White Shadow (34 page)

Blood dripped from the red rooster’s leg as they parted, and it limped and walked sideways before the black bird was back on the attack, pecking at the red bird’s head.

But the red bird, Diablo, would not give up the center. With its head up, it refused to leave the center of the ring, squawking and cackling, its feet digging into the soft brown earth, daring the black bird.

El Negro was upon him and there was pecking and tearing and blood. It felt like it was raining and I half expected to find flecks of blood across my nose, but it was only rum, and in the thick smoke of the cigars from the toothless old men I saw that it was now the tough old black bird that was down.

The Devil was on Negro’s back and tearing into its wings, slashing into the dying black bird and pecking hard at the bird’s head. I watched as a pool of blood collected at El Negro’s head, the old Cubans’ jaws dropping, money disappearing into pockets as the red bird, The Devil, finished the job and walked bragging, strutting circles in the center of the ring, squawking and cackling and taking the makeshift ring to be his new roost.

Diablo stood flat-footed and shook his feathers, expanding its wings, fluttering and stretching. This was his piece of earth now.

The man in coveralls who’d fed Diablo the coffee jumped into the ring and hoisted him high in the air, the bird spent and too tired to claw, and only a handful yelled for Diablo.

The other man left to pick up the dying bird.

I watched in the corner as he eyed the winner and shook his head and pulled out a knife.

He cut off the big, black magnificent bird’s head, and the body twitched violently as he gripped it and tossed it into a burlap sack.

I didn’t find Bill Robles for a long time after that.

In fact, I saw Baby Joe before I recognized anyone. He was leaning against a bright yellow Buick in jeans and a red Western shirt and cowboy hat, smoking a cigar and smiling, talking to an old man with a cane.

I walked toward them.

I said hello to Joe, and he introduced Mr. Robles.

“May I ask you a few questions?”

“About Charlie?” he said. “Sure. Sure. We were like brothers. I would give my life to find out who killed Charlie Wall.”

Baby Joe had told me Charlie was a father and now Bill was a brother. I smiled at the funny little man in the red-and-black hunting shirt and fedora that stretched out too big and wide for his narrow little face. He wore glasses and had thin, old man skin that glowed almost blue under the white.

His nose was hawked and his eyes the lightest blue I’d ever seen. The kind of eyes that you knew hurt during the daylight. But it was night and the only light came over the ring, where men were cheering again as two more roosters challenged each other over a piece of Ybor turf.

Old man Robles talked about heading out to Seffner on the Sunday before Charlie died and how they later went out to Spanish Park for some
ropa vieja
and roast pork and plantains. He said they’d talked for a long time and that Baby Joe was with them, and he looked over at Baby Joe as if he needed Joe to corroborate his story to me.

But I’d heard it all.

“What did you do after dinner?”

“Joe and Charlie took me home,” he said. “But you stayed there. How long?” He looked at Joe.

“A while,” Baby Joe said. The cowboy getup was too much.

“Maybe a couple of hours?”

“Did Charlie seem anxious or upset?” I asked. “Was he mad at anyone, or was anyone mad at him?”

“No, no,” Robles said. “Hey, Joe? Can I—”

Baby Joe pulled a Zippo from his cowboy shirt pocket and relit the man’s cigar. He puffed and smiled. At ninety, Bill Robles still had that edge.

“The cops have been all through this with me, and Joe, too.”

Baby Joe nodded. “He was just Charlie. We talked and laughed.”

“What did you talk about?”

“I’m eighty-nine years old,” he said. “I don’t remember.”

“He wanted you to have that book,” Baby Joe said.

“Yes.” Robles nodded, chomping into the cigar. “Yes. He had this book on cockfighting. Charlie could get real excited when something was on his mind. And after the fights, he had Joe drive him back to his house. He went and got this book.”

“On cockfighting?”

The old man nodded. “You know, on the equipment and all you should use. I think he wanted me to go in with him on a rooster. He’d introduced me to the trainer. You know, Joe?”

“Yeah,” Baby Joe said, leaning back against the yellow Buick. “I don’t know his name.”

“Listen,” I said. “Do you know anything between Charlie and the Trafficante brothers?”

Robles looked at Joe and Joe looked away. He kept smoking.

“I heard that maybe there was some kind of feud,” I said.

Robles looked at his watch and then over at the cockfights. Baby Joe passed him a pint of Old Crow, and the old man took a drink and then said: “Yes.”

“Over Ybor City?”

“No,” Robles said. “Over everything.”

I flipped back through my notebook. There was high yelling and screaming that kept going and going, and the old man was getting impatient. Baby Joe just kept staring up at the sky, the old Cuban cowpoke.

On Fifth Avenue, you could hear a band playing over on Broadway. Some trumpets and piano. It sounded like a hell of a time. The stars were crisp and bright and shone way out over Adamo to the docks.

An old woman sat in a metal chair on her casita and stared at us. When I looked up at her, she turned her head away. I think she was clipping her toenails. She wore a light cotton nightgown and had on thick, black-framed glasses that made her look like an owl on a limb.

“So that’s it?”

Joe shook his head and so did Robles. “We can’t talk about this,” Joe said. “Okay? There’s been bad blood goin’ between the Trafficantes and Charlie Wall since those brothers were knee-high. You know that better than anybody, L.B.”

