White Shadow (3 page)

“Get out of town.”

Charlie shook his head and motioned for another drink. “You miss it?”

“What?”

“Running bootleg hooch and rum and all that. All that business.”

“We made a lot of money back then. Prohibition was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Mr. Charlie Wall, King of Tampa.”

Charlie laughed at that. He ate some peanuts at the bar. The jukebox had gone silent, and it began to rain and Charlie could see the water tapping against the glass glowing from the neon beer signs.

“No.”

“Sir?”

“I don’t miss it. I don’t miss running hooch off Honeymoon Island or having to truck over hundreds of Cubans at election time or getting shot at every time I opened my front door.”

“That happen a lot?”

“So many times—” Charlie said with a wink. “That I don’t even remember.”

A few salesmen types walked in from the drizzle and sat at a back booth. They ordered beers and steak sandwiches, and Babe called to the little barmaid who’d been sitting in the kitchen filing her nails and watching a show called
People Are Funny
with a bunch of gags and pie-throwing.

When Babe started wiping down the bar, Charlie grabbed his hand and said: “Always the goddamned Italians. They think it’s Sicily over here and they scare the Cubans senseless. But let me tell you something, I’m glad Santo Trafficante is dead. He was a reckless, no-brain Wop, and his son is the spitting image. Let him have it. He can have the whole lousy town.”

The men from the back booth looked over, and Babe’s face flushed a bright crimson. He slid his hand from under Charlie’s and walked over to the jukebox.

He dropped in some more dimes and turned off the barmaid’s TV show.

Charlie paid his tab and got back his twenty broken into a ten and two fives. He laid down a five for Babe, as was the custom.

“Mr. Wall, you want an umbrella?”

He shook his head and stumbled out onto Jackson Street, nearly getting run over by a brand-new Chevy Bel Air with whitewall tires. The car honked at him and slowed as it passed, a man calling him an old drunk. But Charlie dismissed the bastard with a wave and wandered down to Franklin Street, where he knew you could window-shop at night. You could watch all the beautiful televisions behind the glass lighting up the puddles on the sidewalk, and there were mechanical toys that jumped and played and barked. Down at Maas Brothers department store, a plastic woman served dinner straight from a brand-new GE oven to a smiling plastic man at a dinette set.

He thought about the days when the streets were made out of bricks and all you could hear was the
clip-clop
of horse hooves and the bell from the trolley. There were saloons and fistfights and chickens scratching in the mud while rich men tried to make their way in the sand with motorcars.

Another car honked its horn, and some teenagers in a convertible laughed at him as he teetered to the curb and found purchase on an old streetlamp.

Charlie fell to his knees and vomited.

Soon, the rain stopped, and the steam heated by the asphalt broke and scattered like smoke on Franklin Street, and Nick Scaglione found Charlie wandering, sauntering, down by City Hall. The old city clock chimed.

“Mr. Wall, are you okay?”

Nick was a slack-jawed kid with wild hair and a pudgy face who ran a bar for his old man. His father was one of the old Sicilians who’d helped edge Charlie out of the rackets years back when they took down Jimmy Velasco.

Nick walked Charlie to his bar—The Dream—and poured a few more highballs, and that made him feel good. A few times he tried to call Baby Joe but didn’t get an answer, and he wondered why he hadn’t heard from him since yesterday, when they’d watched that cockfight in Seffner with old Bill Robles and ended up eating
ropa vieja
at Spanish Park.

Halfway through one of the highballs, Charlie couldn’t stand it anymore and called Johnny Rivera at home, but got his girlfriend, and he cussed a storm about Johnny being a no-good bastard and sorry son of a bitch who had no honor or respect for everything he’d given him.

Charlie slammed down the black phone receiver on the bar and sat for a while in silence, breathing hard out of his nose and downing another drink.

“To hell with them all.”

“Who?”

“You goddamned know who.”

Nick soon offered him a ride, and he took it.

While he opened the door, Nick made a big deal about borrowing his brother’s station wagon and not having Mr. Wall ride in his old jalopy truck, making a to-do about how important Mr. Wall still was, and, for a few moments, as Nick drove, Charlie forgot about being alone at The Turf with the rain and the women who smiled out of pity.

He didn’t talk, only drummed his fingers on the armrest and watched as the building lights went black and the streetlights grew thin down by the channel and the rain tapped across the station wagon’s big, broad windshield while they rolled down Nebraska and past the tourist motels blazing with their promises of COOL A/C and TELEVISION and POOL. Nick wound the station wagon into Ybor, and they passed the cigar factories and the casitas, down to Seventeenth and Thirteenth and Charlie’s big, wide-porched bungalow of his own design.

People had told him a long time ago to live over with all the other Anglos in Palma Ceia, near the golf courses and neat little houses where old enemies and those with grudges would never go. But he had two big Dobermans and a bunch of nosy neighbors, and had been living on Seventeenth Avenue so long he couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

“Mr. Wall?” Nick asked as he let him out. “Can you get in all right?”

Charlie dismissed him with a wave, and stumbled through his iron gate and the night to his front porch. His dogs barked for a moment—stirred from their sleep—and he unlocked his door and punched on the lights.

In the kitchen, he poured out food for his dogs; they ate, and then he let them back outside in the rain that had started again.

The screen door slammed shut and let in pleasant sounds of the night, and he listened to the patter and some orchestra music coming from a neighbor’s radio. He undressed and put on his pajamas and a robe. He placed his well-worn brown slippers by the bed before sinking into the pillow and reading a bit from a book called
Crime in America
by Estes Kefauver.

Then came the knock.

Charlie made his way to the front hall and looked through the peephole.

He smiled and unlocked the dead bolt and opened the door.

