Act of Betrayal

by Edna Buchanan

  “Wait here,” I told Seth outside. Inside, a trauma team worked on the most serious victim, gut shot but still conscious. Woodruff hoped to talk to him before he went to surgery. I sidled up beside the detective and copied the name, Clement Blake, off the victims driver’s license in Woodruff s hand.

  “Think this is related to that incident last week?”

  “Desmond Whitaker?” the detective asked.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Could be,” he said. “I been meaning to chat with him about the real Desmond Whitaker, a New York resident who lost his car and his wallet in a robbery two months ago.”

  “So, who is our Desmond Whitaker?”

  “That’s what I wanna ask him. Hey,” he said. “Speak of the devil.”

  A gaunt man in a hospital gown was slow-stepping down the hallway. He carried his IV bottle and dragged a rack of tubes to which he was attached.

  “That’s him. The guy shot last week,” Woodruff said. “Looks a helluva lot better.” Desmond Whitaker, or whoever he was, stared at the wounded man being worked on.

  “That’s the man who shot me!” he screamed, pointing with an arm that still trailed an IV tube.

  He lurched forward, still shrieking. A nurse blocked him, another called security.

  “Hope they don’t put them in the same room,” I said.

  “Hell, I gotta go talk to him,” Woodruff said, as his walkie crackled to life. The true owner of the driver’s license in his hand was in jail, the dispatcher informed him, and had been for two weeks. “You’re sure?” Woodruff asked.

  “That’s affirmative,” she replied.

  A doctor signaled the detective that he could take a moment with the patient. “Who shot you?” the detective asked.

  A shrug.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Clement Blake,” he muttered weakly.

  “Clement Blake is in jail. You’ve got his ID. What’s your name?”

  The man sighed. “Clive, Clive Steadman,” he said, and was whisked away to surgery.

  The detective saw me scribble the name. “Not so fast,” he said, frowning. “Clive Steadman was that homicide victim on the Interstate last month.”

  I remembered. Dead driver, careening car, wounded passengers who ran away.

  Now I frowned. “But we have to straighten these IDs out by deadline,” I snapped, “for my story and Lottie’s pictures.”

  The detective covered his bloodshot eyes with his sunglasses. “When you do that,” he muttered, “let me know.”

  A chubby cop named Peterson walked up and dealt out the driver’s licenses of the other victims like playing cards on the counter at the nurses’ station. “Lookit this,” he said to Woodruff “Two a these guys have the same name and DOB but the pictures are different. Whadaya make a that?”

  Woodruff muttered curses as Peterson turned to me.

  “Hey, Britt, seen your story today. You sure you got that missing kid’s name right?”

  “What?”

  “Coulda sworn that was the same missing persons case I took the initial report on when I worked south. Same description. But that wasn’t the kid’s name.”

  “Cute,” I said, and took off. Cops love to tease but I was in no mood to play.

  The only people outside the ER were ambulance attendants unloading an elderly woman who had fallen at a nursing home.

  “Dammit, Seth,” I muttered, looking both ways. “Where are you?”

  The ambulance attendants hadn’t seen him. I trudged back to my T-Bird, annoyed. He wasn’t there either. Had he been older, I would let him find his own way home. But he was only twelve, and a not-so-savory neighborhood surrounded the bustling hospital complex.

  I marched back into the ER. Woodruff and two other cops were huddled over paperwork “Did you see that kid I was with, the one with the camera?”

  “You mean Jimmy Olson?” Woodruff said.

  They had not seen him.

  Neither had a security guard at the front desk.

  Seth was gone.

  Increasing alarm had replaced my anger. What would I say to Mrs. Goldstein? “Sorry, I lost your grandson”? Where could he be? He had promised to wait right there. I thought of young Charles Randolph. What did that Gables detective say?

  “Poufff.”

  I dashed back outside. Nothing. The morgue, I thought frantically. He had talked all morning about going to the morgue. The medical examiners office is right around the corner, at Number One Bob Hope Road. I piled into the T-Bird, hands shaking as I turned the key. I backed out of the space and was turning left when I caught sight of Seth in my rearview, a can of Coke in one hand, a bag of chips in the other.

  “Hey!” He slid breathlessly into the seat beside me. “Were you gonna leave without me?”

  “Damn straight.” My knees were weak with relief and I fought the urge to hug him. “Don’t you ever do that to me again, Seth.”

  I left him in the darkroom helping Lottie and listening to her police scanners. The phone at my desk was ringing. “Would have called this morning,” McDonald said, as I settled back in my chair, glad to hear his voice, “but I had to go look for my car.”

  “The Cherokee? What happened? Was it stolen?”

  “Nah, long story. One of my classmates is a Texas Ranger. Big, rugged, with hands like a blacksmith. Parties hard. Borrowed the Cherokee Friday night. Shows up this morning and when I asked where he parked it, he shoots me a blank. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he says. ‘Did I have your car? Shit, I came home in a cab.’”

  “Oh, no.” I remembered many warm moments on hot nights in that Jeep Cherokee.

