White Shadow (6 page)

She knew they were only here for Gomez and they didn’t care about what she’d taken from the Boston Bar. And now they never would.

Now Lucrezia had two reasons to run, and each one was as good as the other.

BABY JOE DIEZ WIPED his face with a pink show hankie and slid kind of uneasy into an old leather chair. He then stood, looked at the seat, knowing it had been the Old Man’s, and moved into a kitchen chair brought in by one of the deputies. He’d seen the Old Man sprawled out like that with the gash in his throat, and now he had a bunch of cops ringing him with their notepads out. He rubbed his hands together and waited for the stenographer to get set up.

Baby Joe wore blousy black pants, a white silk shirt, and a short and fat pink tie decorated with a royal flush of cards. A gold-and-ruby clip dangled from his tie while he leaned forward and chewed gum. Sure he was small—the reason for the nickname—but he was husky and strong as hell, and most folks knew the stories around Ybor about Baby Joe embarrassing men twice his size. He smiled with his black eyes at everyone watching him, struggling to find some kind of comfort in the silence.

Captain Franks sat on the couch with his boss, O. C. “Ozzie” Beynon, inspector of detectives, and State Attorney Red McEwen. McEwen smiled at Baby Joe and adjusted the frames of his trademark tortoiseshell glasses, and asked: “Shall we?”

The stenographer nodded and readied himself to type.

“What’s your full name?” McEwen asked.

“Joe Diez,” he said. His voice was honest and broken and flat. People from outside Tampa thought he sounded like he was from Brooklyn, only he was Ybor City to the core.

“Your address?”

“4607 Thirty-first Street.”

“Where do you work?”

“I feed cattle, in the cattle business.”

Which was true, he didn’t have much to do with the rackets anymore. He’d rather run cows all day long than get mixed up in the business again. He ran a little moonshine now and then out of Pasco County, but that was different.

“Did you carry Mrs. Wall down to the bus station last week to make her trip to Clermont?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Wall went with you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you remember what day that was?”

“It was Thursday, I think, or Friday—Thursday or Friday.” He nodded to himself and looked back at McEwen for approval.

McEwen, short, with gray-and-red hair and horn-rimmed glasses, sucked on his teeth and listened. He was a high school referee on Friday nights in the fall, and stood sure-footed and confident with his arms across his chest. He reminded Baby Joe of a banty rooster as he walked, and Baby Joe knew the killing of the Old Man was going to be McEwen’s biggest thing since that waste-of-time bolita commission.

McEwen moved on, keeping eye contact with Baby Joe, steady and smooth, as if a spider’s thread connected them and breaking away would slit it.

“At the time she left, when were you expecting her back? Today?”

“I don’t know when she was coming back.”

“Have you seen Mr. Wall since then?”

“Oh, yes, sure.”

“Tell us when and where, each time.”

He shifted forward in his seat, still chewing his gum, and rubbed his hands together. His eyes were red, and his voice tough and hard but cracked and broken at the same time, like a man who’d been yelling too long and was tapped out.

“I saw Mr. Wall—the last time I saw him was Sunday. He called me and wanted to go to the rooster fight out here. I wasn’t busy and didn’t mind taking him. I said, ‘Sure.’ I picked him and a friend, Mr. Bill Robles, up about two, and from there we went to the rooster fights and stayed there until five-thirty or six, and we went to the Spanish Park and had dinner there. Then I brought him home. We stayed here and looked at TV awhile, and then I went home.”

“That was this past Sunday night?” Ozzie Beynon asked.

“Yes.”

Beynon was a lumbering bald fella who used to be a star football player for the University of Tampa. Baby Joe had heard that Beynon was the only cop in the department with a college degree and that he’d trained with the Feds. Baby Joe noticed Beynon had paint all over his hands, like he’d been interrupted on his day off.

“Was he drinking then?”

“No, sir,” Baby Joe said, shaking his head. “Well, we had one drink before we ate. That’s all.”

“What is his system of letting people in the door when he is here?” McEwen asked.

“Well, I imagine, you know, if he knows them, he lets them in.”

Light shined in from the west side of the house in heavy yellow slabs, with dust motes clinging and turning inside. But the room was still dark from all the wood beams and paneling and old bookshelves made from heavy lead glass. On the mantel, a clock clicked away loudly.

Baby Joe looked in the hallway and saw Ed Dodge, holding a plastic bag and his camera, moving around the hall. Dodge caught his eye and nodded. Baby Joe had always liked Dodge because he was the kind of cop who knew who you were and understood why you were that way. He had been friends with the Old Man and with other people from Ybor. Baby Joe had known Dodge since the detective had just been a beat cop walking from call box to call box on the Broadway strip.

“Did you happen to step in any of that blood?” McEwen asked as Baby Joe’s eyes turned back to the state attorney.

“I don’t believe I did.”

McEwen looked over at Captain Franks, and Franks said, “Has Mr. Wall had any contact with Johnny Rivera?”

“You know better than that, Pete,” Baby Joe said, knowing everyone understood that you don’t say anything about Johnny Rivera to the police if you don’t want to watch your back every time you take a piss or go to your car or walk your dog.

Franks blushed.

“That’ll be all, Joe,” McEwen said.

