C Corwin: The Cross Kisses Back

Before tumbling into the fake palms, Buddy Wing was the most well-known TV preacher in Hannawa. But he was hardly the only one. Today, I bet there are a dozen preachers here with their own shows on cable.

Anyway, Hannawa is known for its evangelists. So much so that ever since the paper’s series brought the phenomenon to light, Hannawa has been known as “The Hallelujah City.” I think it’s a hoot, but Mayor Kyle Finn sure doesn’t like it. Of course he can’t say so publicly, but Sylvia Berdache, who covers city hall for us, says hearing that nickname literally turns his orange Irish freckles maroon. She does a wonderful impression of him: “We’re workin’ our arses off trying to build a progressive city here-attractin’ high-tech jobs and foreign investment dollars-and what are we known for? Faith-healin’ hillbillies!” Sylvia claims she actually overheard him say that to a Catholic priest once, at the Feast of the Assumption carnival at St. Patrick’s on West Molamar.

Sylvia didn’t say what the priest’s reaction to the mayor’s blasphemy was, but I’ll tell you mine: People can believe anything they want and worship any way they want-just as long as they stay the hell away from me.

At four that afternoon, I saw Aubrey McGinty heading toward my desk with the envelopes I’d given her. Her youthful bounce made me nibble on my bottom lip. I’d been much too helpful earlier. Much too friendly. I needed to re-establish my witchiness. “You sure you’re done with those?” I asked sourly. “I don’t like digging out the same stuff twice.”

“I’m pretty sure I Xeroxed everything I need.”

“Only pretty sure?”

“If it’ll make you sleep better tonight I could go Xerox some more,” she said.

I’d wanted to see her wilt. But she’d only bloomed. I motioned for her to put the envelopes on my desk. They slid in every direction, one nearly capsizing my end-of-the-day mug of Darjeeling tea.

Before waltzing back to her desk she said something that was going to upset my applecart for months to come: “Maddy, I don’t think Sissy James did it.”

Wednesday, March 8

Speckley’s is a wonderful little restaurant about a half-mile west of downtown in the Meriwether Square district. Dale Marabout and I pulled in at the same time.

Meriwether, I suppose, is Hannawa’s Greenwich Village. In the Fifties there were a handful of jazz clubs there, and an assortment of all-night diners and serious drinking bars. In the Sixties the city’s small contingent of Hippies hung out in “Meri” and in the Seventies it was the Disco set. Nothing happened there in the Eighties. In the Nineties it became a trendy area again with coffee and bagel shops, art galleries and antique stores. Speckley’s has been there all along, serving the same famous meat loaf sandwiches, huge gob of au gratin potatoes on the side.

We slid into a window booth. The waitress immediately descended on us and, without asking, turned over our coffee cups and started to pour. I waited for my cup to be full before telling her I wanted tea. The waitress apologized with feigned sweetness and stormed off to find a pot of hot water.

My orneriness made Dale chuckle, as it always did. “So what’s up, Maddy?”

“I told you yesterday-nothing.”

“That you did. So what’s up?”

Dale Marabout knows me too well. He came to the Herald-Union in 1975, when he was twenty-four, after two years at the Elwood Telegraph-Review. I’d already been divorced for ten years and he was sixteen years younger than me. But somehow we started having an exhausting sexual relationship. I’d never been with any man other than Lawrence, and Dale, pudgy and bland and timid as a mole, had never been with any woman. We were exactly what the other needed.

The sex lasted for five years, until I was forty-five. By then Dale had lost some weight and gained a modicum of self-confidence, and I was in full-blown menopausal decline, every part of my body with sexual application going south.

Our nights together dwindled to once a month and then stopped completely when a young kindergarten school teacher named Sharon moved into his apartment building. I missed the sex but understood Dale’s needs. He needed someone he could have a family with, someone to share a mortgage and car payments. He and the teacher married. Twenty-two years later they have a nice house in Greenlawn, a daughter working on her master’s in psychology, and a teen-age son who wants to be a professional wrestler.

Maybe the sex between Dale and me stopped, but our friendship didn’t. Every once in a while I’ll call him, or he’ll call me, and we meet at Speckley’s.

“What’s your take on Aubrey McGinty?” I asked.

It took some real cojones for me to ask him that. Aubrey was Dale’s replacement on the police beat. Dale had covered the cops since Eddie Nogolo retired in 1974, and he loved it. But our new managing editor, Alec Tinker, decided Dale was too cozy with Police Chief Donald Polceznec. So Dale was shuffled to a deputy copy editor slot on the metro desk.

“I’ve edited a couple of her stories already,” Dale said. “She’s good.”

I watched him stir a packet of sugar into his coffee. “Well, you were plenty good, too,” I said. “It still pisses me off the way-”

Dale reached across the booth and patted my knuckles. There were granules of sugar on his fingertips. “It’s okay. Nobody stays on the same beat forever.”

I couldn’t help but think about those fingers. We never loved each other, not in an ooey-gooey way, but it was still a blow when he broke things off, even though I totally understood it. I blew the sugar off my knuckles and told him about Aubrey calling me Morgue Mama to my face. I told him she wanted everything we had on the Rev. Buddy Wing.

Dale stopped stirring. “Really?”

“So she hasn’t been assigned to look into it?”

“Not that I’m aware of. Though I’m not exactly in the loop these days.”

“She doesn’t think Sissy James did it,” I said.

“Sissy James confessed,” he said, sipping. Bitterness was spreading across his face. “There was a shitload of evidence.”

“You think Sissy did it then?”

“Well-sure. The cops found the poison in her garbage. She confessed, for christsake.”

Dale’s bitterness had bloomed into anger and I felt terrible for bringing it on. Being replaced by a kid from a podunk newspaper couldn’t have been easy for him, even though I’m sure he was sick to death of the beat. It wasn’t that Dale was too cozy with the police chief. Dale was too cozy with being cozy. He was forty-nine. He’d written hundreds of murder stories, fatal car-crash stories, kids-fried-to-a-crisp-in-rundown-apartment-building stories. I love Dale Marabout to death, but he was burned out, and he knew it. Still, getting exiled to the copy desk is a real ballbat in the ribs. I’ve seen it happen too many times over the years. Reporters of a certain age just wilt.

“Maybe there’s something new with the story,” I said.

“Like I said, I’ve been de-looped.”

When I got back to the morgue I found a Post-it on my computer screen:

Can we have lunch tomorrow?

Aubrey Mc. ext. 326

Thursday, March 9

Twenty-four hours later I was back in Meri, back at Speckley’s, two booths down from where Dale and I sat. “Go crazy,” Aubrey said, “I’m buying.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said.

“No, I’m buying-I want to thank you for your help with the Buddy Wing files.”

“If every reporter I helped bought me lunch, I’d weigh four hundred pounds.”

We both ordered the meat loaf sandwiches, au gratin potatoes on the side.