Miami, It's Murder

by Edna Buchanan

  “There are no coincidences in homicide cases.”

  “Then you think it’s retaliation, some kind of street justice? You looking at the dead woman’s family? But why would they wait so long to take revenge? And then make it so obvious? They could have shot him on the street and made it look like a robbery.” I was puzzled, thinking aloud.

  “You forget, Britt, he wasn’t supposed to be found. Only Farrington and his killer were supposed to know.”

  “What caliber was the bullet?”

  “We want to withhold that information,” Diaz said.

  “Why?” I said impatiently.

  “Because if the killer reads it in the newspaper he might dispose of the gun, and we want to catch him with it.”

  I sighed. Made no sense to me. Killers all watch television, and they all know about ballistics. If the murderer intended to dispose of the weapon he had already done so. Other criminals develop an attachment for certain guns and will keep them no matter what. But we had fought this argument before, in other cases, and Diaz remained adamant.

  “Did he have any other injuries? What was in his pockets? Was he robbed? Had he been drinking? Think they might have met in a bar? Did you check the construction crew to see if somebody who worked with him might—”

  “Britt, you’re getting way ahead of me and I got to go,” Diaz said impatiently. “He still had his wallet and ID, some cash, was wearing a Rolex. Other injuries were minor, probably from when he went from the catwalk down into the form. That’s all I can tell you now. Later.” And he hung up.

  I went to the library for the Farrington file, which I had returned after the initial story. Onnie was relieved to see me. She looked perky in a smart sand-color slack set, her dusky makeup flawless, small gold hoops in her ears.

  She was humming and seemed happy. I found her cheerfulness annoying but kept it to myself. The Farrington clips had been refiled, and she used a stepstool to reach up into the F’s. As she stepped down in the close quarters between the shelves and handed me the envelope, she sniffed several times and looked puzzled. “What kind of shampoo you using, Britt?”

  “It’s not shampoo,” I said. Hell, it was only thirty-six hours, still thirty-six to go.

  “Hairspray?”

  “Don’t ask. It’s a long story.”

  “Smells like salad or soup seasoning.” She shrugged and hummed some upbeat Tina Turner song. I wondered why I don’t confide more in friends. The only person I spill everything to is Lottie, and that is only because she either guesses without my telling or torments me until I do. I wondered how Onnie would react if I told her about the herbs in my hair or the resguardo dangling from my underwear at that very moment.

  I wrote the Farrington follow-up, focusing on the eerie resemblance between his death and the murder police had accused him of eighteen years earlier.

  I transmitted the story, printed out a hard copy for my own files, and stuffed it into the bottom drawer of my desk where I keep my printouts and notes. My system is simple. When the drawer is too full to close, I sort and file the contents in a squat two-drawer cabinet file next to my desk.

  Tired and edgy, I had slept little the night before and wanted only to escape the office before somebody out there somewhere started shooting at something or somebody and I wound up working all night.

  The phone rang and I snatched it up with a feeling of foreboding. The strange voice was male and angry.

  “This is Ronald DeAngelo.”

  It took a moment to compute that he was the man now married to Mary Berh’s mother. The man who operated the fluorescent bulb factory in Hialeah. “Yes, Mr. DeAngelo.”

  “I have just become aware that you have been out here harassing my wife.”

  I closed my eyes and sighed. “I don’t think harassment is the word, Mr. DeAngelo.”

  “It’s also been brought to my attention that you are attempting to discredit our candidate for governor, Mr. Fielding, an old friend of the family.”

  “I’m afraid you have the wrong impression—”

  “I’m putting you on notice that I consider this a threat to the safety and well-being of my family. My attorney has advised me that this is a gross invasion of privacy.” His voice grew more heated.

  “It involves an unsolved murder,” I said calmly.

  “To bring up painful history and use it against innocent people is an invasion of our privacy. I warn you, I will take any steps necessary to protect my family.”

