Act of Betrayal (6 page)

“Man, is this system a dinosaur!” he said.

I began returning calls. A Broward County man was not interested in Charles Randolph. He had his own obsession. His mother had vanished without a trace when he was ten. Foul play was likely, his abusive stepfather long a suspect, but no charges were ever filed. I referred him to a reporter in the Broward bureau.

A Hialeah Gardens schoolteacher had no information about Charles Randolph either. She wanted me to help find her own missing person. At age forty, shy and never married, she had been swept off her feet by a handsome stranger. After a three-week whirlwind courtship, they married. Eight blissful months later he hooked his boat to his trailer and drove off for a day of fishing. That was a year ago. Unlike skeptical police, she believed he had met with an accident or foul play. I might have agreed, except that when she had tried to notify his family in San Antonio that he was missing she found that they were, too. Neither they, nor their addresses, existed. The man she married had no history, at least not in the name he had given her.

Scowling, teeth on edge, I began punching in the next number as Bobby Tubbs waved to me from the city desk. I saw the look on his face and moaned.

“They're shooting over at the Miami Dream Motel on Northeast Second Avenue!”

“Shooting? Again? Damn!” I snatched up a notebook and my purse. Whatever happened to quiet Sunday mornings in the Magic City? “You're sure?” I hate wild goose chases.

He shrugged. “Lottie called it in. She's out there.”

“Shooting? Cool!” said Seth. He beat me to the elevator.

The Miami Dream Motel was wrapped like a gift in bright yellow crime scene tape, its rosy pink facade dimpled by large-caliber bullet holes. “Stick with me and try to stay out of the way,” I warned Seth.

Traffic was blocked and the building crawled with cops. Their third shooting in two months, this could cost the Miami Dream its license. In a crackdown on violence, the city was enforcing a point system against occupational licenses, as states do against drivers licenses. Points are logged for each murder, shooting, prostitution arrest, drug bust, and SWAT team raid. When they lost their licenses to operate, of course, the vacant buildings usually converted to crack houses, presenting more problems.

The motel patio resembled a blood-streaked battle-ground, with one dead and four cursing, moaning, and whimpering wounded. Looked like another skirmish between embattled Jamaican sects, country boys from Montego Bay versus city slickers from Kingston. Winners today were Miami cops, who had captured most participants too injured to run away.

This would give me a chance to review the players and update my scorecard. A Jamaican had staggered into county ER a week earlier, shot in the back and chest. He told police his name was Desmond Whitaker and that he was taking a walk, minding his own business, when a Rastafarian he knew as Dino drove by in a white Cadillac and shot him for no reason. He had survived surgery and gone to intensive care.

This could be related, I thought, scanning the street for a white Caddy.

“They're all Rastafarians, right?” I asked Cal Woodruff, a skinny detective in a dark suit.

He looked disgusted and stared at Seth, hovering behind me, notebook and pen in hand. “Jesus, Britt, bad enough I have to put up with you. Now you've got a shadow.” He adjusted his sunglasses with a slight wince. Woodruff obviously would have preferred being someplace else, preferably air-conditioned, on this moist summer Sunday. “They look like Rastas, they talk like Rastas, but I haven't met a real Rasta yet,” he snarled.

Woodruff could be right, I thought. The Jamaican Tourist Board insists that few real Rastafarians live in Miami and those who do are peaceful, artistic, and much maligned. Not everybody who wears dreadlocks is a Rastafarian.

“I fucking hate it when they get shot,” Woodruff was griping.

“So do they, I'm sure.” He ignored my remark.

“They're lousy goddamn victims,” he said bitterly. “They never give their right names—ever. Most of 'em are illegals, but they claim to be from South Carolina. Now you know that ain't no southern accent.” He slammed his clipboard onto the back of his unmarked car and took a pen from his pocket. “INS ain't worth shit. And if the bastards don't die, they disappear the minute they get outta the hospital and we can't find 'em again.”

“A bummer when you have to hunt victims down like thieves,” I said soothingly. His voice had the same frustrated edge I had heard in Lottie's when she recounted her pursuit of the Polish Prince.

