White Shadow (16 page)

A cigarette burned in an ashtray closest to us, and Dunn leaned back into his executive chair.

“I talked to Ed Dodge,” I said. “He gave me something.” They waited.

“Apparently, there was birdseed left all around Charlie Wall’s body.”

Martin took a few notes and then lit a cigarette, his eye already a little jumpy.

“They think it’s a message?”

“Maybe he had a bird.” I shrugged. “Dodge says he’s not really sure but seemed to want to get something out there just in case.”

Martin laughed. “Dodge has been watching too much TV. Is that all they have?”

“I know they brought in John Parkhill and Joe Diez.”

“Johnny Rivera, too,” Dunn said. “You knew about that, right?”

I shook my head.

“But you do know Rivera?”

“Some.”

“He was just a kid when I knew him. Charlie’s bodyguard. Saved his life once. You read my column today?”

I nodded. I hadn’t. I tried to avoid it.

“So that’s what you have? The birdseed? The man who talked? What did Pete Franks tell you? Was Charlie talking to any of his boys?”

“I haven’t heard anything.” I felt my face flush, and I looked down at my notes. I flipped through the reporter’s notebook, recounting what Dodge had told me about Charlie’s death.

“He was slashed ear to ear, his head battered. Throat opened with a five-inch gash. Forehead ripped with nine lacerations. And, oh—his skull was crushed.”

“With what?”

“They don’t know.”

“What did Dodge tell you about the birdseed? Did he really think all that phooey was important?”

“He did,” I said, looking back through my notes. “And his bed-covers were mussed. They think he’d retired for the night. Maybe reading. Get this—there was a copy of Senator Kefauver’s book and a copy of the
Times
.”

“Make sure you mention the
Times,
” Dunn said.

“Of course.”

“They know when he died?”

“Pretty sure Monday night.”

“Pretty sure?”

“That’s what they said. But Dodge is pretty keen on this birdseed thing. He thinks it’s some kind of trademark of the killer for singing about bolita or whatever. Maybe in the hearings.”

Martin laughed. “He didn’t say anything in those hearings except put up a comedy routine. Charlie Wall has never said anything incriminating about anything or anyone. He must have been tipping off the police or the sheriff’s vice squad.”

I nodded.

“You ask around,” Dunn said.

JOHNNY RIVERA lived in an old casita at the edge of Ybor City. The narrow house was painted robin’s-egg blue, with tired red shutters and a skinny little porch with two seafoam green metal porch chairs. The windows had been kept open overnight, and Fred Bender just had to squeeze his thick frame through the window and open up the door for Dodge and Buddy Gore. Dodge took off his straw hat when he entered and looked around the small parlor where Rivera kept a couple of folding chairs and a card table loaded with nudie books. One woman covered her breasts in playing cards and another held a horse whip. Topless, with black leather panties.

“Ain’t Rivera too old to jack off?” Gore asked.

Bender slid out of his seersucker jacket and carefully laid it across one of the folding chairs. “C’mon. You’re never too old to jack off.”

Gore nodded as if this was a truly philosophical insight and began opening kitchen cabinets and taking out drawers to look for hidden pockets. He pulled a plastic bag from his frumpy green checked coat and dumped all the knives from the cutlery drawer in it.

Bender began pulling up corners of the rug and sorting through two cardboard boxes advertising Black Jack gum. Rivera had made curtains from some old red sheets, and the house smelled of garlic and burned limes and some kind of heavy cologne coming out of the little bathroom. A leather shaving kit perched on the back of the commode.

“Did I tell you about what Duke’s been up to?” Bender asked.

“No,” Dodge said, checking the drawers in a chest.

“He won’t take a crap in our yard. Hates it. Won’t even take a leak. So he’s taken to running down by this lagoon we have and taking a dump on this rich guy’s lawn. Can you believe it? It’s like he’s making some kind of social statement.”

“You finding anything?” Dodge asked.

“No,” Bender said, now in the bedroom pulling up the edges of the mattress from an old steel bed that looked like it’d been lifted from some hospital. There were scrapes, maybe claw marks, on the old yellowed white paint on the headboard, and Rivera had kept a whole row—maybe a dozen or so—of two-tone shoes beneath a window and on top of one of those old-timey steamer trunks.

“Cheap shoes,” Bender said.

“We all can’t be as sharp as you, Fred.” Dodge smiled.

“I know,” Bender said. “It ain’t easy bein’ me.”

Bender wore French toe oxfords. Oxblood. Crisp white shirt, silver cuff links, and pleated seersucker slacks to match the jacket. Ruth—his wife—said his taste was going to break their family. But they ate and lived in a hell of a nice house over in Beach Park. Ruth was a damned beautiful woman, and for the life of him Dodge never understood why he stepped out on her.

“Hold on,” Dodge said, pulling out the nightstand and finding two long pocketknives and a .38 snub-nosed revolver.

“I got a shotgun in the broom closet,” Gore yelled. “And some shells.”

