C R Corwin [Morgue Mama 01] The Cross Kisses Back (epub) id

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.“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!”People in the audience would shake their arms and shout, “Hello Jesus! Hello Buddy!”I remember Dale Marabout saying the night of Wing’s murder, “At least Buddy will save a bundle on long distance from now on.”So the murder was shown again and again on every newscast in the country, probably in the world, especially after the coroner announced just how Wing had been poisoned.***“I’d sure like to Jack-and-the-beanstalk my way up those legs,” Eric Chen said, shaking the last drop of a Mountain Dew into his mouth.He’d returned from lunch just in time to watch Aubrey retreat to her desk with the Buddy Wing files.“She is a pretty girl,” I agreed.“And I hear a kick-ass reporter.”Eric Chen has worked in the morgue since graduating from college, which makes him about thirty-three or thirty-four.Technically I’m still the head librarian, but Eric is really in charge.That’s because he understands how and why the computers do what they do.It’s all I can do to double-click my mouse.The paper had figured I’d retire at sixty-five like everybody else.Then they’d move Eric up to my position, finally completing the modernization program that editor-in-chief Bob Averill initiated about a dozen years ago.But I had no intention of going peacefully.“Maddy-Maddy-Maddy,” Bob said to me after receiving the bad news about my intention to keep working, “don’t you want to enjoy life a little?”“That’s why I’m staying,” I said.And that’s why I’m going to stay just as long as I can.I love this paper.I love the morgue.And so the modernization program remains stalled, one Dolly Madison Sprowls shy of completion.You’d think Eric would be pissed at me for hanging on, wouldn’t you? He stands to make at least $15,000 more a year if I retire.But he never says boo about it.“I wonder if she likes Chinese?” Eric said when Aubrey sat down and propped her knees against the edge of her desk.He was referring to himself, of course, not won ton soup.Eric Chen is always nurturing the stereotype that Asian-Americans are smarter than Other-Americans.But the only things Chinese about Eric Chen are his eyes and his last name.He was born in Youngstown, for goodness sake.And while he certainly knows what all the buttons on his keyboard are for, he’s a world-class doofus when it comes to things that really matter, like feeding his belt through all the loops in his pants, or making sure there’s enough antifreeze in his pickup truck, or having a relationship with a woman that goes beyond watching her carry an armful of files back to her desk.Still, I like Eric Chen.He’s funny and polite and honest.He’s one of the few people in the newsroom who isn’t afraid of me.To tell you the truth, I’ve spent years perfecting my act as the newspaper’s rottweiler-in-residence.Every morning I come to work determined to be as cranky and uncooperative as I can.It keeps the reporters and editors from asking for information they really don’t need—which they’ll do every damn day, ten times a day, if you let them.But Eric Chen saw through me the day he was hired.And Dale Marabout sure saw through me.And now I knew that Aubrey McGinty saw through me, too.As soon as Eric wandered off, I went to my desk and dialed Dale Marabout’s extension.His desk was way over by the elevator but I could see him pick up the receiver and cradle it under his neck.“Hi, Mr.M,” I said.He swiveled in his chair and smiled in my direction.“What’s shakin’?” he said.“Up for lunch tomorrow?”“Something interesting cooking?”“Just lunch.Speckley’s at noon?”“Noon it is.”I watched him hang up and swivel back to his computer screen.So many stories to edit and so little time.***I came to Hannawa, Ohio, in 1953—the most timid eighteen-year-old on the face of the earth—to attend Hemphill College.Hemphill at that time had one of the best library science programs in this part of the country.I was going to get my degree and go back to New York, get a job in one of the big library systems in Albany or Syracuse or Utica, anywhere but my hometown of LaFargeville, a crossroads clutter of two hundred and eighty-five people surrounded by seven thousand dairy cows.Instead I fell in love with Lawrence Sprowls and after graduation stayed right here in Hannawa.Lawrence was a journalism major and made the dean’s list every semester, and so while other J-grads went off to little piss-ant papers around the state, Lawrence went right to the Herald-Union.They assigned him to the business section, where he quickly made a name for himself covering a vicious three-month strike at the Ford plant.Like other big cities in the Midwest, the 1950s in Hannawa were boom years.Factories were popping up everywhere, outstripping the local supply of workers.Poor families by the thousand streamed out of the South to work twelve hours a day, six, seven days a week, making things they could not yet afford to buy for themselves.It wasn’t long before those workers, their feet now firmly planted in the middle class, got sick of the low wages and long hours.They joined unions and bargained as hard as they worked [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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