Suitable for Framing

Diversion Books
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Copyright © 1995 by Edna Buchanan
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

For more information, email
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First Diversion Books edition April 2014
ISBN:
978-1-62681-245-1

Britt Montero Mysteries
Contents Under Pressure
Miami, It's Murder
Suitable For Framing
Act Of Betrayal
Margin of Error

Fiction
Nobody Lives Forever

Non-Fiction
Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder
Never Let Them See You Cry

For retired Miami Police Lieutenant Bob Murphy, Sergeant Jerry Green, and all the other heroes.

I will speak daggers to her, but use none.
—William Shakespeare

“I knew what it was when I heard the shots.”

The witness had been pumping self-serve gas at an Amoco station across the street. I sidled up with my notebook, virtually ignored by uniformed cops accustomed to my presence.

“I knew it wasn't firecrackers,” he told them, nervously smoking a cigarette. His face was flushed, and a slight paunch hung over his khakis. “I hit the ground. I was in Saigon, the Tet offensive in 'sixty-eight. I know gunfire when I hear it.

“Never thought I'd see something like this, right in broad daylight.” He shook his head.

A middle-aged French Canadian in a rented red Cadillac had objected when a Latino kid jumped out of the car behind him at a traffic light and stuck a gun in his face. He had stomped the gas pedal. In street-speak he “bucked the jack,” trying to escape—a mistake in this case.

The young gunner fired three shots in rapid succession, blasting out two windows. Showered by broken glass, the driver swerved, slamming into a nearby light pole.

The 'Nam vet had sneaked a peek from the ground as the shooter scampered up to the damaged car. “He looked like a little kid, but he had a big gun. I'll be damned if he didn't open the driver's door, calm as you please, and shoot the man point-blank in the leg.” He winced. “Musta hurt like hell. I heard the guy screaming all the way across four lanes. The kid just yanked him out of the car by the back of the neck, threw him down on the street, and took his Caddy.”

A yellow Nissan Pathfinder, a four-by-four, had followed the Caddy at high speed. Probably an accomplice. That became certain moments later, when the occupants of the second car were described as three Hispanic teenagers. The thieves had all been wearing Raiders caps over dark scarves tied around their heads.

The midday sun heated my skin, right through the fabric of my white cotton dress. Covering stories like this one, not long languid days on the beach, reinforces the sun streaks in my dark-blonde hair and the tan on my legs. Sweaty cops were all over the place, and they weren't smiling. The chief and an assistant city manager were on the way. Mugged residents may be left waiting on hold, but violence against tourists creates high anxiety, hand-wringing, and paranoia at city hall, the Chamber of Commerce, the Convention Bureau, and the Hotel Association.

As I took notes, a red-faced woman pulled over in a pickup and hailed the cops. She had seen the carjacker jump out of the Pathfinder and draw a gun from his belt as he approached the rental car. Frightened, she drove on but then doubled back to see what he'd done and tell what she'd seen. She had jotted down the tag number for the cops. The car was stolen, taken from a North Miami man an hour earlier.

A high-pitched three signal interrupted conversation with the woman. The dispatcher's cool, disembodied words followed the emergency tone bleated in stereo from half a dozen police radios.

“A three-thirty. White male taken from his vehicle and shot in the leg. Four-oh-oh-three Ponce de Leon Boulevard.”

Twenty blocks south, in the Gables. Cops exchanged glances. “What the hell?” muttered a husky sergeant.

“Somebody out on a spree,” said a black officer.

Where will it end? I wondered, dashing for my borrowed car.

The shooter in the Gables had arrived in a red Caddy and fled in the new victim's white BMW, according to my portable police scanner.

Traffic was clogged by Gables police cars, now joined by two from Miami. I edged between bystanders after parking on a side street. The reek of traffic mingled with the acrid smell of gunpowder that hung in the still air. A well-built dark-haired man in obvious pain half sprawled, half sat, on the curb. He ignored staring strangers, one hand shading his eyes from the merciless sun. A tourniquet on his leg stanched the flow of blood that had puddled in the gutter. A pale band of skin circled his tanned wrist, signaling where his Rolex used to be.

