Contents Under Pressure

by Edna Buchanan

  I started with Ted Ferrell’s. It was sterling, packed fat with accolades. He had been honored as Officer of the Month several times, and was once nominated for Officer of the Year. He had enough endorsements and grateful letters from citizens to run for office. He was kind to little old ladies who were lost, and even had a letter praising his sensitivity from the foreman of a jury he had testified before in a rape case. He qualified as an expert marksman, and his evaluations consistently ranked between good and excellent. There were also numerous letters of commendation from other agencies he had assisted in investigations, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

  The Blackburns’ files were equally fat, but the contents more spotty. Even city file clerks seemed to have trouble telling the brothers apart. Some of Roland’s files were in Roscoe’s folder, and vice versa. I automatically sorted out the misfiled papers as I read through them, replacing them in the correct jackets.

  Both had reprimands for off-duty bar brawls. Roscoe had forfeited three vacation days for reckless handling of a shotgun that had apparently killed the plumbing in the third-floor men’s room. He claimed that the weapon had toppled over and discharged while he used the john. Clues between the lines suggested horseplay. His records also reflected several visits to the city doctor for temporary hearing loss, apparently caused by the blast in such close quarters. Roland had drawn a two-day suspension for challenging a downtown security guard to a quick-draw contest. The guard took him up on it, and accidentally shot himself in the shin. Both Blackburns had been warned to stop teasing and hassling the transvestite hookers on Seventy-ninth Street. Their six-month evaluations from supervisors ranged from poor to excellent.

  There were also letters commending both for fixing flat tires for elderly motorists, assisting lost tourists, helping citizens locked out of their cars and their houses, and praise from downtown businessmen who were pleased that the Blackburns were cleaning up the city by sweeping the homeless, the panhandlers, and the freelance window washers away from their establishments. There was also a flood of letters dated around the same time from angry advocates for the homeless, accusing the brothers of hassling the street people and trying to drive them out of downtown. They had shared Officer of the Month honors for an exceptional run of good felony arrests, and received citations of appreciation from the Department of Corrections for quickly recapturing half a dozen jail escapees, including a murder suspect who had shimmied down sheets from a third-floor cell block.

  The Blackburns had been reprimanded over the years for being late to roll call, making bathroom sounds and burping noises over police frequencies, failing to show up for traffic court, and occasionally losing their police radios, which cost about $1,500 apiece. Several letters from jailed felony suspects and their lawyers accused the Blackburns of overzealous tactics that encompassed both mental and physical cruelty. Both had been injured several times, either in fights while making arrests or in accidents during pursuits. Both seemed to suffer another occupational hazard of police work: the names of their wives, beneficiaries on their departmental insurance forms, had changed over the years, after divorces and new marriages. All in all, the angry complaints and pats on the back seemed to balance out.

  Carpenter’s file was slim by comparison, though he had more time on the department than all of them. That is exactly what he appeared to be, a civil servant putting in his time, a veteran cop who would not leave a ripple when he retired. No bad marks, no good marks; a career characterized chiefly by inertia. In six months no one would remember he’d ever worn a badge.

  Manny Machado’s evaluations ranked high on appearance and low on attitude. He had received reprimands for tossing a snotty motorist’s car keys off the Brickell Avenue bridge into the Miami River; for refusing to speak English to non-Spanish-speaking citizens, though he was born in this country; and for the use of unnecessary or excessive force. He did a brief stint as a K-9 officer, cut short because his partner bit too many people, including innocent bystanders and other police officers. The K-9 sergeant wrote in one evaluation that Machado did not have the temperament to work with a canine, and spent too much time agitating the animal, something he seemed to enjoy. During that same period, it looked as though Machado would have done better had he let the dog drive; they had been involved in seven on-duty auto accidents, most of them minor, except for one in which he had suffered head injuries and a dislocated shoulder.

  Most interesting was that he and Estrada had both been reprimanded for a brawl with fellow officers, including a captain, over the use of weights in the police gym. Denying a captain a turn at the equipment had been a mistake.

