Suitable for Framing

by Edna Buchanan

  “You crazy? Fool me once, it’s your fault! Fool me twice, it’s mine! Think I’m that stupid?”

  The line went dead. I stood there holding the phone, hoping I was wrong and would hear his voice again.

  I hung up and sat down, mind racing. What the hell happened? I snatched up the phone again and punched in Rakestraw’s number in a rage. I wanted to weep in frustration myself.

  “Britt,” Rakestraw said, “I was just gonna call you.”

  “What the hell happened to Howie?”

  “You heard from him? He ran. The goddamn little street slug ran. The house mother at the Crossing said he went out to a utility room to do his laundry last night and kept going.”

  “He just called, hysterical. He claims he tried to call me a dozen times. I never got any messages.”

  “He called here too, six-seven times in the last couple days,” Rakestraw said sheepishly. “Some of his messages say ‘urgent’; others are asking for help. I was off. Didn’t get ’em till I came in today. We drove up to Altamonte Springs for my parents’ anniversary. The damn civilian they had taking messages in here is two bricks short of a load and didn’t know enough to try to reach me or pass it along to somebody else.”

  “Howie said word leaked out, that FMJ knew where he was all the while and was threatening Miss Mayberry, the woman who lives in the little house—”

  “I know who she is,” he snapped. “Did he say where he was?”

  “He’s mad as hell at me. He blames me for getting him into this and not being there for him like I promised. At this point I’m sorry I ever brought him to the station!”

  “Oh, swell, now don’t you go crazy on me, Britt! These things happen. This is all a misunderstanding, nothing that can’t be straightened out.” He sounded both patronizing and impatient with me.

  “Now I see how police informants get killed! Straightening out your misunderstandings doesn’t make them any less dead.” The venom in my voice surprised me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’m the one who urged him to trust you. He’s just a kid. He was upset and unloading on me.”

  “I know,” Rakestraw said quietly. “Crap seldom runs uphill, it runs down and spreads out.”

  “We should’ve taken better care of him, Rakestraw. We owed him that. He’s trying to protect Margaret Mayberry, and we should too.”

  “I’ll have a watch order put on her place; the beat people are all aware of her anyway. But chances are no kid will harm her if Howie is out there with them doing whatever it is they want him to do.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” I said. “You know how unpredictable FMJ is.”

  I knew it was probably futile, but I had to go to the Edgewater to see if Howie might have returned to his old home.

  Gretchen caught my eye as I fumbled for my car keys. She waved a scrap of paper. “Britt, the police desk says there’s been a boat explosion down on the river, a couple of workers injured. It’s still burning. Here’s the address.”

  “Can’t go right now, I’m too busy.” I took tentative steps toward the elevator.

  “I don’t see anything from you on the budget,” she said, trailing me, her pace deliberately slow. She wore what looked like one of Oscar de la Renta’s bright plaids. My mother would have loved it.

  “Can’t talk right now, but I really can’t do it. Is there somebody else?”

  “If you’re too busy, I’ll give it to Trish.” She smiled knowingly.

  I stared at her for a moment. Was this some sort of inhouse joke? Was everybody in the newsroom snickering?

  “Good,” I said, and walked out. Let Trish’s head ache and her hair smell of acrid smoke and burned flesh. Let her ruin good shoes running through a fire scene.

  At the elevator, I looked back and saw them at Trish’s desk, heads together. Then Trish began to gather her things. Gretchen has hit a new low, I thought, as the doors whispered open. Start manipulating reporters and encouraging professional jealousy and no one in the newsroom would trust anybody. What a delightful prospect.

  Miss Mayberry stared at me through the ever-present screen.

  “He stopped by last night,” she said, shrewd eyes oddly veiled. “Said he wanted to be sure I was all right. Didn’t like the looks of the boys he was with. Didn’t seem as though he liked them much either. But he went with them. Didn’t wait to take the banana bread or the brownies I baked him. What’s going on with that boy?”

  “I know he was worried about you.” I chose my words carefully. No sense in us both taking guilt trips.

  “Pshaw, I’m a tough old bird.” She waved off my concerns with a casual gesture. “I can take care of myself.”

