Suitable for Framing

by Edna Buchanan

  A public outcry would fuel the investigation and assure justice. The family would not stand alone in its grief. Someday a little girl would read about this violent afternoon from a yellowed news clipping with my byline on it and understand exactly what happened to her and her mother and the brother she never knew. So why did I feel like such a ghoul?

  He stared at the photo through watery eyes, then handed it to me. Jennifer Carey’s hair, tied back today, had been carefully curled. She wore blue and a warm smile as she held the baby, all ruffles and satin ribbons. Her husband, Jason on his knee, rested a protective hand on his son’s shoulder, the other arm around his wife. Perfect.

  “We had it taken for her parents’ anniversary in July…” His voice trailed off. The baby’s name was Eileen. I promised to return it.

  “How could anybody just drive away and leave them?” he burst out. “They must be animals!”

  “They’ll catch them. The police put out a BOLO, and tomorrow half a million readers will want them in jail. I’ll do the best I can,” I promised.

  I did not mention that if they were juveniles, too young for adult court, punishment would probably be no more than a minor inconvenience.

  I went back to find Lottie. Rakestraw, wrapping up his work, echoed my unspoken thoughts. “Hope to hell they’re not juveniles,” he muttered.

  Lottie and I drove back to the office in a far more quiet and subdued mood than when we had set out. “Remember,” she whispered, “just before it happened? I was wanting to trade places with her.”

  The lighthearted spirit and the golden afternoon were gone.

  I worked late on the story for the final, long after Lottie had delivered her photos to the city desk and gone home. Luckily, Trish was on duty in the library. She printed out hit-and-run statistics and even unearthed sports clips from Jason Carey’s high school record as a forward on the all-city team.

  She watched over my shoulder as I worked. I object vociferously when editors do that, but I didn’t mind Trish at all.

  “Think you could use a breakdown on crime in that shopping center?” She sounded thoughtful. “You know there’s a push now to ban juveniles from some malls until after six P.M. on school days.”

  “If you could dig up some stax on the mall—especially auto theft figures—it would be great. You think like a reporter, Trish.”

  “I know,” she murmured, her tone curious. I looked up, but she was on her way back to the library.

  I wrote about Jennifer Carey’s career as a speech therapist, put on hold until her children were older, the irony of her only sister’s work as a counselor for troubled teens; and the young couple’s plans for a future, now uncertain. She was still in surgery when I checked with the hospital.

  Gretchen wouldn’t be able to edit my story for another twenty minutes and I wouldn’t go home without watching the process, so I returned the clips to the library. Trish sprang up from a desk where she’d been nibbling a sandwich.

  “Need something else?”

  “Nah, just bringing these back.” I dropped them in the in-basket and leaned across the counter.

  She seemed to want to say something but just stood there. The latest economy kick at the paper is to use as few lights as possible at night, when the building is largely unoccupied. The features section, on the other side of the library’s glass wall, was dark. Her perfect skin luminous, she looked young and vulnerable in the chilly cavernous room filled with looming shelves and shadows. It was probably safe, but it sure looked spooky.

  “You’re all alone back here?”

  “Yep, the only one working tonight. But I don’t mind. In fact I’m learning local history, reading some old stories.”

  I opened the half door and slipped behind the counter. A number of clips were spread out on the desk: The topless dancer saved by her silicone breast implant, which deflected a bullet. The hapless firefighter who forgot to engage the stabilizers before sending an aerial ladder nearly a hundred feet into the air. (When the $750,000 fire truck tipped over, the ten-story aerial ladder and bucket crashed into a busy intersection at rush hour. Half a dozen motorists were injured, along with three firefighters, who fell off the truck as it toppled.) The saga of “Crime Boy,” age thirteen, with a rap sheet of sixty-six felonies. Federal officials took immediate action when his record was publicized, authorizing HUD to relocate him and his family from the sweltering projects into a three-bedroom waterfront home. Crime pays.

