Act of Betrayal

by Edna Buchanan

  As I took notes and asked questions, barely aware of my visitor, he sat patiently, hopeful eyes roving the vast newsroom, its big bayfront windows, and the wide sweep of sky and Miami Beach skyline beyond.

  Finally I finished and turned back to him. “So, you have an old unsolved murder in your family?”

  “I pray to God not.” He hesitated, as though contemplating the possibility. One of the plastic earpieces on his eyeglasses was broken and held together by tape. “My son,” he said, “is missing.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Fifteen.”

  Every reporter hears this story a hundred times. “Did you file a police report?”

  “Yes.”

  The misery in his eyes made me glad to be single and childless. How can kids break their parents’ hearts like this? “What did they say?”

  “They keep calling him a runaway. We know he isn’t.” His jaw tightened. “He had no reason, he isn’t like that. He’d never…”

  “How long has he been gone?” I asked, checking my watch, attention wandering back to the story on my computer screen.

  “Two and a half years, the sixth of this month.”

  “What?” Startled, I refocused on his lace. Did I hear right?

  “Two and a half years,” he repeated, his gaze steady. “Charles disappeared on February sixth, two years ago. It was a Saturday.”

  “Have you heard anything in all this time?” I swiveled my chair to face him.

  “Not a word. Not a call or a Christmas card. This from a boy who never walked out the door without kissing his mother good-bye.”

  Punching some keys on my terminal, I saved my notes and opened an existing file. It’s slugged MISSING. In it I keep the basics on the usual cases—wandering Alzheimer’s patients, the diet doctor who disappeared after faking his own death at sea, the middle-aged couple who left a church supper eight years ago and had yet to arrive home. Miami’s missing persons, all mysteries minus the last page. I don’t know what preys on the minds of other people on hot, sleepless nights. I do know what haunts me.

  “What happened?” I asked. “A family fight? Trouble at school? Did a girlfriend dump him? Were any of his friends with him? Where was he last seen?”

  Something came alive in my visitor’s eyes as he began to answer. Maybe it was hope.

  Charles C. Randolph was an only child, a good and industrious boy, his father said. Tall and mature for his age, Charles had delivered newspapers, washed cars, and mowed lawns since sixth grade. He scored excellent grades and counted on college. His father whisked open his folder to display report cards dominated by A-pluses and glowing comments from teachers. A budding environmentalist, Charles loved reading books about sharks, aviation, and sports. Most prized was his modest baseball card collection and his best friend, Duke, a mixed-breed dog the boy had found injured and nursed back to health.

  “Did he take Duke with him?”

  The father shook his head. “That dog still sits by the front door at the same time every day, waiting for Charles to get off the school bus.”

  “How much money did your son have with him when he disappeared?”

  “No more than twelve dollars, tops. He left some money at home and he had a small bank account. He worked cleaning boats, mostly scraping barnacles, for people in some of the big waterfront houses over on Fairway Island. It was something new he had started, his own idea.”

  I smiled. “Sounds like an entrepreneur.”

  He looked past me, out the window without seeing beyond his own thoughts. “I always wanted to go into business for myself. Always told him that was the way to go. I thought he’d make it.”

  He plucked a small school picture from the folder and held it in his work-worn hand, studying it solemnly for a moment before giving it to me. There was no earring, tattoo, or gang colors. Blond and apple-cheeked, Charles wore his pale hair neatly combed. Merry blue eyes regarded the camera with the innocence of early adolescence. His smile was engaging, with a hint of prankish humor.

  “You’re sure he’s not staying somewhere, with a friend or a relative?”

  “The only one who doesn’t live here in Florida is his grandmother, Lillian, in New York”

  “Has she heard anything?”

  He shook his head. “She’s elderly and ailing. We never told her. It’d be too hard on her.”

  “She doesn’t know?”

  “What could we tell her? We don’t know anything. We drove up for three days last summer, said he was at camp. She’s always badgering us for new pictures and wanting to know why he stopped writing her like he used to. We keep lying, telling her he’s been real busy with school and baseball.”

