Contents Under Pressure

by Edna Buchanan

  Reporters were not her only victims. She cropped photographers’ work so that it lost all impact, form, and composition, reducing carefully thought-out photos to mug shots.

  Her only talent that I could see was getting her hair to look great no matter what the weather or how high the humidity. Gretchen was in her early thirties, and beautiful. Her blond hair was blunt-cut, smooth and sleek, with feathery bangs, and ultrastylish like her sophisticated designer suits. Always as polished as the cover of Vogue, she looked like Ms. Perfect. In reality, she was Perfectly Awful. Recruited out of the Medill School at Northwestern, she appeared to be ascending the corporate fast track to the top as rapidly as her exquisitely fashioned Italian-made high-heeled pumps could scramble—and pity the poor soul, man or woman, who stumbled into her way. Married to a wimpish schoolteacher, she reveled in her assertiveness training and arrogantly ordered us around in a voice that sometimes shrilled to a nasal pitch when she lost control and forgot to “modulate.” You might get the impression I disliked her—I did.

  Partly to escape the office and the chance that Gretchen’s eyes (set a wee bit too close together, by the way) would focus on me and trigger some cockamamie assignment, I finished my stories on the day’s disasters for the early edition, eased out of the newsroom, and drove out to Double Eagle towing for a look at D. Wayne Hudson’s car.

  Even mild-mannered motorists become enraged when their cars are towed, and pitched battles, often with automatic weapons, erupt as a result. Taking someone’s car stirs the same primal emotions aroused in olden days when somebody stole a horse—and you know what they did to horse thieves. Towing is a dangerous business. Several companies held contracts with the city, and their home bases looked like armed camps, surrounded by tall barbed wire fences and protected by guard dogs. They were so tough that one firm refused to give a patient her insulin from the glove compartment of her impounded car because she was ten dollars short of cash for the towing fee. Not even a diabetic coma changed their minds. Motorists redeem their wheels at small, barred windows, cash only, in small denominations, no checks, no hundred-dollar bills. There seem to be more counterfeit than real hundred-dollar bills circulating in Miami. Even the post office refuses to take the big bills any more.

  I was trying to explain to the woman behind the bulletproof glass that I was not there to bail out a car, I just wanted to look at one, when Lucas Taylor, one of the owner-operators, saw me and stepped out of his well-fortified office. We knew each other from many an accident and/or homicide scene where he had hauled cars out of the ocean, the bay, rivers, waterways, and canals, out of swamps, airport parking lots, and the woods, often with bodies in the trunk, bodies in the backseat, and bodies still strapped behind the wheel, some for years before being discovered. The highest count was eight bodies, almost nine, in a car; one was a pregnant woman.

  “Hey, Britt!” He grinned. “You got a car here? You and Lottie wreck another one?”

  “No,” I said, irritated. “That only happened once.” It wasn’t our fault. Who could know that a four-car crash up on the expressway would grow into a nine-car pile-up, with a truck spinning out of control and onto the shoulder where we had parked to cover the initial wreck? Or that the automobile we had just left would cartwheel down a highway embankment and explode? It was Lottie’s company car, and there was hell to pay in the newsroom. (Photographers are provided with take-home cars; reporters use their own wheels and are reimbursed at twenty cents a mile.)

  “I want to have a look at D. Wayne Hudson’s car. It’s a Lincoln, a dark blue Mark VH.”

  “Sure, come on back.” He unbolted the steel door and led me through the office into the storage lot. Lucas was in his mid-thirties, hard-boiled, and husky, a guy that irate motorists should not tangle with. They usually tried anyway, and regretted it. He wore the blue twill uniform of Double Eagle towing, and a smear of grease across one bronzed cheekbone. When he reached for a clipboard hanging from a hook on the wall, I noted his impressively muscular arms. Have I become so desperate, I wondered, that I feel the urge to let Lucas tow my T-Bird? Maybe Lottie was right, maybe we should go out with Larry and his friend Steve.

