C Corwin: The Cross Kisses Back

Tuesday, March 7

The poor lamb. One week on the job and she made the worst mistake a reporter on The Hannawa Herald-Union can make.

She called me Morgue Mama-to my face.

It was right after lunch, on a horrible Tuesday in March. I was perched at the counter that separates the library from the rest of the newsroom, going through the metro section of that morning’s paper. I saw her coming at me over the top of my 250+ drug store reading glasses. She was tall and willowy and young. And good gravy, she was smiling.

She plopped her arms on the counter, side by side like the runners on a bobsled, and leaned forward, actually casting a shadow over me. “Hi, Morgue Mama,” she said. “I need all the files on the Buddy Wing murder.”

I kept working, marking which stories should be saved, and where. In the old days I’d cut the stories out of the paper, scribble a date on them, stick them in an envelope and feed them to the file cabinets. Now stories are filed in cyberspace. Click and the job’s done. No more scissors. No more envelopes. No more of that wonderful inky newsprint on your fingertips. Anyway, I ignored the Morgue Mama thing and kept on working.

“The Buddy Wing files-I’d like to see them,” she said, a little louder but no less cheery.

I peeked over the top of my glasses again. “You’re the new police reporter.”

“Aubrey McGinty,” she said.

“Well, Aubrey McGinty, just so you know, Morgue Mama is what you call me behind my back.”

“Oops.”

“In front of my back you call me Maddy.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“No crime committed. You called me Morgue Mama because that’s what you hear everybody else call me.”

“I really am sorry.”

I hate contrition, even when it’s sincere, which in this instance it seemed to be. “Apologize if it makes you feel better,” I said. “In a month you’ll be so sick of my crap you’ll be calling me Morgue Mama like the rest.”

I was expecting her to hop back to her desk like a frightened bunny. Instead she winked at me like we’d been friends for a hundred years. “But only behind your back?”

“If you know what’s good for you.”

So that’s how I met Aubrey McGinty, maybe the best police reporter the Herald-Union ever had, maybe even better than my dear Dale Marabout. “You can call up all the Wing murder stories on your computer,” I said. “Just type his name in the search box.”

She puckered her lips. Apparently she found it funny that an old bag of prunes like me would be telling someone her age how to conduct a computer search. The computer chip has turned the world upside down, I’ll tell you. Today the young teach the old. Can’t figure out all those teeny weenie buttons on your TV remote? Ask a three-year-old. Can you imagine five hundred years ago some pre-pubescent apprentice showing Michelangelo how to hold his chisels?

“I’ve already got all the on-line files,” Aubrey said. “I’m interested in the older stuff.”

I tried to preserve my perfected sour countenance, but I’m sure my delight was smoothing out my wrinkles. The sweet girl actually wanted something from the filing cabinets. She actually wanted something printed on real paper. I wiggled my finger for her to follow.

Let me explain a few things for those of you who don’t know diddly about the newspaper business. Newspapers report what’s new, what’s happening right now, history on the hoof as they say. But news is meaningless unless it’s put into some sort of perspective. Let’s say you read that the sewer pipes under Cleveland Avenue are exploding, and you think, boy, that’s too bad. Then you read that those sewer pipes are only four years old, and you think how can this be? Then you read that the contractor who installed those sewer pipes is the mayor’s cousin, who after serving eighteen months in a state correctional facility for stealing cars went on to operate a shady television repair business, and despite having not one day’s experience laying sewer pipe, got the Cleveland Avenue contract because he submitted the lowest bid, and that the pipe he installed was made of low-grade iron, illegally imported from the former Soviet republic of Belarus, and you begin to get some perspective.

And how did the newspaper discover all this interesting stuff?

Every paper from the smallest weekly to The New York Times has a library. In the newspaper business we call these libraries the morgue . And it’s a fitting name. Just like they tag and store bodies in the city morgue, stories are tagged and stored in the newspaper’s morgue. But unlike the city morgue, the stuff we tag and store is never buried and never forgotten. It’s always there, waiting to be resurrected by some ambitious reporter. Waiting to give perspective to some current story. Waiting to send mayors and their shady relatives to prison.

So every newspaper has a morgue and every morgue has a crusty old pain-in-the-ass librarian like me, Dolly Madison Sprowls, whom, as you’ve already learned, the reporters call Morgue Mama.

But only behind my back.

The Herald-Union’s computer system was installed in June, 1985. So everything written before then was saved the old-fashioned way, clipped and crammed into a manila envelope, sardined into a file cabinet drawer.

You’d think the younger reporters could access information from a file cabinet without too much trouble, wouldn’t you? But file cabinets are as strange and mysterious to them as the computer system is to me. Oh, they can pull a drawer open-I’m not saying that-but they seem totally incapable of knowing where to begin. “Good gravy,” I hiss at them, “don’t you know the alphabet?”

I took Aubrey to the W cabinets first. We had three thick envelopes tagged WING, THE REV. BUDDY. Then I took her to the C cabinets and dug out four envelopes tagged CHURCHES, HISTORY. “There’s plenty of stuff on Buddy Wing’s ministry in here,” I said, “going back to the Fifties, when he first moved here from West Virginia.” Next I took her to the T cabinets. Two envelopes were marked TELEVISION, EVANGELISTS. “He started his television show in 1964,” I said, “the same Sunday in February that the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.”

“My mother wanted to marry George Harrison,” Aubrey said.

Good God, I thought, they make these reporters younger all the time. I was already twenty-nine years old in 1964, already divorced, already working here for five years.

“Who was your favorite Beatle?” she asked.

“Mel Torme,” I said.

We headed back toward the counter. “You got a videotape of the murder yet?” I asked.

“You’ve got that?”

“Honey,” I said. “Follow me.”

Like a lot of TV preachers, Buddy Wing had too much hair and wore expensive white suits. The day after Thanksgiving, he dropped dead, at the ripe age of seventy-six, in front of fifteen hundred people, during his regular Friday night Hour of Everlasting Life services at his opulent Heaven Bound Cathedral on Shellborne Street.

Far more than fifteen hundred witnessed his murder, of course. Wing’s Friday night services were broadcast live over some two hundred cable channels nationwide. So I suppose a couple hundred thousand were watching when he grabbed his neck and staggered backward into the fake palm trees. By the time the TV networks got through replaying the tape, everybody in the country had seen Buddy Wing die a dozen times. We ran a four-column photo of it ourselves. Page one. Above the fold.

Wing’s theological claim to fame was that he had Jesus’s phone number. Sometime during every broadcast he’d say: “Jesus gave me his phone number when I was just a little boy. And I’ve been calling him every day, ever since. And Jesus is always at home. His line is never busy. Hello Jesus! Hello Buddy!”