Miami, It's Murder

by Edna Buchanan

  Miami, It's Murder

  A Britt Montero Mystery

  Edna Buchanan

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1994 by Edna Buchanan

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition April 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-24-44

  More from Edna Buchanan

  Britt Montero Mysteries

  Contents Under Pressure

  Miami, It’s Murder

  Suitable For Framing

  Act Of Betrayal

  Margin of Error

  Fiction

  Nobody Lives Forever

  Non-Fiction

  Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder

  Never Let Them See You Cry

  For Marilyn Lane, real friend.

  Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered,

  and nothing secret what will not become known.

  —Luke 12:2, New Revised Standard Version

  Chapter 1

  He was the man every woman dreams about—in her worst nightmares. By the first day of summer, he was stalking the city, a serial rapist attacking women in the rest rooms of downtown office buildings. He appeared and disappeared like a wraith, seen only by his terrified victims, six so far.

  It was another crazy Miami summer. The B.O. Bandit, a bank robber with a distinctively bad body odor, was on a bank-a-day binge, apparently not even pausing long enough to shower. Police and frustrated FBI agents seemed unable to sniff him out. A city commissioner who solicited sex from an undercover policeman claimed to arresting officers that he was merely researching social problems. A ravenous forty-pound piranha was discovered circling expectantly in the pool of a beachfront hotel. Then snow fell from the sky (it plummets from airplanes in Miami)—half a ton of cocaine crashed through the roof of a Baptist church, jettisoned by the crew of a Cessna 310 under hot pursuit by U.S. Customs aircraft. And when Miami Beach bungee jumpers were buzzed by the crew of a police chopper, they filed complaints with internal affairs and the FAA.

  Something about our sultry summers and their madness energizes me. I need less sleep, and I wake earlier from technicolor dreams to greet spectacular dawns with no need of an alarm clock. That’s good, because summer accelerates the action on my beat, which is always busy.

  I had nearly finished the story about the grounded copter crew when the newsroom police desk reported an apparent drowning on one of the Beach islands. I snatched up a notebook and my purse, eager for any excuse to escape the office. Gretchen Platt, the assistant city editor from hell, was in the slot today and had been hovering like a foreboding presence over my desk.

  “I better get out there and find out what happened,” I told Gretchen.

  “A drowning, Britt?” She wrinkled her classic nose. Gretchen likes to avoid publishing negative news. Somebody might be offended. Somebody important. Like the Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Development Association, or the Tourist Development Authority. Blond, beautiful, and dressed for the boardroom, she is the image of success, the hard-driving young executive plugged into the pipeline to power. The truth is she would not recognize a good story if it bit her on the ankle. Her idea of news is a puff piece promoting some local organization or cultural event.

  “It’s in an exclusive neighborhood,” I offered, “on one of the residential islands. You never know who it might be, and it’s just a few minutes away. It may be foul play. Doesn’t hurt to check it out.”

  “Well, come right back,” she said doubtfully. “I may have an assignment for you.”

  That worried me. Far better to plow my fertile beat and generate my own stories than leave myself open to Gretchen’s whims and brainstorms.

  I backed toward the elevator trying to tune out her instructions and admonitions, nodding my head all the while like one of those little doggies in the back window of a car.

  It was always a relief to break out of that huge building with its meat-locker temperatures and careen into the afternoon air, even when the temperature was a muggy 96 degrees and the air conditioner in my six-year-old T-Bird was balky. The wet blanket of soft air warmed my chilled bones. I drove east across the Venetian Causeway, where purple bougainvillea and Mexican flame vines compete in a race to see which can be more spectacular. They hugged stone walls and railings beneath royal poinciana trees in brilliant scarlet bloom.

  The narrow span linked a chain of man-made residential islands with romantic Italian names: San Marco, San Marino, Dilido, and Rivo Alto. Passing the sign that said Dilido I did a double take, winced, and shook my head. Some sicko with a can of spray paint had again blacked out the second i.

  Red warning lights flashed and the alarm bell sounded as I approached the east drawbridge, so I floored it, roaring across with just a few feet to spare. I watched in my rearview mirror as narrow wooden barricades descended behind me and the bridge opened for a tall-masted schooner luffing between the channel markers on the south side of the bridge. These graceful sailboats skimming so silently across the water waste more gasoline than powerboats. Eight hundred cars are left to idle and overheat, waiting at a drawbridge opened to accommodate a single vessel.

  The police scanner in my car spit out an exchange on the Beach frequency. The homicide detective at the scene changed the call from a drowning to a possible electrocution. He asked for the medical examiner’s ETA (estimated time of arrival), and dispatch replied that the ME was en route. Interesting, I thought, turning left onto Sunset Island. My pulse quickened in recognition. I had chased a story here before. Could it be? Yes! The same house. Two blue-and-whites out front, one leaving. Rescue already gone. The electronically operated iron security gates stood open in a vacant yawn. No yellow rope, no crowd to be controlled. This was not that kind of neighborhood. Homes here are walled or fenced in by wrought iron. Most owners leave town for the summer. Those who do not would not step out into the afternoon heat to see World War III, much less a single dead body. A familiar Chrysler closed in behind me, driven by a woman with frizzy red hair. Lottie Dane had apparently overheard the radio report and had also swung by to check it out.

