Contents Under Pressure

by Edna Buchanan

  “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said, squinting into the sun. “In fact, the mayor called me at home this morning, to congratulate me. I thought it was a put-on at first,” Ted said gruffly, “some of the guys horsing around. But it was really him. I never talked to the man before.”

  “Neat. I guess he does read the newspaper, despite the big deal he makes out of canceling his subscription every time he doesn’t like a story.”

  “Well, I liked your story, Britt. My family was proud, although my wife is on me now about wearing my vest.” Ted’s words were friendly, but he seemed strangely guarded and uneasy, in a hurry to get away. I gave him Lottie’s pictures, and he drove off without even opening the envelope.

  Instant celebrity, no matter how brief, often affects people in odd ways. Other cops may have been teasing him about the publicity, I decided.

  The same officer was at the accident bureau. He greeted me like an old friend. “Nothing personal, you know,” he said cordially, handing over a copy of the accident report. “I just didn’t want to cross my new sergeant. He never told me what I could and couldn’t release.” Sure, I thought, but I just nodded and took the report. I moved away from his desk and began to read.

  The report on D. Wayne’s accident was written by a veteran patrolman named Lou Carpenter. It had been a one-car accident, witnessed by at least five officers in pursuit of the vehicle. The chase began on Biscayne Boulevard at 1:08 A.M., after the BOLO went out, and ended after the car veered off into the city’s fashion district, blocks of warehouses and manufacturers’ outlets, deserted at that hour. He may have been trying to reach an expressway entrance ramp, but missed the turn, struck a concrete abutment, and skidded into a drainage ditch that bordered the highway. The officer had checked off the box that indicated the driver was not wearing a seat belt.

  The report said that Hudson’s car had been hauled out of the ditch by a Double Eagle truck, one of the towing firms with a city contract. It could still be there, I mused; Alma must be exhausted, with more important things on her mind today than reclaiming her dead husband’s car.

  I continued reading the stilted police jargon, which said that the driver, bleeding from a head injury, semiconscious and combative, had to be restrained by the officers and fire department medics. Then I did a double take: One of the pursuers, listed as a witness, was Badge Number 262, Officer Ted Ferrell—yesterday’s hero.

  Why didn’t he mention it then, or just now in the parking lot? I wondered. That could explain his uneasiness, his rush to leave before I started asking questions about D. Wayne Hudson.

  I studied the names of the other witnesses listed: Officers Manuel Machado, José Estrada, and the Blackburn twins, Roscoe and Roland. I was surprised at the latter two. The twins had a reputation for high-spirited exuberance. If there was a chase, they led the pack; in a manhunt, they ran the bad guy to earth; in a brawl, they won; and if there was an outrageous practical joke, they were usually responsible. I knew them by sight, and had heard they were being kept apart after some of their prior escapades. Yet there they were, out riding midnights together, involved in the same call.

  I did not know Estrada or Machado well, except as bulky, overly muscled weightlifter types who spent a great deal of time working out.

  The report concluded that the driver of the car had not been involved in a felony after all. No wonder they had been reluctant to release the report—the cops had chased the wrong car. But why had D. Wayne run?

  I left messages for all the officers listed to call me, then headed for Number One Bob Hope Road. The site is not what it sounds like. It is not show biz; it is the morgue.

  The medical examiner’s brick and concrete complex is conveniently adjacent to the county hospital.

  Actually, the morgue is more modern and comfortable than the hospital. A stranger might mistake it for a hotel. There is ample parking and well-manicured landscaping. Wall-to-wall mauve couches fill a huge lobby, carpeted in muted forest green. The futuristic building incorporates the latest in technology, including a system borrowed from the airport’s method of dealing with jet fuel odors. Molecules that create odors are constantly broken down and filtered out by air handlers, making the atmosphere smell, for the most part, springtime fresh. With its pastels, warm lighting, and cozy family rooms, this is a place you might have liked to visit had you not known its purpose.