They bagged the evidence and walked out back to a little car garage where Johnny had parked a five-year-old DeSoto station wagon with ragged whitewalls. Most of the garage was filled with old tools and deep-sea fishing gear and more nudie books, twenty or so snapped-shut mousetraps, and a beaten-up bomber jacket. Bender wiped his hands on an old white rag lying next to some old equipment that looked like it came from a well.

Something caught Dodge’s eye. A brand-new Adirondack baseball bat. He made a loop from some narrow rope and slid it around the bat, lifting it up and into a plastic bag.

“Got you,” he said.

At the Boston Bar, they would find a Colt .38 Chief’s Special and a .32 Winchester revolver. Bender made himself a highball and called his wife.

And later his girlfriend.

Dodge helped himself to a cigar. “Can you get all this packed up and take it to the Feds?”

“Sure thing,” Bender said. “Where you going?”

“Baseball game.”

LUCREZIA FOUND her way east.

Rides from traveling salesmen weren’t hard to find. She’d only had to wait for a few moments, her thin yellow dress blowing against her deep brown legs, before a Packard and then a Hudson and finally a cherry red Thunderbird with the softest red leather she’d ever touched pulled over and drove for miles out into the country, the air smelling of orange blossoms and swamps, then deep into the backwoods, where the man in the Thunderbird tried to get her to continue with him down to Miami, promising her endless wine and the finest hotel she’d ever imagined. He seemed more concerned than anything about buying her new shoes. Not just any shoes, but soft little heels that would make her legs so good in that new dress he would buy her. She smiled at him and thanked him, and suddenly there was a dust cloud and the intense smell of swamps and she was standing by a row of junked cars by a small Esso station. No people. She could hear music in the garage. By the door to the front office, a mechanical clown waved to the little speck of red disappearing into the distant haze of bright orange coming from the west.

A little man with a drooping mustache emerged from the garage with his coveralls streaked in grease, holding a wrench and wiping his nose on a rag. He asked her what she needed, looking around her as if she could possibly hide an automobile.

“Where is the next town?”

“You’re here,” he said. His voice had that drawly sound of country people in America.

“Where?”

“Gibsonton.”

She asked if there was a restaurant nearby. She was hoping to find some food with the few dollars she had in her sack—she hadn’t eaten for more than a day—and perhaps find some work. Away from Tampa, but close enough to return when He arrived for her.

“You keep walking,” he said, scratching and popping a blister on his neck. “That’s the Fish Camp.”

She thanked him and heaved the sack over her shoulder, the man watching the little brown-skinned girl in the thin dress and big men’s boots walking into the dark of a Florida night. For three miles, the bugs drank on her sweat, and she swatted them away from her eyes. Big crabs—moving as if they were cockroaches—crawled and skittered into the cane by the side of the road. They edged and ate and swam, making rough, cracking sounds close to the road.

She believed she was lost—not seeing a single car—until she spotted the neon sign at the road’s bend. GIANT’S FISH CAMP.

She walked faster toward the glow.

All around the restaurant stood tiny little white cabins, with a sign advertising the motor court and fishing camp. The red sign burned VACANCY in neon, and she only noticed one car—a large black Buick—parked in front of one of the tiny white houses. She heard the clatter of pans and dishes coming from the back of the kitchen and the loud booming voice of a man and the soft voice of a woman answering. She knocked on the wooden screen door, and she heard a thud on the floor and a woman appeared below the latch of the door. The woman was only a few feet tall and walked on her knuckles, her lower body seeming to disappear into the floor with only a torso rocking off the ground. For several moments, Lucrezia could not speak, looking at the woman with soft ringlets of black hair and a pretty face but in some way seeming like a hallucination that burned and floated out of the edge of a half-remembered dream. Lucrezia opened her mouth.

“We’re closed,” the woman said.

Lucrezia nodded, feeling the emptiness of her stomach as she smelled the rich meat and soft bread cooking. The hiss and sizzle of meat sounded from deep into the kitchen, and before she could speak the woman looked up at her, rocking on her knuckles, her dress disappearing and wrapped up beneath her stomach, and tilted her head. She watched Lucrezia like that and Lucrezia looked out into the crushed-shell lot of the motor court for a while, thinking perhaps the woman spotted something behind her. But the woman was studying her, maybe even listening to her, even though Lucrezia could not speak.

The half woman looked at the tattered bag at her feet and the misshapen men’s shoes. She unlatched the screen door, the spring creaking and squealing open. A silence held between them, the only sound the loud buzzing of the neon sign and the bugs screaming out into the mangroves.

“Little girl, you need to eat,” the half woman said. She reached out her hand to her, and Lucrezia looked down at her and smiled. She took her hand and walked into the kitchen.

JACKSON HEIGHTS was a forgotten neighborhood on the east end of town; a redneck, blue-collar place where most of the headstone makers had their shops and where acres of land had been set aside for graveyards in green, tree-lined narrow roads as carved up and blueprinted as any of the subdivisions over by the bay. People called it the Cemetery District. It was the kind of place Dodge knew he’d get a call to on Friday afternoon, because Friday afternoon was beer time, when few insults got swallowed, and though men were too poor for guns they could carve up another human being with a box cutter or a pocketknife with a six-inch blade.