  “Went downtown to look for it. Found it parked outside Jim Dandy’s, a rowdy bar with sawdust floors. Not a scratch. This guy’s a real character. Somebody asked in class the other day what they do down on the border when somebody runs from them. He said, ‘You shoot ‘im, right where the suspenders cross.’”

  “Nice.” I winced. “Maybe he could help with our immigration problem. Did you say Texas? Is he married?”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe I know just the woman for him.”

  “Lottie?”

  “Why not?”

  “Thought she was seeing some lawyer.”

  “Competition is healthy.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Sure,” I teased.

  My description of the car bombing and the gun battle at the Miami Dream Motel made him homesick, or so he said. He sounded eager for local news and police gossip, so I filled him in and read him my Charles Randolph story.

  “Don’t know why, but that case seems to ring a bell.”

  “He’d never been in any trouble.”

  “Find out if Gables ever sent a tech to the house to try to raise a set of prints off his belongings. Be a shame if none existed.”

  “They didn’t,” I said. “Sounds like the detective did as little as possible.”

  “Miss you,” he said, as romantic as he ever got on the telephone.

  “Three months to go.” I blew him a kiss.

  “Maybe not,” he murmured. “We may get a long weekend at Labor Day. Keep the dates open, I could fly down.”

  “Sounds good to me. I can put in for comp time.”

  I wondered later why I sounded so breezy when I really longed for the man. This time will be different, I promised myself. We’d work at keeping our jobs from becoming a conflict between us. He had never asked if I was seeing anyone else as he had suggested. Did he assume I was? Was he? Was that why he asked me to keep the dates open? Was there more than miles between us? Luckily, I had no time to box shadows.

  Next on my list of messages to return was a woman whose only interest in the Charles Randolph case was that her son and his best friend were also missing. Long gone, presumed dead. A Drug Enforcement agent had unofficially informed her that the two were shot and deep-sixed during a drug-smuggling deal off Key West. That was
twelve years ago but, despite her sons history of drug arrests, she could not accept it.

  “Isn’t there a chance,” she asked, “that he’s alive and has been working undercover for the government all these years?”

  She didn’t like my answer, though I couched it as gently as possible.

  “I called about the Randolph boy,” the next woman said. She sounded congested, as though she had a cold. “I’m sorry to bother you but I can’t help it. I saw his picture this morning and…” She snorted and blew her nose. “I’m sorry, I’ve been crying.”

  “Do you know him?” I rolled my chair to my terminal to take notes.

  “No,” she whispered. “But it was such a shock when I opened the paper. He looks so much like my son.”

  “Oh.” Disappointed, my eyes roved down the list to the next message.

  “David has been missing for four years.”

  Something cold rippled down my spine.

  “What happened?”

  “His dad and I are divorced. He was spending the weekend with his father when they quarreled and he stormed out. It was over something stupid. You know how kids are. He had no money on him and he apparently tried to hitchhike back to my house in Surfside. We never saw him again.”

  David Clower was twelve, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and slender.

  After we talked, I reopened my MISSING file and stared at the entry for Butch Beltrán. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, and slender, missing since March.

  What the hell was going on here?

  4

  I woke up next morning still thinking about the missing boys. The early news reported that the third hurricane of the season, which had been barreling down on Bermuda, had veered away and was dying at sea. Weather watchers were already scrutinizing a new low-pressure wave that had spiraled into the Atlantic off Senegal, on the west coast of Africa. But that was thousands of miles away in the earth’s atmospheric cauldron where the recipe—heated sea temperature, barometric pressure, wind direction, and other variables—must mix just so to spawn a storm. As many as a hundred and twenty-five tropical waves occur during a busy season. About ten become tropical depressions. Of the six that spin into tropical storms, about four escalate into hurricanes.

  My mother called before breakfast. “What have you been doing, darling? Why are you too busy to return my calls?” Without waiting for an answer, she began bubbling over about the new winter fashions. What I yearn for this time of year is a bikini and a beach. Her spirited spiel about skinny belts, saucy patent mules, and forties-styled suits, which would be featured in the fashion shows she was coordinating, failed to interest me.

  My own shop talk, when she did pause for breath, inspired the same nonreaction—until I mentioned the Alex Aguirre bombing.

  “I saw it on TV,” she said. “Those awful people, so brutal…”

  “Did you see my story?” I sounded too eager, but if my own mother didn’t read my stories, who would?

  “You know how I feel about crime and violence,” she said, skirting my question.

  “I cover the police beat, Mom.” I sounded like a child seeking approval, but couldn’t help myself.

  “When will you be promoted to something more positive?”

  “That’s not how it works. I love my beat,” I explained, for what must have been the ten thousandth time. “That’s where the best stories are, people stories. It’s a gold mine for a reporter. You can expose the bad guys, change things, make a difference.”

  “Nothing changes, Britt. You can’t save the world. I thought after what almost happened to you, when that other reporter was killed and you were wrongly blamed, you would consider yourself and those who care about you. Common sense says you can’t keep courting disaster,” she cautioned, for what had to be the twenty thousandth time to me, and to my father before me. Some things do not change.

  She heard my sigh and abruptly switched subjects. “You’ll be glad to know that the grunge look is out,” she chirped cheerfully.

