Miami, It's Murder

by Edna Buchanan

  “We’re getting married!” she screamed, struggling. “He can’t be dead. What are you saying? What do you mean?” As I left she was sobbing, fists clenched and begging. “Why is he lying there? Don’t let him just lie there!”

  When brokenhearted people weep, I am often moved to join them. I fought the urge as I drove back to the office, telling myself that this young woman was actually lucky. She would always remember Steiner as a tragic lost love, never knowing that in this case having what she wanted would probably have been far more tragic for her.

  I had been brand new on the beat when Eloise Steiner was found in a wooded glade just outside a city park. The cops had not yet taken me seriously, and the favorite sport of some was trying to gross out the new female police reporter. Instead of shunning me as usual, Dan and his partner had invited me to view the body. Surprised at my good fortune—reporters hate being restrained behind yellow crime-scene tape—I dutifully followed them down a brushy path overrun by brambles and weeds. The sight in that dark place in the woods was one I will never forget. The cops expected weakness. They saw none. I remained coolly professional, or at least generated that impression, exhibiting only a clinical curiosity. The pretense was not easy. The corpse had been there for three days, in midsummer, and Eloise Steiner had been nine months pregnant.

  When the news broke, Steiner called the cops to report that the still unidentified body could be his wife of less than a year. He had last seen her at about 10 A.M. the prior Saturday, when she drove off to shop a garage sale. She had promised to return by 2 P.M., he said, but she did not come home, then or ever.

  Detectives never got to ask why he had neglected to report her missing. By the time they arrived at his big bayfront home, Steiner’s attorney was at his side. He had declined to speak to police or submit to a polygraph.

  Back at my desk, I called the library for the clips on Steiner. Onnie didn’t wait for a copyboy to deliver them, she brought them out herself. “So the good Lord caught up with him,” she said.

  “Sure looks like it. How’s Darryl?”

  “Excited about first grade.” A wide smile creased her face, the color of burnt toast. “He can’t wait to go.”

  “Give him a hug,” I said, and punched the password into my computer terminal. I watched Onnie hurry back to the library. A former battered wife who had escaped the situation, she was now a single mother on her own. The job I had recommended her for was working out, she had put on some weight and a little makeup, and looked good. It never hurts a reporter to have a good friend in the library, especially on deadline.

  I reached for the phone and dialed Dan Flood at home. He answered on the second ring.

  “Hi, Danny, it’s Britt. You won’t believe the story I’m working on. Guess who got killed this afternoon?”

  “Well, let’s see, I hear Dieter Steiner got pissed off.”

  “Who told you?” I yelped, annoyed. “How come you always know everything first?”

  “Your friend and mine, Ken McDonald, our favorite lieutenant, called to break the news that Steiner is off the map.” At McDonald’s name my stomach spasmed, as usual. Would that ache ever go away? I wondered.

  “Looks like there’s some justice after all,” I said.

  “Maybe there is,” Dan replied.

  “Now I need a quote from the veteran homicide detective who sent Steiner to Death Row. What’s your comment?”

  “It was quite a shock,” he said, chuckling.

  “Seriously.”

  “Okay, okay.” I could hear Dan breathing for several moments as he paused to think. “He faces a higher court now,” he said solemnly. “Sometimes justice triumphs after all.”

  The first two Mrs. Steiners had died three years apart. Both were young, attractive, and well insured. Both had been cremated. No chance for second looks in their cases, but Dan had done a superb investigation into the death of Eloise, wife number three.

  “Good,” I said, tapping Dan’s words onto the screen in front of me. “Anything else?”

  “Off the record? He got what he deserved. He shoulda fried a long time ago. Nobody will miss that son of a bitch.”

  “One person will. Everybody’s got somebody, even Steiner. His fiancée showed up. A pretty girl in a Jaguar. They were planning the wedding. She’s taking it hard.”

  He sniffed. “Fate did her a favor, probably saved her life.”

