Contents Under Pressure (10 page)

Mark and I shared something in common. His desk also looked like a dump truck had backed up to it and unloaded. Not quite middle-aged, he was confident and attentive, with intelligent eyes that looked huge behind the magnifying lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses. An avid train buff, he was wearing his favorite tie, navy blue stripes with an embroidered locomotive, the Southern Railway’s #1401. To anyone who complimented him on it, he would rattle off the engine’s history, built in ‘26, retired in the ‘50s, and now on view at the Smithsonian. I didn’t; I was in a hurry. I asked a simple question instead, hoping for a yes or no answer.

“Are the taped transmissions between dispatch and police officers in the field public record?”

Mark clasped his hands together behind his head and looked thoughtful. “Good question,” he said. Oh Lord, I thought, to a lawyer is there ever a simple answer?

“It’s a gray area,” he said. “They would say it’s not, we would say it is. That’s a fair assessment.”

I sighed, knowing that Gretchen, upstairs in the fifth-floor newsroom, was probably dissecting my stories at this very moment.

“Transmission between cop cars and base is exempt from the public records law if it is part of an active criminal investigation,” he continued. “The key question is: Are the tapes part of an active criminal investigation?”

I explained the situation.

“What do you hope to find on the tape?”

“I’m not sure until I hear it or read a transcript”

“A fishing expedition?”

“More or less.”

“We should probably save an all-out battle for a worthwhile cause, when you know you have a story there.”

“Any investigation of D. Wayne would logically conclude with his death, right?” I leaned an elbow on his messy desk.

“Yeah, but if there is an internal affairs investigation into the conduct of the cops that night that would make it a gray area,” he said. “If an internal affairs investigation began after the tape was made, then the tape was obviously not compiled for that purpose. If the investigation began on day five, for example, that doesn’t mean they can retroactively place public record under a veil of secrecy. Of course,” he shrugged, “they won’t agree, and not every judge will buy our version, either.”

Public records requests from the media were usually run by a police legal advisor who might argue the point. Since my request had not been flatly refused, I agreed that it would be wiser to continue pursuing the tape on my own, without making it a legal issue just yet, saving the big guns for war. Mark relished a good fight but chose his battles. I couldn’t argue with that.

I found my corner of the newsroom in chaos. Lottie, another photographer, several reporters, a librarian, and a clerk were clustered around Ryan’s desk. Gretchen sat up at the city desk looking prim, purposefully working on something, her perfectly outlined lips curved into a smirk. Ryan must have inherited the assignment she meant for me, I thought as I approached them.

As it turned out, Gretchen had indeed had a brainstorm. It had been triggered by the hordes of Cuban rafters, nearly 2,000 so far this year, who had braved the Florida straits in innertubes and rafts to escape Castro’s Cuba and come to Miami. Many were found by the Coast Guard or Hermanos al Rescate (Brothers to the Rescue), a volunteer search group of Cuban exile pilots, of whom I knew a few; one of my father’s cousins was a member. Others, their homemade rafts or small boats treacherous and unseaworthy, were lost forever at sea.

The newspaper, Gretchen had decided, should cast a reporter adrift for a first-person account of what it was really like out there on an inner tube in shark-infested waters, facing strong currents and fifteen-foot waves. She chose Ryan for the job. He told her he was too busy working on his conversation series. When Gretchen insisted, Ryan confessed that he had never learned to swim. “Whether one can swim or not really doesn’t matter out at sea,” she had said. She had a point. Ryan explained that he was easily seasick. “All the better, to make your account more realistic,” she had answered.

Ryan was no survivalist or Outward Bound enthusiast; in fact, he tended to be a bit of a hypochondriac. Other reporters, pretending to commiserate, had gathered like sharks, thoroughly enjoying his plight.

Lottie was to shoot pictures of Ryan on his raft from a Chalk’s seaplane, which would ultimately pick him up if the Coast Guard, a freighter, or Brothers to the Rescue did not find him first.

“Or the sharks,” Howie Janowitz, a general assignment reporter, said happily.

“Is she serious?” I asked. “This sounds like some tabloid TV stunt.”

“She’s serious,” Ryan said glumly. He already looked queasy.