  The Lincoln was parked out on the lot and already wore a coating of dust. The headlights were smashed. Both fenders and the top of the hood were dented, though not seriously, and the windshield, though still intact, was an intricate spiderweb of cracks. Oddly enough, the taillights were also smashed.

  According to the paperwork, which Lucas left on the hood when he went back to the office to take a car, the car had no police hold on it. The accident investigation was complete, and the car was currently accumulating forty-five dollars a day in storage fees. I opened the door and peered into the driver’s compartment. The interior still seemed to have a new-car smell. Maybe I noticed it because my car definitely did not.

  D. Wayne Hudson’s Mark VII was almost new, with 5,784 miles on the odometer. There was a baby seat in the back. My beeper went off, with a message to call Gretchen at the city desk. I ignored it. I could see no bloodstains or damage inside the car. I assumed D. Wayne’s head had broken the windshield; the shatterpoint was on the driver’s side, but there was no physical evidence that I could see. Something about the car bothered me. The beeper went off again, and a voice instructed me to call Gretchen, immediately. Irritated, I ignored it. If some emergency had occurred on my beat, she would have said so. She was just checking up on me. The glove compartment contained the owner’s manual, warranty papers, a baby’s pacifier, a map, and a flashlight. I’d never seen a pair of gloves in one yet.

  The beeper chirped for the third time and I switched it off, then began to worry that perhaps there was some question that, unanswered, might keep one of my stories out of the early edition. Reluctantly I wandered back to the office and asked to use the telephone. Gretchen answered with: “Where are you?” I explained, and she sounded annoyed. “What’s the point?” she demanded.

  I didn’t want to go into it with several people listening to my end of the conversation. “We can talk later,” I said, “I’m tying up a business phone here.”

  “You shouldn’t have gone out there without checking with me first,” she snapped, then put me on hold, interminably.

  I was tempted to hang up but still thought she might have an important question. The woman cashier sulked, picking impatiently at her chipped vermilion nail polish as though waiting to use her own phone. Gretchen eventually got back to me, brisk and officious. “I want you to check in with me once an hour, so I know where you are.”

  No other editor had ever demanded such a thing. Swallowing my anger, I took a deep breath and tried to speak calmly. “Any questions about my stories for the first edition?”

  “They didn’t make it,” she said lightly. “I haven’t looked at them yet. We had too much other breaking news.”

  “Oh?”

  “The new United Fund campaign, appointments to the Cultural Affairs Council, the groundbreaking for the Performing Arts Center, the Jewish Libraries Convention on the Beach, and a public hearing on the special taxing district.” She sounded pleased; it was her kind of newsday.

  “I think what’s happening to kids in our inner city, the robbery in the classroom, and the children stabbed by the hypodermic needle, is important.” My stomach knotted.

  She sniffed. “You can speak to whomever is on tonight.”

  I knew I would have to go back and lobby to get my stories on the budget of the morning paper. As day slot editor, she would leave the proposed budget for the night slot editor. Stories not on the budget stood far less chance of making it into the newspaper.

  “Since I didn’t know where you were and you didn’t answer your page, I had to assign a good story to someone else.” Gretchen actually sounded regretful. “Get your ass back in here,” she said, and hung up abruptly.

  I was still seething when a thought occurred to me: the air bag. What happened to the air bag in D. Wayne’s car? Once deploye
d, air bags deflate and lie there limply, like used parachutes. But it wasn’t there. Alma had said the car had an air bag.

  I went to Lucas, who checked, then wrinkled his tanned brow. “Funny,” he said. “The thing never deployed. Guess there wasn’t enough impact.”

  “It was enough to kill him!”

  We stared at each other. His deep-set eyes became a trifle wary.

  “Was D. Wayne still there when you got to the scene?”

  “They were just putting him in the ambulance,” he said, then threw up one hand as though I was a hoodlum aiming a gun. “Don’t you drag me into nothing, Britt. That city contract is the lifeblood of my business.”

  “Of course I won’t. I’m only trying to find out what happened.”

  “Whatever it was, it was all over by the time I got there.” His expression was defensive.

