Act of Betrayal

by Edna Buchanan

  But all they had in common so far was that they were slender, young, blue-eyed, and fair-haired, and the fact that they were gone.

  Reluctantly, I drove back to the paper and walked into the newsroom, beeper in place on my belt. As I expected, Gretchen zeroed in like a heat-seeking missile.

  “My beeper?” I asked incredulously, as she launched into a harangue. I removed it and stared at the device quizzically. “It’s on,” I told her. I tested it. “It’s working.” I gazed at her innocently. “Are you sure you dialed the right number, Gretchen?”

  But she had the upper hand. “Did you hear about the truck on the Palmetto?”

  “Yup,” I said, “I’m right on top of it.”

  “And the press conference?”

  Uh-oh. “Which one?”

  She smiled malevolently, threw back her shoulders, and jutted her pointy breasts at me. Was that a Wonderbra? “On the Alex Aguirre case.” She smirked and consulted her watch. “You’re five minutes late for it right now. I didn’t have anybody else to send.”

  Oh, God, I thought, stomach lurching. “Did they make an arrest?”

  “That’s the impression I got. I suggest you get yourself over there and ask them.”

  I lunged for a fresh notebook. During phone checks that morning they didn’t even have a suspect. At least that’s what they had told me.

  “At the police station?” I headed for the elevator.

  “No,” she said, “at WTOP.”

  Odd, I thought, cops wouldn’t announce an arrest or a break in the case at the television station.

  Gretchen said something as I brushed by her. It took a moment to sink in. “From now on stay in touch with the city desk, Britt. Save your social life for your day off.”

  I was already on the elevator; she had turned away. “What?” I yelped in indignation. Did she just imply that I had spent the afternoon…? The doors closed and I screamed all the way to the lobby.

  As usual, Gretchen was a fountain of misinformation. No arrest, no cops. Station management had called the press conference to announce a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Alex Aguirre’s killers.

  Though twenty minutes late, I missed nothing but the bickering as station officials got their jollies by forcing all their competitors’ news crews to move their equipment to inconvenient locations at the back of the room. TV people take forever to set up anyway. If Jesus Christ appeared to proclaim the end of the world they would interrupt, ask him to hold it until they set up their equipment, then demand that he start again from the top.

  The widow was present, eyes swollen, dressed in black. The station had her tied up, refusing to let her answer questions from competing reporters. After their poor coverage the day of the bombing, they had had broadcast exclusives on every newscast since. Home videos of the happy family, footage of the bewildered fatherless children, the all-night vigil at the funeral home, the weeping widow pleading for anyone with information to call a special number at the station, or, as an afterthought, the police. The poor woman was caught in the clutches of the news director. The rest of the press corps grumbled, but I understood. Shocked, scared, and alone, she had kids to raise. WTOP-TV, her husband’s employer, was probably the only security in her life at the moment.

  I wondered what it had been like for my mother when she was left alone with me.

  Lottie was there shooting art for the final. “Wait till you hear what Gretchen said to me,” I told her.

  “Let’s go for coffee,” she whispered.

  “We can get it back at the office. I have a couple of stories to write.”

  “No, now.”

  “What?” She looked vibrant and excited; she had combed her hair. That could only mean one thing.

  “I just passed La Esquina de Tejas. His car is parked outside. I wanna drop in for coffee.”

  I sighed. “You sure he’s still there?”

  “If we stop jawing and get over there, he will be. It’ll be a surprise. He asked me to dinner but I had to tell ’im I was working. I felt terrible, poor thing really wanted to see me.”

  The restaurant was only five minutes away. We took my car, so if she decided to stay, Stosh could drive her back to her company Chrysler parked at WTOP.

  Hungry, I decided as we walked in that I wanted a Cuban sandwich. I stopped mid-stride. The Polish Prince, jaunty as ever, sat at a secluded table. He was not dining alone.

  “Lottie,” I turned, hoping to detour her in time. Damn him, I thought. By now I really wanted a sandwich.

