Miami, It's Murder

by Edna Buchanan

  “Time’s running out on him,” she said. “Instead of just sitting home and waiting to die alone, he did something he thought he had to do and he’s man enough to own up to it. Now he’ll be back in the system, on the other side. But at least the system is something he knows. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.”

  I sighed, wondering where it would end. “I’ll call him in the morning to say you’re coming over.”

  “Sure, long as we do it by two o’clock or so, no problem.”

  At home, I took Bitsy out for a while, then took a long walk alone on the boardwalk, watching the light fade. Later I busied myself with a load of laundry and mindless household chores, trying not to think.

  When I finally slept, I dreamed in headlines and bad news-speak: predawn fires, shark-infested waters, steamy tropical jungles, the solid south, mean streets, and densely wooded areas, populated by the ever-present lone gunman, fiery Cuban, deranged Vietnam veteran, Panamanian strongman, fugitive financier, bearded dictator, slain civil rights leader, grieving widow, struggling quarterback, cocaine kingpin, drug lord, troubled youth, and embattled mayor totally destroyed by Miami-based, bullet-riddled, high-speed chases, uncertain futures, and deepening political crises sparked by massive blasts, brutal murders, badly decomposed, benign neglect, and blunt trauma. I woke up nursing a dull headache and swallowed two aspirins before brushing my teeth.

  While dressing, I stared in the mirror and slowly removed my necklace of red and white beads. About time you grew up, I told myself, and dropped it onto my dresser, where it lay coiled like a snake. I put the resguardo in a drawer and slammed it shut. On second thought, I reopened it, took the talisman out, and dropped it in the garbage, enjoying a sense of power over my own destiny. The danger from strangers is over, I thought. The people who can hurt you most are the ones you care about.

  The radio broadcast sinister storm warnings and a tornado watch up and down the coast as I drove to the office, but the sky over Miami was hot, muggy, and clear as a bell.

  I took a Danish and Cuban coffee to my desk and scrolled through the story several times, making minor fixes. At about nine, I dialed Dan’s number. He usually answered quickly, but not this time. I dialed again, letting it ring, nine, ten, eleven times. No answer. He might be in the shower or out in the yard. He could have gone out for breakfast, I thought, or to the store.

  I dialed back in twenty minutes. Then again at ten o’clock. Other reporters, editors, library staffers, and the city-desk clerk were drifting into the newsroom. As I read through the sidebar, my phone rang. Lottie wanted to know if I had made the assignment yet.

  “He’s not answering his phone. I’m worried.”

  “Keep trying,” she said. “Maybe he turned it off and slept in. He could have gone to his doctor. He could be anywhere.”

  “Yeah, like on his floor unconscious. He told me he’d be there,” I said anxiously. “Maybe he—” I didn’t say the words aloud.

  “Don’t box shadows,” Lottie said. “I have to head over to the Seaquarium to shoot the new baby manatee twins. Be back in an hour.”

  I printed out the stories for Mark. Dan still didn’t answer. I checked with the police desk reporter, who said there had been no rescue or police calls at Dan’s address.

  Ryan had come in and appeared to be quarreling with Gretchen up at the city desk; unusual since the two had been on such good terms lately. Striding back in a snit, he flung what looked like a press packet onto his desk. “Why me?” he said. “I hate this damn stuff!”

  “What?” I casually swiveled in my chair.

  “Politics. I’m not a political writer and I hate this stuff. Here I am, assigned to this stupid—”

  “What?” It made me smile to see normally sweet, gentle Ryan as mad as hell.

  “The campaign for governor,” he said, pouting. “Eric Fielding’s here on a campaign swing, and I have to cover his damn speech.” He shoved a notebook into his back pocket.

  I was on my feet, gripped by a feeling of dread.

  “Fielding in Miami? Where?”

  I snatched the packet from his hand. He misunderstood my interest.

  “Want to do it, Britt? You can take it. I hate politics.”

  “Where is he? When?”

  “Here, at the Hilton. I have to get over there right now, if I’m going.” He checked his watch. “He’s speaking at a luncheon, the Biscayne Bay Club.”

