White Shadow (14 page)

“They come for you?” Johnny asked, as he zipped up his fly and then moved over to the basin to wash his hands and face and neck of the jail grease.

“Johnny?”

“No. Santa Claus.”

Scaglione put the brush back into a plastic bucket. His eyes pale and without any smarts behind those black-framed glasses.

“Did they?”

“Yeah, they came by last night wanting to know about the Old Man.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“What I told you.”

“And what was that?”

“You know,” Scaglione said, tucking the bucket on a slanted shelf over by the urinals. “That I seen him drunk and stuff and took him home.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“They ask about me?”

Scaglione looked up at the ceiling and then back at him. “No, Johnny. They didn’t ask nothin’ about you. Well. Maybe. Yeah, they asked if you was still the Old Man’s driver.”

Johnny snorted and began to dry his face with the cloth from the towel machine. He looked into his eyes in the narrow little mirror on the machine and listened to his voice as his eyes looked back, bloodshot and tired. “I need a drink. Line ’em up.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong,” Johnny said. “Just do what I say.”

“Listen, Johnny. I don’t like that cop, Dodge, much. He wants to make us for this, you know.”

“We didn’t do nothin’.”

Scaglione nodded. “You want that drink?”

“That’s all you need to think about, Nick.”

“You tryin’ to buy some time?”

“Sure.”

“Then what?”

“Then I go back to the cops.”

“What about the girl?”

“Lucrezia? I’ll take care of her later.”

They walked out into the bar, where the front door was open and a car rambled past. Scaglione laid down a shot glass and some Bacardi and began to cut up limes and lemons and put them in a porcelain bowl. He had that same dumb, hangdog expression on his face, like if Johnny said it was okay, it was okay. But Johnny knew things were falling apart, and if only he could get through the day—

He took the shot. Poured another.

“I used to like music,” Johnny said. “But now it makes my ears bleed. Rock ’n’ roll. These kids ain’t got no class.”

“You miss the old days, Johnny?”

Johnny didn’t answer, just poured another shot of Bacardi and listened to the sound of the knife running through them limes and down into the board, and that cutting and peeling was kind of making him sick right now.

“Jimmy Longo called yesterday,” Scaglione said, like the thought was just coming to him. “From Cuba.”

Johnny nodded. Poured another slug.

“You know anything about the Old Man talking to some newsmen?”

BABY JOE DIEZ was waiting for Red McEwen when he walked inside his office that morning, and the state attorney quickly nodded him past his secretary and through his door. They sat and talked about the weather and raising cattle, and how it was a real shame that the Tampa Smokers had folded last year because they both loved going to the ballpark and had seen each other there on several occasions. Red’s secretary brought in a warm mug of coffee for Baby Joe, and Baby Joe thanked her and called her ma’am and didn’t even look at her ass jiggle as she walked away.

Red made some phone calls, and it sounded like Captain Pete Franks would be on over, and then Red made some more phone calls. For a while, Baby Joe felt kind of invisible, but it gave him time to look at Red’s office—all paneled in wood and filled with photos of football and baseball and plaques and all that. Baby Joe had always liked Red. Didn’t matter where he’d seen him, Red always spoke like they were old friends from church.

“Joe, we’re going to keep this thing real casual,” Red said.

“You gave us a statement yesterday and came on in today like we asked. Although I didn’t expect you this early. We just want to go over a few more things with you. Things that came to us late last night and after we left Mr. Wall’s house.”

“The funeral is tomorrow,” Baby Joe said, looking down at the carpet.

Red nodded. “I heard.”

“There’s going to be a ceremony over at J. L. Reed’s chapel. Just a short one, and then Mr. Wall is going to be buried next to his father at Oaklawn. You know he really was proud of his father. He was some kind of doctor in the Civil War.”

Red nodded again, and Captain Pete Franks—slight and brown and dressed in a brown suit and blue tie—walked on in and took a seat. The secretary followed him in and handed him a cup of coffee, then asked Joe about a refill.

“No, thank you, ma’am.”

“All right, Joe. Just a few things. Okay?”

Franks leaned forward, taking a sip of coffee. Cars bleated their horns like goats outside the Hillsborough County Courthouse, men hustled around downtown looking for parking spaces to get up to the top level and kiss their boss’s ass. Men who’d fought wars and killed other human beings were now being led around like cattle. That wasn’t for Joe. No way.

“Joe?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When did you hear what happened?” Franks asked in the silence. A few horns beeped in the distance, creating a steady beating rhythm, as if all the cars were working together to make music or just being pissed off.

“Yesterday. Just yesterday.”

“Were you surprised?” Red asked.

Baby Joe nodded and fixed his wide, red Hollywood-style tie back into his golden clip. He placed his hands on his knees and looked across at Red McEwen, wanting to catch the man’s eye, knowing if he did that the man would listen because that was the kind of guy Red McEwen was. He knew that if you told Red something—whether it was good or bad, something he wanted to hear or something he didn’t—that if you caught his eye, he’d listen.

