Edna likes and admires a lot of policemen, but listening to her talk about policemen, you can get the impression that they spend most of their energy trying to deny her access to information that she is meant to have. Police officers insist on roping off crime scenes. (“The police department has too much yellow rope—they want to rope off the world.”) Entire departments switch over to computerized crime reports, which don’t accommodate the sort of detailed narrative that Edna used to comb through in the old written reports. Investigators sometimes decline to talk about the case they’re working on. (Edna distinguishes degrees of reticence among policemen with remarks such as “He wasn’t quite as paranoid as the other guy.”) Once, the man who was then chief of the Metro-Dade department blocked off the homicide squad with a buzzer-controlled entrance whose function was so apparent that it was commonly referred to as “the Edna Buchanan door.” Homicide investigators who arrive at a scene and spot Edna talking intently with someone assume that she has found an eyewitness, and they often snatch him away with cautioning words about the errors of talking to the press rather than to the legally constituted authorities. Edna discusses the prevalence of witnessnapping among police detectives in the tone of voice a member of the Citizens Commission on Crime might reserve for talking about an alarming increase in multiple murders.
—
Once the police arrive at a crime scene in force, Edna often finds it more effective to return to the Herald and work by telephone. The alternative could be simply standing behind the yellow rope—an activity she considers fit for television reporters. She may try calling the snatched witness. With a cross-indexed directory, she can phone neighbors who might have seen what happened and then ducked back into their own house for a bolstering drink. She will try to phone the victim’s next of kin. “I thought you’d like to say something,” she’ll say to someone’s bereaved wife or daughter. “People care what he was like.” Most reporters would sooner cover thirty weeks of water-commission hearings than call a murder victim’s next of kin, but Edna tries to look on the positive side. “For some people, it’s like a catharsis,” she told me one day. “They want to talk about what kind of person their husband was, or their father. Also, it’s probably the only time his name is going to be in the paper. It’s their last shot. They want to give him a good send-off.”
There are people, of course, who are willing to forgo the send-off just to be left alone. Some of them respond to Edna’s call by shouting at her for having the gall to trouble them at such a time, and then slamming down the telephone. Edna has a standard procedure for dealing with that. She waits sixty seconds and then phones back. “This is Edna Buchanan at the Miami Herald,” she says, using her full name and identification for civilians. “I think we were cut off.” In sixty seconds, she figures, whoever answered the phone might reconsider. Someone else in the room might say, “You should have talked to that reporter.” Someone else in the room might decide to spare the upset party the pain of answering the phone the next time it rings, and might be a person who is more willing to talk. Edna once called the home of a TV-repair-shop operator in his sixties who had been killed in a robbery attempt—a crime she had already managed to separate from the run-of-the-mill armed-robbery murder. (“On New Year’s Eve Charles Curzio stayed later than planned at his small TV repair shop to make sure customers would have their sets in time to watch the King Orange Jamboree Parade,” Edna’s lead began. “His kindness cost his life.”) One of Curzio’s sons answered and, upon learning who it was, angrily hung up. “Boy, did I hate dialing the second time,” Edna told me. “But if I hadn’t, I might have lost them for good.” This time, the phone was answered by another of Curzio’s sons, and he was willing to talk. He had some eloquent things to say about his father and about capital punishment. (“My father got no trial, no stay of execution, no Supreme Court hearing, nothing. Just some maniac who smashed his brains in with a rifle butt.”) If the second call hadn’t been productive, Edna told me, she would have given up: “The third call would be harassment.”
—
When Edna is looking for information, slamming down the phone must sometimes seem the only way of ending the conversation. She is not an easy person to say goodbye to. Once she begins asking questions, she may pause occasionally, as if the interrogation were finally over, but then, in the sort of silence that in conventional conversations is ended with someone’s saying “Well, OK” or “Well, thanks for your help,” she asks another question. The questioning may not even concern a story she’s working on. I was once present when Edna began chatting with a Metro-Dade homicide detective about an old murder case that he had never managed to solve—the apparently motiveless shooting of a restaurant proprietor and his wife, both along in years, as they were about to enter their house. Edna would ask a question and the detective would shake his head, explaining that he had checked out that angle without result. Then, after a pause long enough to make me think that they were about to go on to another case, she would ask another question. Could it have been a mistake in the address? Did homicide check out the people who lived in the equivalent house on the next block? Did the restaurant have any connection with the mob? How about an ex-employee? What about a bad son-in-law? Over the years, Edna has come across any number of bad sons-in-law.
Earlier in the day, I had heard her use the same tone to question a young policewoman who was watching over the front desk at Miami Beach headquarters. “What do you think the rest of Bo’s secret is?” Edna said as she skimmed log notations about policemen being called to a loud party or to the scene of a robbery or to a vandalized garage. “Is Kimberly going to get an abortion?” At first, I thought the questions were about cases she was reminded of by the log reports. They turned out to be about Days of Our Lives, a soap opera that both Edna and the policewoman are devoted to. Fifteen minutes later, long after I thought the subject had been dropped, Edna was saying, “So is this new character going to be a friend of Jennifer’s—the one in the car wreck?”
