Suitable for Framing (13 page)

I didn't intend to stop at that hour, but there were lights on. I parked on the dark, empty street and tippy-toed to a window. The house had to have been built in the 1920s, ancient for Miami. The sky was a blank slate without a star. The scent of moisture in the air felt as though a rainstorm was huddled, brooding, somewhere out over the bay. I could see the old wicker furniture in the living room and, beyond that, movement in what looked like the kitchen. She was in there. I caught sight of her, wearing a cotton dress with a bib apron over it, as she worked, quickly and efficiently.

I thought about it, then knocked. She stopped and listened.

“Miss Mayberry, it's Britt Montero from the
Miami News
. I have a message for you from Howie.”

She approached the door, wiping her hands on a striped dish towel, opened it, and squinted through the screen.

I identified myself.

“Lord have mercy. I thought I heard someone.”

It was the first time I had seen her close up. Taller than I expected, she was imposing, at least five feet ten in sensible shoes. Her mostly gray hair was parted in the middle, tightly pulled back, and anchored with two small plastic combs. She had to be close to eighty but carried herself with a stalwart dignity, back straight, eyes alert.

“I wouldn't have bothered you this late, but I just left the office and saw your lights.”

“I do my baking at night,” she explained. “Keeps the house cooler.”

The heady aroma from the kitchen smelled like bananas and sugar.

I told her about Howie. “He didn't want you to worry.”

“I hope they do right by that young man,” she said thoughtfully.

“I'm sure they will. It'll give him a chance at an education.”

“Howard deserves the opportunity.”

“I'm glad we agree. I think he's salvageable.”

“To be sure. He's a fine young man and he certainly knows his way around tools. He's quite the handy one.”

“Definitely gifted,” I said. I didn't say that I knew from personal experience. Maybe it was the hour, or her natural reserve, but she did not invite me inside. I couldn't blame her, though I was drooling to get closer to whatever was browning in the oven.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said. “Howard has been a great help to me here. He has some character. I think your advice to him was excellent. I just hope it all works out. Does he need anything?”

“Our support as friends. This will be the start of a new life. It's the best thing that could have happened to him.”

“If you plan on seeing him at any time, please let me know first. I'll have something to send him.”

I said I would and bid her good night. The wind picked up, carrying leaves and debris into little whirlwinds as I drove across the crossway. The rain began as I carried Howie's things into my apartment.

How I missed the story I'll never know.

That morning the beat seemed quiet, and I spent my afternoon in the broiling sun on the Palmetto Expressway after a sinkhole suddenly yawned open in the center lane, swallowing three trucks, two cars, and a van loaded with migrant workers. Other motorists crashed into one another to avoid it, while a motorcyclist soared over the gaping crater like Evel Knievel and kept going. No one was killed, but it was a hell of a mess. The usual suspects were blameless. The guilty parties were neither Mother Nature nor South Florida's shifting water table. They were members of a county work crew, assigned to drill through the embankment to install a water pipe under the expressway. They had miscalculated. Not bad for a slow news day.

The stretch of highway was closed off, creating a maddening afternoon rush hour. I had called Lottie but she was out, and the desk had dispatched Villanueva to shoot aerials from a chopper. Lottie loves to fly, and I knew she would hate missing it.

I innocently walked in and saw feverish activity around the city desk. No assistant city editor would care what I had. The buzz was a breaking story that hit me like a sucker punch.

“They got 'im!” yelped Ron Sadler, our usually quiet and studious political writer. “They nailed his pasty white ass!” He slammed his right fist into his left palm and spun around in the middle of the newsroom.

“What? Who?” I said, bewildered. Picking up snatches, my heart sank. The biggest damn political scandal in years was breaking—on my beat. And I had no clue.

Detectives had swooped down on Miami City Hall during a commission meeting recess and arrested the vice mayor, Zachary Linwood. Marched his honor out in handcuffs.

“City of Miami detectives?” I had been at the station a few hours earlier, as well as every day in recent memory. Hadn't heard a whisper.

How, I wondered, did the cops ever keep a lid on something so explosive? When there's a big investigation, especially a politically connected probe, rumors and whispers ride the wind like wild seeds. They take root, sprouting from nooks and crannies all over the city. Word is in the air, and reporters know something is about to break. I plow and fertilize my beat faithfully, schmoozing with sources and shooting the breeze, ever alert, ears open, antennae tuned. I hadn't been out of circulation, on vacation, or asleep at the switch. How the hell did I blow it?

“What are the charges?”

Trish strode by me, pausing to check her notebook. “Conspiracy, bribery, extortion, unlawful compensation, official corruption, and misconduct.” She hurried on to the city desk.

