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?”
“I don’t know what I think,” I said. Then I promptly told her exactly what I thought: “The real killer has already framed Sissy James. But now you’re about to prove her innocent. That will mean an all-out investigation by a police department with egg on its face. So the killer kills again, preemptively pointing the police in the wrong direction, toward someone in Tim Bandicoot’s church. The killer has already scattered some new evidence around probably, just like he did with Sissy-probably.”
Aubrey laughed. “My oh my. Aren’t you the super sleuth.”
“You don’t think it’s possible?”
“I think it’s possible.”
We stopped at Central and North Smiley and waited for the WALK sign. I used the opportunity to slide out from under Aubrey’s arm. We were only a block from the paper and the last thing I wanted was for one of my many enemies in the newsroom to catch me being palsy-walsy with a reporter. To protect one’s image, one must be always vigilant.
We reached the paper and used the street entrance, something employees rarely do. We greeted Al Tosi, the day security man at the desk, and rode the elevator to the newsroom. “So what’s on your agenda?” I asked Aubrey before we went our separate ways.
Alec Tinker’s voice ambushed us. “Ladies!”
“Ladies?” Aubrey shrieked playfully. “Someone’s not reading their sexual harassment handbook.”
He pressed his palms together prayerfully and bowed apologetically.
“Or the religious practices handbook,” I added.
He told us that Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates were coming in at one, together, to discuss Aubrey’s investigation. “And you’re invited, too, Maddy.”
“Good gravy,” I said, “why am I invited?”
The meeting was held in Bob Averill’s office on the fifth floor. It’s a long, sterile office, huge round window at one end, display case filled with old Underwood typewriters at the other. The gray walls in between are lined with a century’s worth of important front pages: the Japanese surrender, men walking on the moon, the Kennedy assassination, the violent UAW strike of 1958 (which my Lawrence covered), the 1908 school fire that killed forty-two children, a couple dozen pages in all. Bob doesn’t have a desk, just a glass-top coffee table circled by comfortable leather chairs. The coffee table that afternoon held what it always holds: the most recent edition of the paper, neatly folded, and an aloe plant in a green ceramic bowl.
Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates were already sitting when Aubrey and I arrived. So was Tinker. So was Bob. We sat down quickly and nodded pleasantly to everyone.
I never felt so out of place in my life. Bob was wearing an expensive suit about the same shade as his walls. Tinker had worn one of his better suits for the occasion, dark blue with red pinstripes, meaning he knew that Gates and Bandicoot were coming in at least a day in advance, while only giving us three hours’ warning. The two evangelists, usually resplendent in white double-breasted suits with wide zig-zaggy neckties, were both dressed in charcoal. Aubrey, for her part, was wearing a snug pair of faded jeans and a sleeveless red blouse. I was wearing my absolutely worst-fitting pair of khakis and a T-shirt with a Canada goose on the front that I’d bought years ago on a vacation to Mackinac Island. Aubrey’s jeans won out over my goose as the focal point for the four important men in suits.
“I understand you have some concerns?” Bob said to Tim and Guthrie when our nodding was completed.
They grinned bravely at each other, and Guthrie said, “Yes, we do.”
Their concern, of course, was Aubrey’s upcoming series on the Buddy Wing murder. They were fearful-that’s the word Tim used, fearful -that Aubrey had mistakenly gotten the impression that the two congregations were unfriendly toward each other.
“The fact of the matter,” Tim said, “is that Guthrie and I have been brothers in the Lamb for many years. While some feathers were ruffled, years and years ago, that is all behind us now. Relations between our congregations could not be better.”
“Quite copacetic,” Guthrie added.
I quickly swallowed the giggle that was suddenly dancing on my tongue. Instead I made this horrible noise, as if I was blowing my nose without a handkerchief. It was that word copacetic. Imagine that old be-bop jazz word coming out of the mouth of Guthrie Gates. Back in my college days it was big word among the Meriwether Square crowd. Everything then was either “copacetic” or “most copacetic.”
“You okay?” Bob asked me.
“I’m fine,” I said, wishing I’d had the nerve to say everything was copacetic.
Tinker looked at Bob for permission, and then, apparently getting it through some telepathic process taught to the newspaper chain’s muckety mucks, reassured the two visitors that the Herald-Union’s intentions were not to stir up trouble between the two churches. “We can’t be too specific, as I’m sure you can appreciate,” he said, “but we have some evidence that Sissy James did not murder Buddy Wing. When we publish what we’ve found-if we publish-there’s been no final decision in that regard-our stories will pertain only to the murder.”
