C Corwin - The Cross Kisses Back

“New people?” I asked.

“Kids from the college, TV and radio majors.”

The thought of someone from my alma mater evil enough to kill someone made me defensive. “Not Hemphill College?”

“Goodness no,” she answered. “Kent State.” She had a head of cauliflower in each hand, weighing them with her motherly instinct.

“So why are they there?” Aubrey asked. “To see a real-live television show being taped?”

“We put them to work and pay them. Some are there week after week, for the whole year. Some can’t take our brand of religion and quit after one night. You never know.” She chose the head in her left hand and pushed on.

Next she got a big bag of Idaho potatoes and a bag of those tiny salad carrots. She thought hard about the fresh California strawberries but passed them up. We went to the canned goods aisle. Aubrey continued to press her about the college students. “Were any of these kids ever assigned the job of taking Buddy Wing’s Bible to the pulpit?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” she answered. “That Bible was sort of an important holy relic, you know? It had belonged to pastor Wing’s father, back in his coal mining days. The Bible was always Elaine’s job.”

Elaine, of course, was Elaine Albert, the director who’d passed a lie detector test the day after the murder.

“Elaine wouldn’t have gotten busy and sent one of the college kids to do it, would she?” Aubrey wondered. “And then lied about it so nobody knew she wasn’t doing her job?”

“Goodness no.”

“What about filling his water pitcher?” I asked. “Was that also part of Elaine’s sacred duty?”

“Elaine did that, too. Though I suppose she might’ve given a little job like that to somebody else. Water’s water.”

“Except when it’s tainted with lily of the valley,” I said.

We headed for the front of the store. Every register had a long line. The eyebrow woman groaned and slid behind a woman with a cartful of baby food and disposable diapers. “I want you to know I don’t spy,” she said. “I love the church. I can’t imagine where’d I be without those people. But I also think Tim Bandicoot got a raw deal, the way Guthrie forced him out.”

Aubrey caught that immediately. “Guthrie forced him out? It wasn’t Buddy Wing?”

“Guthrie put the bee in Pastor’s bonnet, little doubt about that.”

“Manipulated him into getting rid of his rival?”

“Not that Tim was without sin,” the eyebrow woman said.

That afternoon we watched paint dry.

At Pizza Hut.

Eric Chen was already there when we pulled in. He had a window booth, facing the Red Lobster across the street. Aubrey slid in next to him. Their bodies snapped together like a couple of magnets. I slid in the other side. “You two have enough room over there?” I asked. They smiled with embarrassment and moved apart-about a half inch.

Eric had already ordered for us, a pitcher of Pepsi and a large pizza with sausage and green pepper.

We were there not only to assess our ambush of the eyebrow woman-which Aubrey and I agreed had gone better than expected-but also to conduct our paint-drying experiment. Given Sissy’s confession, the police hadn’t bothered to test how long it took the gold paint the killer used on Buddy Wing’s Bible to dry.

Eric was not only responsible for ordering the pizza. It also was his job to bring a leather-covered Bible, a tiny paint brush, and a bottle of Testor’s Gloss Enamel, the same kind of gold paint used by the killer, available in any craft store.

According to Aubrey, how long it took the paint to dry was no small matter: “In order for Buddy Wing to get the procaine on his lips when he kissed the cross, the gold paint would have to be tacky. Sissy confessed that she slipped into his office as soon as he left for the make-up chair. She said she quickly painted the cross and then took it to the chapel stage, along with the notes for Buddy’s sermon and the pitcher of tainted water, which she claims she’d already filled in the kitchenette in the nursery. Then she rushed home to watch him die on her TV. Which is doable. Her house is only a five-minute drive.”

“I gather you’ve driven it yourself?” I asked.

Eric answered for her. “We drove it six times last night. Every possible route.”

Aubrey seemed embarrassed that he told me that, as if he was describing their love-making rather than their driving experiment. She continued: “Buddy didn’t kiss the Bible until he was twenty-seven minutes into the service. Add that to the ten minutes he was in the make-up chair, and the four or five minutes he was praying with the elders. The paint would have to stay tacky for thirty-five or forty minutes-so let’s see.”

She opened the little bottle and started painting over the cross on the cover of the Bible. “The killer had to paint the cross very quickly, but also very neatly. The wet cross had to look just like the old one underneath.” Aubrey finished the job in only a minute.

The waitress brought our pitcher of Pepsi and three plastic glasses filled with ice. We sipped sparingly, knowing it was going to be a long wait, for both the paint and the pizza. “So exactly what are we trying to prove here?” I asked Aubrey. “We already know the cross on the Bible was painted during that little window of time after Wing left his office and the service started.”

Aubrey was nibbling on her ice. “Do we really know that? What if the paint doesn’t dry for an hour? Or two hours? Or ten hours? Then the cross could have been painted long before the service, maybe in the middle of the night, and the Bible put on the pulpit at any time. All we really know-if Elaine Albert’s statement is to be believed-is that when she went to get the Bible from Buddy’s desk, it wasn’t there, it was already on the pulpit.”

Eric gently touched the cross Aubrey had painted. He looked at the little circle of gold on the end of his finger and frowned. “If the cross was painted hours earlier, then the killer swiped the Bible from Buddy’s desk hours earlier. But if that Bible was as important to him as everybody says, wouldn’t he go nuts looking for it? Have everybody looking for it? There’s nothing like that in the police reports.”

Aubrey wadded her napkin and wiped the paint off his finger. “There’s nothing much about anything in the police reports,” she said. “As soon as they found the stuff in Sissy’s garbage, and she confessed, the investigation pretty much ended. But you’re right, Eric. Buddy would’ve gone nuts if he couldn’t find his daddy’s Bible. He would’ve said something to somebody.”

It simply popped out of my mouth. “Unless he poisoned himself.”

Eric looked at me like I was crazy. Aubrey, however, smiled slyly. “What if he wanted to kill himself but didn’t want Tim Bandicoot to replace him as the prince of Hallelujah City?” she said.

“And why would he want to kill himself?” Eric asked.

Aubrey took another mouthful of ice. “The autopsy didn’t show any terminal diseases or anything. But maybe he was suffering from depression. Maybe he’d lost his faith. Or never really had any.”

The cross on the Bible was seducing me just like it had seduced Eric. I touched it with my pinky. “If that’s the case, why would he frame Sissy and not Tim Bandicoot?”

Aubrey dutifully wiped the gold circle off my pinky. “Maybe framing Tim Bandicoot would be too obvious.”

This suicide thing seemed utterly bizarre to me. “Wouldn’t setting up Sissy to set up Bandicoot be too obvious, too?”

She laughed. And started singing: “I was looking back to see if you were looking back to see if I was looking back to see if you were looking back at me- Maddy, we’re talking about real cops here.”