White Shadow (20 page)

We all knew that. But in a town of Lazarras and Scagliones and Trafficantes and some other old men who remained nameless in black suits with hair growing out of their ears, talking in an old tongue, you never quite knew who Charlie had offended.

So on Friday, I found myself in the rain—because it always rained on funeral days in Tampa, not because it was a sad day but because it made it a real pain in the ass for reporters to stand outside and write down the color that we needed so badly without the ink bleeding right off the page onto the cuffs of our shirts as we squinted into a faraway sun while the water came down through loose scraggly oaks bearded in Spanish moss in the oldest cemetery in the city.

I knew Oaklawn because you had to park right near the stone wall to get over to the sheriff’s office to check the daily log of arrests, something you mainly did to find out if the mayor had a DWI or if a city councilman had been picked up on Skid Row for offering some cash to a B-girl.

Eleanor stood under a black umbrella far off from me—just one of about a hundred identical black umbrellas springing up like dark mushrooms that day after the service at J. L. Reed’s. The graveside was for the family, and there was Audrey Wall, looking bored as hell, and there was that other old woman who I’d heard was her sister from Alabama, and then there was John Parkhill and Babe Antuono from The Turf and Baby Joe, but then there were members of the Lykes and the McKays and those old pioneer Cracker families to whom the old criminal was so impossibly linked.

I’d taken several pages of notes at the service at J. L. Reed’s chapel off Bayshore and noted Reverend Warren L. Densmore reading from the Book of Common Prayer and his kind of hammy reading from the book of John:
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.”

These words were supposed to be some kind of patch job on the fact that Charlie Wall had been the biggest bootlegger and crime boss that Tampa had ever seen, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what old Charlie had learned about bolita, betting, and rum-running from his old man, the Civil War surgeon who’d helped trace malaria back to mosquitoes.

Charlie had been an original, and had told the other Walls and the McKays and the Lykes and all those fine pioneer types to go to hell. He found more enjoyment over in Ybor in the cathouses and gin joints and deep down in those tunnels than he ever would have at the Yacht Club making polite conversations.

And you had to love Charlie for that. You really did.

The black umbrellas all huddled around the Wall plot under those bearded oaks, and outside them and the cemetery, cars ringed the stone walls of Oaklawn. Buicks and Chevys and Hudsons and Nashes, most of them new and space-age, with bright chrome and words like
Dynaflow
written in scrawl on their trunks. Among all that turquoise and sunny yellow there were those dirty black cars where men in hats sat with windows that let cigarette smoke wander out through the slight cracks. The men had binoculars and notepads, noticing every soul who’d come to see Charlie off.

I turned from them that day in the rain and the sunshine, the umbrellas breaking up, and watched Audrey Wall stare straight ahead in those cat-eyed glasses, a slight smile on her face, exchanging pleasantries with the good old families who’d made a show for their kin. The little hat on her head was slightly askew, and she wore white gloves with her black dress.

Baby Joe shook the hand of an old gray man who held something metallic to his throat while he talked, and Baby Joe pumped the man’s hand about three more times before they parted.

And then there was Johnny Rivera—standing alone—away from the pack. No umbrella, hair flopped down in a wet mop on his face. He watched the crowd, dead-eyed, until they’d parted, and he moved in back of them, kneeling, his hair dripping into a point in front of his eyes as he stayed and watched two colored men in overalls filling up the hole.

I watched him. He stayed until they were done.

MORNING WAS biscuits and gravy made by the half woman who called herself Jeanie. In exchange for cleaning up the clapboard restaurant at Giant’s Fish Camp, Lucrezia was allowed to use a little cabin with a shower and a small washbasin. She awoke at dawn when light was just coming through the mangroves and the roach crabs she’d heard from last night lay dead on their backs in the morning sun as a dirty water spilled over them. She helped Jeanie clear tables and wash dishes, but the woman needed little help with getting up onto a stool to cook bacon or to reach for more flour for the biscuits she was making while a colored woman worked on a fish stew for lunch. At lunchtime, after Lucrezia had washed some of her things in the cabin’s washbasin, a long Cadillac pulled up beside the restaurant, and as she hung her underwear and shirts on a makeshift line in her room she watched the largest man she’d ever seen in her life emerge from the car and meet Jeanie on the back porch. The man stood twice as tall as the average man, with hands as large as skillets and feet like boats. He wore a blue shirt and khaki pants and a gray cowboy hat far back on his head.

When he reached Jeanie, he picked up the legless woman into his arms and hugged her, and she hugged him back—almost as a child would a father—and he placed her back in a delicate way on the porch. He pushed the cowboy hat farther back on his head and took a seat by her on the back porch of the restaurant, and they talked and laughed and smiled in a way that Lucrezia had seen in people who’d loved each other for many years.

Jeanie had told her that she could stay as long as she liked so long as she helped with the tables and the dishes and changed the sheets when tourists passed through Gibsonton on their way to Miami. She’d told Lucrezia about her and Al moving to the town when they retired from the circus years ago, and that many other circus workers had made a home here. When Lucrezia asked who, she was told about the Monkey Woman, and the Siamese Twins, sisters who sold oranges and guava from a roadside stand, and a man who Lucrezia had met at breakfast that morning who seemed quite normal but could mold his face like rubber and—Jeanie later bragged, with biscuit dough in her hands—that he could drive a railroad spike up his nose.

