White Shadow (10 page)

And soon his man, the driver, helped him into that big broad lobby of the Nacional, where the floors were made of tile and looked like a chessboard not unlike the one old men played on in the center of the Placetas square on Sundays, and she watched as the men and women in their stiff clothes drinking
mojitos
stared at her and the drunk general before they moved onto an elevator—the first one she’d ever ridden—and they took it to the top and to a large suite with everything yellow and gold with fringe on the drapes and champagne in buckets and the general stumbled in the bathroom to get onto his knees to vomit in the bathtub, and she stood there with that vomiting sounding like something breaking wide open and ripping apart and she pulled the kitchen knife from under her skirt and she waited until he stumbled out and dropped his army green pants to his knees and showed his weak erection and scarred hairy knees and she walked to him with that practiced smile and she curtsied like on her confirmation day in that same dress, and she said her father’s name over and over and over as she let that blade fly into the man’s stomach and his neck, washing her white lace with blood that scattered across her cheeks and eyes, with thoughts of only that gentle old man who had raised her and what this man, this weak pathetic-smelling man, had done to him.

Moncada,
she told the general before he died.
The 26th of July.

IT WAS nine p.m. before Ed Dodge got home to Alaska Street in Seminole Heights, an old neighborhood built along the Hillsborough River with little pockets of houses and bungalows built back in the twenties and stretching up and over Nebraska and Florida Avenues. Grocery stores, motor courts, and car dealerships that hustled people in with colored flags and promises of winning a TV or a washer and dryer. All he could think about was bloody bats and bloody carpet and half footprints that went nowhere and detectives and captains that didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. No one had been arrested. Just a bunch of people questioned. Just thanking God he wasn’t out there still canvassing Ybor City, or still at Tampa General in the cold meat locker where Charlie waited for a morning autopsy.

Franks and Inspector Beynon wanted the whole squad back at six a.m.

He noticed the flicker of the television in the family room as he pulled into his driveway and cut the lights. When he walked inside, he saw Steve Allen’s
Tonight Show
. Gene Rayburn was doing the news.

The television lit the family room paneled in knotty pine, and he called out to his wife. She didn’t answer.

He called out to her again and cut on the lights.

The record player was on the kitchen table and twirled and skipped around the inner groove. Perry Como.

Dodge turned off the player and the wooshing sound stopped. The room was quiet.

As he turned the corner, coming back out of the kitchen, there was a flash of movement, and he saw a small figure holding a rifle.

“Hands up!”

Dodge put his hands up.

“Git on out of thar.”

Dodge smiled and stepped forward.

His son squinted at him, looking down the barrel of a play rifle, a Davy Crockett cap down hard on his head.

“What’s the haps, Davy?”

“I said keep them hands where I can see ’em.”

Dodge did but at the same time, his eyes wandered down to an ashtray filled with dozens of butts. Some had red lipstick and others, Marlboros, did not. He thought about Perry Como and cigarettes and the empty bottle of gin he saw on the counter.

“Your mother have company tonight?”

The boy shrugged. He let down his rifle.

“Who was it?”

“Some man,” he said. “We went to Mrs. Green’s house. She let us watch television all night.”

“Didn’t your mother put you to bed?”

He shrugged again and placed the rifle on the table.

“Can I see your badge?” he asked. Dodge sat at the dinette and handed it to him.

The boy looked at it, the silver bigger than the palm of his hand, and he felt over the raised image of the city and his detective number.

“You gun down someone tonight?” the boy asked.

“Just a couple. Bad desperadoes.”

“Wow.”

“How ’bout some sleep?”

“Jeez, Pops.”

He pulled up the boy in his arms and walked him back to the bedroom. He tucked him into the sheets and pulled the covers over him. Everything the boy owned was Davy Crockett. The blankets, the linens, the drapes. A picture of Fess Parker on the wall.

“Get some rest.”

“How many did you kill?”

“Two.”

The boy smiled and closed his eyes.

Dodge walked back out, checked on his daughter, who was asleep, and lightly closed the door. He looked in on Janet and saw her sprawled out in her clothes on top of a made bed. Her face had been made up, and she wore a lacey black shirt. She was snoring, and there was a bottle of pills on her dresser.

She was advertising it. Flaunting it.

He went back to the kitchen and threw away the gin bottle and the cigarettes. He closed up the record player and tucked it into the closet. He put on an apron, poured out a box of suds into the sink, and washed dishes.

He poured out a glass of milk and watched Steve Allen.

He stayed for thirty minutes.

He couldn’t sleep.

Soon, he was back in his car, headed downtown, lying to himself about the reasons.

ELEANOR AND I DRANK gin and tonics and listened to a hi-fi she bought with her
Tribune
Christmas bonus (something the
Times
never believed in) with her jalousie windows propped open, letting cool breezes wander in from the bay, smelling all brackish and salty but sweet at the same time. It was midnight, and we thought about driving to Bayshore Boulevard and looking for dolphins or mating fish that left behind green glowing trails in the dark waves. But she had her shoes off and was rubbing her feet as Charlie Parker finished and the hi-fi dropped the next record onto the turntable. I want to say it was Louis Armstrong or perhaps Ella Fitzgerald. Those details I’m not too sure about, because at this time I only smelled the sweetness of Eleanor’s shampoo and loved touching her skin (even if by accident), and just listening to her ramble on about things that were bothering her because, even angry and agitated, she had such a damned wonderful voice.

The phone rang in the kitchen, and she disappeared for a moment to answer it. I heard her clarifying some details for tomorrow’s story. When she returned, I asked, “Can we talk about it now?”