This victim, now moaning aloud, had not even tried to buck the jack. Sharp-eyed urban hunters had spotted his Rolex and his white BMW 540i sedan across four lanes of traffic. Their stolen Caddy swung into a U-turn, falling into traffic behind the Beemer, witnesses said. At the first stoplight, a teenage passenger stepped out, trotted up, and almost nonchalantly shoved a nine-millimeter Beretta in the man's face. He removed the driver's watch, shot him in the leg, then dragged him out of the car, which he took. The Caddy followed. Two motorists had stopped to help the wounded man in the street; others just veered around him.

I gazed down busy Coral Way as though trying to pick up the scent of the predators. “Wonder where they're headed with all these flashy cars?” I said aloud.

“We know where one just was,” a Gables sergeant said, listening to his radio.

A twenty-nine, a robbery: an elderly couple in the parking lot of a South Miami Kmart. The young thief never even got out of the car. A passenger in a yellow four-by-four, he had simply plucked the woman's purse from her arm as the driver floored it. When I arrived, the victims still stood dazed, alone in the middle of the vast lot. He leaned shakily on a cane. She clung to his arm. No crowd had gathered. Bustling shoppers paid scant attention. He was eighty-one. She was seventy-seven.

Luckily the purse had not been attached to her by a strap, so she had escaped being knocked down or dragged. She had no money inside but had lost valuable items. “My prescription glasses are in my pocketbook. They cost three hundred dollars,” she told me in a trembling voice. “My Social Security card and my medication … they're gone.”

Her husband's frail body quaked and she patted his arm.

They lived in a nearby apartment. Occasionally they strolled across the parking lot to the Kmart. Must have looked like easy targets from U.S. 1. The kids had veered into the lot and nailed them on the first pass.

I tried to comfort them. “They'll throw your purse away once they go through it. Whoever finds it will probably call.”

“You really think they might?” Hope lit her brimming eyes.

“Sure.” At least no one was shot, I thought. The boy with the gun must still be driving the BMW.

I wanted to stay, but after twenty minutes there were no new developments. A familiar voice tersely advised on one of the police channels that he was responding to the scene of the last shooting. My stomach did loop the loops. Lieutenant Kendall McDonald. I was tempted to return to the scene for more information and to look with feigned surprise into his silvery-blue eyes. Common sense prevailed. I had to get back to the newspaper, and there was no point. One of the cops promised to call me if the cars were recovered or the bandits captured. As I drove, I scanned the traffic flow for the missing cars and the roadside for the stolen purse. The thieves must have discarded it by now. I fought the urge to stop and start checking dumpsters. It would be like searching for a contact lens lost in the surf, but I wanted somebody to do it.

I sighed, thinking of the old couple, preyed upon by the young in the winter of their lives. What would McDonald and I have been like after so many years together, if circumstances had been different, if career choices, pride, and ethics hadn't stood in our way?

Back in the newsroom I rolled my chair up to the terminal at my desk, picked up the phone, and dialed the library as I began work on the story.

An unfamiliar voice answered. I asked for Onnie.

“She's off today,” the stranger said.

“Tuesdays? Since when?” I asked impatiently.

“Since I got hired this week,” the voice snapped back. “This is Trish.”

A new hire who knows nothing, I thought irritably. A savvy friend in the library comes in handy. Where was Onnie when I needed her? I nearly hung up.

“This is Britt Montero,” I said. “I cover the police beat and need to know if we have any carjacking stats for this year and the latest figures on crimes against tourists. You may be able to find—”

“I know who you are,” she said quickly. “I'll get them out to you.”

“Thanks. I'm on deadline,” I added.

“Right.”

I skimmed through my notes, thumbing through scribbled pages, then began to write a lead.

“Here you go, Ms. Montero.”

Startled, I looked up at a slender young woman hovering at my elbow, a stack of papers clutched to the front of her prim, crisply starched blouse. “A press release issued by Miami P.D. last week breaks down class-one crimes for the first six months of this year. The carjacking stats are listed.”

She peeled off the sheet and placed it on my desk. Her hands were small and graceful, nails neatly trimmed and coated with clear polish.

“Here's a wire piece on the national epidemic of similar crimes.” Her voice was husky and all business, the accent midwestem. A mane of silky dark hair, cut short and sassy, framed her fresh-scrubbed face.

“A safety bulletin issued by Triple A.” She whisked another paper from the sheaf.

Her only jewelry was a school ring with a blue stone and a wristwatch with a no-nonsense black leather band. A final printout hit my desk with a flourish. “I thought you might be interested in a new bill pending in the state legislature. Here's a copy. It's aimed at increasing the penalties for carjacking.”

