Contents Under Pressure (23 page)

“Okay, you don’t have to shout about it,” I said mildly. Turning, I marched reluctantly down the hall toward the elevators, hoping Alvarez would be content and go on about his business. But he wasn’t; he stayed right on my heels, with a mouth that wouldn’t quit. Other eyes joined the silent watchers. Some were enjoying it, I’m sure. Others had to be embarrassed for me.

The back of my neck felt scalded and my knees shaky from the sheer intensity of his attack.

“Harassing my men off duty, trying to push your way into their homes. You don’t get away with that in this department. You’re outta here! Out!”

I tried to maintain my composure, chin up, hoping my hand didn’t tremble as I pushed the down button. It worried me that those who witnessed or heard about this scene would be reluctant to talk to me in the future, afraid of incurring his wrath. I dreaded the possibility of him boarding the elevator with me. As it arrived, he stopped his diatribe and picked up the telephone at the reception desk, manned by a goggle-eyed young public service aide, who stood with his mouth open.

As the door closed, Alvarez shouted, “Don’t you show your goddamn face up here again!” I blinked hard to avoid tears of anger and self-reproach as passengers boarded at two stops on the way down. A mad bomber could probably roam the station unchallenged, I thought, but not a reporter. Sure enough, Danny Menendez, rousted by Alvarez’s call, stood waiting to meet me, his face stony, when the elevator stopped in the lobby.

I smiled, and moved to walk on by, to the media room. He waggled an index finger at me. “This way, Britt.”

“What do you mean?”

“The major wants you out of the building. Now. I don’t know what you did, but he’s pissed off and wants you out.” He jerked his thumb toward the big glass doors to the parking lot.

A storm had blown up and the sky was gray and blustery, palm trees bending in a fierce wind. Fast-food wrappers swept by, riding the air.

“He can’t do that, Danny. This is a public building, and I represent the public. Besides, it’s getting ready to storm out there.”

“He can do it. He’s in charge.”

“Where’s the chief?”

“Out of town, took a few vacation days to get away from this mess. People are already signing petitions for his resignation. Alvarez is acting chief in his absence.”

“Oh.”

Menendez glanced expectantly at the elevator. Oh no, I thought, Alvarez is probably on his way down.

“You better go, Britt.”

The doors slid open and Alvarez erupted into the lobby, shoulders rigid, stiff-legged, and angry, like a bull about to charge. The place was full of people, both civilians and police.

“Okay Danny, but you know I’ll be back.”

“I know,” he sighed.

I beat it out the door as Alvarez tore into Menendez.

“You’re supposed to control access to this goddamn building by keeping the press restricted to this floor! What the hell was she doing upstairs?”

The sky had darkened and the wild wind had whipped itself into that feverish peak it reaches just before the deluge. A few drops sprayed my face as my hair caught in the blast like a banner. My car was at the far end of the parking lot, and I was only halfway there when it began. Fumbling with my car keys, I dropped them as the cold rain beat down on me. As I miserably groped for them, drenched, the ink running off the pages of my open notebook, I felt eyes watching from the glassed-in lobby.

The Hudson cops were indicted ten days later. The charge: murder in the second degree. With community pressure mounting, investigators had wasted no time. Scuttlebutt from the state attorney’s office was that Ted Ferrell had been offered a deal to save himself by testifying against the others. He would never wear a badge again, but he wouldn’t go to jail, either.

He turned it down flat.

The state attorney had then made Carpenter an offer. Less culpable than the other officers, he seemed guilty only of assisting in the cover-up and writing a false report. In exchange for testifying for the prosecution, he would not be charged, and would remain suspended until after the trial, when he would be allowed to retire. He snatched the deal that would save his pension like a drowning man lunging for a life preserver.

Permitted to surrender at the county jail in the company of their attorneys, the Hudson cops were spared the disgrace of being arrested in front of family members or neighbors and marched away in handcuffs. The process was still agonizing. They were still police officers suddenly on the wrong side of the bars, though briefly. They endured processing and fingerprinting, and had their mug shots taken. After brief hearings in the Justice Building across the street, they posted bond and were released.

When we heard that indictments had come down and the officers were surrendering, Lottie and I were assigned to stake out the jail. It seemed like poetic justice, sweet revenge, as she captured Estrada, in jeans and a leather jacket, striding quickly out of the jail with his lawyer, trying to duck the cameras and hide his face. No curses or pit bulls this time.

The Blackburns looked grim, eyes downcast, accompanied by a top-flight criminal defense attorney. Machado, religious medals dangling from his gold chains, was accompanied by several family members and a young woman identified as his fiancée.

Betsy had apparently insisted on accompanying Ted through his bleakest hour. Outside the jail he seemed to try to convince her to wait in the car, but she was determined. She looked ungainly and ready to deliver but walked with him, hand in hand, their faces strained and pale, through the gauntlet of TV and still cameras.

All of the accused refused comment.