Lucrezia wrung out her stockings and shirt and hung them on the line. The wind blew bits of dust up off the beaten shells in the lot and around the little motor court. A new couple had moved into the third cabin, and they had spent most of their morning sleeping but now had come out and were asking for a photograph with the Giant, who smiled and showed a tin star on his shirt and rested his hand on the man, who barely reached the Giant’s waist.

Lucrezia took a seat on her bed and unfolded a napkin covering a biscuit and a piece of orange she’d saved from breakfast, and then, peering out into the lot, unwrapped the ledger she’d taken from Johnny Rivera the other night. She was glad to be away from Rivera and his games and cruelty, and his rough hands and rancid cologne. It was just as He had said it would be for the Movement and the way it had been for Martí.

Nothing is so easy.

As she heard the booming laughter of the Giant outside, a crisp American flag breaking and popping behind him, she thought about the men she’d shot and how she knew they’d find her and how there would be others. She thought about Johnny Rivera and his oily hair and how he would beat drunks that refused to leave his bar, knocking them senseless as she cleared off tables and pretended not to see, before going home and resting for three hours and then getting up again, heading to Nuñez Y Oliva, and then down to the docks and the streets of Ybor City to distribute tracts about the revolution and about taking back Cuba to anyone who would listen.

She sat on the edge of the bed, feet askew and knees locked together, and smelled the food from the restaurant and the dying crabs along the sandy beach of the bay and the sulfur from the factory down the road and thought how tiny everything felt and how much she wished she could return home.

Then she saw a huge belt buckle appear at her door and Jeanie being set on the small porch. Jeanie wandered in on her knuckles, swinging her torso back and forth, and smiling at her. “This is my husband.”

The man bent down at the waist and kept his head ducked as he entered the room.

He smiled and opened his hand that could easily swallow Lu - crezia’s head, but it was warm and soft and light as she took just the tip of his fingers.

“OK AY,” OZZIE BEYNON said. “This is what we’ve got.”

There was a blackboard on a wooden frame behind him that he used to draw circles with chalk, connecting names with other names like the whole thing was a big championship football game. And that kind of made Fred Bender, dressed in a charcoal gray suit with white silk hankie, smile over at Buddy Gore. Ed Dodge noticed it, too, until Franks coughed and they went back to paying attention. Ole Oz was loving it, and maybe it did seem a little funny with the former Tampa U star—who’d never been a patrol officer—to be running the show like he was Jack Webb. The entire group of detectives was in black and gray and their best shined shoes for surveillance on the funeral. It all seemed formal and uptight, like a church service, and it was Friday and stuffy and humid in the office and Dodge wanted to get out of the black suit jacket, roll up his sleeves, and get back to work.

Dodge stifled a yawn until Franks took over. Oz walked behind Dodge and whispered in his ear. “Something goddamned funny?”

“No, Oz. Was that a double reverse you were running up there?”

Some of the detectives laughed, but you can bet that Sloan Holcomb and Mark Winchester didn’t even crack a smile, as Beynon nodded at Dodge and said: “Keep it up and you’ll be back to scraping the shit off the jailhouse walls.”

Beynon took a seat atop his desk over by Winchester.

Dodge had never liked Winchester. On his first day on patrol, Dodge had asked the sergeant why the black cops had to stand in the hall and didn’t take roll call like everyone else.
Because,
the sergeant said.
They’re not
. The next day, someone—he was positive it was Winchester—taped the words NIGGER LOVER on Dodge’s locker.

The room was smoky as hell, and some of the men ashed their cigarettes into the open skull of a human head that had been around the detectives’ bureau since anyone could care to remember. A back window was open and Ozzie’s little marijuana plant, which he showed schoolkids when they took a tour of the detectives’ bureau, shuddered in the wind.

“We hope to have something back from the Bureau by Monday,” Franks said. “They had their scientist people up early just to take on this case. They have the fingerprints, the piece of carpet with what we think is a footprint, the birdseed—or whatever the hell it is—and the baseball bat. And we sent up Rivera’s guns and knives this morning.”

“They’ll be clean,” Dodge said.

“People slip,” Franks said.

Dodge shook his head. “Rivera is too smart. He showed up to take a lie detector plastered out of his mind.”

“You didn’t give it to him?” Franks asked. “Please tell me you didn’t.”

“I did, so I could ask him some more questions. Find out more about where he was on Monday night.”

“Any change?” Franks asked.

Dodge shook his head.

“What about you, Fred?”

Bender folded his arms across his body and tucked his hands up under his large biceps. He sucked a tooth, his hair shining with Brylcreem, and said, “We got Rivera saying his alibi is Nick Scaglione, who is none too clean with his family.”

Scaglione’s dad, Salvatore, was one of the Sicilians, one of those old men who lay back and ran the show while playing bocci ball or raising tomatoes or drinking Chianti or whatever those violent old men from the old country did when not directing men to beat or maim or shoot.

“I just think that doesn’t look too good,” Bender said. “Nick was the last to see the Old Man alive.”