  Hands shaking, I dialed Dan’s number again. No answer.

  “Do you want to take it or not?” Ryan looked impatient. I shook my head and he stomped toward the elevator.

  Trying to stay calm, I dialed the number again, praying, letting it ring, whispering his name, willing him to answer. When I knew he wasn’t going to, I panicked.

  Mark was reading the printouts in Fred’s office. I stuck my head in the door. “I have to go out for a while. I’ll be back.”

  He smiled and nodded, thumbs up, indicating that what he’d read so far was okay.

  I ran down the fire stairs, berating myself for not being smarter. When he asked for another week I had assumed it was to clear up his personal affairs before all hell broke loose. What if he wanted the time to seek street justice for the murder of Mary Beth Rafferty? Hers was the open case that troubled him most over the years. How could I be so blind?

  He had told me himself that he couldn’t stand to see Fielding become governor.

  Breathless by the time I got to my car, I burned rubber leaving the parking lot. The T-Bird ate up the miles between the News and Dan’s house as I cursed traffic and hapless weekend drivers. Please be there, Dan, I prayed.

  The Buick was gone, the driveway empty. I knocked anyway, first with my fist, then with my heavy key ring. Peering in a living room window, I saw no one, then ran around and pounded on the back door. He could be inside. A mechanic might be working on his car. Maybe someone had borrowed it. I felt along the top of the doorframe and looked beneath the mat. People who live alone often hide spare keys in case they lock themselves out.

  I groped around the roots of a dying spider plant in a hanging pot next to the door. Nothing. I looked furtively around. No one watching. The man who lives here is very sick, I thought, rehearsing my story if caught. He could be unconscious on the floor. I’m justified, I thought grimly, looking for something that would break glass. On impulse I tried the door. Unlocked. I pushed it open. The hinges pleaded for oil. “Danny?” I whispered. “Please be here.”

  I stepped into the kitchen. “Dan?” I called. “Are you home? Dan? You in here?” The coffeepot was cold. Not a smell, not a sound. Only the second hand of the clock above the sink.

  “Dan!” I walked rapidly through the living and dining rooms. Checked the master bedroom. The bed was made. What must have been his daughter’s room was now occupied only by old stuffed animals, gathering dust, staring back at me blindly. Tears stinging my eyes, I walked into the Florida room. Stacked on a neat and orderly desk were the scrapbooks we had never looked at and copies of police files. Dan’s old cases.

  One lay open, a brown file folder neatly labeled 71-1479—Mary Beth Rafferty.

  I left at a run. Then a terrible thought occurred to me and I darted back to rifle through the drawer in the sideboard next to the dining room table. Nothing but woven place mats, napkin rings, and tea towels. No gun. “Damn you, Dan! Damn it!”

  The Hilton was near the airport, a fifteen-minute drive at best. I backed out the driveway too fast, bouncing the T-Bird’s undercarriage off the curb. I had thought he would stop. Instead, I had made it easier for him. He didn’t even have to be careful anymore, because I already knew.

  Fielding would be surrounded by press aides, campaign workers, and supporters. There would be no opportunity to corner him alone. But my story was about to appear; this was Dan’s last chance. He wouldn’t care if the world was watching.

  I saw the flower beds bordering the Hilton’s circular ramp up
ahead and abruptly changed lanes. Sirens overtook me from behind. Oh, God, I thought. I abandoned my car on the ramp and ran toward the lobby. A security officer and a valet parking attendant waved their arms and shouted.

  “Move it!” the valet yelled. “You can’t leave it there. We’ve got an ambulance coming in!”

  I tossed him the keys and kept running. Oh, no, I prayed. Left, past the gift shop, toward the main ballroom where the luncheon was scheduled. Other people running. A woman crying. A security guard blocked the door. “The News,” I said, flashing my press card. He hesitated for a moment, uncertain. A policeman shouted, “Nobody gets in here!” Too late. I was inside.

  A sea of people parted and I caught sight of Fielding’s silver-gray hair. On his feet, unharmed, face stunned, he was being maneuvered toward the door by his people. “Bring the limo up,” one yelled into his walkie-talkie.

