Killings

by Calvin Trillin

  Since the breakup of her marriage to Miller, Edna has almost never been seen at parties or Herald hangouts. “I love to be alone,” she says. One of the people closest to her is still her mother, who lives not far from Edna and seems to produce ceramic animals even faster than she once turned out fully wired switchboards. Edna’s house is a menagerie of ceramic animals. She also has ceramic planters and a ceramic umbrella holder and a ceramic lighthouse—not to speak of a watercolor and a sketch by Jack (Murph the Surf) Murphy, the Miami beachboy who in 1964 helped steal the Star of India sapphire and the DeLong Star Ruby from the American Museum of Natural History—but ceramic animals are the predominant design element. She has penguins and turtles and horses and seagulls and flamingos and swans and fish and a rabbit and a pelican. She has a ceramic dog that is nearly life-size. She has cats in practically every conceivable pose—a cat with nursing kittens, a cat carrying a kitten in its mouth, a curled-up cat. Edna is fond of some of the ceramic animals, but the fact that her mother’s productivity seems to be increasing rather than waning with the passing of the years has given her pause.

  All of Edna’s live animals are strays. Besides the cats, she has a dog whose best trick is to fall to the floor when Edna points an imaginary gun at him and says, “Bang! You’re dead!” Some colleagues at the Herald think that a stray animal is about the only thing that can distract Edna from her coverage of the cops. It is assumed at the Herald that she takes Mondays and Tuesdays off because the weekend is traditionally a high-crime period. (Edna says that the beaches are less crowded during the week and that working weekends gives her a better chance at the Sunday paper.) Around the Herald newsroom, Edna is known for being fiercely proprietary about stories she considers hers—any number of Herald reporters, running into her at the scene of some multiple murder or major disaster, have been greeted with an icy “What are you doing here?”—and so combative about her copy that a few of the less resilient editors have been reduced almost to the state in which they would fall to the floor if Edna pointed an imaginary gun at them and said, “Bang! You’re dead!” Edna’s colleagues tend to speak of her not as a pal but as a phenomenon. Their Edna stories are likely to concern her tenacity or her superstitions or the remarkable intensity she maintains after all these years of covering a beat that quickly strikes many reporters as unbearably horrifying or depressing. They often mention the astonishing contrast between her apparent imperviousness to the grisly sights on the police beat and her overwhelming concern for animals. While I was in Miami, two or three Herald reporters suggested that I look up some articles in which, as they remembered it, Edna hammered away so mercilessly at a retired French Canadian priest who had put to death some stray cats that the poor man was run out of the country. When I later told one of the reporters that I had read the Herald’s coverage of the incident and that almost none of it had been done by Edna, he said, “I’m not surprised. Probably didn’t trust herself. Too emotionally involved.”

  —

  Policemen, Edna told the young reporters in Fort Lauderdale, have an instinctive mistrust of outsiders—“an us-and-them attitude.” Edna can never be certain which category she’s in. Any police reporter these days is likely to have a less comfortable relationship with the police than the one enjoyed by the old-fashioned station-house reporter who could be counted on to be looking the other way if the suspect met with an accident while he was being taken into custody. Since Watergate, reporters all over the country have been under pressure to cast a more suspicious eye on any institution they cover. Partly because of the availability of staggering amounts of drug money, both the Miami and the Metro-Dade departments have had serious scandals in recent years, making them particularly sensitive to inspection by critical outsiders. The Herald has covered police misconduct prominently, and it has used Florida’s public-records act aggressively in court to gain access to police documents—even documents involved in Internal Affairs investigations. A lot of policemen regard the Herald as their adversary and see Edna Buchanan as the embodiment of the Herald.

  Edna says that she makes every effort to portray cops as human beings—writing about a police officer who has been charged with misconduct, she usually manages to find some past commendations to mention—but it has never occurred to anybody that she might look the other way. Edna broke the story of an attempted cover-up involving a black insurance man named Arthur McDuffie, who died as a result of injuries suffered in an encounter with some Metro-Dade policemen—policemen whose acquittal on manslaughter charges some months later touched off three nights of rioting in Miami’s black community. There are moments when Edna seems to be “us” and “them” at the same time. Keeping the picture and the press release sent when someone is named Officer of the Month may give Edna one extra positive sentence to write about a policeman the next time she mentions him; also, as it happens, it is difficult to come by a picture of a cop who gets in trouble, and over the years Edna has found that a cop who gets in trouble and a cop who was named Officer of the Month are often the same person.