My jaw must have dropped. “You running a game on me?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Usually this place does not run like a well-oiled machine. Thanks for your help … What's your name again?”

“Trish Tierney.”

“Well, I'm Britt. Thanks.”

She grinned and gave a smart little salute, and I turned back to the story.

“Who
was
that, Britt?” Ryan Battle asked moments later. He is the general assignment reporter whose desk sits just behind mine.

“Trish,” I said.

“Trish,” he repeated softly, his spaniel eyes following the direction she had taken. Ryan falls in love at the flick of an eyelash. “She work here?”

“The library. Make your move fast,” I said over my shoulder. “She's too good to stay there long.”

I finished the story and made one last phone check. The French Canadian was undergoing surgery to remove the bullet; the slug that hit the other victim went through his leg completely. No arrests. I added a tag line and hit the
SEND
button.

The next afternoon was golden. The dealership had called. In a giddy mood, high on the aroma of my new T-Bird that had arrived at last, I picked up my friend Lottie at the paper and chauffeured her on a lighthearted drive.

It was a steamy late-September day with a flamboyantly brilliant sky full of fast-moving clouds and heat lightning that sizzled on the horizon. We parked at the mall, where my new set of wheels stood out, glistening like a polished gem, and strolled inside to snack on frozen yogurt. I like strawberry, smothered in wet walnuts. Lottie ordered chocolate with multicolor sprinkles.

I studied aerobic shoes in the window of a sports store as Lottie cooed at an adorable baby in a bright yellow stroller. The young mother held a second child by the hand, a big-eyed curly-haired toddler. He wore a Barney T-shirt, shorts, and red sneakers that looked brand new, but his baby sister was clearly the star. Her bib said
SPIT HAPPENS
, and she was strapped into a car seat in the stroller. Aware she was being admired, she chortled, babbled, and reached chubby hands for Lottie's frizzy red hair.

Lottie Dane was born in Gun Barrel, Texas. She always wears cowboy boots and is a top-flight photographer who shot major news around the world before settling in Miami. Eight years older than I am, she is close to forty now, is crazy about babies, and has craved her own for years. Long divorced with no kids, her search for Mr. Right has accelerated to a feverish manhunt as her biological clock winds down. If the man is out there, he remains at large. Love and marriage often elude people caught up in the whirlwind of daily journalism. Nine-to-fivers don't understand.

The lifestyle of this young mother with whom we briefly chatted seemed as foreign to us as that of an alien from outer space, but it agreed with her. She glowed.

“Come on, Jason,” she murmured fondly. “Time to go meet Daddy.”

The child waved bye-bye as his mom pushed his little sister's stroller toward the parking lot. Lottie waggled her fingers at him.

“Lordy.” She sighed. “Some women hog all the luck.”

“Bet she's thinking the same thing about us. Probably yearns to be a highly paid professional instead of listening to baby talk all day.”

“Highly paid?” Lottie cut her eyes at me. “Hell-all-Friday, Britt. Is there something you haven't told me?” Her freckles screwed into a pout. “I swear I wouldn't mind walking in her shoes. Wonder what the daddy's like.”

She looked wistful as we ambled toward the parking lot, window-shopping along the way. A new look called deconstructionism dominated fashion displays. Did consumers actually buy garments with ragged exposed seams and unfinished hems? I'd have to ask my mother, the fashion authority in the family, for an explanation.

A mannequin flaunted an ensemble with stitches and buttons sewn on in weird places, stirring unpleasant memories of my only attempt at dressmaking. The more I had sewed, the more I ripped. Today my sorry original would have been haute couture.

I started to tell Lottie that I had missed my true calling. A man's shouts interrupted our conversation, breathless and indecipherable, except for the expletives. The disturbance was in the parking lot, beyond our range of vision. We exchanged startled glances, then broke into a trot, along with others around us. Miamians never shy away from trouble, they run headlong to greet it. Like journalists, they all want to be there first. Ground zero, that's where the story is.

Glass shattered as we breathlessly emerged into the warm moist air. Rubber shrieked on blacktop. Thuds, like sacks of potatoes hurled to the pavement. A baby wailing.

“My car!” I blurted, picturing its pristine opal frost finish. I thought I would never love a set of wheels again after my beloved old T-Bird wound up at the silty bottom of an Everglades drainage canal, nearly taking me with it, but that was before inhaling that heady new-car smell.