  I glanced at the big clock mounted over the newsroom, hands rocketing relentlessly toward deadline. “Where do you work, Mr. Randolph?”

  “The Quicky Lube at Biscayne Boulevard and Sixty-eighth Street.” He fished a business card from his shirt pocket. It identified him as Jeffrey Randolph, Manager.

  “Thank you. I’m on deadline right now, have to finish a story for our street edition.”

  He swallowed, closed his file, and began to get to his feet, face resigned.

  “Then I’d like to come by and talk to you some more.”

  He reacted as though he’d heard a gunshot.

  “I’ll try to be there by four,” I continued, ignoring his startled expression, “unless I’m sidetracked by a breaking story. I’ll call you before I come.”

  Something that had been nagging me during our conversation suddenly triggered my memory. “Hold on a minute,” I said, scrolling through the MISSING file, through “overset” left out of stories about misplaced Miamians and lists with names, dates, and descriptions of others, handy for matching to the skeletal remains and unidentified corpses that surface all too frequently.

  I found it. Blond hair, blue eyes, age thirteen. Virtually the same description. That had to be what I remembered.

  “Does your son know a boy by the name of Butch Beltrán?” I asked.

  Randolph squinted. “The name Butch sounds familiar. I don’t know about that last name. Have to ask my wife.”

  “Probably no connection,” I said, checking the date. “This Butch has only been missing since March.”

  Thousands of people become missing persons in Miami every year. Most surface quickly. Some wear sheepish grins and don’t want to talk about it. Others can’t. They are found in the morgue. A few stay lost forever.

  I watched Jeffrey Randolph walk out of the newsroom. Where is his son? I wondered. Dead? If so, why hadn’t his body surfaced? Corpses tend to turn up. If he ran off to hitchhike across America it was way past time for his adventure to end, for him to call home for a bus ticket or be picked up by the cops somewhere. Missing people are real-life puzzles.

  I finished the bomb follow, wrote a short on the overturned septic tanker, and did cutlines for an aerial Lottie had shot of the traffic mess from a chopper. Then I called the medical examiner’s office.

  Unidentified corpses are buried in a trench dug by a backhoe, mourned only by jail inmates who perform the labor. They spend eternity in an unmarked common grave beside the poor whose bodies go unclaimed.

  Unidentified skeletons are boiled in meat tenderizer to remove all remaining shreds of flesh. The bones are then stored in stacked boxes.

  Photos and dental records are kept on all those unidentified. Occasionally someone is persistent enough to follow the trail of a missing person to the morgue.

  The chief investigator was in. “Have you got any young John Does?” I asked.

  “Have they got bagels in Jerusalem? Whatcha looking for?”

  “White male, thirteen to fifteen. Slender frame, blond, blue-eyed, been gone—”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  I caught my breath, heart thumping, as it always does when mysteries begin to unravel.

  “Get calls about this one all the time. Family, I think. Las
t check I made was three, four days ago. No new Juans or Johns have checked in since then.”

  I sighed. Should have realized it couldn’t be this easy. Randolph was way ahead of me.

  “What about…?”

  “I checked Broward, Palm Beach, and Monroe as well. None that fit. Lotsa Johns and Janes but not this one.”

  “If one comes in…” I said.

  “You’ll be the first to know.”

  Randolph said Coral Gables police had taken the report. The same detective, Wally Soams, handles both juvenile and missing persons. I left him a message, then called Quicky Lube to say I was on the way.

  Now I needed to escape the newsroom before some roadblock loomed. Like Gretchen Piatt, the assistant city editor from hell. She was stepping out of a meeting along with several executive types and the News’s lawyer, Mark Seybold. Wearing a nifty pin-striped power suit, she looked pleased to see me, which meant trouble. More deadly to morale than a speeding bullet, she is a known sniper, but occasionally lobs a grenade. White-hot ambition radiates from her statuesque, fashionably clad body, despite her chronic incompetence, which is matched only by her mean and officious streak. Making subordinates look foolish, with biting sarcasm or a well-timed roll of the eyes, is her specialty. She is, for reasons totally incomprehensible to me, on the corporate fast track. Eager to display her supervisory skills, she blocked my path.