Bob Swift, a Herald columnist who was once Edna’s editor at a paper called the Miami Beach Sun, told me that he arrived at the Sun’s office one day fuming about the fact that somebody had stolen his garbage cans. “I was really mad,” he said. “I was saying, ‘Who would want to steal two garbage cans!’ All of a sudden, I heard Edna say, in that breathless voice, ‘Were they empty or full?’ ”
—
“Nobody loves a police reporter,” Edna sometimes says in speeches. She has been vilified and shouted at and threatened. Perhaps because a female police reporter was something of a rarity when she began, some policemen took pleasure in showing her, say, the corpse of someone who had met a particularly nasty end. (“Sometimes they try to gross you out, but when you’re really curious you don’t get grossed out. I’m always saying, ‘What’s this? What’s that?’ ”) When Edna was asked by David Finkel, who did a story about her for the St. Petersburg Times, why she endured the rigors of covering the cops, she replied, “It’s better than working in a coat factory in Paterson, New Jersey.” Working in the coat factory was one of several part-time jobs that she had as a schoolgirl to help her mother out. Aside from the pleasures Edna associates with reading crime stories to her Polish grandmother, she doesn’t have many happy memories of Paterson. Her other grandmother—her mother’s mother—was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution; Edna still has the membership certificate to prove it. That grandmother, in the view of her DAR family, married beneath her—her husband was a Paterson schoolteacher—and her own daughter, Edna’s mother, did even worse. She married a Polish factory worker who apparently had some local renown as a drinker and carouser, and he walked out when Edna was seven. As soon as Edna finished high school, an institution she loathed, she joined her mother in wiring switchboards at the Western Electric plant. Eventually, she transferred to an office job at Western Electric—still hardly the career path that normally leads to a reporting job on the Miami Herald.
The enormous
change in Edna’s life came partly because a clotheshorse friend who wanted to take a course in millinery design persuaded her to come along to evening classes at Montclair State Teachers College. Edna, who had been interested in writing as a child, decided to take a course in creative writing. She remembers the instructor as a thin, poetic-looking man who traveled to New Jersey every week from Greenwich Village. He may have had a limp—a war wound, perhaps. She is much clearer about what happened when he handed back the first short stories the students had written. First, he described one he had particularly liked, and it was Edna’s—a sort of psychological thriller about a young woman who thought she was being followed. Edna can still recall what the teacher said about the story—about what a rare pleasure it was for a teacher to come across such writing, about how one section reminded him of early Tennessee Williams. It was the one radiant New Jersey moment. The teacher told her about writers she should read. He told her about paragraphing; the first story she turned in was “just one long paragraph.” She decided that she could be a writer. Years later, a novelist who had been hanging around with Edna for a while to learn about crime reporting recognized the teacher from Edna’s description and provided his telephone number. She phoned him to tell him how much his encouragement had meant to her. He was pleasant enough, Edna told me, but he didn’t remember her or her short story.
Not long after the writing course, Edna and her mother decided to take their vacation in Miami Beach, and Edna says that as she walked off the plane she knew she was not going to spend the rest of her life in Paterson, New Jersey. “The instant I breathed the air, it was like coming home,” she told me. “I loved it. I absolutely loved it. I had been wandering around in a daze up there, like a displaced person. I was always a misfit.” Edna and her mother tried to get jobs at the Western Electric plant in South Florida; when they couldn’t arrange that, they moved anyway. While taking a course in writing, Edna heard that the Miami Beach Sun was looking for reporters. The Sun, which is now defunct, was the sort of newspaper that hired people without any reporting experience and gave them a lot of it quickly. Edna wrote society news and local political stories and crime stories and celebrity interviews and movie reviews and, on occasion, the letters to the editor.
Edna Buchanan may be the best-known newspaper reporter in Miami, but sometimes she still sounds as if she can’t quite believe that she doesn’t work in a factory and doesn’t live in Paterson, New Jersey. “I’ve lived here more than twenty years,” she says, “and every day I see the palm trees and the water and the beach, and I’m thrilled with how beautiful it is. I’m really lucky, coming from a place like Paterson, New Jersey. I live on a waterway. I have a house. I almost feel, My God, it’s like I’m an impostor!”
When Edna says such things, she sounds grateful—a state that an old newspaper hand would tell you is about as common among reporters as a prolonged, religiously inspired commitment to the temperance movement. Edna can even sound grateful for the opportunity to work the police beat, although in the next sentence she may be talking about how tired she is of hearing policemen gripe or how irritated she gets at editors who live to pulverize her copy. She seems completely lacking in the black humor or irony that reporters often use to cope with even a short hitch covering the cops. When she says something is interesting as heck, she means that it is interesting as heck.
Some years ago, she almost went over to the enemy. A Miami television station offered her a hundred and thirty-seven dollars more a week than she was making at the Herald, and she had just about decided to take it. She had some ideas about how crime could be covered on television in a way that did not lean so heavily on pictures of the body being removed from the premises. At the last moment, though, she decided not to accept the offer. One reason, she says, is that she faced the fact that crime could never be covered on local television with the details and the subtleties possible in a newspaper story. Also, she couldn’t quite bring herself to leave the Herald. “If I had been eighteen, maybe I would have done it,” she says. “But the Herald is the only security I ever had.”
