Miami, It's Murder (14 page)

The next day started with a bang, leaving me little time to think about either the rapist or the Mary Beth Rafferty case. A Chevy van caught fire, bursting into flames on the expressway at the height of rush hour. The driver managed to extricate himself, leaving behind two cases of .44 Magnum bullets. In the heat from the blaze the ammunition began to explode, and firefighters and motorists who had stopped to help ran for their lives, dodging stray bullets. The bursts sounded like sporadic machine-gun fire. Both sides of the highway were closed to traffic, and cops and firemen took cover in a ditch until it was over. Each time the gunfire died down and it seemed that all the bullets had been expended, a new barrage began, exploding in clusters like popcorn in a microwave. It sounded as if war had been declared at 8
A.M
. as the horns of irate commuters blared in the distance.

Lottie was happy for the opportunity to wear the flak jacket she kept with the other extensive and essential gear in the trunk of her Chrysler.

We were too busy at the scene to talk, but we met later in the
News
cafeteria for a fast cup of coffee. “You get good art of the van?” I asked, tearing open a sugar packet and dumping half into my cup.

“Yeah, did you see it?”

“Haven't seen anything so bullet riddled since Mauricio Miranda's business partners opened fire on him in a clear case of overkill.”

“He that Colombian coke dealer shot more than fifty times in his car?” She peered into a tiny mirror and daintily applied coral-colored lipstick.

“Yep.” I glanced at the big round clock hanging high over the tables, a not-so-subtle hint to employees inclined to tarry.

“Anything new from your pen pal?”

“The rapist? Nope. But I haven't checked today's mail yet. Lottie?” I stirred my coffee with the wooden stick provided instead of spoons. “I'm worried.”

“I'd be too if a rapist was writing to me.”

“It's something else,” I said morosely, then told her my suspicions about Kendall McDonald and K. C. Riley.

“The lieutenants from hell. Maybe it's not what it appears to be.” She sipped her coffee. “It's hard to compete with somebody the man works with,” she mused, “somebody he sees all the time.” She patted my hand. “If it
is
so, could be they deserve each other. She sounds like a real ass-kicker. What you need is some R and R.” She looked coy. “Talked to Captain Curt lately?”

I shook my head.

“Call him, take his little cruise. See what develops.”

“Hey, girls.” Ryan was carrying a Styrofoam coffee cup that was too full in one hand, a giant oatmeal cookie in the other. “Gretchen has been trying to reach you, Britt.”

Shoot. I checked the beeper clipped to my purse. “Hell, I forgot to reset it after I got paged this morning.”

“Forgot?” Ryan said knowingly.

Lottie grinned. “Yeah, you knew Gretchen was in the slot today, didn't you, Britt?”

I pushed my chair back and headed for the newsroom, where I picked cautiously through my mail. No powder, nothing weird or suspicious, at least nothing more weird and suspicious than usual. One message seemed to be addressed in orange crayon. Another was on an ancient, yellowed postcard that looked like it had been in somebody's bureau drawer for the past twenty-five years; it was covered with tiny spidery handwriting that continued up and around the margins. A fat letter with a prison postmark began,
Dear Sir or Ms., whichever the case may be. I AM INNOCENT!

“Where have you been?” Gretchen demanded.

“Running up and down the expressway where bullets were exploding and traffic was backed up for miles.”

“Don't spend a great deal of time on that story,” she said. “Keep it brief, we've got a tight paper. There are mishaps in rush-hour traffic every morning,” she said airily.

“Not like this one,” I said. “One firefighter was grazed, and a bullet knocked the dome light off a trooper's car.” I glanced down at my notebook for confirmation. “And we had two heart attacks and one stroke among the commuters. Thousands were late for work. Plus we have good art. Lottie was out there.”

Gretchen displayed no enthusiasm.

“All the TV stations and the print competition were out there too,” I said. “I think TV's making it their lead story. And I heard that one of the networks is taking a feed on it.”

That caught her attention. The managing editor monitors all three networks as well as the affiliates. If a network plays a South Florida story that the
News
missed or gave short shrift, there is hell to pay.

