Suitable for Framing

by Edna Buchanan

  “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.

  “I saw the story in the paper.”

  “What a crock.” He shrugged in disdain. “Don’t believe half of what you read, and take the other half with a grain of salt.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “They got it wrong?”

  “As usual,” he said. “They just write what they want. All that crap about the reporter who followed her up there, tried to talk her out of it, tried to stop her.” He looked knowingly at me. “All bullshit.”

  “How so?” I affected my best puzzled expression.

  “I seen ’em come outa the building together, arm in arm, walk across the street, get on the elevator. I figured they was going for a car, but the elevator went straight to the top. Nobody parks way up there. I thought maybe the elevator was malfunctioning again. I started up, but before I could even check, here she comes over the side. Whap!”

  I winced as his palms came together, simulating the sound of flesh meeting pavement.

  “The other one, the reporter I guess, steps off the elevator a minute later, dainty as you please. I can tell you, they didn’t have no big discussion like that stuff on the front page. Bullshit. They wasn’t up there thirty
seconds before she broke the law of gravity. Or proved it.”

  “I thought the reporter said she ran down the stairs.”

  “Guess that looked better in print.”

  “Was she upset when she got off the elevator?”

  “Nah. Looked around, cool as a cucumber. Took her time strolling to that pay phone right over there.”

  “Did she see you?”

  “Evidently not, judging from what she wrote.”

  “Did you give a statement to the police?”

  “Nah.” He looked sheepish. “I hadda go down to the garage on Tenth Street. You gotta check in, punch a clock at every building on schedule. You get involved with the police, you screw up the whole shift, hafta write reports. It ain’t worth it. I got trouble enough trying to write these time sheets. Got rheumatoid arthritis. That’s why I hadda give up a better job to move down here.”

  He must have seen reproach in my eyes.

  “If it woulda done her any good, I’da stayed. But it wouldn’t’ve brought her back to life.”

  “What do you think really happened up there?”

  He shrugged. “Musta took a running leap soon as they got there.”

  “Think it could have been foul play? That she was pushed?”

  He looked shocked, totally taken aback at the suggestion. And the man’s chosen profession is security, I thought.

  “Why would somebody do that? Only one up there was the reporter. Cute little thing, she wouldn’t be capable … Why would she do that?”

  I wrote down his badge number and the name off the metal plate pinned to his pocket

  There was no place else to go, then, but home. I dreaded it but found two surprises waiting: Lottie and Onnie, sharing a cup of tea with Mrs. Goldstein in her apartment. They opened the door and called when they saw me inserting my key in the lock.

  “Where the hell were you?” Lottie hugged my neck.

  Onnie did too. “You okay?” she murmured. “Sorry about Howie.”

  “Me too,” I gasped, and began to weep, big choking sobs. I had wanted to be alone, but warm, caring friends were a comfort.

  The concern in their faces touched me. Mrs. Goldstein, pushing eighty and born in the Ukraine. Onnie, a thirty-year-old Miami-born black woman, tall and angular with skin the color of burned toast Lottie, tough and Texas born, with her cowboy boots and frizzy red hair. And me, of course, the daughter of a martyred Cuban freedom fighter or executed political terrorist depending on where you stand. What a group we are, I thought. Friends are the family we choose for ourselves. I’m lucky to have them.

  They had brought pizza, a fragrant pie stashed in Mrs. Goldstein’s oven. “We got your favorite, extra tomatoes and fresh mushrooms,” Lottie said.

  My stomach churned. No way could I eat anything, but I was glad they were there.

  We trouped to my apartment Lottie carrying the pizza. Mrs. Goldstein stayed behind to wait for her husband, who was off on an errand.

  It didn’t help my remorseful state of mind to see Howie’s possessions still in cardboard boxes in my living room.

  “Want me to get rid of those for you?” Lottie said quietly.

  “No!” I said, indignant. “Those are all his belongings.”

  “I was there, Britt. I helped you pack ’em. There’s nothing of value.”

  “I’ll think about it later.”

  I numbly sipped coffee while they ate the pizza and drank lite beers. Lottie swigged hers from the bottle while Onnie sipped primly from a glass. “I know you’ll think I’m crazy,” I began. “And if you repeat any of this, I’ll be fired.” Then I told them everything.

  They exchanged dubious glances several times.

  Maybe they didn’t believe me, but hopefully they gave me the benefit of the doubt. I saved the security guard and Miguel for last.

  “They could be lying,” Lottie said. “Miguel to save himself and the guard just to hear himself talk. If he saw a phony story in the newspaper, why didn’t he call and ask for an editor?”

  “He doesn’t have a clue about journalistic ethics or how a newspaper operates.”

  “If all you suspect is true,” Lottie said slowly, “then Trish has been monitoring and erasing your messages.”

  “How could she? The system’s pretty tight,” Onnie said.

