White Shadow (15 page)

I smiled and nodded, and at the same time felt my face heat up with blood. He stayed for a few moments, answering my questions about how they had found the man.

“I got to go, sport,” Dodge said, patting me on the back. “I got a friend who’s been waiting up for me and I feel like he’s ready to talk.”

JOHNNY RIVERA had made a big show about coming in on his own and was waiting for Ed Dodge in a back office of the Hillsborough County Jail, nothing but a little concrete room where Dodge sometimes ate a fifteen-cent lunch with the guards. Dodge wasn’t in the room about five seconds when he knew that Johnny was liquored up good, but Dodge didn’t acknowledge it, because he knew someone like Johnny would take pleasure in that and lean back in that battered old wooden chair that hoods had sat in since the twenties and get this self-satisfied smug look on his face. Instead, Dodge smiled at him, took off his jacket, removed the canvas cover from the Machine, and plugged it in the wall. Through the big brick walls of the place nicknamed “the Fortress,” Dodge could hear men yelling and screaming and bars rattling and guards’ feet bounding down the old hallways.

Dodge pulled out the wires from the Machine and laid them across the desk, while Rivera asked Fred Bender about the next time he was going to be playing a set down at the Hillsboro Hotel. After the war, Bender had put himself through music school in Chicago, where he’d learned to play jazz.

Bender leaned back in his chair, cool in his Wolf Brothers seersucker suit, and winked at Dodge. “Oh, maybe Saturday,” Bender said. “I don’t get out of the house as much as I used to. You know, with kids.”

“Who you foolin’?” Rivera said. “You chase more pussy than a Polk County hound.”

Bender smiled and shrugged.

The Machine was a little box with scrolls and ink and delicate needles, and a black elastic band called a cardiosphygmograph that fit around the suspect’s upper arm. A thing called a pneumograph fit around the chest to measure the breathing and the heart.

“You know about thirty years ago, this place ’bout got burned down,” Rivera said.

“That a fact,” Dodge said, checking the Machine.

“Yeah,” Rivera said. “Some nutball chopped his family with a meat cleaver, and half of Tampa wanted to hang him from the nearest tree. When the cops wouldn’t let ’em, they was going to set fire to the place.”

“Hmm,” Dodge said.

Bender took Rivera’s jacket when Rivera handed it to him like he was in a club, and Bender hung it on a hat tree. Dodge checked the dials on the Machine and waited for Scarface Johnny to stand before him, already rolling up his sleeve because this might have been the twentieth time for Rivera to sit here and take the test. Someone like Rivera was smart enough to go somewhere and get liquored up before the test to make all of this work just some kind of sloppy, half-interested dance that could be shot down in court about a thousand ways.

Rivera kept eye contact as Dodge pulled the strap tight around his arm, enough to make his fingers turn a bright red.

“You been drinking some, Johnny?” Dodge asked.

He didn’t say anything, just kind of removed his eyes from Dodge and studied his manicure.

“Well, you know how this works, right? I’ll ask you a yes-or-no question, and you’ll answer the best you know how. So just relax.”

“I’m glad to cooperate in any way.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“So, where did you say you were Monday night?”

“Same place I said last night. I was down at my bar with Doug Belden. You know, the councilman? Then I sat around with this waiter from the Columbia named Henry until I closed up.”

“Then where did you go?”

Rivera smiled and played with the wire coming out of his chest. “Went down to The Dream bar; Nick Scaglione seen me there. He was laughin’ a lot about seeing the Old Man staggering on the street. Go ahead and ask him. He’ll tell you the same thing. After he closed up, we went down to the White House and had some sandwiches and coffee.”

“You drive?”

“Jack Parrino took me home.”

Dodge wrote down the name.

“What about Tuesday?”

“This all you got, Dodge?”

“What about Tuesday?”

“Like I said, I worked on my well till late, and then me and Ray went down to the dog track.”

“Ray who?”

“Ray Tarmargo. And these other fellas named Lupe and Pretty Boy. I don’t know their last names. We had a drink at the Lamas Club and then came back to Ybor City about midnight. I closed up the bar and then went down to the Seabreeze to get somethin’ to eat.”

“You ever borrow money from Mr. Wall?”

He shrugged.

“Listen, Johnny, if you so much borrowed a quarter from him, we’ll find out,” Bender said. “So why not get it out now?”

He nodded.

Rivera smiled. “Okay. Sometimes he signed a note for me down at First National. Payable in ninety days, you know?”

“One time?” Dodge asked.

“A few.”

“How many’s a few?”

“I don’t know. He helped me out some.”

“When was the last time?”

“Last year.”

“How much?”

“Five hundred. Like the rest. I paid him back.”

