“It was my grandmother’s. There’s a gash in the side from the U-haul.”
“You can’t really see it.”
“And this is the bathroom-and we’re back in the living room.”
Aubrey knelt in front of my VCR and in a few seconds the blinking 12:00 was gone. “I’ll know not to listen to Doreen Poole from now on,” she said.
I was straightening up the seed catalogs on the coffee table. Once, about fifteen years ago, I ordered some daffodil bulbs from some seed company or the other and now every winter I get a wheelbarrow full of catalogs. I look them over, see if there’s anything I want, and then go three miles down the road to Biliczky’s Garden Center. “Doreen Poole? What did that lunatic tell you?”
Doreen Poole is the reporter who started the Morgue Mama thing, or so I’ve always suspected. Even if she didn’t start it, she sure perpetuates it. I’m sure that’s where Aubrey got it from.
Aubrey was lining up the videotapes on the floor. “She said every room of your house was filled with rusty old filing cabinets. I’m sort of disappointed.”
I laughed. I just love the rumors people spread about me. “The filing cabinets are all in the basement.”
Aubrey got saucer-eyed, as if I’d just admitted having those little spacemen from Roswell, New Mexico locked away down there. “Can I see them?”
“They’re filing cabinets. Gray rectangles of sheet metal.”
“And filled with a hundred years of history.” She pulled me off the sofa and led me by the arm toward the basement steps.
At the time I must have had fifty filing cabinets in my basement. I’ve added several since. Every time Eric Chen finishes putting a cabinet of old files on microfilm, the files and the cabinet go directly into the backseat of my car.
“It smells wonderful down here,” Aubrey said.
“If you like mold,” I said.
She pulled six or seven drawers open, marveling at the manila treasures inside. Then we went back upstairs. I made popcorn, of all things, as if we were going to watch an old Bette Davis movie, and not the police tapes on a murder.
I made the popcorn the way I always do, like I made it back in LaFargeville when I was a girl: I melted a dollop of Crisco in my big iron kettle, plopped in a coffee cup of popcorn, shook it on the electric stove until the lid lifted. I poured it in two aluminum mixing bowls and gave the bigger to Aubrey. I offered her a glass of Pepsi but she wanted milk. That made me smile. That’s the way I eat popcorn, too. Glass of milk, a small sip with every mouthful.
Aubrey sat on the floor in front of the TV. I thought about doing that myself. But I was sixty-seven years old. I’d never get back up. So I sat on the couch and Aubrey pushed the PLAY button on the VCR.
The first tape she played was the newspaper’s own copy of the murder, the one I gave her that day she called me Morgue Mama to my face.
The Hour of Everlasting Life started with a peppy song by the Canaries of Calvary Choir called So G.L.A.D. I’m Saved. There was a live band heavy on drums and electric guitar, and a stage full of dancers, The Sweet Ascension Dancers, twirling like Sufi Dervishes. Cameras kept searching the audience. Then there he was, the Rev. Buddy Wing, dancing up the center aisle, clapping his hands over his head.
Aubrey clapped her own hands, just once, and pointed at the screen. “There, see that, Maddy? He’s not carrying his Bible. That’s why he didn’t notice that the gold paint was wet. The Bible was already on his pulpit.”
I knew what she was getting at. One of the two poisons used to murder Buddy Wing-the heart drug called procaine-had been mixed into the paint that was used to repaint the gold cross on the Bible’s old leather cover.
Wing danced up the stage steps and did a couple of fancy Temptations-like steps with the Sweet Ascension Dancers. “Pretty limber for a man in his seventies,” I said.
Aubrey answered sarcastically through a mouthful of milk and popcorn. “He was a faith-healer. Every time he got an ache or pain he could ask Jesus to make it better.”
It was my turn. “Too bad he couldn’t get the Lord’s attention before the poison got him.”
