White Shadow (5 page)

“A few minutes.”

“But you didn’t call the police for more than an hour?”

“Oh, no,” she said. She grinned. “I had to call Baby Joe and Mr. Parkhill.”

“John Parkhill?”

“Yes, I had to call his attorney.”

“Was the front door locked?”

“Why, yes, it was. All the doors were locked. I already told the nice policeman this. I already told him all of this. I told him there’s fingerprints on the door, unless he used a handkerchief. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a bite of my pie?”

Dodge wandered back to the bedroom, where he said hello to Sheriff Ed Blackburn and a couple of his deputies. The sheriff’s office always worked gangland killings jointly with the Tampa Police Department. Officially because they boasted more trained detectives, but in reality because the police department had been so rotten and crooked for years that no one in Tampa trusted them.

Even Mayor Curtis Hixon moved around with a Perry Mason gleam in his eye and pointed out paintings out of line. A heavy bookend.

“Sheriff, over here,” the mayor said.

Dodge found himself in the Old Man’s salon watching a couple of detectives from the sheriff’s office running measuring tape under the legs of two men in gray suits Dodge had seen around the courthouse.

He took a deep breath, walked back over to the body, and bagged some of the pellets and birdseed. He handed the plastic bag to Buddy Gore, who held the bat, looked at the deputies and suits and cops around him, and said, “Christ.”

Dodge knelt in front of the bloody footprint that he’d squared off with yellow tape. With a pocketknife, he cut a careful square several inches around the print. He slid the piece of carpet into the bag, and walked out to the hallway and past Winchester and Holcomb.

Gore helped Dodge load the evidence, including his camera, in the back of his Ford. As he slammed shut the trunk, a reporter from the
Times
walked up, notebook in hand, and asked him what he’d found.

“A dead old man.”

“How was he killed?”

Dodge lit a cigar—just kind of soaking up the street parade around him—and smiled. “We’re working on it.”

“Suspects?”

“For what?”

“Come on. Why are you guys so damned tight?”

He winked at the reporter. “See you around, Turner.”

THE NEWSROOM buzzed with frantic typing and ringing phones in a dull haze of cigarette smoke and bourbon breath when I ran inside to write the story of my life. CRIME BOSS CHARLIE WALL SLAIN. But instead, I found Wilton Martin, our city editor and part-time reporter, already putting the finishing touches on the big 1-A piece patched together from every writer on the
Times
’s paltry seven-man, one-woman staff. Martin, a retired circus PR man who had been around long enough to remember Charlie when he was a crime boss and running the city, was a nervous old guy with a head of curly blond hair and a curious eye tic. That afternoon, his lid jumped up and down as if hit by a constant prick of electricity while he smoked four cigarettes at once—for fear that one might go out, I suppose—before he pulled the paper from his battered Royal.

He’d dressed that morning in striped black pants and a hot pink shirt, with green-and-blue socks tucked inside a pair of white loafers. One of his feet patted the linoleum floor with nervous energy while he worked.

I took a seat at my desk, listening to his wild typing.

My desk was one of a dozen or so old wood slabs run back-to-back in the long second story of our building, with its brick walls and checked tile floor. There were constant ringing telephones and clacking, crackle-finish Royals and wire baskets with new and old copy and bumper stickers on the city desk proclaiming positions like RIVER FRONT SLUMS MUST GO and a school clock above the door checking off the seconds of our day and cutouts of
Beetle Bailey
and
Snuffy Smith
and a few of
Donald Duck
with the words blacked out and new captions written about the crummy news business.

I flipped through my notes, searching for sharp details from the scene, but knew there were few besides J. L. Reed Funeral Home wheeling out old Charlie on a jumpy gurney—his body covered with a gray blanket—and loading it into a black hearse. I did not see a cold white hand or blood spots or a secret gun taken or an infamous character lurking about. Instead, I’d shared a cigarette with a fat Cuban woman, who clutched a bug-eyed Chihuahua and said things in Spanish that at the time I did not understand.

I think it was something to the effect of
Poor Charlie
.

As I puttered through my notes and slid a fresh sheet of paper into my Royal, Hampton Dunn, the managing editor, stood behind me and read over my shoulder.

Dunn was a short, dark-skinned man with Brylcreemed hair who’d started as a reporter back in the thirties and was damned well aware of the importance of Charlie Wall getting killed. He’d been through most of the gangland killings, and used to tell us about Tito Rubio and Jimmy Velasco and what was called the Era of Blood, as if those days had long passed.

But Joe Antinori had been gunned down not that long ago and now there was Charlie Wall, and you knew Dunn was wondering if that war wasn’t starting to heat back up. The words to the music had changed—the Andrews Sisters were now Tennessee Ernie Ford—but turf wars would never leave a city that refused to be civilized.

Dunn had his hands on his hips—he often stood like that during breaking news—and wore a crisp khaki suit with white shirt and tie.

He grunted.

“That’s all?”

And in the middle of me talking about some of the local color I’d collected at the scene, Dunn walked away, asking Ann O’Meara, our society writer, if she ever got Wall’s attorney, John Parkhill, on the phone.

She hadn’t.

And Dunn groaned again and marched back to his office and his battered wooden desk covered with files and papers and little callback notes, lit a cigarette, and dialed up somebody who he damned well hoped knew more than his lazy reporters.

