White Shadow (22 page)

“You sticking around all day?” I asked.

“Till they finish,” she said. Her eyes didn’t move from her paper. “And you?”

“I got to go file what I have.”

I sat down on the edge of the judge’s bench, and she leaned back in the judge’s chair and plunked up her feet on the edge of the bench like an old-time crony and said, “Mr. Turner.”

“Miss Charles.”

“Funny work, ain’t it?”

“That it is.”

“You working tomorrow?”

“No.”

“I wish this goddamned rain would stop. I parked right next to a puddle and ruined a pair of brand-new shoes in this mess. Why does it always rain on funeral days? Is that some kind of law?”

“You want to have dinner?”

She laughed. I didn’t take that as a good sign.

I didn’t smile. She smiled and leaned into the judge’s desk and patted my face. “You are always so slow. You don’t ask a girl out to dinner on a Friday afternoon.”

“Well, I’ve been a little busy.”

“Sure. Sure.”

“How about steaks down at Leo’s or a movie at the Fun-Lan?”

“A drive-in. So tempting.”

I stood and tucked my reporter’s notebook in my back pocket. I noticed how the rain had taken out any semblance of a crease in my pants.

“I got a date,” she said.

My heart kind of slipped to my stomach—although I knew she had dates—and I answered back, “Oh.”

She patted my hand. “Maybe a drink, then.”

“I don’t want to ruin your date. Who’s it with?”

She shook her head. “That is it,” she said in her Red McEwen Cracker drawl. “That
is it
. No more questions.”

“Where?”

“Where what?”

“Where for that drink?”

“Where else? The Stable Room.”

“You buying?” I asked.

“Silly boy. Silly boy.”

She looked at me and smiled with one of those smiles where a woman can hold you with her eyes and it’s more intimate than making love or kissing or holding hands, one of those smiles where she can let you in so completely and honestly you just kind of hang there and don’t breathe.

“Okay,” I said, and winked.

It was a half-assed wink because my face kind of froze due to her smile, and I kind of felt stupid about that as I walked back to the
Times
to type out what little we now knew.

JOHNNY RIVERA sat on his porch with Henry Garcia as the evening sun was going down through the thick fronds of Ybor City palm trees. The neighborhood children were playing stickball in front of his place on Fifteenth while all their mothers were inside cooking beans and rice and roast pork while listening to Tito Puente on the radio and would soon be calling them inside. This was the time of the day when everything turned gold and orange in Ybor. It was Friday night in the little city, when the cigar workers and the janitors and the plumbers and electricians all got paid and would come home to those stickball-playing kids and mamas cooking dinner and bring home cash along with a pint of rum and they would listen to music and talk on the porch like Latin people do, just kind of soaking up that sun going down, and seeming to understand what it was about much more than the Crackers on the other side of the city.

“You told him what I said,” Johnny said. “Right?”

“Yeah, sure. I’m not stupid. We had drinks down at your bar, and then we closed up and went to Nick’s place.”

“But first I dropped off my car while you waited.”

“Sure. Sure.”

“And then had what?”

“Sandwiches and coffee at the White House. Just like it happened.”

“Did he ask you if you waited for me before we went to Nick’s?”

“Yeah.”

Johnny nodded and leaned back into the green metal chair on the front porch of his big casita, waving over to Armando, who lived across the street and whose wife Johnny sure wanted to screw.

“Shit.”

“What is it, Johnny?”

Johnny dropped his dumb smile and lit a Lucky Strike, cupping his hands over the match. He fanned out the match and squinted into the smoke. His shirt was black and white with red dice above the pockets. His lucky shirt.

“I just got some problems is all, and I want Ed Dodge to quit riding my ass. I took a fucking lie detector. What else does he want?”

“I thought you said you quit in the middle of it.”

“I finished answering all the questions about the Old Man.”

“Why they making you for this thing?”

Johnny leaned back in the metal chair, taking in a big lungful of smoke and using both hands to push back his long black hair. He stretched, and turned his head to one side to hear that relaxing pop. “You want to know why? ’Cause it’s easy. ’Cause me and the Old Man had a past going back to the days. You know. And Dodge is stupid and thinks that’s all there is in Ybor. He thinks we still have the juice.”

“You still got juice, Johnny.”

“Yeah,” he said, looking down the road to the west where that flat, hard orange light was bleeding down the street and over the tin roofs on the casitas. He looked at his Hamilton watch and knew he had to take over again at nine, and that he didn’t have much time to do what was needed.

He stood. “Thanks, Henry.” He tossed his cigarette into the bushes and then walked over behind a high bush and started to take a piss while drinking the rest of his Miller beer. He waved to two women who passed and they waved back, and he belched as Henry trotted off the porch, saying he’d stop by the Boston Bar after he got off at the Columbia.

FIVE MINUTES LATER, Johnny was in his station wagon and driving down Nebraska toward the Centro Asturiano, a goddamned big old four-story club of stucco and tile, where the Cubans had their bowling alley and dance hall and a theater and a big, beautiful onyx bar imported from Mexico. You’d swear you were in the Habana Viejo and not down in some Florida Cracker town where you couldn’t be in the whites’ country clubs and had to start your own palaces to be with your own kind, down the street from your own hospitals where you had your own insurance paid with a monthly due from the Centro.