  “Unless you made your four-digit code something real easy to guess, your date of birth, your phone number, or your address,” Lottie said. “A lotta people make the mistake of doing that ’cause it’s easier to remember.” They both watched me expectantly.

  “Worse than that,” I said. “I was never careful. Hell, she sat next to me, hanging over my shoulder half the time. I trusted her. I think I even asked her to retrieve messages for me a couple of times when I was on deadline.”

  They groaned.

  “Who’d have thought,” I said.

  “You’ve changed it?” Lottie said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Change it again,” she said. “To think,” she added, “I was mad as a yard dog for a while, wanted to bite myself, ’cause you and Trish were so thick. Thought I’d lost a friend.”

  “I’m not that easy to lose.” I remembered how bitchy she’d been.

  “I thought I had a choice piece of gossip,” Onnie said, eyeing the last piece of pizza, “but you’re a hard act to follow.”

  “Tell us,” Lottie demanded.

  “It’s said that Trish slept with Abel Fellows to land the newsroom job.”

  “What? I warned her about him! Told her he’d come on to her if he had the chance.”

  “Maybe she used that information to her advantage. He apparently boasted to a buddy about it.” She looked coyly from Lottie to me. “Sheila, from personnel, confirmed that he’s the one who recommended her hiring.”

  “I thought it was me, pushing her to Fred Douglas.”

  “Either way,” Onnie said wryly, “you helped her into the newsroom.”

  “And look what she’s done,” I said, thinking of Howie. “That bitch.”

  “May her bones be broken more than the Ten Commandments,” Onnie said, and lifted her glass.

  “Proves what I always say,” Lottie muttered. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

  She excused herself to visit the bathroom and returned swinging a shimmery silver chain. “Where’d you git this, Britt? Found it on your bureau.”

  “What is it?” Onnie turned from the microwave, where she was zapping the last slice of pizza.

  I sighed. “Toss it in the garbage. It’s supposed to be a dream catcher. My life’s been a nightmare since I got it. A Comanche friend of Trish’s made it for her.” I caught the circular pendant with its silver feather, then passed it over for Onnie to examine. “She gave to me when she got hired. It’s one of a kind.”

  “Hell, no, it ain’t!” Lottie said. “I just wondered when you started shopping by mail too.” She is addicted. “I see these in them New Age catalogs all the time, from two or three different mail-order houses. Sell ’em by the thousands. But it ain’t Comanche. It’s Ojibway. Hell, she didn’t even get the tribe right.”

  I watched them as they left, wondering what they would say about me on the way home. My best friends in the world. Did they believe me, or were they measuring me for a rubber room?

  Chapter Seventeen

  I called Officer Annalee Watson from home next morning. She was not in, but she got back to me in a few minutes.

  “How can I help you?” Her tone was distant and not at all helpful.

  “I wondered how the twins were doing.”

  “Fine. HRS has left them in the custody of the mother and grandmother, but they’re under the supervision of a social worker and Janice has to attend parenting classes. Don’t know how much she’ll retain. She may have her tubes tied.”

  “Makes sense to me.”

  “Is that all?” She sounded decidedly cool.

  “No, actually it isn’
t. I wanted to ask why you didn’t call me when the twins were found.”

  “I did,” she shot back, annoyed and defensive. “I was surprised you weren’t interested. The day before it seemed like you were.”

  “I was. What gave you the impression that I wasn’t?”

  “I called you, left a message, and was about to dial your beeper number when the other reporter, Trish, returned the call. She said you were too busy on another assignment and had asked her to handle it.”

  “That wasn’t true. You’re sure you called my number?”

  “The one on the card you gave me,” she said impatiently.

  “Didn’t you find it odd that somebody else returned the message?” My messages obviously had been monitored.

  “No,” she snapped, “you both work for the same paper. Look.” She lowered her voice. “I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

  “Why not?”

  “You wouldn’t win any popularity contests around here at the moment, if you catch my drift.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I mean, I’m gonna take a lotta crap, anybody hears me talking to you. Your little escapade, trying to help a cop killer get away. Everybody’s talking about it.”

  “What?”

  “Doesn’t enhance your reputation as a reporter.”

  “Officer Watson, the kid was a passenger in the car that day and never had a gun. He wanted me to help him surrender. That’s what I was doing when somebody, probably the same person who’s been sliming me, dropped a dime and we were surrounded. He was a valuable witness who could have helped put the cop killer in the electric chair.”

  “Well, the word is out that a cop jilted you and now you’re a woman scorned with a hard-on for law enforcement.”

  “Good grief! I used to see a police officer, sure. The conflict in our jobs is what keeps us apart. We’re still good friends. Before you form any opinion, please ask some police officers who know me, who’ve dealt with me in the past.” I took a deep breath. “I don’t think you really believe these rumors or you wouldn’t have tipped me off about them. Thanks for being up front with me.”