I typed up what I had and slid it across Wilton Martin’s desk, knowing little or none would be used, because all we really knew was that Charlie was dead and that someone had cut his throat, according to Captain Pete Franks’s grunts as he passed the pool of reporters on Seventeenth Avenue and got into his car heading out after the hearse, sliding through onlookers who were patting their chests and shaking their heads.

I had to take a cab back to the
Times
.

Martin slid the sheet under his ashtray, lit another fourth cigarette to keep it all going, and didn’t say a word as he kept right on banging on his typewriter.

The Blue Streak was held with the headline: CHARLIE WALL DIES VIOLENTLY. I made calls to John Parkhill, who we’d been told saw the body before the cops, and I heard a rumor that Mrs. Wall was staying at the Hillsboro Hotel, but after paying off the porter I learned it was only that—a rumor. Rumor and slices of details of Charlie are all we fed off of for the next few hours in the haze and smoke and sweat and feigned sympathy. We cobbled together the loose facts of what had made Charlie—a scarecrow version of the man I’d once met down at The Hub bar who’d tipped his hat and told me a story about Al Capone coming to Tampa and the whores he’d known in Havana cribs and how politicians used to come much cheaper.

In my mind, I saw the thinness of his white skin and the looseness of the flap under his jaw and the broken blue-and-red veins in his nose and under his cheeks, and then I heard his Cracker drawl and saw that knowing, quick wink that let you understand that he was a hell of a guy.

We wrote that the elder statesman of criminals was dead. We wrote of his old exploits—mainly from Hampton Dunn’s memory from when he was a young cop reporter on the
Times
beat—and a lot of “poor Charlie”s, but we had damned little to write about the killing itself.

He was dead.

It was murder.

And we all kind of waited for the next big, violent thing to follow.

SHE WAS narrow-hipped, with full, sensual lips and slanted brown eyes that became obscured in the brushiness of her pageboy cut. Her darkened hair fell over them like a veil as she sealed the roll on the thick tobacco leaves of the tenth cigar that day and listened to the man in the guayabera reading from
A Tale of Two Cities;
all the women who sat behind her whispered of revolution and a lawyer’s possible release from prison. She should no longer care for such things, she thought, rubbing the edges of her men’s brogans together under the long wooden table in the open warehouse. She should only care about America and money and beautiful new dresses that the women who wandered down Seventh Avenue wore on Saturday nights. The fight at the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba and the death of her father were long ago.

She wore a yellow, flowered cotton dress, broken and thin from washing in a galvanized tub and drying on her casita’s clothesline. Her shoulders and forearms flexed hard and brown with the work, and she moved the hair out of her eyes with a breath. She was seventeen and beautiful to all men who knew her.

The engine smells of the banana port rushed through the old windows with the blaring cow sounds of the tugs on the channel as the foreman came to her and clasped her upper arm, whispering into her ear in Spanish.

She nodded and tore his hands away from her, but followed him along the creaking plank floors of Nuñez Y Oliva and back into a wood-paneled office thick with blue smoke breaking and disappearing from two black metal fans on Señor Oliva’s desk.

Three men in black suits and ties, all young with pointed noses that smelled her as she entered, examined her knees and the back of her legs while she stood, head down, veiled hair closed as if she could make herself invisible.

“Lucrezia, these men have come from Habana.”

She understood.

The foreman nodded to the men in agreement and left, whistling a low tune and jangling the operator’s keys in his hands. The men watched her for a while as she stood there, and one made an effort, rising from his chair, pulling the damp black hair away from her neck and brushing her nape with his fingers.

She knew why they were here, and her hands shook as she felt her face flush from the heat.

The two other men looked away and examined the smoke coming from their cigars.

“¿Le conoce, General Gomez?”
he asked. “You know him?”

She bit her lip and hugged herself in the small room. On the walls hung old cracked photos of broken men with mules and tobacco leaves, and a serious man in a white suit who’d lived many years ago. He waited on a knee, presenting a smiling woman with a rose. There were words written in ink at the bottom of the photo, but they were scrawled and jumbled.

The man, just a boy, grabbed the back of her neck and needled his fingers into the skin.
“Le conoce y apuñaló un cuchillo en su corazón.”

When he asked her about stabbing the general in the heart, she looked down at her old shoes. Bits of cured tobacco were caught in the laces. She just shook her head.

The man screamed at her, his nails on her neck feeling like the feet of a rooster, and she knew what would come next. She held herself tighter.

The two men laughed as he threw her against Oliva’s desk and pushed her face into the papers and cigar boxes, working his small hands up her legs, under her dress, and into the elastic of her underwear, which he pulled down to her knees.

She turned to him. No longer breathing or scared but living the way a person does when trapped underwater without feeling or sound; and she stared into his black eyes, watching him as he unbuttoned his suit pants. She crooked her finger at him, bringing him into her dry with a smile, and the two men in black suits with him only laughed, their hats still in their hands, reclined in Oliva’s chairs and enjoying their smoke. And he soon shook and came on her dress, before she reached for his balls with her right hand and into his coat pocket with her left, brushing past a pocket watch ticking like a heart against her palm, and felt for a gun that she pulled out and fired into him twice and over his shoulder four more times into the smiling men before she darted through the window that brought in smells from the port. Exotic flowers and fruit and rust and chipped paint and sewage and places she’d never been and never believed she’d see.