  Dr. Vernon Duffy was temporarily in charge while the chief medical examiner accepted honors at an out-of-town conference. I was first introduced to Duffy out in an Everglades hammock full of rare ferns, air plants, and orchids. We shook hands over the skeletal remains of a slain drug courier discovered by bird watchers a few hours earlier. It was one of my first murder scenes, and I will never forget it.

  Duffy began his career as a sheriff’s deputy in rural New Hampshire. His father had been a funeral director, and Duffy always had a preoccupation with death. He decided to go to medical school, where he realized that the only doctors who ever know what really happened, albeit too late, are pathologists. So for the past twenty years he had elected to be the last, rather than the first, responder to the scenes of unexplained deaths.

  He caught the eye of Dade County’s chief medical examiner in a hotel bar during a convention nine years ago. The chief liked Duffy immediately because he told great stories, despite coming from small-town New Hampshire, where not much ever happened. In fact, Duffy’s only cases of consequence were carbon monoxide deaths caused by sex in the snow. Impassioned young couples parked in freezing lovers’ lanes always left the heaters running.

  Duffy wanted to work where the action was, so he quickly accepted the offer to come to Miami, a long way from snow-driven New Hampshire.

  I hoped to find him in his office, but the acting chief was busy in the ground-floor morgue, which resembles a gleaming stainless steel kitchen so shiny and immaculate that you could eat off the floor—except that you wouldn’t want to.

  A visit to this place, in fact, is enough to convert one to vegetarianism. It does that to me, sometimes for weeks, until I am overcome by yearnings for roast pork or a palomilla steak.

  Dr. Duffy, slightly built and stooped in his surgical greens, was working on a case. Occasionally he turned to scribble with a felt-tip pen on a wall board behind him. The object of his attention was an older man with wispy gray hair. Age seventy-three, I saw, peering at his chart. The doctor acknowledged me with a nod as he continued, intent on his work. I stood behind his elbow and watched. The dead man’s pale arms were blackened by soot, and the left one bore a strange pattern of scrapes. His front teeth were broken, and he had big raccoon eyes, darkened by skull fractures. His head lolled at an odd angle.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Traffic,” Duffy said. “Didn’t stop at a red light and got walloped by a dump truck. Broadsided.”

  “What time of day?”

  Duffy ran the back of a wrist across his creased forehead and grimaced through his bifocals at the paperwork. “At 1:47 P.M. on Coral Way, the 2400 block.”

  The gas tank had ruptured, and the man’s car had burned, which explained the soot on his arms. The grillwork of the dump truck, which had smashed into the driver’s side, left the pattern on his left arm.

  No one, according to the police report, knew where the dead driver had been coming from or the destination he had never reached. His back and neck were broken and his aorta ruptured. “Did he slump over before he ran the light?”

  “No, no heart attack here, Britt. He’d had prior, successful heart surgery and was in relatively good shape. Why he didn’t stop, I don’t know.”

  “Strange neighborhood?”

  Duffy glanced at the paperwork again and shook his head. “Nope. Lived right nearby.”

  Not unusual, I thought. Most fatal traffic accidents take place within a few miles of home. That might also explain why he had not worn his seat belt. Motorists buckle up as they head f
or the highways, but often don’t bother for a drive to the corner store for a quart of milk. The man with the wispy gray hair had undergone heart surgery to prolong his life, then failed to fasten his seat belt. “Small car?”

  “Big four-door sedan.”

  Swell. Sometimes I think about trading in my T-Bird for a tank. Miami traffic teems with lost tourists, illegal aliens, bewildered senior citizens, crazed crack addicts, and aggressive gun owners, many of them fugitives with short fuses, automatic weapons, and extra ammo in the glove compartment. But this man drove a tank, and it didn’t save him.

  Dr. Duffy plopped the man’s liver onto a scale. I stepped back, but not quickly enough; droplets spattered the front of my print challis skirt. “Oh,” Duffy said, seeing my expression as I wondered how to explain this to the dry cleaner. “Excuse me.”

  He scooped the internal organs into a plastic bag and tucked it back into the canoelike cavity in the man’s body. Then he began to close the incision. His needle, about five inches long, was S-shaped and stainless steel; his thread was thick twine, and the stitch he used was a running figure eight.