I got to speak briefly to a sweating victim on a gurney. Bullet wounds in both legs had hampered his getaway. His name was Rat, he said, wincing, and he knew nothing. He was taking a walk, minding his own business, when he was shot. At that moment, however, a crime scene tech was photographing two guns, a mean-looking Walther semiautomatic and a Browning with a twelve-shot clip, lying where he had fallen. Each had apparently been fired until empty.

“Who were the guys shooting at you?” I asked him.

“Ah, mon, they sell smoke … They just drive by and shoot at people.” He batted bloodshot eyes at me, trying hard to sound virtuous. “I was just walking on the sidewalk and there comes this car down the street and they just start shooting.”

“Are they mad at you?”

He stared straight up at puffy clouds overhead as he was bundled into the ambulance. “Probably.” The medic slammed the door.

“Who the hell is that?” a cop shouted.

I spun around. The dead man in dreadlocks still lay sprawled flat on his back, arms outstretched. But now, inside the roped-off area, stood Seth, straddling the body, bending from the waist, snapping the victim close up with his Instamatic.

Cops bellowed. “No, no,” I yelped. “He's just a tourist. I'll get him.

“Get away from there, Seth!” I insisted he step outside the yellow rope. He ignored me until he ran out of film. He was good. His face glowed. Bet his friends pay attention, I thought, when he whips out the snapshots from his Miami vacation. “What would they think of us in Hopewell, New Jersey? What will his grandmother think of me?

He was everywhere, peering over the medics' shoulders, tailing the technicians, dogging the detectives. Never, ever give him coffee again, I told myself, as cops tried to determine which bullet holes were fresh and which had been left by the last shooting. I talked to witnesses, found Lottie, and introduced her to Seth, who was instantly intrigued by her camera equipment. She had been driving out to breakfast when the shooting call went out on her scanner.

I tried to send Seth back to the paper with her, but he insisted on going with me to the hospital where Woodruff planned to sort everybody out. Reporters are barred from the emergency room, but if I simply breeze in with the cops, wearing press ID, which from a distance resembles police ID, I often escape detection.

“Wait here,” I told Seth outside. Inside, a trauma team worked on the most serious victim, gut shot but still conscious. Woodruff hoped to talk to him before he went to surgery. I sidled up beside the detective and copied the name, Clement Blake, off the victims driver's license in Woodruff s hand.

“Think this is related to that incident last week?”

“Desmond Whitaker?” the detective asked.

“That's the one.”

“Could be,” he said. “I been meaning to chat with him about the real Desmond Whitaker, a New York resident who lost his car and his wallet in a robbery two months ago.”

“So, who is our Desmond Whitaker?”

“That's what I wanna ask him. Hey,” he said. “Speak of the devil.”

A gaunt man in a hospital gown was slow-stepping down the hallway. He carried his IV bottle and dragged a rack of tubes to which he was attached.

“That's him. The guy shot last week,” Woodruff said. “Looks a helluva lot better.” Desmond Whitaker, or whoever he was, stared at the wounded man being worked on.

“That's the man who shot me!” he screamed, pointing with an arm that still trailed an IV tube.

He lurched forward, still shrieking. A nurse blocked him, another called security.

“Hope they don't put them in the same room,” I said.

“Hell, I gotta go talk to him,” Woodruff said, as his walkie crackled to life. The true owner of the driver's license in his hand was in jail, the dispatcher informed him, and had been for two weeks. “You're sure?” Woodruff asked.

“That's affirmative,” she replied.

A doctor signaled the detective that he could take a moment with the patient. “Who shot you?” the detective asked.

A shrug.

“What's your name?”

“Clement Blake,” he muttered weakly.

“Clement Blake is in jail. You've got his ID. What's
your
name?”

The man sighed. “Clive, Clive Steadman,” he said, and was whisked away to surgery.

The detective saw me scribble the name. “Not so fast,” he said, frowning. “Clive Steadman was that homicide victim on the Interstate last month.”

I remembered. Dead driver, careening car, wounded passengers who ran away.

Now I frowned. “But we have to straighten these IDs out by deadline,” I snapped, “for my story and Lottie's pictures.”

