White Shadow (33 page)

I peered up at the skinny palm tree growing awkwardly by the steps and cursed it for its lack of shade. More newsmen had found spots along the big marble columns on the top steps that rose to a great banner across the building reading THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. By God, I knew one of the photographers would get the shot of Santo and Henry coming down the steps with that behind them in some kind of sophomoric attempt at a true American metaphor.

I bought a Coke from a street vendor and settled back in my spot. It must’ve been an hour later that the doors cracked open and out spilled Santo Trafficante with Jimmy Longo and John Parkhill a few beats behind them, walking step in step with Henry. Henry was reptilian and cool in those thin green-tinted sunglasses he always wore on that jet-streamed skull of his. White suit and tropical shirt. Santo in a dark pin-striped affair, with his coat thrown over his shoulder.

I trotted over to Santo and Longo and they smiled and walked, Santo such a damned pro and always familiar with the dance of being an unconfessed gangster.

He smiled and greeted a few lawyers and even newsmen, like a practiced politician or one of the boys from the chamber of commerce.

He looked at me, pudgy faced in that crew cut and glasses, and smiled. He outstretched his hand and I shook it. “Mr. Turner?”

I didn’t know what to say and it kind of took me back—that kind of gesture held me in silence—and he turned and kept talking to Jimmy Longo. There was a black Cadillac waiting at the foot of the steps, and Jimmy opened the door for him and he smiled again for the cameras before getting inside and Jimmy driving away, leaving me wondering how the hell he knew me.

I trotted back to Parkhill, who did know who the hell I was, and I stood waiting for him to run the reporter gauntlet from the radio folks and the people from the
Tribune—
although I believe Eleanor was inside the courthouse, along with our man from the
Times
—and finally hound-dog-faced Parkhill tried to skirt me and I tapped him on the shoulder and he turned back and said: “Not right now.”

“Do you feel confident having the trial here in Tampa?” I asked him.

“Absolutely not,” Parkhill said. “My clients have been the victims of a constant and continuous newspaper campaign of the most vicious type.”

“Come on,” I said.

“How are these two men supposed to get a fair trial in Tampa when they are referred to as hoodlums and strong-arm men?” Parkhill asked, because he wasn’t about to take on the negro associates in the case that had been dragging on for about a year. “These family men had this same matter overturned by the Florida Supreme Court.”

“So you’re still saying the Trafficantes have nothing to do with the bolita business?” I asked, and smiled. “And they didn’t buy that new Merc for that St. Pete detective?”

“You work for nothing but a scandal sheet, and you can tell your editors that I told you so!” Parkhill said, waving his finger at me and then walking briskly down the steps.

At the foot of the steps, I saw Edy Parkhill for the first time. In a blue dress, she stood long and lean and brown, kissed her lawyer on the cheek, raising her right foot as she did.

I knew the bastard had planned it that way.

“You really want me to tell Hampton Dunn that he works for a scandal sheet?” I asked when I caught up with him. Some of the other newsboys cracked a grin.

“You tell him to call me if he disagrees,” he said, and stomped off, probably to go drown himself in a quart of martinis.

“It’s Parkhill, right?” I asked, spelling it out. But he was gone and the comment only gained a couple laughs from the other reporters and a detective I knew who worked over at the sheriff’s office’s vice squad.

His name was Ellis Clifton, a former
Tribune
reporter from Georgia who’d been fired last year for tipping off the cops about Gasparilla bigwigs having a private casino night. Sheriff Blackburn had hired him the next day as a detective.

I liked him. And trusted him.

“You know Santo was pissed when we arrested him last year,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“We wouldn’t let him comb his hair or brush his teeth before we took him to jail and he thought that was cruelty,” Clifton said in his rough Georgia drawl and laughed.

“You patched it up with Red Newton yet?” I asked, talking about the ME who’d fired him at the
Tribune
.

“As long as he gets the night cops reporter to bring him home from the bars and doesn’t drive,” he said. “We have nothing to say.”

Just then, Henry Trafficante glided by me, chewing gum and all alien thin and mean and in those green sunglasses, and just as he passed he looked directly at me—while ignoring the rest of the pack shouting questions at him—and he smiled right at me and nodded.

He kept walking, but that smile made me feel like someone had touched me with a piece of ice on the back of my neck.

I looked over at Clifton, thinking maybe I’d imagined it.

“What’d you do to him?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

Clifton shook his head and put on his hat. “Don’t ever trust a Sicilian who smiles at you, kid.”

AFTER PARKING down on Seventh Avenue, bustling past the evening crowd and past the maître d’ and into the grand dining room, Johnny Rivera found Muriel out on a date with a traveling salesman from Miami at Las Novedades restaurant. The place had been there forever, the menu bragging about Roosevelt riding a horse through the front door looking for black beans, and it probably hadn’t changed much. Spanish tile and toreador paintings and the like. Rivera sweated in the coolness from the overhead fans and stood above Muriel at the little booth where she sat with the man.

He stared down at her.

She had on one of those little boy’s shirts that was popular. Baby blue, and an open neck to show a string of pearls. The pearls kind of pissing Johnny off because she was here playing footsie with some salesman slob while he was sweating it out with Joe Bedami and the cops and he was left holding the bag of flaming shit.

“Hey—” the salesman said. “You got some kind of problem?”

“Can it, craphead,” Johnny said. “Outside, Muriel.”

She turned up her nose and played with her stiff little collar. There was a big plate of paella before them, and they looked liked they’d just dug into it while sipping down a pint of sangria and smoking and playing like they were real-life lovers.

“You can wait, Johnny,” she said.

The man stood. And he made a big show of placing the napkin down on the seat. He wore a gray sharkskin suit and loose knit tie. He was a blond with a heavy tan and smelled like a bottle of English Leather.