  “You know who lives here?” I greeted her.

  She shook her head. A Nikon 8008 with a long lens was slung over her right shoulder. The pockets of her loose khaki vest were stuffed with protruding orange and black film canisters.

  “Dieter Steiner!” I said. “I came out here once to try to interview him before he got indicted for murdering his third wife. He wouldn’t open the gate and threatened to call my editors—and the police,” I said.

  Bad things had happened to the brides of Dieter Steiner. Though not quite Bluebeard, the man was off to a good start. He had lost his first wife while scuba diving. He climbed into the boat, he said, turned, and she was gone. Her body surfaced later. No one suspected anything at the time. Accidents happen. Wife number two had apparently shifted her car into drive instead of reverse and accelerated while attempting to back out of a space on the sixth floor of a multistory downtown parking garage. Her Mercedes convertible shot forward, crashed the barrier, and plummeted to the pavement below, also killing an elderly pedestrian
waiting for a bus. Another tragic accident.

  “The self-made widower?” she said.

  “Yup.”

  “I’ll be go-to-helled.” We stared at each other.

  “Doesn’t mean it’s him,” I said. “Could be a new gal pal, a workman, or his gardener, or his—”

  A Miami Beach detective named Greg Wallace came strolling toward us from around the back of the house. He was hot, sweaty—and grinning.

  “It is Steiner!” I said. “Look at that cop’s face.”

  “Hell-all-Friday,” Lottie said and checked her camera.

  “Where is he?” I asked the detective.

  “You already heard?” He jerked his head toward the back of the house and led us along a stamped concrete walkway that angled around the lushly landscaped side of the building.

  Dieter Steiner lay on his back on the wooden dock, a quickly drying puddle surrounding his sodden sun-bronzed body. His arrogance was gone. So was the shiny gleam of his single gold earring, clouded by salt water. Scattered nearby were rubber gloves and sticky peels off the backs of EKG pads, discarded by paramedics who had tried to revive him. He wore multicolor shorts and no shirt. His fists were clenched, his mouth foam-flecked. His fly was open.

  We stood silent for a moment. The incoming tide made slapping, sucking sounds beneath the dock. “Hard to see what all those women saw in him,” Lottie finally said.

  Police had received the call via ship-to-shore radio telephone. A family on an outing aboard their twenty-four-foot Bertram had seen Steiner urinating off his dock into the bay. Moments later they heard him cry out, then plunge into the water.

  “Neighbors say he made it a habit,” Greg said.

  “What?” I asked, taking notes.

  “Exposing himself, using the bay for a bathroom. He usually did it in front of boaters. Especially if women were aboard. Maybe he was objecting to their wakes or trying to tell ’em they were coming too close.”

  “Or maybe he was just a jerk,” I said.

  “One less to worry about,” he answered.

  “What happened?” I asked the detective. “Was he under the influence? Or do you think he just got dizzy and fell?”

  “That’s what we thought at first,” he said, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. “But the people on the boat saw him fall, circled, came back, fished him out, and tried CPR. No dice. I think I know why.”

  He looked significantly at a Budweiser Beer sign mounted on the dock.

  “I think it was electricity. Ain’t that something? The state didn’t have to do it. He zapped himself.”

  “But how?”

  “The ME will say for sure, but both the folks trying to revive him and one of the medics got zinged when they touched that pole.” He indicated one of four supporting a striped canvas awning over the dock. The innocent-looking pole suddenly beckoned, as alluring as a wall wearing a wet paint sign. “Don’t touch it,” he warned.

  “Why would it kill him and not them?”

  “He was holding on to the pole that light’s wired to—took a whiz in the water and got zapped.”

  I winced, wondering why men have the immediate urge to unzip and urinate whenever they see a large body of water. A surprising percentage of Miami’s male drowning victims are fished out fully dressed, their pants open.

  Lottie wondered the same thing. “Greg?” she asked. “Why do you guys always do that?”

  “What?” Sweat banded his collar and ringed his armpits. He was printing carefully into the spaces on a report attached to his clipboard.

  “You know, into the ocean and the bay, canals and pools?”

  He looked irritated, stopped writing, and tugged at his collar with one finger. “Hell, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Because it’s there, I guess.”

  “They throw beer cans and pee into the water—’cause it’s there?” repeated Lottie.

  “It must be territorial,” I said, shaking my head. “Like dogs lifting their legs to mark trees and fire hydrants.”

  Greg looked exasperated. “Hey, it’s just that most guys are beer drinkers and ready to take a leak anytime the opportunity presents itself.”

  “It’s probably a latent desire to show their wienie anytime the opportunity presents itself,” Lottie declared.

  “Baloney! It’s just one of those things.” Greg’s voice was rising. “God’s will.”

