White Shadow (27 page)

I looked at my watch again, laid down two quarters and a dime, and walked out of Jake’s, with Jake still smiling at the folded newspaper in his hand, and didn’t look back. I turned the opposite way from the
Times
and continued up Franklin and glanced at a big window display of the latest Emersons and Zeniths all showing a monkey driving a go-cart, and then walked past a shoe shop and a liquor store before turning my head and seeing Baby Joe in that fresh-pressed suit, now with a gray hat on his head, following me.

I livened up the pace a bit, turning the corner at Madison and up toward the old courthouse, and then stopped at a clapboard newsstand, with the latest edition of the
Tribune
on clothespins, and a girlie magazine showing a buxom beauty in a leather bustier cocking her head coyly. I bought a pack of Black Jack gum and some Chesterfields and kept walking down Madison until I finally slowed in front of an office building, where I lit a cigarette.

I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw Baby Joe was about three feet from my face.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Sorry, Turner,” Baby Joe said, and shrugged. “Can I have a cigarette?”

“Sure.”

I handed him one.

“We okay here?” I asked.

“Good a place as any,” he said. “Jake’s is pretty much like advertising. Maloof has a big mouth.”

“You doin’ all right?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess. Just don’t make no sense.”

“What kind of questions are the cops asking?”

“They wanted to know what the Old Man had been up to and what we were doing on Sunday night.”

“Where were you?”

“We went to the cockfights with old Bill Robles. I told you that.”

“What else did they want to know?”

“They wanted to know how the Old Man locked up at night, and how he’d open the door. Hey, I didn’t tell them nothin’ about you or anything. Okay? They didn’t ask nothin’ about us bein’ friends and you and the Old Man. Ain’t their business.”

I nodded. “Thanks, Joe,” I said, my voice shaking. “They ask you anything about birdseed?”

He shook his head. “Saw your story.”

“Make any sense?”

He shrugged. “Not to me. You kill a man, you kill him. I know a lot of people who are in that line of work and you don’t leave no callin’ card. That’s like something out of the movies.”

“Then what was it?”

“I don’t know.”

We smoked for a while, and I was careful not to take out a notebook or anything because Baby Joe knew I was just fishing. That’s the way it had always worked with the Old Man, too. You didn’t interview for quotes, you just wanted them to lead you in the right direction. Baby Joe would do the same for other reporters, long after I’d left the cop beat and the
Times
folded.

“What about the money, Joe?”

He shrugged. “I guess that’s all he had.”

“Could it have been stolen?”

“They didn’t touch nothin’ on the man,” he said. “You know that. Whatever happened to Mr. Wall had nothin’ to do with money.”

“What about his businesses?”

“Ozzie Beynon and Franks asked me about that. They asked me a lot about something they’d heard about him having business over on the east coast or down in Miami with Ralph Reina.”

“Was that true?”

“No.”

He smoked some, and I thought.

“Mr. Wall liked you, Turner,” Baby Joe said. “He appreciated you coming around just to drink over at the house or meeting him down at The Turf and not coming by just when you needed something. He was a lonely man, and he liked to laugh and talk with young people.”

I looked up. “What happened, Joe?”

It was just such a simple, obvious question that it left us in silence for a while, with just the sound of the traffic out on Franklin Street and cars zooming past us on Madison.

“Honest to Christ,” he said, crossing his heart with the cigarette-free hand. “I’d tell you. I’d tell the police. I want this son of a bitch caught. Mr. Wall wasn’t doin’ nothin’ to nobody.”

“You have to be thinking what I’m thinking.”

He nodded.

“Johnny Rivera?”

“That goes back a long time, and I’ll tell you something I ain’t told the police. The Old Man had been calling up Johnny a lot to cuss him out. But I just don’t see him killing him is all. I know Johnny, and he’s a mean son of a bitch, but not to Mr. Wall.”

“Detectives gave him a lie detector.”

“They wanted to give me one.” He laughed in kind of a sad, tired way and stubbed out his cigarette under his polished shoe as if it was a hell of an effort.

“Seven thousand, seven hundred,” I said, more to myself.

He nodded.

“What did he spend his money on?”

“I don’t know,” Joe said. “He didn’t do much. Liked to watch TV and drink. He gambled, but I never heard him complain about losin’ much.”

“Where’d he gamble? In Ybor?”

“Old Man had been goin’ to Cuba a lot. He loved Havana. Took some special flight.”

I looked at him. “You tell the police that?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “They never asked.”

“You go with him?”

“No,” he said. “He liked to go alone.”

DODGE WOUND his way past a pack of kids on hand-painted bicycles, his arm out the window, listening to the sounds of Ybor like when he was a beat cop relying on his ears to tell him the moods of the place. Wainright was doing the same thing beside him, and he wondered if Al missed being a patrol cop like he did.

Wainright checked for his badge clipped to his belt and straightened the leather across his back and shoulders.

Both of them wore light tropical-weight suits and silk shirts with the collars over the jacket lapel.

“Let me take the lead,” Dodge said. “You want to make her comfortable. Okay? You don’t get anything from coming down hard. This woman just saw her husband’s head nearly sawed off. She’s scared and probably still in shock.”

“What do I do?”

“Watch.”

Dodge pulled behind another black sedan at Charlie Wall’s bungalow on Seventeenth Avenue, down near that iron gate in a long rock wall that surrounded the property.