  Estrada had graduated in the same academy class as Machado, and also seemed short-tempered with the public. One man complained that when he had called police to report a noisy party next door at 2 A.M., Estrada had arrived and pistol-whipped him. A woman said he had broken her jaw when arresting her for quarreling with a taxi driver about a fare. On the other hand, he had positive letters for his outstanding appearance in the honor guard when the president visited Miami, and for his playing in the Pig Bowl, the hotly contested annual football game between the city and the county police departments.

  Menendez did not look up when I left. Next stop was the Dade County Courthouse. The swallows return to Capistrano, and the turkey vultures come back to Miami, I thought. They arrive every year to glide and wheel in the wind drafts above the Courthouse, a towering twenty-eight-story, four-tiered granite wedding cake built in 1925. Spreading six-foot wings, the buzzards ride the northeastern breezes and sun themselves on the silver pyramid atop the building. I love the neoclassical columns, the broad stone steps, the high ceilings, and the secrets inside, just waiting to be ferreted out.

  The civil court index, the key to the legal battles, the frivolous and the frauds, the dreams and divorces, the torts, the scams, the tortured truths and all-out lies, is contained in a revolving cassette holder in a public viewing room in the recorder’s office. Each cassette contains a spool of microfilm listing the alphabetized names of plaintiffs and defendants. Under Ferrell, Ted, for example, you would see all the local civil suits in which he was named, either as plaintiff or defendant, including divorces. Ted had once sued a realtor and some people named Warren.

  Both the Blackburns and Estrada had divorces. The Blackburns together and independently were listed as codefendants with the city in a half-dozen lawsuits. Estrada, a cop only six years, was codefendant in nine cases, Machado in eight. I didn’t bother with Carpenter since he was not present when whatever happened to D. Wayne Hudson took place. I listed all the case numbers in my notebook, and took the ornate elevator down to the first floor to pull the files.

  Fred Douglas had evidently done right by me with Gretchen: either that or my beeper battery was dead. I had no desire to hear from her, unless of course a major story broke on my beat, or news came from the Coast Guard.

  I wrote the case numbers on slips of paper, passed them to a clerk and waited at the counter. Lawyers, law clerks, and private detectives occupied four large wooden tables, scribbling notes and examining files. I was glad no other reporters were present. They usually nosed around to find out what I was working on. I did the same when I saw them, out of curiosity and the worrisome fear that perhaps they were on to something I’d missed, something major, the big one. Thank God for competition; it keeps you on your toes.

  The clerk, a slim, fortyish woman named Bev who had been there for years, came back with an armload of files. “This is enough to keep you busy for awhile, Britt. Tracking something, huh?” The eyes behind her fashionable eyeglasses were as bright and as alert as a bird’s.

  “Yep,” I winked.

  “I’ll watch the front page,” she said.

  I carried my stack of files to one of the tables and settled in a corner chair, facing the door. This was an old habit; I hate having anyone peer over my shoulder while I am poring through the publi
c records of other people’s lives.

  Ted and his wife, Betsy, were the plaintiffs in his lone lawsuit. When they had bought their home, the sellers and the realtor claimed it had a new roof. The Ferrells learned it was a lie the first time it rained. The old roof had simply been whitewashed, and leaked like a sieve. The Ferrells sued and settled for the cost of a new roof. Good for them, I thought.

  A chilling pattern emerged from the other men’s lawsuits. Virtually all the most serious incidents had taken place between midnight and dawn. The cases had been filed by people who did not simply write letters to the department; they hired lawyers. Some did so from hospital beds, others from jail cells. Most people claiming abuse by the Blackburns appeared to have a reason for being stopped, such as jogging in a residential neighborhood at 2 A.M., but not for what they claimed happened next. Physically assaulted, battered by fists, nightsticks, and heavy metal flashlights, the plaintiffs said that numerous unidentified cops witnessed, took part in, or ignored the attacks on them.

