Contents Under Pressure Page 24

  Onnie and I browsed the farmers’ market, selecting a basket of fresh vegetables, stopped by the marina for fresh grouper right off a fishing boat, and went back to her place, where she whipped up a mean gumbo. While we chopped okra, green bell peppers, potatoes, and tomatoes and then cooked and ate dinner, we talked mostly about her situation. I decided I didn’t need to worry about Onnie. She was ready. The numbed weariness and shame that had weighted her shoulders when we first met had been replaced by an unwavering determination and enough driving energy to take action at last. Pert and clear-eyed, in jeans and a red scoop-necked blouse, she had obviously done a lot of thinking about her man.

  “What it comes down to,” she told me flatly, as she washed the dishes and I dried, “is that he’s broken and he can’t be fixed. Lord knows, I tried.”

  Two days later, we attached a U-Haul trailer to the back of my T-Bird, filled it with their meager possessions, and moved them to an efficiency in Liberty City. The new apartment was small, but the building was not bad. It had a tot lot, and was close to a good school where Darryl would start kindergarten in six months. Onnie had landed a temporary Christmas season sales job at a big discount store. When a better, more permanent position came along, she would upgrade to a one- or two-bedroom in the same complex.

  I wasn’t interested in seeing other men, but agreed to appease Lottie by going out for drinks with Larry and Steve one Friday night during the Christmas season. Lottie was all bubbly that day, and actually wore a dress. Just before we were to leave the office, a news story broke. A cruise ship bound for the Caribbean was steaming back to the Port of Miami because something had gone terribly awry with the food or the water supply—it was not immediately determined which—and half the crew and most of the passengers were suffering severe cramps and diarrhea.

  We left a message at the bar where we were to meet Larry and Steve. Lottie called, turning to ask me how to explain the breaking story we had been assigned. “Just tell them to check the morning paper,” I told her, and we rolled.

  Lottie and I met the ship as it docked to interview and photograph the passengers off the once-gala holiday cruise. Honeymooners, retirees, and entire families all raced by in a big hurry, not eager to talk as they disembarked.

  We could have made a fortune with a Kaopectate concession. They were all mad as hell and looking for a bathroom.

  “You can’t be glum about our ruined plans when you look at those poor people,” I reminded Lottie, who was still cranky, as we got back to the office. “More than eight hundred went on that cruise. Some probably saved for a year, and now it’s ruined. You know they won’t even find a decent hotel room here this time of year. Look what’s happened to their plans.”

  A good news message waited on my desk. Betsy Ferrell had had her baby, a little girl. Six pounds, eight ounces. Her name, given the season, Holly. Holly Ferrell. I like it.

  “Lucky it wasn’t a boy,” Lottie snapped. “Poor thang probably would’ve been named Rudolph.”

  I sat down heavily at my desk, thinking about the Ferrells and the baby, and what was happening to them and Miami, and suddenly felt a hundred years old. “Maybe,” I said, “they should have named her Mercy.”

  Eighteen

  The holiday season was not especially jolly. Miamians were jittery, the multiethnic community seethed, more tense and divided than ever, and Kendall McDonald presented me with a Black Forest cuckoo clock for Christmas. It was beautiful, with energetic little Tyrolean dancers that burst out tiny doors and spun around every half hour, and its noisy occupants certainly fascinated Billy Boots who stalked it for hours, tail atwitch. But I had hoped for something more romantic. What did this gift say, aside from its timely cries? Was this a joke? Was he trying to tell me something?

  Ryan, romantic as always, suggested that McDonald was saying that he wanted our relationship to endure for all time. If the clock had said something other than “cuckoo,” I might have bought that. Lottie, always a pal, tried to comfort me, saying that the gift surely indicated McDonald’s hopes for a future in which we shared custody of the clock and more.

  Worse, McDonald clearly expected me to be thrilled with his gift, and, ace detective that he was, realized that I was not. We did not really discuss the matter, but he exuded a troubled sense of bewilderment that I failed to share his enthusiasm for the clock.

  I shouldn’t have complained. Many Miamians had it worse. Some were out of work, others were homeless, and it seemed as though the rest had armed themselves for the Christmas season. Perhaps it was just a run of bad luck for gun owners.

  I did the story about the woman who slept with both her gun and her asthma inhaler under her pillow. Fumbling around sleepily after her nasal passages clogged during the night, she squeezed the wrong one and shot herself in the snoot. Another woman was gunned down by her own purse, when she carelessly flung it into a supermarket shopping cart, forgetting the small handgun tucked inside for protection. A dry cleaner lost his .9mm when he forgot that he had set the weapon on the roof of his car before driving away from his Westchester home. Another man surely wished he had lost his. He stuck his .25 caliber handgun in his front pants pocket in order to free up his hands to juggle grocery bags from car to house. As he wrestled with two big brown sacks loaded with canned goods, the gun fired. They found him writhing in his driveway, surrounded by scattered groceries.

  Made you skittish about owning a handgun. But as long as every madman in Miami had ready access to weapons and as long as I lived solo and traveled tough turf, I wanted mine, too. At least I was careful, and knew how to use it.

