All I’d done was find a freelance assignment for Dale after he’d blown a fuse and quit the paper. That assignment was coming to an end and what Dale would do for money now was anybody’s guess. Still, that assignment, as temporary as it was, clearly had renewed his self-confidence. He was going to be okay.
Sharon pronounced the meat loaf the best she’d ever had, the au gratin potatoes incredible. All three of us ordered the key lime pie. We chatted through I don’t know how many refills of iced tea. I checked my wristwatch I don’t know how many times.
During our lunch, the conversation had repeatedly drifted to Aubrey’s series on the Buddy Wing murder. Dale had written a crime series or two during his years on the police beat and understandably wanted to know exactly how she was organizing it. I told him what I knew:
The first story, scheduled to run on Wednesday, would lead with Sissy James’s confession that she did not poison the Rev. Buddy Wing. It would rehash Ronny Doddridge’s suicide and Tim Bandicoot’s own recent confession of his affair with Sissy. It would also rehash Buddy’s death and his nasty split with Tim Bandicoot over speaking in tongues. But this story wouldn’t contain too many details. This was the teaser story.
Thursday’s story would go back to the very beginning, Buddy Wing’s childhood in West Virginia and his migration to Hannawa to begin his ministry. It would discuss Buddy’s theological beliefs and the nuts and bolts of building his evangelical empire, from the salad days of the Clean Collar Club, to the erection of the Heaven Bound Cathedral. It would end with the coming of Guthrie Gates. A sidebar would explore Hannawa’s emergence as the “The Hallelujah City.”
Friday’s story would re-examine Tim Bandicoot’s falling out with Buddy over speaking in tongues, the snake handling and the like. Ronny Doddridge’s sudden appearance as security guard would be recounted, and so would the lingering anger and suspicion-and the spying-between the two congregations. One sidebar would tell Tim Bandicoot’s life story: his childhood in Buddy Wing’s church, his Bible college years, his marriage to Annie, their fall from grace and their struggles at the New Epiphany Temple. Another sidebar would recount some of Buddy’s troubles: his wife’s death from lung cancer, his run-ins with Wayne F. Dillow and Edward Tolchak, his church’s many near-bankruptcies, how over the years he survived the Tonight Show jokes about his having Jesus’s phone number for example, the snide comments about how he dressed and talked and wore his hair.
On Saturday Aubrey would tell the world about Sissy’s pitiful childhood, the stripping and prostitution, her rescue by Jesus Christ, her affair with Tim Bandicoot, her confession to the murder. As Aubrey promised, the story would not say a word about little Rosy.
Sunday’s story would be the big finale. It would state emphatically that Sissy was telling the truth, that she was in Mingo Junction that Thanksgiving weekend, visiting her cousin, as she did every year. The story would examine the length somebody went to frame her, the evidence sprinkled in her garbage and the spare bedroom where she worked on her crafts. The story would ask: If Sissy James didn’t do it, then who did? There would be several sidebars. One would examine the police department’s hurried investigation. One would ask why Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates, and others who knew Sissy, so readily accepted her confession; that story also would tell readers where those good Christians were the night Buddy was poisoned. Another sidebar would show just how easy it was for the real murderer to enter the inner bowels of the cathedral and paint that poison cross on the Bible, fill that pitcher with poisoned water. The final sidebar would tell Aubrey’s story-the broken car windows, the threats and the bruises, the red Taurus station wagon that pursued her while she sought the truth, and, yes, how Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates got into a shoving match in Bob Averill’s office.
Accompanying Aubrey’s stories on Sunday would be an editorial imploring the Hannawa police to reopen the case.
Monday, July 10
I came in at eight and went straight to Aubrey’s desk. A felt-tip pen was sticking out of her mouth like a cigar. Her fingers were draped across her keyboard like ten sleeping salamanders. Every few seconds a few fingers would twitch awake and a string of words would race across her computer screen. Several diet Coke cans were in her wastebasket. Several Milky Way wrappers, too. “I hope you didn’t work all night,” I said.