  I wanted to ask if his wife had remembered the name of the only witness, Mary Beth’s playmate, but this did not seem like the right moment. It was too late anyway; he had hung up.

  I reached for the phone to call him back, to assure him that the last thing I intended to do was to cause his family pain, and then remembered that the number was unlisted.

  As I stood to leave, the night city-desk clerk handed me a message that had come in while I was on the phone. Marianne Rhodes had left word that it was urgent.

  I sighed and dialed the number. Three times, it was busy. On the fourth try she answered immediately, her words loud and slurred.

  “Do you know anything, Britt? The police aren’t telling me a thing,” she pleaded. “Detective Arroyo isn’t even returning my calls.”

  “He’s probably out in the field,” I said gently. “I’m sure he’ll let you know right away if there are any developments.”

  “Those bastards aren’t doing anything! They’ve botched the investigation. They’re going to let him get away with it.” She sounded fragile, about to shatter.

  “They’ve got lots of manpower on it,” I assured her. “They’re working the case really hard.”

  “Not from what I hear! And you, you didn’t even have a story today.” Her voice was accusatory.

  “Because there were no new developments. Have you had any rest?”

  “Can’t sleep,” she muttered.

  “Did the doctor give you anything?”

  “I hate taking pills. A friend of mine heard that one of the other victims has been on all kinds of medication since it happened and is walking around like a zombie.”

  “You have to get some sleep,” I told her, thinking I could use some myself.

  “I’ve been drinking too much,” she acknowledged remorsefully. “It’s the only thing that helps.”

  “You have to go on, get on with your life.”

  “What life? What life?” The words were a sob of anguish. “I can’t go back to my job, which was the best one I ever had. I drove away the only man who ever loved me.” I heard ice tinkling as she paused to gulp from a glass.

  “Ben? Your fiancé?”

  “That’s right, that son of a bitch. He couldn’t take it. Who could? I have to keep going back for exams of my throat and my private parts to see if he gave me VD.”

  I winced. “Do your parents live here?”

  “Yeah, Cutler Ridge.”

  “Why don’t you stay with them for a while?”

  “I can’t stand being around them. All they do is look at me and cry.”

  “Look,” I said, sounding upbeat and sensible, though I wanted to cry myself. “You’ve got to get yourself some help. You’ve got to stay together so when they catch this guy you can help convict him.” God forbid if he isn’t caught, I thought.

  “I don’t want him convicted!” she screamed. “I want him dead for what he did to me!”

  “I know,” I said bleakly.

  “He’s after you, you know.”

  “You’ll get over this,” I said quietly. “You and Ben should see a counselor together.”

  “Would you call him for me?”

  “Ben? I think it’s better if you call. The last person he wants to hear from is a reporter.”

  “But I threw his things out in the street. I told him I never want to see him again. Why don’t you put this in a story?” she sobbed. There was a crash as she dropped the phone.

 
“Marianne? Are you all right?”

  She did not pick it up again, but I could hear her weeping and muttering.

  After several minutes I hung up, called the rape squad, and left a message for Harry, asking him to call her, that she needed help.

  I have had better days at the office, I thought, staring at my telephone as though it were the enemy. I left alone, cautiously scanning the parking lot, glad to see a security guard. I waved to her, unlocked the car, checked the interior, and watched to make sure I wasn’t followed as I drove out of the lot, toward home.

  Chapter 16

  The world sparkled in the morning, washed by an overnight storm. Alamandas bloomed on their white wooden trellis, a brilliant pink against a sky so blue and grass so green they hurt my eyes. I showered, shampooed my hair with great delight, then went to the office. A surprise waited on my desk, a large manila envelope. Inside, a glossy eight-by-ten of a handsome, smiling Captain Curt Norske, shot aboard the Sea Dancer. He leaned against the railing, skyline behind him, relaxed and laughing, probably at something the photographer had said. Lottie must have dug back in her old negatives to find it. Attached was a note in her distinctive left-hand scrawl: Don’t miss the boat!