  The streets were growing more intense. I could feel it as I made my daily rounds, and saw it in the graffiti on the walls of Overtown and Liberty City. “Cops-Killers.” “Off A Pig.” I would be relieved when the trial was over. Sure enough, the judge did grant a change of venue because of the publicity barrage, and the case was moved to Atlanta.

  Ted’s stubborn insistence that there really had been a BOLO that sparked the fatal pursuit nagged at me. Why would he admit everything else and continue to lie about that?

  The question was still gnawing at my consciousness the day jury selection began in Atlanta. Janowitz was covering the trial for us. Every news organization in town had a team there. I wished I could attend, but it was impossible. Defense attorneys were eager to take my deposition in the case. The prosecution also wanted to talk to me, about which officer had confessed the night I went to their homes. Then, of course, they would call me to testify against him. No way. Mark Seybold had informed them that I would not reveal my source, and had warned me to watch out for subpoena servers in case they tried to lay the papers on me anyway. Several had either been turned away or referred to him by security in the lobby.

  I had also alerted Mrs. Goldstein, my landlady. Knowing her, not only would she tell them zilch, she would run them off with a broom. She was an expert on spotting shady characters and giving them what-for. The dodge had worked well, so when I stepped off the elevator onto the fifth floor, on deadline, riffling through my notes on a story, I was confident and preoccupied. A process server was the furthest thought from my mind.

  Ryan was standing over Gloria, the receptionist, at her big desk facing the elevators. She was on the phone and looked tense, with an odd expression on her face. Ryan caught my eye and kept jerking his head. I had never noticed that sort of tic in him before. What is it with them, I thought, almost irritably. With things so weird out on the street, the least my colleagues could do was try to act normal. Ryan stepped toward me. He needed a haircut, but I liked him that way, with his hair curling around the nape of his neck, the sleeves of his light blue shirt rolled up, his tie loosened and askew.

  I assumed he wanted me to join him for coffee. “I’m in a hurry,” I sang out, “on deadline,” and moved to stride on past him.

  “Britt Montero,” a perky little old lady, a pink-cheeked cherub with fine white hair, hailed me from behind. I turn
ed in surprise; she apparently had been seated in a chair in the conversation pit for those who waited in the newsroom lobby. She walked as though she had had an old hip fracture but stepped lively, in sensible shoes with short stubby heels. Pink scalp showed through her soft perm. She carried a bulky old-fashioned navy blue pocketbook and a sweater over her arm. Somebody’s grandma.

  I returned her engaging smile. Ryan waved his arms behind her back. What is wrong with that guy today? I thought.

  “Yes?” I said to the woman, wondering if I should remember her from somewhere.

  “Here you are, dearie,” she said sweetly, as though presenting a home-baked treat, and pressed something into my hand.

  I looked down, but before my eyes even focused on the subpoena, I had put it together and knew I’d been had.

  “You’re good, really good,” I said bleakly, as she stepped onto the elevator, smiling triumphantly.

  “You young people shouldn’t always be rushing around the way you do. Take the time to enjoy yourself,” she said, as the door began to glide closed. “Smell the flowers,” were her parting words of advice. Ryan had clapped one hand over his eyes and was shaking his head. He had tried to warn me.

  “Is that security on the line?” I snapped at Gloria.

  “No, it’s the lawyer, Mark Seybold.”

  “Okay, tell him they got me. Then call security and tell them to take a good look at her on the way out, so she can’t sneak by next time.” I bet she didn’t even have to sneak, I thought; they probably gave her directions.

  “Who would believe it?” I said, to no one in particular. “Nobody is who they seem to be anymore.”

  “Sorry,” Ryan said. “Didn’t you see me trying to warn you?” he added, a tad peevishly.

  “Yeah,” I sighed, “I just wasn’t thinking.”

  I was in trouble now, I thought. If I had to go to Atlanta to testify, I could conceivably wind up in jail on a contempt citation for refusing to divulge my source. With my luck and the state of the system, the guilty would go free and I’d languish behind bars indefinitely. I examined the subpoena, curious to see which lawyer had been clever enough to send that innocent-looking grandma instead of the usual scuzzy characters who served them.

  “Hey,” I said aloud. “She gave me the wrong one.” Nope, it had my name on it. But the case was Bertie McCloud versus the power company and the City of Miami. “What?” I muttered.

  This was not the Hudson case at all. This was a civil case, a wrongful death action. A mother was suing the city and the electric company for causing the death of her son Bobby, who’d been electrocuted while stealing copper wire from an Overtown light-pole. Though they were not married, his girlfriend was also a plaintiff, suing on behalf of their two small children, now deprived of a father. The defendants were accused of negligently maintaining an attractive and dangerous nuisance, one that had enticed their son and father to a premature death. The plaintiffs wanted my notes and/or tapes and photos from the scene and ultimately, of course, big bucks to assuage their grief.

  “Now that is chutzpah,” Mark said, reaching for his telephone.

  I stood in front of his desk. “You don’t think they can succeed in getting anything, do you? The man died because he was a thief.”

  “The power company and the city will probably settle with the family,” Mark said, “just to avoid the expense of a trial.”

