White Shadow (12 page)

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said. “I needed something angry.”

The rain pinged away on the roof, and two derelicts passed, looking inside and wandering away. She pulled her panties back on, leg by leg, fixed her bra, and pulled her dress back down over her knees.

“My husband is a shit bag.”

“You shouldn’t go to derelict bars.”

“He’s not at home anyway.”

Dodge buckled his belt and looked down at his hands. He found his cuffs, sap, and loaded leather holster. She looked at him fixing the cuffs back on his belt and sliding into the holster and seemed to have no interest at all.

“I guess I don’t blame him,” she said. “He was friends with this old man who got killed today. You know the one, Charlie Wall. The gangster.”

“Who is your husband?”

She smiled. And he touched her arm.

“Did he do this to you?”

“Questions. Questions.”

She started giggling again and fit her hands to Dodge’s cheeks. Squeezing. “Too funny.”

THE CUBANS waited in their black suits, bloody and hungry and oddly cold in the warm wind of the Banana Docks early that morning. They smoked cigarettes and stayed tuned to the radio, listening for any news of the shooting at the Nuñez Y Oliva, and heard nothing but the national news about atomic tests from President Eisenhower, a new Navy Reserve training facility in Winter Haven, and the latest on the Charlie Wall killing. When the announcer read that detectives believed the killer was known to Wall and had left certain clues at the scene, the men looked at each other and finished their cigarettes, windows down. The blue paint on the hood of the Nash glowing in the first light as the tugs sounded in the port and the lines to an old junker called the
Igloo Moon
seemed to stretch out to infinity above the dirty, oil-slicked water up onto the cleats of the rusting boat.

One of the Cubans, the driver, held a dirty handkerchief monogrammed with his initials to his stomach, while the other’s leg had been tied tight by a fight doctor who worked over on the Twenty-second Street Causeway down below Ybor City in the back of a crab shack. The tools he’d used to cut out the bullet smelled like fish and rotting things, and the man wanted to take a bath and get the nastiness off him and burn his suit.

Even though it wasn’t on the news, men would be looking for them.

An hour later, an old Pontiac station wagon—yellow with white trim—pulled in behind them, getting so close the men thought it might bump their rear fender. The driver dropped the cigarette on his lap and cursed while he fanned out the embers catching on his seat, and then looked back into his rearview mirror as this big goddamned man with heavy, dark eyebrows and black eyes stepped out.

He was a tall man with tall dark hair that was combed into a large pompadour on top of his head. He put on mirrored aviator sunglasses, walked over, and leaned down to look in the car.

He nodded and stuck a piece of gum into his mouth and wandered over to the edge of the
Igloo Moon,
following that big thick line of rope that ran up into the sky. He tugged at it and looked around at the other freighters in the port. Empty and quiet at dawn, a few blue sparks from a welder’s torch seen far off on another rusty ship down on the docks.

The Cuban man, the driver, used the frame of the door to help himself stand and waited for the man they had called for help—Carl Walker—to turn to him.

“It’s a mess,” the driver said. “We need to do something about Chi Chi.”

“Where is he?”

“In the trunk.”

“Why didn’t you dump him?” Carl Walker asked.

“We were told to wait. Meet you.”

“You sorry Cubans. Do you always have to call me down when you shit your diapers?”

The man stared at him as his friend shifted in his seat, looking for comfort for his leg, and then felt his bloody coat for a cigarette. “You’ll be paid.”

Carl Walker opened his Windbreaker, for a moment just showing a flash of the star he wore as a deputy up in Pasco County, and pulled a .44 from his holster, aiming it into the forehead of the driver.

“Where is the girl?”

“She’s gone.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Get in the car.”

“What?”

“Get in and drive.”

“What about—?”

“It never happened. I squared it.”

“What about Chi Chi?”

“I said I squared it.”

They drove slow and quiet, the way you do after a long church service when you’re left alone with your sins and yourself and your own mortality. They coasted down the Twenty-second Street Causeway, past the crab shacks and the small cigar factories, and past the Ybor whores wandering their way home in Palmetto Beach from the flophouses with high heel shoes in their hands, and the crazy men who sang Spanish songs to themselves on their jalopy bicycles. They drove and hugged the bay and finally found a quiet little spot where the Chamber of Commerce people had set out metal grills and picnic tables, where moms and dads and kiddies could roast weenies and sing campfire songs and old dad could light a pipe and take in that fine Florida sunshine.

In that weak, daybreak light, Carl Walker shot those two wounded men in the back of the head and dropped them and the dead man in the trunk into the bay, watching them curve and skirt the edge of the rocks of the jetty like trash being flushed out in the toilet until they disappeared.

He wiped off his seat and the door handle and dumped his .44 in the water and started to walk to a little tin-roof restaurant where a woman he sometimes fucked would make him a café con leche and rub his shoulders and perhaps give him a blow job until it was time to roll back to the Banana Docks and head back to the backwoods to fight crime and raise hell.

