Miami, It's Murder (2 page)

She cut her eyes at me. “For your friend Danny Boy. Thought he'd like a last look at Steiner.”

She was probably right. That's Lottie, always thoughtful.

Detective Daniel P. Flood had arrested Steiner and proved the man had murdered his wife. I covered the story from start to finish. Dan's strong case convicted Steiner and sent him to Death Row—but could not keep him there. The defense had won a new trial based on the judge's flawed charges to the jury, and the second time around was a no-go: witnesses had died, disappeared, become amnesiacs or oddly reticent. The defendant had walked away a free man.

It was unusual to leave a sudden death scene where there were no tears. Everybody seemed almost cheerful, I thought, unlocking the T-Bird. Then another player arrived, parking her open green Jaguar convertible on the swale. The young woman adjusted her sunglasses and frowned at the patrol car, the detective's unmarked, and the medical examiner's vehicle blocking the driveway. She wore white tennis shorts with a matching pullover. Her legs were long and tanned.

She paused, staring at me, her expression puzzled, and glanced toward the back of the house where slanted sunlight shimmered off the glowing green foliage.

“Where's Dieter?” She studied me curiously.

“Are you a friend?” I asked quietly. “Something's happened.”

Her eyes strayed over my shoulder.

“Don't go back there,” I warned.

“Why, what's going on?” She turned to look at me for a moment and didn't like what she saw. A shadow crept into her widening eyes.

I stepped in front of her, reaching for her arm. “An accident. You mustn't go…”

She eluded me and broke into a run, loping around the shaded side of the house.

“Wait!” But she didn't hear me. She had already rounded the corner, was in sight of the dock, and had begun a high-pitched cry that rose and fell with her footfalls.

“No-o-o-o!”

I followed. The detective caught her wrists, speaking in a low voice, trying to step between her and the body, but her knees buckled and she was falling.

“We're getting married!” she screamed, struggling. “He can't be dead. What are you saying? What do you mean?” As I left she was sobbing, fists clenched and begging. “Why is he lying there? Don't let him just lie there!”

When brokenhearted people weep, I am often moved to join them. I fought the urge as I drove back to the office, telling myself that this young woman was actually lucky. She would always remember Steiner as a tragic lost love, never knowing that in this case having what she wanted would probably have been far more tragic for her.

I had been brand new on the beat when Eloise Steiner was found in a wooded glade just outside a city park. The cops had not yet taken me seriously, and the favorite sport of some was trying to gross out the new female police reporter. Instead of shunning me as usual, Dan and his partner had invited me to view the body. Surprised at my good fortune—reporters hate being restrained behind yellow crime-scene tape—I dutifully followed them down a brushy path overrun by brambles and weeds. The sight in that dark place in the woods was one I will never forget. The cops expected weakness. They saw none. I remained coolly professional, or at least generated that impression, exhibiting only a clinical curiosity. The pretense was not easy. The corpse had been there for three days, in midsummer, and Eloise Steiner had been nine months pregnant.

When the news broke, Steiner called the cops to report that the still unidentified body could be his wife of less than a year. He had last seen her at about 10
A
.
M
. the prior Saturday, when she drove off to shop a garage sale. She had promised to return by 2
P
.
M
., he said, but she did not come home, then or ever.

Detectives never got to ask why he had neglected to report her missing. By the time they arrived at his big bayfront home, Steiner's attorney was at his side. He had declined to speak to police or submit to a polygraph.

Back at my desk, I called the library for the clips on Steiner. Onnie didn't wait for a copyboy to deliver them, she brought them out herself. “So the good Lord caught up with him,” she said.

“Sure looks like it. How's Darryl?”

“Excited about first grade.” A wide smile creased her face, the color of burnt toast. “He can't wait to go.”

“Give him a hug,” I said, and punched the password into my computer terminal. I watched Onnie hurry back to the library. A former battered wife who had escaped the situation, she was now a single mother on her own. The job I had recommended her for was working out, she had put on some weight and a little makeup, and looked good. It never hurts a reporter to have a good friend in the library, especially on deadline.

I reached for the phone and dialed Dan Flood at home. He answered on the second ring.