“Well,” she said, pretending that did not influence her decision. “Write it for what you think it's worth and we'll see.”

Actually I had not spoken to any TV people out at the scene, as most were hovering overhead in helicopters. But somewhere at that very moment I knew some TV reporter was making the same sales pitch to a reluctant editor, saying, “Well, I heard the
News
is front-paging it.”

The rush hour from hell was one of those stories that the Chamber of Commerce and the tourist bureau would hate—but everybody would read.

I was wrapping it up when Bobby Tubbs, one of the assistant city editors, appeared at my desk.

“We just got a call on a construction accident you might be interested in,” he said.

“Construction accident?”

“Yeah, the contractor, the guy who owned the company, apparently got buried in wet cement. Sounds like your kind of story.” He dropped the address onto my desk.

The site was that of yet another new shopping mall under construction in west Dade, invading what was once subtropical wilderness, the home of migratory wading birds and lush foliage. Apartments and a new expressway exit were all under construction nearby, and I had to maneuver the T-Bird past trucks and large equipment. The breeze from the high-speed expressway driving had been pleasant, but as soon as I slowed down my hair began to curl damply along my forehead and at the nape of my neck. Damn, I thought, I had to stop procrastinating and have the air conditioner repaired.

I parked in the shade of a sapodilla tree and left the windows rolled down so the car wouldn't get too hot.

Detectives from the county were busy, conferring with the owner, the architect, and the concrete foreman, but the superintendent in charge of construction filled me in. Al Benjamin, sturdy and sun-bronzed, shirt straining over a slight paunch, wore an orange hard hat bearing the company logo and his name. His crew had been temporarily idled by the investigation, and I began to get the impression that he was more agitated about the delay than the contractor's tragic demise.

“It's the liquidated damage clause in the contract,” Benjamin explained, lighting up a cigar. The mall center was targeted for springtime opening, and the building project was on a tight schedule with a $10,000 bonus for each day early it was brought in and a $10,000-a-day penalty if late. Meeting or beating the completion date also appeared to be a matter of professional pride. “My projects have always come in on time and on budget,” Benjamin said. “These men are all paid by the hour, and we can't afford to lose even half a day.”

He scowled, took the cigar from his mouth, and called to one of his men, “Here comes the roach coach!” A small truck with aluminum siding, a rolling canteen that peddled sandwiches, coffee, and snacks, pulled up sounding its melodious horn—the first few bars of “La Cucaracha”—and was mobbed by the construction workers.

We resumed our conversation. After hearing what happened, I wasn't surprised that everybody needed coffee. Personally, I wanted something stronger.

Twenty-five concrete columns had been poured for the shopping mall's vertical garage. Positioned in each were four steel reinforcing rods, bound together by metal straps. Three-quarter-inch plywood forms had been erected in the shape of a pillar around each group of rods two days ago.

Then, at dawn yesterday, the first six of thirty trucks were in line, each ready to unload eight to ten yards of ready-mix concrete. The contractor, Sam Farrington, age fifty-five, was not there, though his big black Mercedes-Benz was parked in its usual spot next to the construction trailer. Farrington was a pugnacious boss who tended to tightly oversee and interfere with the sub-contractors, according to Benjamin, and I sensed that the crew was not bereft by his absence. This was a major pour and, due to the nature of wet concrete, timing was paramount. Delays were costly. The subcontractor waited twenty minutes, then gave the foreman the order to proceed with the scheduled pour.

The foreman maintained constant radio contact with the drivers, and as each empty truck left the site, another was on the way. As concrete flowed into each form, a worker on a wooden catwalk lowered a vibrator linked by a long hose to a gasoline-powered generator. The vibrating action prevented the concrete from honeycombing, ensuring the integrity of the pillar. The crew finished the pour, and the concrete was left to set up for twenty-four hours. Today they had returned to strip away the plywood forms with crowbars, exposing the brand-new pillars.

Farrington was still absent, his Mercedes in the same spot.

Where he had vanished became obvious when a worker peeled the plywood away from the fourth pillar.

“Come on, I'll show you,” Benjamin said grimly, turning on his heel.