  “What did the boys look like?”

  “Four or five of ’em, in a new … one of those four-wheel-drive things. A Blazer, I think. Bright yellow. They didn’t come to the door, so I didn’t see ’em close, but they were blowing the horn and yelling. Sounded like bad business to me. Don’t know why Howard would sashay around with that bunch.”

  “Miss Mayberry,” I said, “be careful. If any of those kids come around, don’t open the door. And call the police.”

  “On what? I don’t own a telephone. Never had one. Don’t need one,” she said stubbornly. “There’s a pay phone right inside the mall.”

  Despite what she said, despite the reality that Howie was in the company of trouble, on the run with FMJ and his crew, I went to the roof. A short, pudgy man stepped out of what looked like the hotel laundry and stood smoking a cigarette. I waited in my car until he crushed the butt with his shoe and went back inside.

  Howie’s little hideaway was empty except for dust mites floating in the shaft of sunshine that fell inside when I swung open the door.

  “Howie?” I called hopefully, more to myself than him. What remained of his “protection” lay near the door, the stick broken as though across someone’s knee. A loose snarl of tape hung from the business end. The blade was missing. Either Howie had been here or someone else had decided not to let a perfectly good knife go to waste.

  I walked around trying to think, gazing at traffic below, hoping to magically spot the yellow Blazer from this vantage point. Black smoke spiraled skyward to the south. I watched its color change to yellow, then white. Either we had a new pope or the boat fire on the river was now under control. Sirens wailed in the distance. A white car approached and parked across the street as I looked down on the east side. Rakestraw got out and crossed, apparently to see Miss Mayberry. His warnings would carry more weight than mine. My vantage point was comfortable. Instead of the frustration that had dogged me recently, I felt a sense of power: unseen, yet able to see everything. I wanted to stay where I was and never go back down to reenter the real world.

  I tore a page from my notebook, scrawled a message, and left it inside Howie’s little space: Please call me. It can still be all right. It’s not too late. Your friend, Britt. I underlined friend and included my phone number, adding my home number as well.

  Rakestraw’s car was still parked as I left the complex. I expected to see him on Margaret Mayberry’s front porch speaking through the screen. He wasn’t there. Evidently she had let him in the house. I drove by the apartment where FMJ’s mother and sister lived. No one answered my knock. I scribbled Please call me on the back of my card and slid it under the door.

  Back at the office I stopped at the police desk to ask Jerry, the cub reporter who monitors the police radios, about carjackings the night before. “Only one that I know of,” he said, adding what I expected: “A tourist who got shot. They took a yellow Blazer.”

  I walked preoccupied into the newsroom. Trish was dictating from the fire scene. A few people, including Gretchen, were peering over the shoulder of the intern taking the story. Two of the three victims had died, the third was at the bum center along with a fireman critically injured in a second explosion.

  I wondered what had happened and wished I were covering it, but there was no tim
e. I had to track Howie down before he got into serious trouble and wound up in prison or worse.

  I left the office and just drove, listening to the police scanner in my car, checking every place I could think of—teen hangouts on the Beach, in Overtown, and around the Edgewater—willing him to be there each time I turned a corner. If the police couldn’t find them, what chance did I have? But I kept looking till midnight.

  The next morning I checked Howie’s place again and circulated my cards among the kids at the Edgewater game rooms. They all flat out denied knowing him, even the ones I had seen him with the day we met.

  Rakestraw called after I got to the office.

  “Where you been? You get my messages?”

  “No,” I said. “I just checked my voice mail.”

  “Well, you better check it again.”

  Goddammit, I thought. Why isn’t the system working? What if Howie had called?

  “Guess who I’ve got here?” he said.

  “Howie?”

  “I wish. A lady I thought you might want to speak to.”

  “Miss Mayberry?”

  “No.” He quit the guessing game. “Howard’s mother. Want to talk to her?”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  On the way out I confronted Gloria. “Did you call the Audix room to find out why I’m not getting my messages?”

  “I did, and your line is working fine, Britt. If nobody calls, you don’t get messages.”

  She saw my face and made a hasty suggestion.

