Margin of Error

by Edna Buchanan

  “She knew when she gave the cops her address that we’d be all over her,” Niko said bitterly. “She’s not stupid.”

  “With my luck, she’s moving into my building at this very moment,” I said.

  Lottie and I exchanged half a dozen calls that afternoon as I caught up on my laundry and housekeeping chores. She was suffering the torments of the damned. By late afternoon it appeared that Gretchen had come through. All the photo editor said, in passing, to Lottie was, “Damnedest thing about that cold-weather picture.”

  “Ain’t it,” she said vaguely, looking appropriately distressed.

  “Hope you talked to the widow.” He shook his head.

  “Nice lady, sure have.”

  She and Mrs. Maxwell, now residing in a Collins Avenue condo, had shared a long and lovely chat. New to town, newly widowed, she had served Lottie tea and home-baked coffee cake. Lottie now had a new best friend, whether she liked it or not.

  By day’s end it appeared as though blame had somehow fallen squarely upon the shoulders of an inept copy boy who had somehow delivered the wrong file to the photo desk. His sloppy work, or even deliberate carelessness, probably related to the fact that it had been his last day on the job. Now on a trip to Europe, he was returning to Dartmouth to pursue the study of veterinary medicine.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” I told Lottie, then described McDonald’s obnoxious behavior.

  “He’s jealous!” she hooted.

  “Lance doesn’t like him either. It’s surprising, because in some ways they’re very much alike.”

  “Maybe Lance is insecure, worried about the size of his peepee. A lot a those hunky body-building studs are, you know.”

  “Lance isn’t.”

  “Hell all Friday, Britt! Good for him. Good for you. You have to tell me every little detail!”

  We were on Entertainment Tonight that evening. At least Lance was. My mom called, all excited, saying she saw me in a background shot. I dashed to the TV, missed myself, but caught the tail end of Lance’s interview. He rubbed his brow in a familiar modest gesture as he said that the shooting was progressing smoothly on location and that any problems with the production had been overcome. I wondered if he had his fingers crossed.

  The weather remained clear next day, and the rain scenes could be shot. “But it’s in the forties,” I told Lance. “You’ll catch pneumonia.”

  No way to wait until the weather warmed up, he said; every day on location costs big bucks, and the film was so overbudget now it was creating a negative buzz in the industry. Disaster-speak could build into a self-fulfilling prophecy at the box office.

  A tropical storm had apparently been written into the story line by another new writer flown in from LA to “punch up the script.” Kirby Walters, the last script doctor, the one who so hated his hotel accommodations, had been banished back to Hollywood, described to me by Lance as the place bad people go when they die.

  Ziff filled me in on the scandal.

  Walters’s downfall was too many nude scenes on the Beach. None were in the script; they were between his shy college-age son, who had arrived to spend a few days, and Wendy’s spoiled, heavy-drinking, pot-smoking, sexually aggressive high-school-age daughter, sixteen going on thirty-five, who had flown in to do the same. In an ugly scene, Wendy had threatened to have the son arrested and the father’s legs broken.

  Ziff was now convinced that “both the devil and the anti-Christ are involved in this movie.” Made sense to me.

  They shot the rain scene at a remote boat ramp. I wanted to go, but after Gardiner Bowles and Cassie Malone are drenched, the script called for them to, what else, strip off their wet clothes and fall into each other’s arms again.

  I would have loved to watch, but it was another closed set. Lance advised against it.

  “At least,” I told him, “Gardiner Bowles has an active sex life.”

  Lance called me between takes, just after dawn. Drenched, wrapped in a blanket, drinking hot soup from a thermos, his teeth chattered.

  “Listen,” he said. “I have to go to LA tomorrow for the Dark Journey premiere. It’s a bad time to leave, but it’s in my contract. I’ve got to try to support the film, as much as I can. Short trip, two nights and a day, but you wanna come with me? We’ll get outa town, go to the premiere, see the movie, spend a little time.”