We walked around a new concrete column in what would soon be the northwest quadrant of the shopping mall's parking garage. Though I knew what to expect, I could not help but gasp. “That's him,” Benjamin said flatly. “First time I seen anything like this, and I grew up in this business.”

The missing contractor was standing, the only position possible inside the pillar. A tuft of hair, his nose, fabric-clad kneecaps, and the toes of his shoes protruded slightly through the hardened concrete. They had obviously been pressed against the inside of the plywood form when wet cement gushed over him.

He looked like the victim of an ancient volcanic eruption, overtaken by lava and frozen forever in stone.

The owner's representative, the architect, Benjamin, his assistant, and a county inspector had been attending a job progress meeting in the construction trailer when the concrete foreman shouted the news over Benjamin's walkie-talkie. Somebody dialed 911, thinking the mishap had just occurred, but this was no emergency. It would take dynamite to move this body before the cops arrived.

In fact, that was my first question. “How will they get him to the medical examiner's office?”

“That's what they're discussing now,” Benjamin said, frowning at the workmen, who were straggling off in various directions with their food and coffee.

Police said the entire twenty-five-foot pillar had to come down. Seemed reasonable to me. The concrete foreman, a lanky man wearing boots, seemed pleased at the difficulty his men encountered as they tackled the job with jackhammers. “We build 'em to last,” he said, nodding.

A homicide detective named Orestes Diaz was in charge from Metro-Dade, the police department with jurisdiction in the unincorporated area of Dade County.

“How do you think he got in there?” I said, shouting over the sound of the jackhammers. Diaz was sweating, and flying flecks of concrete had lodged in his shaggy mustache and hair.

“Don't know,” he yelled back, as the Mercedes was hooked up to a wrecker, to be towed off for scrutiny by the crime lab.

“Are you thinking accident or foul play?”

“We're not ruling nothing out,” he said. Farrington was last seen at the site on Wednesday, after the forms had been readied for the Thursday morning pour. “The crew said he normally didn't hang around after the end of the day.” Diaz scratched his head and snorted. Irritating dust from the jackhammers hung in the hot, still air around us, sticking to damp skin. “I tell ya, Britt. If he hadn't been right up against that plywood form, he'da never been found. You know how they say Jimmy Hoffa got paved over in the end zone at the Giants' stadium? If this is a homicide, this guy wasn't supposed to be found either. He wudda been holding up this shopping center for the next hundred years.”

When the pillar was reduced to a height of about fifteen feet, workers used welding irons to cut the reinforcing rods and straps, freeing the block in which the body was encased. A crane hoisted Farrington's concrete coffin, a section about twelve feet long, onto a flatbed trunk. The men covered it with a tarp for the drive to the medical examiner's office.

“Think they'll be able to determine a cause of death?” I asked.

“Probably, but it's gonna take a lotta work first, getting him outa there.”

I piled back into the T-Bird to go back to the office and file a brief account for the early edition. On the way I stopped in a little roadside store for a cold drink. Concrete dust packed my sinuses, and my head was beginning to ache.

I used the rest room, splashed water on my face and arms, browsed the cooler, picked out a Yoo Hoo chocolate drink, and took it to the cash register. I didn't spend more than seven or eight minutes in the store, a small family operation that would probably be forced out of business once the shopping center opened. The T-Bird was parked at the side of the building, where spaces were marked off for half a dozen cars. Mine was the only one there. I backed out, sipping from the bottle as I drove.

When I finished, I reached for a litter bag on the back seat. Good citizen that I am, I would never dream of pitching an empty soda bottle out the window. I was navigating traffic on the east-west expressway, eyes glued to the road, left hand on the wheel, the right groping blindly on the back seat for the bag, when my fingers blundered into something sticky and slimy. I jerked my hand back, taking my eyes off the road. Blood!

Horns blared as my car veered all over three lanes. The driver of a van gave me the finger and other motorists cursed and scowled, but I managed to regain control, using one hand. Shuddering convulsively, I was loath to touch the steering wheel with bloodstained fingers. My legs too shaky to stomp the accelerator or the brake, I swung onto the shoulder and coasted to a dead stop.