Morgue Mama Read Free Page A

years younger than me. But somehow we started having an exhausting sexual relationship. I’d never been with any man other than Lawrence, and Dale, pudgy and bland and timid as a mole, had never been with any woman. We were exactly what the other needed.
    The sex lasted for five years, until I was forty-five. By then Dale had lost some weight and gained a modicum of self-confidence, and I was in full-blown menopausal decline, every part of my body with sexual application going south.
    Our nights together dwindled to once a month and then stopped completely when a young kindergarten school teacher named Sharon moved into his apartment building. I missed the sex but understood Dale’s needs. He needed someone he could have a family with, someone to share a mortgage and car payments. He and the teacher married. Twenty-two years later they have a nice house in Greenlawn, a daughter working on her master’s in psychology, and a teen-age son who wants to be a professional wrestler.
    Maybe the sex between Dale and me stopped, but our friendship didn’t. Every once in a while I’ll call him, or he’ll call me, and we meet at Speckley’s.
    “What’s your take on Aubrey McGinty?” I asked.
    It took some real
cojones
for me to ask him that. Aubrey was Dale’s replacement on the police beat. Dale had covered the cops since Eddie Nogolo retired in 1974, and he loved it. But our new managing editor, Alec Tinker, decided Dale was too cozy with Police Chief Donald Polceznec. So Dale was shuffled to a deputy copy editor slot on the metro desk.
    “I’ve edited a couple of her stories already,” Dale said. “She’s good.”
    I watched him stir a packet of sugar into his coffee. “Well, you were plenty good, too,” I said. “It still pisses me off the way—”
    Dale reached across the booth and patted my knuckles. There were granules of sugar on his fingertips. “It’s okay. Nobody stays on the same beat forever.”
    I couldn’t help but think about those fingers. We never loved each other, not in an ooey-gooey way, but it was still a blow when he broke things off, even though I totally understood it. I blew the sugar off my knuckles and told him about Aubrey calling me Morgue Mama to my face. I told him she wanted everything we had on the Rev. Buddy Wing.
    Dale stopped stirring. “Really?”
    “So she hasn’t been assigned to look into it?”
    “Not that I’m aware of. Though I’m not exactly in the loop these days.”
    “She doesn’t think Sissy James did it,” I said.
    “Sissy James confessed,” he said, sipping. Bitterness was spreading across his face. “There was a shitload of evidence.”
    “You think Sissy did it then?”
    “Well—sure. The cops found the poison in her garbage. She confessed, for christsake.”
    Dale’s bitterness had bloomed into anger and I felt terrible for bringing it on. Being replaced by a kid from a podunk newspaper couldn’t have been easy for him, even though I’m sure he was sick to death of the beat. It wasn’t that Dale was too cozy with the police chief. Dale was too cozy with being cozy. He was forty-nine. He’d written hundreds of murder stories, fatal car-crash stories, kids-fried-to-a-crisp-in-rundown-apartment-building stories. I love Dale Marabout to death, but he was burned out, and he knew it. Still, getting exiled to the copy desk is a real ballbat in the ribs. I’ve seen it happen too many times over the years. Reporters of a certain age just wilt.
    “Maybe there’s something new with the story,” I said.
    “Like I said, I’ve been de-looped.”
    When I got back to the morgue I found a Post-it on my computer screen:
    Can we have lunch tomorrow?
     
Aubrey Mc. ext. 326
     
    ***
     
    Thursday, March 9
    Twenty-four hours later I was back in Meri, back at Speckley’s, two booths down from where Dale and I sat. “Go crazy,” Aubrey said, “I’m buying.”
    “Don’t be silly,” I said.
    “No, I’m buying—I want to thank you for your help with