Morgue Mama: The Cross Kisses Back (Morgue Mama Mysteries)

by C. R. Corwin

  Friday morning I found a Post-it on my screen:

  Super news. Speckley’s for breakfast?

  A.

  ***

  Saturday, March 18

  Aubrey was already in a booth by the door when I got there. She was wearing the hood from Old Navy. Her hair was a mess and her eyes looked like yesterday’s bagels. It was ten-thirty and Speckley’s Saturday breakfast crowd was already thinning out. French toast was enough for me. Aubrey got the Big Meri: scrambled eggs, bacon, home fries, two buttermilk pancakes. “You’re going to explode,” I said.

  “I’m going to will the calories to my breasts,” she said.

  “Be thankful they’re small. Look where my big beautiful tits ended up.”

  “They still look pretty perky.”

  “The wonderful world of wire,” I answered.

  We laughed and then she told me the great news: She’d talked the police department’s PR officer into giving her copies of their Sissy James videotapes—the interrogation, arraignment, even stuff from the crime scene. “It’s all public stuff, of course,” she said, “but they can be real tight-ass about it if they want. You’ve got to employ just the right psychological crowbar.”

  I wanted so much to keep my distance from her. But how can you not like someone that earthy? “And what crowbar did you employ?”

  Aubrey’s eyes were following our waitress as she much-too-slowly made her way up our aisle with the coffee pot. “The grateful-dumb-girl-way-over-her-head-that-someday-just-might-sleep-with-you crowbar.”

  “I’ve heard of that crowbar,” I said.

  She explained the police-beat facts of life to me: “Once the cops get sick of your reporting they’ll shut you out all they can. But I’m new, so they’re in their buddy-buddy seduction mode, trying to make me like them, so later when the poop hits the propeller, I’ll dutifully report it’s milk chocolate. Two months from now it might take a court order to get those tapes. You have a VCR at home?”

  “Of course I have a VCR at home—not that I know how it works.”

  And so we drove to my bungalow on Brambriar Court. She in her old Escort. Me in my old Dodge Shadow.

  I call my house a bungalow because it makes living in a shoebox sound cozy. There’s hardly enough counter space in the kitchen to make a sandwich and the closet in my bedroom only holds one season at a time. I bang my hip on the bathroom sink every time I get out of the shower. I’ve got bruises so old you’d think they were birthmarks.

  “It’s really cute,” Aubrey said.

  What could I do but give her the grand tour? “This is my bedroom—”

  “I love that old iron bed.”

  “—and this is the guest room. As you can see it’s sort of a catch-all—”

  “Where’d you get that dresser? It’s fantastic.”

  “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 boo
k 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 death to be grotesque and horrible. Right there on the stage. For all the world to see.”

  When Wing began to stagger back, the director, trained to follow his every move across the stage, went to another camera and a wider angle. Wing stepped backward toward the curtains, like someone retreating from an onrushing tide at the beach. He fell into the fake palms and slid to the floor, convulsing and vomiting.

  Some members of the Canaries of Calvary Choir shrieked while others kept singing. Some members of the Ascension Dancers froze while others kept dancing. A low groan of uncertainty spread across the audience. Guthrie Gates ran across the stage and pulled Buddy Wing into his lap. The director switched to a commercial. There was Buddy Wing, alive on tape, promoting his upcoming Jesus-trip to Tallahassee. “So many will be healed,” he said.

  Aubrey ejected the tape. “Weird combo, isn’t it? Procaine and lily of the valley—a sophisticated heart drug found only in hospitals and a weed that grows everywhere.”

  “Sissy apparently isn’t the sharpest cheese in the dairy case,” I said, remembering Dale Marabout’s stories on the murder. “But she did work as a food service aide at Hannawa General Hospital, taking trays to patients. Theoretically she could have known what procaine was, and what it could do. She could have stolen it from an unlocked drug cabinet, just as she confessed.” I poured some of my popcorn into Aubrey’s empty bowl. “As for the lily of the valley, you’re right. It grows everywhere. I remember picking it in the spring for my mother. She loved those little nodding white bells. Who knew the water in the vase could kill you.”

  Aubrey filled her fist with popcorn and fed the kernels into her mouth one at a time. “You know what really intrigues me about all this? The tongue thing.”

