Aubrey pressed her face against the side window. She stared at the passing sky. “She owed her the truth, too.”
We drove along in silence, the playfulness wrenched right out of us from the sadness we found in Mingo Junction. “At least now we know Sissy didn’t kill Buddy Wing,” Aubrey said after several miles. “I can go to Tinker and start working on the story above ground.”
My fingers tightened around the steering wheel. “Tinker already knows about your investigation.”
Aubrey wasn’t at all pleased to hear that. “Who told him? Marabout?”
I could feel my head shrinking down my sweater like a turtle. “I told him.”
She said, “Shit, Maddy!” But it sounded like “ Et tu Brute? ”
I confessed in fulclass="underline" “Yesterday I went to see Bob Averill about Dale’s quitting-”
“Averill knows too?”
“He knows, too. I was explaining why Dale went off his rocker.”
“That he’s jealous of me? Good God.”
“That is not why he quit.”
Aubrey was an inch from screaming. “That’s exactly why he quit.”
“No it’s not, Aubrey. He’s simply afraid you’re biting off more than you can chew.”
Aubrey put an M amp;M on her outstretched tongue and flicked it in like a lizard devouring a fly. “That sounds like jealousy to me.”
Eric laughed at her. “You are so full of yourself.”
“I am not full of myself.”
“Of course you’re full of yourself,” I said. “If you weren’t you couldn’t be doing what you’re doing. There’s nothing wrong with being-confident.”
Aubrey surrendered. “So if Dale wasn’t driven mad by my brilliant reporting, then what was it?”
I wasn’t about to share my mid-life crisis theory with her. No one her age could possible understand an excuse like that. So I put it in journalistic terms. “You work all those years as a reporter convinced that the editors on the copy desk are a bunch of drooling old doofuses. Then suddenly you’re on the desk. You’re the drooling old doofus. You panic. You embarrass yourself. Anyway, that’s sort of what I was telling Tinker and Bob when I let the cat out of the bag about the Buddy Wing thing.”
I thought I was getting through to her but I was wrong. “This is the most important story of my life,” she said. “I can’t afford this relentless busybody crap of yours.”
She glared at me and I glared back. The car drifted and I almost clipped a mailbox. “You should have told them yourself,” I said.
Aubrey swung her head around and waited for Eric to defend her. But Eric didn’t defend her. He offered her his last Dorito. “Okay,” she said, “maybe I should have said something. But I wanted to be sure about Sissy first. I didn’t want them to think I was some chicky-poo air-head off on some wild goose chase.”
“Believe me,” I said, “nobody thinks that.”
Chapter 12
Monday, May 15
Aubrey was summoned to Bob Averill’s office as soon as she got to work Monday. She was up there for two hours. When she got off the elevator, she gave me a thumbs up. The paper was going to let her proceed with the story.
I wasn’t a bit surprised. Proving that Sissy James didn’t kill Buddy Wing would be a great story. It would be a nasty, tantalizing drama that would keep the city spellbound for months. Murder. Sex. Police ineptitude. Religious hypocrisy. It would be Hannawa’s O.J. story.
Aubrey and I sneaked out of the newsroom at four and walked down the hill to Ike’s Coffee Shop. Ike’s was the only remaining tenant in the eight-story Longacre Building, a beautiful old art nouveau palace that once housed many of the city’s most prestigious doctors and lawyers. The faded sign in the window of the empty storefront next to Ike’s had been announcing a major renovation of the building for at least a decade.
But Ike hangs on, selling lattes to-go to harried white office workers and mugs of regular coffee to the retired and under-employed blacks who like to linger at the little round tables. I buy my tea bags there, in bulk, not because I get a better price, but because Ike needs the money, and, well, I just like his company.
Ike was at the sink washing mugs when we came in. He sang out: “Morgue Mama!”
I wriggled my fingers at him. “Tea and a regular coffee, Ike.” We sat at the empty table by the cigarette machine.
Aubrey was surprised. “You let him call you that?”
“Ike has earned the right,” I said.
“I’m jealous-how has he done that?”
“Driving me home a hundred winter nights when my car wouldn’t start. Always making sure I’m having a good day.”
Ike brought our mugs. “Morgue Mama ever tell you why everybody calls me Ike?” he asked Aubrey. “Even though my real name is Leonard?”
Aubrey gave me a playful glower. “I’m afraid Mrs. Sprowls keeps lots of secrets from me.”
“Well-It’s because I was the only black man in Hannawa anybody knew who voted for Dwight D. Eisenhower.”
Aubrey looked at me for help.
“You’ll have to forgive Miss McGinty,” I said to Ike. “She is very, very young.” I leaned toward Aubrey and whispered. “Ike was Eisenhower’s nickname.”
Ike laughed and went back to his dirty mugs. Aubrey and I started making plans for her now-official investigation of the Buddy Wing murder.
“You don’t look too happy about Bob and Tinker giving you the go-ahead,” I said.
“Every word I write they’ll be perched on my shoulders like a couple of big-nosed parrots. Can’t say that! Awrrrak! Can’t say that! ”
“That’s the way big papers work,” I said. “It’s your reporting but their reputations.”
She sarcastically toasted me with her mug. “Well, just so you can sleep nights, I’m going to play by the rules.”
“Which are?”
“That I simply try to prove Sissy couldn’t have done it-which we’ve pretty much done already-and, if I can manage, get her to admit it on the record.”
“But not try to find the real killer?”
She imitated Bob Averill’s slow, dry Midwestern voice: “That is the police department’s responsibility.”
“And it is,” I said.
She returned to her own voice: “But they do want a series-five or six parts-so we can still do lots of snooping. Background on the atmosphere that led up to the murder. History of the church. Bandicoot’s split with Wing. The anger and the rivalry. How easy it would be for someone else to paint that cross. How the police rushed to judgment. Whatever we can put together to paint the big picture.”
I sipped my tea and waited for one of Ike’s regulars to rattle a pack of Kools out of the cigarette machine. “You still want this to be we? Even after I let the cat out of the bag?”
“It’s still we, Maddy. You, me and my wild, Asian-American sex toy.”
We laughed and sipped and ducked the cigarette smoke wiggling toward the ceiling.
The paper-rightfully-did not want Aubrey looking for the real murderer. But I knew Aubrey would keep looking. She not only wanted to free Sissy James, she wanted an arrest and a trial. She wanted a story that would go on for months. She was as interested in advancing her career as Bob Averill and Alec Tinker were about advancing theirs. The Herald-Union was not going to be her last stop. She had her eyes on the Washington Post or The New York Times. And why shouldn’t she?
“What happens,” I asked, “if we do stumble onto the real killer? Would you go to the police, like you did with the football coach at The Gazette?”
“I suppose.”
We passed on the free refills Ike offered us and started back. Central Avenue, pretty much empty all day, was filling up with rush hour traffic. “Did you tell Bob about your car windows?”
“Am I out of my mind?” she asked.
Sunday, May 21
Before Aubrey could pursue the Buddy Wing story full-time, she had to finish her series on the city’s street prostitutes. She worked day and night all week. I dug out all the old files I had on the subject, some going back to the twenties. Prostitution is not only the world’s oldest profession, it’s one of the world’s oldest newspaper stories.