Suitable for Framing

by Edna Buchanan

  When Rakestraw returned, the other detectives cleared out as if they knew what was coming.

  “Here’s the problem,” Rakestraw said.

  “What do you mean problem?” My heart sank.

  “Because Howard has no parent or legal guardian he will have to be declared a ward of the state. It takes a judge to do that, and we also need a court order to have him admitted to the Crossing. Before a judge will issue one he’ll want a psychological evaluation to convince him that Howard is stable and not just giving us a con job.”

  “You can tell him that,” I protested.

  Howie’s eyes darted back and forth between us.

  “That’s not the way it works, Britt. You know the system well enough to grasp how it operates. He’ll have to spend a few days at Youth Hall first.”

  “He has to be protected. You can’t just throw him into general population. If word leaks out that he’s talked to you—”

  Howie got to his feet. “You said—” he began angrily.

  Rakestraw made a sharp motion to cut him off. “This is only temporary, Howard. Just temporary, a couple of days at the most. If you’re gonna work within the system you have to let the system work, and it takes time.”

  “This isn’t fair,” I said calmly.

  “He’ll be in isolation. A couple of days,” Rakestraw said. “We’ll press to get the formalities done ASAP.”

  There was no point in arguing in front of Howie. I didn’t want him to panic.

  “I don’t get to go home for my stuff?”

  Rakestraw shook his head. “We can send a zone car by later to pick it up, if you like. How much do you have?”

  “My books, my hot plate, my dictionary. My clothes, man.” His situation was sinking in, and apprehension filled his eyes. “I don’t want no police taking it. Britt?” he implored, shaking his head.

  “I’ll pick everything up for you,” I said. “I can store what you don’t need at my place and bring whatever you want to the Crossing. I’ll take care of it.”

  My reassurances did not have the effect I had hoped. “What if I change my mind ’bout everything right now?”

  Rakestraw looked uncomfortable. I gave him credit for that, at least. “You just confessed to a number of felonies,” he said. “If you don’t stick to the deal you take the fall for everybody.”

  Howie’s eyes locked on mine. I saw him struggle to stay calm. He kept a stiff upper lip.

  “Remember,” I said quietly, “nothing good is ever easy. But you want to do things right in your life from now on. This is the way to do it. AK. I’ll take care of your stuff; Rakestraw will take care of everything else. You and I will stay in touch. Call me whenever you can. This won’t take long.”

  Rakestraw nodded in support but spoiled the moment by reaching behind him for his handcuffs.

  “Empty your pockets and turn around,” he told Howie. He saw my look. “We can’t transport without them,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “How long?” Howie said.

  “No more than a week,” Rakestraw said, “maybe less.”

  Lower lip jutted out, Howie did as instructed and the cuffs were snapped around his wrists.

  “Will you tell Miz Mayberry where I’m at? Don’t want her to worry ’bout me.”

  I promised, as Rakestraw steered him down the hall to booking. Watching him go, it was hard for me to remember that he was not a man. He was just a boy. Somebody’s son.

  I took the elevator to the lobby, suffering mixed emotions about Howie and how I was going to lug all his worldly possessions down from the roof of the Edgewater. Once I did, where would I put them? I hadn’t considered that when I blithely offered to safeguard them for him. Sometimes I am my own worst enemy, I thought. Preoccupied, I didn’t even see Trish or hear her call my name.

  She plucked at my elbow as I crossed the police station lobby.

  “Britt!” She looked flushed and breathless. “You must be working on something major. You look so serious.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  I must have sounded curt because she hesitated. “Picking up my police-press ID card.”

  Discomfort flickered in her eyes for a moment. Most likely she didn’t like being asked to explain herself; I wouldn’t.

  “Thought I’d take the opportunity to introduce myself around,” she said lightly, “since I had to be here anyway. Never know when you’ll cross paths with the cops on a story.”

  “Good thinking,” I agreed. “Right. Sorry, I’m just a little crazed. Actually I’m not even working on a story for tomorrow.”

  We walked together to the front desk, where I picked up a clipboard. “Guess who I met,” she whispered as I scanned the entries on the twenty-four-hour log. “Your Lieutenant Kendall McDonald.”

  I stopped reading. “He’s not my lieutenant,” I said ruefully.

  “Too bad,” she said with feeling. “Those eyes! That hunk could make the devil sweat.”

  “Now you sound like Lottie.” I laughed. “What did he have to say?” I hated my own prurient interest in everything the man said and did.

  “We talked mostly about the Rosado suicide. I thought I should report the latest to somebody.”

  “The latest?”

  “I’ve been getting phone calls from both Miguel, the husband, and Ernesto, the son. I can see how the two of them made that poor woman crazy. Each blames the other for her death, the suicide survivors from hell.” She tossed her head, pushing back her hair with an impatient gesture. She was letting it grow, and the longer, wavy look was becoming. She has really blossomed since being hired, I thought.

  “There’s always been bad blood between them,” she was saying. “She was the peacekeeper. Now she’s gone, it could very well lead to violence. Did I tell you about the brawl at the funeral home?”

  “No, what happened?” Our heels clicked in unison as we crossed the cavernous lobby.

  “The two of them really got into it, chairs broken, women screaming, the whole nine yards. The police were called to break it up.”

  “How’d you hear about it?”

  “I was there.” Her eyes softened. “Went to pay my respects. You know, since I was the last…” Her voice trailed off.

  “What a nice thing for you to do,” I said, mildly surprised.

  “Next day at the cemetery, relatives and the priest had to restrain them from attacking each other. I tell you, Britt, grief does strange things to people. I’ve been trying to talk some horse sense into them.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t get too involved. If they call again, suggest grief counseling.”