—
Even before the appearance of Miami Vice, Miami was the setting of choice for tales of flashy violence. Any number of people, some of them current or former Herald reporters, have portrayed Miami crime in mystery novels or television shows or Hollywood movies. Some of the show-business types might have been attracted mainly by the palm trees and the beach and the exotica of the Latin drug industry: the opening shots of each Miami Vice episode are so glamorous that some local tourism-development people have been quoted in the Herald as saying that the overall impact of the series is positive. But the volume and the variety of real crime in Miami have, in fact, been of an order to make any police reporter feel the way a stockbroker might feel at a medical convention: opportunities abound. Like most police reporters, Edna specializes in murder, and, as she might express it in a Miller Chop at the end of the first paragraph, so does Miami.
When Edna began as a reporter, a murder in Miami was an occasion. A woman who worked with Edna at the Miami Beach Sun in the days when it was sometimes known as “Bob Swift and his all-girl newspaper” has recalled the stir in the Sun newsroom when a body washed up on the beach: “I had a camera, because my husband had given it to me for Christmas. The managing editor said, ‘Go take a picture of the body.’ I said, ‘I’m not taking a picture of a washed-up body!’ Then I heard a voice from the other end of the room saying, ‘I’ll do it, I’ll do it.’ It was Edna.”
In the late seventies, Miami, like other American cities, had a steady increase in the sort of murders that occur when, say, an armed man panics while he is robbing a convenience store. It also had some political bombings and some shooting between outfits that were, depending on your point of view, either running drugs to raise money for fighting Fidel or using the fight against Fidel as a cover for running drugs. At the end of the decade, Dade County’s murder rate took an astonishing upturn. Around that time, the Colombians who manufactured the drugs being distributed in Miami by Cubans decided to eliminate the middleman, and, given a peculiar viciousness in the way they customarily operated, that sometimes meant eliminating the middleman’s wife and whoever else happened to be around. Within a couple of years after the Colombians began their campaign to reduce overhead, Miami was hit with the Mariel Boatlift refugees. In 1977, there were two hundred and eleven murders in Dade County. By 1981, the high point of Dade murder, there were six hundred and twenty-one. That meant, according to one homicide detective I spoke to, that Miami experienced the greatest increase in murders per capita that any city had ever recorded. It also meant that Miami had the highest murder rate in the country. It also meant that a police reporter could drive to work in the morning knowing that there would almost certainly be at least one murder to write about.
—
“A personal question,” one of the Broward-bureau reporters said after Edna had finished her talk in Fort Lauderdale. “I hope not to embarrass you, but I’ve always heard a rumor that you carried a gun. Is that true?”
“I don’t carry a gun,” Edna said. “I own a gun or two.” She keeps one in the house and one in the car—which seems only sensible, she told the reporters, for someone who lives alone and is often driving through unpleasant neighborhoods late at night. It also seems only sensible to spend some time on the shooting range, which she happens to enjoy. (“They let me shoot an Uzi the other day,” she once told me. “It was interesting as heck.”) A lot of what Edna says about her life seems only sensible, but a lot of it turns out to have something to do with violence or crime, the stuff of an Edna story. Talking about her paternal grandfather, she’ll say that he was supposed to have killed or maimed someone in a barroom brawl and that his children were so frightened of his drunken rages that the first sign of an eruption would send some of them leaping out of second-floor windows to escape. As an example of her nearsightedness, she’ll mention some revelations in Paterson that seemed to indicate that she had bee
n followed for months by a notorious sex criminal without realizing it. When Edna talks about places where she has lived in Miami, she is likely to identify neighbors with observations such as “He lived right across the street from this big dope dealer” or “He was indicted for Medicare fraud but he beat it.”
Edna’s first marriage, to someone she met while she was working at the Miami Beach Sun, could provide any number of classic Edna leads. James Buchanan had some dealings with the anti-Castro community and was close to Frank Sturgis, one of the Watergate burglars. Edna says that for some time she thought her husband was simply a reporter on the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel who seemed to be out of town more than absolutely necessary. The story she sometimes tells of how she discovered otherwise could be written with an Edna lead: “James Buchanan seemed to make a lot of unexplained trips. Yesterday, at the supermarket, his wife found out why. Mrs. Buchanan, accompanied by a bag boy who was carrying a large load of groceries, emerged from the supermarket and opened the trunk of her car. It was full of machine guns. ‘Just put the groceries in the backseat,’ she said.”
Edna tried a cop the next time, but that didn’t seem to have much effect on the duration or quality of the marriage. Her second husband, Emmett Miller, was on the Miami Beach force for years and was eventually appointed chief. By that time, though, he had another wife, his fifth—a wife who, it turned out, was part owner of what the Herald described as “an X-rated Biscayne Boulevard motel and a Beach restaurant alleged to be a center of illegal gambling.” The appointment was approved by the Miami Beach City Commission anyway, although one commissioner, who stated that the police chief ought to be “above suspicion,” did say, “I don’t think we’re putting our city in an enviable position when we overlook this.”
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