“Red, I want you to know—from my heart—that I loved that old man. That’s what I come in here to tell you. I know what you guys think of me, because of my past and how I used to get in trouble when I was a kid and a young man, but that’s not me anymore. See, me and the Old Man just got tired of all that. Sure, we drank a bit; he was too old to chase women but liked to look plenty. We played bolita and bet the fights. You should know we were betting the other night. We were betting the hell out of this tough old black bird named Cock’s Walk, and he tore the hell out of this red bird, and that’s what I thought about when I closed my eyes last night. That old man was more proud of some rooster than he was proud of another human being. He was drinking rum out of a flask with old man Robles and having a hell of a time.”

Baby Joe realized he hadn’t been breathing the whole time he said all that.

“We know how you felt about Charlie,” Franks said, touching his shoulder. “We just want to get to what happened. It was a pretty nasty thing, you know.”

“I loved that old man. I loved him like a father. More than a father. I got a lot of love for him, you know. I wouldn’t have harmed a hair on that man’s head. I would’ve never.”

Red stood up and walked away, and that didn’t make a lot of sense until Baby Joe realized his face was all wet, which was something he hadn’t felt since he was a child. The last time he’d felt anything like that was after a fight—maybe fifteen years back in Ybor City. He’d had a knife stuck in his side but hadn’t known it until he was driving like hell away from that bar and found himself wondering why his side was all soaked.

He guessed it was like that.

“What about Johnny Rivera?” Red asked.

Baby Joe clasped his hands together and rocked a little bit in thought. “I know that’s what you guys were thinkin’ if you wasn’t thinkin’ about me. But you know, I think Johnny has a lot of love for the Old Man, too. Ask him. He couldn’t have done nothin’ like that after all Charlie Wall did for him. Back when he was a kid, Johnny didn’t have nobody.”

“Was Mr. Wall in the habit of opening the door late at night without taking precautions?” Red asked.

Baby Joe shook his head. “Mr. Wall was real careful about that. He’d always look through that peephole, and if he couldn’t see you that door didn’t open.”

“Always?” Franks asked.

“Always.”

Red McEwen walked over to a long bank of blinds and pulled the cord to shut out the light. The room seemed more quiet and cool now, and Baby Joe wished he could take back the crying thing and had a sudden impulse to look over the desk at that yellow pad of paper and see if Red McEwen had written down what happened.

“We thought maybe you could help us with this,” Franks said. “Do you believe what happened to Mr. Wall came about because of the killings that happened several years ago here in Hillsborough County?”

Baby Joe looked away, “I can’t tell you nothin’ about that, Red. Me and Mr. Wall just talked about politics.”

MY WINGTIPS made clicking sounds on a big terrazzo map of Hillsborough County on the first floor of the courthouse, walking past hustling lawyers with hard black briefcases and secretaries looking beautiful and determined and holding armloads of briefs. I was just a boy with an out-of-style necktie, baggy pants, and heavy, dull shoes in need of a shine. But somehow the notebook in my back pocket made me feel important, and I enjoyed saying my name with
“Times”
following behind it, giving it weight.

As I took a turn, right down at the first floor with that long bank of telephone booths, not far from where the blind league sold coffee, I saw Ed Dodge—goddamned Ed Dodge—talking to a woman in dark stockings and bright yellow blouse with a gold pen.

Dodge was in a khaki suit and blue shirt and holding a cigar in the side of his mouth. His blue shirt collar lay splayed over his jacket lapels.

I wandered on over and inserted myself between their smiles, and the woman looked down and then away and said she really had to be going. Dodge turned to me with a frown because he knew me from crime scenes as that pesky kid who always got in his way. He had had to listen to my questions when some punks with greasy white T-shirts (honest to God, the actual APB) ripped off the Fun-Lan Drive-In with Friday night’s take. The movie?
Night of the Hunter
. First run. Bad boy Mitchum.

He tilted his head. No hello. No witty remark.

“Hello,” I said. “Nice day, isn’t it?”

“Sure thing,” he said. “Go ahead and ask it, Turner.”

“I just wanted to say hello. Talk about the frustrations of today’s legal system.”

He turned to leave.

“You going to go call the
Tribune
?”

He stopped.

“Why would you say that?”

“C’mon. Everyone knows that Eleanor Charles has you beat.”

“Nice.”

“Come on. Give me a break on one thing. Listen, if I don’t have anything new, I might just get fired, and my job is crummy and all that, and I don’t make much money. But I kind of like eating.”

He stood there for a moment. He watched a woman pass. Dark woman. A Cuban girl who switched and swayed with a bottom independent of her body.

“The house was locked. Every door and every window. The shades were drawn.”

“I know, I read the paper, too.”

“Whoever did this also was able to slip by Charlie’s dogs. That shows either great stupidity or someone the dogs knew.”

“I read that, too.”

I waited.

Dodge said: “Birdseed.”

I waited some more.

“We found birdseed at the crime scene, and for the damned life of me I can’t make sense of it. Maybe some kind of message.”

I nodded and wrote it down, waiting for him to say more.

“I’d like to get something in the paper about it. Maybe someone could help us.”

“A message?”

He leaned close to me, maybe about a foot from my ear, and smiled and waved at some attorney in a blue suit clutching a paper under his arm. “Hello,” he said. “Maybe Charlie was shooting his mouth off to someone. The birdseed was because he was singing to someone, and we know it wasn’t a cop. So if it wasn’t us, then who?”