Aubrey spent the next two weeks researching Sissy’s life. She learned Sissy was born in Mingo Junction and still had relatives in that God-forsaken river town. She learned Sissy had been arrested several times for prostitution in her teens and twenties. She learned Sissy was one of the two hundred members of the Heaven Bound Cathedral who followed Tim to Lutheran Hill. She learned Sissy worked as a food-service aide at Hannawa General Hospital. She learned Sissy was one of those unfortunate women addicted to crafts.
“Sissy’s hobby was perfect,” Aubrey wrote. “She had a spare bedroom filled with jars of paint and little brushes. I couldn’t believe my luck.”
Aubrey then went to work picking the poisons she’d use. She’d taken that course in criminal toxicology and still had the textbook. She looked for a poison that Sissy theoretically could steal from the hospital. She took a liking to the heart drug procaine. She leafed through an EMS training manual at the library and confirmed that paramedics carried it in their drug boxes. She called the EMS director in Rush City. “They were thrilled to death I wanted to ride with them and do a story,” she wrote.
Everything was falling into place for Aubrey regarding Sissy James. Sissy had a motive: she was Tim Bandicoot’s lover and one of those driven from Buddy Wing’s flock; as a hospital worker she had access to drugs; as a maker of worthless cutsie-wootsie crafts, she had the manual skills necessary to paint that poisonous cross on Buddy Wing’s old family Bible. Sissy had the opportunity: as the other woman, she would be home alone on Family Night.
Wrote Aubrey: “I was convinced the police would immediately suspect Tim Bandicoot of the murder. They’d quickly discover he had an alibi for Friday night. But they’d discover just as quickly that he had a lover on the side, an emotionally unstable proselyte with a questionable past. They’d go to her house and find all the evidence they needed.”
During our lunch at Speckley’s, Dale and I had assumed Aubrey chose the “real killer” in advance. But that’s not what she did at all.
Wrote Aubrey: “I realized it would be too chancy picking my second suspect right away. Tim Bandicoot was the perfect choice-sleazeball evangelist sets up his crazy girlfriend and all that-but if I wanted to have Buddy Wing drop over dead on live TV, which I really did want, then it couldn’t be Tim. He would have that Family Night alibi. So would Annie, a perfect choice otherwise. Through my research I’d found several other potential suspects. But how could I be sure the one I chose wouldn’t produce an iron-clad alibi? So I decided to put off my decision on the second suspect until I was working at the Herald-Union , when I could investigate them all thoroughly.”
I got off the interstate at Mt. Gilead and pulled into The Leaf. It’s a wonderful little restaurant right off the exit ramp that serves breakfast 24 hours a day. I had a quick half-mug of tea in the car then went inside for a three-cheese omelet. Every waitress in the place reminded me of Sissy James-bone-tired working-class women dedicated to survival no matter how much crap the world throws at them.
Sissy has survived more than most, hasn’t she? With Buddy Wing’s help she crawled out of the sewer of prostitution, only to be enslaved in an illicit love affair with a weak-willed married man-Tim Bandicoot-an equally odorous predicament. Then Aubrey McGinty chose her as Schmuck Number One. Given her excellent training in victimhood, Sissy immediately confessed to a murder she did not commit, which I’m sure delighted Aubrey to no end.
Now with my help, and Dale Marabout’s help, and ironically Aubrey’s help, Sissy James is free of the sewer again. After Aubrey’s confession, the city prosecutor hurried back into court. The judge dismissed the charges against her and she was freed. What happened to Sissy was tragic. But all in all, things have worked out well for her: Nine months in Marysville for stupidity is a lot better than life without parole for murder.
After returning to Hannawa last fall, Sissy returned to the Heaven Bound Cathedral. “Our sister has come home,” Guthrie Gates announced from the pulpit during his televised Friday night service. She was applauded and cheered.
Guthrie, by the way, has put Sissy in charge of the cathedral’s new outreach ministry to the city’s prostitutes. Guthrie told me he got the idea from Aubrey’s series on the women who work along Morrow Street.
Keesha, the prostitute Aubrey used in her lead, is not one of the women Sissy is trying to save. Keesha is dead.
I left my waitress a $5 tip and coaxed my Dodge Shadow back onto the interstate.
During the first week of November, Aubrey rode with the Rush City paramedics and stole two bottles of procaine and a syringe from their drug box. She went to a crafts supply store and bought several little bottles of gold paint, and some tiny brushes. She practiced painting crosses on an old Bible she bought for a dollar at a yard sale. She timed how long it would take the paint to dry. “I knew procaine was a lethal drug,” she wrote in her confession, “but I began to worry whether Buddy would ingest enough to kill him. So I looked in my textbook for another drug, as a backup. In the appendix, right below the procaine entry, I found lily of the valley. I discovered that even the water in a vase can be fatal if swallowed. I knew from my visits to the Heaven Bound Cathedral that Elaine Albert always put a pitcher of water on the pulpit. It was perfect. I found a greenhouse in Akron that grew lily of valley and I bought five live plants. I soaked the stems and leaves until I had a very lethal quart of water.”
Thanksgiving night Aubrey drove to Hannawa and checked into the Quality Inn. She spent all day Friday in her motel room watching television. At six, she put on one of her old Kent State sweatshirts and drove to the Heaven Bound Cathedral with her duffel bag of tricks. She walked right in. She went to the kitchenette in the nursery and filled a water pitcher with the tainted lily of valley water. When Buddy Wing left his office for the make-up room, she scooted in. She closed the door and painted the cross on his Bible. She took the Bible and the water and Buddy’s notes to the pulpit. She drove back to the motel and watched Buddy Wing die. At midnight she drove into Hannawa and planted her evidence in Sissy’s garbage cans.
In March, Aubrey came to work at the Herald-Union. She immediately sucked me into her madness. For weeks I followed her all over Hannawa. I thought I was helping her prove that Sissy James didn’t kill Buddy Wing.
What I was doing, of course, was helping Aubrey find the perfect person to set up-that poor soul whom Dale Marabout aptly labeled on his napkin hypothesis as her second schmuck.
By the end of June it was clear to me just who that schmuck was going to be. It was going to be Annie Bandicoot.
Annie Bandicoot not only had a basketful of motives for poisoning Buddy Wing-revenge for his kicking Tim out of his church, getting Sissy James out the picture, clearing the way for the Bandicoots to become the king and queen of Hallelujah City-she also had the opportunity. Friday night was Family Night at the New Epiphany Temple. But that particular Friday night was Father and Son Night. While Tim and his sons were in Cleveland watching the Cavaliers beat the Knicks, Annie was waiting at home.
Aubrey, of course, owed that particular piece of information to Sandra Leigh Swain, the make-up woman we’d jokingly called the eyebrow woman. What a fruitful source she turned out to be: she not only told Aubrey that Annie didn’t have an alibi, she told her that Sissy did! “Prior to my conversations with Sandra Swain, I did not know about Sissy’s Thanksgiving weekend trip to Mingo Junction,” Aubrey wrote in her confession. “I was thrilled. I knew I could prove Sissy’s innocence.”