  I heard them revving up the rain machine and calling Lance for another take. The temperature was 42 degrees. The reporter who hated leaving Miami out of fear that she might miss a murder did not hesitate.

  “When do we leave?”

  I had comp time coming, and took it.

  My mother and Lottie were beside themselves about what I should take, what I should wear, what to do with my hair. This was not tossing a toothbrush into an overnight bag to leave town on a story. This was a goddam Hollywood premiere!

  Lottie thought I should have my hair frosted. My mother decided my eyebrows and eyelashes should be dyed.

  I decided against both.

  Then Gretchen called.

  “Britt? How much money did they raise at the AIDS benefit?”

  “Tons,” I guessed. “Much more than they had anticipated.”

  “You have to be more specific than that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s gone. Along with Wallace Atwater.”

  20

  Monica Atwater had bypassed the usual channels and called the police chief at home to report Wallace missing. She feared for his safety. He must be the victim of foul play, she said. However, she had not reported his disappearance until the bank began to question Wallace’s transfer of the proceeds from the benefit into another account, which he had cleaned out.

  Any foul play seemed to be on Wallace’s part. He had apparently lost a fortune in bad investments. The money belonged to him, his clients, and lifelong friends whose retirement funds he managed. If anything was left, it disappeared with him. The Atwater bank accounts were empty, money gone, along with Wallace, his passport, and a young secretary named Lynda.

  To add insult to injury, Lance’s checks to pay for the party had been deposited into the same account. The caterer, the musicians, the florist—none had been paid. Lance paid the bills for the second time, taking the hit with good grace.

  But the precious positive publicity and goodwill generated by the benefit was about to evolve into embarrassing headlines. And the timing could not be worse. Lance was about to do publicity and interviews for the new movie. The questions could not be dodged. Not only were they disconcerting, they would divert focus from the film he was promoting. I wrote the story, of course, again earning me the undying animosity of the filmmakers and the Chamber of Commerce. I could see their point. I drank the champagne, I ate the chocolate piano, and now I was asking them to show me the money.

  “No way you could hold off on it for a while?” Lance had asked, pained.

  “No way,” I said.

  Monica refused to talk except to insist that the events were totally out of character for her husband, that she trusted him implicitly, and there had to be an explanation. Then she filed for divorce.

  Our LA plans changed slightly. Instead of flying west together, Lance was booked for New York first, a publicity blitz beginning with the Today show. His schedule was tight, it was all hard work, and now he was fighting a cold, from the drenching rain scenes.

  He would jet to LA from New York and I would fly out from Miami, alone. Separate flights, I thought, how romantic. But at least we would return together. This is what I need, I told myself, not to be alone, to share time, secrets, and my body with someone who cares. The fact that he was the object of a million fantasies was a definite plus, though I heartily wished he had at least one less fan.

  In the days after Niko and I missed finding Stephanie at her apartment she bombarded Lance with greeting cards, novelty gifts, and love letters, all postmarked Miami. Wearing a scarf and sunglasses
and driving a blue Buick Riviera, she showed up at Star Island and announced she was Lance’s houseguest. When the guard at the gate recognized her and called the house for instructions, she raced away.

  She left me messages at the office and on my answering machine, unnerving since my home number had been unlisted since an unpleasant experience several years ago. Sometimes she merely left her name, to let me know she was out there. Other times, she would sing out, in an almost musical lilt: “You’re not listening to me.” Or an ambiguous: “You see, I told you. Lance and I are in love.” Unsettling, but nothing cops or courts would construe as threatening.

  Usually the reluctant traveler, I was ready to get out of town. Lance left for New York, downing large quantities of vitamin C and nursing his sniffles. Dave and Frank went with him. Pauli went on to LA. Niko was not thrilled about staying in Miami, but he had been working closely with fraud and forgery investigators and the missing persons detective in an attempt to track down Wallace Atwater and the embezzled charity money.

