Suitable for Framing

by Edna Buchanan

  “No, I work for the newspaper, the Miami News.”

  The hip-hopper’s stare was blank. “What channel?”

  The future of my chosen profession looked bleak.

  A skinny shy-looking kid in a Marlins T-shirt lingered on the fringe.

  “Maybe you’ve seen him,” I said, trying to draw him out.

  He shook his head slowly. Something sly shone in his eyes. Was he lying?

  The boy who had been sucking noisily on his pacifier removed it to ask, “Why you want Cornflake?”

  “I write stories and thought he might have one to tell.”

  That brought choruses of, “I tell you a story, baby,”

  “I got a story for you,” as they preened and postured and tried hard to look bad. “How about a nice bedtime story?” asked a kid wearing a Malcolm X T-shirt and a fade haircut.

  “When you see Cornflake, ask him to give me a call,” I said briskly, ignoring their hoots. “I need to find out if some things I heard about him are true.”

  They eagerly snatched the business cards I offered, exhausting the supply in my skirt pocket. A rash of obscene phone calls would probably be the only result. Who cares? I thought. Let them talk dirty to the newsroom voice mail. That curse on mankind deserves it.

  “Bitt?” said one, scrutinizing my name.

  “Brrritt,” I said, entertaining ugly thoughts about the Dade County school system.

  “Staff writer?” asked the shy kid, reading off the card I had given him. “What’s that?”

  My reply—“I cover the police beat”—elicited cries, guffaws, laughter, and mock trigger pulling. “Pow! Papow! Pow!”

  “Right,” I said serenely, as the laughter died down. “I need to talk to Cornflake because he may be getting blamed for something that wasn’t his fault.” Seed planted, I took off.

  When I opened the trunk of my car to retrieve my purse, it buzzed like a swarm of killer bees. I flicked off my pager and it immediately began to beep again.

  I drove across the street to the paper and called the city desk from the security phone in the lobby. “Where are you, Britt?” Gretchen’s voice could shatter contact lenses.

  “On my way in to the office.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Out on the police beat, Gretchen, where I go every day.” I should have known better.

  “I had a question, and since you couldn’t be reached we had to pull one of your stories out of the early edition. I’ve warned you to stay in touch. You didn’t answer your page.” Her tone was the one most people reserve for misbehaving ten-year-olds.

  “I had it locked in the car so it wouldn’t get snatched.” I sighed. “Give me a break. Remember? It was my day off yesterday, yet when you paged me I was already at the scene and on top of the story.”

  “What have you done for me today, Britt? You’re not off now.”

  The lobby security guard whose phone I had promised not to tie up for more than a moment began to pout I turned away to avoid his scowl. “I’ll be right in, Gretchen, as soon as I can,” I promised. “Hope traffic isn’t too bad.”

  I sprinted for the elevator and moments later, when Gretchen glanced up from the city desk, I was working diligently at my terminal. She looked puzzled and narrowed her eyes. “Britt, when did you get back?”

  I shrugged innocently. “’Bout half an hour ago, I guess.”

  She glanced at the clock and gave me a murderous look.

  Gloria, the city desk clerk, promised to tell me right away if Peanut or Cornflake called.

  “You working on something with teenage gangs?” asked Ryan. His rumpled shirts hide the heart of a poet He is much too gentle to be in this business.

  “I don’t think they’re an organized gang, like the Thirty-fourth Avenue Players, just freelance carjackers who may have escalated to murder.”

  He waxed bitter about the story he was working on, a feature on the Miami Design Preservation League, one of Gretchen’s pet projects.

  “That again?” I commiserated. “If anybody can make it interesting, you can.”

  “Luckily I never get bored,” he said, “with you around, Britt.”

  I offered to bring back coffee, headed for the third-floor cafeteria, and encountered Trish on the elevator. She wore a neat navy blue suit and a white cotton shirt with a little red string tie. The uniform of a job seeker, I thought. “You’re in early,” I said.

  “Thought I’d make another pass at personnel. Guess our talk last night gave me the heart to try again.”

