White Shadow (9 page)

“Do we know what Charlie was saying to the newsmen?”

“No, sir. We do not.”

“Make some calls.”

ED DODGE drove with the windows down, the police radio on low, running past the Columbia coffee shop and then turning onto Twenty-second, heading north to Columbus and the Boston Bar, with a detective trainee named Al Wainright riding shotgun, upright in his seat and watching the night faces scattering on the sidewalks. About all Wainright had learned so far was not to make a damned traffic stop in an unmarked unit. The first time Dodge had let him drive, he’d tried to pull over a guy for blowing through a stop sign, and Dodge had had to ream him out for not realizing he was now a detective.

Wainright was a lithe, movie-star-handsome kind of man who liked to wear tropical suits and silk shirts and was known to flash his badge down at the Sapphire Room or the Tampa Terrace bar on a Saturday night and talk about being a real detective to crowds of admiring women. But whatever ego he had was always kept in check by the cops who knew his secret.

As a kid, Wainright had been some kind of child star and used to travel around the Southeast in a vaudevillian act where he danced and sang. He apparently hated the precocious child he’d been, and his face would grow red with shame anytime the older cops would ask him if he’d perform a little soft-shoe or sing some Hit Parade for the boys in the police locker room.

As Dodge swung off the main drag and into a shell parking lot, Wainright was checking out his profile in the side mirror and straightening out a new tie.

A tin light hung by the front door of the Boston Bar, and a circular window blazed with beer signs. As the detectives climbed out of the car, they heard Sinatra sing from a jukebox, reminding Dodge of the last time he’d been here and all that broken glass and blood.

Wainright checked out the selections on the jukebox, while Dodge wandered over the smooth concrete floor past the eyes of all the derelicts and hucksters to see Johnny Rivera’s broad back turned to him as he arranged clean glasses and smoked a cigarette.

Dodge didn’t say anything; Rivera knew he was here.

Most of the bar was empty; it was early for a place like this. He noticed a bottle blonde with big blue eyes and nice muscular calves sitting alone in a side booth. There was a fat black man in a red suit eating popcorn by the toilets and two women playing pool in a back corner. Dodge looked back to the front door, and remembered how in ’53 Joe Antinori had just come inside to deliver a plate-glass window to Johnny Rivera and got shot three times.

Rivera said he’d gone in the back when some man—Rivera made the point of the man’s ordering rye because no one from Tampa would order rye—pulled out a gun and shot old Joe right through the glass he was holding and into his heart. Dodge knew Rivera had either sat right there and watched it or pulled the damned trigger himself. But Rivera never even spent a night in jail, and a witness Dodge had found later skipped town after changing his mind on what he saw. Dodge remembered Inspector Beynon asking him about that unnamed witness and his not saying a thing. The last thing he wanted to do was let the goddamned police department know where to find this guy. The man would’ve been dead within an hour.

“What the fuck do you want?” Rivera said.

“Hi-ya, Johnny.”

“I’ll call Captain Franks right now,” he said. “Don’t come in here and be hassling me.”

“For what?”

“Save your mind-fuck, Dodge,” Rivera said, smiling with his eyes and patting down the skinny black tie he wore with a white shirt.

“Just want to talk.”

“I got nothin’ to say.”

“How ’bout a beer?”

“You drinkin’ on duty?” Rivera said. “I get tired of you guys comin’ in here and wantin’ information or to bullshit and then walkin’ out on your tab.”

Dodge smiled at him and took a deep breath. When Dodge worked a guy, he always talked in a deep, low voice, and tried to show the guy, even a shit bag like Johnny Rivera, that he had respect for him. You didn’t talk to hoodlums like cops in B movies, because after all, that got you nowhere. That was movie-cop stuff. The only people you’d ever see Dodge talk down to were other cops who took free vacations from the mobsters or would look the other way at whores who gave them squad-car blow jobs.

Mostly, Dodge just listened. He was good at listening.

“You know why you come to me?” Rivera asked. “ ’Cause I’m the only fucking guy you know in this city to shake down. You’re a lazy, dumb cop who doesn’t have shit on anyone, and the only thing you know is I got a rough past. So what? I got nothing to do with this.”

“With what?”

“Fuck off, Dodge. That’s why you are so goddamned stupid. You think that I’m gonna tell you I ain’t heard about Charlie Wall. Everyone in this goddamned town with a radio or a set of clean ears has heard.”

“Okay, let’s talk, Johnny. I’ve always been fair with you, and so far you’ve been straight with me. But if it’s not me, it’ll be Mark Winchester or Sloan Holcomb. Do you really want that?”

“Like I said, save the mind-fuck.”

“Where were you Monday night?”

“He was dead last night.”

“Okay.”

Rivera wiped down the bar and began to wander in back to a storeroom filled with wooden crates.

“Can I have that beer? How ’bout that Miller on tap?”

“You want an alibi? I was working here all night.”

Dodge sighed and listened. He waited for a while in silence and then said, “All night?”

“All fucking night.”

“I suppose someone saw you.”

“I got a hell of a lot of people who saw me.”

Dodge took out his small flip pad and pen. “Who?”

“You know who was in here the other night?”

Dodge waited.

“A goddamned city councilman, that’s who. I remember, because he’s the Calvert distributor, and”—Rivera pointed behind him—“I just got in a case the other night from him.”