  “Isn’t it odd that the air bag didn’t inflate?”

  “I dunno,” he mumbled. “Maybe it’s defective, maybe the car skidded sideways. The collision has to be head-on for the bag to deploy.”

  “There is damage to the front.” I looked at him questioningly. “Did you see skid marks?”

  He hesitated. “It was dark.” His lips tightened and his eyes focused over my shoulder at nothing that I could see. “Talk to the accident investigator. He’s the man with the answers.”

  “Okay,” I said, then gave him a sweet smile. “But if you think of anything that will help me put it together, you know where to find me.” I handed him my card.

  “Sure,” he said. As I walked away, he called after me. “Hey Britt, you and Lottie should ride together more often. We can use the business.”

  On the way back to the paper I stopped at headquarters to request the tape of the chase again. The public information officer, usually a nice guy, was snotty. “We take more than fifty thousand calls a week from the public. That’s our priority, not catering to your whims. You’ll get it, if and when we find the time to track it down for you.”

  I wasn’t sure if taped transmissions were public record, so I didn’t lay a legal request on him. I left messages for Ted, Roscoe and Roland Blackburn, Jose Estrada, Manuel Machado, and Lou Carpenter, the cops who had chased down D. Wayne, and the officer who wrote the accident report, to call me.

  Back at the paper, I stopped first at our attorney’s office. Mark Seybold looked unassuming and stodgy, but beneath that business suit beat the heart of a tiger, and cops who caught him by the tail were in for a wild ride. He had kept me out of jail when a judge had instructed me to reveal a source and had come to my rescue when prosecutors tried to seize my notes in an attempt to get me to do their investigative work for them. I was relieved and immensely grateful each time. The law scares me. Each time Mark saved me, he disappointed the members of our editorial board. They would have been delighted to see me jailed, giving them the opportunity to fiercely editorialize about freedom of the press. If it ever came to a showdown, I would refuse to reveal a source, but I sure as hell would hate to hear cell doors clang shut behind me.

  Mark and I shared something in common. His desk also looked like a dump truck had backed up to it and unloaded. Not quite middle-aged, he was confident and attentive, with intelligent eyes that looked huge behind the magnifying lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses. An avid train buff, he was wearing his favorite tie, navy blue stripes with an embroidered locomotive, the Southern Railway’s #1401. To anyone who complimented him on it, he would rattle off the engine’s history, built in ‘26, retired in the ‘50s, and now on view at the Smithsonian. I didn’t; I was in a hurry. I asked a simple question instead, hoping for a yes or no answer.

  “Are the taped transmissions between dispatch and police officers in the field public record?”

  Mark clasped his hands together behind his head and looked thoughtful. “Good question,” he said. Oh Lord, I thought, to a lawyer is there ever a simple answer?

  “It’s a gray area,” he said. “They would say it’s not, we would say it is. That’s a fair assessment.”

  I sighed, knowing that Gretchen, upstairs in the fifth-floor newsroom, was probably dissecting my stories at this very moment.

  “Transmission between cop cars and base is exempt from the public records law if it is part of an active criminal investigation,” he continued. “The key question is: Are the tapes part of an active criminal investigation?”

  I explained the situation.

  “What do you hope to find on the tape?”

  “I’m not sure until I hear it or read a transcript”

  “A fishing expedition?”

  “More or less.”

  “We should probably save an all-out battle for a worthwhile cause, when you know you have a story there.”

  “Any investigation of D. Wayne would logically conclude with his death, right?” I leaned an elbow on his messy desk.

  “Yeah, but if there is an internal affairs investigation into the conduct of the cops that night that would make it a gray area,” he said. “If an internal affairs investigation began after the tape was made, then the tape was obviously not compiled for that purpose. If the investigation began on day five, for example, that doesn’t mean they can retroactively place public record under a veil of secrecy. Of course,” he shrugged, “they won’t agree, and not every judge will buy our version, either.”

