White Shadow (25 page)

It was almost two a.m.

He knew the neighborhood well. As a beat cop, he’d walked the streets at night, from Fifth to Fifteenth, from call box to call box, talking to Sicilian women about the weather, or having a café con leche with the Cuban men who would sit on their porches late at night and read the paper by a single bare bulb. He’d played stickball with the kids, used good manners when addressing whores, and always gave the hoodlums respect until they crossed the line. Ybor was all about the rhythms. You knew the rhythms, and you’d know when the music didn’t sound right.

Wainright had gone by the Boston Bar two hours ago and had been told by the barmaid that Rivera was off. He’d also gone by The Dream, and to some greasy spoon where Rivera sometimes saw a waitress named Elizabeth Hernandez. Nothing. So Dodge had told Wainright to go home and get some sleep and he’d take over. And so here he was, drinking stale coffee and finishing off a cold Cuban sandwich he’d bought down at Brothers Café earlier that day.

The brothers had always taken care of Dodge from the time he’d first walked the beat in Ybor. They still kept a small marble-topped ice-cream table especially for him. When the other customers would leave, they’d talk in low voices about things they’d heard down at the Cuban Club or from their uncle who played dominoes at the Centro. But nothing on Charlie Wall. The brothers just shook their heads and shrugged:
The Old Man was killed. Who could say why?

Dodge started his car, windshield wipers beating across the glass, and drove slow past the casita, a dull glow from the porch light shining over a couple of empty concrete planters and rusting metal porch chairs. He kept on driving, and took several turns around Ybor, angling back to Columbus and Twenty-second and the Boston Bar. He found a vacant lot across Columbus and clicked off the ignition, window down, listening to the jukebox playing “Mona Lisa” deep inside the bar, and seeing a couple of negro women in red and blue sequin dresses and high heels flop out the front door and hang on to each other as they rambled down the street in a wobbly walk.

There was a big red button advertising Coca-Cola above the sharp point of the tricornered building, and under it red neon spelled out LIQUORS. Neon signs advertising Pabst and Schlitz shined in the big bank window, and another whore walked out onto the street with a bald fat man chomping a cigar, his arm around her, rubbing her shoulders and ass. Dodge leaned back into the car’s seat, checked the clock in the center of the Spartan console, and waited.

He had no interest in going home.

For a long time, he thought about being at the bar two years back and seeing Joe Antinori’s brains spilling out on that black-and-white tile floor and watching Mark Winchester and Sloan Holcomb going through the dead man’s pockets with smiles on their faces as the cameras took pictures for the papers. And he remembered sitting in this same car with Joe Antinori two weeks before his death.

That day they’d driven down to Leo’s Bar on Hillsborough, and Dodge drank coffee while Antinori drank two shots of cold Jack Daniel’s and laughed about getting busted in Kansas City that time when he was running dope for JoJo Cacciatore and Lucky Luciano. When he got tired of his midday drinking, he told Dodge he wanted to show him something, so they drove back to Ybor and parked not far from the Hav-a-Tampa factory, where they could clearly see a grocer named Pepe, who made more money selling bolita than eggs and Cuban bread, talking outside to two old beat cops in uniform. Antinori had smiled as he checked the cops’ arrival with his watch, while Dodge saw Pepe hand the men in uniform an envelope and two bottled beers. One of the cops turned up the beer, while the other, standing right there on the street below the cigar factory and in the plain sight of dozens of casitas, counted out the money in his stubby fingers and then looked like he was asking for more.

Dodge had felt his face flush and grabbed the door handle.

“Dodge,” Antinori said, laughing. “This is every day. It’s business. I can’t stop it. You can’t stop it. And if you keep trying, I want you to know you’re going to end up dead. Just like me.”

Dodge still remembered that pleasant smile on Joe’s face, at peace with the mechanics of Tampa and his fate and the way things would shake out.

And two weeks later, Joe was facedown on that checkerboard of linoleum, spilling all that blood out, Dodge thinking nothing else but how the hell can a man hold so much inside of him.

Dodge poured himself some more coffee in the dark car and yawned. A few minutes later, a wood-paneled station wagon, maybe a ’49 DeSoto, pulled in front of the bar and Johnny Rivera got out in a blue silk shirt and blousy white pants. He walked inside and disappeared for about ten minutes before coming back out with a man named Lopez who Dodge knew had been the catcher for a few years for the Tampa Smokers. Lopez disappeared, and Rivera waited outside and smoked, hand resting on the columns that supported the metal awning.

Then a car not unlike Dodge’s slid up Twenty-second and killed its lights. Rivera stubbed out the cigarette underfoot as the jukebox loudly played “Heartaches,” complete with the whistler and the rhumba beat. Dodge used his field glasses to look into the side windows of the car, and when he did the little globe in the car came on, illuminating Mark Winchester smiling and shaking Rivera’s hand as Scarface Johnny took a seat beside him.

Dodge nodded to himself, waiting until Johnny left the car ten minutes later, and watching the twin glow of Winchester’s taillights as the cop drove away.

LUCREZIA’S HANDS STILL SMELLED of aged tobacco leaves from Nuñez Y Oliva and had a faint brown discoloration that seeped deep into her fingertips and calloused palms. The blood she could wash off, but the tobacco would stay for many days. Her father, the pharmacist, would be ashamed of what she’d become in Ybor, but would more than understand the sacrifice. She’d taken jobs well below her family’s place in society, pleased men who were disgusting to her but knew things, and abandoned her country for Ybor City.