White Shadow (44 page)

Dodge looked over to Navarro and the man smiled at him. His big mustache drooped over his lips and hid his teeth. “Not to worry,” he said.

JOHNNY RIVERA toweled himself off under the cabana at the Nacional Hotel while Santo Trafficante sat poolside under an umbrella with a two-bit actor who’d been in the movie
Scarface
(he’d been making cracks about “Scarface” Johnny all day) and honest-to-god Tarzan himself. The actors were drinking rum punches and were loaded as hell. Trafficante just smoked cigarettes and drank ice water and listened to their fag Hollywood talk and discussed opening up a hotel called the Capri. Even though it was raining, women with big tatas and wide asses paddled around the pool and called out to waiters to bring them martinis. They’d watch from the edge of the pool, their elbows holding them above water, as they’d sip on their drinks and bite into that olive as Tarzan himself, or Jungle Jim or whatever the fuck he was calling himself, would laugh and laugh with Santo, his shirt open with his gut spilling over his swim trunks.

Johnny had had it.

He removed the bandage off his leg and looked at the big sewn place that had turned most of his leg purple. He limped to a bamboo chair, the skin on his thigh feeling tight but better with the swim, and told a Cuban boy to get him a shot of tequila and a pack of cigarettes.

This was the first day that Santo had let him come out of his fucking room. At first, the room service was great, and on the second night he’d even ordered a whore to come up and say hello. After they’d done it a couple of times, he got her to clean up his room and get him a cold beer.

There was only so long you can sit on the tenth floor of some hotel, even a real nice place like the Nacional, and drink and screw yourself silly.

He needed to breathe some real air. And the pool had felt warm and good on his bad leg.

He sat in the chair, and the boy handed him the shot of tequila and laid the cigarettes on the table.

Rivera looked up at him, and the boy got nervous and shook one loose from the pack, striking a wooden match and lighting it for him.

When the boy walked away, Rivera watched Jungle Jim/Tarzan strut over to the high dive and give off that goddamned yodel and do a double backflip into the pool. All the wide-assed women clapped and yelled and one whistled and two of them swam out to Tarzan like they were one of those fucking chimps in the movie and held on to him as he made it to the shallow end.

Santo stayed under the umbrella and kept talking to Mr. Big Shit, Raft. Rivera didn’t like the creep and didn’t believe a word that came out of his mouth. He’d already told him twice that he’d banged Marilyn Monroe and that she was a lousy lay. Rivera knew that was bullshit.

Johnny Rivera had been around real tough guys all his life and could spot a pussy actor from a mile away. Even one who tried to walk the walk.

In the pool, Tarzan hoisted two bikini tops out of the water, and the women play-fought with him until he turned and gave one a big smooch and then the other, this one lasting longer, the woman really planting one on the old guy. And he handed them back their tops, and they all got out of the pool—with the old man’s crooked wanger pointing out of his wet trunks—as they walked through the light rain and into a little cabana, where he saw Tarzan close the shades.

One woman was left in the pool and she drunk-walked over to Santo and began to massage his shoulders, and Rivera watched as Santo moved forward to get the woman to leave him the hell alone, and lit another cigarette. He kept moving his hands around as he spoke, and Raft smiled at him and nodded and said some kind of joke that Johnny couldn’t hear before the actor walked off with the woman to another cabana.

Johnny joined Santo. It was pleasant under the umbrella in the rain, and Johnny sipped the tequila, not shooting it like some mook, and fired up a cigarette. There was a small patter on the umbrella, and a waiter came outside with a rolling cart filled with lobsters and black beans and yellow rice and plantains and pitchers of sangria. There was a break in the sky over the bay, and a gold and pink light fell over the clear water. Way out, he could see a cruise ship.

Santo took a small plate of food. He kept silent as he made some notes into a small leather book that he soon pocketed into his suit coat. He’d been writing small and deliberate. A bookkeeper.

Rivera extinguished the cigarette and cracked open a lobster.

Jimmy Longo joined them.

Longo sat down and took a plate from the waiter. They served Rivera last.

“We’re good?” Santo asked.

“Yeah,” Jimmy Longo said. “The bank’s all set up. Victor Arroyo, Ricardo Gomez, and Gabriel Carrillo. Who the hell were those guys, anyway?”

“You ain’t too bright, are you?” Rivera asked. “They’re front names for the Old Man, you retard.”

Longo was wearing a brown Hawaiian shirt and tan Sansabelt slacks. He looked like an Italian ape, grinning like he’d been the one to deliver the book. If it hadn’t been for Johnny getting the ledger, they wouldn’t know jack about the Old Man’s bank accounts.

“You got a problem?” Longo asked.

“No problem.” Rivera smiled at him. He forced the smile as he looked at Santo. “What about the cops?”

Santo shrugged as he picked at his food and took another sip of the ice water. “I’m more interested in that girl.”

Longo shook his head. “She’s gone.”

“Hey,” Rivera said. “Nobody told me you were looking for her.”

Trafficante nodded and ate.

“She killed a big, swinging dick around here?”

Trafficante nodded again.

“I never saw that in her,” Rivera said. “She was kind of like some beaten dog. She had her head down a lot. Wouldn’t talk. For a long time, I thought she was retarded.”

“She killed those men in Tampa, too,” Santo said. He cut his lobster into little pieces. It was the same as the small handwriting.

“Yeah,” Rivera said. He played with his food and scooped in a big mouthful of black beans. “That’s what Jimmy said.”