Shoot, I thought. They sure didn't think them up on the spur of the moment right after I left the station. Where were my sources?

Fred Douglas must have picked up my thought. He looked up, a phone in one hand. “Britt, have you been working on this?”

“Uh, no,” I said lamely. “I was out on the—uh, sinkhole story.” His eyes dismissed me as he turned away.

“All the department will say is that the chief, city manager, and state attorney plan a joint press conference later,” Janowitz yelled from his desk.

I was not alone in my humiliation. Barbara DeWitt, the city hall reporter, stood near ground zero at the city desk, face pale, arms clutched across her abdomen as though struck by a sudden stomach ailment.

“Did you know anything about this?” I asked quietly.

She shook her head. “Nothing. How come we didn't hear? I was covering the commission meeting,” she said, voice tight. “When they took a break everybody went out to eat. So did I. Every reporter at the meeting, all the TV guys, missed the whole thing.”

Jesus. The final edition of the afternoon paper was already on the street out of the running. The story broke on our time, taking us totally by surprise. “At least nobody else has it. We'd look a lot worse if somebody did.”

Barbara looked at me oddly. “Nobody's got arrest footage. We're the only ones with art.”

“Art? We have art?”

“Yeah. Trish and Lottie were there.”

I followed her hollow stare. Trish stood at the city desk, the eye of the storm, cool and in charge. Consulting her notebook, flipping through pages, she was briefing a clutch of editors who hung on her every word.

Barbara stepped back, hoping to disappear in the confusion. It made sense, but my curiosity beat out the urge to lie low. I edged up to listen as Trish spoke to a copy boy: “Pull the file on J. L. Harvey; he's a contractor.” She refocused on the editors. “At least that was his front Harvey was arrested last month, drug trafficking. He's the link. They were partners.” She paused, eyes reflecting the avid expressions around her. “It's all a land scam and they were in it together.”

“Ain't that something.” Ron Sadler stood next to me, shaking his head, arms folded in front of him. “Guess who was sitting in his office when the cops got there, broke out the handcuffs, and read his honor his rights?” he whispered.

“Trish?”

“They were sharing a Pepsi.”

What luck! Old demon envy followed hot on the heels of my surprise. What the heck was she doing there? Was she just introducing herself around to the local politicos? Never know when you'll run into one on a story.

The managing editor emerged from his office, like a bear from his cave, sleeves rolled up, intense and driven, the scent of political scandal sending the printer's ink that passes for blood pounding through his veins. Only a few stories a year lure him out of his lair and into the newsroom.

And of course Gretchen chose that moment. “Britt, where were you? How could you be so out of touch!” Her voice rose, and my face flooded with color. “We're lucky Trish was on top of this!” Out the corner of my eye I saw Barbara step behind a pillar.

Pitying eyes regarded me solemnly, then returned approvingly to the star of the show.

“The chief is mad as hell that we were there,” Trish was saying, one hand resting confidently on her hip. “He pitched a fit, got all apoplectic and red in the face.”

“He looks good that way,” the managing editor said warmly, eliciting obligatory laughter from the troops.

“He ordered that no further details be released until the press conference at ten
A.M
. tomorrow,” she said.

Uh-oh. On the afternoon paper's time.

“No problem,” she added crisply. “I have enough to lay the whole thing out.”

“We have somebody out now, picking up copies of the arrest report and the search warrants,” the city editor announced to the chief.

“The cops served them simultaneously, at his office and his home,” Trish added.

“The art is great,” the city editor went on. “We're the only ones in town who got a thing. TV's got nothing and they're scrambling.”

As if on cue, Lottie bustled into the newsroom still wearing her darkroom apron, a stack of freshly printed photos in her freckled fist. Editors flocked over to the photo desk just six feet away and the rest of us crowded around. She had it all: the vice mayor, wearing metal bracelets by Police Products, Inc., along with his usual silk tie and conservative suit. His honor marched out of city hall in disgrace, bundled into the backseat of a cage car, aristocratic features folded into something querulous. Detectives from the public integrity squad lugging boxes of seized files and documents from his office to their cars.

“Great stuff,” Fred Douglas said admiringly.

There was Sergeant Tully Snow, obviously recovered from his little mishap during the bogus sniper incident. Face distorted, he was shouting at the photographer to back off. Lottie didn't often draw that sort of antagonistic response from cops. Had to be pressure from the top on this one.

Onnie delivered library photos of Zachary Linwood during various high points of his career, to run in a layout with the jump of the main story. Our eyes connected as she commiserated silently with me. She knew the score.

Lottie's pictures would run front page, in color.

They were good but sad, I thought. Zachary Linwood had always been a gentleman to me, unfailingly polite and eloquent, when I called him at home in the dead of night for his comments on breaking stories, police shootings, scandals, or a fired police chief.

