Suitable for Framing (21 page)

Dammit, I thought, weeping. It's not fair. He's been alone all his life.

He sure as hell was not going to die alone. “I'm here, sweet boy,” I said. I gathered him into my arms and held him.

That was how they found us.

They pieced the scenario together quickly. When the stun grenade was hurled, a SWAT sergeant in cumbersome gear was clambering over the chain-link fence that separated the Edgewater property from the back of Miss Mayberry's. Startled by the flash and explosion, he lost his footing and squeezed the trigger of his nine-millimeter Glock. A single silver-tipped slug slammed into the ground. The edgy troops poised out front assumed somebody had shot at them and returned fire en masse.

It happens.

Miss Mayberry's long-dead pioneer father had saved my life by building his house of solid Dade County pine in which the resin was allowed to harden, making the wood impervious to fire, termites, and bullets. The only slugs that had invaded the interior of the house had smashed through windows and the screen door.

By the time they burst in Howie was dead in my arms and I was just—resting, too exhausted to lift my head.

Rescue checked me out. Only minor cuts and scratches. I had to give a statement at police headquarters.

“How could you?” raged the captain, a huge former motorman whose gut now obscured his belt buckle. McDonald, Rakestraw, the SWAT lieutenant, and two other detectives were there. “You know better!”

“I was doing my job,” I retorted. “There were no weapons. He was a scared juvenile. He trusted you.” I glared at Rakestraw. “He trusted us. He was mishandled the first time he tried to come in and work within the system. I didn't know where he was today until I got there myself. He wanted to surrender and we were trying to figure the safest way to do it when you … you killed him.” I fought to keep my composure. My ears were still ringing, and I ached to get my hands on Trish.

“You seem to forget,” the captain snarled. “A good police officer was killed.”

“But not by him,” I said.

“Did he say where they were?” He pushed his thick, beery face close to mine.

“Why don't you ask him?” I said bitterly.

“A lot of mistakes have been made on both sides,” McDonald said gently. “But we're on the same side, Britt You want them off the street as much as we do.”

I bit my lip to keep it from trembling. I'd be damned if I'd let them see me cry. “Howie said he last saw them in Hialeah. He didn't say exactly when or the address. You didn't give him the chance.”

The SWAT lieutenant grew red in the face but said nothing.

“Is Miss Mayberry all right?”

“She's fine,” Rakestraw said. “She's giving her statement now.”

“You sure messed up her house.”

Before leaving I told them, “I know who called it in to you. Trish Tierney is directly responsible for Howie's death. And she nearly got me killed too.”

They exchanged puzzled looks.

“It was her, wasn't it?”

“Who?” said the captain.

“Don't give me that,” I said angrily. “I know what Trish did.”

Back at the office I told my bosses what she had done, how she had tipped the police with the lie that Miss Mayberry was being held hostage and failed to mention my presence, obviously hoping to see me blown away along with Howie.

“Those are serious accusations, Britt.” Fred Douglas and John Murphy, the managing editor, were clearly uncomfortable.

They summoned Trish, who waltzed in prim and proper, lying through her teeth as I glared. She appeared shocked at the suggestion. “I consider Britt a mentor. I would never, ever do such a thing.” She had returned to the paper, she swore, and had spoken to no one about the Mayberry house.

“I knew Britt was inside,” she concluded. “She asked me to keep a confidence and I respected her wishes.”

Before leaving Murphy's office she stopped in front of the chair where I sat, put her arms around my shoulders, and gave a gentle squeeze. “I'm so sorry. You must be very upset. Poor Britt,” she murmured. I wanted to scream and shake the truth out of her. Instead I remained rigid.

Speechless, I saw the look in their eyes. They believed her. Were they blind?

“Ask the police,” I blurted, voice quaking. Probably more to pacify me than to seek the truth, Murphy put a call in to the chief. We waited in uncomfortable silence. The chief called back with an answer in less than ten minutes.

I scarcely breathed while they spoke briefly. Murphy thanked him profusely, apologizing for the trouble, and cradled the phone.

