White Shadow (4 page)

Ed Dodge knew it was all a symphony of Latin jazz and sinners and bright-eyed boys who shined your shoes for ten cents, and that the feeling of the lights and the music and the smell of the roasting coffee down at Naviera Mills and of the black beans at Las Novedades was some kind of dream.

He was drawn here. He understood the Ybor people.

Before he became a city detective, Dodge had been a child of the Depression, digging out of trash cans for food, and living on Skid Row in a one-room studio with his mother, who loved bars and wandering salesmen. The only true love and respect he’d known—really, that first acknowledgment of self-worth—was from a Parris Island drill sergeant who’d called him a shit-eating pussy while he did push-ups in the rain and begged to be shipped out to the South Pacific.

Never did. He spent most of his time with his teenage wife and their young daughter out on Treasure Island near Frisco and damned near cried when Uncle Sam sent him packing back to Tampa in a ’36 Chevy he bought for three hundred bucks, returning to a Mickey Mouse job as a soda jerk at Clark’s Drug Store.

Even when they brought him back up from inactive for Korea, he’d only got as far as a troopship off the coast of Italy, where the memories came in flashes of deep red wine that made you laugh until your ears hurt, and black-haired women who had long delicate fingers and smelled of olive oil and soft flowers and made you promise them things about eternal love in all their Catholic ways.

Ybor had these same women. And they were killing him.

Dodge worked alone that afternoon, even though he’d been breaking in a new partner for the past week because he’d accused Captain Franks of playing favorites on assignments. He’d been stuck with chickenshit while Mark Winchester and Sloan Holcomb got to interview a Bayshore Boulevard heiress about a lost diamond earring.

That’s the way it worked, detectives took on all cases out of the pool. There was no homicide or robbery or vice. One big open room. What seemed like a thousand cases a week. Today, Dodge was working a Broadway smash-and-grab at a silver store next to Max Argintar’s Men’s Shop.

The radio cracked to life under his dash, and he heard the call for all detectives: 1219 Seventeenth Avenue.

He called back his response.

Only a mile or so away.

It was always something. Some man getting his pecker shot off by his wife or a radio being lifted out of an open window or some old woman thinking the man across the street was eyeing her legs a little too closely. It was rape or murder or asphalt fistfights between boys that would last until someone couldn’t move. Because in Ybor City, you didn’t lose a fight, that was as good as quitting, and your family didn’t haul their ass out of Palermo or Havana to get stuck down in some run-down ethnic soup. This was a world boiling with ambition.

Not until he turned the corner and saw the shiny curved hoods of dozens of sheriff’s office cruisers and other cops and spectators did he know this was Charlie Wall’s place. He’d run some surveillance here a few years back when they were tailing Johnny Rivera for the Joe Antinori killing.

From the moment he sifted through a crowd of deputies, beat cops, prosecutors, and detectives, Dodge understood this was going to be an A1 clusterfuck. Captain Franks met him in the living room of the house, everything smelling like mothballs and hamburgers. Franks asked him to get his camera out of the back of his car, and he did, finally following them through a long hallway to a back bedroom where deputies and uniformed cops took turns looking down at the old man sprawled out on the floor in a white nightshirt, his throat cut open and chunky blood all over the back of his head.

Old Charlie would’ve hated for anyone to see his hair sticking up like that, like some kind of rooster comb caked in a pool of coagulated blood that flowed from his neck.

A couple young deputies laughed.

Dodge turned to the deputy, a potbellied kid with a red Irish face. “Who told you to be in here?”

“I just came to look.”

Dodge stared at him for a good ten seconds, camera hanging in his left hand, and the deputy and his taller buddy walked out with their heads down.

Dodge loaded the 35 mm film into his Kodak and took a shot. Flashbulb exploding. He popped out the hot bulb and loaded in another.

“You need help?” Franks asked.

“No.” He breathed. “I’m fine.”

“We want every possible angle.”

“Yes sir,” Dodge said without much feeling, and looked down just outside the doorway.

“You knew him,” Franks said. “Didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Dodge said. “He used to come down to the theater I worked when I was a kid.”

He saw two attorneys drinking coffee and talking in hushed tones. Beside one of their well-polished shoes was a dark smear of blood.

“Can we please clear this room?”

Franks ushered the men out.

Dodge knelt onto the carpet. Green and plush. Soft and clean. The smear wasn’t a smear at all.

It was a footprint.

Dodge loaded another flashbulb, and asked for a tape measure to run alongside the print. He snapped a shot. Loaded a bulb. Snapped another shot. And another.

Quick rhythms. Everything recorded. Every detail.

“You find a knife?” Dodge asked.

Franks walked back into the bedroom and shook his head. “No weapon.”

Dodge stared at the gash and the blood on the carpet.

Buddy Gore, a small, rotund detective who he’d never known to smile, called behind him. He pulled open a closet door and motioned to Dodge. Gore wore a wrinkled brown suit with bright green tie. His tie hit him about midchest, and his shoes were dirty and scuffed. He had a wide, pleasant face, brown eyes, and full cheeks.

“I wish I had one of these to get out from my wife,” Gore said.

Behind the door, Dodge looked into a long, concrete hallway. He and Gore followed the tunnel for several feet, their shoes making hollow echoes down the way to the garage. Gore knocked on the walls, ringing back the solid thud of steel.

“Nifty.”

“Sure is,” Dodge said.

“One of the neighbors said he had this thing built years ago,” Gore said. “That way, he could walk from his car to his house without someone blasting him with buckshot.”

Dodge moved through the garage tunnel and back into the bedroom. He didn’t say a word. He glanced back down at Charlie Wall, facedown in the carpet. Blood flecked his white, empty face like splattered paint or some kind of pox.