  “Poetic justice, if nothing else,” I said soothingly. “Especially if he was electrocuted. He was sentenced to the chair. The governor came this close to signing his death warrant before Steiner won his new trial. He’s been living well.” I turned, assessing the expansive pool patio area and the rambling two-story house, with big picture windows and a second-floor terrace bordered by ornate wrought-iron railings.

  “Nice place,” the detective agreed, “but he scrimped on the wiring. That was his mistake. Shoulda had it done right, by a pro. Don’t touch a thing, okay?” He walked back out toward the front of the house to greet Dr. Vernon Duffy, one of Dade County’s associate medical examiners.

  Dr. Duffy, a New Hampshire transplant, looked wilted in the steamy heat. He carried his equipment in a foam-lined aluminum camera case. A voltmeter was tucked in an inside pocket, the electrodes dangling below the hem of his shapeless sports jacket. He reminded me of a nerdy high school friend of mine, now a NASA scientist. Slightly stooped and pale, Duffy spends too much time in the morgue. He nodded perfunctorily to me and Lottie, as though expecting us to be there, then glanced toward the body.

  “Is that who I hear it is?”

  “Was him,” Greg said. “Guess his winning streak couldn’t last forever.”

  “They never do,” Duffy said, taking out the voltmeter.

  “Won’t be no tears shed over at City of Miami homicide,” Greg said. “Or the state attorney’s office. It really pissed them off when he walked.”

  Duffy stooped to touch the voltmeter’s positive red probe to the base of the galvanized pole and dropped the negative black probe into the bay water. The needle swung to 120 volts. The beer sign, the type usually displayed in bars and cocktail lounges, was lit by a fluorescent bulb and hung from the metal support structure by two rusted metal brackets.

  “Neither that light nor the box with the outlet is meant for outdoor use,” he said, his eyes trailing the extension cord to a utility shed near the dock. “Didn’t even have the wire grounded. Why would he use a sloppy hookup like that?”

  “Lazy,” Greg said. “Or just dumb. Look at that.” There was a newer outlet, a three-prong that would have accommodated the ground wire, just a few feet away, near the davits for Steiner’s boat, a high-powered blue-and-white eighteen-foot Custom Craft with PHOTOG painted on the prow. “He shoulda disconnected that old line.”

  “Looks like he touched the energized pole and grounded through the urine stream. The path of electricity went from his arm to his penis. I recall a similar case in Chicago,” Duffy said, examining Steiner’s feet, lifting one, then the other. He straightened up. “A man was electrocuted when he urinated onto the third rail in the subway system: knocked him right off the platform.”

  Greg nodded, his expression softened into one of fond reminiscence. “Yeah, when I was little, we talked another kid into peeing into a running lawn mower. The electricity went right up the stream of urine and knocked him on his ass.”

  I took a deep breath and stared at Lottie, who crossed her eyes.

  As I turned to go back to the paper and write my story for the state edition, Lottie was shooting a picture of Steiner still flat on his back, gazing into the sun. “What’s that for?” I muttered. “You know they’ll never put a picture of an uncovered corpse in the morning paper.”

  She cut her eyes at me. “For your friend Danny Boy. Thought he’d like a last look at Steiner.”

  She was probably right. That’s Lottie, always thoughtful.

  Detective Daniel P. Flood had arrested Steiner and proved the man
had murdered his wife. I covered the story from start to finish. Dan’s strong case convicted Steiner and sent him to Death Row—but could not keep him there. The defense had won a new trial based on the judge’s flawed charges to the jury, and the second time around was a no-go: witnesses had died, disappeared, become amnesiacs or oddly reticent. The defendant had walked away a free man.

  It was unusual to leave a sudden death scene where there were no tears. Everybody seemed almost cheerful, I thought, unlocking the T-Bird. Then another player arrived, parking her open green Jaguar convertible on the swale. The young woman adjusted her sunglasses and frowned at the patrol car, the detective’s unmarked, and the medical examiner’s vehicle blocking the driveway. She wore white tennis shorts with a matching pullover. Her legs were long and tanned.

  She paused, staring at me, her expression puzzled, and glanced toward the back of the house where slanted sunlight shimmered off the glowing green foliage.

  “Where’s Dieter?” She studied me curiously.

  “Are you a friend?” I asked quietly. “Something’s happened.”

  Her eyes strayed over my shoulder.

  “Don’t go back there,” I warned.

  “Why, what’s going on?” She turned to look at me for a moment and didn’t like what she saw. A shadow crept into her widening eyes.

  I stepped in front of her, reaching for her arm. “An accident. You mustn’t go…”

  She eluded me and broke into a run, loping around the shaded side of the house.

  “Wait!” But she didn’t hear me. She had already rounded the corner, was in sight of the dock, and had begun a high-pitched cry that rose and fell with her footfalls.

  “No-o-o-o!”

  I followed. The detective caught her wrists, speaking in a low voice, trying to step between her and the body, but her knees buckled and she was falling.