  “What a pity,” I said. “Grunge was me.”

  “Some of the new pieces are such fun!” she burbled, ignoring my sarcasm. “Flowerpot purses are going to be very big, they’re clever and kitschy. So is faux fur and thigh-high vinyl boots.”

  I imagined whipping my notebook out of a flowerpot purse after making a grand entrance at police headquarters in faux fur and thigh-high boots. It would get their attention. I bit back a smart remark, suddenly overwhelmed by images of Cassie Randolph and the other mother, the stranger who had wept on the phone about her missing son, and the memory of how in my darkest hour my mother had been ready to mortgage all she owned and more, to save me.

  “I love you, Mom.”

  She paused for a millisecond, then rushed on, as though she hadn’t heard. “The new hemlimes are more realistic, right at the knee, but I have serious reservations about the white ankle socks with platform sandals.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” I said. “So do I.” We promised to meet for lunch later in the week. There have been times with my mother when the thought of DNA testing crossed my mind, certain that I was somehow switched at birth—but I am so much like my father. Our simpatico is ephemeral, more a spiritual bond than direct knowledge. Whenever I am in danger or despair, he is with me. Estamos juntos. We are together. My real memories of him are few. I remember peering out from between bars, my playpen placed under a grapefruit tree in a sunlit yard, as he bent close to me, dappled light and shadow filtered through leaves dancing on his face and arms as he lifted me high and higher, up and away from my prison. I remember the warmth of his words, “mi angelito rubia,” and my mother laughing in a way I have never heard since. And there is a clear recollection of riding in a car snuggled comfortably between them in a world before child safety seats.

  My mother insists that I was too young, that I couldn’t possibly remember any such thing, but I do.

  What little she says about him so conflicts with the stories told by my Aunt Odalys and other relatives that it is impossible to know now, nearly three decades later, who and what the man really was. But I sense that we are the same. Maybe it is simply that I long to be part of his committed and passionate world rather than that of haute couture and flowerpot purses.

  No promising leads in the Alex Aguirre bombing, according to homicide. Nobody had called to claim responsibility, the motive remained unknown. I called Yates from the bomb squad to double check.

  Bombers’ signatures are as distinctive as fingerprints. The way they twist their wires, the components they choose, the tool markings they leave, the military or commercial explosives they use. “Haven’t found it yet,” Yates said. “We’re still sifting through the debris, using finer screens now.”

  I had another story, a choice tidbit picked up during my phone checks. My first stop was the Miami Beach police station three blocks west of the ocean, on Washington Avenue. Until it was built, South Florida cop shops were formidable fortresslike structures. Miami Vice and the Art Deco renaissance changed that. Both influenced this gleaming white building with sweeping curves, glass brick, and a high inside balcony. The past was even respected, unusual in a city with a short history and officials with shorter memories. The new police headquarters stands behind the old City Hall built the year after the devastating 1926 hurricane. Unlike the sleek modern building that has replaced it seven blocks away, the original is a wedding cake, a show of faith erected in a time of disaster. A two-story base supports a nine-story tier topped by an arched confection garnished with balusters and urns and a red tile roof. It now houses courtrooms, offices, and a restaurant. The new Deco police station is connected by a plaza, a favorite location for fashion shoots and an exercise in psychedelia.

  Glamorous long-legged models and famous foreign photographers mingle with rumpled detectives, handcuffed prisoners, battered victims, and sleazy bondsmen under a technicolor sky that smells of sea and salt. The giddy ambience creates an impression that nothing
here is actually real, but all make-believe instead, created for the glossy pages of some slick magazine.

  The chief scowled and ducked back into his office when he saw me, probably tipped off by the mayor, who was also evading my phone calls.

  They had been too quick with the key to the city. Again. Forgetting the outrage last time, after another honored visitor was identified as a former Nazi.

  Their latest honoree, a brawny German visitor, had wrestled an armed robber to the pavement, snatched away his gun and pummeled him until police arrived. After the negative worldwide headlines generated by the robbery murders of several foreign tourists, this was the answer to a publicists prayer and cause for as much media hype as could be wrung out of it.

  Police had awarded the hero a plaque, the mayor had presented the key to the city, and he had been showered with accolades during a standing ovation at a full meeting of the city commission. Publicity pictures were flashed around the world, revealing that the hero was wanted in Berlin for child molesting.

  In this world of scam artists and swindlers all drawn like magnets to this city, the safest course is to honor only the dead—after thorough background checks. Miami city fathers now follow that route, burned too often after renaming streets in honor of celebrities, civic leaders, and philanthropists quickly exposed as drug lords, tax evaders, or scam artists. They should take the same precaution with proclamations, another kiss of death. Shortly after city officials celebrated Yahweh Ben Yahweh Day in Miami, the self-proclaimed God, son of God, was indicted in connection with fourteen murders and a firebombing.

  I cornered the chief for a comment, then dropped by the missing persons bureau. A young officer named Causey was in charge. Missing persons was once the exclusive province of women officers, but now the women are more likely to be out on patrol, in uniform, fighting crime in the streets while many male officers hold down desk jobs.