  “Britt,” she said, her voice unnecessarily loud, “are you finished with your septic tank story?” Shooting sidelong glances at her colleagues, she wrinkled her nose and shuddered delicately.

  “Yes, I am,” I said. I smiled sweetly, wondering what it would cost to have the trucker dump another load next time she flipped the top on her flashy BMW convertible. Whatever the price, it would be worth it.

  “Where are you rushing off to now? Has someone been killed?” Her tone was patronizing and condescending. Tossing her hair, cut in a sleek new style, she awaited my answer.

  “Not yet.”

  She waited, an eyebrow arched, her glossy blond head cocked expectantly.

  “I’m on my way to an interview.”

  “A story on tomorrow’s budget?”

  “No, a case I’m just beginning to look into.”

  “What kind of case?”

  A troubling question. Missing teenagers are not considered bona fide news in late summer. With a new school term looming in their immediate future, some do make a run for it.

  I pressed the elevator button desperately. “An old case, like the Mary Beth Rafferty mystery.”

  They all reacted. Mark, the lawyer, bit his lip, a nervous tic he displays when not gnawing his fingernails. My initial suspect in that case had been Eric Fielding, current resident of the governors mansion. He was only a candidate when I accused him of murder.

  The elevator doors yawned open just in time and I made my getaway, wondering what perverse quirk had made me say that. Gretchen always brings out the worst in me.

  I drove north on Biscayne Boulevard, the main drag. The harsh glare of the afternoon sun seemed as merciless as the landscape. Once Miami’s street of dreams, the Boulevard greeted travelers and tourists, refugees from the cold North. Now it is lined by shabby motels, laundromats, doughnut shops, and small Haitian and Cuban restaurants.

  The Quicky Lube, a freshly painted, freestanding building, faced the Boulevard. The customers’ entrance was at the back. Motorists formed lines to drive-through bays where fast-working crews changed the oil, checked filters, fluids, wipers, tires, and batteries, vacuumed the interiors, and washed the windows—all in ten minutes. The cheerful waiting room inside had a color TV tuned to a soap opera, a half-full coffeepot, a fresh newspaper, and a window to the cashier’s cubicle.

  Randolph was printing out a credit card receipt for a waiting customer. His somber face brightened when he saw me and he waved me into the small glass-enclosed office where we could see both the crews at work and the waiting room.

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” I said, sitting in front of a metal shelf stacked with bold red and yellow cans of brake fluid and tune-up spray.

  He nodded and settled into a chair across from me, manila folder in his hand, his look less desperate. Somebody now shared his lifeboat, or had at least acknowledged his cries for help.

  “Charles was born here in Dade County?”

  “Baptist Hospital. I was there. They let fathers in the delivery room. Two days before our seventh anniversary.” He paused, then added, “My wife had had four miscarriages. This boy made up for all that, never gave us a minute’s trouble.”

  Charles, in excellent health, he said, had left as usual on a sunny Saturday morning, dressed for work in a blue denim shirt over a T-shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers.

  “Not his good high-tops, just a pair he used for working on boats,” his father said slowly. “He usually came home by four. My wife felt a little uneasy by five, five-thirty. The three of us always ate supper together and Charles knew to call if he was late. When he wasn’t home by six-thirty, we knew something was bad wrong, and we called the police. They wouldn’t send anybody out or even take any information over the phone. Said it’s not department policy to make a report until somebody is missing for more than twenty-four hours.” He sighed. “We called all of Charles’s friends. One had seen him ‘bout ten-thirty that morning. Said Charles was walking along Garden Drive on Fairway Island, drinking a can of Dr Pepper, just beyond a house where we know he cleaned a sports-fishing boat. We never found a soul who saw him again. I went over to the place he’d been to last. The owner was out of town but the housekeeper said he’d cleaned the boat and washed down the dock. She had given him the soda pop before he left. I drove around there, looking for a couple hours, then went home to wait. That,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “was one rough night.”