“We must congratulate her. This has to be the first genuinely original or dramatic idea the woman had ever had in her entire life,” said Eduardo de la Torre, our society editor. Impeccable as usual, with his aristocratic profile, gold-buttoned navy blue blazer, and a perfect manicure, he smiled at Ryan and sighed. “If only she had chosen me.” We all laughed.

The raft would be authentic, borrowed from the Coast Guard, who had either rescued the occupants or found it empty and adrift.

“I just hope it doesn’t have bad karma,” Ryan fretted.

“You live in South Florida, surrounded by water, and you really can’t swim?” I asked, when most of the crowd had drifted back to work.

He gazed balefully at the city desk. “I never could put my face in the water. Besides, Britt, you know yourself, whenever you cover a drowning you always quote the survivors who described the victim as a good swimmer. They
always
say that. Something happens. Good swimmers get cramps, their feet get tangled in underwater vines, they go out too far, they get overconfident. You almost never hear of a drowning victim who couldn’t swim. When you can’t swim, you’re safe. You know enough to stay out of the water.” It made perfect sense to him.

“And you’ll never die in a car crash if you never get into a car,” I said. “But you’ll never go anywhere, either.”

“And you never get pregnant if you don’t have sex,” Lottie added. Ryan’s face settled into a pout. Even his pals had turned on him.

“You’ve got to learn to swim,” I said. “Look at all the cars that wind up in the water around here.”

“I don’t have time now,” he said miserably. “She wants this for Sunday’s paper.”

“What if there’s a storm? This is hurricane season, for God’s sake. How long are you supposed to stay out there?” I glared across the room at Gretchen, her glossy, golden head bent over her terminal.

“Twenty-four hours.”

“I’ll take such great pictures of you,” Lottie said soothingly, “on your flimsy little raft, out there alone, man against the sea. In color, front page. You’ll be famous.”

Ryan looked slightly happier. “Look at it this way,” I told him. “No phone, no pager, you’ll get a great suntan out there on the water. No noise, just the birds, the fish, the sea, and the sky. It’ll be like a vacation, a day on a sailboat.”

“I don’t sail. I get motion sickness on buses. I get nauseous standing on a dock looking at the waves.” Ryan already looked a bit green, but the promise of fame was beginning to look attractive. “What if the Coast Guard tries to rescue me before you take the pictures?”

“Don’t go,” Lottie said quickly. “Just tell them you’re out there waiting for somebody.”

“Sure, in the middle of the Gulfstream. Britt,” he turned to me, his brown eyes imploring. “You love this kind of stuff, you’re even half Cuban. If you volunteered…”

“No thanks. It’s not my beat. I’m working on something, and besides, I like boats with bathrooms.”

“Don’t forget sunscreen, shark repellent, and Dramamine,” Lottie said, tallying them on her fingers. “And don’t worry, I’ve got nautical maps and the tide tables. We won’t lose track of you.”

Ryan began to clear his desk, which was as neat as mine was messy. “I’m going home,” he said. “I think I’m coming down with something.” He sniffed several times, blew his nose, and left the newsroom like a man walking the last mile.

“It’ll be a great adventure, something to tell your grandchildren about,” I called after him.

“Poor thang,” Lottie cooed.

I sat at my computer terminal and scrolled the edited versions of my stories. As I had feared, Gretchen had gutted them, changed the leads, and hacked them by half. The editors had already conducted the last news meeting before the final edition, and Gretchen would soon go home. I slipped into an empty chair up at the city desk, called up my stories and rapidly restored them to their original versions. There were only so many times one could get away with that. I prayed fervently for Gretchen’s future success, a golden opportunity in a distant city, like Peking. Soon.

Bobby Tubbs took over the night slot, and I made my pitch. I hated to do this, but Tubbs grew enthusiastic when I hinted that the competition was also at work on the story about the kids jabbed by the hypodermic needle. By the time I left, my stories were on the budget and bound for the morning edition unless big breaking news bumped them out.

What a way to earn a living, I thought, fighting the world to get the news, and then sparring with coworkers to get it into the paper.