  A burglary suspect caught red-handed said that he was captured and cuffed with unnecessary roughness, his face pounded on the pavement, his nose and a cheekbone broken. I had seen another side of the same case in the Blackburns’ personnel files, a letter from the neighborhood homeowners’ association, applauding them for this very arrest. I took a break to stretch my legs and go to the water fountain. This burglar could be a savvy criminal trying to evade jail by blurring the details of his arrest, I thought. But what about the fifty-nine-year-old stockbroker whose arm had been broken in two places after he was stopped on suspicion of drunk driving? He claimed he was cold sober, returning home from a financial seminar in Boca Raton. He alleged that he was unable to pass the roadside sobriety test due to recent hip surgery, and that he was beaten when he tried to explain.

  Estrada’s cases were even more frightening. A woman motorist said he stopped her for failing to signal a turn at an empty intersection at 3 A.M., grabbed her by the ankle, and dragged her from her car, bouncing her head on the concrete and the curb. She suffered a skull fracture. She claimed he also damaged her car by jumping up and down on the hood.

  I remembered that night at little Darryl’s house, Estrada atop the coffee table.

  Another motorist, a doctor on his way home at 1 A.M., after being called out to attend a patient at the emergency room, was pursued into his driveway by Estrada, who accused him of making “a wide turn,” then struck him with a heavy metal flashlight that broke his glasses and his nose. The physician had been arrested for resisting arrest.

  How can somebody be arrested only for resisting arrest? I wondered. Few cases had gone to trial. The city had settled most out of court with relatively modest cash awards. Some were still pending, like the case of a waiter, stopped after exiting the expressway on his way home from work, assaulted and beaten with nightsticks. His wrist and two fingers were broken, and he lost some teeth. His offense: a burned-out taillight. Machado was a codefendant on that one, along with the Blackburn brothers.

  Stiff, chilled by the air conditioning, and eyesore after shuffling papers for hours, I walked down the courthouse steps in brilliant late-afternoon sunshine, crossed the street to the towering new government center with its lobby full of shops and potted palms, and rode the elevator to the tax assessor’s office. It was almost closing time, but what I needed would not take long. I found the Blackburns, Estrada, Machado, and Carpenter all listed as homeowners on the Dade County property tax rolls, and copied their addresses. The Blackburns lived in modestly assessed houses in South Miami. Roscoe had a pool; Roland did not. Carpenter lived in a Miami Springs condo. Estrada and Machado lived in the same subdivision, a block and a half apart. That would make it easier when I went out to knock on their doors.

  I felt a sense of accomplishment driving back to the office. Nothing conclusive; from what I’d read, almost any one of the cops involved could have attacked D. Wayne Hudson. But at least I’d done a good day’s work. Using public records sometimes gave one a sense of invincibility. People could slam doors, refuse calls, stonewall, and run, but in today’s world of computers, one thing they couldn’t do was hide.

  The stack of phone messages on my desk contained none from Kendall McDonald, leaving me vaguely disappointed. Several times that day I’d thought about laughing with him, and his goodnight kiss. Was I crazy to be thinking this way about a cop?

  Lottie was back, and had left me a note. The Vagabond had abandoned the search, leaving it to the Coast Guard. Ryan’s parents had arrived in town. She was with them, and invited me to join them for dinner, not an event I looked forward to. I began to organize my notes, typing them on sheets of yellow paper torn from a lined legal pad instead of tapping them into the computer terminal. Call me old-fashioned, but I still love typewriters, empty sheets of paper waiting to be filled with words, and the privacy of one, lone, hard copy of a file. Worse than having somebody look over your shoulder while you work is to have them do it electronically. Anyone at the News, if clever, could access whatever anyone else entered into the VDTs, which are linked to a central computer. Editors snoop on reporters; reporters snoop on editors and each other. That is their business, it is what they do. With the right equipment, they can even do it from outside the building.

  I opened a file for each of the cops. The best time to catch them at home would be in the hours before they left for work. I hoped to hit them all the same night; I didn’t want to give them the chance to match notes on my questions and rehearse their stories. Taking people by surprise, I’d found, usually resulted in the most truthful answers, or enough devious confusion to make the lies obvious. At least that was my experience.