  “What brings you here today, young lady?” he asked as he worked.

  “Another traffic,” I said. “D. Wayne Hudson.”

  He nodded. “We already did that case.” He motioned for me to follow him. Bodies enter the morgue very much like they do the jail, photographed, weighed in, and then stored in a cold room. The doctor opened the walk-in cooler and indicated the second from the end in a row of occupied trays on wheels. “Here he is.”

  I wished I was not seeing D. Wayne like this. Though slightly sunken due to the transplant team’s organ removal, his body was as well muscled and impressive in death as it had been in life. He had been an amazing athlete. Swelling on one side of his face gave him an almost whimsical expression. His head had been shaved in the hospital, I assumed. He had not been circumcised.

  “What are all those marks?”

  “Extensive evidence of resuscitation and medical attention,” Duffy said slowly. “Needle injections. He came in with a Swan-Ganz catheter, which monitors blood pressure, an endotracheal tube to provide air to his windpipe, a Foley bladder catheter to drain urine, and a nasogastric tube so he wouldn’t aspirate his stomach contents. The other injuries were apparently sustained during the fatal event.”

  I grew queasy counting the cuts on Hudson’s head, and had to turn away for a moment. It is easy to maintain a professional distance from a dead stranger, but there is no way to remain impassive when the body in the morgue is someone you know. A cut less than an inch long angled his right eye. There was another about two inches above the brow, one over his left eyebrow, and one between the eyes. The longest measured two and a half inches. Five in all. He must have gone through the windshield, I thought. Feeling light-headed, I took a deep breath and fought the desire to sit down.

  “He was in otherwise good health?” I scarcely recognized the sound of my own voice.

  “Oh yes, Britt, excellent donor. All there is of note is scarring from old knee surgery.”

  “What about alcohol or drugs?”

  “Blood alcohol measured .01, taken shortly after arrival at the hospital,” Duffy said, glancing at the chart. “Equivalent, I would say, for a man of his size,” the doctor half-closed his eyes as he calculated, “to about one highball or shot of whiskey consumed in the past two hours.”

  That was well under the limit: Florida’s legal definition of an intoxicated driver was one with .10 blood alcohol.

  “Drugs?”

  “Still running tox, but nothing discernible. Apparently, this is what did the job,” Duffy said, his gloved finger indicating the cut over D. Wayne’s half-open right eye. “Depressed skull fracture. Although it doesn’t appear that deep, it had to have caused the brain swelling that proved fatal.”

  “Anything unusual?”

  Duffy peered over his eyeglasses and shook his head. “The head injuries are consistent with a traffic accident.”

  I nodded, thanked him, and stumbled out into the sunshine and untreated fresh air. Driving back to the paper, I realized with regret that I would now find it difficult to remember D. Wayne any other way.

  My mail and a stack of phone messages were waiting back at the newsroom. None of the calls were from the cops I wanted to hear from. Two were from Pete Zalewski. I harked back nostalgically to the days when inmates were allowed only one phone call. Now all Dade County Jail prisoners had phones in their cells, with free local and 800 calls. I was out when he called, but there was no escaping Pete Zalewski today. Among my mail was a bulging envelope bearing his return address. The word “legal” was scrawled in the upper right hand corner, in place of postage.

  Jail mail from the accused to their attorneys was free, courtesy of us taxpayers. So inmates now seemed to be marking all their mail “legal,” with no questions from corrections or postal authorities. It was not surprising; no one questioned another inmate who had operated a gigantic nationwide $2 million credit-card scam from behind bars, while he awaited trial for murder. More than a thousand credit-card numbers and hundreds of 800 numbers were found in his six-by-eight cell, but police were powerless to stop him because taking his telephone away would violate his rights. No wonder no one bothered to question mere postage.

  The envelope from Pete contained a dozen sheets of lined yellow legal-size paper, each covered on both sides and in the margins with his tiny, cramped handwriting. I pushed it aside to read later.