Ahead of them, Bender and Gore got out of their unmarked sedan and wound their way between the cars while they slid back into their jackets and took out writing pads.

“We already checked most of these houses last week,” Gore said.

“Who’d we miss?” Dodge asked.

“Couple of the houses on Sixteenth.”

“Can you check?”

Bender smiled. “Sure thing.”

“Just got the FBI reports,” Dodge said.

Wainright looked over at him because it was the first time he’d heard of it. They’d flown the reports and evidence up to D.C. the day after the Old Man was killed with some kind of hope that it would lead to the killer. But Dodge said instead he’d just gotten back an empty report on the Teletype telling them they’d found no fingerprints and that the shoeprint couldn’t be identified.

Bender shook his head. “Shit.”

“Yeah,” Dodge said.

“What about the knives and guns we got from Rivera?” Dodge shook his head, too.

“Come on,” Gore said, sticking a toothpick into his little mouth. “When you ain’t got shit, back to base one.”

Dodge lifted up the tight iron clip that kept the gate closed, the big thick gate that read THE STEWART IRON WORKS CO., and he walked up to the front porch door and knocked. Wainright followed. There were no dogs, and he saw no lights on in the house.

A television played inside, and he heard laughter.

Audrey Wall opened the door in a hot pink housecoat and cocked her head at Dodge and Wainright as if she had no idea who they were.

Dodge introduced himself for the third time.

Wainright nodded and took off his hat.

“Yes?” she asked.

Dodge explained that he’d called her two hours ago, and she had told him to wait until seven when she’d be free.

She smiled dully and said, “All right.”

She just left the door open, and she walked back into the dark house, all that paneled wood and carved bookshelves making the room seem like something out of another century. A varnished cave with leaded-glass cabinet doors covering empty shelves. The only light came from a small black-and-white television on a metal stand, where
I Love Lucy
played loudly. Audrey Wall sat back down in a big green plaid chair and propped her feet up. Her sister, Abbie Plott, was asleep on a nearby sofa in a flowered housecoat. Snoring.

Wainright cracked a smile at Dodge, and Dodge squatted down near the old woman and said, “Ma’am, we really need to talk.”

“No.”

“Ma’am?”

“Shh. Not now.”

So Dodge and Wainright sat together on a long couch for the next twenty minutes and watched Lucy and Ethel in Hollywood finding their way down to the Brown Derby, where Lucy noticed William Holden at the next booth. Lucy stared at Holden so much that suddenly it was Holden who turned it around and leaned into the booth and would not take his stare off Lucy, making the TV audience laugh and Lucy Ricardo squirm.

When it was over, Dodge clapped his hands together and waited for Audrey to get up, but the old woman had not moved once during the show, her eyes dully trained on the glowing box, neither laughing nor moving now that the show was over.

“Ma’am?”

She turned and cocked her head at Dodge. Her little cat glasses had jeweled frames and dirty lenses, and suddenly her eyes brightened and she said, “Yes?”

“We need to talk about Charlie.”

She nodded.

Wainright turned off the television just as a commercial came on with a jingle for Texaco gasoline.

She stayed reclined and stared at the ceiling. Without the television, the room became even darker. Without being asked, Wainright walked to the front of the house and pulled the cord to open the blinds, loose slats of light jumping to life on the wood floors and covering Audrey’s face in stripes.

Abbie Plott stirred awake and wrinkled her nose like an animal just catching wind of something in the woods. She opened her eyes, straight at them, and then closed them again.

“Mrs. Wall, did Charlie have any good friends in the newspaper reporting business?” Dodge asked.

“He wanted to be friends to all of them. He had no enemies among them.”

“Was there anyone that was closer to him?”

“He was polite and wanted to be friends with all of them,” she said with a blank nod. “Mr. Wall was a true gentleman.”

Abbie Plott turned the TV back on and settled herself right in front of the screen.

“Do you recall any newspaper reporters coming to the house in the past six months or so?”

“They were from the
Times
and the
Tribune,
but I don’t know who they were.”

“They never gave you their names?”

“I don’t mean to be rude,” she said. “I told you I didn’t know who they were. They came from the paper, and Mr. Wall was polite and cooperative.”

“Have any of the Trafficante brothers been out to see Charlie?”

“Well, let’s see. Not for a long time,” she said. “Mr. Wall knew the old Mr. Trafficante very well, I believe.”

“His sons have not been out here in a long time?”

“No. Santo is very nice, as far as I know, always a gentleman in my presence, and so was his father.” She nodded to herself some more, as if agreeing with the thought or having the pleasant image of Santo Trafficante in her mind. The suit. The smile. The manners.

“How long has it been?”

“Since what?”

“Since Santo was out here?”

“Not since during the holidays.”

“Did he and Charlie argue?”

“No,” she said. “Would you like a milk shake with brandy and an egg?”

“Ma’am?”

“I have a little cold,” she said. “It’s medicine.”

“I would,” Abbie Plott said, turning away from the screen, then back at the television, dancing to a little jingle about Tootsie Rolls. She followed her sister into the kitchen.

Dodge nodded to the back hallway, moved by the kitchen, and told Mrs. Wall they needed to see Charlie’s bedroom again, and the old woman replied sweetly, as if Ed Dodge was looking for the restroom or a place to hang his hat.