  “They shouldn’t pay a dime,” I said, my voice rising. “They should try the case.”

  “It’s just not worth the expense.” He shook his head. “Or the risk that a jury might sympathize enough with the mother or the fatherless children to grant some big award.”

  “So by the same token,” I argued, “the survivors of a bank robber killed in a holdup could sue the bank just for being there, with all that money.” This was outrageous. The rats were winning.

  Mark had his secretary get the grieving family’s attorney on the telephone, as I impatiently prowled his office surveying the railroad art on the walls. While I studied a framed lithograph of two locomotives, Mark convinced the man in no uncertain terms that I had no information that could not be obtained elsewhere and that there was no way I could or would be used by him as his free private investigator in the case.

  I returned to the newsroom, relief mingled with my sense of outrage, I was not going to Atlanta, or jail, after all. At least not this time.

  Poor Bobby McCloud, lured to his death by a seductive streetlight pole. Only in Miami, I thought.

  The city’s factionalism had even split the police department. The Latin officers’ organization was supporting Machado and Estrada. The Anglo officers’ association was raising funds for the defense of Ted Ferrell and the Blackburns, and the black officers’ group, supportive of D. Wayne Hudson, was rooting for convictions.

  I wanted to talk to Francie about what was happening, so we agreed to meet one morning when she had to stay up to go to court anyway. With tension among the cops so thick that you needed a machete to hack through it, she certainly could not afford to be seen with me. Even McDonald was growing reluctant to be seen with me in public. Francie and I arranged to meet at a safe place, the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach, where the only other people would be tourists or elderly local residents, with too much going on in their minds and memories to notice us.

  Miami Beach has one of the largest Holocaust survivor populations in the world, and one of the most dramatic memorials to the victims. A huge green arm sculpted from painted bronze and tattooed with a number from Auschwitz reaches into the air, tormented human figures clinging precariously to its sides. The hand blindly gropes the sky.

  In the original plans, the giant arm was to be taller than a seven-story building, easily seen by air traffic to and from Miami International Airport. Beach homeowners were horrified at the prospect of the arm’s grotesque green shadow falling across their pools, patios, and pricey views, and protested. Eventually a compromise was reached. The arm is only four stories tall.

  The unique landmark is a place where I often meet sources who don’t want to be seen coming to the newspaper.

  I waited for Francie in the meditation garden, a sprawling plaza of Jerusalem stone surrounding a huge water lily pond.

  The winter day was a tourist’s dream, low humidity, temperature in the mid-seventies, an azure sky reflected in the mirrorlike surface of the lily pond.

  I recognized Francie’s happy, lilting walk from a distance. She had worked all night and spent several hours in court, but looked fresh and energetic, though pale. She still wore her dark blue police-issue trousers, but had switched her uniform shirt for an embroidered white blouse with mother of pearl buttons. Her soft brown hair, usually pinned up in a twist when on duty, giving unruly suspects less to grab onto, was brushed out and hung loose, down around her shoulders. Without speaking, we strolled through a vine-covered arbor flanked by painful photographs of Holocaust history, past an eternal flame, and entered a dark and lonely tunnel.

  It led us out into the light, where the outstretched arm reached for the sky. We lingered in silence, then passed a long black granite wall etched with victims’ names, similar to the Vietnam War Memorial.

  “Doesn’t this place give you the heebie jeebies?” Francie whispered.

  “Nope,” I said, scanning the familiar rows of names. The sun felt good on my skin as we settled on a stone bench, facing the lily pond. “In fact, I like to come here.”

  “I’ll never understand why,” Francie said, squinting, and slipping on her sunglasses.

  “It’s hard to explain, but it’s a comfort, like church, or coming home. On our jobs we see people brutalized and killed every day. It happened yesterday, it’s happening today, and it’ll happen tomorrow, over and over. They die alone and are forgotten. Statistics. But not these victims.” I gestured at the scene around us. “Nothing could be worse than to face what they did and be forgotten. But they weren’t. They weren’t simply swallow
ed by time.

  “People read their names over and over. That keeps them alive. I think that as long as somebody remembers you, you’re never really dead.”

  “I see your point,” Francie said slowly. “So many of the victims we see are forgotten two weeks later. Like they never existed.”

  “Exactly. Nobody even knows or cares that they lived or died. That’s why I love to write about old, unsolved murder cases whenever I can, to make people remember. Speaking of work, how’s the job?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s getting harder and harder to be a cop in this town.” Her small face looked sad. “Sometimes I’m almost embarrassed to wear the uniform. You stop a motorist on traffic and they say, ‘What are you gonna do, beat me to death?’ Strangers make remarks on the street People are afraid to open their doors to us, even when we’re trying to help them. The streets are hostile. I’ve never seen it this bad. Morale is at rock bottom. You hear about the fight the other night?”

  “What fight?”

  “I’m glad you’re sitting down, Britt.”

  “Not another black versus white incident?”

  “You got it.”

  “Oh no.”

  “But this time there’s a twist. It wasn’t cops brutalizing civilians. The cops were brutalizing each other.”