held up her index finger like a number one. “First, when I saw the police tape of her confession on TV, she just didn’t look guilty.” She swallowed and held up a second finger. “Two, that murder of the football coach taught me never to trust the police-I don’t mean their honesty, most cops are pretty honest-but their work. They’re human and humans fuck up.”
I’ve got an absolutely filthy mouth myself, but there are certain words that simply cannot be formed by the lips of a woman of my generation. The one that starts with F is one of them. “So how did they screw up the football coach’s murder?”
Aubrey put down her sandwich and folded her hands under her chin. “About a month before the coach was killed, he threw this big deal senior off the team for repeatedly peeing in the gym bags of the junior varsity players. The coach warned him a bazillion times to stop. But he kept it up. So the coach tossed him off the team. And the kid’s father went berserk at the next school board meeting. Threatened the coach and everybody else. His son wouldn’t get a scholarship now, just for kidding around in the locker room, blah-blah-blah. So when the coach was shot three times in the head, they immediately arrested the kid’s father.”
I remembered the story from our own coverage. Rush City is only forty miles south of Hannawa, right on the edge of our circulation area. Big papers love it when people in those little Norman Rockwell towns go nuts. “Then you’re that local reporter who found the real murderer?”
Aubrey stabbed the last au gratin potato on her plate. “No biggie. Everybody in the high school knew the coach was doing the cheerleading advisor. And knew that her husband knew. How much police work does it take to find something like that out? It took me about an hour.”
I felt a sudden need to confess. “I think I let the cat out of the bag.”
“Which cat is that?”
“The Buddy Wing cat,” I said. “I mentioned to Dale Marabout that you were looking into it. I figured you’d already cleared it with Tinker.”
I could see from the way she was chewing that she wasn’t pleased. “At this point I’m just trying to see if there’s a story there.”
“I was a little concerned, that’s all,” I said. “Big papers are more complicated than small papers. The pace is crazier. In order to make it work, everybody has to know what everybody’s doing.” I wasn’t trying to inflict one of my infamous Morgue Mama lectures on her. I was genuinely concerned.
“I’m not doing this at the expense of my other stories, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said. “Buddy Wing is totally on the side until I have something solid to go to Tinker with. Okay?”
I knew the okay meant that I should mind my own business. “Okay,” I said.
The waitress brought the check. Aubrey turned it over and winced.
I pulled it away from her. “How about you just pay the tip?”
On our way to the car she asked me if I’d go with her to the Heaven Bound Cathedral on Saturday. “Just to snoop around a little,” she said.
When I got back to the morgue I first helped Doris Rowe, editor of the paper’s Weekend section, search the B cabinets for our old files on the history of the Bowenville Blueberry Festival-“How hard can it be, Doris? It’s under either Bowenville or Blueberry”-then I got on my computer and called up our stories on the Rush City football coach murder.
For all that baloney about the public right to know, newspapers don’t like to mention competing papers. But we had no choice with the football coach story. We not only mentioned The Gazette by name, we mentioned Aubrey McGinty by name:
Reporter uncovers “the real shooter” in football coach murder
RUSH CITY -Police conceded yesterday that they arrested the wrong man for the Oct. 12 shooting death of Rush High School football coach Charles “Chuck” Reddincoat.
Two days after the shooting, police had charged 48-year-old Stephen Stuart. Stuart had publicly threatened Reddincoat after the coach benched his son for harassing junior varsity players.
But based on information provided to police last week by Rush City Gazette reporter Aubrey McGinty, Chief