  I watched Lance on Today. He looked bravura but sounded hoarse, and as they came back from a break he was putting away his handkerchief. Touching his brow in that familiar earnest gesture, he gamely fielded questions about the embezzled money, the Trent Talon tragedy, the fire, and other production problems. Skillfully, he kept steering the conversation back to his target topic, his new movie, Dark Journey. When he gazed into the camera and confided how much he was looking forward to LA and the premiere, I couldn’t help smiling. He was in frigid New York; I was in Miami. Hard to believe that by late tonight we’d be in LA together.

  I planned to work a few hours and take off at noon. The magic of that morning’s Today show faded in the face of real life. A nine-year-old girl had been critically wounded, caught in the crossfire between two carloads of teenagers. The gang unit was working overtime trying to track the shooters. Listening to the scanner as I dressed, I heard the BOLO (Be on the lookout) in the drive-by. They said that the beef might have been between the Brickell Boys and the PLO. The latter still hadn’t been picked up, but the dispatcher described them as armed, dangerous, and “suspects in a thirty-one.” A homicide. Was that a mistake? Or had the PLO killed somebody I didn’t know about?

  I called Bliss.

  “Do you have them in a homicide?” I asked.

  “Yep. The Fairborn case.”

  “The Metrorail security guard? How do you know?”

  “Drugfire.”

  Ours was the third police department in the nation to acquire Drugfire, a high-tech computerized program developed by the FBI to work drug-related and gang shootings. A microscope-mounted camera automatically shoots digital pictures of the backs of cartridge cases collected at shooting scenes. The individual markings, as distinctive as fingerprints, are captured, their images stored. Without even being asked, the computer automatically compares them to stored images from other crime scenes, ranking them in similarity. Casings from the 9mm pistol used to blast away at Angel and me had been compared to eight hundred open 9mm cases already in the computer. A casing from the bullet that killed Randall Fairborn ranked number one.

  “It’s a match,” Bliss said. “Same gun; all we gotta find now is the kid using it.” His name: Ignacio Zamora, better known as Iggy Zee, on the street.

  “That’s great. When did you find all this out? Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Didn’t wanna step in it. The lieutenant was cracking down on us initiating any contact with the press except through PIO. Apparently he’s in a mad-dog mood this week.”

  “Who isn’t?” That was my doing, unfortunately.

  “According to gang unit intelligence, Iggy Zee is the only one still looking for Angel. Always gotta be one stubborn little bastard in the bunch. The others couldn’t care less about her, they’re just watching their own skinny butts.”

  “But Iggy Zee must know that Darnell was arrested and the hit is off. Why would he be crazy enough to keep after her? Or crazy enough to keep the same gun, for that matter?”

  “They don’t think ahead, you know that. They live hour by hour, minute by minute, and worry about the consequences later. This guy, he just likes shooting people, I guess. Word on the street is, he said he was gonna take the bitch out and by dammit, he’s gonna take the bitch out.”

  “A man of his word. How nice in this day and age. Is somebody protecting her?”

  “As if! Think the taxpayers can afford a personal bodyguard for Angel Oliver? She’s safe enough over there.”

  “Sure. As long as she lies low and stays put. Did you tell her about this?”

  “Nah, I called. The kid said she wasn’t there, so I left a message.”

  “I hope you talk to her,” I said. “I tried, but I don’t think I got through.”

  “It’s her ass,” he said, his voice deliberately casual. He could not forget the fact that she was also a defendant in one of his cases. I realized that to Bliss there are just good guys and bad guys, us and them, and Angel was not one of us.

  My flight was leaving at two o’clock, and arrival time in LA was 10 P.M. The good news was that I was traveling first class, as Lance’s guest. Two brief stopovers were the bad news. I think that even when we die, we will have to go through Atlanta and then Dallas.