Of course that didn't mean I wouldn't have been delighted to break this story myself. Linwood was a Miami institution, old establishment, last of his breed, the remaining white Anglo male on the city's governing body. A former U.S. senator, folksy and cantankerous, he had been a strong voice in South Florida politics for more than thirty years. A two-term mayor in the eighties, he was now sixty-seven and likely to be retired by the voters at the end of his term in eighteen months. Court-mandated changes in voting districts made it almost certain he would be replaced by a Hispanic.

Instead of going out in style after a long and distinguished career, he was ending it with a rap sheet and a likely new record, as convict.

“He was going to cast the deciding vote to change the zoning on a tract of environmentally sensitive land for commercial development,” Trish was explaining.

“But he'd need five votes to make it work,” the managing editor said skeptically.

“Exactly.” She arched an eyebrow. “Each of the other four commissioners owed him a vote in exchange for his on their pet projects.”

There was silence, except for ringing telephones ignored in the background.

“They bought the property,” she said, referring to her notes, “for just under five hundred thousand dollars, but the zoning change will push the value to at least three million. The partnership was only on paper. Linwood never invested any money; the dope dealer put up the cash. Linwood's contribution was delivering the votes. His share was to be a third.”

A third of $3 million. Not bad. Trish knew chapter and verse, all the inside details of a complex and highly secret investigation. I couldn't wait to hear how all this had come about.

“They had to move fast,” Trish was saying, “because environmentalists had taken their concerns to the federal government, asking that they move in to tie up the property.

“The scheme went awry when J. L. Harvey was busted last month on drug trafficking and money laundering charges. The case against him was solid, but he had insurance in case something like that happened.

“He had recorded the entire conspiracy. He had secretly taped every meeting, documented every discussion with Linwood. Apparently he did a better job of it than most undercover cops.”

I found myself nodding. Made sense. A criminal's best escape route is to deal his way out of trouble, and the most valuable bargaining chip is a dirty cop or politician. Cops and prosecutors will always deal to land one of them.

“He called Miami detectives from his jail cell and offered to give them the vice mayor. Our man,” Trish said, “is pretty well nailed.” She snapped her notebook closed.

“Why did he do it? He's so close to retirement.” An assistant city editor shook his head.

“You've got it,” Trish said, skin flushed with the color of a reporter on top of the hottest story in town. “This was his last chance to score big before being run out of office. This would have been his retirement money. The income from his small law firm has never really funded the lifestyle he likes. He was so sure this would go down without a hitch, he'd been out shopping for a second home in Vail.”

The rookie reporter I had recently instructed on how to find Flagler Street had wrapped up every detail of Miami's story of the year.

“Hell of a job, Trish!” said the managing editor. His use of her name was significant; most of us in the newsroom are convinced that he has no idea who we are.

“I'd better start writing.” Trish checked her watch.

“Need any help?” I offered.

She briefly broke stride. “Thanks, Britt, but Fred is going to work with me on this one.”

As they settled in front of her terminal, I beelined for Lottie at the photo desk. She was seated in front of an IBM Selectric typewriter, tapping out the pink caption sheets for the backs of the photos.

“How did you two ever pull that off?”

She stopped typing and leaned back in her chair. “Hell-all-Friday, Britt, I take back whatever I said about that woman.” She gave a low whistle. “You were right. I hand you that She is damn good.”

“But how…?”

She winked. “She's got great sources.”

“Who?” I demanded. “She doesn't even know anybody in Miami. It's my own damn beat and I had no clue.”

“Lottie, I need those left-to-rights!” bawled Joe Hall, the photo editor.

Frowning, she banged out the last one, identifying the detectives escorting Linwood. She glanced up at me. “Snow is still a sergeant, ain't he?”

“Right,” I said impatiently.

She handed them over to Hall. “All I know,” she said, “is Trish called in, said something major was about to go down at City Hall, and we had to send a photographer. Bobby was in the slot and didn't take her too seriously, but I said I'd go.”

“Everybody's taking her seriously now,” I murmured.

“Betcher boots.” She paused. “The other night in South Beach she said a big story was about ready to break.”

“Never said a word to me.”

“You weren't there, remember?”

She stopped as Hall interrupted, collar open and rushed. He hovered over her chair. “AP called. They want to take one of these. This,” he said, displaying the shot of cops escorting the handcuffed politician out of City Hall, “is the page-one picture. We want to see it in color for the final. It's being played big. We need to get the black-and-whites down to engraving.”

I glanced back at Trish and Fred, in deep concentration, him reading over her shoulder as she typed rapidly on the screen.

Hall wheeled and walked away.