  A fat file lay open: that of Linda Snell, a serial killer whose crimes I had covered. The sweet churchgoing Snell had been widowed three times. No one suspected more than bad luck until the lonely widow took to picking up men at truck stops across the state. When next seen they were dead bodies at the side of the road.

  A bad woman, but a welcome change from the usual serial killers—men who stalk women like animals. Solved a lot faster, too. The cops took quick action.

  “I remember these stories,” I said fondly, sitting down at the desk and glancing through the stack of neatly folded clips. “She’s still on death row.”

  “You haven’t done a folo in some time.” Trish took a seat opposite me. Her eyes were soft gray and glowing, with striking dark rims around the iris, and her body language was intimate, as though eager for the company.

  “There you go again, sounding like a reporter.”

  “You’re one of the reasons I’m in this business,” she blurted.

  “The library?”

  “No. Please.” She lightly dismissed her surroundings with a small wave of the hand. “Journalism.” She smiled, pronouncing the word with reverence. “I’m a reporter. I interned on a small paper in Oklahoma, and when your stories crossed the wire we would fight over who got to read them first. Now”—she glanced warmly around her—“here I am.”

  “So if you’re a reporter, what are you doing in the library? How come you’re not out in the newsroom?”

  “That’s what I keep asking myself—and your editors.” She pulled a shapeless cardigan tightly around her small frame. If they are so intent on saving energy, I wondered, why don’t they turn down the confounded air-conditioning at night?

  “Would you like half my sandwich—it’s only peanut butter and jelly—and some tea?” Her thermos was red and yellow plastic.

  I had forgotten how hungry I was. The yogurt, long ago at the mall, was all I had eaten all day.

  “I wouldn’t dream of eating your lunch, but I’d love some tea.”

  She found another mug and poured a steaming lemony brew.

  “Some of the stories you file are odder than fiction,” she said as we sipped. “We’d post them on our newsroom bulletin board back in Black Mesa. Not much action there,” she said ruefully.

  Trish had gone on to work general assignment for the Shelbyville Post Gazette in Oklahoma and the larger Star-Courier in Kansas City.

  “Will you transfer into the newsroom when there’s an opening?”

  “You know of one?” Her eager eyes locked on mine.

  “Not at the moment But that means nothing. You know how it is.”

  Most reporters are gypsies. Why any writer would leave this great news town, the city I love, where I was born and belong, remains a mystery to me. But they do, every day. Little newsroom farewell soirees seem to take place every other Friday, with punch and cookies rolled out after deadline for the bulldog edition.

  Restless colleagues yearn for bigger markets in Washington, New York, or Chicago or dream of covering exotic wars in foreign lands. Those whose dreams come true never experience anything that does not break out in Miami at one time or another. Every major national scandal has a Miami angle. As for action, why dodge bombs or bullets on some godforsaken strip of real estate thousands of miles away when you can do it right here? We have it all: war, murderous weather, foreign intrigue, spies, refugees, and hand-to-hand combat in the streets. What more could a writer want?

  “I thought hiring on as a
reporter would be easier,” Trish was saying, “especially after I won first place for deadline reporting in the annual Oklahoma Press Association awards last year. I applied for reporting jobs here three times, but they never called me.” She shook her head, face pinched. “I guess I should have had a job before I quit the old one, but I just had to get out of there and I was sure this was the right move. This”—she lifted her eyes, shadowed in the gloom, to the broad picture window framing Miami’s sweeping nightscape of glittering city lights—“is the place for me. I just know it.”

  I could relate. I never take it for granted. I am always thrilled by the lacy shadows of palm fronds on stone, the warm caress of soft moist air, the roar of the sea.

  “And it’s always easier to get a job when you’re in the same city,” Trish went on. “Right?”

  “I thought it was always easier to get a job when you had one.”

