C Corwin - The Cross Kisses Back

My stomach was so queasy I was just nibbling my half of the sandwich. “I have to tell you, Aubrey,” I said, “this Doddridge thing really scares me.”

She was chomping like a horse. “You don’t think it was suicide? Come on-just by looking at him you could tell there was a lot of bad stuff going on inside his head.”

“That’s exactly my point, Aubrey. Maybe he knew something about Buddy Wing’s death. Or had some strong suspicions he was sharing with others at the church. And maybe that worried the real killer. Somebody clever enough to poison Wing the way he did, and pin it on Sissy with all that evidence, easily could’ve made Doddridge’s death look like a suicide.”

“And you think maybe the murderer will keep killing. Ronny Doddridge. Aubrey McGinty. Dolly Madison Sprowls, maybe?”

“It’s crossed my mind.”

She dismissed my fears by taking another enormous bite from her half of the sandwich.

“I’d think it would cross yours, too. You’re being followed. Your car windows have been-”

“And I’ve been slapped around and threatened. But this really looks like an honest-to-God suicide.”

“You’re awfully nonchalant about all this.”

“What I am is awfully hungry,” she said.

I let the subject drop and watched her chew. She was not only hungry. She was exhausted. She’d spent all morning trying to follow up on the Doddridge story, with little success. The police were still freezing her out over the ruckus her stories on the chief’s reorganization plan caused. I’m sure whatever information she was getting was coming from disgruntled officers far down the food chain, information that had to be checked and double-checked. “Any idea what the suicide note said?” I asked.

“I can’t confirm it yet,” she said, “but Doddridge apparently apologized to the congregation for not protecting Buddy Wing better.”

I wrapped my half of the sandwich and wedged it into my purse. I’d try to eat it later. “This is all getting so complicated.”

Aubrey took a long, noisy drag on her lemonade. “So, Maddy, tell me about that new sofa.”

Thursday, June 22

On Tuesday, the county coroner ruled Ronny Doddridge’s death a suicide. On Wednesday, Aubrey came back from police headquarters with a copy of the suicide note. It was written directly to the Reverend Buddy Wing:

Dear pastor,

I am so sorry I let you down. Surely I am going down to hell where I deserve to be. When the devils came back to get you I was hiding like a school boy to smoke a cigarette, as I am sure both you and Jesus already know. I was born no good and remain so.

Ronald James Doddridge

A powerful note. Unfortunately we could not run it word for word, not while the case was still open. And even though the coroner had rendered his expert judgment, the police would take their good time-six months or more-before officially proclaiming that Doddridge took his life without undue or illegal interference of another person or party. So for her Thursday story Aubrey had to paraphrase:

Doddridge out for smoke night Rev. Wing poisoned

HANNAWA -Before putting a pistol to his head last Thursday, Heaven Bound Cathedral security guard Ronald “Ronny” Doddridge wrote a note apologizing for taking an unauthorized cigarette break the night the Rev. Buddy Wing was fatally poisoned.

According to sources close to the police investigation, the note was addressed directly to Wing and began with the salutation, “Dear pastor.”

SEE NOTE PAGE A9

It was another good story. Having encountered Ronny Doddridge herself, on those two occasions, she was able to describe his appearance and mannerisms to a tee. She talked to his neighbors again about his daily habits, getting a measure of his friendliness. “He was something of a loner,” said the woman who lived across the street, “but when you waved at him he’d always wave back.”

Aubrey also talked to the eyebrow woman, who confirmed, off the record of course, that Doddridge, like herself, was indeed a secret smoker.

Aubrey also talked to Guthrie Gates.

Well, Gates had to talk to her, didn’t he? The security guard at his church had not only killed himself, he’d also pried open two old cans of worms: Buddy Wing’s murder and the rift between Buddy and Tim Bandicoot.

Aubrey interviewed Gates on the phone, long after I’d gone home for the day, so I have no way of knowing exactly what she asked him. But given his answers, she had clearly asked him what he thought Ronny Doddridge meant by “when the devils came back to get you.”

“We preach belief in a literal devil,” she quoted Gates as saying, “though I can’t say by the note whether Ronny was speaking literally or metaphorically. But there’s no doubt Pastor Wing’s murderer was possessed by the devil in some way. I only wish I’d known brother Ronny was hurting so.”

Before work on Thursday morning, I met Aubrey at Ike’s. We got our coffee and tea to go and walked up to the reading garden at the main library. We sat across from the pink metal monstrosity by the famed Cincinnati sculptor Donald Raintree Tubb, a blindfolded pig gleefully riding a bicycle made entirely of sausage links. “So, are we still buying the suicide note?” I asked.

“I think we are,” she said. “The handwriting comparisons and the motive all seem to add up.”

I sucked a tiny of taste of tea through the slit in the plastic lid on my paper cup. “Then assuming the note is legit-what exactly does it tell us?”

Aubrey had been staring at the pig on the bicycle. Now she turned her face toward me, the breeze off empty Central Avenue plastering her loose red hair across her eyes. “You read my story, right? When I asked Gates what he thought when the devils came back to get you meant, he immediately reduced it to one devil. But Ronny had said devils.”

“You think Ronny meant real devils?”

“Real human devils. Devils that came back-meaning they’d been there before.”

“Let me guess-the devils who’d been there before are Tim Bandicoot and his followers, the ones who pooh-poohed Buddy’s talking in tongues.”

“That would be my guess.”

“And you think Doddridge knew that for sure?”

“No way of knowing. But Ronny Doddridge wasn’t as dumb as he looked.”

No he wasn’t. Aubrey’s story on him had surprised me totally. Ronny Doddridge wasn’t just some poor sap in the church who needed a job. For fourteen years, he’d been a deputy sheriff in Mineral County, West Virginia. Six months after he was forced to resign for repeatedly drinking beer in his patrol car, Buddy Wing brought him to Hannawa as the Heaven Bound Cathedral’s first security guard. Ronny was the nephew of Buddy’s dead wife. But there was apparently more to it than family obligation. Buddy hired him just five months before the very public flap that sent Tim Bandicoot and two hundred members of his flock off to that abandoned Woolworth’s store on Lutheran Hill. Buddy Wing knew there was going to be trouble and wanted someone loyal, and maybe experienced with a gun, to watch his back.

Aubrey showed me her watch. It was almost ten. We left the bicycling pig and headed up the hill toward the Herald-Union. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Why would Doddridge kill himself if he was onto something? Wouldn’t he take what he knew to the police? Or Guthrie Gates? Or you? Why would he just scribble that cryptic little hint about devils coming back and then shoot himself in the head?”

“Overwrought with guilt?” she ventured.

“Not so overwrought to leave a big hint,” I said.

Aubrey put her arm around me, like I was a silly child. “You really don’t think he killed himself, do you?”