  Even frozen on film, his engaging grin made me smile in return. I slid the photo back into its envelope and dialed Lottie’s extension.

  “Thanks for making it up for me, Lottie. What a neat way to start the day.”

  “Did you see it?” she asked.

  “It was on my desk.”

  “The editorial.” Her voice sounded flat.

  “What?” Though I had glanced through the morning paper over orange juice and coffee, I hadn’t read the editorial page. I rarely do. It’s usually boring, sometimes embarrassing.

  “We endorsed Fielding today.”

  I went to the city desk and picked up a copy. The editorial writer extolled Fielding’s sterling qualities, enthusiastically recommending him as best choice for governor. I wondered if Dan had seen it yet and suddenly decided what I wanted to do today if I could avoid being captured by some other story.

  I bustled out of the newsroom as though headed out on my beat. The Center for Forensic Pathology is a block-long structure that will accommodate as many as 350 corpses at a time. It is not listed among the Chamber of Commerce attractions designed to draw tourists, but Miami does have the world’s best morgue.

  I stated my business to a disembodied voice piped from somewhere inside the imposing edifice, and the security gate opened. I parked between a shiny black hearse and an unmarked homicide car and skirted the building to the front entrance, guarded by an ancient bronze cannon salvaged from a shipwrecked Spanish galleon.

  The Santa Margarita sank with all aboard during a hurricane off the Florida coast three hundred and seventy years ago. The chief medical examiner selected the cannon when given the option of choosing the art for his new $12 million complex. The politically appointed committee on art in public places was appalled. Members argued that a big gun, even a big gun crafted by fifteenth-century artisans, is no work of art. They prefer incomprehensible abstracts created by expensive modern artists. One critic denounced the cannon as a militaristic symbol of death.

  The barrel is leveled at the inner city, where the last riots broke out. I think it’s appropriate.

  The chief investigator was at his desk. Records here date back to 1955 and are never disposed of. Common practice is to withhold the files on unsolved murders, assumed to be still under investigation, from the press. Reporters are referred to the police detective on the case. But a twenty-two-year-old homicide is a cold case, and I anticipated no problem unless someone was aware of the link to Fielding. Then it might be considered a political hot potato. I was glad the chief medical examiner was lecturing to students and unaware of my presence.

  The investigator, a tough and savvy former police detective, was agreeable, and I tagged along to one of the storage rooms where he dug through several cardboard cartons for the file on Mary Beth Rafferty.

  “Just let me know when you’re through with it,” he said, and returned to his office.

  I settled down at a conference table. The pictures were attached, with color slides in a separate envelope.

  In the scene pictures, Mary Beth looked like a broken and discarded doll. No wonder the case haunts Dan, I thought. I closed my eyes and pushed them aside to read the autopsy report, noting that the chief had done the cut himself.

  The body is that of a well developed, well nourished female measuring 49½ inches and weighing 55 pounds. The appearance of the deceased is consistent with the stated age of eight years.

  The hair is brown, wavy, and shoulder length, the irises are brown, and the pupils each measure .5 centimeter. Numerous petechiae are present over the conjunctiva.

  Petechiae are little broken blood vessels in the eyes, and I knew enough to understand that their appearance indicates some choking or smothering.

  The dentition is in good repair.

  Her teeth were good.

  The frenulum is torn, lacerated, and contused.

  The little tag of skin between her lip and gums was torn and bruised.

  Examination of the neck reveals multiple linear to regular partially confluent abrasions with scattered contusions.

  Scrapes and bruises on her neck.

  I imagined Fielding posing for television in a classroom full of eager children and shivered.

  The next line set my heart to thumping. On the left shoulder there is a bite mark measuring 3.5 by 2.5 centimeters in cross dimension. The abrasions caused by the teeth marks are red and dried. There are underlying subcutaneous purple-red contusions of the soft tissue.

