Contents Under Pressure

by Edna Buchanan

  “I’m sorry. I know I should have called first, but I just happened to be in the neighborhood,” she said.

  I invited her into the newsroom, a little embarrassed about my grubby desk, and asked if she’d like to go to the cafeteria for coffee. “Not unless you really want some,” she said. “I just need to talk.” The look in her eyes told me that she didn’t just happen to be in the neighborhood.

  Ryan’s chair was available, so I wheeled it around his desk and parked it next to mine. She sat down, clutching her purse. “I didn’t know you guys were expecting again,” I said cheerfully.

  She started to say something, gulped, and her eyes brimmed with tears. Embarrassed for her, I took the box of Kleenex from my desk drawer and handed it over. She plucked one out, then kept the box balanced on her lap. Naively, I figured there must be trouble in paradise, that Ted had been acting up. Some men did when their wives were pregnant, but I was surprised at Ted.

  “Britt, I want you to know we’ve always been grateful. Putting Ted’s name in stories in the past, the story last week…” Tears overflowed and she pressed a tissue to her eyes. Her fingernails were neatly trimmed and immaculate. I became conscious of my own fingers, stained with ink from the cheap ballpoint pens the paper issued to us. “It’s meant a lot … We’re so proud of him.” She sniffled, struggling to continue.

  “Mrs. Ferrell, what’s wrong?”

  “Please call me Betsy.”

  I nodded.

  “This story, the story that you’re working on, please let it alone. Don’t write it.” Pink blotches had appeared on her cheeks as she dabbed at her eyes.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” she gulped. “D. Wayne Hudson.”

  “Why are you so upset about this story? Look, just catch your breath and tell me what we’re talking about here.”

  “You know why,” she said, then leaned back in a determined effort to regain composure. She sniffed and made an attempt to smile. “You know we’re a SITKOM family.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Single Income, Two Kids, Outrageous Mortgage,” she placed her left hand, with its modest wedding band, on her swollen belly—”except soon it will be three.”

  Not living out in suburbia, I guessed I wasn’t caught up on the lingo.

  “I have never wanted Ted to work midnights,” she said cryptically. “He never liked working with those guys; they’re always in trouble. But he wanted the extra money, with the new baby and all. He swore he’d never let them drag him into anything. That was why he switched back to days. If only he’d done it sooner.” She leaned forward, eyes pleading. “We can’t afford to have him get in trouble and lose his job. It’s not just losing the paycheck, or even the house with a baby on the way. It’s the job.” Her voice was low and intense. “He loves it so much.” She looked ready to weep again, and I felt like shit.

  “What makes you think Ted is in trouble?”

  “He won’t be if you just let it go. Let it go, Britt.”

  I was confused. “How do you know what I’m working on? I haven’t even talked to Ted about it.”

  “They know, Britt. They all know you’re on the story.”

  “Who is ‘all’?”

  “Ted, the Blackburns, Manny Machado, Estrada, their families, Carpenter. Everybody’s upset.”

  Her words were chilling. While I’d been piddling around, unaware, my lame efforts had been agitating a lot of people.

  My face must have telegraphed my feelings. Betsy looked apprehensive. “Ted doesn’t know I’m here,” she whispered. “But I thought if I appealed to you, woman to woman, you wouldn’t do this. There are so many other stories. I’m sure they’d be eager to help you with some of them. You’ve been so good to us, so fair in the past.” She shredded a tissue nervously.

  “I’ve never been good to you and Ted, Betsy. I wrote stories about him because he deserved them. All I can tell you is that I’m as fair as I can be, and I do care. Did Ted do something wrong?”

  “He never would!” she cried vehemently.

  “So what is there to be upset about?”

  “You don’t understand…” she stopped, her eyes changing. “You’re going to keep working on it,” she said slowly.

  “Sure, and it would make everything a lot easier if Ted would just give me a call and help me piece together what actually happened that night.”