“So what would push it?”

Joe shrugged. Old Bill Robles was already walking back to the fights with a light, small limp.

“Between me, you, and them chickens,” Baby Joe said. “Mr. Wall set up a little bolita down in Miami last year. The Trafficantes found out about it and paid him a visit.”

“When was that?”

“Christmas.”

“He stop?”

“Sure did,” Joe said. “It wasn’t a request.”

“You tell the cops this?”

Baby Joe smiled and winked: “They didn’t ask, L.B. Don’t you know these things?”

INSIDE DIXIE Amusements, Santo watched Jimmy Longo load a jukebox with dimes and listened as that song “Rock Around the Clock”—the new one all the kids went wild for—loaded with a crackle and slight bump. It was a loud and jumpy tune, and Santo didn’t think much of it, but it would make the Feds toss off their earphones if they were trying to listen in.

He stood in the middle of a twisted maze of jukeboxes and slot machines and roulette wheels. Cigarette and pinball machines. It was very dark in the center of the warehouse, and Santo lit a smoke as the kids’ tune bounced off the brick walls.

Sweaty and bald, with those dead black eyes, Joe Bedami stood before him. He wore his Dixie Amusements coveralls and had just come from his delivery truck.

“You spoke to Johnny?” Santo asked.

“He ain’t seen the girl.”

“I don’t believe squat Johnny Rivera says.”

“You want me to keep an eye out?”

“Can we get someone else to follow him?”

Bedami nodded.

“Someone good?”

Bedami nodded again. “I’ll call Walker.”

“Johnny knows,” Santo said. “He’ll lead us right to her.”

The loud kids’ music was bounding across the concrete floors and walls and was giving Santo a headache. Bedami’s face was all shadows and red light from the glow of jukeboxes.

Santo reached for a paper he’d set on top of a new pinball machine. He unfolded it neatly on the glass covering all the flippers and bumpers and mazes.

He pointed to a story and a name with his index finger.

Longo had gone by the offices to shoot a mechanical bear. “Rock Around the Clock” slipped off and then the same 45 landed right back on the platter.
One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock, rock.

Bedami nodded.

Santo shook his hand. He leaned in close and said in Bedami’s ear: “If Johnny gives your man trouble—”

And he left it there, leaving the words to hang in all that teenage anger that boiled in that goddamned song.

WHEN DODGE returned from Raiford, he pulled a yellow legal pad from his desk and worked notations about physical evidence: bloody footprint, birdseed, fingerprints, baseball bat. He struck lines through them all, smoked a couple of cigarettes, and drank a cup of coffee. He called home. No answer.

He made a list that included: Baby Joe, Audrey Wall, Johnny Rivera, Nick Scaglione. He scratched through each name with a red pen but circled Rivera. No physical evidence. No witnesses.

He slowly circled Rivera’s name again and then opened up the big canvas book they kept on the Joe Antinori killing. He read through the book for more than an hour, until it was just himself and Fred Bender. Bender was still tracking down leads on the dead Cuban cops, checking through contacts at restaurants and hotels and coming up empty.

“Has Winchester been around?” Dodge asked.

“Not today.”

“You ever know him to be friendly with Johnny Rivera?”

“Not me.”

“I saw him at the Boston Bar the other night,” Dodge said. “He was sitting in a parked car with Scarface.”

“You tell Franks?”

“What good would that do?”

“You really hate that son of a bitch, don’t you?”

Dodge opened up a shorter file on the shooting of Santo Jr. in ’53, and read through a report of a few witnesses that heard the commotion and an interview of Trafficante himself, who was just winged. He closed that file and placed it back into the cabinet. He read back through the file on Joe, and read through the interview taken with Johnny Rivera.
Rivera and Trafficante.
He’d never made much of the connection until he’d seen Winchester and Rivera together at the Boston Bar. Dodge had known for the last two years that Winchester had been on the take for the Trafficante brothers.

But he’d keep it to himself—that was the game.

From his pocket, Ed Dodge pulled out the letter from Charlie’s safe-deposit box addressed to L. B. Turner c/o
Tampa Daily Times
. He read over the brief greeting from Charlie and then checked over the names. He memorized the three names, then put the letter back. Since he’d found it, it had never left his possession. This was his ace in the hole, but if word of it ever broke, L. B. Turner’s life wouldn’t be worth shit.

Even Parkhill didn’t know what the letter was about.

Dodge closed the files on Joe Antinori, Santo, and Charlie—all their lives knocking into each other like dominoes—and called home again. The phone rang fifteen times without an answer. The windows were open on the detectives’ floor, and he heard the rumble of thunder out in the bay.

He slumped forward and made a few more notes. Fred Bender walked behind him, slipping into his big khaki-colored sport coat and patting Dodge on the back. Dodge smiled at him, and soon he was alone in the room.

As soon as he heard Bender close the door, he picked up the phone and called a corner market at Twenty-second and Lake. He asked to speak to Robert, and the Cuban who answered the phone gruffly told him that he had the wrong number and hung up.

Dodge waited at his desk. The thunder bellowed again out there, sounding like an empty stomach.

Ten minutes later, the phone rang. He picked it up.

A booming voice said: “This is Robert.”

“Robert,” Dodge said. “We need to talk.”

“I’m busy.”

“We need to talk.”

“Sure. Sure.”