  “I doubt those macho types would go for it. But I’ll give it a try.”

  “Yeah, no point in them compounding the tragedy.”

  A sudden thought struck me as I pushed open the lobby door and I smiled.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Me, warning you not to get involved. You busy later, Trish? I need some help and some cardboard boxes.”

  She looked at me questioningly.

  “So, okay,” I said. “I got involved.”

  I itched to call McDonald when I got back to the office. The mere mention of the man’s name did that to me. I wanted to ask him to run interference for Howie, to assure that things moved along smoothly the way they should. For Howie, as well as for justice in the Carey case. A phone call would be safer than seeing him in person. Grow up, I told myself. Did I want to call because justice is so rare and people sometimes slip through the cracks, or was it an excuse to hear his voice?

  Instead, I recruited Trish, Ryan, and Lottie and made a run to a liquor store for some cardboard boxes.

  Lottie came with me in the T-Bird, and Ryan brought Trish in his car. We parked up on the roof near Howie’s lair. Better than trying to haul cartons of household possessions down flights of stairs past security.

  Lottie was in a sour mood. “What the hell is that?” She peered at the dam
aged plastic sleeve on my steering wheel. “Did you hot-wire this car?”

  “I have to get that fixed,” I mumbled.

  “This is a new car.” She eyed me suspiciously. “You did buy it, didn’t you, Britt?”

  “Of course!” I told her about Howie.

  “You let him demonstrate on your brand-new car?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Then she asked about Ellie, the neighbor Trish had saved.

  “She’s about the same, I guess. Trish said the family has hired a part-time companion to give the husband a break.”

  “I can’t see why you were so impressed and bragging on her. Call that a good deed? Sure, Trish was a real Girl Scout, but hell-all-Friday, I wouldn’t thank her if I was that poor old woman. What about quality of life? If you were in her shoes, would you want to be saved?”

  “A life is a life,” I said, quoting Trish. “You can’t let it slip away. Her husband was nowhere ready to give her up. He would have blamed himself.”

  “If it was me,” Lottie muttered, “I’d be asking Dr. Kevorkian to make a house call.”

  She was getting on my nerves, unusual for Lottie. She seemed to be pouting about something. “Well, don’t say that in front of Trish,” I told her. “I hope you’re in a better mood when we go to dinner.”

  Ryan pulled up behind us, looking over his shoulder, fearful that we’d be arrested. He stayed with the cars to act as lookout. Heat waves rose from the rooftop pavement baked by the blinding late-afternoon sun.

  “I can’t believe the kid lived up here,” Lottie said as we entered Howie’s little cubicle. It didn’t seem so cozy in broad daylight.

  “It’s not a bad view.” I folded Howie’s three pairs of socks and three pairs of underwear into his three T-shirts and packed them in a box.

  There wasn’t much to take. His paperbacks, a book tided How to Increase Your Word Power, his dictionary, and the hot plate filled one box. His clothes, toiletries, and meager cooking utensils went in another. Trish carried the bedroll. I even packed the jar with the little packets of sugar and coffee creamer.

  “Should we toss this out?” Trish wrinkled her pert nose as she held up the plastic model of the U.S.S. Enterprise. “It’s broken.”

  “No,” I said, and packed it with his clothes.

  “What in blue blazes is this mean-looking contraption?” Lottie brandished Howie’s “protection.”

  “Was he practicing for the javelin toss?” Trish asked.

  I didn’t mention I had almost been the target. “I guess we can leave that behind,” I told them, checking to see if we had missed anything.

  Everything fit in my car. When Howie called from Youth Hall I could truthfully tell him that his place was packed up, his belongings safe.

  When we got back to the newsroom, no one had even missed us. I typed up my notes for an eventual story on FMJ and company. Trish parked at the desk next to me, as usual. When I finished, I rolled my chair around to face her. She always looked so bright and eager.

  “What do you really want to do, Trish?” I asked casually. “What’s your ambition?”

  “To be famous,” she replied softly, without hesitation, “and rich.”

  “Get serious.” I leaned my chin on my hand, elbow on my desk. “You work for the News, remember? I meant what’s your goal here, at the paper?”

  “I want to do what you do, Britt.”

  I smiled. “If you do what I do, Trish, then what am I going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged and casually turned back to her reading, a Corrections Magazine that had arrived in my mail.

  Funny, I thought. I didn’t know if she was serious or joking. We had all planned to go to South Beach later for a drink and a bite to eat. Ryan was between his usual brief and intense romances and was obviously hoping Trish would succumb to his charms.

  My luck ran true to form. We planned to leave at seven-thirty. Gunfire erupted at seven-twenty. I promised to join them as soon as I could. “Sure,” Lottie said knowingly. “We’ll believe it when we see you.”

  The scene was way up in North Dade, just south of the Broward County line. The distraught family of a despondent unemployed factory worker who had been drinking and threatening suicide had called police to come and stop him. They did. However, in order to do so, they had to shoot him. Now he was just as dead as if he’d succeeded in the first place. The hysterical family insisted that it probably would have ended better had they never called the cops. No way to know for sure, but there are few situations that a policeman can’t make worse. The survivors did stop wailing and cheered up considerably, however, when it occurred to them that now they had somebody to sue. The bereaved were already consulting with one of Miami’s fine legal practitioners, a specialist in wrongful death actions, before the body was removed. I finished the story at eleven-thirty, then cruised by the Edgewater and Margaret Mayberry’s little wooden frame house.

  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.

  Chapter Ten

  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?