Never Let Them See You Cry

by Edna Buchanan

  A short time later a stranger appeared at my desk. “Hi,” he said, “I’m Kurt Russell.”

  He looked rumpled enough to be a reporter: gold-rimmed spectacles, faded blue jeans, tennis shoes and a T-shirt from a small-town Colorado bar.

  I had only seen one of his films, Silkwood, and clearly remembered the scenes with his shirt off, but I would not have recognized him now. Not only was he fully clothed, but his entrance was so unobtrusive that no one else even looked up. “Where’s your entourage?” I asked. He had none.

  Minutes later, as if on cue, a story broke: a double murder. The movie star was surprised that in spite of deadline urgency, we had to fight bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic in my nine-year-old car to reach the crime scene. “It never even occurred to me that you have to deal with the stupid everyday things like rush hour.”

  He was right. Getting there is not half the fun.

  The neighborhood was residential. A young married couple had been shot to death, murdered in their own home. One eye-witness: their toddler son, fifteen months old. The orphan was found clinging to his mother’s body, drenched in her blood and wailing. An older brother, age three, was safe in nursery school. No one had picked up the older child, so school officials notified a relative, who discovered the bodies.

  The crowd was mostly neighborhood residents. We mingled with the morbidly curious, the police and the press. The murderer had escaped undetected, but Kurt Russell would not. Since I would not have recognized the actor in a crowd, I did not expect anyone else to. Wrong.

  As the star absorbed the real-life drama, the atmosphere began to change. A man in the crowd stared. Some young girls gawked and giggled. An irate young woman, about to slam her door to avoid my questions, paused, eyes fixed on the face over my shoulder. Her expression softened, her lips parted. A middle-aged woman in Red Cross shoes forgot the sheer horror of the crime and trotted after us in hot pursuit of Kurt Russell’s autograph.

  He had hoped to remain invisible, had even considered wearing a disguise—”big frizzy hair, bushy mustache, big horn-rimmed glasses,” he told me later. He does not understand why people seek autographs. “It’s not a painting you can admire, it’s only a little bit of a trophy.”

  Gut reaction masked, he pleasantly complied with the request as the woman burbled praise for Silkwood. She clutched her little trophy. She had broken the ice.

  A cry echoed through the crowd. “Do you know who that is?” Fellow suburbanites slaughtered in their home were suddenly forgotten. A TV news crew caught on. Their camera swung into a 180-degree turn. Dead bodies and babies forgotten, the film crew stampeded after the star, clamoring for an interview. The crowd followed.

  Police officers assigned to crowd control at the crime scene looked puzzled. Only moments earlier they had to force people to stand behind the yellow ropes. Now they were no longer necessary. The crowd had run off in pursuit of some stranger. We dashed for the car and made our getaway.

  I was surprised. So was Kurt Russell. He had underestimated his appeal. Even if recognized, he had expected to be ignored because of the sensational events at the murder scene. Wrong again.

  I thought my job was the real stuff, gritty true life-and-death drama, but to most people what they see in darkened movie theaters, at twenty-four frames per second, is far more compelling. They are fascinated by a recreation of life, somehow bigger, better and far more appealing than the real thing.

  Russell later told costar Mariel Hemingway: “I guarantee you that if somebody was lying in the street bleeding and you came up, they’d forget the emergency. The victim would be crying ‘God! Get me help! My leg’s been cut off … Wait, wait a minute. You’re Mariel Hemingway!’”

  Later events proved him right.

  The crew was shooting a murder scene on the beach at dawn. Coincidentally, a real-life murder was unfolding on the beach that dawn. The scenario began late the night before: A young couple had been drinking wine and cuddling in a car parked near the water. A stranger emerged from the shadows, announced he was a police officer and ordered the young man to step out of the car. When he did, the stranger battered him to death with a baseball bat.

  The killer kidnapped the girl. She was raped, driven aimlessly around the city, then left in a strange neighborhood.