  “I have to go now.” She stood abruptly, placed the box of tissues on my desk, and turned to leave. Unconsciously, she was clutching her purse to her bosom, like a baby. “Thanks for talking to me. Please don’t tell anyone I was here.”

  So something ugly did happen between the cops and D. Wayne Hudson, I thought, watching her walk away. I bet I knew what it was. Somebody had lost control, and the others were covering up for him. I wondered which of D. Wayne’s injuries had come at the hands of a brutal cop? Or did they all? Only one thing was certain—nothing would keep me from this story now.

  Nine

  Parking at the police station was a pleasure at eleven o’clock at night. What a difference twelve hours made. I dropped my car keys, a comb, and other essentials into the deep pockets of my navy blue cotton jumpsuit.

  McDonald had not forgotten. When I mentioned his name at the front desk, the officer said I was expected, and handed me a clip-on visitor’s pass. He escorted me across the empty lobby, past the stainless steel memorial to the thirty city officers killed in the line of duty since 1915, inserted his key card into the elevator slot, punched five, and returned to his post.

  The fifth-floor halls were deserted; few people were on duty, and I liked the freedom of not having to look over my shoulder for Major Alvarez or some other officious supervisor eager to challenge my presence.

  Robbery and homicide shared a big open office with picture windows looking out on Overtown, a high-crime ghetto neighborhood. McDonald, Flood, and two other detectives were huddled at desks at the homicide end of the room. They were handling their mail and paperwork, returning phone messages, and monitoring their radios all the while. McDonald broke into a big, slow smile when he saw me wending my way toward them, and I couldn’t help smiling back. He spoke to his partner, and Flood’s head spun around. “What!”

  “Britt’s with us tonight,” McDonald repeated.

  Uh oh, I thought. No wonder everything was okay with Flood, until now. He didn’t know I was riding with them.

  Ignoring Flood’s scowls, I browsed the homicide board, which spanned an entire wall. The board listed each of the current year’s murder victims in numerical order, revealing at a glance the number of killings inside city limits so far this year, 121. Although most of those whose names were listed there did not lead orderly lives, their deaths were neatly catalogued. Each entry, precisely printed in black grease pencil, included the date, time, the name of the victim, the location and manner of death, the lead detective on the case, and the killer. Many of the killers, as well as occasional victims, were described simply as UNK. The worst possible case scenario for an investigator was a homicide in which weeks or months have elapsed with both victim and killer still listed as UNK. Where did you start when one unknown human being was murdered by another?

  Other suspects’ descriptions were brief and basic enough to fit thousands of South Florida residents, such as W/L/M (white Latin male), age 20s to 30s. Those known by names were identified, along with their DOB (date of birth) and the charges filed against them.

  Most of the names seemed like old acquaintances. That was because I had covered their cases.

  Another detective, whom I knew only slightly, was on the telephone at a nearby desk. His end of the conversation sounded like he was pacifying a citizen unhappy about an unsolved case. He looked bored and slightly sullen, gazing blankly out the window as he mostly listened. Suddenly he leaped to his feet with a shout.

  “Holy shit! Gotta go now!” He slammed down the receiver and s
printed across the office toward the hall.

  “What the hell?” Flood muttered, rising from his desk.

  “A 330, just down the street, corner of six and two,” the detective shouted breathlessly. “Some son of a bitch just shot a guy right off his bicycle. Right in front of me. Out there!” He was pointing and talking rapidly into his radio.

  We ran to the window. A block-and-a-half away, a man lay sprawled in the street under a bright anti-crime sodium vapor light. His bicycle was already gone. The killer had pedaled away on it.

  One reason for building the new station in this neighborhood was so its presence would cut crime and upgrade the area. Some people didn’t get the message.

  “He won’t even need a car,” Flood said. “He can beat feet to the scene.”