Betsy spoke to the crush of reporters and photographers around them as she and Ted were climbing into their car. “My husband is a good man. He cares about people and the community.” Tight-lipped and tearful, she said nothing more.

As I typed her quote into my story later, I experienced an odd sense of déja vu. Where had I heard those words before? Then I remembered. Another wife, another mother had said the same thing to me about her husband. Alma Hudson, the victim’s widow.

That night, I watched myself uncomfortably on the TV news, on the fringe of the media pack that pushed, shoved, and rushed after each accused cop. It flooded my mind with images of the horrifying scene Ted had described, the wild pack attack on D. Wayne Hudson. I shivered, switched off the set, and took refuge in the warm arms of Kendall McDonald, who had been watching somberly beside me.

The Hudson case continued to dominate daily news coverage for months, as though it, like the voyage of the Starship
Enterprise,
would be never ending. I took little part in that coverage. My job was to report on crime in the streets, and the city had no lack of that. The Hudson case had begun grinding its way through the court system toward justice, and the
News
had two reporters on that beat. They did their jobs well, perhaps too well, for my taste. I would have been content to wait for the trial for new revelations. But competition is fierce—from the other local newspaper, the three network affiliates, the local independent station, which had a strong news department, radio news reporters, and the wire services. All had been burned when we broke the story and were now playing catchup, trying to be the first to report each new angle or new development, like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

In the process of discovery, depositions taken by the prosecution were made available to the defense, and therefore to the public. Other police officers had joined the chase. They came up just after Hudson was stopped but took no part in the attack. Under oath, they testified to what they had seen. Each day brought breathless coverage of damning new disclosures, along with the painful details. Descriptions of the blows taken by D. Wayne Hudson. How he was handcuffed during the beating. How the officers deliberately damaged his car and stomped on his watch, smashing it while it was still strapped to his handcuffed wrist. Each new revelation increased demands from the public that the chief step down.

The Hudson cops were the biggest story in town. I watched, at first with interest, then with a growing sense of discomfort, wondering if the saturation coverage would mean that no impartial jury could be picked in Miami, making a change of venue necessary. For me, life went on; deadlines kept coming. The news never slowed down, especially on my beat. Work had always been my salvation, my solution to everything from a broken heart to a bad cold. But life on my beat and in the newsroom was not the same. Caught in the scalding glare of publicity and public scrutiny, the police department did not perform well. Indeed, it began to resemble the runner who suddenly realizes he is in the spotlight, drops the ball, and drops the ball again and again—or more succinctly, perhaps, the Keystone Kops.

Innocently perusing police reports, I unearthed a story about a man on the outskirts of Liberty City who had lost his house keys and wallet to a mugger. When he returned home, he had to climb in his own window. It made sense to me, but it was dark, and a well-meaning neighbor thought he was a burglar and had called police. The officer who arrived sent his K-9 partner in through the open window after the “burglar.”

The dog quickly cornered and chewed on the screaming homeowner. Then the officer thumped the man a few times with his fist and dragged him outside, happily thinking he had nailed a felon in the act. The unfortunate resident had been mugged again, this time by the cops. It was a good story.

The homeowner happened to be black, the officer happened to be white. Suddenly race was relevant. Angry black groups charged racism. I wasn’t so sure. The same mistake might well have occurred had the homeowner been white and the officer black, or if both had shared the same color skin. To a reporter like me, accustomed to leaving any mention of race out of a story, it seemed odd that it suddenly took on so much importance.

A few days later, a Latin police officer who had been shaking down a Biscayne Boulevard hooker for sex, apparently got too kinky. He had acquired a gynecologist’s instruments and wanted to play doctor. Literally. Irate, she refused to play and turned him in. She called me first. Her chief complaint, aside from the rubber gloves, the speculum, and uteroscope was, “He ain’t even a member of the vice squad, and he expect me to do him twice a week and now this shit?”

We had a nice long chat, and I referred her to internal affairs. An investigation was launched, with the officer relieved of duty after she passed a polygraph.

Though she did not mention it initially, once the story appeared, she bought into the rhetoric a vocal group of angry black activists who insisted that the cop did what he did because she was black. I thought the situation seemed more sexual than racial, but there it was again.

A few angry letter-writers accused me of fueling racial tensions in an already divided community, my regular correspondent Randall Woxhall accused me of being a sexist bitch, and I was bombarded by love letters and admiring phone calls from Pete Zalewski and his cellmates. They loved the stories at the jail. I made their day.

None of the above was my intention, but you can’t ignore a legitimate news story. Other readers praised my “crusade” to bring injustices to light. This was no crusade; I was just reporting the news. And to tell the truth, writing these stories didn’t make my job any easier. I would have been a lot happier if the police had quit dropping the ball and getting themselves into these situations.

But they didn’t. It didn’t keep raining, it poured. Cops on the midnight shift stopped a trio of unruly, smart-ass teenagers who became belligerent and mouthed off at the wrong moment. Rather than take them in and endure the inevitable hassle of paperwork and juvenile court, the officers decided to simply teach them a lesson, by dangling them over an expressway bridge by their heels. A set of parents reported the incident and a brutality investigation was launched. The teenagers were black, the officers white.

