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

by C. R. Corwin

  My fears returned right after the Fourth of July when the windows on Tish Kiddle’s Lexus were smashed. No mystery who did the smashing. “What’s Aubrey going to do if Tish stays on the story?” I worried to Dale.

  “There’s not a chance in hell Tish Kiddle will stay on the story,” he said. He was right. Forty-eight hours later Tish Kiddle was broadcasting from sunny Orlando.

  TV 21’s report on Tim Bandicoot’s public confession about his affair with Sissy James did bring matters to a head, however. Tinker told Aubrey to start writing her series and Bob Averill put in a call to Detective Scotty Grant. Bob Averill made me go to police headquarters with him. “Sorry we didn’t tell you about this earlier,” Bob told Scotty Grant. “We weren’t sure of our facts yet and we didn’t want to get you folks involved in a crazy goose-chase.”

  Grant was surprisingly grateful. “Nobody likes chasing gooses,” he said.

  So it came down to that final Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. While Aubrey was imprisoned in the newsroom racing to meet her deadline, Dale Marabout was at home racing to meet his, turning a dozen reporter’s notebooks full of scribbled notes into a story.

  By now Scotty Grant had advised Tim and Annie Bandicoot of the situation. They were prayerful and cooperative. Officers searched their property. Under the driver’s seat of Annie’s Saturn they found a Bible covered with hand-painted gold crosses. Under the passenger’s seat they found a curly auburn wig and pair of red-framed lollipop glasses big enough to disguise even the most familiar face. It still wasn’t enough to arrest Aubrey, however. Dale’s evidence was largely circumstantial and the items found in Annie’s car bore neither a suspicious fingerprint nor fiber.

  Sunday, after I had lunch with Dale and Sharon at Speckley’s, I drove to Bob Averill’s pricey condominium in White Lake. Tinker and Scotty Grant were there. “Okay, Maddy,” Bob said, bringing a tray of snapping highballs from the kitchen, “tell us what you’ve got in mind.”

  I told them about Aubrey’s surprise birthday dinner for Eric. “She wanted me to help her make a cake and a lasagna. Cakes are nothing. But a lasagna, that’s a pretty time-consuming dish, even when you’ve got all the ingredients handy. Lots of layers. Lots of steps. If you forget to put one of the ingredients on your shopping list—say the ricotta cheese—and somebody has to go back to the supermarket, well that just stops you in your tracks, doesn’t it?”

  Bob sloshed his mouthful of highball, like it was mouthwash. “Just how does this lasagna of yours help arrest Aubrey, Maddy?”

  I toasted the three impatient men and after a miniature sip, bedazzled them with my shrewdness: “Dale needed everything he could get on Aubrey’s past. I’d been to Aubrey’s apartment before, and seen her cardboard boxes marked SHIT FROM COLLEGE and SHIT FROM HOME. The evidence that might be in those boxes was simply gnawing a hole in me. So when Aubrey asked me over to help her make a lasagna, I was tickled pink. I gave her a list of ingredients to buy and intentionally left off the ricotta cheese. So right when I was up to my elbows in boiling noodles, she had to run out to the supermarket. I figured that would give me time to snoop. I found her college transcripts—which listed that odd elective course she took in criminal toxicology—and I found the textbook from that course, with a number of poisons marked with a yellow highlighter, including procaine and lily of the valley.”

  Scotty Grant was as excited as a thirteen-year-old finding his father’s Playboys. “And that stuff is still in her apartment?”

  I nodded proudly. “It is. And that’s my idea. Aubrey plans to frame Annie Bandicoot. But what if she suddenly discovers, at the very last minute, that Annie wasn’t really at home that Friday night? That she had a solid alibi?”

  Tinker at least was keeping up. “She’d have to frame somebody else.”

  “Absolutely. And she’d have to plant some convincing evidence. And what does she have that she could grab in a hurry?”

  “I’m guessing it’s not a slice of your leftover lasagna?” Bob joked.

  “Her toxicology textbook,” I said.

  “It would have her fingerprints all over it,” Tinker said.

  “Xeroxes wouldn’t,” Scotty Grant said.

  I toasted him. Everybody dutifully sipped. I told them my idea and they went for it.

  So, Monday afternoon, while Aubrey was working feverishly to complete her stories, I brought Aubrey the story from the morgue files that Eric had found—the one about Annie Bandicoot being in Kentucky over the Thanksgiving weekend with a gaggle of other preachers’ wives.

  It was a real story. Annie really was in Kentucky over Thanksgiving. It just wasn’t that particular Thanksgiving. It was five Thanksgivings ago. I simply had Eric alter the date on the computer file. Aubrey didn’t question that doctored story for a minute. What reporter would? If something’s in the morgue it’s the gospel truth.

  Aubrey tossed the story on her desk and went back to work, as if it was no big deal. But I knew it was a big deal; at least I had my fingers crossed that it was.

  Scotty Grant followed Aubrey home Monday evening. At ten-thirty she drove to an open-all-night Kinko’s. Scotty watched from his car as she copied several pages from a book. She was wearing gloves. Then she drove to a Walgreen’s drug store and bought a can of lighter fluid, a box of stick matches and a plastic bottle of Evian water.