She tilted her head back until she was looking straight up into my face. She yawned noisily, like the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. “I should have,” she said.
So I let her work and went to my desk to collect my mug. Had it only been four months since Aubrey McGinty first called me Morgue Mama to my face? Asked to see the files on Buddy Wing? It seemed more like four years-one of those officially packaged four years, like college or a presidential term, with a distinct beginning, an endlessly horrifying but exhilarating middle, and an abrupt end.
And it was going to end abruptly, in less than forty-eight hours. Once those big presses downstairs started rolling with that big story splashed across the top of Page One, the journey that put Aubrey and me in the same wobbling canoe would be over. Her life would go in one direction and mine in another. We’d talk, when there was something to say. We might even reminisce if the opportunity arose. But things would not be the same.
At ten-thirty I heard Aubrey yell, “Who has time for this crap?”
She yelled that after getting a call from the police department’s PR guy, informing her that Chief Polceznec was going to hold a news conference at eleven. Tinker sent Doreen Poole to cover it. She came back at noon with the lead story for Tuesday’s paper:
Beleaguered police chief says he’ll retire early
Sylvia Berdache hurried to a one o’clock press conference at City Hall, providing a sidebar to the story:
Sad to see his “old amigo” step down, mayor appoints Ted Duffy interim chief
I just knew Lionel Percy sent one of his flunkies out for cake and ice cream. Ted Duffy was a well-known paper-pusher in the safety director’s office, in Sylvia’s words, “a real marshmallow who wouldn’t even rock the boat in his bathtub.”
A little after two, Eric Chen appeared at my desk with a grin on his face. He handed me a printout, the way a boy hands a doctored report card to his mother. Eric wanted nothing to do with Aubrey these days, not after that night in Meri, but I was still his boss. I’d told him to keep checking the computer files for information on the various people connected to the Buddy Wing story, especially Annie Bandicoot.
When I read the printout I clutched my throat, in case my heart had any idea of escaping. “Good job,” I said.
I took a long, steadying drink of my room-temperature tea and trotted to Aubrey’s desk. “Eric just brought me this,” I said, sliding the printout into her hands. It was a short story, written months earlier by religion editor Nanette Beane:
HANNAWA -Right after serving their own families Thanksgiving dinner, the wives of six local ministers left for eastern Kentucky Thursday night, their cavalcade of minivans and station wagons loaded with food, clothing and toys to make this Christmas a little brighter for families in that economically ravaged region.
“It’s a little thing for us to do,” said Joy Brown, wife of the Rev. Donald Brown, pastor of Culver Ridge Methodist Church, “but it’ll be a big thing for the families down there.”
Brown, coordinator of the trip, said the women would spend Friday and Saturday visiting homes in Lee and Owsley counties and then attend Sunday morning worship services at the Baptist church in Korbin Knob, a small mountain town approximately 80 miles southeast of Lexington.
Other women making the trip were Ellen Hopsen, wife of the Rev. Ernest Hopsen, Tamarack Episcopal Church, Hannawa Falls; Jennifer Moeller, wife of the Rev. Richard Moeller, Greenlawn Reformed Church, Greenlawn; Sophia Wildenhein, wife of the Rev. Ralph Wildenhein, St. Marks Lutheran Church, Brinkley; Annie Bandicoot, wife of the Rev. Tim Bandicoot, New Epiphany Temple, Hannawa; and Cynthia Short, wife of the Rev. John Short, Spire Hill United Church of Christ, North Hannawa.
Items for the mission were donated by members of the six participating congregations.
I pointed to the date the story ran, which is included in the computer file of every story that we publish, along with what page it appeared on, which editions it ran, and who wrote it.
Aubrey stared at the story. “Wonder boy couldn’t have found this a week ago?”
