Contents Under Pressure (5 page)

“Traffic,” Duffy said. “Didn’t stop at a red light and got walloped by a dump truck. Broadsided.”

“What time of day?”

Duffy ran the back of a wrist across his creased forehead and grimaced through his bifocals at the paperwork. “At 1:47
P.M
. on Coral Way, the 2400 block.”

The gas tank had ruptured, and the man’s car had burned, which explained the soot on his arms. The grillwork of the dump truck, which had smashed into the driver’s side, left the pattern on his left arm.

No one, according to the police report, knew where the dead driver had been coming from or the destination he had never reached. His back and neck were broken and his aorta ruptured. “Did he slump over before he ran the light?”

“No, no heart attack here, Britt. He’d had prior, successful heart surgery and was in relatively good shape. Why he didn’t stop, I don’t know.”

“Strange neighborhood?”

Duffy glanced at the paperwork again and shook his head. “Nope. Lived right nearby.”

Not unusual, I thought. Most fatal traffic accidents take place within a few miles of home. That might also explain why he had not worn his seat belt. Motorists buckle up as they head for the highways, but often don’t bother for a drive to the corner store for a quart of milk. The man with the wispy gray hair had undergone heart surgery to prolong his life, then failed to fasten his seat belt. “Small car?”

“Big four-door sedan.”

Swell. Sometimes I think about trading in my T-Bird for a tank. Miami traffic teems with lost tourists, illegal aliens, bewildered senior citizens, crazed crack addicts, and aggressive gun owners, many of them fugitives with short fuses, automatic weapons, and extra ammo in the glove compartment. But this man drove a tank, and it didn’t save him.

Dr. Duffy plopped the man’s liver onto a scale. I stepped back, but not quickly enough; droplets spattered the front of my print challis skirt. “Oh,” Duffy said, seeing my expression as I wondered how to explain this to the dry cleaner. “Excuse me.”

He scooped the internal organs into a plastic bag and tucked it back into the canoelike cavity in the man’s body. Then he began to close the incision. His needle, about five inches long, was S-shaped and stainless steel; his thread was thick twine, and the stitch he used was a running figure eight.

“What brings you here today, young lady?” he asked as he worked.

“Another traffic,” I said. “D. Wayne Hudson.”

He nodded. “We already did that case.” He motioned for me to follow him. Bodies enter the morgue very much like they do the jail, photographed, weighed in, and then stored in a cold room. The doctor opened the walk-in cooler and indicated the second from the end in a row of occupied trays on wheels. “Here he is.”

I wished I was not seeing D. Wayne like this. Though slightly sunken due to the transplant team’s organ removal, his body was as well muscled and impressive in death as it had been in life. He had been an amazing athlete. Swelling on one side of his face gave him an almost whimsical expression. His head had been shaved in the hospital, I assumed. He had not been circumcised.

“What are all those marks?”

“Extensive evidence of resuscitation and medical attention,” Duffy said slowly. “Needle injections. He came in with a Swan-Ganz catheter, which monitors blood pressure, an endotracheal tube to provide air to his windpipe, a Foley bladder catheter to drain urine, and a nasogastric tube so he wouldn’t aspirate his stomach contents. The other injuries were apparently sustained during the fatal event.”

I grew queasy counting the cuts on Hudson’s head, and had to turn away for a moment. It is easy to maintain a professional distance from a dead stranger, but there is no way to remain impassive when the body in the morgue is someone you know. A cut less than an inch long angled his right eye. There was another about two inches above the brow, one over his left eyebrow, and one between the eyes. The longest measured two and a half inches. Five in all. He must have gone through the windshield, I thought. Feeling light-headed, I took a deep breath and fought the desire to sit down.

“He was in otherwise good health?” I scarcely recognized the sound of my own voice.

“Oh yes, Britt, excellent donor. All there is of note is scarring from old knee surgery.”

“What about alcohol or drugs?”

“Blood alcohol measured .01, taken shortly after arrival at the hospital,” Duffy said, glancing at the chart. “Equivalent, I would say, for a man of his size,” the doctor half-closed his eyes as he calculated, “to about one highball or shot of whiskey consumed in the past two hours.”

That was well under the limit: Florida’s legal definition of an intoxicated driver was one with .10 blood alcohol.

“Drugs?”

“Still running tox, but nothing discernible. Apparently, this is what did the job,” Duffy said, his gloved finger indicating the cut over D. Wayne’s half-open right eye. “Depressed skull fracture. Although it doesn’t appear that deep, it had to have caused the brain swelling that proved fatal.”

“Anything unusual?”

Duffy peered over his eyeglasses and shook his head. “The head injuries are consistent with a traffic accident.”

I nodded, thanked him, and stumbled out into the sunshine and untreated fresh air. Driving back to the paper, I realized with regret that I would now find it difficult to remember D. Wayne any other way.

My mail and a stack of phone messages were waiting back at the newsroom. None of the calls were from the cops I wanted to hear from. Two were from Pete Zalewski. I harked back nostalgically to the days when inmates were allowed only one phone call. Now all Dade County Jail prisoners had phones in their cells, with free local and 800 calls. I was out when he called, but there was no escaping Pete Zalewski today. Among my mail was a bulging envelope bearing his return address. The word “legal” was scrawled in the upper right hand corner, in place of postage.

Jail mail from the accused to their attorneys was free, courtesy of us taxpayers. So inmates now seemed to be marking all their mail “legal,” with no questions from corrections or postal authorities. It was not surprising; no one questioned another inmate who had operated a gigantic nationwide $2 million credit-card scam from behind bars, while he awaited trial for murder. More than a thousand credit-card numbers and hundreds of 800 numbers were found in his six-by-eight cell, but police were powerless to stop him because taking his telephone away would violate his rights. No wonder no one bothered to question mere postage.