“I guess it’s too late for you to run off and go report to Hampton Dunn my fantastic story that will make y’all cry in the morning.”

Even though she was trying to be funny, it was a bit harsh because, after all, the
Times
was taking small, dying breaths with our paltry staff and the
Tribune
was that eight-headed beast that lived in our publisher’s—Mr. David E. Smiley’s—nightmares.

“What does it say?”

“Same as yours,” she said. “Did y’all use the quote Charlie Wall told the senator at the Kefauver hearings?”

“Maybe.”

“About why he escaped so many attempts on his life?”

“You mean because he had that bulletproof walkway from his garage? You know that thing is made of brick and steel?”

“No,” she said. “Not that. He told the senator that he lived so long because the devil took care of his own. Isn’t that just so wonderful and evil and poetic? I love Charlie Wall for that.”

“God bless you.”

Eleanor lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the islands—just a little sandbar in Hillsborough Bay where they used to shoot silent movies in the twenties after they dredged land for some high-dollar hotels—in a two-story building with decorative concrete blocks fronted by a heated swimming pool, which was always cold, and a few transplanted palm trees.

“All I know is that I spent the day talking to this boozy lawyer at The Turf,” she said. “He kept on moaning about how much he was going to miss poor Charlie.”

“John Parkhill.”

“What a lout.”

“No kidding,” I said. “What did he tell you?”

“He said I had a great build,” she said, rolling her eyes and lighting a cigarette, fanning out the match. “I mean, would you say that to a woman you just met?”

“I think I said that to you.”

“Yes, but you were being a true journalist. Direct and honest.”

“Honest?”

“Well, I do have a great build.”

“Of course,” I said. “Then what was wrong with Parkhill? He was just a man.”

“Well, a real lout of a man. But, yes, a man. He can’t help that. But I believe we were supposed to be talking about his dear deceased relative.”

“John Parkhill is related to Charlie Wall?”

“Distant cousin,” she said, walking over to this neat little wooden bar—really, just a small table—that she unfolded and found some more gin to add to her drink. She dropped in a couple more fresh limes she bought from a roadside stand in Seminole Heights and joined me again, tucking her bare, tired feet up under her.

“Please don’t tell me he knows who did it.”

“Of course,” she said. “What else did you expect?”

“From you?” I asked. “Everything.”

“He said Mr. Wall was retired from any—get this—past activity that he may have been involved in.”

“How can you retire from things that you only
may be
involved in?”

“As I said, a lout and a lawyer.”

“Bad combination.”

“Is there any other kind?”

“So, just bemoaning the loss?”

“That, and he told me that detectives wanted to know about any business he had on the east coast and in Miami,” she said. “He told me this after his second helping of that god-awful Canadian whiskey. Have you ever been to Miami?”

“What else?”

“Pushy, pushy,” she said. “He said he turned over the records to a detective.”

“Who?”

“Ed Dodge,” she said. “ I think.”

“Terrific.”

“Why is that?”

“He doesn’t care too much for me,” I said. “He goes much more for the leggy, blond, and beautiful type.”

“I did find out something else interesting,” she said, winking at me. “I really shouldn’t tell you this, but I’m sure you’ll be finding out in the paper tomorrow when you get your thirty-five-cent breakfast at that greasy spoon.”

“Jake’s Silver Coach Diner is not a greasy spoon.”

“Of course not. Of course not. But what you’ll find out is that the police, or Red McEwen I should say, have asked to open up Charlie’s safe-deposit box.”

“When?”

“Read all about it.”

“Hmm.”

“Who do you think did it?” she asked.

“I honestly have no idea,” I said, lying to her because she would do the same to me if she thought she had any clue to who had killed Charlie Wall. But I had more than some idea—I had a great deal of idea—who had killed the Old Man, because when you talked to someone constantly on the phone before he died and perhaps met him at his house at odd hours of the night or maybe found a back room in a Cuban café to talk about old times and new times and the old guard and the new guard, you began to learn a great deal about this wonderful, sordid, sick, and dirty network that breathed under the city’s skin like a fungus.

“No idea?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “May I have another drink?”

“Please.”

I made a new one, adding a few more limes and a dash of tonic.

I walked back to the sofa and switched off two table lamps. The room was still and musical, and I felt tired and drunk as I found my place on the couch, putting down the drink that I used as an excuse to make my move and slid my hand on the small of her back and kissed her softly on those red lips. Her hands found my face, and we kissed for a while, but soon the record caught on that dead place at the center where it bumped and whooshed and sounded like the surf at the beach.

And she used the flat of her hand to push me back and then straighten her hair. “Mr. Turner, I do believe it is late and I do believe we will have a hell of a day tomorrow.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, knowing it was time. I thought about the way Eleanor kept most of her life as neat and hidden as any safe-deposit box of an old dead gangster.

I grabbed my hat like a gentleman and said good night. Soon, I found myself at Peter O. Knight airstrip at the end of the island.

All the old DC-3s from before the war were long gone, and I was lucky to catch a few doctors or lawyers with their Pipers or Cessnas taking off or landing in that pitch darkness over the jetty. There was a narrow little strip lit with red and blue lights where I could hear that gentle hum of their single engines that, to me, sounded like music, along with the lapping black bay and the late-night Tampa radio. Soon I was asleep on the warm hood of my Chevy, the moon and the stars overhead with no particular place to go, and only a gentle searchlight crossing over the tip of the island to cut across the darkness.