Never Let Them See You Cry (36 page)

When I called his office on May 18, to wish him a happy birthday, Steve was in fine spirits. The prognosis had improved, and the treatment had worked. Surgery was again an option. He was going to Cincinnati. “It looks good,” he said.

Other good news: Steve had become the youngest member of Miami's Orange Bowl Committee, Jane and Bert were taking him out for a birthday dinner that night, and Bert was about to interview with TWA in St. Louis.

A friend had called earlier to ask if he was depressed at turning thirty.

Not at all. “Turning thirty in this family,” Steve Southerland said, “is a major accomplishment.”

We talked briefly about survival and the importance of moving forward despite the odds. “I would not trade any of the experiences we've had,” he said. “If there is a purpose to all this, it's probably to make other people who deal with crisis know that, despite whatever happens, it's the quality of life you lead, not the quantity.”

The surgery went exceptionally well.

Steve Southerland entered the race for Florida State Senate that same summer. Jane looked radiant, her husband beside her, as Steve announced from a wheelchair. His dad's old partner, Ron Sorensen, was there in uniform, our happy occasion at last.

Steve looked vigorous, acknowledging that he was still undergoing physical therapy, but said the tumor had been removed. He playfully vowed to “be back on my foot again soon.”

He felt strong, he said, and had no doubt he could serve effectively.

“This is for me a very special moment,” he said. “I always felt I should give something back to the community.” A tough campaign lay ahead. When someone in the crowd pointed that out, the last of the Southerlands smiled. The uphill race, he said, “will be like any other battle worth fighting.”

He fought it well. He raised nine thousand dollars in campaign funds and took 44 percent of the vote from his veteran opponent, who had raised fifty thousand dollars. Forty-four percent was not enough, of course.

Steve's spirit was not dampened. “The best part of the battle is that it taught me a lot about life and taught a lot of people how I feel about life—and making the most of it. Even if you don't succeed, making the effort is a success in itself.

“You should always fight for your dreams.”

Steve Southerland is no quitter, nor does he feel sorry for himself. Neither does Jane. “I've had a great life,” she said. “Look at people who have five or six kids who've been into drugs and robbery—and even murder. Facing that kind of problem would be really hard for me to handle. Can you imagine having kids on drugs and watching them kill themselves a little at a time? Mine all fought hard to survive. I had unbelievably good kids. With all they had to go through, I don't remember them ever being bitter. I once apologized to Mike and Steve for bringing them into this world to suffer so. They both said that life was worth it.”

As Steve Southerland said, “Just being alive is the most important thing.”

Choose a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life
.

—C
ONFUCIUS

The world is full of real-life heroes, and I love to tell their stories and chronicle their feats, their adventures and their noble deeds.

I am still hooked on stories, and this singular city, with its rednecks and Rastafarians, Contras and cocaine cowboys, Yahwehs and yahoos, villains and victims. My love affair with Miami, the longest-lasting in my life, endures, as the city and I both grow and change.

Miami is still hot. Sleepy South Beach, once famous for its senior citizens, now throbs through the soft nights with a healthy and youthful energy, more lusty and alive than it has ever been. Hot bodies and the city's sizzling beauty dazzle the world in movies, commercials, fashion photography and stunning photos that capture Miami's true colors, breathtaking blues and shades of gold. Across the Bay, the city seethes with tension, battered by trauma and transition. Sometimes the city heat seems too hot not to burn. Not again. I hold my breath. The world is watching. Miami has been discovered.

To a far lesser degree, I too have been discovered and burn with ideas and stories to tell.

Life is a series of trade-offs; everything exacts a price. The cost of the city's new fame is traffic snarls and parking problems, haze, pollution and destruction of our precious environment and wildlife. The carpetbaggers and profiteers will always be with us.

The struggle never ends—progress at a price. On leave from the
Herald
, I yearn for the fray, the daily battles, the exhilaration of stalking the wild story, the stimulation of the streets, the interaction with sources, strangers and talented newsroom colleagues. I miss the intensity of deadline, focusing in tight on a story and tuning out all the meaningless and mundane irritants of life that make you crazy if you surrender to them.