It was not my car skidding, hurtling in reverse. It was a flame-red Trans Am with dark tinted glass and a broken windshield on the passenger side. The young mother who had been pushing the stroller was sailing across its roof, arms extended like a sky diver in free fall. She flipped face first onto the windshield, glanced off the hood, and dangled for an instant before slamming to the asphalt.

The driver ground into gear, brakes smoking. The car exploded forward, tumbling the woman like a rag doll, dragging her for at least thirty feet, as it roared flat out toward the exit. From beneath the speeding car came a chilling scraping sound, like metallic fingernails gouging a blackboard. As the red car freewheeled out onto the main thoroughfare, tires screaming, I glimpsed what was caught in the undercarriage: a crumpled yellow baby stroller.

“Oh, no. Oh, no!” I murmured aloud.

A muscular young man in gym shorts and a cutoff T-shirt charged after the Trans Am like a maddened bull, then wrenched a rock from the landscaping and hurled it like a football. The car easily outdistanced it, as he cursed in frustration, turned, and punched a parked Pontiac, setting off its alarm.

He winced, shaking bruised knuckles as the siren and a baby's cry keened in a chorus of high-pitched wails. Something lay broken in the traffic lane. It wore little red sneakers.

Shoppers poured from the mall. Horrified drivers had stopped, but impatient motorists to the rear leaned on their horns in a mind-numbing cacophony. I ran to move the child to safety but saw his head as I approached. Shuddering, I knelt, touched one of his new shoes, then backed away. The back bumper had been level with his skull. He was dead.

Eyes blurring, I looked wildly around, focusing on the cries in the confusion. The center's lone attempt at landscaping was flowering hibiscus in the narrow median. The baby, still strapped into her padded car seat, had been thrown into the hedge by the impact.

“It's all right, it's all right.” I dropped to my knees, crooning. “Don't cry. Please don't cry.” Her thin blanket was scorched and a tiny flailing arm was red and blistered, probably by the car's muffler or catalytic converter. No bleeding, no obviously broken bones. She was wailing loudly, a good sign. Afraid to pick her up, I tried to make her comfortable in her seat.

Her mother was lying silent on the pavement, legs splayed in a terribly twisted position, bones obviously broken. Lottie and an older woman hovered over her. I searched faces in the growing, babbling crowd and shouted.

“Did anybody call Nine-one-one?” Blank, shocked expressions.

“They're on the way! On the way!” A young black security guard was barking into his radio. Waving his arms, demanding that people stand back, he averted his eyes from the dreadful sight on the pavement, trying to direct traffic around the scene and clear a path for rescue.

Lottie gripped my elbow. “She's got a pulse,” she muttered, her face white. “The mother's still alive, but I don't know for how long. Your keys,” she demanded, twangy voice flat.

“The keys? We can't follow them, they're long gone.”

“Your keys,” she repeated, her outstretched hand remarkably steady. “My cameras.”

Of course. I tossed her the car keys and she took off at a dead run.

Swallowing hard, I fished a notebook from my purse. There was a fire station just a mile away, and I prayed that rescue was not tied up elsewhere. I enlisted a motherly middle-aged woman to keep anyone from touching the screaming baby until help arrived.

The scene was a mess. A plastic baby bottle crushed on the pavement next to the mother's scuffed left tennis shoe, laces still neatly tied. Her purse spilled, contents scattered over a wide area. Her right shoe, fifty feet from its mate, between a diaper bag with tire tracks and a Raiders cap.

Cops and paramedics arrived fast, though the wait seemed like forever. It always does in real emergencies. The mother's right arm was also fractured, white bone protruding. Blood trickled from her mouth. Air rescue had been dispatched. She and the baby would be airlifted to the county hospital trauma center. No rush to move the toddler. No hurry when the next stop is the morgue.

“They took my fucking Trans Am,” the agitated young man in the muscle shirt blustered to the first cop on the scene. “They took my fucking car! Look what the hell they did!” He gestured angrily toward the chaos. “I can't believe this. I can't fucking believe this!”

His name was Arturo, and he noisily complained that be had just put fifteen hundred dollars' worth of work into the car. The cops took his car's description and plate number, then issued a BOLO: Be on the lookout.

“They went west on One hundred sixty-third Street,” I offered. “They could be on the I by now.” The Interstate and the Palmetto Expressway were nearby, with Broward County and downtown Miami just minutes away. They could be anywhere.