“You are mistaken, Britt. Trish was not responsible. I think we all owe her an apology.”

“What do you mean? Incoming calls are taped; they must have her voice on tape.”

He shook his head. “There is no tape. The call that led the SWAT team to the Mayberry place came into the complaint room from inside police headquarters.”

“That's impossible.”

“The chief has investigated. The number called was a line used only by police officers. The caller was a male, obviously a policeman, using police terminology.”

“Who? What policeman?”

“They don't have a name. It's possible they won't. All the complaint-room clerk can recall is that the officer reported that the suspect in the McCoy murder had broken into the Mayberry house and was holding the owner hostage. He said SWAT should be mobilized; then he either hung up or was cut off.

“They acted on it, since the information came from within and a check with the lead investigator confirmed that the woman knew the suspects. It was just presumed that the caller himself was en route to the scene. A radio car went by, saw the shades drawn, which was unusual according to the investigator, and they mobilized.”

“I don't believe it,” I murmured, confused.

“This professional rivalry—this cat fight—has got to stop.” Fred looked exasperated. “Britt, why don't you take some time off?”

“You may be right.” I got to my feet, smiling sheepishly. “Maybe I misjudged, jumped to conclusions. I don't need time off. I just need to get back to work.” I excused myself and stepped out into the newsroom.

Why argue? Without proof, I'd only succeed in convincing them that I was crazy or obsessed. Maybe I was.

As I passed her desk on the way back to mine, Trish looked up and smiled. I smiled back, my heart hollow.

I couldn't shake the feeling that my world was on a collision course with disaster.

“A reporter touches lives,” I told Marty, as I fought tears. “It's not supposed to be fatal.”

“You did the best you could for him, Britt. At least you cared. Nobody else did. We both know the system sucks, and you're not to blame for that.”

“She manipulated it, Marty, the way she did the Rosado family.”

“Speaking of Trish,” he said, “I haven't been able to come up with much yet. The guy I know at her last paper is out of town on vacation. I'm still trying to reach him. Ran her job, credit, and college applications, and checked her hometown newspaper and cop shop for basic bio. Trish N., born November 23, 1968, oldest of two, dad a furniture manufacturer, mom dabbles in real estate until the kid brother is born, when Trish is about six. Baby brother is sick from day one, not expected to make it Congenital heart defect, has surgery three times by the time he's four years old.

“He and the parents do a lot of traveling back and forth to a New York hospital, where he has two of the operations. Big sister is sort of shuffled around, sent away to school at about fourteen. Then on to a college dorm, good grades in J-school, lands her first job, and is off and running.”

“What happened to her father?”

“Whatdya mean?”

“She grew up without a father, like me. At least that's what she said. I assumed he was dead, divorced, or a runaway.”

“Nope, still very much alive. Married thirty years. Still operates his company. Church deacon, Kiwanis, Rotary, drives a Beemer, all that good stuff.”

“You're sure?” Was there
anything
she didn't lie about?

“As shooting. All alive, if not so well.”

“The brother?”

“Mark, born June 3, 1974, still lives at home. Missed a lot of school because of his health. So far just has a semester in at the local junior college. Oh, yeah, one other item. Your girl got a plaque and a little write-up in the local fish wrapper when she was twelve. Could be what drew her to journalism as a career.”

“What was it for?”

“Lifesaver, good citizen, all that shit.”

“What'd she do?”

“Neighbor kid disappears, midsummer, major search ensues, the whole town involved. Trish finds him trapped, curled up in a discarded refrigerator. Guess somebody forgot to remove the door as required by law. She pulls him out. Nobody's around and the kid's not breathing. She gives him mouth-to-mouth, which she recently learned in a Junior Red Cross class, and saves his life.”

“How old was the child?”

“Three.”

“Unable to explain what happened, just like an advanced Alzheimer's patient.”

“Say again?”

“Marty.” Fear and excitement collided in my voice. “She rescued an elderly neighbor, a woman curled up in a storage locker in the building where she lives. Gave her mouth-to-mouth. Around the time she came to work here. She was a hero. Told me she'd never done it before.”