Working at home, alone, is solitary confinement, but childhood dreams grew out of this self-imposed isolation into reality. Before I could even read, I said that when I grew up I would write books. Fiction was what I had planned before I was swept into that whirlwind called journalism.

In 1990 my first novel was published. I am blessed. How many of us get to do what we dreamed of as children?

I had never written fiction before—though I had been accused of it a few times in the past—and found it to be a source of unexpected satisfaction. We all yearn to be tidy, to wrap up the loose ends and resolve all the perplexing mysteries, but in real life, in journalism, that does not happen. Murders go unsolved; corpses remain unidentified; missing people stay lost forever. They dwell in your dreams.

Write fiction, and you can tell the whole story, solve all the mysteries, tie up the loose ends and see to it that the good guys win.

So unlike real life and so much more satisfying.

Nothing is easy, of course, especially writing fiction in a city where truth is stranger. But once begun, it was a joy to let imagination soar, to see characters spring to life, step forward and clamor to tell their stories.

Afterward, I returned to real people and real life with this book, intending, when finished, to plunge back into journalism and the police beat. But something happened: Certain faces and voices began to haunt my consciousness, imaginary characters with stories to be told. The time came to report once more for work in that big
Herald
newsroom in the sky overlooking Biscayne Bay. I hesitated and picked up my mail only on weekends to avoid the editors and their questions about when I was coming back to the beat. Like someone addicted to secret pleasures, I thought,
Not yet, just one more, just one more book first, another novel
.

So the isolation continues—for one more novel, maybe more. The dual lifestyles are a study in contrasts: Reporters battle deadlines, miss regular meals and survive on coffee, action and adrenaline. Authors set their own schedules and work at home, close to the refrigerator, unfortunately.

Police reporters are generally as welcome among strangers as Freddy Krueger in the girls' dorm. It is not unusual for people to slam doors, curse or even run when approached by a reporter.

Authors, however, are invited to literary luncheons and library teas, often by people who would never dream of talking to a police reporter.

In this case, reporter and author are one and the same, not entirely at ease at literary luncheons and teas. I am more comfortable knocking on a stranger's door to inquire if he murdered his wife than making small talk with the literati at a cocktail party.

The life of a reporter is unlike any other. There is something noble and exciting about venturing out into the world in search of the truth. No day is ever the same. Each is an adventure, another crusade. That is how I spent the best years of my life so far, and I want to do it again, but now there is something else that I love as much.

So I try to shut out the sounds of sirens in the night, try to block the news flashes on the latest car bombing, steer clear of the newsroom to avoid being captured, and steel myself against intriguing phone calls from sources. My longtime companion, a portable police scanner, has fallen silent, the batteries long dead. Instead I listen to bird songs and wind chimes, I watch a daredevil mockingbird dive-bomb intruders and the slow-paced mating dance of two love-struck chameleons outside my window. I ponder mountainous clouds, a glowing turquoise sea and sudden summer thunderstorms. No beepers, no emergencies, no three-alarm fires, a news junkie on the wagon.

I work alone, surrounded by heavy-laden fruit trees and brilliant bougainvillea, bright green water, my favorite cat, and a flowing stream of stories, stories, stories, springing up from some inner source.

No news bulletins from downtown. For a writer this is life at its most free.

My days seem like a dream, so far from the familiar din and chaos of the newsroom. The
Herald
lands on my lawn with a plop each morning, minus my byline. I live without the daily link to readers, the lifeblood of communication. But I persist. The news goes on without me as I create my own world in a growing manuscript. It is a long time between deadlines. Sometimes, drowning in the silence, I yearn to surface, emerge from my isolation and travel door to door, delivering my story to total strangers and watching them read it—at gunpoint if necessary.

I am indebted to Marilyn Lane, David M. Thornburgh and Renee Turolla, patient and nurturing friends. Special thanks to the men of Random House, Peter Osnos, Mitchell Ivers and Ken Gellman, for their enthusiastic support, to my agent Michael Congdon for his guidance and friendship, to
The Miami Herald
library staff and Rebecca Smith of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida for their expertise, and to Sergeant David Simmons and all of Miami's heroes for their courage and inspiration.

Edna Buchanan came to Miami on vacation from Paterson, New Jersey, and found it like stepping from a gritty black-and-white newsreel into Technicolor and Cinemascope. She fell in love with Miami's bright textures and stark, soulful sunlight.

