Contents Under Pressure

by Edna Buchanan

  No one was at the terminal, and the screen was empty except for the cursor, blinking invitingly. I rolled up a chair, sat down and typed in the key words, POLICE and BRUTALITY. A list began to appear on the screen before me, all the articles on the topic published by major papers around the nation in the past twelve months. It was longer than I had anticipated, and I spent the next hour-and-a-half calling them up on the screen.

  Then I burst into Fred Douglas’s tiny glass-front office for help. He has the best view among the midlevel editors, a panoramic vision of sky and Biscayne Bay behind him.

  “This,” I told him, “could be a major story. There is a chance, a good one, that one of the cops killed D. Wayne Hudson…”

  “Uh-hmm,” he said, looking doubtful and leaning back in his chair. “What makes you think so?”

  I told him everything I had. “I’ve also been reading clips about major police brutality cases from all over the nation. The Rodney King case that was caught on videotape in LA, the ones in Texas, New Orleans, and Boston—all of them happened on the midnight shift. Those hours seem to be a dumping ground for violent, trouble-prone cops. The officers who need discipline the most are allowed to roam their cities at night with little or none.”

  He was silent for a moment. “Do it,” he said, dropping his pencil on the desk. “Go get it, and take all the time you need.”

  “Will you spring me from Gretchen’s clutches? I’ll keep an eye on my beat,” I promised, “and do any daily stories that need to be done while I’m working on this.”

  “Sure thing, but if you get backed up and want to hand some stories off to another reporter, let me know.”

  All right! I thought. My steps bounced as I returned to my desk, mind racing. My phone was ringing. I reached for it with misgivings, glancing at the clock and hoping fervently that it was not Pete Zalewski, who often called at about this time. An old axiom warns to be careful about what you wish for, because you might get it.

  The caller was not Pete.

  “Hi, Britt, I’m so glad I caught you.”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Are you busy?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Did they find your friend yet?”

  “Ryan? No.”

  She made tsking noises. “Too bad. I like reading his stories. They aren’t always full of crime and violence.”

  “That’s because he isn’t on the police beat like I am, Mom.” I rubbed my forehead, suddenly realizing how wary I was. “The search is still on,” I said. “We still have hope.”

  “I’ve got a surprise, something that will cheer you up.”

  “Oh?” I said warily.

  “I asked a friend over at Jordan’s to put away the perfect handbag for you.”

  “I really don’t need one, Mom.”

  “That awful big thing you carry around is just too much. It makes you look like a bag lady, Britt. You’ll love this one. It’s precious, and it’s on sale. My friend can use her discount, and it will be a great buy.”

  “Does it have the designer’s initials all over it?” Her silence told me it did. “I don’t know, Mom. I just have this thing about carrying a purse with initials on it. I want them to be mine.”

  “You don’t understand designer quality,” she said, a chill in her voice.

  I sighed. Maybe it was nice. “How many sections does it have? Does it have an outside pocket for my beeper?”

  “No. There’s a pocket inside with a tiny mirror.”

  “It’s not very big, is it, Mom?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to get you away from.”

  “But I need something roomy, with lots of compartments and outside pockets.”

  “That’s what you have now, dear. It’s not the look for you.”

  “I don’t care about the look, it doesn’t sound like what I need.”

  “Nothing I try to do for you is good enough, is it?”

  “It’s not that. I appreciate you thinking of me, but it just wouldn’t be practical. I wouldn’t use it.”

  “All I’m trying to do is help you to properly accessorize…”

  Call waiting kicked in with a click. Perfect timing.

  “Somebody’s trying to get through to me, Mom. I better take this call. Talk to you later. Bye.”

  With relief I hit the button and greeted the new caller. No one answered. “Hello?”

  At first I thought no one was there, but then I heard breathing and the faint sound of music in the background. “Hello?” I said again. “This is Britt Montero.”

  “Dead,” whispered a voice so low that I was unable to discern whether it came from a man or a woman. “You are dead.”

  “You have the wrong number,” I said emphatically, and hung up, shaken.