Lottie’s wine-colored Chrysler was parked outside the 1800 Club, so I stopped and went inside. The place was dark and crowded as usual, but I spotted her red hair right away in a backroom booth. Ryan hadn’t gone home sick after all. “You have to watch out for seabirds,” she was saying as I joined them, “they’ll try to peck your eyes out.”

He responded by draining his wineglass.

I frowned at Lottie. No point in adding to his anxieties. “How many of those has he had?” I asked when he went to the men’s room. “Has he eaten anything?”

Ryan was no swimmer and no drinker, either. At newsroom parties he usually got sick, then fell asleep. I ordered a hot roast beef sandwich for him, a dinner salad for me.

“The Bermuda Triangle has got him as worried as hell with the hide off,” she said.

“The way to calm his fears is not to tell him about birds that will peck out his eyes.”

Lottie looked miffed until I agreed to join her, Larry, and Steve one night later in the week. Then she perked right up. Ryan came back and claimed he wasn’t hungry. “You need some blotting paper, pal,” I told him. He began to nibble at his food as I changed the subject from his upcoming ordeal.

“Can you believe how the department of health and rehabilitative services mixed up those babies?” I asked.

Howie Janowitz and another reporter were working on a story about an unknown number of infants taken into custody by the state at birth and apparently inadvertently switched by foster parents and social workers during the months that followed.

“They never would have known it,” Lottie said, her fork in my salad, “if they hadn’t tried to return that white baby to a black couple.”

“Our tax dollars at work,” Ryan sighed.

The black couple, now capable of caring for their child and eager to take him home, protested that they were being given the wrong baby, but state officials insisted the infant belonged to them. Two other mothers then complained that babies returned to them were not the same ones taken by the state. Only after they repeated their stories to a reporter did state officials begin to acknowledge the possibility of a mix-up. None of the infants’ footprints matched those taken at birth, but it was also discovered that footprinting is not a priority to delivery room nurses. Most prints are too smeared to match to anything. Now other mothers were suspiciously scrutinizing the babies returned to them by child welfare. The scandal was burgeoning, and there was talk of mass DNA testing—at major expense to the taxpayers—in an attempt to sort out the whole mess.

“A baby is a baby is a baby,” Lottie said dreamily. “Hell-all-Friday, those people should just be grateful and love the little ‘un they’ve got.”

“You wouldn’t say that if it was
your
little ‘un,” I told her. “Imagine raising the wrong child.”

I left Lottie and Ryan just before 11
P.M
. and drove to police headquarters. At the public information office, I made another request for the tape, thinking I might have better luck with a different shift. The man on duty promised to look into it. The Blackburns, Estrada, and Machado were all off, I was told, but in the lobby I spotted Lou Carpenter, arriving for duty. Weathered and slightly paunchy, he was a soft-spoken veteran cop, never a standout but never a total screw-up either, just a man putting in his time.

“You didn’t return my call,” I accused him, trying to look wounded.

“Uh,” he said, surprised to see me. “Sorry, uh, I was off. Got to get to roll call.”

“I have some questions about D. Wayne Hudson’s accident,” I said, falling into step beside him.

“See my supervisor.” He kept walking. So did I.

“You wrote the accident report. You were there. I’d rather talk to you.”

He stopped, inflated his cheeks, and blew out a puff of air in exasperation. “What do you need to know?” he said brusquely.

“What exactly did the car hit?”

“It’s on the report. He did a head-on into the bridge support, then skidded into the drainage ditch beside the road.”

“How fast was he going?”

“It was a high-speed chase, but he slowed down on the curve and was trying to brake when he lost control—probably doing about forty-five.”

“How’d he get hurt?” I continued.

“Bouncing around in there, hitting his head,” Carpenter said irritably, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, his eyes darting around the lobby.

“How did you know he wasn’t wearing a seat belt?”

“Usually you ask the driver, if he’s conscious, but he was gone from the scene when I got there. The witnesses told me.”

“Witnesses?”

“Right. The officers who were first at the scene.”

“Uh huh. Did you figure out his speed by measuring the skid marks?”

“Nah, it was dark…” He shook his head and extended one hand in an entreating gesture. “It didn’t look like a fatality. At that point I didn’t think his injuries were serious. It didn’t seem like a big deal.”