White Shadow (24 page)

A hand was on my shoulder and I brushed it off. And it was there again, and someone was calling me “buddy” and then “pal,” and I found one of the ushers pointing at the movie screen that had long since gone black, and the amorous couple had disappeared.

“Yeah. Yeah.” The only words I could think of as I got to my feet and grabbed my hat that had fallen onto the floor and into a pile of spilled popcorn.

It’s a strange feeling entering a theater in light and coming out in dark, people filing past you in their Friday-night clothes and teenagers on dates and old men with tattered pants counting out money in their hands to see a picture show alone.

I moved through them and under the marquee, not even looking back to Skid Row to see where the man had been shot by Mark Winchester because I knew I’d just find emptiness out there. Moments clicking off and vanishing.

I wandered over to Florida and stopped in the Sapphire Room at the bottom of the Floridan Hotel, a swanky little place that a buddy of mine called the Surefire Room because, well, just because. I sat at its horseshoe-shaped bar and watched the Palma Ceia country clubbers and the yachtsmen and their pretty wives or girlfriends in their Friday-night clothes and rested my elbows on a padded bar and ordered my first whiskey sour of what would be about ten that night. I left a fat tip that the bartender pocketed, and I turned and listened to a nice little combo playing out some bar jazz, nameless tunes that just were supposed to make you happy enough to drink.

I wasn’t there long before a drunk woman ran into me and put her arms around my neck, pronouncing me the most ordinary-looking man she’d ever seen.

“I love ordinary men.”

“Wonderful.” I turned back to the bar.

“I’m not ordinary,” she said.

“Why, no, you’re not.” She wasn’t. She was a dark, little pixie of a girl with that boy-short hair that women believed made them look like they were Parisian or Audrey Hepburn, and a blue sequin dress that was just a bit over the top for the Surefire Room. She had big eyes and bigger false eyelashes, but a fine little fanny.

She pouted her lip and turned to the bartender for another martini and kicked up one of her legs in expectation of more gin. The girl got her drink, held it in a stretched hand and an elbow tucked into her side, and sipped the gin as if just a simple sample was all she needed and she wasn’t already sloshed.

“Are you going to tell me your name?”

I did.

And she smiled. “That’s a nice name.”

“No fault of my own.”

“Excuse me?” The band had started to play a more up-tempo sound and people had started to dance, and she glanced at me with those big eyes over the drink. “What do you do?”

“I’m a newspaperman.”

“How exciting.”

But I wasn’t listening to her. I was watching over her shoulder, a little alcove beyond the metal railing where a man and woman were talking, and for a moment I believed my day had been too long and hard or someone had slipped a mickey into my whiskey sour. I walked past the girl (she rabbit-punched me with a light push) and through the dance floor, past the men with the Brylcreem and the buzz cuts and the double-breasted suits and the doctors and lawyers and professionals who were wound up so tight that just a drop of gin or Canadian whiskey could send them to the moon.

The air smelled like Brut and English Leather and raw desperation.

I stood in the middle of them all, my drink in my hand, my Hamilton ticking off the seconds, waiting for the time to see the Eleanor that I saw in my mind. But there she was, not walking in late from the
Tribune,
not gaining that CinemaScope entry compliments of Mr. Tony Kovach, but laughing while a gawky man in a blue suit with a double chin and a low hairline kissed her neck.

Your ears go deaf at moments like that, even when a trumpet is blaring and a man is singing his heart out while playing the piano and drinks are clicking and the Friday-night world is having a hell of a time around you.

You only hear the clock, that fast click on your watch that seeps through your skin and into your blood and pulses into your ears.

She saw me.

I think.

Drink caught in her hands, a smile caught midstride on her lips.

But I came up for air, out of the water where I’d been trapped, and turned and walked back out onto the street. There were lots of bars and friendly places and people that I knew and who liked me and plenty of whiskey sours and other fine liquors to wash some things from my mind.

And so that’s what I did.

That’s how I came upon the man who had no voice but spoke to me about Charlie Wall, my mind pickled and raw and broken and not sure if he was a hallucination, too, or truly a person who was telling me the truth from the past.

I BELIEVE IT was the eighth whiskey sour when I first met W. D. Bush. Or maybe it was the tenth. I’d gone down to the Stable Room, my comfortable little hole on the ground level of the Thomas Jefferson Hotel—or the TJ, as we called it back then—and sat at the bar. I was still fuming over that double-chinned low-browed son of a bitch who was kissing Eleanor’s neck. When a woman hurts you in that kind of way, it’s not something you can neatly scrape to the side of the plate for later digestion but instead it becomes an ill, spicy thing that feeds into your head until you get that tenth whiskey sour in you and perhaps roam the streets until you sober up enough to drive home.

I believe W. D. Bush noticed me before I noticed him. But when I noticed him, I had the feeling that this was what he’d been waiting for, and the man—maybe sixty and leathery and big-eared and -nosed in a suit so black it looked like a moving shadow—took up the bar stool next to me. I’d seen him. I knew him.

And then it came to me as he sat down and ordered a whiskey. “Nice and neat.” His voice cool, brittle, and aluminum, coming from what looked like a little radio he held at his throat. He turned to me, shadow-suited and black-hatted, and smiled at me, placing the device to that scarred geezer throat, and saying, “Fine funeral.”

The funeral. The man talking to Baby Joe.

