White Shadow (54 page)

I called out to him and Fidel turned.

I ran and shook his hand, and he reached out and hugged me.

“Señor Turner, I tried you many times at the newspaper, but there was no answer. I have something for you.”

Fidel reached into his trousers and pulled out a silver cigarette lighter. He handed it to me and clasped his large hand around my closed fist holding his present. He winked. “I bought it in New York City. It has much luck.”

I shook my head.

He nodded.

I said thanks and fumbled for the book under my arm. I handed him the book and he looked at the cover, puzzled, but trying not to show any confusion. He pumped my hand and thanked me twice. “We had many cockfights at my father’s plantation in the Oriente province. That’s like Texas for Americans. It’s the biggest province in Cuba. We do the most work, we make the most rum and sugar. We make the money, too. We hate dictators. This book will remind me of that. To be strong and hard.”

I shook my head.

“Look inside.”

He opened the book. Inside the first page, I’d scrawled: “Rascals will struggle to infest politics.”

Fidel smiled: “Martí.”

I nodded, and I shook his hand. He hugged me again.

I made a show of using his lighter to smoke a Chesterfield. “Gregory Peck smokes these.”

“Ah,” he said. “I like him.”

We stood and smiled at each other. He patted my arm. The conductor called for all passengers. He was an elderly black porter with a big belly and a black suit, and he kept a big thick gold watch at his waistband like they did in the Old West.

“Good-bye, my friend,” Fidel said.

I started to speak, but for a few moments found it difficult. My throat tightened. “I had a friend who was hurt by bad people who are in Havana.”

He studied my face.

“Why are you telling me this now?”

He was the last figure on the platform.

The porter took out his gold watch and glared down at us.

I took the book from him and flipped to the inside cover. “This will help you.”

He studied the pages. His eyes moved over Charlie Wall’s old man, intricate scrawl.

I leaned in close and hugged him. “Fight. Kill them all.”

I turned and walked away, my hands in my pockets, hat slipped back on my head, and did not respond as he yelled to me again and again until the train pulled out of Tampa.

I will always remember his yell to me. It sounded like a battle cry.

IT WAS COLD inside the trunk, and the Cadillac rattled and bounced as it made its way down a rough road. The trunk flooded with a red glow from the taillights, while the jack and lug wrench jangled by Dodge’s head as he lay bound by the spare tire. He did not know where they’d taken his wife or if she was still alive, and he did not care. He thought only of the way they’d kill him. He imagined they’d be taking him deep into the county or maybe up to Pasco, where they’d make him dig his own grave before pointing a .22 behind the ear and dropping him in some palmetto patch. Dodge had never been shot. Never been wounded. He’d seen plenty of men shot. One by friendly fire on Parris Island, an unfortunate Marine taken down by the stray fire of a sergeant who wanted the grunts to crawl on their bellies in hog entrails and manure. That Marine had been shot in the head, and Dodge never learned if he’d lived or not. He’d seen a woman shot cold by her husband in a kitchen. He’d seen two negroes kill each other over a five-dollar card game in the Scrubs. He’d seen an army private during the war get his dick shot off by a B-girl he’d just raped.

But as much as Dodge had tried, he’d never been given so much as a scratch.

The Cadillac bumped and jostled along, and Dodge stared at the back glow of the taillights thinking that he’d never give the bastards the satisfaction of anything more than a big Fuck You.

He wondered about the pain and how much it hurt. He hoped they’d get him on the first shot but knew they’d play with him. They’d played with Charlie Wall. They’d made it all about some big Sicilian message. Messy and brutal. They’d been the same way about Eleanor Charles.

The Cadillac slowed and doors slammed.

They opened the hood, and light from the globes of streetlamps blinded him. Rain fell from the cold November sky, and the two men looked down at him before pulling a pillowcase over his head and dragging him out from the trunk by his bound wrists. Someone knocked him in the head with their fists to show they meant business, and he felt the flesh on his calf tear against the trunk lock.

Someone grabbed his feet, and he did not fight as they carried him. The pillowcase grew wet on his face from the rain, and he heard the rain—stronger now—hitting the streets in Ybor City. Dodge knowing it was Ybor City from the streetlamps and the rough brick streets and knowing it was Sicilians who were taking him somewhere.

A door closed behind him. Must’ve been midnight. Or was it one?

He heard hard shoe soles
thwap
on stairs and Italian voices laugh and talk. His bound hands filled with blood and had grown numb. His wrists felt as if they would tear from his forearms. He could still hear the rain, a heavy great rain falling against windows and on streets, pounding and running into gullies and cleaning Ybor City streets late at night so the people could awake in the morning with all the beer bottles and newspapers washed away out into the channel.

The talking stopped and the sound of the stairs disappeared.

They shoved him into a seat. A light shone through the pillowcase and white-hot into his eyes. Someone pulled the pillowcase from his head. It had smelled of mothballs and old ladies and hair oil and dead skin.

He squinted his eyes shut, but the light was still white-hot.

Four figures waited at a table in nothing but shadow. The black-shadow people grumbled.

He heard the fizz of soda and more speaking in Italian.

He wished to God they’d get on with it and just kill him.

“Ed Dodge,” a voice called. It was old and spoke in uncertain English.

He didn’t answer. It hadn’t been a question.

“You like being a policeman detective?” a voice asked. He thought it an odd combination in an odd question. He tried to pull his hands apart, but the rope was tight on his wrists. His fingers were frozen now. His ankles were bound, but his toes could move in his shoes.