  I looked in her hopeful face and saw myself seven years ago. “I was just taking a break. You have time for coffee?”

  “Sure.” She beamed at the invitation. “Great story this morning by the way, stripped on local. That poor mother and her children.”

  She reached for a teabag as we passed through the cafeteria line but switched to Cuban coffee when she saw it was what I was having. “Never tried it before,” she said, grinning.

  “If you want to stay wired for a week, it’s great.”

  We settled at a table with a postcard-perfect view of the bay, the eastern sky, and the shimmery Miami Beach skyline. Her big eyes drank it all in.

  “You talked to the husband, right?”

  I nodded, thinking of Jason Carey.

  “How’d you ever get him to open up like that? How they met, the last thing she had said to him that day, all the details about their lives together. It made it so real, the readers must feel like they know them.” She bravely sipped her coffee, barely wincing. I imagined how the cafeteria’s muddy brew would taste to a tea drinker who had never tried it.

  “Did he know his son was dead when you talked to him?”

  “Yeah, the detective had told him.”

  “Whew!” She leaned forward, intense. “Did you see the little boy’s body? How did he look?”

  “Bad.” I stared into my cup. “I knew he was dead. Killed instantly. We were there before the police. In fact we were there when it happened.”

  “How in hell did you manage that?”

  “Coincidence, bad luck, timing.” I shrugged and thought about all the stories where nothing more than poor timing cost a life. Minor mistakes, like losing your way or a wrong turn become major when a young man with a gun is waiting on the next corner. Oversights as trivial as leaving your car window down, or setting your door ajar as you carry in packages, or walking to a window after mistaking the noises outside for firecrackers—all can prove fatal.

  Some risk takers survive life on the edge and achieve ripe old age. Others lead cautious lives but make a single small mistake and die. Some make no mistake at all. What did Jennifer Carey do wrong?

  “The detail,” Trish was saying. “How do you ever get all that detail? Like your story about the librarian who had his landlady’s head in his freezer with the chicken potpies. You mentioned the icicles hanging from her nose!”

  “I talked to the policewoman who opened the freezer for some ice for her Coke.”

  “What a surprise.” Her expression was mock gruesome.

  “Sure was,” I said nostalgically. “She was killed not long after, but I often wonder if anybody asked how her day had gone when she went home that night. What did she say? What could she say? How can any of them ever explain to normal people what it’s like being a cop in Miami?”

  “Or a reporter,” Trish said, eyes bright.

  I told her about the Swiss tourists who witnessed fifteen crashes and a bank robbery during a ten-day Miami vacation. Miami Vice fans, they were never alarmed. The city was exactly what they had expected. “I like it,” the wife told me, pleased that her husband captured the bank robber on film as he was being captured by police.

  I went back to the Cuban coffee machine for a refill. Trish passed, remaining seated, hungry eyes slowly surveying the cafeteria. “What do I have to do to get on the reporting staff at this newspaper?”

  “Speaking S
panish would help.” My hire was a mistake. They simply assumed, because of my last name, that I wrote and spoke fluent Spanish. When the mistake became obvious, I was assigned the police beat which no one else coveted. A lucky break for me.

  “I’m taking lessons.”

  “Good. Don’t forget to emphasize that to them, and don’t give up. Editors love persistence.”

  Her eyes never left my face.

  “Which ones have you met?” I asked.

  “Fred Douglas. And I met a Murphy and an Anson.”

  “They’ve all got clout but Fred is the best. Watch out for a guy named Fellows, a real womanizer. He’d make a move on you for sure.”

  She took a small clothbound notebook from her purse and uncapped her pen.

  “Abel Fellows,” I said, lowering my voice. “Never be alone with him. But keep calling the others or dropping by, since you’re in the building anyway. Editors love enterprise. Send them notes and memos but keep it tight; they love brevity, too. Timing is important. I’ll put in a good word for you and let you know if I hear of anything.”

  “You’d really do that for me?” She looked perked up—probably flying on caffeine. “I don’t know how to thank you, Britt.”