  I had a hunch Aubrey would try to frame Wayne F. Dillow. He had motive and opportunity and a wonderful old brick barbecue in his backyard where evidence could be planted without a fuss. My hunch proved correct. Aubrey arrived at Dillow’s a little after midnight. She parked far up the street and slipped through several dark backyards. Scotty Grant watched from a neighbor’s evergreens while she dribbled the copies with lighter fluid and then set them on fire. She let them burn for only a few seconds before dousing them with the Evian. She had done the same thing with the blood-stained overalls she planted in Darren Yoder’s hunting cabin. She was making it look like Wayne Dillow was trying to destroy evidence that would prove he poisoned the faith-healer who betrayed his beloved wife.

  That Tuesday night at the paper Aubrey had pooh-poohed the circumstantial evidence in Dale’s story. But when she read the part of his story that reported all of this—what could she do but confess?

  ***

  I left I-71 and took US36 into Marysville. The prison officials checked me in. It was the fourth time I’d visited Aubrey since she was sentenced in September. She is serving two life sentences for aggravated homicide. She will serve them without hope of parole. She will serve them consecutively. She is lucky. The prosecutor wanted death.

  I was ushered into the same little room where Aubrey and I met with Sissy James. I sat on the blue sofa. When Aubrey came in she sat next to me. “How’s the flag-making business?” I asked.

  Her answer was sharp and sarcastic, pure Aubrey McGinty. “I’m getting more patriotic by the day.”

  I handed her the copy of the Herald-Union I promised. She unfolded it and scanned Dale Marabout’s latest story on Lionel Percy. Alec Tinker had not only rehired Dale after Aubrey’s arrest, he’d put him back on the police beat. For the last few months Dale had been joyfully covering Percy’s metamorphosis from much-feared police commander to hapless inmate shoveling out cow barns at the state prison farm in Grafton.

  Percy’s troubles, by the way, began the same week Mayor Kyle Finn appointed Ted Duffy interim police chief. Duffy had spent a lifetime nurturing a reputation as a timid, go-along-to-get-along bureaucrat. But inside lived an ambitious man with a long memory. During his first week as interim chief, he met secretly with State Attorney General Eileen Bachelor. Her probe brought down Lionel Percy and two scooping handfuls of corrupt underlings. It also changed Mayor Kyle Finn’s re-election plans.

  Aubrey refolded the paper and slipped it under her arm. “So, Maddy—what brings you to Disney World?”

  I felt light-headed and clammy, like I had the flu. I wrapped my long arms around my waist and told her. “Well, there’s been a m
urder at Hemphill College—”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  Her sarcasm put me at ease. “It was an old classmate of mine, Gordon Sweet. We all called him Sweet Gordon because that’s the way his name appeared on class rosters. Sweet comma Gordon. Anyway, he went on to become a professor there. In archeology. He specialized in some kooky field called garbology—digging into landfills to see how average people really lived. He was an eccentric old Beatnik but as harmless as a marshmallow. The police are clueless.”

  Aubrey’s eyebrows elevated ever so slightly. “And you want me to help you find the murderer? You’ve got some big balls for a tiny old woman.”

  Chapter 22

  Saturday, March 17

  Ike put my Darjeeling tea and a Ghirardelli chocolate on the table. It was almost closing time. The street was empty and so was his coffee shop. “How’d your visit with that crazy girl go?” he asked.

  I patted the chair next to mine and he dutifully sat. I was tired from the long drive but I needed company. “It went fine,” I said.

  He unwrapped the chocolate for me. “I’ll tell you one thing—if you’d bamboozled me the way you bamboozled her, I don’t think I’d be inviting you to my prison cell.”

  “I wouldn’t accept your invitations if you did,” I said.

  We both laughed. It’s hard to say whose laugh was sadder.

  He slid the flat square of chocolate across the table on its foil wrapper, like a bribe. “You played that Aubrey McGinty like a fiddle, just like you play everybody else, me included.”

  I broke the chocolate in two and slid the big half back to him. “You’re giving me way too much credit.”

  Ike nibbled like a gerbil. “You and me are so much alike it’s scary,” he said.

  “Alike? How are you and I alike?”

  “Underrated and overlooked,” he said. “These young business-types that prance in and out of here every morning—to them I’m nothing but the old black guy who pours their coffee. Not a damn one of them knows I taught high school math all those years, that I probably taught their own mamas and daddies, that in a roundabout way I’m responsible for their own big-shot success. Old black guy pouring the coffee, that’s all I am.”

  “And me, Ike?”

  “You’re Morgue Mama. Keeper of the musty-dusty old files. What everybody forgets, is that behind that sour, tea-sipping frown you wear like a TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT sign, resides the shrewdest damn woman in Hannawa, Ohio.”

  “What a lovely compliment.”

  “I meant it to be. Aubrey McGinty was so impressed with her own sick genius, she couldn’t see you had a hundred times the brains she did. Hundred times the curiosity and a hundred times the guile.”

  Ike got up and locked the door. He grabbed a whole handful of Ghirardelli chocolates from the counter and sat back down, resting his legs on an empty chair. “You ever ask her why she killed those men?” he asked. “The real, deep-down-in-the-soul reason?”

  “I don’t have to ask her. I know why. At a very early age she learned that bad people take what they want from good people. So why shouldn’t good people take what they want from bad people?”

  Ike nodded in slow motion. “You think she sees herself as a good person?”

  “Aubrey is a good person,” I said, “except for that bitter little knot in her brain that kills people.”

  Ike unwrapped another chocolate for us.

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