It was a cautiously worded bit of corporate boilerplate that Aubrey simply couldn’t let stand. “Of course, when a newspaper publishes any story, it’s our duty to put things in context,” she added.
Tim Bandicoot frowned sourly. “Context can mean a lot of things,” he said.
“We’d like whatever assurances you can give us that Miss McGinty won’t dredge up any more than’s necessary,” Guthrie added.
Bob shifted from his left buttock to his right. “We don’t dredge, gentlemen, we report.”
It was the appropriate thing for an editor-in-chief to say, of course, but dredge is what newspapers do, and should do.
Guthrie was repentant. “I shouldn’t have said dredge.”
Tim was not. “Your paper, Mr. Averill, has a history of treating religion like it belongs on the sports pages. Hallelujah City. All that stuff.”
Bob set himself square on both buttocks. “We did not coin that phrase, Mr. Bandicoot. That was that radio guy-Charlie Chimera.”
“You’ve certainly repeated it enough times,” Tim Bandicoot said.
Bob pawed the air. “Everybody’s repeated it-but the point is, the Herald-Union is not anti-religion.” He then explained our earlier coverage of the split between Tim and Buddy Wing. “Buddy was a very public figure, not only locally but nationally. And when a very public figure does very public things, like casting an assistant pastor out of his congregation during a live television broadcast, that is going to be reported.”
Bob had hit a nerve with Guthrie Gates. “Pastor Wing did not cast Tim out. He merely said that the gift of tongues was about to come over him and that all who might be offended should listen elsewhere.”
Tim Bandicoot leaned forward and clasped his hands together. He closed his eyes. But he did not pray. He growled slowly like a Doberman strapped into a muzzle. “Guthrie, I was never offended when Buddy spoke in tongues. We simply had a difference of opinion.”
Guthrie held up his hands and spread his fingers in surrender. “Sorry. I’ve gotten us off track.”
I can’t say if Tim was prepared to let the matter rest. But Aubrey sure wasn’t. She leaned back and crossed her legs like a man, wrapping her hands around her pointing knee. “It’s more than a difference of opinion, isn’t it? It’s a fundamental difference in belief. Buddy believed that speaking in tongues was proof of being baptized in the Holy Spirit. And those who didn’t, weren’t. That’s what you believe, too, isn’t it, Guthrie?”
He nodded nervously. “But it has nothing to do with Buddy’s death.”
“Whether it does or it doesn’t,” said Aubrey, “it’s part of the big picture that we have to report.”
Guthrie pushed back his bangs. They were beginning to turn dark with perspiration. “I don’t see why.”
Tinker was about ready to say something diplomatic to keep the conversation dull and businesslike. Bob, however, did his Richard Nixon impersonation, dropping his eyebrows and shaking his jowls, a signal to let Aubrey keep going. Which she did.
“Well,” she said, “the woman now in prison for Buddy’s murder was one of those two hundred people who followed Tim out of the cathedral. And the one Tim was sleeping with, to boot.”
“There’s no reason to go there,” Guthrie pleaded. He seemed oddly more uncomfortable with Tim’s carnal sins than Tim himself.
Aubrey ignored him. “So, if Sissy James is innocent, then somebody set her up. Somebody who knew about the affair. Somebody who knew his or her way around the cathedral. Somebody with a most wicked sense of humor-big glob of poison right on Buddy Wing’s wagging old tongue. How can we not print all that?”
Guthrie came out of his leather chair like a jack-in-the-box. “You are not a police officer, Miss McGinty. You are not judge and jury. You’re just some damn little-”
Aubrey’s lips thinned and tightened. “Reporter?” she asked. “Or were you going to say girl?”
I was sure Bob or Tinker would say something now. But neither did. They let Aubrey say whatever she wanted.
“We are not going to point fingers, and we are not going to pass judgment on anyone,” she said. “We are just going to report.”
“And embarrass a lot of good people,” Tim said softly.
“If people in your congregations are embarrassed,” Aubrey answered just as softly, “it will be from the embarrassing things other people in your congregations did.”
Guthrie, still standing, issued a mean-spirited “A-men.” Tim knew it was aimed at him. He sprang out of his leather chair and pushed Guthrie back into his.
Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates had come into Bob Averill’s office as brothers and were now acting like it. They crashed into each other like two bull walruses competing for a dewy-eyed cow on a rocky beach in the North Atlantic. There wasn’t any punching or swearing, just pushing and an occasional growl from deep inside their straining guts.
Bob Averill, the veteran of so many heated discussions in his office, went to his phone and called security. Tinker, a managing editor who someday hoped to be an editor-in-chief just like Bob Averill, pulled the coffee table out of the way, saving the aloe plant and the neatly folded copy of that morning’s paper. Aubrey and I stayed put in our leather chairs and tried not to pee our pants laughing.