“You must’ve been saying something to her,” Trafficante said.

“She didn’t just end up with Charlie’s ledger for the hell of it.”

“She was sneaky,” he said. “I caught her a few times listening in on me while I talked, and when I got back home that night, you know, from Charlie’s—”

Trafficante held up his hand to stop him from going further.

Rivera nodded. “It just happened. She stole it from me. Didn’t have nothing to do with what I said or what I know. She just took it.”

“We’ll find her,” Jimmy Longo said, dipping his cold lobster into some tartar sauce. “Hey, can we get some of that ice cream tonight? At that street place down from the Floridita?”

“Sure,” Santo said.

“Let me ask you a question, Santo,” Rivera said. “Do your friends just sit around all day and drink and fuck?”

Trafficante looked away. His face flushed.

He stopped eating and cleaned his glasses with his linen napkin.

Rivera smiled, glad he could do that to him. “I guess if I was a big star, I’d do that, too. But you know who I’d screw?”

Longo looked annoyed. “Who?”

“Loretta Young.”

No one seemed to be paying attention to Johnny Rivera. “I like it when she dresses up as a nun or schoolteacher in those little plays she puts on. Or when she reads the Bible.”

The men were quiet for a while, and it reminded Rivera of driving along with those phone books up under his ass as he’d take Charlie Wall all around Ybor City to collect on bolita and run the gin joints. Or even when he met with crooked politicians and cops. That was what? Twenty years ago? Thirty?

Johnny Rivera listened to the rain and thought about Lucrezia, wondering where she’d ended up and if she could ever understand Charlie’s notes the way he could.

AL TOMAINI had come for Lucrezia early that morning and drove her back to the bait shack in Gibtown where he’d parked his Cadillac. Jeanie had packed them a sack lunch of chicken salad sandwiches and cold green beans, and they’d followed Highway 19 north toward Tallahassee. Lucrezia watched all the little roadside stops whiz by her open window: the Skylark Motel, the Cadillac Inn, the Westgate Motel and Camp Grounds. Most of the little motels had swimming pools, where she watched children splashing themselves in the hot sun, and some had playgrounds with metal animals on big coiled springs rocking back and forth, or Indian villages with concrete tepees. They stopped halfway at a drive-in, and Al bought her a Coke float and just about scared the waitress to death.

She set down the drinks and never came back for the money.

He had to get out a few more times as they passed Tallahassee and his legs had grown stiff and cramped. She sat beside him but in front of him, as he steered from the rear seat. They listened to the radio tuned to a religious show that warned her to read the Bible and stay away from alcohol and promiscuous women, and then they listened to a ball game being played in Chicago, and for a while they listened to country music and the disc jockey talked about men she never knew like Bob Wills and Hank Williams and a man named Lefty. By the time they reached Pensacola, she had fallen asleep, her head back on her seat as the Gulf wind blew through the car and the big engine hummed in a worn, hot rhythm.

They drove through the town and wound up on some back streets near the shipyards, and Al’s Cadillac hobbled over the brick streets and under the big limbs of fattened oaks. Small palm trees were planted along the sidewalk, and old people sat on green benches and stared with their mouths open. She peered in bars and oyster houses where gold paddle fans swept away the humidity and watched dockworkers and common men sharing a beer in greasy coveralls.

Al parked down by the shipyards in a cleared section of sandy earth. He got out of the car and stood, and Lucrezia yawned and followed.

She picked up her sack and tilted her head up to the Midway. There was a mini roller coaster and a Ferris wheel and thousands of blinking lights and clanging bells. The air smelled of sugar, and she saw stands for cotton candy as she followed Al past the ticket takers and strange men calling out to her. She watched the parents, following their eyes to their children whipping around in swings hung in midair. Lucrezia lost her footing a few times in the sand, and she’d turn as Al would call out to her and she’d follow.

Al walked through the fair, out back to a loose city of trailers.

He knocked on one of the doors and it soon swung open. She heard opera playing from inside the trailer.

A man waddled out onto the wooden steps and onto the ground. He did not even reach Lucrezia’s shoulders or Al’s thighs but must have weighed almost four hundred pounds. His neck was a fleshy extension of his head, and his thighs were as large as tree trunks. He wore black pants and no shirt, and his breasts hung down full and thick like an old woman’s.

There was a peculiar smell about him, almost like a farm animal. And he breathed quick into his nose and dispelled air, as if he could catch a whiff of his future.

He looked high up at Al. Al bent at the waist and took the man’s hand.

The man nodded. His fatty cheeks flapped as he did.

Al pointed to Lucrezia.

The man nodded again.

“This is Fat Ass,” Al said. “He’ll look out for you and make sure you’re safe. He can take you as far as Juárez and then you can take a bus from there.

“How long till you’re in Juárez, Fat Ass?”

“A week,” he said. “We have three days in El Paso next. Goddamned Florida to Texas and not shit in between. We had a show booked in Biloxi, but we got swindled. You know the drill.”

Fat Ass looked Lucrezia up and down. “Okay. Okay. You can bunk with my wife. She’s in the next trailer. But you have to work. Everyone works. She knows that, right, Al?”

“Didn’t expect anything else.”

Fat Ass hobbled back into his trailer and slammed the door shut. The sun was going down, and there was calliope music coming from the carousel and the mirrors on the spindle threw shafts of light around on the sandy earth and in broken shards onto Al’s chest.