  “She’ll never believe it.” I sipped from the Styrofoam cup of café con leche I had brought back to my desk. “You know how love is.”

  “Yeah.” His tone changed to a more familiar one. “You know, I was expecting your call, kid. After all these years, I know exactly how you operate.”

  “You should know my MO by now, Pops. How are you anyway?”

  “Lousy. When I roll out of bed in the morning it sounds like somebody making popcorn. Everything’s breaking down. I’m dying, but we all are, every day.”

  “Quit complaining, you sound good to me,” I said fondly. “You have to listen to your doctors, do what they tell you, and take care of yourself.”

  “Sure. Let’s have coffee, Britt, or lunch sometime next week.”

  “You bet,” I said, working on my lead.

  It read:

  A man who escaped death in Florida’s electric chair due to a legal technicality was apparently electrocuted in a freak accident at his luxurious Miami Beach home Wednesday.

  I sat next to Bobby Tubbs, the assistant city editor in the slot, while he edited the story. Then I hovered around the city desk until the copy editor wrote the headline. I like to make sure there are no slipups and the head actually has something to do with the story. It did.

  MURDER SUSPECT ELECTROCUTED AT HIS BEACH HOME, in 55-point Bodoni. By Britt Montero, Miami Daily News Staff Writer. That’s me.

  I returned to my desk, picked up the sheaf of telephone messages, and riffled through them. Two were from my mother.

  As I reached for the phone, I became suddenly aware of a figure looming behind me. Eduardo de la Torre, the tall elegantly garbed society editor, stood poised at my elbow as though posing for GQ. I knew what he wanted. Despite his breeding and genteel manners, he is always voraciously eager for all the details of death, disaster, scandal, and crime in the elite circle he writes about. The more lurid the better.

  “Like to join me for a cup of coffee?”

  “I’ve got some.” I lifted my cup. “You never told me you and Dieter Steiner were friends.”

  He shifted his shoulders uneasily and showed me his aristocratic profile: His family tree boasts Spanish nobility, and he never lets anyone forget it. “Why do you say that? He’s no friend. It’s just that you and I haven’t traded stories in a while.”

  “Come on, Eduardo, the only time you invite me for coffee is when one of your social register people is in trouble—robbed, indicted, or dead.”

  “Then it’s true?” he breathed, raising an arched eyebrow.

  The story would appear in half a million newspapers in the morning, but his almost prurient interest always makes me perversely reluctant to share details. He just seems to enjoy them too much. However, Eduardo can often be a good source for information and unlisted home telephone numbers when his socialites forget their manners and come to the attention of the police reporter.

  “Is what true?”

  “Steiner. Is he dead?”

  “I didn’t know he was in the Black Book.”

  “You mean the Social Register. Muffy, his fiancée, is in: one of the Palm Beach Benedicts,” Eduardo said chattily, ticking off names on his immaculately manicured fingers. “And Eloise was. And so was he, during the year or so they were married. He was out, of course, once they arrested him for her murder.”

  “Naturally. Well, he’s out for good this time. He’s dead.”

  “Who?” chimed in Ryan Battle, the general assignment reporter who sits behind me. “Who’s dead, the B.O. Bandit? Did you hear that lo
cal banks are buying canaries? When the canary dies they know the bandit is in the neighborhood.”

  I stared at him balefully. The frustrated cops hunting the bandit weren’t laughing.

  “No, not him,” Eduardo said eagerly. “It’s Dieter Steiner, the German photographer, the one whose wives kept dying.”

  “What happened?” Ryan got up from his desk and drifted over to mine.

  “Yes, what happened?” Eduardo echoed.

  I told them, briefly.

  “Did you actually see the body?” Eduardo’s eyes gleamed like black marbles. “What was he wearing?”

  “Not much,” I said truthfully, then told them Lottie had pictures. They trotted off to the darkroom together to peer over her shoulder. It was a dirty trick and I knew Lottie would hate me for it, but it gave me my chance to escape.

