Suitable for Framing (3 page)

A fat file lay open: that of Linda Snell, a serial killer whose crimes I had covered. The sweet churchgoing Snell had been widowed three times. No one suspected more than bad luck until the lonely widow took to picking up men at truck stops across the state. When next seen they were dead bodies at the side of the road.

A bad woman, but a welcome change from the usual serial killers—men who stalk women like animals. Solved a lot faster, too. The cops took quick action.

“I remember these stories,” I said fondly, sitting down at the desk and glancing through the stack of neatly folded clips. “She's still on death row.”

“You haven't done a folo in some time.” Trish took a seat opposite me. Her eyes were soft gray and glowing, with striking dark rims around the iris, and her body language was intimate, as though eager for the company.

“There you go again, sounding like a reporter.”

“You're one of the reasons I'm in this business,” she blurted.

“The library?”

“No. Please.” She lightly dismissed her surroundings with a small wave of the hand. “Journalism.” She smiled, pronouncing the word with reverence. “I'm a reporter. I interned on a small paper in Oklahoma, and when your stories crossed the wire we would fight over who got to read them first. Now”—she glanced warmly around her—“here I am.”

“So if you're a reporter, what are you doing in the library? How come you're not out in the newsroom?”

“That's what I keep asking myself—and your editors.” She pulled a shapeless cardigan tightly around her small frame. If they are so intent on saving energy, I wondered, why don't they turn down the confounded air-conditioning at night?

“Would you like half my sandwich—it's only peanut butter and jelly—and some tea?” Her thermos was red and yellow plastic.

I had forgotten how hungry I was. The yogurt, long ago at the mall, was all I had eaten all day.

“I wouldn't dream of eating your lunch, but I'd love some tea.”

She found another mug and poured a steaming lemony brew.

“Some of the stories you file are odder than fiction,” she said as we sipped. “We'd post them on our newsroom bulletin board back in Black Mesa. Not much action there,” she said ruefully.

Trish had gone on to work general assignment for the
Shelbyville Post Gazette
in Oklahoma and the larger
Star-Courier
in Kansas City.

“Will you transfer into the newsroom when there's an opening?”

“You know of one?” Her eager eyes locked on mine.

“Not at the moment But that means nothing. You know how it is.”

Most reporters are gypsies. Why any writer would leave this great news town, the city I love, where I was born and belong, remains a mystery to me. But they do, every day. Little newsroom farewell soirees seem to take place every other Friday, with punch and cookies rolled out after deadline for the bulldog edition.

Restless colleagues yearn for bigger markets in Washington, New York, or Chicago or dream of covering exotic wars in foreign lands. Those whose dreams come true never experience anything that does not break out in Miami at one time or another. Every major national scandal has a Miami angle. As for action, why dodge bombs or bullets on some godforsaken strip of real estate thousands of miles away when you can do it right here? We have it all: war, murderous weather, foreign intrigue, spies, refugees, and hand-to-hand combat in the streets. What more could a writer want?

“I thought hiring on as a reporter would be easier,” Trish was saying, “especially after I won first place for deadline reporting in the annual Oklahoma Press Association awards last year. I applied for reporting jobs here three times, but they never called me.” She shook her head, face pinched. “I guess I should have had a job before I quit the old one, but I just had to get out of there and I was sure this was the right move. This”—she lifted her eyes, shadowed in the gloom, to the broad picture window framing Miami's sweeping nightscape of glittering city lights—“is the place for me. I just know it.”

I could relate. I never take it for granted. I am always thrilled by the lacy shadows of palm fronds on stone, the warm caress of soft moist air, the roar of the sea.

“And it's always easier to get a job when you're in the same city,” Trish went on. “Right?”

“I thought it was always easier to get a job when you had one.”

She sighed. “I never dreamed it would take this long, and I was getting low on cash … Maybe I shouldn't have settled for the library, but I needed work and thought it would be a foot in the door, that I could more easily move into the newsroom from here.”

“I knew you were too good to be true. You're great to have back here on deadline—but I'll let you know the minute I hear about anybody leaving.”

She scooped up a bleating phone. Somebody from the national desk wanted a recent photo of Boris Yeltsin. “What's he done now?” she asked. “Is he dead?”

A reporter's curiosity. I smiled. She looked up and winked.

“Pissed off the Latvians again. Okay, I'll bring it right out.”