  “… obviously deranged …” I heard Fielding say as they whisked him by.

  “What happened?” I asked a young man in a waiter’s uniform.

  “Some nut tried to attack the candidate,” he said, “and Fielding’s bodyguard shot him.”

  Two paramedics appeared through another door, beelining for a small anteroom behind the raised dais where the dignitaries’ tables flanked the podium. I followed to where two other medics were already huddled over somebody stretched out on the lavender carpet. I saw the baggy gray suit and untied shoes that barely fit over his swollen feet.

  The medics were cutting away his bloodied shirt. I dropped to my knees beside them. “This man’s a heart patient,” I said urgently. “He’s seriously ill.”

  “That’s not the issue right now. He’s been shot. You know him?” a medic said.

  The bullet hole, oozing blood, was on the right side of Dan’s pale chest. Breathing rapidly, he was gasping for breath as one of the medics placed an oxygen mask over his face.

  “Yes, he’s a police officer, Miami homicide, recently retired.” The medics reacted. One, in contact with the hospital, radioed that the patient was a police officer. That would guarantee a top-flight reception at the hospital, I thought. If Dan made it to the hospital.

  The medics pressed a gauze dressing over the bullet hole.

  “Start the IV with lactacted Ringer’s solution and run it wide open,” one directed.

  “He tried to kill Eric Fielding, our next governor!” boomed a red-faced man who hovered over us, showering us with spittle. “I saw the whole thing.”

  “Who shot him?” I said.

  “That fellow over there,” he said, pointing at Martin Mowry, who looked exactly like his pictures. “Works for Fielding. The old guy walked up to Fielding, said something, and pulled a gun, and the other guy shot ’im.”

  Mowry, crew-cut, husky, and in his late thirties, had just removed his weapon from a shoulder holster and handed it over to one of several police officers surrounding him. Another officer had Dan’s dark blue steel revolver.

  Someone from the hotel staff had taken the podium and was announcing that the unfortunate incident was under control, the candidate had departed, and luncheon would be served. Nobody paid attention.

  Dan’s eyelids fluttered, and I took his right hand in both of mine. His bluish skin felt cold and clammy.

  “Daniel. I’m here.”

  A medic radioed his vital signs ahead to the hospital: “BP is eighty over fifty, pulse one-twenty, respiratory rate is forty.”

  They glued three silver-dollar-sized pasties to his skin, to each side of his chest and his abdomen. Each was linked by an electrode to a machine the size of a boom box.

  “I’ve got the heart monitor hooked up,” one radioed. “Looks like sinus tachycardia.”

  “You were supposed to stay home,” I said inanely, squeezing Dan’s hand, “in case I had any questions.”

  He rolled his eyes as if to say it was just one of those things.

  Because it was a chest wound they were in a big hurry to transport him to the trauma center. I heard them request air rescue but both choppers were tied up, ferrying traffic victims from the south end of the county. They wheeled him out on a stretcher, literally running him through the dining room and the lobby past hundreds of hostile, questioning, or curious eyes.

  Running with them, I glimpsed Ryan with police and hotel officials but averted my eyes to stay with Dan.

  They insisted I sit beside the driver when I wanted to ride with Dan in the back of the rescue van. A young policeman did climb in next to him, to take down any statements Dan made.

  The siren’s wail washed over us as traffic scattered in our path. The van speeded up, veered, and turned off an expressway exit as I clung to the door handle.

  Dan was dying, I realized. And the son of a bitch who murdered Mary Beth Rafferty would go on to his next campaign stop en route to the governor’s mansion. Where was the justice in that? Anger coursed through my veins and bubbled over into a decision.

  We rolled up in front of the four-story trauma center in minutes, though it seemed longer. It always does. I scrambled out of the front as they unloaded him with all his attachments: IV, oxygen, and heart monitors. I held on to the side of his stretcher as he was rushed through the automatic doors, where a dozen people, all medical personnel, waited.

  Dan reached up and pulled off his oxygen mask and I leaned down to listen. He tried to grin, eyes cloudy. “Ain’t no retired Kamikaze pilots, Britt.”

  He did not look scared.

  “Should I say a prayer, Dan?”