  She sighed. “I never dreamed it would take this long, and I was getting low on cash … Maybe I shouldn’t have settled for the library, but I needed work and thought it would be a foot in the door, that I could more easily move into the newsroom from here.”

  “I knew you were too good to be true. You’re great to have back here on deadline—but I’ll let you know the minute I hear about anybody leaving.”

  She scooped up a bleating phone. Somebody from the national desk wanted a recent photo of Boris Yeltsin. “What’s he done now?” she asked. “Is he dead?”

  A reporter’s curiosity. I smiled. She looked up and winked.

  “Pissed off the Latvians again. Okay, I’ll bring it right out.”

  Back at the city desk, I saw that Gretchen was editing my story and had inserted the word alleged in front of the phrase “hit-and-run car.”

  “Gretchen, Gretchen,” I argued impatiently. “It really happened. I saw the car hit her and speed away.” Then I saw that she had also added an alleged in front of the word victim, referring to Jennifer Carey.

  “Well, if we don’t qualify it you should attribute it to the police,” she argued stubbornly, pursing her lips. “Whose word do we have on this?”

  I suddenly felt very tired. “Take my word for it The woman was a victim. She did not crush her little boy’s skull and then fling herself across the parking lot; they were run over. That is fact. We don’t have to qualify it or attribute it to anybody. All that does is slow down the story and make me look silly. It happened, Gretchen. Believe it.”

  She grudgingly deleted the offending words. I should have been more diplomatic. She would make me pay for this, but I felt fresh out of patience.

  Before escaping the cold and nearly empty building into the heat of the night I made final phone checks with the cops, the hospital, and the intern who mans our police desk in a noisy little nook off the newsroom. No new developments. Jennifer Carey clung to life. The thieves and the Trans Am had vanished without a trace.

  I drove across the causeway, half listening to the crackle of the new police scanner in my dashboard and the rumble of thunder across the Everglades. While fighting deadline and the desk there had been little time to think. Now I felt drained.

  Bitsy yapped, running in circles as I unlocked the door to my apartment while Billy Boots meowed in agitation from atop a bookcase. Several volumes lay scattered on the floor, evidence of rough play or a serious skirmish.

  “What’s been going on?” I scolded. “Can’t you two just get along?” Ignoring the winking red light on my message machine and the cat purring against my ankles, I foraged in the fridge. Pickings were sparse. I hungered for real food, salteado de camarones, shrimp sautéed in onions and garlic with chopped plum tomatoes, or ropa vieja, which translates as old clothes but is shredded beef in savory wine sauce. All I could find in the depths of the freezer was a frozen breakfast bearded by frost an inch thick. Eleven P.M. was no time for breakfast, but my stomach wouldn’t know the difference. I scraped ice off the package, popped the little tray in the oven, fed the animals, then took Bitsy for a stroll. Jennifer Carey’s little son and her struggle to survive haunted my thoughts. Would she ever go home again?

  The night was starless and hot, the temperature holding at 88 and the air thick with humidity that dampened my clothes and curled my hair in wispy tendrils. The moon, a faint glimmer, burst free from the dense overcast for just a fleeting moment as we returned. Full, lustrous, and ripe, it took a bow, then sailed again into its cover of clouds.

  I picked at my midnight supper, juicy little sausages oozing sodium phosphate atop pancakes bursting with goodies like calcium caseinate and sodium aluminum phosphate, all listed in tiny print on the side of the carton. My stimulated taste buds cried out for an accompaniment of orange juice and strong coffee. I drank a glass of wine instead and went to bed.

  Usually I sleep well, but this night something disturbing, a prescient sense of trouble, hung in the air. Must be the full moon, I thought.

  Chapter Three

  Breakfast at midnight had been a mistake. At 6 A.M. I awoke hungering for a Cuban sandwich, my body clock convinced that it was lunchtime. Jennifer Carey was in surgical intensive care. The Trans Am had not been spotted, said the cop who answered my call, which meant that by now it was most likely at the bottom of a canal, totally dismantled in a chop shop, or on the high seas aboard a southbound freighter.

