Contents Under Pressure Read Online Free Page B

had picked up both my stories, leading with D. Wayne’s death, reading them almost verbatim. It was 7:30 A.M .
    I showered, dressed, put on some lipstick, ran a comb through my hair, and headed out. Helen Goldstein, my landlady, was watering her flower beds with a hose.
    “You came home late last night.” She smiled playfully, her face hopeful. The Goldsteins had been married for nearly sixty years, and she was always asking when I would bring home a nice man. I always replied that I would have to find one first, and that was not easy because she had apparently snatched up the last one.
    “I know, I worked late,” I called, as I hopped in my car. She looked disappointed, and waved me on.
    Miami police headquarters squats like a fortress at the edge of Overtown, a mammoth five-story rectangle, its concrete facade covered by red clay colored tiles. Local law mandates that a percentage of the cost of all public buildings be set aside for artwork. As a result, a huge and colorful abstract, handpainted by a French artist on Italian tiles, dominates the gradually escalating walkway to the main entrance. The cops hate it. They favor artwork that is more humanistic and easier to understand, like sculptures of policemen helping little children or of fallen heroes. Squinting at the colors, painfully bright in the glare of the morning sun, I understood their objections.
    The accident bureau was an L-shaped office tucked into a corner of the main floor. An officer I didn’t know was manning the unit, seated at a desk in front of a giant street map of the city pricked by red pins marking the sites of fatal accidents, yellow pins indicating injuries, and blue pins denoting hit-and-run investigations. Huge clusters of multicolored pins at certain intersections were enough to make me want to change my usual driving habits and detour for miles if necessary. This office was devoted to the deadliest and most destructive force in South Florida, the motor vehicle. Here, the officers had selected their own artwork. Framed photo enlargements of the city’s most spectacular smashups hung from every wall, impossible to ignore. The motorist impaled on a pipe when he smashed into a plumbing truck was my candidate for the photo most likely to stimulate the use of bus passes.
    I identified myself and asked to see a copy of the report on D. Wayne’s accident.
    The officer in charge shook his head, eyeing me lazily up and down. “I’m not authorized to release information,” he said, as if I should know better than to ask.
    This was ridiculous. “Accident reports are public record,” I explained.
    He was unimpressed. A small, self-satisfied smile played around his lips as he shook his head again, slowly this time, for emphasis. “My sergeant is at a staff meeting. I do nothing without his say-so. You’ll have to wait until he’s here.”
    “Okay, I’ll be back.” I crossed the lobby to the Public Information Office for my usual check of the log and a computer printout of police reports from the night before. When the new station was built, public information was on the fourth floor near the chief’s office. But allowing reporters access to the fourth floor to obtain their bleak one-paragraph press releases full of mindless police jargon gave them the opportunity to detour to more interesting upper-floor offices such as Robbery, Homicide, and Internal Affairs—where real news, juicy stories and good quotes could be ferreted out The brass caught on fast, lopped off part of the vast lobby and converted it into a PI office. They hoped that reporters grounded in the lobby would remain content with what the department chose to tell them. Some actually are.
    On the left side of the PI office was a media room, furnished with two desks, telephones, and stacks of police reports and arrest forms. A huge replica of the Miami police uniform shoulder patch dominates one wall. Blue-bordered, with a palm tree at the center, it is a favorite backdrop