  Police took her back to the murder scene as they tried to piece the story together. The teenager sobbed inconsolably, with good reason. Her date had been brutally murdered. She had been abducted and violated. A policeman happened to mention the film crew shooting nearby. The victim’s sobs subsided. She asked if they thought she could get to meet Kurt Russell. The cops said they would try.

  The actor readily agreed, after being told the story. He sat and counseled the girl for some time.

  Counseled? Who needs a rape counselor when you have Kurt Russell?

  We talked a lot. We both took notes.

  I was not hooked on the filming at first. The Herald will only permit Hollywood to use the newsroom after midnight, and I am usually gone by then. But one night I worked late on an investigative piece about a police official who had apparently been removing his trousers at elementary school playgrounds and exposing himself to little girls.

  As I pounded out the story, I could not help but notice the busy and industrious film crew. They were constructing a railway so the chief cameraman and the director could zoom around the huge newsroom while shooting a chase scene, the one where reporter Kurt Russell hurdles desks and crashes into a copy boy as handsome homicide detective Andy Garcia tries to stop him.

  The crew was quick and efficient. They knew what they were doing. It was remarkable how quickly they conceived, constructed and completed the project. Ingenious. I could not help but think of Metrorail, the mass transportation system Dade County leaders had been building for years. They never seemed to finish, and it never seemed to work. Cost overruns were staggering. It is still costing us money. President Ronald Reagan once commented that it would be cheaper to buy each Miami commuter a Cadillac. He was probably right.

  Yet this small, unassuming crew swiftly built this miniature Metrorail in no time at all, and it worked perfectly. The difference, of course, was that taxpayers were not footing the bill. Unlike most politicians, these film producers demanded value for money spent. It was exciting to see efficiency and creativity in action, something working right for a change. Deal with government long enough and you forget it can be done.

  I finished my story and stayed all night. Next morning I asked for all my vacation time so I could spend the next four weeks watching the film crew work. They have the unbelievable ability and knowhow to turn night into day and day into night. They create their own thunder and lightning—and rain. Real rain does not photograph well, and their rain is better, it looks more real than the real thing. And they can turn it off whenever they like.

  Heck, Hollywood is better than real life.

  Sidebar: Romance

  Love is a crime that requires an accomplice.

  —CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

  Take this job and forget small comforts, such as relationships, romance and a social life.

  Working weekends makes sense on the police beat, so my days off are Monday and Tuesday. For a time I dated a lawyer. One night we planned dinner at eight. The timing would be tricky, since I worked until seven, but I thought I could pull it off.

  Wrong again.

  Minutes before seven, an emergency alert sounded at Miami International Airport: a plane with hydraulic problems limping in for a landing. I snatched up a notebook and raced to the airport. The big jet circled for a long time, then touched down. A perfect, though heartstopping, landing, while emergency crews stood by. I hurried back to the Herald, wrote a short and went home, tired, but happy. It was 11:00.

  On my front door I found the lawyer’s business card. Oh no, I groaned. How could I have forgotten? A single word was scrawled on the back: Why?

  I don’t know why.
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  I have no explanation for how everything else diminishes in importance when a news story is breaking or how a planeload of people in trouble commands the total focus of my attention, making personal matters such as love and sex insignificant at the moment.

  People smarter than I am, with better-balanced priorities, can handle it all. I guess I can’t.

  A man I loved at the time called one afternoon. On deadline, on my first newspaper job, I snatched up the telephone, eyes riveted to the clock, pressured, pumped up, mind careening in panic between the three stories I had to finish in forty minutes.

  The caller casually drawled, “Hi, sweetheart.”

  “Who is this?” I snapped. In the silence that followed it occurred to me who it was, of course, but I had no time to explain, and the words, already spoken, were irretrievable.

  Obviously there is little romance on this job and even less as the years speed by, but no matter. There are small, special moments to savor.

  Such as when I called a young Latin homicide detective to talk about a murder he was investigating. “Are you gonna write a story?” he asked.

  I said yes. “Good,” he said. “I always learn something new about my cases when you write about them.”