JOHNNY RIVERA STRAINED with heat and muscle to loosen a four-inch well casing that’d been fucking up ever since Easter. He worked shirtless, and the last twenty years of not having to hustle so much had gone to a thick flab around the waist of his dark work pants. He ran his fingers through his black, curly hair (stylishly cut and kept longer than most men), spit, and planted his feet on each side of the metal pipe running deep into the loam, sand, silt, and bedrock down to the water vein. He strained to loosen that four-inch casing from the hole, so he could search deeper on the little parcel around his house for another go. He was tired of taking brown showers like someone crapping all over him.

Johnny pulled again, as hard as he fucking could, and the shit didn’t budge. His back cracked and bent, his face filled with blood, hands turned purple, and he kicked at the clumps of earth and stared over at the couple of men he’d hired to finish the job. A couple of cheap niggers he’d found down at the port.

Johnny wiped off his flabby stomach with a pink towel embroidered with dice and slid into a short-sleeved black silk shirt. As he buttoned up over the gold coin on a chain, he yelled: “Come on. What the fuck am I payin’ you for?”

They glanced at each other, their deep black skin and secret ways just making Johnny sore as hell about the dollar apiece he was planning on giving them.

One of them shook his head before grabbing hold of the casing in Johnny’s fucking yard, and Johnny’s hands let go of that last pearl button on his shirt and reached for the man’s throat, pulling the big buck close enough to smell the chicken on his breath. He shook him, even though the man was twice as big as Johnny, and Johnny thought it was about settled—that afternoon Florida heat swimming high above them and the palm fronds rattling like paper bags—when that second nigger put a slice of cut pipe under his neck and pulled Johnny away.

Johnny shot a sharp elbow into the man’s stomach, and the man grunted and fell to his knees. His partner came at him with a switchblade, cutting and jabbing, but Johnny wasn’t scared because he’d been raised on switchblades and they always seemed kind of comical and toylike to him, and he grabbed the soft spot on the man’s wrists, leaned in hard—digging his fingers and nails into his tendons—and the man dropped the knife and stood, huffing and bug-eyed, looking at him.

“You want to get paid, or you want to play grab-ass?” Johnny said, and smiled, the wild curly hair twisting and falling into a point over his eyes and down to his nose.

The old man checked his stomach, and for the first time Johnny noticed the man was old and gray and might just be the other nigger’s father from the way the younger man helped him up. But Johnny didn’t feel bad about it or say he’s sorry for punching and beating them because he’s got a fucking job to do, and it’s about two p.m. and he’s got to be back down to the Boston Bar at five to slice up lemons and run the whole start-up.

Without a word, the men began to work on the casing, and Johnny walked to the back door of his little casita to use the phone and called Manuel at the garage and told him to bring down his tow truck because even three men couldn’t pull that rotted son of a bitch out of the ground.

“What are you doin’ at home?” Manuel asked, the sound of mufflers gunning in the background.

“Thumbin’ my nuts,” Johnny said. “You comin’ or not?”

“Yeah,” Manuel said. “But ain’t you heard?”

“What?”

“Charlie Wall’s dead.”

“Yeah?”

There was silence on the phone, and more gunning mufflers and the sound of maybe a fucking wrench dropping on the oil-slick concrete.

“What was it? A heart attack?” Johnny asked.

“No,” Manuel said. “He got his throat slit.”

They hung up and Johnny walked back outside, a nice, easy seventy-degree breeze rounding its way from the port and down the narrow streets of Ybor and bending his dead orange tree, giving those niggers some kind of comfort. But Johnny didn’t have much comfort as he found a rusted patio chair to sit down in, lit up a Lucky Strike, and stared through the broken slat in his fence to his neighbor’s yard where that mama had nice tatas and sometimes hung laundry in her bra and panties. Just a slim bit of dark snatch showing in the white.

He smoked, and the breeze struck his hair.

Charlie Wall. Man took him from picking old men’s pockets to running bolita tickets to roughing up shit-for-brains Cubans who tried to get too much of a cut. He had memories, good memories, of Mr. Wall in the Cadillac and young Johnny driving for him, with that slim line of scar on his cheek and people calling him Johnny Scarface behind his back. He thought about all that sweet Cuban rum they smuggled in from Nassau and all those goddamned incredible whores who he’d take on two at a time before he’d even reached seventeen and those fine silk shirts and suits Mr. Wall would buy for him in Havana and the way the white cleanness of their fabric would sometimes get splattered with just a fine mist of blood so he’d have to drop them in the Hillsborough River with a knife or a big .44 and wash his hands with pumice and dirt to get clean.

There was a lot of blood and rum and whores. It all just kind of stayed mashed up together in Johnny’s mind. But he was forty-five now and not some little kid without a father who’d latched onto a bootlegger to run errands for and drive pickups loaded with hooch while he steered and braked with phone books up under his ass. Charlie Wall was just a dead, washed-up old man. Just a drunk at the bar with old stories and memories. And that was a place Johnny never wanted to be.

Almost made him glad that Mr. Wall was dead.

It made all that stuff from long ago not seem that real.

“Mr. Rivera,” the old man called out from the yard.

Johnny finished the Lucky Strike and tapped it out in the dirt. No sight of the broad through the slats.

“Yeah.”

“This thing seems to be mighty stuck.”

Johnny watched the old man clean the rust and dirt from his hands and scrape under his nails with a pocketknife. Johnny shook his head and walked back inside, picking up a basket of clean clothes the woman left for him this morning.

“You figure it the fuck out.”

He walked past the men staring at him as he rounded the corner and out of sight.