  We heard the detective on the radio, reporting the shooting to dispatch. He had seen two men, one on a bike, apparently arguing under the streetlight. The other had pulled a gun and shot him.

  McDonald picked up his radio and spoke laconically to the detective, who by now had reached the lobby. “I guess we can assume you’re handling this one,” he drawled.

  We all stared out the window. Several youths had appeared and approached the body. One crouched beside him.

  McDonald radioed what was happening to the detective who was on the way. “We’ve got some bystanders, looks like one of them is taking your victim’s pulse—or his wristwatch. Hell, dammit! He’s got his watch! Tall black kid, wearing jeans and a dark-colored muscle shirt. Headed west on Six. He’s running.”

  A patrol car skidded around the corner, lights flashing. The bystanders scattered.

  “Nothing good ever comes out of Overtown,” Flood grumbled, turning back to his desk.

  I continued staring out the window at the growing tableau below. “Something did once,” I said quietly. “D. Wayne Hudson.”

  The radios stayed active with the manhunt and with street patrolmen frequently raising detectives for advice or to report incidents or injuries that might develop into something serious. Homicide detectives hated surprises, like people who died in hospitals weeks after minor crimes that were never properly investigated and were now murders.

  Flood was discussing a mugging victim on the radio. “How bad was the hit on the head?”

  “Apparently it was some object, maybe a pipe,” the tinny voice of a young patrolman answered. “Knocked the victim to the ground. He was hit from behind, then fell forward and struck his face on the pavement.”

  “How many stitches?”

  “About twenty-one in the back, six in the front. His nose is kind of bloodied, and it may have loosened a couple of teeth.”

  “Was he ever unconscious?”

  One could hear the officer conferring with someone, perhaps the victim, in the emergency room. “He’s not sure, maybe briefly. He crawled to the corner gas station where somebody helped him and called us.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Seventy-two.”

  “Talk to the doctor and see what he says. Lemme know if they decide to admit him.”

  “QSL.”

  McDonald was responding to an officer handling a robbery on NW Twentieth Street at Twelfth Avenue, a rental car attacked by street people who smashed the windshield with rocks, then robbed the occupants. “Are the victims local?” McDonald said.

  “Negative. Tourists, a family from Ohio.”

  “Okay, get them down here to talk to robbery. Now.”

  Had the victims been Miamians, a report would have been filled out and a detective may have contacted them eventually, if he found the time. But tourists took priority. Their cases carried a sense of urgency. Criminals loved to stalk them, like hunters stalking their prey, because of the scant chance that an out-of-towner would return to testify against them in the unlikely event of an arrest. In fact, there was a strong possibility that the victim would leave town before an investigation could even be launched. Most traumatized tourists fled at once. That, of course, left city officials and chamber of commerce types wringing their hands and ordering the cops to give their cases top priority, even if it meant ignoring the local tax payers who got mugged.

  McDonald motioned me to help myself from the coffeepot set up near the interview rooms. The muddy brew looked like it had been made earlier in the day, perhaps even earlier in the week, but if the night stayed relatively quiet, I would need the caffeine. It was murky and lukewarm, but I poured some into a Styrofoam cup and stirred in sugar with a plastic spoon.

  A hoot of jubilation came from McDonald, and I moseyed over to his desk. He’d received a positive ID from the lab on a print lifted from a detective’s car. The crime had been one of deception on both sides, a narcotics reverse sting gone awry ten days earlier. The “drug sellers” were really cops, the “drug buyers” were really robbers. The playacting ended when the robber ringleader pulled his impressive new gun, a European model fitted with extra safety features. He had never fired it before and forgot to release the safety before trying to kill the cops. As he wondered why his expensive new gun wouldn’t work, they shot him dead and his accomplices scattered.

  Police shootings are more sensitive than they once were, and are now investigated like homicide cases. It is important to interrogate all participants. Police had had no luck until now—the Rockwell computer had matched a single thumbprint lifted from the roof of the undercover car to a man by the name of Rodney Williams.