  That’s the part that had intrigued Dale Marabout, too: Buddy Wing’s flap with Tim Bandicoot had been over speaking in tongues. And the killer had chosen a drug that instantly numbed Buddy’s lips. Surely the killer knew Wing’s first reaction to the poison would be to lick his lips. Surely the killer knew there would be a close-up on Wing’s face. Dale had asked the police about it, but their PR guy just shrugged and shook a Tic-Tac into his mouth. They already had Sissy’s confession.

  “What about the lily of the valley?” I asked Aubrey. “Think there’s anything symbolic about that?”

  She had the next tape in the VCR ready to go. “I’ve thought about that.”

  “And?”

  “Bell-shaped flowers? For whom the bell tolls? Sissy’s not that deep and neither is anybody else. More than likely, it was just a very handy poison to get down Buddy’s throat in big gulps.”

  The next tape was a short one: the police department’s jerky shots of Sissy James’ ramshackle garage. The digital time and date on the tape showed that it was made on the Monday morning following the murder, shortly after they showed up at Sissy’s door to question her. The camera panned the cluttered workbench inside the garage and then showed several different angles on the garbage cans lined up on the sidewalk behind the garage. Finally it zoomed deep inside one of the cans, focusing tightly on a Ziploc freezer bag. Now we could see Hannawa’s top homicide man, Scotty Grant, examining the bag’s contents: a small jar of gold paint, a tiny paint brush, a pair of vinyl surgical gloves, a tiny glass bottle with a syringe stuck in the top.

  “That’s all too convenient, isn’t it,” Aubrey said. “All that evidence in one bag in one place. The bag wasn’t even stuffed down inside a milk carton or anything. Just lying there on top. Puh-leeze.”

  The next shots were of a spare bedroom in Sissy’s house where she kept her crafts supplies: jars of paint and glitter, brushes, a glue gun, shopping bags filled with feathers and plastic beads, Christmas ornaments at various stages of completion. Aubrey paused the tape. “So we know from this shot that Sissy knew her way around slow-drying paint. Too easy, don’t you think?”

  I was no more impressed than Aubrey. “If Sissy was into crafts,” I said, “then everybody who knew her knew she was into crafts. And no doubt ran the other way screaming every time they saw her coming with her shopping bag full of her cutsie-wootsie crap.”

  Aubrey stretched out on the floor, flat on her young straight back, chewing popcorn. “A lot of planning went into that murder, Maddy. Either the killer knew Sissy very well—all about her hospital job and her stupid hobby and her absolute worship of Tim Bandicoot—or they researched the hell out of her. They designed the murder around her. But the evidence is too perfect. A killer that methodical must have figured the police would find it too perfect, too.”

  “And go arrest Tim Bandicoot?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “But then Sissy confessed.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But wouldn’t the killer also know
she might confess to save Bandicoot’s neck?”

  Aubrey sat up in one flowing motion—I hate how young people can do that—and propped her chin on her knees. “Maybe the killer didn’t care who got arrested. As long as it wasn’t him—or her.”

  I went to the kitchen for more milk and came back with the most brilliant thought. “Maybe the real killer did care. Maybe the real killer knew Tim Bandicoot had a solid alibi for that night.”

  “Somebody like Bandicoot’s wife, maybe?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And why would she kill Buddy Wing?”

  “To get Buddy Wing out of her husband’s way,” I said. “And Sissy out of hers.”

  Aubrey covered her head with her arms, as if the ceiling were going to come down. “We are absolutely evil. And absolutely in over our heads.”

  She resumed the tape. There were shots of Sissy’s closets and the shelves of junk in her basement. Nothing interesting or unusual. Then there were various angles on the house’s exterior. It was one of those old two-story frame houses built just before the Depression. Hannawa is full of them. They were once the dream homes of big middle-class families. Now they rent cheap to people on the edge.

  Next came the interrogation tape. It was slightly out of focus and the voices were barely audible. Aubrey didn’t pause it once. She just let it run. It lasted about fifteen minutes.

  Sissy was only twenty-six, but on that tape she looked forty-six. She was a tad plump. Her hair was ridiculously blond. Despite her blank face and sunken eyes she was pretty. She was wearing an enormous ill-fitting sweater with a Thanksgiving turkey on the front. I’d guess she knitted it herself.

  Detective Scotty Grant asked her if she killed the Rev. Buddy Wing and she said yes. He asked her how and she said with a combination of heart drugs she stole from the hospital and drinking water laced with lily of the valley. Every question was more specific and so were her answers.