She settled in Miami Beach and never looked back, working her way up from covering church socials for a small, now defunct newspaper to becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter on the staff of
The Miami Herald
.

Far from the grit of Paterson, she lives in Miami Beach with four cats, at work on a new book, on leave from the maelstrom of her journalism career, in which she has reported more than five thousand violent deaths, three thousand of them murders.

She is still in love with the hard beauty of Miami, a city of sunshine and hurricanes, mayhem and murder—land of the midnight gun.

Nobody Lives Forever

Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter Edna Buchanan's fiction debut is just as dark, wild and dangerous as the crimes she covered for The Miami Herald.

What shocking secret do a menacing housewife, a kinky bad girl, a shy child, and a cold-blooded killer have in common? Veteran Miami homicide detective Rick Barrish sets out for the answer as he investigates a series of murders in his neighborhood and hunts down an elusive killer.

As tensions in his personal life rise, so does the murder rate, and he soon discovers that his case hits closer to home than he ever imagined.

Contents Under Pressure (A Britt Montero Mystery)

The first novel in Pulitzer Prize-winning Edna Buchanan's riveting Britt Montero series.

Meet Britt Montero, a crime reporter for a major Miami newspaper. She practically sleeps with a police scanner by her bedside. She's smart—and reckless—enough to pursue a story no matter where it takes her.

When a high-speed police chase leads to the death of a black football hero, Britt discovers that what seems like a cut-and-dry case is actually an intricate web of racially charged violence. As the city she loves explodes into a major riot, Britt is caught-up in life-threatening events that bring the case to its shocking twist.

Miami, It's Murder (A Britt Montero Mystery)

Edna Buchanan weaves a tale about the murderous streets of Miami, and how the predator can quickly become the prey.

Miami crime reporter Britt Montero has a lot on her hands. She's investigating a series of bizarre deaths involving sex, electrocution, and freshly poured concrete. As if that isn't enough, there's the long unsolved murder of a young girl that may implicate the front-runner in the governor's race.

Pursuing a lead, Britt follows the trail of a serial rapist. Enraged by her stories, the rapist is soon the one trailing her. Tensions mount as Britt fights to uncover the truth with all the odds stacked against her.

Suitable for Framing (A Britt Montero Mystery)

Edna Buchanan returns with another tale of violence and murder on the streets of Miami.

A mother and child are the recent victims of a fatal hit-and-run. Miami crime reporter Britt Montero witnesses the tragedy and relentlessly pursues the story. At the same time, trouble lurks in the newsroom. A new, ambitious reporter covets Britt's job. Britt begins to suspect that her rival's “breaking news” stories may not be what they seem. As she investigates, Britt herself becomes the prime suspect in a shocking murder. Faced with losing more than just her job, Britt is left fighting the most desperate deadline of her life.

Act of Betrayal (A Britt Montero Mystery)

The Britt Montero series continues with this thrilling installment from Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna Buchanan.

When Miami crime reporter Britt Montero reports a missing teenager, she discovers that the case may be related to a string of ­­­­unsolved disappearances. As Britt delves into the baffling case, an old mystery opens new wounds: she unexpectedly meets two men who knew her deceased father. Through them, Britt learns that he left a diary identifying the man who betrayed him. But the diary isn't easily possessed; anyone who finds it seems to be marked for murder. At the height of a terrifying category five hurricane, Britt needs to face the man who betrayed her father in order to uncover more than one truth, but will her hunger for justice turn her into the next victim?

Margin of Error (A Britt Montero Mystery)

Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna Buchanan's heroine Britt Montero once again delves into Miami's dark side of obsession and murder.

Crime reporter Britt Montero's dreams have been haunting her. She had to shoot a man to save her own life, and the memory of it is torturing her. Meanwhile, a major Hollywood actor strides into the newsroom—and Britt's life—hoping to do research for the character he portrays: a secret agent undercover as a Miami crime reporter. An obsessed madwoman stalks the star, and mysterious mishaps, accidents, and deaths push Britt and the star closer together. Both are menaced by the stalker. Or is it someone else who is determined to sabotage the film and kill the star?

Nobody Lives Forever