Back at the city desk, I saw that Gretchen was editing my story and had inserted the word
alleged
in front of the phrase “hit-and-run car.”

“Gretchen, Gretchen,” I argued impatiently. “It really happened. I saw the car hit her and speed away.” Then I saw that she had also added an
alleged
in front of the word
victim
, referring to Jennifer Carey.

“Well, if we don't qualify it you should attribute it to the police,” she argued stubbornly, pursing her lips. “Whose word do we have on this?”

I suddenly felt very tired. “Take my word for it The woman was a victim. She did not crush her little boy's skull and then fling herself across the parking lot; they were run over. That is fact. We don't have to qualify it or attribute it to anybody. All that does is slow down the story and make me look silly. It happened, Gretchen. Believe it.”

She grudgingly deleted the offending words. I should have been more diplomatic. She would make me pay for this, but I felt fresh out of patience.

Before escaping the cold and nearly empty building into the heat of the night I made final phone checks with the cops, the hospital, and the intern who mans our police desk in a noisy little nook off the newsroom. No new developments. Jennifer Carey clung to life. The thieves and the Trans Am had vanished without a trace.

I drove across the causeway, half listening to the crackle of the new police scanner in my dashboard and the rumble of thunder across the Everglades. While fighting deadline and the desk there had been little time to think. Now I felt drained.

Bitsy yapped, running in circles as I unlocked the door to my apartment while Billy Boots meowed in agitation from atop a bookcase. Several volumes lay scattered on the floor, evidence of rough play or a serious skirmish.

“What's been going on?” I scolded. “Can't you two just get along?” Ignoring the winking red light on my message machine and the cat purring against my ankles, I foraged in the fridge. Pickings were sparse. I hungered for real food,
salteado de camarones
, shrimp sautéed in onions and garlic with chopped plum tomatoes, or
ropa vieja
, which translates as old clothes but is shredded beef in savory wine sauce. All I could find in the depths of the freezer was a frozen breakfast bearded by frost an inch thick. Eleven
P
.
M
. was no time for breakfast, but my stomach wouldn't know the difference. I scraped ice off the package, popped the little tray in the oven, fed the animals, then took Bitsy for a stroll. Jennifer Carey's little son and her struggle to survive haunted my thoughts. Would she ever go home again?

The night was starless and hot, the temperature holding at 88 and the air thick with humidity that dampened my clothes and curled my hair in wispy tendrils. The moon, a faint glimmer, burst free from the dense overcast for just a fleeting moment as we returned. Full, lustrous, and ripe, it took a bow, then sailed again into its cover of clouds.

I picked at my midnight supper, juicy little sausages oozing sodium phosphate atop pancakes bursting with goodies like calcium caseinate and sodium aluminum phosphate, all listed in tiny print on the side of the carton. My stimulated taste buds cried out for an accompaniment of orange juice and strong coffee. I drank a glass of wine instead and went to bed.

Usually I sleep well, but this night something disturbing, a prescient sense of trouble, hung in the air. Must be the full moon, I thought.

Breakfast at midnight had been a mistake. At 6
A
.
M
. I awoke hungering for a Cuban sandwich, my body clock convinced that it was lunchtime. Jennifer Carey was in surgical intensive care. The Trans Am had not been spotted, said the cop who answered my call, which meant that by now it was most likely at the bottom of a canal, totally dismantled in a chop shop, or on the high seas aboard a southbound freighter.

I skipped my usual run on the boardwalk. Sluggish and out of sorts, all I could manage was a slow jog around the block with Bitsy. Even her short legs were able to keep up with me. I showered, dressed in lettuce-green cotton, drank some black coffee, and headed out, thrilled at the sight of my new car waiting, its finish as smooth and lustrous as the inside of a seashell. The beat was relatively quiet and driving sheer luxury in an automobile with a functioning air conditioner.

I visited the cop shops, scrutinized the logs of overnight check-ins at the morgue and the county jail, and arrived at the office armed with several stories.

An offshore storm had driven a school of sharks in toward the beach, where one had mistaken a surfer's foot for lunch. The surfer had been sewed up at Mount Sinai while the Beach Patrol hastily hoisted warning flags for swimmers, who ignored them anyway.

A bolt from the same storm killed a thirty-two-year-old Sunny Isles bicyclist as he pedaled north on Collins Avenue. Struck by lightning, he crashed into a tree, fell off his bike, and was hit by a cement truck.