Another midnight shift officer chased down a teenage burglar on foot, then recognized him as a burglar he had arrested just twenty-four hours earlier. The frustrated cop forced the cocky thief to “walk the plank” into a murky canal, then hauled him off to jail sopping wet and blubbering. He claimed the youth had jumped into the canal in an escape attempt. Witnesses said different. The burglar was black, the officer white.

What the hell was going on here? It got so that I almost hated finding these stories. But there they were.

With half a dozen groups clamoring that he resign or be fired, the beleaguered chief raised the drawbridges and refused to talk to the press about anything. He came down hard on the miscreants among his men, but it seemed that the more his troops were publicized, scrutinized, and criticized, the more they fouled up. It suddenly seemed like they couldn’t do a thing right. I knew the feeling well myself.

Everybody was supersensitive. When I wrote about a robbery at a CenTrust Bank and routinely described the robber as black, thirty to thirty-five years old, five feet, ten inches tall, with a neatly trimmed mustache, glasses, a tan sports jacket and a buttercup yellow shirt, black readers complained that we had stereo-typically identified the robber as black.

Gretchen sternly “counseled” me on the matter. Unless, she said, we had a superdetailed description that could lead to positive identification of the culprit, race should not be used to describe a criminal.

“But,” I argued, “reporting whether the wanted man is black or white certainly does narrow down the possibilities. What’s the point of mentioning his glasses and his mustache but not what color his skin is?”

She was adamant, and not pleased when I asked why, if it was so wrong, had she, as editor on the story, let it get into the newspaper.

A week later, Fred Douglas, whom I always had counted on to be grounded in common sense, left a brief note in my typewriter: “See me, in my office.”

I did, and was not crazy about what I saw. He looked uncomfortable, his thin face pinched and serious.

“Britt, I’ve been asked to discuss this with you because Gretchen felt you weren’t receptive to her the last time this issue came up.”

What is he talking about? I wondered. What has Gretchen done to me this time? Whatever, my best defense was a good offense. “I’m always receptive to my editors,” I tied indignantly, trying to look properly righteous.

Fred toyed with a slim gold pen on his immaculate desktop. “You know that this paper always strives for sensitivity when it comes to minorities?”

“Of course,” I said, on the alert. “And nobody is more sensitive than I am on the police beat.”

“True, but you have occasional lapses. Like this latest.” He leaned forward, opened his desk drawer, and removed a tearsheet of one of my stories.

The story was sensitively written, if I did say so myself. It was an interview with the family of a grocer gunned down by robbers a year earlier. The murder was still unsolved. The man’s son had called, asking me if there was any way to revive the case that still haunted the survivors, and perhaps generate some new interest by police. He wanted to know if offering a reward might help. I went to visit the family and wrote about the major void left in the lives of the widow, three sons, and their wives. The victim’s first grandchild had been born since his death, a birth he had eagerly anticipated. The closing of his corner store, where he had extended goodwill and credit, had made a major difference to the entire neighborhood. Senior citizens, single mothers, and others on fixed incomes now had to ride two buses to buy and lug home their groceries.

Bewildered, I scanned the story Fred had dropped in front of me. His expression was stern. “What’s wrong with this?” I asked. “You’re saying it’s not sensitive?”

“Catch the second reference to the widow,” Fred said, as though I had missed something obvious.

“Sally,” I said.

“A reader called, accusing us of referring to her by her first name because she’s a black woman. Our style is to use only last names on second reference.”

“Except that in this case everybody else quoted in the story has the same last name. All the sons, all the daughters-in-law. Using her first name was the easiest, most common sense way to avoid confusion and make it clear who was speaking. It had nothing to do with race. Oh, for Pete’s sake!” I sprang to my feet, too agitated to sit, pacing back and forth in the short space in front of Fred’s desk.

“The cops had forgotten this guy’s murder. It devastated his family and changed the quality of life in the whole damn neighborhood, and when I try to rekindle some interest in solving it, I’m accused of being insensitive, and racist? Who the hell complained? Not them?” I jabbed an index finger at the tearsheet, at Lottie’s solemn group picture of the Anderson family. “They were thrilled and grateful that somebody still cared and remembered the case.”

“It wasn’t them, per se,” Fred said, swallowing a nervous sip of black coffee from a Styrofoam cup, his adam’s apple bobbing. “Sit down, sit down.” My body language and argumentative reaction obviously made him uneasy. But I stayed stubbornly on my feet. Probably a mistake; our professional relationship had always been good. But what the hell, I thought, this is ludicrous; I don’t deserve being jerked around like this. I towered over him, seething. Wedged behind his desk, he was looking more and more like a trapped rat. “It’s just that another reader, a black person, called, got the ear of the ME, and complained that it was demeaning.”