  Public records requests from the media were usually run by a police legal advisor who might argue the point. Since my request had not been flatly refused, I agreed that it would be wiser to continue pursuing the tape on my own, without making it a legal issue just yet, saving the big guns for war. Mark relished a good fight but chose his battles. I couldn’t argue with that.

  I found my corner of the newsroom in chaos. Lottie, another photographer, several reporters, a librarian, and a clerk were clustered around Ryan’s desk. Gretchen sat up at the city desk looking prim, purposefully working on something, her perfectly outlined lips curved into a smirk. Ryan must have inherited the assignment she meant for me, I thought as I approached them.

  As it turned out, Gretchen had indeed had a brainstorm. It had been triggered by the hordes of Cuban rafters, nearly 2,000 so far this year, who had braved the Florida straits in innertubes and rafts to escape Castro’s Cuba and come to Miami. Many were found by the Coast Guard or Hermanos al Rescate (Brothers to the Rescue), a volunteer search group of Cuban exile pilots, of whom I knew a few; one of my father’s cousins was a member. Others, their homemade rafts or small boats treacherous and unseaworthy, were lost forever at sea.

  The newspaper, Gretchen had decided, should cast a reporter adrift for a first-person account of what it was really like out there on an inner tube in shark-infested waters, facing strong currents and fifteen-foot waves. She chose Ryan for the job. He told her he was too busy working on his conversation series. When Gretchen insisted, Ryan confessed that he had never learned to swim. “Whether one can swim or not really doesn’t matter out at sea,” she had said. She had a point. Ryan explained that he was easily seasick. “All the better, to make your account more realistic,” she had answered.

  Ryan was no survivalist or Outward Bound enthusiast; in fact, he tended to be a bit of a hypochondriac. Other reporters, pretending to commiserate, had gathered like sharks, thoroughly enjoying his plight.

  Lottie was to shoot pictures of Ryan on his raft from a Chalk’s seaplane, which would ultimately pick him up if the Coast Guard, a freighter, or Brothers to the Rescue did not find him first.

  “Or the sharks,” Howie Janowitz, a general assignment reporter, said happily.

  “Is she serious?” I asked. “This sounds like some tabloid TV stunt.”

  “She’s serious,” Ryan said glumly. He already looked queasy.

  “We must congratulate her. This has to be the first genuinely original or dramatic idea the woman had ever had in her entire life,” said Eduardo de la Torre, our society editor. Impeccable as usual, with his aristocratic profil
e, gold-buttoned navy blue blazer, and a perfect manicure, he smiled at Ryan and sighed. “If only she had chosen me.” We all laughed.

  The raft would be authentic, borrowed from the Coast Guard, who had either rescued the occupants or found it empty and adrift.

  “I just hope it doesn’t have bad karma,” Ryan fretted.

  “You live in South Florida, surrounded by water, and you really can’t swim?” I asked, when most of the crowd had drifted back to work.

  He gazed balefully at the city desk. “I never could put my face in the water. Besides, Britt, you know yourself, whenever you cover a drowning you always quote the survivors who described the victim as a good swimmer. They always say that. Something happens. Good swimmers get cramps, their feet get tangled in underwater vines, they go out too far, they get overconfident. You almost never hear of a drowning victim who couldn’t swim. When you can’t swim, you’re safe. You know enough to stay out of the water.” It made perfect sense to him.

  “And you’ll never die in a car crash if you never get into a car,” I said. “But you’ll never go anywhere, either.”

  “And you never get pregnant if you don’t have sex,” Lottie added. Ryan’s face settled into a pout. Even his pals had turned on him.

  “You’ve got to learn to swim,” I said. “Look at all the cars that wind up in the water around here.”

  “I don’t have time now,” he said miserably. “She wants this for Sunday’s paper.”

  “What if there’s a storm? This is hurricane season, for God’s sake. How long are you supposed to stay out there?” I glared across the room at Gretchen, her glossy, golden head bent over her terminal.

  “Twenty-four hours.”

  “I’ll take such great pictures of you,” Lottie said soothingly, “on your flimsy little raft, out there alone, man against the sea. In color, front page. You’ll be famous.”