The detective covered his bloodshot eyes with his sunglasses. “When you do that,” he muttered, “let me know.”

A chubby cop named Peterson walked up and dealt out the driver's licenses of the other victims like playing cards on the counter at the nurses' station. “Lookit this,” he said to Woodruff “Two a these guys have the same name and DOB but the pictures are different. Whadaya make a that?”

Woodruff muttered curses as Peterson turned to me.

“Hey, Britt, seen your story today. You sure you got that missing kid's name right?”

“What?”

“Coulda sworn that was the same missing persons case I took the initial report on when I worked south. Same description. But that wasn't the kid's name.”

“Cute,” I said, and took off. Cops love to tease but I was in no mood to play.

The only people outside the ER were ambulance attendants unloading an elderly woman who had fallen at a nursing home.

“Dammit, Seth,” I muttered, looking both ways. “Where are you?”

The ambulance attendants hadn't seen him. I trudged back to my T-Bird, annoyed. He wasn't there either. Had he been older, I would let him find his own way home. But he was only twelve, and a not-so-savory neighborhood surrounded the bustling hospital complex.

I marched back into the ER. Woodruff and two other cops were huddled over paperwork “Did you see that kid I was with, the one with the camera?”

“You mean Jimmy Olson?” Woodruff said.

They had not seen him.

Neither had a security guard at the front desk.

Seth was gone.

Increasing alarm had replaced my anger. What would I say to Mrs. Goldstein? “Sorry, I lost your grandson”? Where could he be? He had promised to wait right there. I thought of young Charles Randolph. What did that Gables detective say?

“Poufff.”

I dashed back outside. Nothing. The morgue, I thought frantically. He had talked all morning about going to the morgue. The medical examiners office is right around the corner, at Number One Bob Hope Road. I piled into the T-Bird, hands shaking as I turned the key. I backed out of the space and was turning left when I caught sight of Seth in my rearview, a can of Coke in one hand, a bag of chips in the other.

“Hey!” He slid breathlessly into the seat beside me. “Were you gonna leave without me?”

“Damn straight.” My knees were weak with relief and I fought the urge to hug him. “Don't you ever do that to me again, Seth.”

I left him in the darkroom helping Lottie and listening to her police scanners. The phone at my desk was ringing. “Would have called this morning,” McDonald said, as I settled back in my chair, glad to hear his voice, “but I had to go look for my car.”

“The Cherokee? What happened? Was it stolen?”

“Nah, long story. One of my classmates is a Texas Ranger. Big, rugged, with hands like a blacksmith. Parties hard. Borrowed the Cherokee Friday night. Shows up this morning and when I asked where he parked it, he shoots me a blank. ‘Jesus Christ!' he says. ‘Did I have your car? Shit, I came home in a cab.'”

“Oh, no.” I remembered many warm moments on hot nights in that Jeep Cherokee.

“Went downtown to look for it. Found it parked outside Jim Dandy's, a rowdy bar with sawdust floors. Not a scratch. This guy's a real character. Somebody asked in class the other day what they do down on the border when somebody runs from them. He said, ‘You shoot ‘im, right where the suspenders cross.'”

“Nice.” I winced. “Maybe he could help with our immigration problem. Did you say Texas? Is he married?”

“Why?”

“Maybe I know just the woman for him.”

“Lottie?”

“Why not?”

“Thought she was seeing some lawyer.”

“Competition is healthy.”

“Is that so?”

“Sure,” I teased.

My description of the car bombing and the gun battle at the Miami Dream Motel made him homesick, or so he said. He sounded eager for local news and police gossip, so I filled him in and read him my Charles Randolph story.

“Don't know why, but that case seems to ring a bell.”

“He'd never been in any trouble.”

“Find out if Gables ever sent a tech to the house to try to raise a set of prints off his belongings. Be a shame if none existed.”

“They didn't,” I said. “Sounds like the detective did as little as possible.”

“Miss you,” he said, as romantic as he ever got on the telephone.

“Three months to go.” I blew him a kiss.

“Maybe not,” he murmured. “We may get a long weekend at Labor Day. Keep the dates open, I could fly down.”