And a Miami family had called police to report their dead mother missing. Her body, shipped to New York for burial, had been mistakenly sent to Aruba. The mistake was discovered when an empty casket, intended for Aruba, arrived at the funeral home in Brooklyn. Now services were postponed indefinitely because customs officials were refusing to return the body from Aruba without proper identification, certification, and other necessary paperwork.

I wrote all three for the early edition. Before returning my messages, I checked the Careys' conditions—baby Eileen was fair and her mother critical—retrieved the borrowed family picture from photo, slipped it into an envelope addressed to the father, and dropped it into a wire room out-basket.

Then I opened my own mail.

The first piece was neatly typewritten, on good stationery:

He thoughtfully included his telephone number and a copy of a letter to him, under a U.S. Senate letterhead.

I opened the next envelope, a friendly invitation, hand-written on lined paper:

The return address was a forensic unit that houses the criminally insane. Thompson was confined years ago after police found parts of his wife and his mother in his septic tank.

The next letter was also handwritten, on lined paper torn from a yellow legal pad.

I was familiar with this one too: the Singer.

Was my name scrawled on a bathroom wall somewhere? Other reporters receive fan letters, notes of gratitude, commendation, and praise. I get mail from the jail.

I sighed. The editors of this reader-friendly newspaper instruct reporters to answer all correspondence.

Taking a cue from John Glenn, I typed a brief response to Dr. Merrill.

I wondered what the news desk would do to get back at me and swept the other letters into the trash. I will not become pen pal to people in cages and padded cells, I told myself. They are there for a reason and have more time to write letters. Management could not have had them in mind when they issued the reader-friendly edict.

Rakestraw should be in by now, I thought so I drove to the station and dropped by AIU, the Accident Investigation Unit. He looked agitated, not surprising for someone whose office is decorated with grisly color art of crash victims. He had news, major headway in the Carey case.

“Got a line on the thieves,” he said grimly. “Don't know the backseat passenger for sure, but we've got a positive ID on the driver and a street name on his front-seat buddy. Same guys who did the carjacks and kneecaps the day before.”

“Great,” I said, pen poised. “Who are they?”

“Can't tell you. They're all puppies.”

“Puppies! No way. Puppies are cute. You mean the killers are juveniles?”

“You've got it. Junior scumbags. The driver won't be eighteen until October fourteenth, so we can't release names.” He rifled clumsily through his desk for something, didn't find it, and slammed a drawer irritably.

“Does the driver have a past? Was he the shooter the day before?”

“Is the pope Catholic? Do bears shit in the woods? Will you keep asking questions?”

“What kind of record? How long? How bad?”

“You know I'm not allowed—”

“Well, if you won't tell me his name, at least you can let me see his past.”

“All I can say is that it's extensive, okay?”

“How'd you find out who he was?”

“Got his name from 'nother kid, the one brought in on that trailer fire that burned up his little sister.”

“His past include violence?”

Rakestraw nodded.

“Has he done any time?”

“Our boy's a dropout. Last time he hurt somebody the judge punished him by ordering him to go back to high school.”

“How nice for his teacher and the kids who want to learn. Sounds like he's overdue for his name in the paper, just to warn his neighbors that he's living next door.”

“Can't do it, Britt. Much as I'd like to.”

“You know I would never say how I got it.”

“It's against the law.” His words were clipped, his mouth a tight line. “We have to protect these misunderstood children.”

“Swell,” I said sharply. “You'd rather wait until he maims and kills a few more women and little kids.”

Rakestraw's jaw tightened and his eyes flashed. Hell, I thought, I've pushed too far. He stood up, glaring. “Look, Britt, you know I can't give you the information in this file, but I can't prevent you from printing it—or anything else you find out on your own.”

“Right,” I said sullenly, wondering how in hell I could do that.

He stretched his lean body and arms, then sighed as though stifling a yawn. “I'm going for a cup of coffee.”

Dismissed, I angrily snapped my notebook closed and was about to tuck away my pen when he added, “I'd ask you to join me, but I'm sure you'll find other things to do here while you're waiting for me to come back.”

He checked his watch. “I should be gone at least ten minutes.” He stepped to the door of his small office, eyes lingering, along with mine, on the open file atop his desk blotter. “The captain is prowling around the building somewhere like a homicidal maniac, so be cool.” He strolled out and closed the door, leaving me alone.