  The phone rang again almost immediately. Steeling myself, I answered. To my relief, this time it was Pete Zalewski.

  Eleven

  All I wanted was to go home alone, mope a little, and get to bed early. I needed the rest, which is why it is difficult to explain how I wound up dining on smoked salmon and red snapper and sipping a 1986 Chardonnay in an intimate and elegant little restaurant on a side street in Coral Gables, with Sgt. Kendall McDonald.

  He had fought his way through to me on the telephone, no easy feat when competing with tips on stories, the calls from my mother, a deeply depressed Pete Zalewski, and whoever was trying to scare me. Like me, McDonald hated the voice mail systems. My line was constantly busy, so he finally called the main newsroom number. Phyllis, the city desk clerk, waved that I had an emergency call on another line, giving me a good reason to escape from Pete, just in time. I usually tried to cheer Pete up; this time he was dragging me down with him into his own bottomless depths of despair. I simply could not accept the general newsroom consensus that Ryan was shark bait.

  I told McDonald that I was feeling punk and sad about Ryan, was getting threatening phone calls, and wanted only to go home and await news from the Coast Guard. Yet somehow, minutes later, I was giving him directions to my apartment.

  By the time I had thrown the unsightly stacks of newspapers that pile up in my kitchen and living room into the bottom of a closet, showered, and slipped on a pale lavender silk shirtwaist, he was at my door.

  He stood there, removing his sunglasses, looking handsome in chinos, a pale blue oxford shirt, and a navy sports jacket. Buenisimo. It had been a long time since a man had stood in my living room, waiting to take me out.

  “Very nice,” he said, glancing around the apartment, then resting his eyes on me. “Very nice.”

  Billy Boots greeted him with friendly curiosity, as though they were old acquaintances. “I hope you’re not allergic to cats,” I said.

  “Nope. So are you the watch cat here, big fella?” McDonald said soothingly, scratching under Billy’s chin, while I picked up my purse and pager. “Do you chase away all the bad guys?”

  Billy purred loudly and rubbed against his pants leg.

  “Looks like love at first sight.” I was surprised. “He usually ignores strangers.”

  “He must smell Hooker.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Hooker, my dog. She got the name because I found her on the street, on the Boulevard, up near Seventy-ninth.”

  This was a good sign, I thought. I have never trusted men who didn’t like animals.

  He was studying a framed photo on an end table. “Who’s this dude on the horse, a Mexican bandit?”

  “No, a Cuban freedom fighter. My father. That was taken on the finca where he grew up.”

  “Ah, I can see the resemblance now.”

  “You can?”

  “Sure, the jawline, the eyes.” He glanced between me and the photo. “No denying you’re his daughter. What does he do now?”

  “He doesn’t. Castro killed him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I was just a little girl at the time.” Suddenly I wanted to prolong t
he moment. “Would you like a drink before we go?” I had a bottle of vodka in a kitchen cabinet, and chilled white zinfandel in the refrigerator.

  The phone interrupted before he could answer. The new city desk clerk was very young and very serious.

  “You’ve got a call,” she said urgently. “I’ve got him holding on the other line. Sounds important. Says his name is Pete Zalewski. Want me to put him through to you?”

  “No,” I said, annoyed. “Tell him to call me tomorrow, when I’m in the office.”

  “I didn’t give him your home number,” she said quickly. “Even though he asked for it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You did the right thing. You never know when it could be important. This one isn’t.”

  McDonald was scrutinizing the Winslow Homer prints on the wall. “These are nice,” he said, smiling.

  “I like his later stuff the best, the watercolors in Bermuda and Florida,” I said, realizing too late that I sounded pretentious.

  McDonald nodded. “Did you know that before Homer became known as a painter, he covered the Civil War? Did sketches from the front lines for the newspapers of the day. Actual battle scenes. Can you image Eddie Adams, or some other famous war photographer, being sent to the front with a sketchpad instead of a camera?”

  “How did you know that?”

  He shrugged. “Civil War buff. I read a lot on that era.”