  Neat.

  A Metro homicide detective, big, brash and sometimes obnoxious, called to shoot the breeze about his efforts to solve a perplexing murder mystery. “What do you think?” he finally blurted. “What would you do?”

  Throwaway lines to them, but they mean a heck of a lot to me.

  And then there is Police Lieutenant Arthur Beck, a man I would run away with—if I could mix business and pleasure and he were not happily married. But I can’t, and he is. So he’s never asked, and if he did, I couldn’t go.

  Arthur Beck is different than most cops. A wholesome, sentimental man with a goofy sense of humor, all Little League, which he coached, Disney World, where he frequently takes his family, and fun, which he has—except when on a case. Then he is as serious as a stroke.

  When we first met he was a new homicide sergeant who had never dealt with the press. It was the weekend, and I was at headquarters talking to him when his radio spit out a shooting in Overtown. We both headed for our cars. I pulled in right behind his unmarked Plymouth at the crime scene, an old wooden-frame rooming house.

  Mattie Davis, a seventy-one-year-old woman in spectacles, was the shooter. The man she shot was sprawled on the floor, paramedics working on him. Her niece was nearby, covered with blood, her forehead split wide open.

  Mattie Davis owned and operated this old rooming house. Wearily, in the matter-of-fact manner of a woman at the end of her rope, she explained what had happened: One of her tenants, Edward Leon Dukes, age thirty, had turned into a monster out of a nightmare. She had no way of knowing his history of violence when he rented the room, but he quickly began to terrorize and brutalize her and his fellow tenants. He refused to move out.

  The problem seemed solved when the tormented rooming-house tenants heard on the street that he was wanted for murder, for shooting a man during a crap game. Somebody tipped off police one night after Edward Leon Dukes came home. Sergeant Beck himself had arrested Dukes.

  To the relief of the peaceful tenants, he was gone. For good, they thought, but they never took into account the vagaries of our justice system. Edward Leon Dukes was declared criminally insane and committed to South Florida State Hospital. Four months later, doctors pronounced him competent, and a judge found him not guilty by reason of insanity.

  First stop for the newly freed Edward Leon Dukes was his old rooming house. Still seething about his arrest, he bullied and assaulted Mattie Davis and her tenants and kept coming back, again and again. Mattie Davis took out an assault-and-battery warrant. He found out and returned, enraged. He caught her on the second floor, knocked her down and kicked her in the stomach. When Bea Moore, her niece, age forty, tried to stop him, he smashed a bottle across her forehead. As he battered her niece, Mattie Davis marched downstairs to get her gun. She had never fired the .38-caliber revolver purchased for protection a year earlier.

  She ascended the stairs, holding the gun. Edward Leon Dukes saw it and ducked into a room occupied by two other tenants. Mattie Davis squeezed the trigger. A round smashed through the heavy wooden door as she shouted for the frightened tenants to get out. They emerged and stampeded down a back stairway. Dukes peeked out, saw Mattie Davis still holding the gun and slammed the door. He stood with his back flat against it. Her next bullet crashed through the door and into his back.

  She handed the gun to the first police officer who arrived.

  “I’m glad I hit him. He’s a bad man,” Mattie Davis told us. Bruised and disheveled, she sighed and sat down heavily in an armchair near an open Bible. A good, church-going woman, she had never had so much as a jaywalking ticket in her life.

  The bloodied niece confronted Sergeant Beck. “You should be ashamed for letting a man like Dukes out on the street. I hope he dies.”

  Beck was not at fault for Dukes’s release, but he represented the system. It was only natural to blame him.

  I asked Sergeant Beck what he planned to do now.

  “Arrest Mattie Davis,” he replied.

  “How could you?” I whispered, horrified, realizing, of course, that I was not remaining entirely objective.

  “I hate to do it,” he said, his expression not at all apologetic, “but I have to charge her.” He had already conferred by telephone with an assistant state attorney who advised him to make the arrest.