“Who was it?”

“Belden. Doug Belden.”

“Okay,” Dodge said. “Who else?”

“I’m calling Franks.”

“Franks knows I’m here.”

“Bullshit.”

“Allison,” Dodge called over to Al Wainright, using his full, real name, who’d found that new song, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” on the jukebox, and the record dropped in place at the end of “Mambo Italiano.”

Wainright grinned. The ballad started.

Rivera twisted his head and leaned across the bar. “I got something for you. All right? I know who killed the Old Man. But don’t bring this back to me.”

Dodge nodded.

“His wife is batshit crazy,” he said. “She once took a shot at him while he was on the toilet. You know he was always going out for some strange reason when he turned seventy, and she shot right at the Old Man while he was reading a magazine and taking a crap.”

Dodge nodded, and tried to make Rivera consider that he may be making some headway, some kind of level of belief that would never occur for a million years.

“While you’re looking up where I was, why don’t you find out that Mrs. Wall was up at Chattahoochie last year.”

Dodge looked at him. Waiting.

“Look it up,” Rivera said. “She bounces around to nuthouses like a pinball. I took the Old Man up to North Carolina a couple of years ago to look at her. She was sitting in some room eating Jell-O and drooling all over herself.”

“She tried to kill him?”

“Like I said, look it up,” he said. “She got a goddamned brain operation last year. She’s mental.”

Wainright stood beside Dodge now.

Wainright pulled open his coat and tucked his hand in the pocket, not to be cool but to show off his new blue-finish .38. And Dodge tried to ignore him, because showing a guy like Rivera your gun was kind of like sticking out your tongue.

“If you’re lying to us, we’ll run your ass into jail so fast your ears will bleed,” Wainright said.

“I got it, Allison.” Dodge kept looking at Rivera.

“You think because you got slick clothes and a greasy smile that you’re the man,” Wainright said. “You’re old, Rivera.”

“Have a nice fucking day, Dodge,” Rivera said. “Take your wife with you.”

Dodge turned and saw Rivera’s shit-eating grin in a side glance along the bar mirror. He grabbed Wainright by the arm and was leading him away from the bar when Rivera yelled out, “Get that little faggot out of my bar.”

Wainright pulled his arm free of Dodge and jumped over the bar and on top of Johnny Rivera, knocking the man sideways with his body, pummeling him with fists, before Rivera gripped Wainright by the arm and tossed him over his shoulder and onto his back, and Dodge heard a giant
woosh,
as if all the air in a giant balloon was escaping.

Rivera stood and pulled a sawed-off 12-gauge from beneath the register and had it aimed at Wainright’s head, sweat all over Rivera’s pudgy face as he sucked in air like a dying fish, his face heated with blood and anger.

Dodge whipped his Smith .38 from his leather and had it in Rivera’s ear, and Rivera knew the routine.

He dropped the 12-gauge and hovered his hands over the bar, Wainright getting to his feet and pulling his .38 about ten seconds too late.

“I wish you hadn’t done that,” Dodge said, out of breath. “You need to think about your next step, Johnny. I just want to talk, but everyone in this city thinks you slit that old man’s throat. I want you to study on that for a while, and then decide what you want to tell me. I may be the best goddamned friend you ever had.”

Dodge wiped his brow with his free hand and then reached for his cuffs. He tossed them to Wainright and said: “Cuff him and bring him along. If you ever pull that kind of shit again, I’ll shoot you myself.”

SHE WAS filthy and tired and hungry and asleep on the couch of her cousin, Muriel. The cousin had a child, a lost husband, and laundry washed in a pot and hung to dry through the middle of the casita. Through the night, the baby kept crying, and sometimes Muriel woke up and walked with him, loose and aimless, across the beaten floor, while Lucrezia lay on the tattered couch and stared up at the leaking ceiling, listening to the rain coming in off the bay.

The splattering rain sounded like tiny fingers drumming in the darkness. By the time the storm hit, she wondered if she’d make it out of Ybor City alive.

She studied the ledger for a long time by candlelight but tucked it back under the couch when she heard Muriel stir once again, because, after all, it was Muriel who’d gotten her the job at Johnny Rivera’s Boston Bar, and the one who would hide her in the small, cramped attic when he came looking. But Lucrezia didn’t know how much longer that would last as she stared up at the ceiling of the casita, her clothes still smelling of the tobacco she rolled, and of the smoke from the men she’d shot and probably killed.

She’d bathed in Muriel’s sink twice to get off the smell of the man, washing herself with a cloth, as a soldier would dress wounds in the field, before slipping back into her dress and finding some bread to eat. She had done it. It was over, and thinking and acting as a child would do nothing for her.

It was the same way last year with Gomez.
She’d known where he’d go and about his man, the driver who would roll down the Malecón—even on the rainiest of nights—to find young whores fresh in from the country to take to the Nacional, where the gangster Lansky kept a room for all the generals. And she watched, as this would happen for several nights last year, until the car, that long black car, stopped before her, she in a dress that her father had bought her for church with lace and ruffles and matching white gloves, and the man let her in the back of the car with the mustached general, who allowed Lucrezia to hold his hat while he kissed her neck and pulled her small breast from the dress—that dress her father had saved for—and sucked on her and moaned and smelled of rum and cigarettes.