“Hi, Danny, it's Britt. You won't believe the story I'm working on. Guess who got killed this afternoon?”

“Well, let's see, I hear Dieter Steiner got pissed off.”

“Who told you?” I yelped, annoyed. “How come you always know everything first?”

“Your friend and mine, Ken McDonald, our favorite lieutenant, called to break the news that Steiner is off the map.” At McDonald's name my stomach spasmed, as usual. Would that ache ever go away? I wondered.

“Looks like there's some justice after all,” I said.

“Maybe there is,” Dan replied.

“Now I need a quote from the veteran homicide detective who sent Steiner to Death Row. What's your comment?”

“It was quite a shock,” he said, chuckling.

“Seriously.”

“Okay, okay.” I could hear Dan breathing for several moments as he paused to think. “He faces a higher court now,” he said solemnly. “Sometimes justice triumphs after all.”

The first two Mrs. Steiners had died three years apart. Both were young, attractive, and well insured. Both had been cremated. No chance for second looks in their cases, but Dan had done a superb investigation into the death of Eloise, wife number three.

“Good,” I said, tapping Dan's words onto the screen in front of me. “Anything else?”

“Off the record? He got what he deserved. He shoulda fried a long time ago. Nobody will miss that son of a bitch.”

“One person will. Everybody's got somebody, even Steiner. His fiancée showed up. A pretty girl in a Jaguar. They were planning the wedding. She's taking it hard.”

He sniffed. “Fate did her a favor, probably saved her life.”

“She'll never believe it.” I sipped from the Styrofoam cup of
café con leche
I had brought back to my desk. “You know how love is.”

“Yeah.” His tone changed to a more familiar one. “You know, I was expecting your call, kid. After all these years, I know exactly how you operate.”

“You should know my MO by now, Pops. How are you anyway?”

“Lousy. When I roll out of bed in the morning it sounds like somebody making popcorn. Everything's breaking down. I'm dying, but we all are, every day.”

“Quit complaining, you sound good to me,” I said fondly. “You have to listen to your doctors, do what they tell you, and take care of yourself.”

“Sure. Let's have coffee, Britt, or lunch sometime next week.”

“You bet,” I said, working on my lead.

It read:

A man who escaped death in Florida's electric chair due to a legal technicality was apparently electrocuted in a freak accident at his luxurious Miami Beach home Wednesday.

I sat next to Bobby Tubbs, the assistant city editor in the slot, while he edited the story. Then I hovered around the city desk until the copy editor wrote the headline. I like to make sure there are no slipups and the head actually has something to do with the story. It did.

MURDER SUSPECT ELECTROCUTED AT HIS BEACH HOME,
in 55-point Bodoni. By Britt Montero,
Miami Daily News Staff Writer
. That's me.

I returned to my desk, picked up the sheaf of telephone messages, and riffled through them. Two were from my mother.

As I reached for the phone, I became suddenly aware of a figure looming behind me. Eduardo de la Torre, the tall elegantly garbed society editor, stood poised at my elbow as though posing for
GQ
. I knew what he wanted. Despite his breeding and genteel manners, he is always voraciously eager for all the details of death, disaster, scandal, and crime in the elite circle he writes about. The more lurid the better.

“Like to join me for a cup of coffee?”

“I've got some.” I lifted my cup. “You never told me you and Dieter Steiner were friends.”

He shifted his shoulders uneasily and showed me his aristocratic profile: His family tree boasts Spanish nobility, and he never lets anyone forget it. “Why do you say that? He's no friend. It's just that you and I haven't traded stories in a while.”

“Come on, Eduardo, the only time you invite me for coffee is when one of your social register people is in trouble—robbed, indicted, or dead.”

“Then it's true?” he breathed, raising an arched eyebrow.

The story would appear in half a million newspapers in the morning, but his almost prurient interest always makes me perversely reluctant to share details. He just seems to enjoy them too much. However, Eduardo can often be a good source for information and unlisted home telephone numbers when his socialites forget their manners and come to the attention of the police reporter.

“Is what true?”

“Steiner. Is he dead?”

“I didn't know he was in the Black Book.”