The hatred between Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates was understandable. They were both bright and ambitious young men. They’d found themselves under the same roof, climbing the same ladder. Two heirs, one throne. What good was going to come of that? So if that speaking in tongues business hadn’t erupted, something else would have come along to drive one of them out. But the tongues business did erupt. And it turned a nasty sibling rivalry into an even nastier battle between an aging father and an errant son.
That rift between Buddy and Tim was hardly small potatoes. It was a big, big deal. When Aubrey first started looking into the murder, I went to Nanette Beane, the paper’s religion editor, and asked her what she knew about speaking in tongues. Well, naturally, she didn’t know diddly. Before becoming religion editor she’d been the food editor and before that she’d covered suburban school board meetings. But she did have a number of reference books strung across the back of her desk and she found one called The Fundamentals of Fundamentalism and it contained a chapter on the subject.
Buddy Wing was a Pentecostal.
Pentecost-I have to admit I didn’t know this-was the seventh Sunday after Jesus’s resurrection, when he appeared before his disciples. They were so filled with the Holy Spirit they began to speak in tongues, the Bible says. So that’s what Pentecostals still do today: They fill themselves with the spirit and say things no one but God understands.
Some Pentecostals believe different people are given different gifts-so if you don’t speak in tongues, that’s okay, you can still get into heaven. Others are not so forgiving: If you don’t have the gift of tongues you aren’t really saved. Buddy Wing apparently fell into that second group. So when Tim Bandicoot came back from Bible college, his head brimming with theological flexibility, and started suggesting that the Heaven Bound Cathedral might do better in the here-and-now, television viewer-wise, if Buddy toned down a few of his more controversial practices, like healing people through the television screen, like handling rattlesnakes every year on his birthday, or like speaking in tongues, well, you can only imagine what Buddy thought.
Tim had grown up in the church. His parents were original members of the Clean Collar Club. He was the son Buddy never had. I’m sure Buddy tried everything he could to correct Tim’s errant thinking. At some point he must have realized it wasn’t going to happen and he brought in Guthrie Gates and began grooming him.
Why didn’t Buddy just send Tim on his merry way, to start his own church, to spread the good word in his own way? Maybe he had tried to do that. Maybe Tim wouldn’t leave gracefully. Maybe Tim had the power of his convictions and was determined to stay and fight. Maybe Tim, religiously speaking, knew a cash cow when he saw one and wasn’t about to walk away. Maybe Guthrie’s sudden appearance as a rival only stiffened Tim’s resolve. Who knows what kind of psychological stuff was going on inside, and among, Tim Bandicoot, Guthrie Gates and the Rev. Buddy Wing?
All we know is that things slowly came to a head, and one night, with the television cameras grinding away, Buddy Wing cast Tim Bandicoot from his flock.
The fancy Greek word for speaking in tongues, by the way, is glossolalia: glossai means tongue, lalein means to babble. But what believers speak is not Greek. It is a heavenly language, perhaps the language spoken by the angels, or God himself. When humans speak it, they have no idea what they are saying. When humans hear it, they have no idea what they’re hearing. They are simply in the spirit.
“ Shalbala-she-shalbala,” Buddy cried out from his pulpit the night he cast out Tim Bandicoot. “The gift of tongues has come over me. All who might be offended better listen elsewhere. She-shalbala-shebendula-shebendula. Out of this holy place you who reject the gift, you who pretend to be saved.” His finger surveyed the congregation, the choir and the dancers and the orchestra, and like the jittery needle on a compass found Tim Bandicoot seated alongside Guthrie Gates in the row of huge gold chairs behind his pulpit.
Can you imagine the humiliation felt by the two hundred who retreated toward the exit signs that night? Can you imagine the self-righteousness felt by the thousand who applauded them out?
Tim Bandicoot and Guthrie Gates left as they’d come-together. Except this time the Herald-Union’ s own version of Ronny Doddridge, day shift security guard Al Tosi, who stood five-six and weighed four pounds for every one of his sixty-two years, was waddling behind them. Both Tim and Guthrie were crying.
Tim had apologized profusely after the shoving match. Guthrie had only sniffled indignantly, “I suppose you’re going to print this, too?”
Which was a good question. Was their meeting in Bob Averill’s office off the record? Or was it fair fodder for Aubrey’s series-to help give context to the rift between the tongue-speaking followers of the Rev. Guthrie Gates and the non-glossolalianites in the Rev. Tim Bandicoot’s New Epiphany Temple?