This is illegal, I thought, feeling giddy as I spun the folder around to scan the contents. The adrenaline gave me a rush. No wonder some people find crime fun.

Gilberto Sanchez, street name Peanut, 2475 Northwest 27th Avenue, parents Ileana and Mario. Habitual offender, a busy boy. His juvenile record began at age seven, its roots apparently planted even earlier. Shoplifting, chronic truancy, fighting in school, burglary by age nine, armed robbery with a knife by eleven. He didn't miss much. Everything from lewd and lascivious conduct at twelve to grand theft auto at thirteen. Loitering and prowling, aggravated assault, destroying public property, arson, and carrying a concealed weapon. Not much left but murder, and this creature wasn't even eighteen yet. But he would be soon. Had his mother given birth just a few weeks earlier, he would be facing these charges as an adult. Even then, of course, he would be treated as a first offender, his juvenile crimes not even considered. No wonder these kids share a common contempt for the system.

When Rakestraw returned, a half-full coffee cup in his hand and doughnut dust on his whiskers, I was primly leafing through a Fraternal Order of Police magazine.

“Feel better?” I smiled.

“You still here?” He took his seat, put the cup down, and slipped the file folder into a drawer.

“I need the street name of the passenger.”

“J-Boy.”

I gave him a questioning look.

“Because he likes to smoke joints.”

“That sure narrows it down.”

“Probably only ten thousand or so running around out there,” he agreed amiably.

“Anything at all on the backseat passenger?”

“Black kid.”

“American, Latino, or from the islands?”

“Don't know. These gangs of kid car thieves are pretty well integrated.”

“Nice to see the younger generation overcoming prejudice.”

“Yeah. Now if they'd just quit robbing, raping, and shooting—”

“Think they stole the Trans Am 'cause they liked it or for some other reason?”

“Coulda been to cannibalize for parts, maybe on order from some adult who repairs them, or to export, or to use in some other crime.” He shrugged. “A lot of adult criminals are using juveniles. If they're arrested, it's no big deal. The kids aren't afraid of the system. We've had twelve- and thirteen-year-olds delivering expensive late-model cars to these guys for as little as a hundred and fifty bucks apiece. It's tough for auto theft to nail them because we don't have any undercover cops who can pose as juveniles in a reverse sting. We're getting hit hard, averaging a hundred and ten stolen cars a day.

“One other thing,” he added. “Arturo neglected to mention something until after you left the other night.”

“What's that?”

“When they stole his Trans Am?”

“Yeah?”

“He had a loaded nine-millimeter Glock in the glove compartment.”

Swell, I thought. As if Peanut and J-Boy weren't menace enough out there in high-speed 3,000-pound machines, now they had another gun, a rapid-fire model with a clip that holds fifteen rounds.

I left Rakestraw, locked my purse in the trunk, and went off to Northwest 27th Avenue to find the home of Peanut Sanchez. I disliked leaving my new T-Bird unprotected on his turf, in front of the dingy apartment house. I would feel more comfortable and less defensive after the first dreaded dent or ding.

The dusty hallway walls were decorated with mindless graffiti and scribbled vulgarities, marking off turf like stray cats do. Cooking smells mingled with mildew and the acrid scent of urine. It was nearly 10:30
A
.
M
. on a weekday, but TVs and radios blared in both Spanish and English from behind closed doors.

A pregnant teenager answered my knock. Dark hair fell in curly ringlets around her oval madonna face, marred only by a smattering of teenage pimples. She wore gold hoops in her ears and a maternity smock over black short shorts. Wads of crumpled tissue separated her naked toes. A blood-red sheen glistened on eight toenails; two remained untouched by the tiny brush in her right hand. The small red bottle was in the left. Formaldehyde and alcohol, the odor of wet nail polish, permeated the air.

Her pudgy fingers were encrusted with rings. Some gold, some silver, some plain, others ornate and decorated with stones or tiny chains that linked them together.

“¿Cómo está usted?”
I began.

“I speak English.” She eyed me and my notebook suspiciously.

“Hi, is Peanut home?” I asked, wondering what I would say if he was. It would not be the first time I had chatted with somebody wanted by the police. Criminals are so eager to convince journalists of how unjustly accused and terribly misunderstood they are that it rarely occurs to them to do bodily harm to reporters. They are usually on their best behavior. However, the memory of bloodstained pavement was still too fresh for me to take Peanut's explanation seriously, if indeed he had one.