He still said nothing.

“We’ve been watching you,” another voice said. This was English. Ybor City accent. “You are a persistent man, Mr. Ed Dodge.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dodge said.

“You know who we are?”

“Sure,” Dodge said. “Everybody does.”

That’s when he expected it. That’s when he expected the hammer to fall in the goddamned basement of whatever ethnic club they’d dragged him into. They wanted him to squirm and sit before them in their Sicilian tribunal and all feel fat and happy to see him die in front of them all. They needed the ceremony. The fucking Italians and all their ceremony.

Dodge closed his eyes tight against the bright light. His heart feeling almost like it would stop. Sweating at the brow with dead wrists pulling against the rope and holding his breath.

He heard nothing but awkward coughing and shifting in rickety old chairs. He smelled something vaguely of cherries.

“We want to promote you.”

Dodge said nothing.

“We want you to run the Vice Squad.”

“I’ve only been a detective for two years,” he said. “You got the wrong man.”

More coughing and rickety seats. More speaking in Italian.

“You don’t wish to run the Vice Squad?”

“I don’t mean to be ungrateful,” Dodge said. “But who are you to make the decision?”

There was a lot of laughter, and even in the pain of his wrists and the shallow breathing from knowing he might die Dodge let out a laugh. He laughed with the old Italian men.

One of the old men, perhaps one of the Grocers, stood from his chair and walked into the beam of light. “Take care of your family,” he said. “You can’t take care of two children on a policeman’s pay.”

“I’ll let you know.”

“You let us know now,” the man said.

Dodge mumbled something.

The old Sicilian leaned in and Dodge spit right in his eye. Someone smacked him hard against the back of the head and he fell from the wooden chair to the cold marble floor, so cold to the touch it felt like a crypt. He was on his knees and had grown sick with the jostling Cadillac and the bumpy brick roads and the smell of liquor and cherries. And on all fours, he vomited on the floor and looked up—below the beam of light—seeing the source of the light at the head of the table. Looking in the way you see the falseness of the image in a movie house clicking from a small square hole of a projection booth.

He knew them all. But he wasn’t sure if they saw his eyes before pulling the pillow over his head and beating him again with what felt like baseball bats.

“You want to rethink this?”

Dodge was on all fours. “It’s not that easy,” Dodge said. “I don’t turn for a dollar. Fuck you and fuck all your mothers in hell.”

The beating was like a hailstorm. Hot and furious on his back and head.

He never lost consciousness. He felt them load him back into the Cadillac and drive for what felt like hours.

He waited for the earthen pit or the crypt or the football stadium or the mouth of the bay.

But when they stopped, he was jerked out and dropped hard on the asphalt street.

Squares of vacant lots had been cleared.

The rope on his wrists had been loosened, and he tore away at it with his mouth. He walked for a half mile down the empty streets, where small frames were being erected for houses. They looked skeletal in the insignificant rain and light thunder from the bay. A large sign read SUNSET PARK: TOMORROW. TODAY.

He found West Shore Boulevard as the rain hit heavier. Maybe four, five in the morning. His head was hot with blood and it mixed with the rainwater falling down his hair and into his eyes.

He had to stop twice to place his hands on his knees and vomit. A car slowed to a stop in front of him, and he stared back into the twin glow of the headlights, believing they’d returned. He started to turn and run.

But a red light flashed from the side of the car and two cops emerged.

ON A BRIGHT winter morning on the Florida Avenue side of the Tampa Police Department, I parked my car behind a city cab and saw Ed Dodge stand under the fronds of the palm trees growing against the side of the old station house. He was smoking a cigar and smiling. The fronds made skeletal shadows against the light brick walls.

The large doors were wide open to the sergeant’s desk where they booked prisoners. A half dozen or so newspapermen and photographers stood griping and smoking and waiting for whatever Chief Roberts called us here about. The old bullet-headed Cracker was yakking it up with Leland Hawes from the
Tribune,
who didn’t seem to be buying the backslapping.

Roberts stood there in his full dress blues reading from a prepared statement someone had given him. He smiled and motioned for Mark Winchester to come from the crowd.

“Detective Winchester will be taking over as head of our Vice Squad,” Roberts said. “As you know, Vice is one of the most important parts of our police work here. He’ll be looking at ways to crack down on the bolita still being sold in Tampa and into prostitution and drugs that could potentially harm the youth of our city.”

Winchester stood proud and erect in a dark brown suit and brown tie, and he shook Roberts’s hand with a warm sincerity. He looked directly into the cameras as he spoke a quick speech, punctuated with: “Bolita dealers, clean up or clear out.”

I think we ran those words under the photo of him with Roberts on the second page.

I got a few quotes from Roberts and an offhand remark from Winchester.

“How are you going to stop bolita?” I asked.

“We have our techniques,” he said, smiling.

I looked over at Leland and he rolled his eyes at me. Both of us were ready to get back to the court beat and pissed off we were stuck with this story because someone had the nerve to be stabbed in a Broadway Avenue bar earlier that morning, shaking loose the cop reporters.

When I walked outside through the police station’s doors, Dodge was gone.

I don’t think I saw him again until November, when he transferred over to the State Attorney’s Office to work for Red McEwen. That was about the time of the dead girl and the moonshine racket and Joe “Pelusa” Diaz’s now-famous letter. The letter from the grave.