  The scrawled address on another envelope looked dishearteningly familiar. The letter inside was neatly printed:

  Dear Miss Montero, Since you have not shown me the courtesy of a reply to my most recent letter, I must introduce myself once more. I am the one about whom the late President John F. Kennedy spoke in his televised inaugural address in January 1961, in Washington D.C. He later said that “we must prepare World History for the next 10,000 years,” or “we might become extinct like the dinosaur.’’ He was referring to my mind.

  Let me explain. In 1959 I separated my psyche (soul) from my head. My psyche stared me in the face. It was round and yellow and disappeared. Later on, in 1960, I was hospitalized and had some electroshock treatments which electrified my mind and sent it into outer space, in orbit around the planet, among the Russian and American satellites. Since then, my mind has been monitored by the satellites orbiting earth and by Russian and USA computers on the ground. Sincerely, Martin T. Rodgers

  P.S. I am radioactive.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, and the image of D. Wayne Hudson appeared. I shook it off and looked at the letter again. Why, I wondered, did the crazies seem to single me out?

  The voice of Ryan Battle broke into my thoughts. He was aglow, though not radioactive, at his desk behind me, telling someone how his feature story about the need for more mommies to lead Girl Scout troops had been read into the Congressional Record by Congressman Lewis Black. Ryan had curly, chestnut-colored hair and big, soft brown eyes with lashes that any woman would kill for. He looked like a young Lord Byron, and was a talented writer and an aspiring poet. A gentle, sweet soul, he was far too nice a person to be a reporter.

  “Guess what, Britt?” I turned toward his smiling face. “The Kiwanis is giving me a plaque for the series I did on parents without partners.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You get plaques and I get jail mail—and this.” I thrust Martin T. Rodgers’ missive at him.

  Ryan read the first line and looked up, frowning slightly. “He says you didn’t answer his last letter.”

  “Of course not.”

  “You saw the memo. You’re supposed…”

  These are lean times for newspapers, and our publisher, Harvey Holland, had recently launched a campaign to make the News more “reader-friendly.” Part of his strategy was to torment reporters further by instructing them to answer all reader mail.


  “Read on. Encourage somebody like him, and he bombards you with a dozen more. I don’t have time to be Radioactive Man’s pen pal. I’m polite; I answer letters. But some mail begs to be ignored.”

  “He won’t like it,” Ryan murmured, rolling his eyes toward the sixth floor, where the publisher lurked in his spacious penthouse office.

  “Never mind,” I snapped. Ryan didn’t get it. Even the nicest guy in the newsroom was irritating me now. I was having a bad day. The sight of a dead hero on a slab kept surfacing in my mind like a nasty headline.

  I tore open another fan letter.

  Dear Miss Montero, Someone should knock your depraved brains out for printing the name of the man charged with raping that slut in the Flagler Plaza parking lot. Since when are you the guardian of morality and ethics in Miami? How do you get your kicks, through sadistic perversion, like hurting and destroying harmless normal men with your degenerate newspaper? Bravo, you castrating Cuban bitch! Is this your contribution to the feminist movement? Congratulations, you sick broad.

  Sincerely yours, Randall Woxhall.

  I could not believe this one. The arrested man had had a history of violent crimes. The “slut,” a medical secretary attacked while walking to her parked car after working late, was still hospitalized, a cheekbone and both arms broken. I crumpled the letter and wondered if there was a full moon.

  “God, Britt, I love it when you open your mail,” Ryan said. “Let’s see.”

  I flipped the letter onto his desk, then rolled a sheet of paper into my typewriter. “Dear Sir, Thought you should know that a deranged person is writing me crank letters and signing your name. Sincerely, Britt Montero, News Staff Writer.” I tore it out of the typewriter, signed with a flourish, and passed it back to Ryan. “What do you think?” I said, addressing the envelope.

  Ryan read it in silence. “I doubt that is what Holland had in mind,” he replied solemnly. I took it from his hands, stuffed in into the envelope, marched into the glass-walled wire room, and flung it in the outgoing mail basket as he watched.