  Needing to map out an itinerary, I went up to the city desk to get a fix on the cops’ neighborhoods from the big blue city directory. Getting lost is easy in Dade County. I’ve lived here all my life, and I do it all the time. Streets to nowhere end in canals, waterways, farm fields, or swamps. The secret is in knowing the through streets and the grid pattern, which divided into northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest. Flagler Street is the north-south dividing line, and Miami Avenue divides east from west.

  Unfortunately, all the municipalities didn’t follow the system. Miami Beach has no NE, NW, SE, or SW designations, and wealthy Coral Gables reflects old Spain, with Ponce de Leon Boulevard, Alhambra, Segovia, and Aragon, names found only on short squat curbstones, unlit and impossible to read after dusk. That upscale bedroom community favors the attitude that if you do not know the exact location of your destination, then you are not welcome in their city.

  No wonder bewildered tourists keep stopping to ask directions from strangers who draw guns and rob them.

  The big Bresser’s City Directory lists the intersecting streets and landmarks around any address. My phone rang as I was running my finger down Machado’s block, checking for a through street. I sighed impatiently, tempted to let it ring until the caller was switched to voice mail. I felt an undercurrent of urgency, like a bloodhound on the scent. But the call might be important, so I marked the page with a scrap of paper, plodded dutifully to my desk, and unenthusiastically answered. It took a moment for what the caller said to sink in, then I shrieked as though I had won the lottery.

  “Ryan! Is it really you? Where the hell are you?”

  “Mexico City. At the airport, Britt.”

  “Mexico City?” I was laughing, although tears stung my eyes.

  “Look Britt, I don’t have much time. They want to put me on a flight to Toronto.”

  “Toronto?” I repeated, dimly aware that a crowd had begun to form around my desk. “It’s Ryan!” I cried, nodding at them, and cupping my right hand over my ear to block out their applause and cheers. Gretchen lingered on the fringe, and I saw a look of relief in her eyes. I couldn’t even feel angry at her at that moment.

  “Yeah, I don’t have a passport or any papers with me,” Ryan was saying, “so they won’t let me stay here. And I can’t prove I�
��m an American citizen…”

  “How did you get to Mexico City?”

  “From Cuba, on Mexicana Airways.”

  “Cuba!”

  “Yeah,” he said sheepishly. “Where was Lottie? She didn’t call at midnight, so I thought my radio was malfunctioning. I’d had a couple of beers, and when I stood up to get better reception, it slipped out of my hand. Sank like a rock.”

  “Oh Ryan, they were singing and playing the guitar…”

  “I got swept south, past the reefs, by the current. I saw sharks. Big ones, Britt. I gave them all my food to keep ‘em happy. I threw out messages, in Coors bottles.”

  “I knew that was you! I told Lottie she should have checked them!”

  “I ran out of sunscreen, and the batteries in my portable TV got wet. A Cuban fishing boat finally picked me up. They saw the Soviet inner tubes and thought I was trying to escape from the island, so they turned me over to a patrol boat. They took me to Mariel. I finally convinced them I was a gringo, but the military thought I was CIA, or a drug smuggler. They questioned me for twelve hours and finally let me go, but the tide wouldn’t quit pushing me back along the coastline. I kept getting picked up again by other boats and taken back to the same military guys. They finally gave up pushing me off the coast and put me on a plane for Mexico City. Put Lottie on.”

  “She’s out to dinner, with your folks.”

  “Mom and Dad? What are they doing there?”

  “Getting ready to plan a funeral, Ryan. We’ve all been so scared. We thought you were lost at sea. The Coast Guard is still searching for you. Geez, you would have loved your obit. They’ve had three people working on it.”

  “Ha, ha, ha. It had better be good. Hey, Britt. Can somebody go by my apartment and get my passport and a credit card?”

  “Ryan, wait! Don’t get on the plane to Toronto.” Word of mouth had already reached the executive offices, and gray suits were joining the crowd. One had snatched up the phone on Ryan’s desk and already had lawyer Mark Seybold on hold.