  I had no time to think about Angel now. But then I wondered. Which kid did Bliss leave the message with? Harry most often answered the door and the telephone, but he couldn’t even write yet.

  Oh, for Pete’s sake, I thought, and called.

  “Mommy’s not home,” Harry said.

  Where was the woman? If she was visiting Darnell in jail, or hiring him a lawyer, I would slap her silly.

  “Let me talk to Misty,” I said.

  “She went to school.”

  That was good news.

  “What are you gonna bring me?”

  “Who’s taking care of you?”

  “I’m big now,” he said indignantly. “I don’t need a baby-sitter.”

  “Okay, let me rephrase this, Harry.” If those kids are home alone, I swore, I would find Angel and kick her butt. “Who else is there?”

  “Beppo, the twins, the kitty cat…” he recited in singsong fashion.

  “Any grown-ups?” I asked sweetly.

  “The lady.”

  “What lady?”

  “Maria.”

  “Good, put Maria on the phone.”

  “She’s watching telebision.”

  The stringed theme of a daytime soap opera swelled in the background.

  “I don’t care, Harry, put her on. Now.”

  He clunked the phone down on a tabletop and went away. For a long time.

  “¿Hola?”

  “María?”

  “Sí.”

  “Where is Angel?”

  “School. She go to school.”

  “Misty’s school?”

  “No, no. Her school. She study to be secretary.”

  I could picture that.

  “Where?”

  “Downtown. Eh, Lindsey Hopkins.”

  “What? She’s not supposed to go over there.”

  “She afraid she miss too much school.”

  She said Angel was not expected home until three.

  Damn. I looked up the number, then realized calling was probably pointless. The school is huge, on ten acres, a little United Nations with students from forty or fifty countries. It would be quicker to go there and yank Angel out of class myself.

  It was eleven o’clock. Niko was picking me up to go to the airport at twelve-thirty. I could do it if I hurried.

  I drove over there, cursing traffic all the way, hit the office, and found where secretaries in training were studying in third-floor classrooms. I didn’t wait for the elevator; I ran up the stairs. The halls ended in open breezeways where students lounged over soft drinks or books.

  I trotted up and down, peering into classrooms. Angel was seated in a middle row of
the fourth room I peered into. Class was in session. They seemed to be working on reading their own shorthand, something I wish I had mastered myself.

  I tried to signal but she was absorbed, brows knit, rosebud lips slightly parted and moving wearing the befuddled expression of a dog trying to read a road map.

  I asked a long-haired girl slouching by when classes would break. In less than five minutes, she replied, so I waited, tapping my foot, pacing checking my watch. From a gym down the hall came the rhythmic counts, cries, and grunts of a karate class in session.

  The bell rang and the secretarial students poured out. All but Angel, who lagged behind, talking intently to the paunchy middle-aged male instructor.

  This woman was driving me nuts. “Come on,” I muttered. “Come on.”

  Behind me, at a table in the breezeway, one of the students slowly got to his feet and also seemed to be waiting. Angel emerged just then, her hair loose, face set and serious. Her pregnancy was beginning to show, I thought, or perhaps it was just the cut of her cheap plaid slacks.

  “Britt.” She looked surprised. “What are you doing here?”

  “More important, what are you doing here?”

  I must have sounded like an irate mother scolding a child, because Angel looked intimidated, then stepped back, clearly alarmed.

  “School is good,” I conceded. “I understand that. But this is irresponsible. To come over—”

  “It’s one of them!” she said. That’s when I saw she was staring past me, toward the kid in the breezeway.

  Dropping her books, she ran down the hall. I whirled, mouth open, for a better look at the lanky kid who had been sitting, head down at the table. He wore loose, nondescript street clothes, a shapeless checkered shirt flapping over a black T-shirt and khaki cargo pants with half a dozen pockets. He had the look of a gang member: short black hair, traces of a mustache and a goatee, tattoos on his arms, and an automatic pistol in his waistband.