  “Your drink…” I remembered, as the telephone rang again.

  We stared at each other. “You’re a popular girl.”

  “Only with people who want their names in the newspaper, or find themselves in forced confinement.” The answering machine kicked in after the second ring. The voice of the caller resounded loudly in my small apartment. It was my mother.

  “Where are you, Britt? If you’re not there, I can only hope to God you’re out on a date. But that’s probably too much to expect…” Face burning, I rushed to lower the volume on the machine.

  I turned back to McDonald. “About that drink…”

  He was grinning and pacing near the door, graceful, long-legged, and athletic, like a racehorse eager to run. “I’ve got a better idea. Let’s beat it out of here. I’ve come to take you away from all this. You work too hard, you need escape, a few laughs, a little cheering up.” He touched my shoulder lightly as we went out the door, and ushered me to his car, a shiny black Jeep Cherokee. I saw when he removed his jacket that he wore his off-duty gun, a short-barreled revolver, in a shoulder holster. A police department pager was clipped to his belt. I stifled a laugh. I also wore my pager, and carried a notebook in my purse. So this is how we get away from it all, I thought. Though neither of us was on the job, we weren’t quite off, either.

  I am an edgy passenger with most men, watching the traffic and itching to take the wheel myself, a trait that I’m sure does not enhance my social life. But now, I relaxed. I liked the confident way he drove. Usually watchful and alert, I had forgotten what it was like to really wind down when I was out and about in Miami.

  Perhaps I knew the dark side of the city too well. I guess we both did. When a figure approached the car at a red light near an overpass, I stiffened in my seat. “It’s only a window washer,” McDonald said, noticing my reaction. The bearded street person vigorously smeared the windshield with a dirty rag.

  “I always watch out for these guys; some of them are okay, but others…” I said, as McDonald passed the man some change.

  “I guess it’s scary for a woman driving alone,” he said as we pulled away from the light.

  “It doesn’t scare me,” I said quickly.

  “Oh I know, you never get scared,” he said, sneaking a sidelong glance out the corner of his eye.

  “I don’t. I just try to avoid trouble by using common sense.”

  “Not an easy thing to do sometimes,” he said.

  “Right, if you drive the expressway you run the risk of being nailed by the highway robbers.” Modern-day highwaymen, they hurl heavy objects into traffic, disable passing cars, and attack the occupants. “So to avoid the x-way, you stay on city streets and wonder about that stranger lurching toward your car at traffic lights. It may be somebody who just wants to wash your windshield, or a robber ready to put a brick through it to get your money, jewelry, and maybe even take your car.”

  “Yep,” McDonald said. “But what you should watch out for, since you’re usually where the action is, is the sudden civil disturbance. Those things erupt so fast, without warning.”

  “I know, I once interviewed a woman horribly burned by a Molotov cocktail hurled into her open car window for no apparent reason.”

  “It’s hard to believe,” he said, “that there are still towns where a driver’s biggest concern is watching out for potholes. Here we have vandals dropping cinder blocks from overpasses…”

  “And police impersonators who pull over cars to rob or rape the drivers,” I chimed in.

  “Robbers who deliberately rear end other cars, then rob the motorist who steps out to check the damage,” he said.

  “The deranged drivers with guns…”

  “Ready to kill for a parking space,” he finished. “I’ve handled a couple of those.”

  “The Beach has had some driveway robberies. The guys follow motorists home and pull guns on them as they get out of their cars,” I told him.

  “I know what job you’ll never be offered,” he said. “Writing brochures for the chamber of commerce.”

  “I bet they’d like to muzzle us both. It is sad,” I said. “I can remember when driving used to be fun. When I was a teenager and first got my license, my friends and I would just go out for rides. We’d cruise up and down the beach, and then go all the way out to the Monkey Jungle.”

  “Driving through Miami now is like the Grand Prix,” he said. “You win if you make it to where you’re going.”

  “The prize,” I said, “is keeping your wallet.”

  “Is this a great town, or what?” he asked, and we both laughed.