“That first incident happened a long time ago, back in 'eighty.”

“You don't forget something like that.” I knew Marty understood and was simply playing devil's advocate. “This could be a pattern. Doesn't it strike you as interesting that both victims were helpless, incapable of talking coherently about it after being resuscitated?” I remembered Trish saying that Alzheimer's patients were like little children. In more ways than I had imagined at the time.

He gave a long low whistle and promised to get back to me with anything else he learned.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I remembered the name of the stalker, a Clayton Daniels, supposedly influentially connected.”

“Atta girl,” he said. “I'll see what I can find out.”

“You're great.”

“'Bout time you realized it.”

On the way home I drove by the parking garage where Magdaly Rosado leaped to her death.

I hadn't been there before. The apartment house where she had lived stood across the street. It was an older two-story building, longer than it was wide, with crank windows and a small tiled front patio that bespoke better days. None of the room air conditioners were in use, and all the windows were open. A vacancy sign swung in the breeze outside. Not surprising. They obviously had at least one, with Magdaly and Ernesto dead and Miguel in the hospital facing a murder charge.

I knocked on a few doors but no one at home remembered much about that day, except for seeing Magdaly dead in the street. The general consensus was a surface sadness at what had happened to the family, with an undercurrent of unspoken relief that they were gone.

The municipal parking garage looked like an explosion in a paint store. In a failed attempt to disguise its utilitarian use the city had painted it in a myriad of Art Deco colors: turquoise, peach, sea blue, and pale pink. The open stairwell had purple railings. And windblown rainwater had trickled in, staining the peach-color walls with streaks of mossy green.

This modern city garage had numbered spaces. Drivers punch in their number, buying time from a computerized device on each level. It spits out receipts bearing the space number, the amount paid, and the expiration time. Meter maids run computer tapes that tell them which spaces are paid for. The system eliminates the need for attendants, cashiers, and the possibility that some deserving motorist might find a meter with time left on it.

I drove around and around, up the sloped ascent. The low ceilings in parking garages always make me claustrophobic. It was a relief to emerge from the dimly lit bowels of the garage into the expanse of open sky on the roof. It was empty. It reminded me of the Edgewater rooftop, which I quickly forced from my thoughts. There were domed streetlights for nighttime illumination. I couldn't imagine when they would be necessary, unless motorists were urged to park in garages and ride shuttles to special events. Concrete supports about eighteen inches wide and two-and-a-half feet tall were spaced every twelve feet along the perimeter of the rooftop parking. Those were the lowest places, where someone could easily throw one leg over. Connecting the supports were stretches of chain-link fencing about eighteen inches higher.

I looked down, but I have never liked heights and hate the unpleasant tingling in my lower extremities when I approach the edge. Some primal warning against the urge to leap and fly.

I climbed back in the car and began to cruise slowly down the way I had come. Three levels were empty. A few scattered cars were parked on the fourth, along with a three-wheeler ridden by a middle-aged man wearing a dark blue security uniform. He seemed startled to see me with all those empty spaces in my wake. I stopped and backed up to where he sat. He wore reading glasses low on his nose and had been filling out some sort of a time sheet. A thick ballpoint pen was clenched awkwardly between his thumb and index finger, as though hampered by an arthritic condition or old injury.

He put down the pen and gingerly stepped down from the three-wheeler. He was short and stocky, and his too-long uniform trousers draped over the tops of his scuffed black shoes.

“Hi,” I said. “I didn't know they had security here. Is this something new?”

He waggled his head no. “The last six months we've had patrols running between here and the other garages around the clock. We got vandalism, graffiti, stolen cars,” he said in a singsong voice, ticking off the transgressions on oddly gnarled fingers.

I shook my head, as though wondering what the world would come to next. “You must have been here, then, the day the woman fell off the roof.”

He surprised me by nodding. “Yeah, coulda done without that. Her form was good but her landing was lousy. What a mess. Lived right over there.” He pointed a curled paw in the direction of the apartment house.