He parked on the side of the building and trotted up the steps, wandering into a huge terrazzo hall—like something you’d see in a damned capitol building with brass and stained glass and gold statues—and then took the steps up to the third floor to the theater where all the big Cuban bands came to play. They were setting up for a show in the theater when he walked in and waved to a Cuban woman standing on a ladder helping attach a cutout yellow moon to some string. Johnny sat in the dark corner of the theater in a red velvet seat and listened to some punk kid—maybe ten years old, like he was when he met Charlie Wall—finding his way off-key to some old tune.

Johnny watched the stage and the woman in the back corner of the theater, thinking how goddamned small the seats were and how the old people who built this place must’ve been midgets. He lit another cigarette and combed his hair and tucked the comb back into the front flap of his dice shirt.

Johnny was beginning to feel the drunk burn off, and his head had a dull ache. He left the cigarette in his fingers and thought about Dodge trying to pull that Antinori shit on him again and trying to pull him into a mess he hadn’t been a part of for years. But he knew the thing with the Old Man wasn’t looking good, no matter what Henry Garcia had to say, because some two-bit Columbia waiter wasn’t going to get Ed Dodge and Fred Bender off his ass. He needed to come up with the girl, Lucrezia, quick if things turned real sour.

The kid on the stage kept banging out those off notes on the piano, and he kept thinking about Monday night. That space in time was going to kill him, that thirty minutes when he slipped off from Henry and before he got picked up to head over to The Dream. He was the one who’d locked the goddamned door after he found the Old Man like that, lying with his whole body spilled out of him, facedown in the carpet, Rivera’s shoe sticking in his blood, and that mirror catching his face as he turned to leave that big, quiet goddamned house where everything was still at one a.m. and still smelled of a messy death when everything inside you lets loose before the body goes into that rigid stillness.

Yeah, he was fresh on the floor, and yeah, he’d taken Charlie’s ledger from Charlie’s desk, and yeah, he’d run like hell back to Fifteenth and his casita, and he’d tossed the shoes into a plastic bag and changed his clothes and waited like that, chain-smoking and drinking a shot of rum, until Henry pulled up in his little yellow car and honked twice and told him to come on.

Muriel sat down beside him in the theater and pulled her hair up into a little bun on her head and said, “You think I should cut it, like this?”

“What?”

“Short. Like Audrey Hepburn.”

“How the fuck should I know?”

She gave a pouty look. “What’s wrong, baby?”

Man, she smelled good to Johnny, like fresh gardenias and olive oil and ripe sex, the tops of her full warm Cuban breasts spilling out from that tight pink top. Her brown eyes were as large as saucers and her voice kind of breathy and warm in his ear. “What’s wrong?”

“The girl. The girl you made me hire. Lucrezia. Where is she?”

“I don’t know, baby.” She played with the thick hair that grew at the nape of his neck. “She’s just my cousin.”

He grabbed her wrist and twisted it into his lap.

“Johnny.”

He put hard pressure into the little tendons in her smooth small wrist that he could encircle with his thumb and forefinger with ease and whispered to her: “Where is Lucrezia?”

“Ow. You’re hurting me, Johnny.”

“Scream and I’ll break the fucking thing.”

She looked into his eyes, her breathing staggered and jumpy with a deep hurt showing on her face, not from the pain, but because Johnny had broken some line that she never knew he could cross, understanding that Johnny felt pretty damned comfortable in that territory.

The kids onstage, maybe a half dozen, started singing a nursery rhyme in Spanish, something that Johnny remembered his mother used to sing to him, and then there was that banging of the piano and the girl’s hurt look, and maybe more than anything he knew that if he hurt her more she’d never give it up again in the back of the Boston Bar against all those cases of Lord Calvert with her skirt up around her chest, biting her lips and screaming deep into his chest.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He crushed his cigarette under his sharp-pointed patent leather shoes and just shook his head. “I’m in trouble. Lucrezia took something from me. From the bar, and I need it.”

She smoothed his hair and cradled him into her firm, large breasts. He put his hand on her knee. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ll ask around. It’s okay, Johnny.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, baby. Don’t worry.”

I WROTE A STORY for the Blue Streak about John Parkhill, Babe Antuono, Abbie Plott, and Audrey Wall being interviewed by Red McEwen, and a small color piece on Charlie Wall’s funeral (complete with the corny lines about the father teaching the gambler the ways of the world), typed up neat and tight and laid on Wilton Martin’s desk. Wilton read it—only one cigarette going this time, and one red sock to match the blue one—and then fed the story back through his L. C. Smith and delivered it to Hampton Dunn, who read it and rewrote the damned thing again, smiling all the while with his fingers working over the copy paper like a Swedish masseuse. By the time the final version was placed into the basket ready for the copyboy, I recognized only a few of my own words and my byline binding those quotes. Standard routine.

I ate lunch at the Old South Barbecue, made a few calls to the sheriff’s office and the police department (tunnel-visioned as hell on Charlie Wall and not imagining that an idiot would have the audacity to commit another crime the week the old kingpin and three Cuban cops died, it being Friday and all), but at almost four we got word there was some kind of damned standoff at a pawnshop on Skid Row.