  But she never missed a beat. She swept past me, to his table. Mouth open, I watched.

  In intimate conversation, holding both hands of his companion, a striking young brunette in a red sundress, he did not see Lottie until she spoke. More a whine than a word.

  “Ssstoooosh.”

  I had never heard such a sound come out of Lottie before. He looked up, with the expression of an escapee suddenly aware that the sheriff has got the drop on him.

  “Ssstooosh. The kids are huungry, honey. When are you coming hooome? They keep crying for their daddy.”

  He swallowed. “Lottie.” His smile was sickly, eyes pleading as he looked past her and saw me.

  I smiled back, shook my head faintly, and sat at the counter to watch.

  The young woman at the table dropped her napkin and stared at Lottie.

  “Kristin,” Stosh said anxiously. He got to his feet. “I want you to meet—”

  “Don’t feel baaad,” Lottie whined at the woman. “It happens all the time, I’m uuused to it.”

  As I followed Lottie out the door, Stosh Gorski, face pained, was fast-talking Kristin, who had pushed away her plate and was picking up her purse.

  “Damn, Lottie,” I said admiringly. “That was good.”

  “That calaboose shyster,” she muttered, climbing into my car. “He was all over her like a duck on a June bug. Let’s git outta here. You was right about him all along, Britt. All I want to give that man now is a grenade with the pin pulled.”

  We laughed, as I drove off into the dusk.

  6

  I needed more time to work on the lost boys and knew I wouldn’t get it from Gretchen, so I confided in my city editor. A mistake. Fred Douglas leaned back in his creaky leather chair, fingers covering his mouth, heavy-lidded eyes inscrutable behind his bifocals. He might have looked distinguished except for the huge blue ink stain a leaky pen had left around the pocket of his pin-striped shirt.

  “Nahh, Britt.’’ His expression was that of a man who had just swallowed something unpleasant. “You know what happens with these missing persons stories. Remember that—”

  “I know, I know,” I said impatiently. Who could forget the virginal fifteen-year-old Catholic schoolgirl who left home as usual one morning but never got to her honor classes at Holy Name Academy? Shy and sweet, loved by the nuns who taught her, the girl had never been on a date or alone with a boy. Her mother, a widowed seamstress, was raising her only daughter in a sheltered and religious household. The cops and the press corps took the case seriously.

  The mother wept on the television news for the girl’s return. “We are more than mother and daughter, we are best friends.” Savvy detectives and medical examiners all assumed the worst. The novenas, the publicity, and public concern mounted. By the fifth night a grim-faced anchor announced at the top of the eleven o’clock news that hope for the girl’s safe return was all but abandoned. As footage of the search for her body aired, the missing teenager flounced angrily into the station.

  “Leave me alone!” she demanded. “Quit putting my picture in the newspaper and on TV.” She was not missing, she said, just sick of the nuns, sick to death of her mother, and had no intention of going home.

  The damage she did to genuinely missing persons totally ignored by the press and police after her escapade is incalculable.

  I am sure some died awaiting h
elp.

  “You’re always seeing plots and patterns,” Fred intoned. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t,” he added quickly, with a cautionary hand gesture as my face mirrored my indignation. “Your imagination and driving curiosity are what make you a great reporter. But this”—he spread out his arms—” sounds like coincidence. Everything that goes on doesn’t necessarily have to be related or part of some gigantic plot Shit happens.”

  “Listen, Fred.” I leaned forward. “You know that Anglos are now a minority in Miami.” He raised an eyebrow.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, blond, blue-eyed boys of twelve and thirteen are not all that common around here anymore,” I continued. “At this rate they’re becoming an endangered species. Don’t you think that six or more missing sounds like more than a coincidence?”

  “Not necessarily,” he said. “Remember, it’s over a long period of time.”

  “The missing boys are news,” I said, trying my best to sound assertive.

  “News is what editors say it is.” The hard edge to his voice was unlike him, and made me wary. I didn’t want to argue.