Oh, we were being cold. It’s just the way newspaper people get. They see so much pain and hear so much crap. They’re as soft inside as anybody else. Maybe softer. When they were kids they read novels and poetry and let flies and spiders out the window rather than squish them. The sarcasm is just a cover, a way to cope. Nurses and cops are the same way.
Buddy Wing rocked on the balls of his feet for a good fifteen minutes, sharing the good news. He ended every sentence with that rhythmic uh! all the TV preachers use:
“God told Eve not to eat the fruit of that tree- uh! But Eve disobeyed- uh! Oh, that fruit looked so good- uh! And the serpent said it was okay- uh! Oh, that beguiling serpent- uh! And so Eve ate and ate- uh! And made Adam eat too- uh! And every day since, men and women have been eatin’ and eatin’ from the tree of sin- uh! And God is not happy- uh! No, he is not happy at all- uh! ”
Anyway, Wing ended his sermon with his famous bit about having Jesus’s phone number. Then there was a long commercial-I guess you could call it a commercial-where he offered viewers his latest book for free, mentioning several times they also should send in their best financial gift. “Some can send $1,000,” he said. “Some $500, some only $100. Even if you can send only $20 or $10, send for this free book today- uh! ”
The Sweet Ascension Dancers danced and the Canaries of Calvary Choir sang and Guthrie Gates brought out a wheelbarrow full of prayer requests and dumped them on the stage. While Gates sang the sourest hymn I’d ever heard, Wing crawled into the unopened envelopes and prayed his heart out, until his English was transformed into some heavenly tongue. Then there was another commercial, this one for a free videotape of his most-recent soul- saving mission to Africa. “Some can send $1,000. Some $500-”
Aubrey had already watched this tape a dozen times, I’m betting. She kept saying, “Listen to this” and, “You’re going to love this.” Now she said, “Here it comes.”
We both stopped chewing and sipping. The Rev. Buddy Wing was going to die in front of our eyes and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. Five months earlier when that church service was for real, and not magnetic impressions on a spool of tape, somebody else knew Buddy Wing was about to die.
It was the part of the broadcast where un-saved people in the audience were called to the edge of the stage. Everybody had their arms lifted over their heads. The Canaries of Calvary were soaring, the Ascension Dancers were opening and closing their arms, imitating blooming roses. Wing walked slowly to his pulpit and raised his Bible over his head. Then, tears seeping from his tightly closed eyes, he drew it to his lips. He kissed the gold cross. “Twenty seven minutes into the service,” Aubrey said.
Buddy Wing had been kissing that cross for at least forty years, in every service he’d ever conducted, on television or off. Any other time he would have folded his Bible across his heart and walked to the end of the stage, and saved those who had gathered. This time he just stood there, surprised, worried, frantically licking his lips. The camera had zoomed in for the kiss and Wing’s head was ear-to-ear across my television screen. You could see the gold paint on his lips and busy tongue.
Aubrey pushed the PAUSE button. “Procaine is a synthetic version of cocaine. It’s a powerful anesthetic given to people having heart attacks-to get their hearts beating normally again. It immediately numbed his lips. That’s why he started licking like that. And the licking numbed his tongue. Then the inside of his mouth and then his throat.”
She pushed the PLAY button. Wing was trembling now. He dropped his Bible and reached for the glass of water on the shelf under the pulpit. He drank in big fast gulps, water leaking from the corners of his quivering mouth.
Aubrey paused the tape again. “Even a tiny overdose can cause immediate convulsions and a coma. Death in a half hour maybe. But it’s iffy whether the amount of procaine the killer was able to mix into the paint would have killed Buddy by itself.”
“So the killer poisoned the water, too-a double whammy?”
Aubrey filled her mouth with popcorn. “Lily of the valley is so toxic that even the water in the vase can be lethal. It pretty much causes the same reaction as the procaine. Lungs stop breathing. Heart stops pumping.” She pushed PLAY and Buddy Wing continued swallowing the water. “One thing is clear-the killer wanted old Buddy’s