  The redness and bruising under the skin indicated that the bite was inflicted before she died, that her heart was still pumping and blood vessels were crushed. If the bite had occurred after death the underlying tissue would have been bloodless.

  What interested me was the bite mark itself. I reached for the pictures and shuffled through them.

  Some graphically revealed what the reporters meant when they wrote that Mary Beth was “sexually molested” and “sexually mutilated.”

  She had been raped with a tree branch.

  Revolted, I tried not to look at those, searching quickly for what I wanted. Taken in the morgue, the naked child, pitifully small on the autopsy table. The close-up of the bite marks. Yes, I thought.

  The chief always documented pattern injuries meticulously, even before the science of forensic odontology came afield. There were several closeups, shot from various angles. In each, the marks on Mary Beth’s shoulder were placed in perspective by an L-shaped millimeter ruler.

  The copy I made of the best photo on the office Xerox was not as clear as I would have liked, even though I fiddled with the contrast controls, making it first lighter, then darker. I folded it into my notebook and walked out with it.

  Dr. Everett Wyatt’s office is at my favorite old historic downtown address. The Ingraham Building is not all neon, smoke and mirrors, or clever Architectonica, it is one of Miami’s jewels, a neo-renaissance revival building finished in 1927. In those days ten stories was ambitious. The lobby ceiling is gold-plated, with one-of-a-kind bronze chandeliers, and the elegant bronze elevator doors are engraved with early Florida wildlife scenes.

  The building was named for Miami pioneer James Ingraham, who arranged the historic meeting between Henry Flagler and Julia Tuttle, the mother of Miami, in 1895. The railroad came south as a result, a watershed event that changed the face of Miami forever.

  The lobby, with its high ceilings and all that marble, has the kind of echoing acoustics that make me want to yodel.

  I sat waiting in a comfortable leather chair in Wyatt’s private office, looking west out the windows behind his desk, over a city and expressways undreamed of when the building was new.

  An ebullient fast-talking man with an intense curiosity and quick intelligence
, Dr. Wyatt has a thriving practice among both living patients and the dead. He expanded his interests into forensic dentistry about a dozen years ago, using his expertise to identify the dead through dental charts. It takes a special kind of dentist to work with skeletons and decomposed, burned, or disfigured bodies. He then expanded into bite-mark analysis.

  His expert testimony has been responsible for numerous murder convictions, two of which ended in the electric chair. Bite-mark comparison can be more damning than fingerprint evidence. A suspect might be able to explain his fingerprints found at a crime scene, but it is pretty damn hard to convince a jury that he innocently left his tooth marks in a murder victim.

  A room full of patients, most probably unaware of his second specialty, waited. The fact that Wyatt is also my personal dentist won me almost instant access. He remembers me because we always discuss cases, and when in his chair I constantly beseech him to remember, “I’m alive! I’m alive!”

  He entered the room with his usual speed, wiry and intense, with brilliant blue eyes. “What’s up, Britt? You say it’s important?” He glanced at my file, which his receptionist had placed on his desk, and frowned. “When’s the last time you had your teeth cleaned?”

  “Dr. Wyatt, could you still match the bite mark left on a murder victim twenty-two years ago with the teeth of the man who left it?”

  “Twenty-two years!” His bright eyes sparkled with enthusiasm at the idea. “I’ll be testifying soon in the case of Archie Greene.”

  Greene is a laborer believed to have killed a dozen prostitutes over a number of years.

  “He bit one in 1984 and we got his impressions in 1992 and were able to match it up. But never a case twenty-two years old. The killer would have to have some kind of unusual—”

  I whipped out the copy of the picture from the medical examiner’s file. He took it and frowned. “I’d need to see the original, of course, and have it enhanced.”

  “Enhanced?”

  “Computer enhancement. Is this from the medical examiner’s file?”

  I nodded.

  “Good, that means we’ll have a slide. We’ll print the slide and get the computer to bring it up. Amazing what they can do to enhance it.”