  “Why don’t you change your code? It’s easy to do. Somebody else might have theirs mixed up or something.”

  I decided to do so when I got back. Right now, I was in a hurry.

  She was sprawled in a hard wooden chair in Rakestraw’s office, slump-shouldered and awkward, bare legs stretched out in front of her. Rail-thin and bony, she wore skimpy short shorts, ankle-high boots, and a midriff top, sans bra. If seductive was her intended effect, it would have worked better to cover her scarred arms and legs.

  She raised her head but failed to register my presence. Her eyes had the dusky, unhealthy glaze of somebody on the street too long.

  Rakestraw leaned against the doorjamb, apparently finished with her. He rolled his eyes as I sat down opposite the woman, smiled cheerfully, and said, “Hi, so you’re Howie’s mom.”

  About to nod off, she made a losing effort to focus.

  “Have you seen him lately?” I asked, glancing anxiously back at Rakestraw. His look told me she hadn’t.

  “I tol’ him,” she slurred, jerking her head in his direction. She winced, eyes narrowing, teeth set on edge, as though even the slightest movement created discomfort. “I ain’t seen that boy fo’ a coupla years.” Something in her stare reminded me of the retarded mother who had mislaid her children. “I always called him my sweet boy,” she muttered. “He a man now,” she announced, chin skidding toward her chest.

  “Not quite. We need to find him before he gets in serious trouble,” I said urgently. “I’m a friend of his.”

  Her eyes came up again, lips pursed in an argumentative expression. “He a good boy. Always helped me.”

  “I know.” I thought of his rooftop lair. “He’s very self-sufficient.”

  She leaned forward then, intent on speaking. “I was never able to do nothin’ for ’im. See, I been on drugs all his life. Whenever I got money I didn’t do nothin fo’ him, spen’ it on crack. Now I never will be able to do nothin fo’ ’im. I’m sick.” She spat the words out. “I got the HTV.” She sniffed. “You see ’im, tell my sweet boy his mama loves ’im.”

  Exhausted by the exertion, she slumped back in the chair with a sigh, head lolling.

  “Did you ever give him a Star Trek toy, a model of the U.S.S. Enterprise?” I asked. I sensed an impatient movement from Rakestraw behind me.

  She frowned. Her eyes lifted, though she never raised her head, giving her an odd wolflike expression. “Never bought ’im no toys.” She brought up a scrawny hand and rubbed at her forehead, as though massaging a memory. Her cracked lips curled on one side. “You mean that spaceship thing?”

  She nodded gingerly, a half smile on her face. “Came one Christmas. He musta been eight or nine. All wrapped up. With a food basket, Toys for Tots or some shit like that.”

  “He still has it,” I told her, not knowing why I felt it important for her to know, “or did until just recently.” Presently it sat in a box behind my sofa. She didn’t seem to hear.

  “She hasn’t seen him. Probably wouldn’t recognize him if she did,” muttered Rakestraw. He had picked her up outside the same crack house where she was last busted. She belonged in a hospital but declined medical attention, so he was about to take her back where he had found her. We both urged her to have Howie turn himself in or call us if she saw him.

  As she got slowly to her feet, an emergency signal, a 330, a shooting, went out on the radio. At 47th Street and Seventeenth Avenue. Rakestraw and I exchanged glances. I asked aloud what we both wondered. “Think it’s them?”

  We listened to the rapid-fire transmissions. “Doesn’t sound like it,” he said. “It’s at the cemetery.”

  More than one victim, at least two down, at Our Lady of Victory Cemetery.

  “Inside the gates?” I asked.

  “Sounds like it.”

  We have had mourners robbed at the graves of departed loved ones, a rape or two, thieves who steal the bronze flower vases from gravesites—and the usual problems during full moon rituals—but I couldn’t recall any recent shootings breaking out among the dead.

  “Sounds like a smoker,” he said, referring to a scene so fresh that gunsmoke still hung in the air.

  I headed for my car. The cemetery was ten minutes away. By the time the ornate wrought-iron gates loomed ahead, a half dozen emergency vehicles were inside, lights flashing. No one had roped it off yet, so I followed.