He looked over at the bed and at a green armchair.

Dodge inched closer.

Birdseed scattered over the chair and deep into the carpet.

More pictures taken. Inside. Outside.

Every angle of the house. The flashes hurt his eyes.

Outside, the wind ruffled his hair and blew strong in his ears. Over the fence and into the street, there was the murmur of people talking, but a still quiet in the backyard. Somewhere a rooster crowed. There were too many people there, talking and moving around and smiling and laughing about the old days and how Charlie was quite a guy for an old gangster, and they talked a lot about bolita and shotguns and money, but no one was looking. All that noise and radio static of empty talk was hurting Dodge’s head, and he stood outside for a moment trying to think, because when you left a scene all you had left was what you took with you. So he would take the photos and would gather the evidence and then they would canvass the neighborhood and then no one would have seen anything and then they’d talk to the usual hoods and no one would know a damned thing about it.

He knew he needed to think. Locked doors and drawn blinds. Lead shot. And beating and stabbing. There was money on the dresser. There was jewelry and watches and rings and a television. He just kept thinking about all that rage that came down on that old man, nearly ripping off his head and crushing in his skull like a piece of rotten fruit.

The two deputies Dodge had run out of the crime scene bent over in Wall’s backyard close to a metal cross used to hang laundry. They poked at the ground like children playing war, and Dodge sauntered up behind them.

They pulled the broken end of a baseball bat—the fat end—away from some tall grass. It was covered in dirt; he noticed no blood.

“Leave it.”

They got to their feet.

Two more photos. No flash.

The pieces, fragments of nothing, was all he had. Dodge collected that nothing while the lawyers and cops talked and smiled about an inevitable end to the Old Man.

DETECTIVE BUDDY GORE walked Charlie Wall’s bungalow and the grounds with Dodge and helped him tag the bat for evidence before they followed brick steps to a back door, only to see more cops, deputies, and detectives in the kitchen. The station houses for both departments had emptied out, deputies and patrol cops wandering around and checking out the Old Man’s house.

Mrs. Audrey Wall sat at a kitchen table drinking coffee and talking to one of the police detectives, Fred Bender. She was a worn old woman with stiff dyed hair and glasses shaped like cat eyes. Her chunky legs were crossed; there was a half-eaten piece of pie in front of her and another old woman—Dodge had been told was her sister—by her side.

“That’s when we arrived back at the bus station,” Audrey Wall said. “We took the Greyhound. I will never do that again. Some of the people smelled very badly. An awful odor about buses.”

“When was that?” Bender asked.

“Oh, twelve-thirty or so?” she asked, looking over at her sister. The other old woman nodded. “That’s when we got hamburgers and pie.”

“This pie?” Bender asked.

“Yes, it’s butterscotch. I told Abby about the pie at the Goody-Goody on the ride back from Clermont and she just couldn’t wait.”

Audrey sliced off another bite and stuck it into her mouth. She closed her eyes and chewed.

Bender looked back at Dodge and gave him the crazy eye. Bender was a thick-necked cop who practiced curling weights before going on duty. He was also a hell of a joke teller and pussy hound, and picked up extra money for his wife and kids by playing jazz piano at downtown bars. He wore only the best suits from Wolf Brothers, while Dodge alternated two he’d bought from a Penney’s catalog.

“And when did you arrive back here, ma’am?” Bender asked.

“I don’t know. Twelve-forty? Yes, about then. We had burgers, too. Goody-Goody makes the best burgers. I told Abby about the burgers. She’s from Wetumpka, Alabama. They don’t have anything like that in Wetumpka, Alabama. Do they?”

“Hush,” sister Abby said. “Let me have some of your pie.”

“Ma’am,” Bender said. “When did you find your husband?”

“Mr. Wall?” she said. “Oh, yes. Let me think.” She kept chewing and then swallowed. “That nice man from the cab company brought my bags into the bedroom.”

Bender nodded and made notes. “So, he saw Mr. Wall?”

“No,” she said. “My bedroom is before his. I went into Mr. Wall’s bedroom to use the phone. I was going to call Baby Joe and find out where Mr. Wall had gone. I’d seen the papers on the front porch, and all the shades were down in the house. I thought he must be out of town. It was so dark all over the house.”

“And that’s when you saw the body.”

“Mmm-hmm,” she said. She smiled at Bender as if she’d just passed a test or had complimented him about his wife or new car.

Mark Winchester and Sloan Holcomb walked in from the bedroom where the Old Man lay. Dodge ignored the detectives, knowing they’d try to get the case even though he was the first on scene.

Dodge held up the bat for Bender to see.

“That’s not anything,” Mrs. Wall said, her face shriveled and her voice shrewish. “One of the kids threw that over the fence ages ago. The killer went through the front door.”

She stood up and cleared away the coffee cups and pie. Dodge thought about the matter-of-fact way she’d said “killer,” and it sounded false and prepared, as if a line she’d read in a book.

“Do you know what kid?”

She brushed by, red-eyed and coffee-breathed, to the sink. She was a pinch-faced old woman, and Dodge wondered how an old hotshot like Charlie Wall had ever been turned on by something like that.

Bender shrugged his shoulders, and the sister smiled at him and offered half a hamburger. The woman smiled blankly, as if in a constant dream.

“No, thank you, ma’am.”

“Well, okay, then,” Abby Plott said. “You holler if you need anything.”

“Mrs. Wall, why were you in Clermont again?”

“Abby and I were visiting my other sister. Mrs. Margaret Weidman. I was registered at the Clermont Hotel.”

Bender looked back at his notes. “You were home at twelve-forty. How long before you found Mr. Wall?”