C Corwin - The Cross Kisses Back

Except for the chain-link fences and Slinky-like rings of razor wire, the prison looked like a small college. Some of the buildings were old and strangely quaint-the first were built in the early nineteen hundreds-while others were cold and modern. There were a few bunches of trees here and there, though the prison clearly could have budgeted a little more for landscaping. On the drive from Hannawa, Aubrey told me that Marysville housed eighteen hundred women, most for non-violent crimes like drugs or forgery or prostitution, most for getting mixed up with the wrong kind of man.

I was surprised that Sissy James had agreed to talk with Aubrey. I also was glad Aubrey invited me along. I’d sat in the morgue for forty years watching reporters rushing in and out, watching the stories they banged out turn into neat columns of print. Now I was getting a chance to see a reporter in action. I knew that Aubrey cared how this whole Sissy James thing panned out, but frankly I just liked the snooping and the lunches afterward.

The guards directed us to the maximum security building. It was big and new. Except for the bars in the windows it didn’t look much different from the middle school they built up the street from my bungalow a few years ago. Inside we were politely interrogated, checked for drugs and weapons, and led into a tiny windowless room. It was furnished with an uncomfortable-looking blue sofa, a single wood chair without armrests, and a small coffee table made of molded plastic. The walls were bare except for a closed-circuit TV camera and a framed photo of Republican Governor Dick Van Sickle.

Aubrey motioned for me to sit in the chair. She sat in the middle of the sofa, so Sissy would have to sit close to her no matter which end of the sofa she chose. We only had to wait a couple of minutes before Sissy was ushered in. Her baggy cotton slacks and blouse were the same gray as the floor tiles. The guard positioned herself in the doorway, arms folded across her mixing-bowl breasts.

Sissy was surprisingly friendly. She smiled and shook our hands and sat on Aubrey’s left side. She’d only been in Marysville for four months, but she looked thinner than she did on the interrogation and arraignment tapes. Aubrey took a notebook and pen from her purse, but she didn’t open the notebook or click the pen, her old off-the-record trick. “What job do they have you doing here, Sissy?” she asked.

“Flag shop.”

“Making flags you mean?”

“American flags. Ohio flags. I like it.”

“Keeps your mind off things?”

“It makes the day go by.”

“You’ve got a long row to hoe, don’t you? Life without parole.”

“Life goes by in a minute. Then you’ve got eternity with the Lord.”

“Confident you’re going to heaven then?”

Sissy’s smile turned hard and uneasy, like the seat of that damn wooden chair I was sitting on. “I’ve already been forgiven,” she said.

Aubrey put her notebook on the coffee table and twisted until her arms and chin were resting on the back of the sofa. She was close enough to stroke Sissy’s cheek if she wanted. “And what has God forgiven you for? Murdering Buddy Wing or covering up for somebody else?”

Sissy’s eyes floated up to the governor’s picture, her popularly elected lord here on earth. “I know there’s still lots of talk about me taking the blame for somebody else.”

Aubrey nodded. “For Tim Bandicoot, your lover.”

Sissy just stared at the governor. “Everybody knows me and Tim did wrong. That’s no secret. God’s forgiven me for that, too.”

“And apparently Tim’s wife has forgiven him,” Aubrey said. “I hear they’re a happy family again.”

Said Sissy, “As it should be.”

“You don’t think Tim was just using you for sex? The way other men had used you for sex?”

I watched Sissy’s eyes cloud over, her nostrils glow pink. “You just know everything, don’t you?”

Aubrey’s voice shriveled into a whisper. “I read the transcripts of your sentencing hearing. If it hadn’t been for all that stuff that happened to you when you were a kid, you might be on death row right now.”

I’d remembered Dale’s story on the sentencing: Sissy’s lawyer had talked for an hour about her illegitimate birth, her mother’s early death, the shoplifting, the running away, the drugs, the stripping in rathole bars, the escort service stuff, how she’d been rescued by the Rev. Buddy Wing, pressing his open hands against the inside of her television screen. Her lawyer was followed by a dozen members of the Heaven Bound Cathedral, forgiving her the way they knew Pastor Wing surely would have forgiven her, praying that Sissy be allowed to live and be a witness for God’s love inside the secure walls of the Ohio Reformatory for Women.

“What happened to me ain’t important,” Sissy told Aubrey. Her head was bent over her knees now, and her arms wrapped around her waist, as if she had a bad case of menstrual cramps. “All that matters is that Satan got the best of me and I killed Pastor Wing.”

If I’d been the one asking the questions, I would have been rocking Sissy in my arms. But Aubrey pulled back, making sure there wasn’t a whit of compassion in her voice. “I don’t think you killed Buddy Wing,” she said. “And I don’t think Tim Bandicoot killed him either, though I’m sure that’s what you think.”

Sissy almost screamed it: “I killed Pastor Wing. Why don’t anybody believe that?”

Aubrey put her notebook back in her purse. She hadn’t written a word. “Well, the police believe it. The judge believes it. So you’ve got them on your side. But me, I’m not on your side. I’m going back to Hannawa and I’m going to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Tim Bandicoot didn’t do it, even if he’s the world’s biggest asshole in every other way. And then I’ll come back and we’ll have another talk.”

Sissy James walked out of the room before another word could be said. Her arms were still wrapped around her waist. She was crying.

Aubrey and I drove into Marysville and had an early lunch in a restaurant that looked a lot like Speckley’s. The specialty of this place was fried bologna sandwiches. We were both intrigued. The bologna was a half-inch thick, smothered in cheddar cheese. The bun was soaked with grease. They were absolutely wonderful. After lunch we checked out the antique shops. I bought an old Lassie novel for Joyce, my niece back in LaFargeville. Like every collie owner I ever met, Joyce collects anything Lassie. Then we started for home.

In the hilly part of Richland County traffic stopped. Both lanes north, both lanes south, thousands of idling cars and trucks spewing blue exhaust. It was raining so hard you’d of thought we were in a car wash. We couldn’t see a thing. Aubrey punched the radio buttons for the right song to soothe her growing anxiety. Finally she squealed “Shit!” and jumped out of the car. She disappeared up the berm.

I was antsy, too. Not so much about the traffic jam-sooner or later we’d start moving again-but about the lie Aubrey told me that day we went to see Guthrie Gates at the cathedral. One of the first lessons new reporters at the Herald-Union learn is that you don’t bullshit Morgue Mama. Heap all the bullshit you want on your sources or on the editors. On Morgue Mama, not even a teaspoonful. But now there I was, being bullshitted by Aubrey McGinty and afraid to confront her about it. I was simply furious with myself.

Aubrey was gone for a half hour. She jumped into the car soaking wet. “Remember Maddy,” she said even before the door was closed, “pneumonia-virus.”

She took her cellphone from her purse and punched in a flurry of numbers with her little finger. Somebody picked up right away. “Metro,” she said. And so I learned about the accident up ahead at the same time the desk did. A skidding semi full of Florida grapefruit had been broadsided by another semi hauling steel I-beams. Bouncing, flying, rolling grapefruit had caused six separate accidents. Nobody was dead, but several had been seriously injured, among them 25th District congresswoman Betty Zuduski-Lowell. “Her nose is broken and she’s screaming at the top of her lungs that she’s a member of the U.S. Congress,” Aubrey told the desk. “There must be fifty or sixty people standing in the rain eating grapefruit-God, I wish I had a camera.”