  I skipped my usual run on the boardwalk. Sluggish and out of sorts, all I could manage was a slow jog around the block with Bitsy. Even her short legs were able to keep up with me. I showered, dressed in lettuce-green cotton, drank some black coffee, and headed out, thrilled at the sight of my new car waiting, its finish as smooth and lustrous as the inside of a seashell. The beat was relatively quiet and driving sheer luxury in an automobile with a functioning air conditioner.

  I visited the cop shops, scrutinized the logs of overnight check-ins at the morgue and the county jail, and arrived at the office armed with several stories.

  An offshore storm had driven a school of sharks in toward the beach, where one had mistaken a surfer’s foot for lunch. The surfer had been sewed up at Mount Sinai while the Beach Patrol hastily hoisted warning flags for swimmers, who ignored them anyway.

  A bolt from the same storm killed a thirty-two-year-old Sunny Isles bicyclist as he pedaled north on Collins Avenue. Struck by lightning, he crashed into a tree, fell off his bike, and was hit by a cement truck.

  And a Miami family had called police to report their dead mother missing. Her body, shipped to New York for burial, had been mistakenly sent to Aruba. The mistake was discovered when an empty casket, intended for Aruba, arrived at the funeral home in Brooklyn. Now services were postponed indefinitely because customs officials were refusing to return the body from Aruba without proper identification, certification, and other necessary paperwork.

  I wrote all three for the early edition. Before returning my messages, I checked the Careys’ conditions—baby Eileen was fair and her mother critical—retrieved the borrowed family picture from photo, slipped it into an envelope addressed to the father, and dropped it into a wire room out-basket.

  Then I opened my own mail.

  The first piece was neatly typewritten, on good stationery:

  Dear newswriter Britt Montero,

  You are the second to share my discovery of an Inspector Deity, a new deity. U.S. Senator John Glenn was first. Enclosed is a copy of his letter to me. The following news is for immediate release.

  The subjects are quasi-stellar radio sources and the universe’s new type-M red stars. Scientists believed that stars were created by clouds of cosmic dust condensed from stellar supernova explosions. If not otherwise informed by our Inspector Deity, I would have thought that myself.

  However, more than ninety percent of the red type-M stars in the universe are formed by golden G-type stars like our sun and Alpha Centauri.

  Terrible infrared light and heat make it necessary for planets around golden G stars to be moved t
o an icy glacial distance when a type-M red star is being created.

  Please report this to the world at once.

  Best regards,

  Emmett R. Merrill,

  M.D.

  He thoughtfully included his telephone number and a copy of a letter to him, under a U.S. Senate letterhead.

  Thank you for your letter concerning the discovery of an Inspector Deity. I have forwarded the information to NASA for their comments. You should be hearing from them in a few weeks. Feel free to contact me again if I can be of further assistance.

  Best regards.

  John Glenn, United

  States Senator

  I opened the next envelope, a friendly invitation, hand-written on lined paper:

  Ms. Montero,

  Next time you find yourself in the neighborhood of South Florida State Hospital, please stop by for a chat and a cup of tea.

  Sincerely,

  Perwin Thompson

  The return address was a forensic unit that houses the criminally insane. Thompson was confined years ago after police found parts of his wife and his mother in his septic tank.

  The next letter was also handwritten, on lined paper torn from a yellow legal pad.

  Dear Ms. Montero,

  With all sincere hopes these few lines find you in good health and relaxation. I am illegally incarcerated in the Dade County Women’s Jail. The bastards lied! I did not assault those police officers. They harassed and followed me and planted the knife! My only desire is to entertain and to touch the hearts of people with the sound of my voice. God has gifted me with a solo lead voice. I sing from the stomach. I began singing after my drug experience so I am confident that I don’t have significant brain damage. Please investigate the lying bastards on the police department at once.