  I punched the elevator button and rode alone to the lobby, neither sad nor glad that Dieter Steiner was dead. Mostly I felt a sense of closure, as if fate had somehow taken its natural course.

  That is what I love most about this job—it is a front-row seat on life. The law could not touch Steiner, but something beyond it did. I thought of Eloise, the two women before her, and Daniel Flood at home. He would probably sleep better. The best revenge, I thought, is just living.

  Lottie met me downstairs in the parking lot ten minutes later and we drove over to La Esquina de Tejas for media noches—midnight sandwiches—with ham, pork, Swiss cheese, mustard, and pickles stacked on sweet rolls. We ate them at a table covered by a plastic tablecloth and paper place mats bearing the map of Florida.

  “Thank you very much for sending the Bobbsey Twins back to the darkroom,” Lottie griped, dousing her side of black beans and rice with hot pepper sauce. A Texan, she is addicted to liberal doses of Tabasco on everything, including her breakfast oatmeal.

  “Knew you’d appreciate them,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “Think Steiner woulda married that poor new woman?”

  “If he did, Dan’s sure she would have been found downside up in a ditch.”

  “What did he say about Steiner finally getting what he deserved?”

  I mimicked Dan’s low-pitched growl. “He said, ‘Hell, Steiner was just a blade of grass in the whole yard. He ain’t the only one. His ain’t the worst case by far.’”

  “What is the worst?” Lottie patted her lips primly with a napkin and leaned across the table, dark eyes intent.

  I thought about it for a moment. We both knew how Dan obsessed about old cases, the “unsolved” murders in which he knew the killer but could never build a prosecutable case. Justice gone awry was his favorite topic of conversation.

  “Mary Beth Rafferty, I guess.”

  Lottie watched expectantly as I stirred the Cuban coffee that would probably keep me wired till dawn.

  “Mary Beth Rafferty is an old case, a big one,” I explained. “From long before you came to Miami. I was just a kid, ten or eleven when it happened. But I remember it.” I sipped the coffee, then rested the cup on its tiny saucer. “My mother would not let me out of her sight for months. That murder struck fear into the entire city. You have to remember, Miami was like a small town at the time. Mary Beth was a little girl, abducted, sexually molested, and murdered.”

  Lottie did an exaggerated shiver. “Unsolved?”

  “Technically. Nobody was ever charged, but the police always had a suspect, and you will never guess who.”

  Lottie’s eyes widened. “Somebody I would know?”

  I nodded. “Eric Fielding.”

  “You’re kidding. The politician? Our wanna-be governor? I’ve made the man’s picture a half dozen times.” She put down her fork. “Tell me.”

  I began the story. “This was twenty-two years ago. Little girl named Mary Beth, eight years old, out playing three o’clock in the afternoon, just down the street from her house, in the Roads section. Guy snatches her and drags her off into the woods. Her little playmate runs home, too scared to tell anybody for a while. Not long after the alarm goes out, a seventeen-year-old kid on a bike finds her nude body on a canal bank. The seventeen-year-old kid? Eric Fielding.”

  “And you think he did it?”

  “Dan’s convinced he’s the doer. For sure. Never was another suspect, from what I understand. The kid had a history of window peeping, and he came along just too conveniently.”

  Lottie looked solemn. “The person who reports finding a body often turns out to be the person who put it there.”

  “You’ve got it,” I said. “They like the recognition, being the center of attention. Some even think it ensures that they won’t become a suspect, as if the cops were that stupid.”

  “Why didn’t they arrest him?”

  “Wanted to but never had enough.”

  “No witnesses?”

  “Only the playmate, a little boy who’d been hit and nearly killed by a car once, left with a bad limp. He was with her when she was snatched by the killer, but his mother freaked and wouldn’t let cops near him. She was overprotective to begin with, I guess, and scared as hell. Not surprising. The Fielding family was loaded, big bucks and political clout even then. When Dan and his partners pushed, they got cease-and-desist calls from the city manager and the mayor, suggesting they look someplace else for the killer.” I leaned forward. “Dan says our would-be gov did that little girl as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow. I’ve never known him to be wrong.”