DODGE WAS up at five a.m., showered and shaved and down to the morgue at Tampa General by six, smelling the queer smell of the dead and the perfumes that tried to hide the rot. It was a gentle, abrasive sweetness that sometimes made him send his suits out to the cleaners when the smell clung to his clothes and the soles of his shoes. There was no light down in the belly of the old hospital, just a few warehouse lamps over the cold slabs. Old Charlie was there, dissected and white as the sheet over his private parts, on the main porcelain table—drained of blood and fluids—a sample from his heart in a large vial. Dr. Story walked around Dodge and the body in a slow waltz of facts, holding his clipboard and drinking coffee from a paper cup, oblivious to the smell and the slight stickiness that gently held your shoes. Dodge moved over to Charlie Wall, holding a broken piece of baseball bat in his right hand and then looking down at the crushed skull of the Old Man.

“By the time we conducted the autopsy, rigor was beginning to leave the body,” Story said, using a new unsharpened pencil to point to the massive opening under Charlie’s jaw. “The deep incised wound almost traversed, passing across the anterior portion of the neck measuring thirteen centimeters long. This wound passed through the carotid artery on both sides, completely severing them, severed the jugular veins, the larynx, and the upper portion of the esophagus. A portion of the larynx was lying free in the wound.”

Dodge nodded. Story’s voice echoed off the china white tile. A
drip-drip-drip
sound came from another body on a stainless steel stretcher by the door. With only the two lights in the room, it still felt like night, and maybe a bit like winter. Even though Dodge had seen dozens of dead bodies, there was something about the butcher shop down here that made it all seem so damned natural to kill a person and slice him up.

Story peered down at his clipboard and tucked the pencil behind his ear. “Blood alcohol level at .146 postmortem.”

“Was this a fight?”

Story looked at Dodge and shook his head. “There was no evidence of lines of hesitation about the edges of the wound on the neck. Whoever did this cut deep and hard and quick.”

“What about a woman? Could a woman have done this?”

“She would have to be one hell of a woman. Strong, you know.” Dodge reached into the plastic bag and gripped the broken-off fat part of the baseball bat. He looked back at Story, and Story nodded as Dodge fit the bat into the crushed part of Charlie Wall’s skull, a softness in his gray-black hair like that of bruised fruit.

The end of the bat fit into his head in a gentle curve.

Dodge made some notes into his flip pad, walked back out through the clean, sweet-smelling hallways, got into his car, and drove back across the moat of the water separating the islands from Tampa. Light broke over the bay, golden and flecked over the asphalt streets and dirty old buildings and through the downtown, as he wound his way back down Lafayette and Grand Central where a pro wrestler named Harry Smith, aka Flash Gordon, aka Georgia Boy, had opened up a health club.

Harry was the kind of guy who would wander around the gym and kid the Italians for being too loud and the Cubans for being womanizers. And if you were from Alabama or Bumfuck, Florida, you were shit out of luck. Because Dodge had seen Harry take plenty of men down a few pegs.

At the gym, Dodge worked out for a half hour, took a steam and a second shower, and then called over to the station and said he wanted them to bring up Rivera for a lie detector.

The desk sergeant said: “He’s gone, Ed. Bailed out early this morning.”

“Bailed out? Bailed out for what?”

“I don’t know, I just got here. I’m just reading what it says.”

THERE ARE wingless planes and a thousand words from a tattered dictionary in my dreams before I wake at the little studio in the Georgian apartments, boil myself an egg, make a pot of coffee, and feed the cat that appears on my first-story ledge every morning. My room is only large enough for a Murphy bed and a small kitchen and has a tall closet that you have to walk through to get to the little bathroom covered in honeycomb black-and-white tile.

I have a narrow little gas stove and a tiny box for a refrigerator where I keep quart beers and bottles of milk and cartons of cigarettes to keep them fresh. I have maybe two hundred paperback books in wooden crates I’ve fashioned into a shelf: Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Robert Louis Stevenson (one with a really nifty cover of
Treasure Island
with grinning pirates flashing swords), the poems of Robert Penn Warren, a complete set of the Tarzan adventures, and a Book-of-the-Month Club edition of Erle Stanley Gardner. But the most dog-eared, beaten-to-hell book on the shelf was
Merriam-Webster’s
old boy, a clothbound wonder, highlighted and underlined with a broken spine and ringed with coffee stains. When I couldn’t sleep—which was often—I’d play my records and flip through the pages looking for words that I didn’t know existed.
Pneumatology. Esotropia. Escutcheon.

I’d underline them and say them out loud and nod, and then read out the definition again before searching for a new word. Last night, the dictionary had fallen off my lap and found its way to the floor—splayed open next to a marble ashtray—my record player caught in interminable rotation, scratching and bumping in that slow, sealike rhythm until I fell asleep shortly before dawn.

A cold shower, coffee, two cigarettes, and the egg. I heard a couple above me screaming at each other, pots rattling. Next to me, a radio crackled to life, and I heard my neighbor playing some Dean Martin and pouring water into her coffeepot. People talked outside my window, walking down toward the bay. Bright gold light crawled through my blinds and into my room, and suddenly the world was awake and I was, too. It was hard to remember much of the last twenty-four hours because the world wasn’t quite in balance. The Old Man who kept the order in this town was dead, and we—the newsboys—would be kept just outside the circle as police needled and pricked and crawled under holes to find some kind of sense to the thing.