The envelope from Pete contained a dozen sheets of lined yellow legal-size paper, each covered on both sides and in the margins with his tiny, cramped handwriting. I pushed it aside to read later.

The scrawled address on another envelope looked dishearteningly familiar. The letter inside was neatly printed:

I closed my eyes for a moment, and the image of D. Wayne Hudson appeared. I shook it off and looked at the letter again. Why, I wondered, did the crazies seem to single me out?

The voice of Ryan Battle broke into my thoughts. He was aglow, though not radioactive, at his desk behind me, telling someone how his feature story about the need for more mommies to lead Girl Scout troops had been read into the Congressional Record by Congressman Lewis Black. Ryan had curly, chestnut-colored hair and big, soft brown eyes with lashes that any woman would kill for. He looked like a young Lord Byron, and was a talented writer and an aspiring poet. A gentle, sweet soul, he was far too nice a person to be a reporter.

“Guess what, Britt?” I turned toward his smiling face. “The Kiwanis is giving me a plaque for the series I did on parents without partners.”

“Nice,” I said.

“What’s wrong?”

“You get plaques and I get jail mail—and this.” I thrust Martin T. Rodgers’ missive at him.

Ryan read the first line and looked up, frowning slightly. “He says you didn’t answer his last letter.”

“Of course not.”

“You saw the memo. You’re supposed…”

These are lean times for newspapers, and our publisher, Harvey Holland, had recently launched a campaign to make the
News
more “reader-friendly.” Part of his strategy was to torment reporters further by instructing them to answer all reader mail.

“Read on. Encourage somebody like him, and he bombards you with a dozen more. I don’t have time to be Radioactive Man’s pen pal. I’m polite; I answer letters. But some mail begs to be ignored.”

“He won’t like it,” Ryan murmured, rolling his eyes toward the sixth floor, where the publisher lurked in his spacious penthouse office.

“Never mind,” I snapped. Ryan didn’t get it. Even the nicest guy in the newsroom was irritating me now. I was having a bad day. The sight of a dead hero on a slab kept surfacing in my mind like a nasty headline.

I tore open another fan letter.

I could not believe this one. The arrested man had had a history of violent crimes. The “slut,” a medical secretary attacked while walking to her parked car after working late, was still hospitalized, a cheekbone and both arms broken. I crumpled the letter and wondered if there was a full moon.

“God, Britt, I love it when you open your mail,” Ryan said. “Let’s see.”

I flipped the letter onto his desk, then rolled a sheet of paper into my typewriter. “Dear Sir, Thought you should know that a deranged person is writing me crank letters and signing your name. Sincerely, Britt Montero,
News
Staff Writer.” I tore it out of the typewriter, signed with a flourish, and passed it back to Ryan. “What do you think?” I said, addressing the envelope.

Ryan read it in silence. “I doubt that is what Holland had in mind,” he replied solemnly. I took it from his hands, stuffed in into the envelope, marched into the glass-walled wire room, and flung it in the outgoing mail basket as he watched.

I returned to my desk, ignored Ryan, flipped open my notebook, and started work on the D. Wayne Hudson follow-up for the early edition.

“Britt?”

I spun in my chair. “What
is
it, Ryan?”

“Where’s my phone?” he asked softly.

I couldn’t help laughing. “Sorry, I needed to use it last night.” I pawed through the debris on my desk: long computer printouts of D. Wayne’s football career, Styrofoam coffee cups, old newspapers, notes, messages, mail, and copies of my own stories. I unearthed Ryan’s telephone and plunked it back onto his desk.

“You can use it anytime, when I’m not here. Just try to put it back,” he said. There was no way you could take offense at Ryan.

I promised. Moments later, “Britt?”

“Yesss.”

“What’s that funny smell in here?”

I glanced down at my clothes. “Something splashed on my skirt this afternoon.”

“What?”

“Ryan. You. Don’t. Want. To. Know.”

I focused on the screen in front of me as I tapped words into my computer terminal, watching my story grow.

“Britt?”

I cocked my head in his direction, my eyes still on the screen.

“You are a beautiful woman.”

In spite of myself, I smiled into the green glow in front of me. Ryan always knew the right thing to say.

I ended the story with the time and place of the funeral service. It was annoying that none of the officers had responded to my messages. I glanced at the time. Ted Ferrell would be off by now, and had gone home without calling me. Damn. The Blackburn brothers and the weightlifters were still on midnights. They wouldn’t arrive until 11
P.M
., if they worked tonight. I had left both my home and office numbers. I wondered if they would call.

I knew I might never find out why D. Wayne ran. His license was clean and valid. Perhaps he simply wanted to avoid a ticket that might spoil his driving record. Maybe it was his competitive spirit. The movies often make outrunning the cops look like a challenge. Maybe, though this seemed unlikely, he was simply speeding and didn’t see them until too late. Maybe it was something else. Why did this story trouble me so? I made a note on my calendar to check the tox report when it came back in a week, then began work on the stolen copper wire story.

When my phone rang I snatched it, hoping it was Ted or one of the other cops. But before a word was uttered, I knew the origin of the call. The background noises were unmistakable—the echoes, the yells, the slams of metal doors. “Hello Britt, this is Pete.”

“I know.”

“You’ve been busy today. I tried calling you a couple of times.”

He spoke very slowly, as though heavily medicated or deeply depressed. His sonorous voice was sad, like his long, pebbly face. I had seen Pete only once, on the Sunday he killed Patsy.