  I watched with fresh eyes the scenery flashing by. I was in someone else’s hands, being driven to an unknown destination by an armed and well-trained man who could handle any crisis. Nobody dared mess with him, and that made me feel safe and cared for, instead of alone and on my own in a mostly hostile world, the way I usually was.

  The music on the radio ended, and a weather report followed, warning of squalls and fifteen-foot seas. Sick at heart, I had a vision of a tiny raft surrounded by black sea.

  “They’ve got to find Ryan,” I burst out. “I hate to think of him lost out there.”

  “Tell me about him,” McDonald said, turning onto Ponce de Leon, a broad European-style boulevard in Coral Gables.

  “He’s a sweet, gentle guy,” I told him. “A young twenty-six, just a kid, but a good writer. He’s sentimental, and he’s had a crush on every woman in the newsroom.”

  “Including you?”

  “That was over in two weeks. He’s like a younger brother. His desk is right behind mine, and we talk all the time. It’s almost like being roommates. He must be scared to death out there. And I’m afraid we’ll never see him again. That he’ll just be lost in limbo, one of those unsolved mysteries of the sea. I feel so guilty. Somehow I should have kept him from going.”

  “You can’t beat yourself up over this, Britt. He’s an adult; he could have said no. It sure as hell was a dumb idea. That editor who sent him sounds like living proof that a mind is a terrible thing to have.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you saw her,” I replied.

  “She good-looking?”

  “The kind of face men write poetry about.”

  “Brains turn me on before beauty.” He turned to look at me. “But real dynamite is a woman with both.” He made a left onto a small side street. “Don’t write this Ryan off so fast. Some people are born survivors.”

  “You usually see the ones who aren’t,” I said glumly. “So do I
.”

  “There’s nothing we personally can do about it tonight, so block it out for now.” He reached for my hand and squeezed it. “Worry about it tomorrow,” he said, and winked.

  Inside the bistro, fresh flowers adorned the table and an attentive waiter hovered over us like a helicopter. The staff seemed to know and like McDonald; our table was quiet and candlelit.

  “The special here is always superb, something that will make you want to junk your stove and make a standing reservation,” he confided.

  The waiter told us about the special, and I shook my head. “I never eat veal,” I said quietly. He backed off while I studied the menu. I intended to spare McDonald the story, but his eyes were questioning.

  “The baby calves,” I explained. “Do you know they snatch them from their mommies?”

  He rolled his eyes. “You, uh, have personal knowledge?”

  “As a matter of fact, I was there a couple of years ago when a hijacked truck was recovered. The hijackers took it at gunpoint and forced the driver out in the Everglades. They must have thought he had a load of whiskey or VCRs. They abandoned the truck later, left it parked in the hot sun. When the police opened the back a day-and-a-half later, there were all these adorable, glossy baby calves, big-eyed and hungry, and bawling for their mothers.

  “I was new on the job at the time, and thrilled that they had been rescued. It was a happy ending. Then I asked a policeman what would happen to the calves next. He said the owners were dispatching a new driver to deliver them to their original destination—the slaughterhouse.” I took a deep breath. “I will never forget that scene, or eat veal again.”

  “I swear, I have never harmed a baby calf in my life.” McDonald solemnly searched his menu, then his eyes lit up. “How do you feel about baby fish? They don’t have to bite that hook if they don’t want to. They never cry for their mommies.”

  We both ordered fish, and McDonald sat back and smiled. I wanted to relax and unwind, but as I gazed across the table into the endless depths of Kendall McDonald’s silvery blue eyes, a loathsome question gnawed at my consciousness: What if Gretchen could see me now? Her implication that I fraternized with the cops was insulting and had infuriated me, yet here I was, big as life and twice as sassy, doing exactly that. I glanced guiltily at the door, expecting her and her schoolteacher husband to walk in, catching me in the act, proving that she was right. This is a big city with lots of restaurants, but stranger things happen all the time. It would be just my luck to see her, or someone else from the newspaper. I bit my lip and scrutinized an arriving party of four.