  “Nope,” he mumbled. “If I get reborn I’ll be pissed off. Once is enough.” I smiled, but I wanted to cry in pain and outrage.

  The oxygen mask was pushed back in place and an officious nurse ordered me away. I had to tell him first. I whispered in his ear. “I’ll do it, Dan. I’m going to get Fielding for you.”

  He looked confused but squeezed my hand. “I’ll prove he did it,” I said. “I’ll find the kid, the witness, I swear. No way he’ll win. I promise.”

  His eyes closed, but I knew he heard me.

  The trauma team took over.

  “Get me an arterial blood gas,” a nurse commanded. A technician rolled up a portable x-ray unit. A doctor used his stethoscope. “I don’t hear breath sounds on the right side. He’s bleeding into his right chest. Get me a setup for a chest tube.”

  A nurse insisted I go to the waiting room. I wondered if I would see him alive again.

  I called the city desk from a pay phone outside emergency and dictated what I had. My story on Dan would now run in the early edition, topped off by the new developments.

  I took a cab back to the Hilton, picked up the T-Bird, and went to police headquarters. Only a skeleton crew mans homicide on weekends.

  “I need to see an old file,” I brashly told the young detective, “the Mary Beth Rafferty case. It was twenty-two years ago. Lieutenant McDonald said it would be okay.”

  “We don’t keep files that old here, they’d be on microfilm at the warehouse. Takes about a week to order them,” he said.

  “No, it’s an unsolved case. All unsolved cases stay here.”

  “But the press isn’t authorized to see cases still under active investigation.”

  “Active investigation? It’s twenty-two years old! I just need to check some background for a story about cold cases.”

  “You sure the lieutenant authorized it?”

  “Would I be here if he hadn’t?”

  He disappeared into a storage room and came back with a fat file half a foot wide. “You’re welcome to it. It’s a big one.”

  I thumbed swiftly through the papers, fearing that Kendall McDonald, whose name I had taken in vain, might appear at any moment and catch me. He would surely respond to the news of Dan’s attempt to shoot Fielding. Would he go to the hospital or come here?

  I found what I was looking for among the photos: an old eight-by-ten glossy of a small boy with grave blue eyes. His young face looke
d frightened. His mother, a pretty, plumpish woman, held his hand, her other arm extended as though to ward off anyone approaching him. Her mouth was contorted as though in mid-protest.

  An attached report listed her name, Mildred Van de Hyde, and that of her son, Robert. Bobby Van de Hyde. Skinny, he looked younger than eleven, and frail. I remembered Dan saying that the boy had been hit by a car once and nearly killed. That he had a severe limp.

  I copied the names and address off the report, studied the faces in the old picture, and slid them back into the folder.

  “That’s all I need,” I said brightly. The detective didn’t even look up. Lieutenant Kendall McDonald was pushing his way through the glass door into the lobby as I left the station.

  “Britt, did you hear about Dan?” His face was grim.

  “How is he?” I said.

  “In intensive care. This is incredible. I don’t know what the hell is going on.” He ran his fingers through his hair, eyes pained. “Somebody said he pulled a gun on Fielding! I don’t believe it.”

  “Believe it, McDonald. We have a story running in the street edition.”

  “Well, I’m gonna find out what the fuck is happening and why some bastard shot him,” he said, and stormed into the station.

  I escaped. My beeper chirped persistently for the second time, and I turned it off. I knew they wanted me to work on the attempt on the candidate’s life. If I returned to the paper I’d be drafted. My priorities were different.

  I checked the phone book I keep in the car. No Van de Hyde. I stopped at a roadside booth and called the paper. Thank God Onnie was in the library.

  “How is he?” she said.

  “Still alive. Can you get the big blue crisscross directory?”

  “Will do.” She came back a minute later. “Got it.”

  “Okay.” I gave her the Van de Hydes’ old address. She found it. A four-unit apartment complex, she said.

  “Who lives there now?”

  She rattled off the names and phone numbers as I took notes and dug quarters from the depths of my purse. One tenant never heard of Mildred or Bobby. Another did not answer. The third, an older man, remembered them well.