  Our Lady of Victory is my kind of cemetery, an old-fashioned burial ground studded with tombstones, crosses, marble angels, madonnas, and mausoleums—as opposed to one of those sterile parklike places with metal plaques set flat in the ground. I favor places like the old Key West cemetery, where one tombstone bears the message I told you I was sick. Another is engraved with a message from a widow: I know where he is sleeping now.

  Whatever happened here had gone down in the interior of the grounds, along a crunchy gravel drive. I parked as close as I could without blocking emergency vehicles and grabbed my notebook.

  Paramedics worked feverishly over one victim. Another lay dead among the tombstones, already covered by a yellow plastic sheet. A playful breeze lifted one corner, exposing a foot wearing a basketball shoe. At least a dozen blood-spattered white roses were scattered nearby, along with a gun lying in the grass.

  The deceased would be removed from the cemetery and taken to the morgue. The natural order of events had been thrown into reverse. It would make more sense to merely roll him into an open grave. But murder is seldom efficient or sensible.

  I quickly pushed open my door, before somebody official could order me to move the car. Then my stomach did a free fall.

  A slender woman in blue stood under an oak tree talking intently to two cops.

  Trish. What the hell was she doing here? On my beat, my story. How the hell did she hear about it and get here so fast?

  I scrambled out of the car and stalked over to them.

  One cop had his hand on her shoulder.

  “Trish!” I exploded. “What are—”

  “Oh, Britt!” She threw herself into my arms for a hug. “It was terrible. They killed each other!”

  I stood frozen, then pulled away and stared at the bloodied green carpet of manicured grass. That was when I saw the small gravestone among the scattered flowers. A new one. MAGDALY ROSADO, 1954–1994.

  “It’s them!” Trish blurted, eyes red-rimmed. For the first time I saw the blood on her pale linen skirt.

&nb
sp; “Trish.” I nearly recoiled. “What happened?”

  “The desk knows,” she said breathlessly. “I called the paper right after I called Nine-one-one. Photo is on the way.” Her gray eyes were huge. “It’s them,” she repeated. “Miguel Rosado—and Ernesto.” She gestured toward the covered corpse. “I couldn’t stop them. They both had guns. I’m lucky to be alive. I was nearly caught in the crossfire trying to stop them. If I hadn’t stumbled, I’d be dead.” She winced, placing small polished fingertips over both ears. “They’re still ringing. He was standing right next to me when he emptied the gun at Ernesto.”

  I still couldn’t comprehend. “What were you doing here, Trish?”

  “You know I’m working on a story about Reach Out’s mishandling of the Rosado suicide.”

  I nodded, gazing at the wounded man. Two IVs dripped fluids into his body, an oxygen mask covered his face, and a medic was pressing sterile gauze over a bloody wound in his abdomen.

  “I was doing a sidebar on her death’s impact on the family,” Trish continued. “There’s been bad blood, a bitter feud, between them, so I was interviewing them separately. I arranged to meet Ernesto here today when he brought flowers to his mother’s grave. Miguel suddenly showed up. They began shouting at each other and they both pulled guns. I couldn’t believe it … I tried to stop them. I got it on tape.”

  She held up a miniature recorder.

  “The police are taking it, but they promised to copy it for us.”

  Miguel was being readied for the rescue van, apparently too close to death to wait for an ambulance.

  “I can’t believe he’s still alive,” she said, her voice a husky whisper. “He was hit at least four times. I tried to stop them.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “What does the desk want us to do?”

  “I’m writing a first-person account. I think I’ve got everything. Then I have to go down to police headquarters to give a statement.” She gazed into my eyes. “What a story,” she said solemnly. “What a tragedy.”

  Villanueva had arrived and was already shooting, using a Nikon with a 300-millimeter lens. Trish stepped over the bloodied roses and stood near the body. He worked quickly, closer than usual, firing off at least a dozen frames before the cops asked Trish to step away. They were more relaxed than if the killing had been a whodunit. The cops had both shooters—one, maybe both, dead—and an eyewitness. As the medics lifted Miguel into the rescue van, Trish motioned to the photographer, then reached out to steady the IV bottle. He caught it. So did a TV news crew that had just arrived.