  Lottie absently chewed her sandwich. “If they were so sure the little boy could have identified Fielding as the one who snatched Mary Beth, couldn’t Dan have forced his mother into letting the boy talk to them and have a look at a lineup?”

  “She was a working woman, a single mother bringing up her only child alone. He would have pointed a finger at the son of a rich influential family. What would you do? It must have scared the bejesus out of her. And look at Fielding since, graduated from Harvard Law School, elected to the city commission twice, and now front-runner for governor.”

  “Knowing Dan, it must make him as mad as a red-assed dog,” Lottie said. “Something ought to be done. I can’t believe we may elect a governor who got away with murder.”

  “He’ll fit right in with all our other elected public officials,” I said glumly.

  “I’m serious. Somebody, maybe a good reporter,” she said, cutting her eyes at me, “oughta take another shot at it.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “The cops can’t nail it down for twenty-two years, and you think a reporter is gonna prove he’s a killer now, before election day?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt none to try,” she said. “Sometimes old secrets tend to ripen, and all you have to do to have ’em fall into your lap is shake the tree one more time.”

  Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to shake the tree, I thought. That’s the wonderful thing about Lottie. She believes nothing is impossible.

  “Dan was one of the best detectives the city had,” I said mournfully, as we drove back to her car, still parked at the paper. “And they forced him out.”

  “How can they do that?”

  “Legally, they can’t force a terminally ill cop to retire. But they do it anyway. The brass said it was too risky for him to keep working homicide. They said it could be hazardous to his health, because of his heart.”

  “The job’s probably all that’s been keeping him alive.”

  “Exactly.” Dan’s wife of thirty-four years had died suddenly, collapsing on the street, of an aneurysm. Six months earlier their only daughter, a Marine, had been among those killed by a direct SCUD missile hit on a barracks in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. The run of bad luck came full circle when Dan’s previously undetected heart condition flared. “It was all he had left. We can relate to that.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said. “When’s the last time I had a date that didn’t get screwed up by the job? When’s the last time you had any kind of date?”

  Kendall McDonald, Dan’s former partn
er, and I had been romantically entangled for a short sweet time, until ethics and our jobs conflicted and he succumbed to ambition. The breakup had worked for him; he made lieutenant. I ignored Lottie’s comments on my love life, or lack of same.

  “It was a real bummer,” I said. “They transferred Dan to a desk job, processing reports, shuffling papers. When that didn’t work, they assigned him to the front desk, in the lobby, in uniform.” We stopped at a light and I turned to her. “Can you believe that? Here is a guy who hadn’t worn a uniform in decades, a detective proud of his homicide closure rate, reduced to the job they usually give to screwups or handicapped cops.”

  “Riding a desk.”

  “Right, meeting and greeting every irate citizen, mental case, and weirdo who wandered in off the street. That did it. After two days he put in his papers and retired.”

  “He survives the war on crime and gets stabbed in the back by his own.” Lottie sighed and shook her head. “If not for bad luck, he’d have no luck at all.”

  “I know.” I sighed too. “I even had fantasies about adopting him.”

  “What?”

  “I conveniently managed to cross his path when I was out with my mother—and introduced them, hoping they would hit it off.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. So I asked him to lecture the residents at her condo about security; they’d had some burglaries. Nothing. I guess my matchmaking for her is about as successful as hers is for me.”

  “Poor baby,” said Lottie. “You want a daddy.”

  I grew up without a father. Mine died trying to free his native Cuba. I was three when he was executed by a Castro firing squad. “You could have worse people than Dan in the family,” I said.

  My dashboard police scanner crackled with routine calls as we rode through the silent streets, me thinking about Dan. In a career that spanned thirty-five years of Miami’s evolution from quaint southern resort to Miami, the exotic international capital as well known for violence as for its palm trees and beaches, it was only natural for some cases to go unsolved. But homicide detectives always hope. First-degree murder has no statute of limitations.