  “Fred, remember when beauty queens and gorgeous models began disappearing? Christopher Wilder was using a camera to lure them into his clutches. He promised to make them cover girls.”

  Fred remained skeptical.

  “Remember when young women with pierced ears and long brown hair parted in the middle were vanishing from Seattle to Florida? Ted Bundy, another serial killer, was snatching them on a cross-country murder spree. Eventually somebody spotted a pattern.”

  “You don’t know that any of these kids are dead, Britt,” he said impatiently. “It would be totally irresponsible for us to suggest that a serial killer is stalking South Florida, preying on kids. You want to create a panic because some teenage boys ran away from home? We’d sure look silly if they started showing up.”

  “I’m not saying that any of the boys are dead or that there’s a serial killer, that was just an example. But something is going on here. Printing the story will help find out what it is. If they are runaways we can probably flush them out. I just think it’s a helluva story that all these missing kids fit a certain profile.”

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t keep digging. See what you come up with, but don’t spend a lot of time on it. We’ve got the big special section on Cuba coming up and we need every warm body in the newsroom.”

  “I’m not working on that,” I said quickly. “I’ve got my beat to cover. Just because I have a Cuban name doesn’t mean—”

  “Everybody is expected to contribute,” he said sharply.

  Rumors of Castro’s demise and Cuba’s collapse sweep Miami with regularity. I have heard them all my life, but lately the winds of change blow stronger and more persistently than ever. Real at last or merely wishful thinking? Perhaps the inevitable was imminent. The bearded one, however, has outmaneuvered and outlasted eight American presidents. I wouldn’t count el líder out yet.

  The paper was reacting to the growing evidence of instability and trouble in Cuba, determined, as usual, not to be caught unaware when it happened. Of course editors and reporters, many long since dead, retired, or senile, had been on top of this about-to-break story for thirty years.

  “Things are happening in Cuba,” Fred said vigorously. “We’re gonna be right on top of them, the transition and its impact on South Florida. This isn’t going to be another Watergate.”

  “I wasn’t here then,” I said defensively.

  “I wish none of us had been. It was an embarrassment. The Washington Post beat us on every break in what should have been our story. The burglars were from Miami, the plot was essentially hatched here, and we wound up following the Post on everything.” His jaw clenched at the thought of the humiliation. “We need to pull this special together in a hurry and the city desk will be spread pretty thin. I expect you to do your part, Britt.”

  How did this happen? I wondered, as I left his office. I had gone in there to ask for time off my beat to work the missing boys, and wound up arguing to stay on the beat to avoid writing for the special section. How did Fred do that? I had to work fast to come up with an enterprising idea with a Cuban connection, a good story that would take minimal time and research. If I waited until some editor gave me an assignment, it could turn out to be something tedious and time-consuming.

  I try to generate my own stories and avoid Cuban issues. Because of my name and family history, people expect me to feel a passion for Cuban politics. I do not. My focus at the moment was on the lost boys.

  I met Lottie for coffee in the third-floor cafeteria.

  “He hasn’t called,” she said.

  “I’m not surprised. Lottie, what did you expect?”

  “I know, J know. But he had such pretty eyes and a great ass.”

  “I thought you were over all that.”

  “I am, I am.”

  She had been assigned to shoot photos for the special section and we brainstormed on what I could do.

  She scrunched up her freckled face the way she always does when she’s thinking. “How about,” she drawled, “Can Cuba Be Saved? From bad architects and greedy developers. They’re sure to be the first wave that lands once that island is liberated.

  “Seriously, Britt, first thing they’ll do is to replace all that great old Mediterranean and Deco architecture with strip shopping malls, last food joints, and condos. They’ll make the Maleacón and Varadero into concrete canyons. I just know it. Lookit what they’ve done to Florida. They’ll slice, dice, and pave over Havana till it looks like the Westchester Shopping Center.” She bit into a giant chocolate chip cookie, sharp teeth glinting in the fluorescent lights. “That will be our ultimate revenge on the Cubanos.”