“You mean the Social Register. Muffy, his fiancée, is in: one of the Palm Beach Benedicts,” Eduardo said chattily, ticking off names on his immaculately manicured fingers. “And Eloise was. And so was he, during the year or so they were married. He was out, of course, once they arrested him for her murder.”

“Naturally. Well, he's out for good this time. He's dead.”

“Who?” chimed in Ryan Battle, the general assignment reporter who sits behind me. “Who's dead, the B.O. Bandit? Did you hear that local banks are buying canaries? When the canary dies they know the bandit is in the neighborhood.”

I stared at him balefully. The frustrated cops hunting the bandit weren't laughing.

“No, not him,” Eduardo said eagerly. “It's Dieter Steiner, the German photographer, the one whose wives kept dying.”

“What happened?” Ryan got up from his desk and drifted over to mine.

“Yes, what happened?” Eduardo echoed.

I told them, briefly.

“Did you actually see the body?” Eduardo's eyes gleamed like black marbles. “What was he wearing?”

“Not much,” I said truthfully, then told them Lottie had pictures. They trotted off to the darkroom together to peer over her shoulder. It was a dirty trick and I knew Lottie would hate me for it, but it gave me my chance to escape.

I punched the elevator button and rode alone to the lobby, neither sad nor glad that Dieter Steiner was dead. Mostly I felt a sense of closure, as if fate had somehow taken its natural course.

That is what I love most about this job—it is a front-row seat on life. The law could not touch Steiner, but something beyond it did. I thought of Eloise, the two women before her, and Daniel Flood at home. He would probably sleep better. The best revenge, I thought, is just living.

Lottie met me downstairs in the parking lot ten minutes later and we drove over to La Esquina de Tejas for
media noches
—midnight sandwiches—with ham, pork, Swiss cheese, mustard, and pickles stacked on sweet rolls. We ate them at a table covered by a plastic tablecloth and paper place mats bearing the map of Florida.

“Thank you very much for sending the Bobbsey Twins back to the darkroom,” Lottie griped, dousing her side of black beans and rice with hot pepper sauce. A Texan, she is addicted to liberal doses of Tabasco on everything, including her breakfast oatmeal.

“Knew you'd appreciate them,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Think Steiner woulda married that poor new woman?”

“If he did, Dan's sure she would have been found downside up in a ditch.”

“What did he say about Steiner finally getting what he deserved?”

I mimicked Dan's low-pitched growl. “He said, ‘Hell, Steiner was just a blade of grass in the whole yard. He ain't the only one. His ain't the worst case by far.'”

“What is the worst?” Lottie patted her lips primly with a napkin and leaned across the table, dark eyes intent.

I thought about it for a moment. We both knew how Dan obsessed about old cases, the “unsolved” murders in which he knew the killer but could never build a prosecutable case. Justice gone awry was his favorite topic of conversation.

“Mary Beth Rafferty, I guess.”

Lottie watched expectantly as I stirred the Cuban coffee that would probably keep me wired till dawn.

“Mary Beth Rafferty is an old case, a big one,” I explained. “From long before you came to Miami. I was just a kid, ten or eleven when it happened. But I remember it.” I sipped the coffee, then rested the cup on its tiny saucer. “My mother would not let me out of her sight for months. That murder struck fear into the entire city. You have to remember, Miami was like a small town at the time. Mary Beth was a little girl, abducted, sexually molested, and murdered.”

Lottie did an exaggerated shiver. “Unsolved?”

“Technically. Nobody was ever charged, but the police always had a suspect, and you will never guess who.”

Lottie's eyes widened. “Somebody I would know?”

I nodded. “Eric Fielding.”

“You're kidding. The politician? Our wanna-be governor? I've made the man's picture a half dozen times.” She put down her fork. “Tell me.”

I began the story. “This was twenty-two years ago. Little girl named Mary Beth, eight years old, out playing three o'clock in the afternoon, just down the street from her house, in the Roads section. Guy snatches her and drags her off into the woods. Her little playmate runs home, too scared to tell anybody for a while. Not long after the alarm goes out, a seventeen-year-old kid on a bike finds her nude body on a canal bank. The seventeen-year-old kid? Eric Fielding.”