  I went back to the newsroom with Ryan’s coffee, feeling good about our talk. Women don’t reach out to one another enough, especially in this business. Those who make it become one of the boys, turning their backs on their sisters. Like Gretchen. We have seen the enemy and she is us.

  When Fred Douglas stopped by my desk before the afternoon news meeting, I seized the moment.

  “Hear you interviewed Trish Tierney. Gonna hire her?”

  “The gal from Oklahoma? Isn’t she working in the library now?”

  “Sure, but that’s not where she wants to be.”

  “Didn’t know you knew her.”

  “Not real well, but she’s super eager and smart as hell. Probably be a good hire.”

  “She’s young, without much experience.” He looked doubtful.

  “How will she get any if nobody gives her a chance? She’s already won statewide prizes.”

  “In Oklahoma,” he pointed out.

  “You always say we need more women in the newsroom.” I stood up and looked him right in the eye.

  “You may be right,” he said, his tone noncommittal, before escaping to his meeting.

  Chapter Four

  Victims, cops, car-alarm salesmen, and my mother had left a long printout of messages in response to my carjacking and auto-theft stories. They all wanted me to call them.

  One couple had driven in separate cars to Dadeland Mall to see their interior decorator. They met again later, wandering aimlessly through a sea of parked cars. Both of theirs, similar sports jobs, had vanished. Did the same thieves steal both? If so, were they aware that out of thousands of cars they had selected two, parked an acre apart, belonging to the same couple? Do browsing auto thieves make up most of the people milling about in mall parking lots?

  A small boy aboard a sightseeing boat in Biscayne Bay pointed out an automobile just like the family car on the deck of a passing Liberian freighter bound for Haiti. “Look, Daddy, there’s our car!” he cried. His parents laughed. When they returned to port at Bayside hours later, their car was missing from the parking garage.

  “Have I got a story for you!” a Hialeah detective promised. I love it when a man says that to me. I love it when anybody says that to me. “We’ve got a guy and his wife had their car stolen from a shopping center parking lot last week.”

  “Yeah? Old news, isn’t it?”

  “Wait, wait.” He paused for effect “They file a police report and rent a car. Three days later they come home in the rental. What do they find in their driveway? Their missing car.”

  “The thief returned it?”

  “Right, and leaves a handwritten note on the windshield. Listen to this.” I heard the sound of paper rustling. “It says, I’m sorry, but if you knew the circumstances under which I was forced to take your car, you would know that it was a real emergency. Please accept my apology and these theater tickets. Attached are two tickets to the Grove Playhouse. For Friday night.”

  “You’re kidding! A remorseful thief. Cool. I wonder what the emergency was. Maybe it was—”

  “Wait.”

  “Uh-oh. The tickets were stolen? They got busted at the box office?”

  “Nope. They use the tickets, enjoy the show, but get home and find their house cleaned out. Empty, wall to wall. The thieves must have backed up a truck. Hey, they knew they had plenty of time, at least three hours.”

  What a scam. I love Miami, but sometimes I suspect Rod Serling is the mayor.

  The victims agreed to a picture. Lottie was the only photographer in house at the moment, so I walked the assignment back to photo. She was hunched over a light table. The illumination from within made her red hair glow, as she squinted through a loupe at long strips of color negatives.

  Photo was shorthanded, and she grumbled as usual. “I don’t even have time to wind my watch or scratch my ass.”

  “It’s no big deal,” I said. “Maybe they could just stand next to their car, in front of the house.”

  “No, no, no! That’d be as stiff as a pair of leather britches on the fridge!” She snatched the card from my hand and read my brief description of the story. “I’ll shoot ’em in a room where their furniture used to be. With a wide-angle lens, maybe an eighteen; that’ll make the room look big and empty, and they’ll look small and pitiful. Maybe they could hold up their ticket stubs. Poor babies. Were they insured?”

  That’s one of the things I love about Lottie. She may bitch and moan, but she is all pro at heart and gets right into the spirit of a story.

  I told her about Trish and her efforts to transfer to the newsroom.