  He may have been one of the conspirators. All of the robbers had leaned on the detectives’ car at some time during the negotiations.

  McDonald called records for Williams’ rap sheet and copies of all his prior arrests. We all pulled chairs up to the same desk, searching the paperwork for the dead man’s name as a prior codefendant or relative. We found no link between Williams and the man police shot. Williams did have a number of arrests on drug and robbery charges, which looked good, but none were in the Brownsville neighborhood where the shooting went down. That looked bad. Criminals are creatures of habit.

  “Uh oh,” McDonald said, scanning A-forms. “Unless he’s doing something new, or his cousin or somebody lives in this building, he may have left his print on that car at some other time, some other place.” He looked disappointed.

  “When’s the last time they washed the car?” I asked.

  “Good question,” Flood said.

  “Probably impossible to find out, but worth asking,” McDonald said.

  “Would the undercover officer recognize Williams’ mug shot?” I asked.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” he said. “They were dealing mostly with the main man, the guy they shot.”

  “Thing to do,” Flood said, “is to go roust Rodney and ask him what the hell happened that night. That could solve our problems. He might tell us.” He looked at me. “That’s the secret, never ask if he was there, ask him what happened when he was there.”

  “I do that all the time,” I told him, chin on my palm, elbow on his desk.

  “Don’t ever try it on me,” he growled, but he cut his eyes at me with a grudging look of approval. I did like him.

  Since the city seemed quiet, with no major chaos in the streets at the moment, we studied Rodney’s most recent mug shots and set out to hunt him down at his usual haunts.

  I was glad to be alone with McDonald and Flood in their big unmarked Chevrolet Caprice, in a more private setting, without others overhearing our conversations. McDonald drove, with Flood in the passenger seat, me in the back.

  We drifted through neighborhoods unsafe for motorists in broad daylight. There was a great deal of movement on the street given the hour, which was almost 1 A.M., and our plain, unmarked four-door car fooled no one. People lounged comfortably on corners and in doorways as though in their living rooms. The downtown foot traffic was constant, homeless people pushing shopping carts full of aluminum cans, piled high with their possessions, stacked with merchandise they had stolen. Others dragged their beds, huge
pieces of folded cardboard as big as refrigerators, looking for their spot. Most wore layers of clothing, carrying their entire wardrobe as they moved about.

  “They’re younger than the hobos and bums of yesterday,” Flood pointed out. “Drinking has stayed about the same, but a lot of these people are strung out on crack.”

  “It’s the drug addiction of the poorest of the poor,” McDonald said. “If they’re young they’re usually addicted to crack. They drink wine too, but just to stay numb. When they do get their hands on a few dollars they buy crack first, then alcohol, then they try to get, not buy, food. That’s the order of their priorities.”

  We rolled through the streets staring, watching for a face, as eyes watched us from the shadows. Nothing in this city where I was born and raised looked the same as it did during the day. Miami’s blue vistas seemed shrunken, as though a lid of darkness had been clamped down, cutting off the vast horizons and shrinking the city. I felt a strange intimacy between us, out there together, sharing a metal cocoon moving through a strange and surrealistic landscape. I could see how police partners who worked this shift could become closer to each other than to their families or spouses.

  Alone in the backseat, I eased out my notebook. Flood was reminiscing about the bad old days, the year of the big gasoline shortage. The long lines at the tanks sent the city murder rate skyrocketing while the county’s dropped, when killers stopped dumping dead bodies out in the remote countryside. Short on gas, they left them lying where they fell, inside city limits, unfortunately.

  Flood folded two slices of chewing gum into his mouth. “Trying to quit cigarettes,” he explained, as he chomped and offered the pack around.

  During a lull in conversation I asked, “How does this shift affect your home lives? How do your wives cope?”

  “She’s used to it,” Flood said, and shrugged.