  —

  “There’s a love-hate relationship between the police and the press,” Mike Gonzalez, one of Edna’s best friends on the Miami municipal force, says. A case that Edna covers prominently is likely to get a lot of attention in the department, which means that someone whose name is attached to it might become a hero or might, as one detective I spoke to put it, “end up in the complaint room of the property bureau.” Edna says that the way a reporter is received at police headquarters can depend on “what you wrote the day before—or their perception of what you wrote the day before.”

  Some police officers in Dade County won’t talk to Edna Buchanan about the case they’re working on. Some of those who do give her tips—not just on their own cases but on cases being handled by other people, or even other departments—won’t admit it. (According to Dr. Joseph Davis, the medical examiner of Dade County, “Every police agency thinks she has a direct pipeline into someone else’s agency.”) Cops who become known as friends and sources of Edna’s are likely to be accused by other cops of showboating or of trying to further their careers through the newspaper. When I mentioned Mike Gonzalez to a Metro-Dade lieutenant I was talking to in Miami, he said, “What Howard Cosell did for Cassius Clay, Edna Buchanan did for Mike Gonzalez.”

  Gonzalez is aware of such talk and doesn’t show much sign of caring about it. He thinks most policemen are nervous about the press because they aren’t confident that they can reveal precisely what they find it useful to reveal and no more. Edna’s admirers among police investigators—people like Gonzalez and Lloyd Hough, a Metro-Dade homicide detective—tend to admire her for her skill and independence as an investigator. “I’d take her any time as a partner,” Hough told me. “Let’s put it like this: if I had done something, I wouldn’t want Edna investigating me. Internal Affairs I don’t care about, but Edna…” They also admire her persistence, maddening as it may sometimes be. Hough nearly had her arrested once when she persisted in coming under the yellow rope into a crime scene. “She knows when she’s pushed you to the limit, and she’ll do that often,” Hough told me. “And I say that with the greatest admiration.”

  A police detective and a police reporter may sound alike as they stand around talking about past cases—recalling the airline pilot who killed the other airline pilot over the stewardess, or exchanging anecdotes about the aggrieved bag boy who cleared a Publix supermarket in a hurry by holding a revolver to the head of the manager—but their interests in a murder case are not necessarily the same. If an armed robber kills a convenience-store clerk, the police are interested in catching him; Edna is interested in distinguishing what happened from other killings of other convenience-store clerks. To write about any murder, Edna is likely to need details that wouldn’t help an investigator close the case. “I want to know what movie they saw before they got gunned down,” she has said. “What were they wearing? What did they have in their pockets? What was cooking on the stove? Wha
t song was playing on the jukebox?” Mike Gonzalez just sighs when he talks about Edna’s appetite for irrelevant details. “It infuriates Mike,” Edna says. “I always ask what the dog’s name is, what the cat’s name is.” Edna told me that Gonzalez now advises rookie detectives that they might as well gather such details, because otherwise “you’re just going to feel stupid when Edna asks you.”

  There are times when Edna finds herself longing for simpler times on the police beat. When she began, the murders she covered tended to be conventional love triangles or armed robberies. She was often dealing with “an up-front person who happened to have bludgeoned his wife to death.” These days, the murders are likely to be Latin drug murders, and a lot fewer of them produce a suspect. Trying to gather information from Cubans and Central Americans, Edna has a problem that goes beyond the language barrier. “They have a Latin love of intrigue,” she says. “I had a Cuban informant, and I found that he would sometimes lie to me just to make it more interesting.” It is also true that even for a police reporter there can be too many murders. Edna says that she was “a little shell-shocked” four or five years ago, when Dade murders hit their peak. She found that she barely had time to make her rounds in a thorough way. “I used to like to stop at the jail,” she has said. “I used to like to browse in the morgue. To make sure who’s there.”