Johnny leaned into him and got close to his ear, almost like a lover, and whispered: “Sit down, Bob, or I’ll rip off your fucking head and embarrass you in front of your date.”

He looked into Johnny’s eyes and shrugged.

“My name’s not Bob,” he said, and sat back down.

“Hey—” Muriel said, looking at the salesman. “That’s it?”

The salesman looked down at his hands, and Johnny grabbed Muriel by the tips of her fingers and then grabbed hold of the back of her arm as he led her through the kitchen—where most of the cooks knew Johnny because the Boston Bar was an after-hours place for the Ybor workers—and through the long stainless steel rows of black beans and rice and red snapper and open cans of green peas. He held her tight to him and kicked open a back door, where he pushed her out hard by the back, and she fell to her ass in the crushed-shell lot.

He reached for her by the string of pearls, twisting it tight in his hands the way you would control a dog, and brought her into his face: “Where is she? Your cousin? Where is she?”

“Jesus, Johnny. Jesus.”

He gripped her tighter and the string broke and the little pearls fell like pebbles across her shirt and into the shell lot, and Johnny pushed her back down on her ass. She stayed there, kind of crying, as she searched on her hands and knees for the pearls and tucked them in her cupped hand.

“Fuck you!” she screamed. “You greasy sack of shit.”

Rivera kicked her square in the gut and she fell to her side, trying to mouth in air like a dying fish.

“I don’t know,” she said, breathing and sobbing and breathing and sobbing.

A cook in a smeared white T-shirt walked outside for a smoke and then saw Rivera and turned back inside. Rivera walked close to Muriel and gripped her hair tight in his fingers, feeling the stiff hair spray in his clenched hand.

“Lucrezia? Where the fuck did she go?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know!”

She was screaming and wailing and then curled tight into a ball.

Rivera caught his breath. He combed his hair. He lit a cigarette.

Horns were honking down on Seventh, and he heard people greeting each other out on the street and a little jazz combo kicked up somewhere. Shit.

He backhanded her, and her head popped a bit to the side. But she didn’t move. She wiped her bloodied lip on her sleeve.

“I have a phone number,” she said. “All you had to do was ask.”

Rivera laughed a little and shrugged.

“Don’t you ever look at me again.”

And that kind of made Johnny Rivera feel bad, because in his blind, scared tortured day of looking for Muriel he never thought about losing the best piece of ass he’d had in years.

He nodded.

She walked past him and through the kitchen.

No one looking toward Rivera, dozens of eyes kept on the food and plates or sacks of yellow rice.

He followed.

She got to the table, opened her purse, and tore a piece of pink paper in half. She handed it to Rivera and looked at the salesman.

Muriel dabbed more blood onto a napkin and was about to sit down. But instead, she clutched her purse under her arm and tossed the bloodied napkin at the salesman.

She brushed past and sauntered out through the front of the restaurant, all the people eating and talking and laughing, and out of the door.

Rivera pocketed the pink slip of paper.

And smiled.

“Too bad, Bob.”

THERE WAS A DIRT LOT where a house used to be on Fifth Avenue, close to Eighteenth or Nineteenth Street between two casitas. Cars ran for several blocks up and down the bumpy brick street and past the lot, filled with mostly working-class Cubans in dirty hats clutching cash in their fists and cigars in their jaws. They all stood behind a squared section of concrete blocks surrounding a smooth, sandy dirt ring. Overhead, a long row of white bulbs had been strung over the arena in a crisscross. While they waited for the main event, the onlookers clamored in Spanish and English and Italian, and pretty soon I found my way to the edge of the ring where I could see the fight and hope to spot old Bill Robles, one of the last men to see Charlie Wall alive.

I stood waiting and looked for people I knew. But these men were all off real work from the sandpits and phosphate mines and orange groves and docks. These weren’t the country club Cubans or the Broadway merchants. These were the men who believed—and rightfully so—that Ybor City was just a suburb of Havana. And over cheap rum and beer, you exchanged your money and watched a couple of roosters fight to the death.

A boy, maybe nine, handed me a fruit jar filled with rum and I took it and smiled, and then he asked me for a quarter, which I paid.

I knew Bill Robles was damned near close to ninety, and I spotted maybe thirty men who’d be about that age. Most of them were dark-skinned and probably Cubans. They drank the same cheap rum out of fruit jars and gummed unlit cigars in their mouths, shouting and yelling when two big, scrapping roosters were pulled from their wooden boxes.

One was black and the other was a reddish color.

Both had been stripped of their natural spurs and fitted with three- or four-inch razor blades that fit snuggly on their talons. I watched a short Cuban man in greasy mechanic coveralls open the red bird’s beak while another short man plied it with what looked like thick Cuban coffee. The bird was held outstretched, clawing and scratching, the razor blades a whirl of motion in the empty air.

Across the ring, a man wearing a red bandanna held the black bird over the soft, scratched dirt and seemed to be whispering to it. The huge black cock held strangely calm, tilting its head with some kind of reptilian-looking intelligence. Those foreign yellow eyes stared at the empty ring, crowded by the men with fistfuls of cash, and cigars and booze. They yelled and screamed “Negro” and “Diablo,” the roosters’ names, I supposed, and I watched a fat man in a porkpie hat taking last-minute bets and logging them into a leather-bound book he kept balanced on his stomach.

There was a clap by the side of the ring and the roosters were held dangling—the yelling down to a whisper—and with a wave from the fat man, the birds were set free, fluttering and finding each other in the dirt lot under the hastily strung white lights. Like small fighters, they circled each other before meeting, sensing each other and perhaps smelling each other, then tearing into a flurry of red and black feathers and squawks and blinding light of blades.