“Street punks. Stinking little bastards,” Arturo was saying. “Son of a bitch! They got my Trans Am. There's his hat!” He pointed at the Raiders cap. “That hat belongs to one of them.”

After a workout at a mall exercise club, Arturo explained, he had stepped outside and seen a trio of street kids, no more than sixteen or seventeen years old, breaking into his car. He shouted as they piled inside and hotwired the car as he bore down on them. He was fast, but they were faster.

We had seen only two shadowy silhouettes behind the dark-tinted front windows. But Arturo said there was a third; a skinny kid had scrambled into the backseat.

The car's engine had sprung to life with Arturo only a few strides away. In a last desperate effort to stop them, he had heaved his gym bag containing a set of ten-pound weights. The windshield broke and the driver reacted by slamming the car into reverse, into the woman and her children.

“They gonna be okay?” Arturo had simmered down, voice subdued, suddenly comprehending something much more tragic than a stolen car. “Look at them.” He stared wide-eyed at the victims. “They just left them, like roadkill. You don't drive off and leave an animal in the street like that.”

The woman, now surrounded by medics, must have heard Arturo's shouts and tried to steer her kids out of harm's way.

“You a witness?” the cop asked me.

“To part of it.” The young mother replayed her airborne acrobatics slowly in my mind, churning my stomach. “She went over the top of the car, and they hit her. Dragged her.”

“Accounts for the road rash.” His stolid face remained impassive. “She alone with the two kids?”

I nodded. “We had just seen them in the mall.”

The lot could not be cleared because many of the cars belonged to moviegoers inside the mall's triplex theater. Police blocked 163rd Street instead, so the chopper could touch down in the roadway.

With a mounting sense of dread, I studied new faces in the still-growing crowd. What had she said? “Time to go meet Daddy.”

He must be on the way or waiting somewhere, checking his watch, expecting his family. My stomach knotted in sympathy for this stranger whose life was about to change forever.

Detective Bill Rakestraw had arrived and was removing his Rolatape, a digital tape measure on wheels, from the trunk of his unmarked car. He wore a grim expression and department-issue coveralls, navy blue, with
MIAMI POLICE
on the back.

“Britt. How'd you get here so fast?”

“I didn't I was here when it happened. Lottie too. We just stopped for some yogurt, saw this woman and her—”

“Is this what they say it is?” His thin, sharp face was somber behind the bristly mustache.

“Yeah,” I said miserably. “Kids.”

I know how he reacts to fatalities involving children. A tough cop, he is also a family man and nearly quit traffic homicide after handling the hit-and-run death of a nine-year-old bicyclist the same week that a three-year-old swung open the back door of the family car and tumbled into an expressway fast lane. Two so close together seemed overwhelming.

There are many sad jobs in police work. Rakestraw has one of them. He investigates fatal accidents. Whenever his beeper chirps, somebody is dead.

My own beeper, clipped to my purse, began to sound and I darted into the mall to call the city desk.

It was my day off, but that never stopped Gretchen Platt, the editor from hell.

“Britt, we have a report of some kind of hit-and-run involving pedestrians at the—wait a minute, let me see here—the Hundred and sixty-third Street Mall. Can you check it out? See if it amounts to anything.”

“It does. I'm here, at the mall. A mother and her two babies. Some kids backed a stolen car over them at about forty-five miles an hour. They got away. It's awful, Gretchen. They're working on the woman now.”

“How many dead?” Bright and officious, her voice had a distant quality.

“One little kid, maybe the mother.”

“I'll send photo.” Her businesslike tone never changed. Did this woman have a clue as to what was happening?

“No, Lottie's here too. She's shooting a lot of stuff.”

“Excellent. We'll need you to write for the state edition.”

Rakestraw had talked to witnesses and was now on hands and knees inspecting the asphalt where the stroller had gouged the pavement. That would help determine the point of impact.

“Got anything?”

“Just starting to document the physical evidence,” he said slowly. “A busted tail light.”

“How did they get into the car? The owner said he locked it.”

“Looks like they busted a window. Probably used a spark plug.”

Spark plugs are convenient tools for thieves. Their porcelain tops will crack car windows, which can be easily pushed in without the shatter of broken glass. Kids wear them on leather shoestrings dangling from their necks or belts. Some pride themselves on spitting spark plugs with enough force to smash a window. Whatever happened to innocent times when kids were content to see who could spit seeds the farthest?