  “Not a bad story idea,” I said, “but I’d rather do something tied into my beat and I have to come up with it fast, before I get some cockamamie assignment.”

  “How about a trend story on how the Marielitos pushed up Miami’s crime rate?”

  “Politically incorrect,” I said glumly, chin in my hand.

  “Guess that rules out the Alex Aguirre bombing and other apparently politically motivated murders.”

  “You’ve got it,” I said, then told her what I really wanted to work on.

  She munched her cookie and sipped tea, listening intently. “Where in tarnation you think all them kids are at?” she finally said. “It’s spread over so much time. You really think they could be related?”

  “Don’t know, but I sure wanna find out.”

  “Are they all Dead Heads, or rock star wannabes? Maybe everytime some rock group or carnival hits town, kids leave with ’em.”

  “Don’t think so, but it’s worth checking.” I scribbled a note to scan the papers at the time of the disappearances for local events attractive to teens.

  “My big brother ran away maybe twenty, thirty times,” Lottie reminisced. “I tagged along ‘bout a dozen times, didn’t want to miss nothing. Got as far as Hidalgo County once. We usually went home when we was hungry. Once we took my daddy’s pickup. J.J. wasn’t even big enough to see over the steering wheel. I was screaming at the top of my lungs. We landed bottom side up in a ditch, hauled ass, and didn’t look back. Swore it wasn’t us. My daddy went crazy and accused my mama of letting her low-life cousin Randy drive his truck. That man could wreck a one-car funeral…”

  “I don’t want to hear about your dysfunctional family,” I snapped. “I’ve got one of my own. I’m trying to think here.”

  She pouted, then asked, “Where you gonna start with those kids?”

  “You tell me. The trouble is that they’re at that awkward age. If they were younger, there’d be a nationwide child search. A few years older and we’d have driving records to check. Credit cards, bank accounts, utility bills, passport, marriage, divorce, social security, and phone records.”

  “And rap sheets, military records, and hunting licenses,” she adde
d, “and don’t forget about boat registrations and tides.”

  “Everybody leaves a trail, but these kids haven’t lived long enough. Twelve-year-olds don’t drive, open checking accounts, or file W-twos.”

  “They fell right through the cracks. Some people are missing because they OD’d and their friends panicked,” she offered.

  I nodded, remembering the premed student who buried his teenage date after she overdosed. He eventually led persistent cops to her shallow grave. Most ODs are dumped by the roadside, in the woods, or outside hospital emergency rooms.

  “Too young,” I said, shaking my head. “And too many.”

  Trouble waited in the newsroom. Gretchen and Ron Sadler, the paper’s political writer, looked far too happy to see me as I returned with a cup of coffee.

  Ron, trim, studious, in his thirties, with wavy brown hair and dark eyes, underwent a major metamorphosis recently, transformed after becoming a “political pundit” on a local Sunday morning “Meet the Press”-style TV interview show. The owlish glasses he always wore were replaced by Giorgio Armani frames with nonreflective lenses, in order to make him look less nerdy on camera. His rumpled reporter look is gone. He now wears designer suits and power ties and no longer has his hair cut; he has it styled. He has arrived in the newsroom still wearing traces of television makeup on nights when they weren’t even taping. Lottie swears he has become a star in his own mind.

  They circled my desk like vultures. “Britt!” Gretchen trilled, relentlessly perky. “We were just talking about you!” This was bad.

  “You are aware of the special section on Cuba, aren’t you, Britt?” Ron boomed, in his new, hearty anchorman imitation.

  “Like everyone else on Planet Earth,” I said cheerfully. “I have some ideas about a piece Id like to do for it.” My scrambled thoughts broke like billiard balls and then coalesced. “The impact on Miami, the chaos when Fidel falls, the traffic, the street celebrations, rallies, car caravans, marches.” I spit it all out while wondering where the hell it had come from. Panic triggers something creative in my brain cells. “City and county officials must be making contingency plans. I’ll shoot you a memo this afternoon.” I backed away, as though late for an appointment.