  “Maybe they’re doing her a favor,” she said glumly, scowling up at an overhead vent. “She probably ought to quit the library and bail outa here while she still can. I swear this place will kill us all. Something poisonous is spewing outa the air-circulation system at this very moment.”

  “Lottie, this building is only ten years old.”

  “I don’t care if they built it last Saturday. I tell you if I had to work in here every day, my life expectancy would be something short of six months. We’re lucky we spend a lot of time out in the field.”

  “Sure, on the streets of Miami where it’s much safer.”

  “You heard about the PCBs, right?”

  “I heard the pressmen were complaining.” I trailed her back to the photo-pool equipment room, wondering where FMJ was holed up, while she searched impatiently for a 500-millimeter long lens for a Dolphins game assignment at Joe Robbie Stadium that night. “Anything to it?”

  She turned, hands on her hips, hair in her eyes. “Only that polychlorinated biphenyls were discovered in one of the ink tanks in ‘concentrations higher than the acceptable level.’ They’re claiming it’s not dangerous, but I asked Miriam, the medical writer, to look it up.” She leaned forward, eyes narrowing. “That stuff apparently causes everything from cancer to two-headed babies and nerve disorders.”

  She saw my skepticism.

  “You know how Ryan’s always whining that he feels sick.” Her tone was growing argumentative.

  “He’s a hypochondriac. Always has been.”

  “Maybe not,” she said, finding the lens she wanted. “Maybe he’s just more sensitive to his environment than most of us. You know, like the canaries they send down in the mine shafts.”

  I sighed. “PCBs or not, Trish would gladly change places with anybody out in the newsroom.”

  “You want some young smart-ass female nipping at your heels, lusting after your job?”

  “For God’s sake, Lottie! That’s the attitude that makes it so tough for women to get anywhere. We have to help each other.”

  “Try suggesting that to Gretchen.”

  “Ri
ght,” I said. “But Gretchen’s an aberration. You’ll like Trish. She’ll fit right in. Let’s go to La Esquina de Tejas some night next week and bring her along. It’ll cheer her up. She needs to meet people. I’ll see if Ryan can join us.”

  She grudgingly agreed.

  My phone was ringing when I got back to my desk.

  “I got your message.”

  “Who is this?”

  There was a pause. “Cornflake.”

  Startled, I slid into my chair and snatched up a pen. “I’m glad you called.”

  “The information was inseminated that you wished to discuss some matter with me.” He was trying his best to sound mature and businesslike.

  “You mean disseminated?”

  “Whatever. What is the nature of your requisition?”

  I couldn’t help but smile. “Let’s get together and talk,” I said, “just you and me.”

  “We are conversing at the present time.” His voice sounded wary and faintly familiar. “How may I assist you?”

  “Let’s meet. How about the Japanese Garden, on Watson Island?”

  He hesitated.

  I had forgotten. This kid was only fifteen or sixteen. “Do you have a car?”

  “No, but I can acquire the necessary transportation.”

  “Never mind,” I said quickly, “I’ll come to where you are.”

  “Edgewater complex, level two. Park in section pink or orange, proceed straight south, and board the elevator to level two. Stop at the merry-go-round first, then proceed to the food court. Purchase a Coke and sit at a table for two.”

  “I’ll wear a white carnation.” I couldn’t resist.

  “Say what?”

  “Never mind. How will I know you?”

  “I know you.”

  “Why do I have to go to the carousel first?”

  “So I can ascertain that you are alone.”

  I sighed. “Okay, how about twenty minutes?”

  “Fifteen.”

  I got there in ten.

  The pastel painted horses rose and fell in rhythm with the music. A few mothers stood on the revolving platform next to their squealing tots. I had not been instructed on how long I was to watch the carousel ponies, so I waited until the happy music slowed and began grinding to a stop. Then I strolled past book, luggage, and smoke shops to the food court, nearly empty at this time of day. I ordered a soft drink. Did it really have to be a Coke? I wondered. The cooking smells made my mouth water. Would the entire rendezvous abort if I ordered a hot dog? I have little patience with people determined to transform life into Mission Impossible. Everything is already too complicated.