  Dukes was a violent man with a violent history. In addition to murder, he had been arrested half a dozen times for assault. One Miami street cop told me Dukes had been involved in at least seven shootings.

  Arthur Beck arrested Mattie Davis. The charge: assault with intent to murder. I was worried. If Edward Leon Dukes died, she would face trial for murder. But what if he didn’t die? He would surely come back, madder than hell.

  I rarely sympathize with people arrested, especially for violent crimes, but this case was different.

  Mattie Davis was treated for her beating injuries in the prison ward of the same hospital where surgeons fought to save Edward Leon Dukes, the man who had inflicted them.

  The good news was that a judge released Mattie Davis in her own custody. She certainly was not about to run away.

  The bad news was that her freedom would end if the charge escalated to murder.

  I asked a doctor about Dukes’s chances. He was not hopeful. Edward Leon Dukes died less than twenty-four hours after he was shot.

  Sergeant Beck’s hard-nosed lieutenant showed little sympathy for Mattie Davis. “She will be charged with murder,” he announced to the press.

  The newspaper story had gone out on the wires. Sergeant Arthur Beck, the good-natured cop who had had little prior contact with the press, began to receive hate mail from as far away as Canada, the Virgin Islands and England. Shame on him, they wrote, for arresting Mattie Davis.

  The far-reaching power of the press astonished him, especially when many of the letters were addressed to “Sergeant Arthur Beach Beck.” I knew how that happened. Reporters typed stories then on specially treated paper that split into three copies. The pink ones went to the wire service. On first reference to the sergeant I had typed Beach, not Beck. Force of habit. I had worked for five years at a small local newspaper where all the stories were about Miami Beach. I found it almost impossible to type B-e without automatically following with an a-c-h. My penciled correction did not go through to the pink copy.

  We had long suspected the wire services of being lazy. Ditto for many subscribers, radio and TV news people who simply “rip-and-read” stories off the teletype. A Herald newsroom prankster had proved the point by typing a story about the discovery of a World War II German U-boat at the bottom of Biscayne Bay, its mummified crew intact. He made it all up of course. The German submarine was top news story on a local TV network affiliate that n
ight. There was hell to pay in the Herald newsroom.

  My explanation was simple—but Beck did not buy it. His mother’s maiden name was Beach. He was now convinced that the jackals of the press were probing his ancestry. Full-blown paranoia had blossomed in a formerly good-natured and easy-going individual.

  The state attorney’s office, highly sensitive to publicity and public opinion, began to rethink the case against Mattie Davis. “If the facts I have heard are correct,” State Attorney Richard Gerstein announced, “it was a serious mistake for anyone [from his office] to advise them to arrest her. It was an obvious case of self-defense, and she should not be charged with anything.” He assigned a top assistant to review the facts.

  Days later, as irate letters continued to pour into police headquarters, Gerstein made his decision. After hearing accounts from five eyewitnesses, he decided the shooting was justifiable. Mattie Davis would not face a murder charge.

  Sergeant Beck, who had taken all the heat for arresting the woman, on advice from that same state attorney’s office, was disgruntled. He insisted that Edward Leon Dukes, on the other side of a door, his back turned, no longer posed a physical threat to Mattie Davis and she had no right to shoot him.

  The sergeant accused Gerstein of a decision based on “politics.” I dutifully scribbled his angry diatribe in my notebook, as he blamed the state attorney’s action on the “publicity the case received in the newspaper.” In other words, my stories.

  Mattie Davis rocked on her rooming-house porch, relieved and apologetic. “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. But it’s a big relief to me and to my tenants that he’s gone. I did everything I could to get rid of him,” she told me. “I had him arrested three times, and they didn’t do nothing but turn him loose. He lived by the gun. It was either him or me. He wasn’t crazy. He was just mean.”

  Made sense to me.

  Though all was well, except for Edward Leon Dukes, of course, the case had obviously ended a friendship. It was not the first time, but Beck was a good cop and a decent man. I would miss him and the wacky stories of his misadventures at Disney World.