  His gaze made it clear that that bad night had stretched into many.

  “We called the police again next morning.” He smiled bitterly. “They didn’t want to take a report on Sunday. A sergeant told me he had boys of his own, said this kind of thing is common. Not with my boy, I told him. He said to check with Charles’s friends and give it till Monday morning.”

  “By that time,” I murmured, “the trail was cold.”

  “Had I known then,” he said, nodding. “What we needed was a search, with lights and dogs…” He trailed off. “But they were the professionals, we had to listen to them.”

  “Did you know your son’s next stop? Was he on his way to clean another boat?”

  He nodded again, clearing his throat. “Went door-to-door ourselves. We didn’t know exact addresses, Charles kept them in a little notebook he always carried. He must have had it with him. We just knew the neighborhood. Found two big houses where he should have been that day. People said he never came.” He took a folded handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose before resuming. “They all told us what a polite boy he is and what a good worker.”

  “You have the addresses?”

  “Right here.” He removed a sheet of lined paper from his folder. “The first is the one we know he was at; he never got to the other two.”

  “Good,” I said, studying them. “So we know that he disappeared somewhere in about a half-mile stretch of Garden Drive.”

  “The two he never got to was that Cuban singer, Vera Verela, and that other fella, Reyes, who’s in the news all the time.”

  I nodded, aware of both. “And the one he left?”

  “A doctor, some kind of scientific researcher, travels to Canada a lot. He was out of town at the time. Had a thirty-one-foot sportfisherman, a blue and white Rampage with a flying bridge. Too busy to use it much, he said. He sold it, not long after. I went back and met the man later. Said Charles reminded him of his sons.”

  “You think that maybe he arrived at the second house, started work, and then something happened? Was he a good swimmer?”

  Bodies occasionally surface around local marin
as, people who live or work aboard boats, usually partyers with a snootful who fall into the water unseen, usually at night.

  “He’s an excellent swimmer, knows to be careful around boats and the water. I’m not saying it couldn’t have happened,” Randolph said, rubbing his chin, “but if so, where is he?”

  True. Bodies usually surface within thirty-six hours. Those trapped under docks or snagged on debris at the bottom are eventually freed by winds, wakes, and tides.

  “Were the cops aware of anything unusual happening in the neighborhood that morning?”

  “Like what?” Randolph stood for a moment to slide the glass window closed because of a distraction on the other side where an employee was explaining to a customer that if the transmission is not serviced at thirty thousand miles the “gasket on the pan could crack and the engine could seize up on you.”

  I shrugged. “Traffic accident? Film crews shooting a movie, bikers headed to a rally, a robbery, any kind of disturbance—even a stolen car, anything that might tie in somehow, anything that Charles might have stumbled upon or become involved in.”

  “I didn’t hear about anything like that,” he said, frowning, “and believe me, I combed every bush and turned over every rock in that neighborhood to the point where police were stopping me as a suspicious person. I would think that our detective must have checked that out.”

  “The Gables detective?” I hated to burst his belief like a balloon, but most missing persons detectives do little more than write reports. Sometimes they even slip up on that. Rarely do they leave the office. Unless foul play is obvious or an infant or small child is missing, nobody hits the street to investigate, and in those cases homicide usually takes over.

  “No, our private investigator,” Randolph said. “I hired him after the second week, when the police wouldn’t do anything. The man said that for fifteen thousand dollars he could bring Charles home. We managed to scrape together seven thousand. He took it and did nothing. You’re asking me more questions than he ever did.”

  I copied the phone number of the PI. “Hope you have better luck with him than we did. He stopped answering our calls,” Randolph said.