Free Morgue Mama by C.R. Corwin Page B

desk now, but he was joyously giving the same sort of speech. “From now on,” he said, “when profanity is pertinent to a story, we dash it and run it.”
    Dale, to his credit, didn’t back off. “And how is it pertinent here, Tinker? Everybody knows cops have garbage mouths. All you’re trying to do is sell papers.”
    Tinker’s head lowered as slowly as my automatic garage door. “And you’re not trying to sell papers, Marabout? I’m not so happy to hear that.”
    Well, that’s how it went. Dale lost the argument and on Saturday the story ran with the dashes. Dale called me at home on Sunday. He tried to sound carefree and chatty, but I knew he was worried. “People do need to know what kind of bastard Lionel Percy is,” he admitted, “and maybe Aubrey’s story will do some good. But she’s going to pay for it. She’s made one of their own look bad. They’ll close ranks, freeze her out for a couple of months until it looks like she’s sloughing off, then feed her bad information on some big story to make her look incompetent.”
    “She’s hard as nails,” I said.
    That made him laugh. “You used to tell me I was hard as nails. Now I’m just another worn-out lump on the copy desk.”
    It was the first sexual innuendo between us in years—if you want to call anything that blatant an innuendo. I let it go by. “You’re a good copy editor,” I said.
    I spent the rest of the day kicking myself for that
good copy editor
remark. What a horrible thing to say. It was like praising some old geezer architect for the log cabin he was building out of Popsicle sticks at the rest home. At least I knew he was probably kicking himself for his hard as nails crack. We’d been lovers once. But Father Time and that damned kindergarten teacher had put an end to that. Now we were friends. That was enough.
    ***
     
    Saturday, April 15
    Letters to the editor started pouring in on Monday. By fifty to one they lambasted us for sinking to such a new low. The girls in circulation were busy all day with people calling to cancel their subscriptions. At Tuesday night’s City Council meeting, several of the backbenchers used language they wouldn’t have dared using in public before, presumably in the hope of finally being quoted in the paper. On Wednesday, Charlie Chimera, afternoon drive-time host on WFLO, ranted all four of his hours about what he repeatedly called the
Herald-Union’
s, “disgusting descent into the murky mire of irresponsibility.” Every caller agreed with him.
    Our circulation started climbing back up on Thursday.
    Finally it was Saturday again and Aubrey and I were on our way to see Tim Bandicoot.
    At first we discussed the weather—the first thing all Ohioans discuss when they crawl into a car—and then why Tim Bandicoot would agree to talk to us about Sissy James. “It sure can’t be for the free publicity,” I said. “Sissy’s name all over the front page could destroy him.”
    “I’m the enemy,” Aubrey said. “He wants to take my measure.”
    “Take your measure? Somebody’s been watching too many old movies.”
    She knew I was joking. She also knew I was taking her down a few pegs. “Then how about this?” she asked. “He knows Sissy will be all over the front page with or without his cooperation. So he might as well appear helpful.”
    “
Appear
being the key word?”
    She repeated my question as a declarative sentence. “Appear being the key word.”
    “Which raises all sorts of possibilities?”
    “Which raises all sorts of possibilities.”
    Tim Bandicoot’s New Day Epiphany Temple was located east of downtown, on Lutheran Hill, at the corner of Cleveland and Cather, an old commercial district that once served the city’s German enclave. By the Fifties those Germans had been absorbed by other ethnic groups and other neighborhoods. Today Lutheran Hill is populated by South Koreans, Pakistanis, poor blacks and even poorer Appalachian whites. Three-quarters of the