  Edna found that the sheer number of murders overwhelmed each individual murder as the big story. “Dade’s murder rate hit new heights this week as a wave of unrelated violence left 14 people dead and five critically hurt within five days,” a story bylined Edna Buchanan began in June of 1980. After a couple of paragraphs comparing the current murder figures with those of previous years, the story went on, “In the latest wave of violence, a teenager’s throat was cut and her body dumped in a canal. A former airline stewardess was garroted and left with a pair of scissors stuck between her shoulder blades. Four innocent bystanders were shot in a barroom gun battle. An 80-year-old man surprised a burglar who battered him fatally with a hammer. An angry young woman who ‘felt used’ beat her date to death with the dumbbells he used to keep fit. And an apparent robbery victim was shot dead as he ran away from the robbers.” The murder rate has leveled off since 1981, but Edna still sometimes writes what amount to murder-roundup stories. “I feel bad, and even a little guilty, that a murder no longer gets a story, just a paragraph,” she says. “It dehumanizes it.” A paragraph in a roundup piece is not Edna’s idea of a send-off.

  On a day I was making the rounds with Edna, there was a police report saying that two Marielitos had begun arguing on the street and the argument had ended with one shooting the other dead. That sounded like a paragraph at most. But Edna had a tip that the victim and the killer had known each other in Cuba and the shooting was actually the settling of an old prison score. That sounded to me more like a murder that stood out a bit from the crowd. Edna thought so, too, but her enthusiasm was limited. “We’ve already had a couple of those,” she told me. Edna has covered a few thousand murders by now, and she’s seen a couple of most things. She has done stories about a man who was stabbed to death because he stepped on somebody’s toes on his way to a seat in a movie theater and about a two-year-old somebody tried to frame for the murder of a playmate and about an eighty-nine-year-old man who was arrested for beating his former wife to death and about a little boy killed by a crocodile. She has done stories about a woman who committed suicide because she couldn’t get her leaky roof fixed and about a newspaper deliveryman who committed suicide because during a petroleum shortage he couldn’t get enough gasoline. She has done stories about a man who managed to commit suicide by stabbing himself in the heart twice and about a man who threw a severed head at a police officer twice. She has done a story about two brothers who killed a third brother because he interrupted a checkers game. (“I thought I had the best-raised children in the world,” their mother said.) She has done a story about a father being killed at the surprise birthday party given for him by his thirty children. She has done a story about a man who died because fourteen of the eighty-two double-wrapped condom packages of cocaine he tried to carry into the country inside his stomach began to leak. (“His last meal was worth $30,000 and it killed him.”) She has done any number of stories about bodies being discovered in the bay by beachcombers or fishermen or University of Miami scientists doing marine research. (“ ‘It’s kind of a nuisance when you plan your day to do research on the reef,’ fumed Professor Peter Glynn, of the university’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.”) Talking to Edna one day about murder cases they had worked on, a Metro-Dade homicide detective said, “In Dade County, there are no surprises left.”

  Edna would agree that surprises are harder to find in Dade County these days. Still, she finds them. Flipping through page after page of routine police logs, talking to her sources on the telephone, chatting with a homicide detective, she’ll come across, say, a shopping-mall murder that might have been done against the background of a new kind of high school gang, or a murderer who seemed to have been imprisoned with his victim for a time by a sophisticated burglar-gate system. Then, a look of concern still on her face, she’ll say, “That’s interesting as heck.”

  To the New Yorker reporter who set the standard—

  Joseph Mitchell

  BY CALVIN TRILLIN

  No Fair! No Fair! (with Roz Chast)

  Jackson, 1964

  Dogfight

  Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin

  Trillin on Texas

  Deciding the Next Decider

  About Alice

  A Heckuva Job

  Obliviously On He Sails

  Feeding a Yen

  Tepper Isn’t Going Out

  Family Man

  Messages from My Father

  Too Soon to Tell

  Deadline Poet

  Remembering Denny

  American Stories

  Enough’s Enough

  Travels with Alice

  If You Can’t Say Something Nice

  With All Disrespect

  Killings

  Third Helpings

  Uncivil Liberties

  Floater

  Alice, Let’s Eat

  Runestruck

  American Fried

  U.S. Journal

  Barnett Frummer Is an Unbloomed Flower

  An Education in Georgia

  About the Author

  CALVIN TRILLIN has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1963. His nonfiction includes About Alice, Remembering Denny, and Jackson, 1964. His humor writing includes books of political verse, comic novels, books on eating, and the collection Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin.

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