“Yes, sir.”

The room was all red now and dim, and men in their thirties sat in wicker furniture talking about the war or sex or both. W. D. Bush was an apparition, and his voice was so odd in my head that I looked around me to see if I wasn’t alone and had simply dozed off again. Everything so ethereal and red and hazy. Light with a kind of thickness to it.

“Were you friends with Charlie Wall?” I asked.

The device placed to the throat. “Yes.”

The piano was so light and underscored that I could hear the man pretty clearly, and the Stable Room was a place where people came to drink and talk or to be alone with themselves. And the line of bar, from me to the old man to out the door, was pretty much empty.

The front door opened wide and let in spring breezes from the river that smelled of new flowers planted on Franklin Street and rotting meat from the Switchyards.

“How did you know him?” I tried to keep an evenness in my slurring voice. I hated being drunk. I hated not being in control, and I was feeling fuzzy as hell.

“Tampa detective,” he said, “retired,” and reached into his wallet, one of those old-fashioned kind, big and thick from when money was larger, and pulled out a card. W. D. BUSH. TRAVELLING DETECTIVE. ROYAL AMERICAN SHOWS.

“The circus.” I smiled.

“For the funeral,” he said, metallically enunciating. “I came back.”

I nodded. And drank more.

He lit a cigarette and pulled in some smoke. In the reflection in front of us, I watched him cover his throat with his hand as still, gray smoke leached out through his laced fingers. There was a green neon clock above the booze bottles showing 11:30 and advertising WDAE radio, and I noticed the second hand click off with great interest. I glanced up again at the mirror and saw a skinny, balding kid with a straw hat by his elbow and a drink he could not afford in his hand. I saw his tawdry suit and his dead father’s eyes and numb look on his dumb face, and by him, I saw the shadow stubbing out the cigarette, eyes hooded deep with creases black and tired. He was watching me watching him, and hearing everything and seeing everything and taking in everything in the bar, from the song Tony Kovach was playing to the man laughing like a mule by the phone booth in the back corner, tired of being this way and wanting to return to being a normal man.

I smiled at him in the mirror. He didn’t smile back, but in the very few minutes I ever knew W. D. Bush I knew he wasn’t a man who smiled often.

He told me a little about what had happened in ’39 and his trip to the World’s Fair in New York, and later finding those bank robbers in Havana who’d tried to kill Charlie Wall, and his personal correspondences with Mr. J. Edgar Hoover in which W. D. Bush called the would-be assassins “men who tried to take the life of one of our most prominent citizens.”

I recognized W. D. Bush not as a good man, but as a man who had been everything the world had expected him to be in his time.

“I told them,” he said.

The bartender, Charlie or Marty—or what the hell—laid down another whiskey sour.

“Told who?”

“The detectives.”

“What? What did you tell them?”

“It’s not easy.” He laid down the contraption and shot back the rest of the whiskey.

I waited.

He spoke again: “Things are not easy. They don’t know Charlie. They believe it’s John Rivera or Joe Diez, the small boy. They don’t know. That is easy. Things are not easy.”

“Who do you think it is?”

He smiled. “I must get back,” he said, the frequency of the voice box shooting up and down. “Midnight train. A show in Savannah.”

I nodded. “But wait. Wait, wait, wait.” You repeat words a lot when you’re a little high. “Who? Who is it?”

“Message.”

“What?”

“A message. Too personal. The killing.”

“From who?”

He shrugged in the red light and grinned like a satyr. “Nothing changed. Everything the same from before.”

“An old enemy?”

“Oldest kind,” he said, his words breaking. “In this town.”

“Who?”

“Not who,” he said, laying his money on the table. “How many.”

And he hobbled to the door, his shoulders stooped and hat worn down deep and crushed into his eyes. He stopped at the door and observed himself in a mirror by the coatrack. He stood a little taller, fixed the bill on his fedora, and hobbled out into the darkness.

I paid a few moments later and tried to find him.

I wanted to know. I’d heard his name, the former chief of detectives. And here he was with me and talking in codes and riddles about the death of the Old Man. I saw a dark figure way down on Franklin walking toward Maas Brothers and broke into a drunk, wobbly run down the street, but when I stopped and looked, the figure was gone, and it was midnight and a white convertible Chevy blew past me. A drunk girl hung off the back, almost squirming out onto the trunk, begging me to come with her.

But she was gone, too.

And so I walked.

And I thought about the man with no voice and about Eleanor and about Charlie Wall, and at two a.m. I ended up at a bar for drunks and derelicts called The Hub. I had switched to straight whiskey, and I smoked a dozen or so cigarettes as an old woman with hair bleached a high white and eyes coated in blue frosting danced with two men who hadn’t shaved or bathed for days. They groped her and felt for her in the late-night smoke as Dean Martin and Nat King Cole sang on the jukebox, making the whole twisted, complicated thing sound so easy.

YBOR CITY was the kind of neighborhood where everyone noticed a dull black ’53 Ford parked along those skinny streets and an Anglo sitting alone in the driver’s seat smoking a cigar and listening to the radio. Some skinny kid with a big mouth or some old Cuban lady in a flowered housecoat would get on the phone—or hell, just yell from her window—and pretty soon everything was blown. But Dodge waited it out anyway, down on Fifteenth, about a block away from Rivera’s casita, while he drank coffee from a metal thermos and listened to the radio in the rain.