“Hello,” he said, smiling. Glad to have company. “Come in. Come in.”

He shook the man’s hand and the man entered. The man had dead eyes and said nothing, and just as Charlie started to close the door an unknown man followed and all three stood awkwardly in the hallway.

Charlie invited them back to his sitting area—as was his custom with his confidants—and asked if they wanted a drink. But they shook their heads and stood awkward and silent.

“Take a seat,” Charlie said.

Then he noticed the blackjack in the man’s hand. When he turned, the unknown man held a baseball bat loosely in his grip.

Charlie turned. He looked at the .44 on his bedside table.

He walked to his dresser and combed his hair with the silver brush. The brush had belonged to his father, a surgeon in the Civil War.

He stared at himself and the men behind him. Charlie Wall straightened his robe and nodded.

They looked at him, not as humans but as animals. Wolves.

“Come on, you lousy boys,” he said. Calmly. “Let’s get this bullshit over with.”

They walked behind Charlie and there was the flash of a blackjack in the mirror, and the weight and anger of it all dropped him to his broken knees, his eyes exploding from his head. They beat him with blackjack and bat, holding him to the edge of consciousness until he crawled. He couldn’t see, but he could hear them talking. Something had broken, and he felt small BBs under the weight of his hands.

He heard the ticking of his bedside clock.

He spit out a mess of blood and phlegm and several broken teeth. His breath wheezed out of him and his heart felt as if it would jump from his chest.

It was the long blade Charlie heard last, clicking open and slicing into the sagging flesh under his chin.

It had all been so beautiful.

THE BLUE STREAK edition of the
Tampa Daily Times
was headed to press and I was headed to a barbecue joint for lunch when I got the tip that the Old Man was dead. I didn’t believe it. People like Charlie Wall didn’t die; they’d been around Tampa since the streets were made out of dirt. But I headed down to the Tampa Police Department anyway, and five minutes after chatting up some detectives on the third floor found myself running after Captain Pete Franks down the side steps.

He cranked the black ’54 Ford with the stock radio under the dash and I jumped in beside him and didn’t say a word as we headed to Ybor City.

“What do you know?”

“As much as you do.”

“Is he dead?”

“If not, he’s real sleepy.”

“My editor called his house and someone said he was just lying down.”

“That’s what you call a half-truth.”

I’d known Franks since joining the
Times
fresh out from the army, where my bad eyesight and so-called aptitude had landed me in intelligence. I’d sat and waited and read reports from Seoul about sending MacArthur home and fatal errors at the Yalu River and wanted to be a pilot so badly I memorized every type of plane built since Kitty Hawk. But instead, I filed papers and listened to all-night jazz while dreaming about B-9s and Mustangs and what it must be like sailing up there and taking it all in from those blue heights.

“Aren’t you too late for deadline?” Franks asked.

“It’s being held.”

“For Charlie?”

“Of course.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Franks—although his real name was probably Franco or Francolini or something—was a stocky Italian who ran the pool of roughly a dozen city detectives. People thought he was from Ybor because of his dark looks, but he’d come to Tampa from Alabama and spoke Italian with a Southern drawl.

I rolled down a side window and felt the cool breeze on my arm. I used the sleeve of my shirt to wipe the sweat off my face. I took the straw hat off my head and set it on my knee.

“Now, when we get there,” Franks said. “No offense. But you are not coming in. You know the rules, buddies or not.”

I nodded.

“What about the photographers?”

“Jesus Christ, L.B.”

When we pulled up at Charlie’s house, every damned cop car in Hillsborough County was there. City cops and county deputies. Lawyers and prosecutors. Bail bondsmen and criminals. Seventeenth Avenue looked like a block party, with everyone craning their heads over Charlie’s metal gate to see what the hell was going on. Women held babies against their chests and smiled from the excitement. Men wandered around the cool shade of Charlie’s big porch, while I sweated through my shirt.

Charlie had the biggest house on the block, maybe the biggest in Ybor. It was a big wide-porched place with a shingled roof bordered by a stone fence. There were large, healthy ferns in concrete pots near the slatted railing, where men smoked cigarettes and looked back at the spectators.

Franks soon left me on the sidewalk, by the hearse from J. L. Reed, and I listened to a couple of Cuban women prattling on about poor ole Charlie. They loved him. To the people in Ybor, he was a hero.

Leland Hawes from the
Tribune
was there. And although I liked Leland, I’d hoped they’d send their new female reporter, who I liked a great deal.

I interviewed neighbors and friends.

“No, no,” they said. “Nothing. Who would kill such a sweet old man? He always waves. He always speaks to us. He gives the kids in the neighborhood his spare change.”

I stood there on the hot Florida street in my wrinkled khakis and dress shirt with tie. I fanned my face with my straw hat and held my notebook in my pocket. I watched the long rows of palms bending slightly in the spring wind.

I waited for Franks to come outside, but the house kept filling. I saw the reflection of the whole scene from the spotless window of a black-and-white squad car, the figures wandering on the porch in the glass’s prism.

“Is Detective Dodge in there?” I asked a beat cop watching the front gate.

He shrugged. “I ain’t seen him.”

It was then that I saw Lou Figueredo, the big, stocky bail bondsman, let out a yell and fall to his knees. He looked up at the perfect Tampa sky and crossed his heart in the Catholic tradition.

I stepped back and made a note.

YBOR CITY was brown-skinned women with green eyes and tight flowered dresses that hugged their full fannies as they switched and swayed down the sidewalks of Broadway past the flower shops, tobacco stands, and jewelry stores. It was men in straw fedoras and children with dripping ice cream and whores standing in back alleys smart-mouthing beat cops who roamed the avenue holding cigars in their thick fingers.