“Why’d you need the money? You in some trouble?”

“I wanted to go to the World Series.”

Dodge sat on the desk and looked back at Bender. Bender crossed his arms, which were as thick as a mule’s legs, and asked: “Does Charlie Wall own any part of the Boston Bar?”

“No.”

“Were you and Mr. Wall on good terms before he died?” Bender asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Rivera said. “I mean, he was gettin’ up there and would sometimes get pissed ’cause he still wanted me to drive him places like the old days and he hadn’t figured out that I don’t work for him no more.”

“Where’d he want to go?”

“To The Turf. Always The Turf.”

Rivera kept his hands on his knees and would nod with everything he said, as if since he was nodding and believing it then the whole goddamned world should, too. His eyes were red and kind of sleepy, and his slick, greasy hair fell over them as he stared down at the floor, until he wanted to make a point to Dodge or Fred Bender and then he would look at them with a yellow-toothed smile, his cologne and whiskey breath turning the little whitewashed brick room into something foul. Dodge would keep him moving, run Johnny Rivera. If he just kept him running and running and running, the old Cuban would slip up. Rivera was it. If he hadn’t killed Charlie Wall, he knew who had.

“I told him I got my own business to take care of, but he’d been giving me hell,” Rivera said. “He was sayin’, ‘Every time I call for you and want you to take me someplace, I can never find you.’ You know? So, it was like that.”

“You used to work for him,” Bender said. “His bodyguard.”

“Nah. It wasn’t like that. I was never on any payroll. In fact, after the war it started to cost me money to carry him around. You know how cheap the Old Man could be.”

“Was he broke?”

“Nah.”

“How much money did he have?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

“A million?”

Rivera shrugged.

“Johnny,” Dodge said. “I hope you understand this doesn’t look good. Okay. I got people telling me that you and the Old Man were on the outs? Okay? Then we find Mr. Wall in his house that’s been locked up tight with not a damned thing missing. Why would he just let a stranger in his house, and why would a stranger do that to the Old Man unless he had a lot of hate inside of him about something, or wanted to send some kind of message, like you guys did during the Shotgun Wars?”

“Like I said. Check out his wife. She’s a hell of a woman.”

“I’ll ask you again. Did you participate in the killing of Charlie Wall?”

Johnny leaned back in the stiff wooden chair, the chair cracked and groaned, and he looked over at Bender, and then back at Dodge, and said: “You know, I wouldn’t harm a hair of the Old Man’s head. He raised me, Dodge. Raised me from a nothin’ kid.”

“You ready for the test?”

He nodded. Silent. Dodge flipped the switch on the Machine and leaned forward to study the play of the needles along the tape. Bender moved over to the desk and took a seat to watch Johnny and to lead in the questioning. Bender stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray and waited until Dodge gave him a strong nod.

Bender: “Is your first name Johnny?”

“Yes.”

“Is your last name Rivera?”

“Yes.”

“Were you born in Tampa?”

“Yes.”

“Have you seen Charlie Wall in the past week?”

“No.”

“Have you talked to Charlie Wall in the past week?”

“No.”

“Did you have anything to do with the murder of Charlie Wall?”

“No.”

“Do you know who killed Charlie Wall?”

“No.”

“Do you owe Charlie Wall any money?”

“No.”

Rivera leaned back into the seat and studied the ceiling, exhaling a long breath and rubbing his hand over his jaw. He was bored as hell with this, knowing full well that if he kept himself real cool and didn’t let his blood kick up Dodge wouldn’t have squat, and that even though Dodge would want to do this again when he was sober he’d have a hell of a line for his attorney, to say he already took the damned test.

Dodge stood up and shook his head, tired of listening to Scarface Johnny’s slurred speech and lazy, bullshit answers. He looked down at Johnny and said: “Did you have anything to do with the death of Joe Antinori?”

Johnny looked up and didn’t answer. His face turned red and sweat began to break out on his brow; his nostrils getting big, beginning to breathe too fast. “Fuck you, Dodge. I came in here to answer questions about Charlie Wall because of the respect I have for the man and now you want to pull this trick? Well, that’s it. I’ll talk to McEwen ’cause he’s a stand-up guy, but you’re a fraud as a cop, trying to pin the Antinori thing on me when you couldn’t ever do it before, just like you’re trying to pin the Old Man on me now. So go fuck yourself, Dodge. I’m through.”

Dodge let it hang there like that in the little brick office in the bottom of the Fortress. But Dodge stayed cool, just pulling Johnny Rivera off the Machine, first by the arm, and then from the heart.

He lit a cigar and looked over at his friend Fred Bender as Johnny Rivera stumbled out of the room, his shoes clicking on the tile floors of the jail.

Bender said: “Nothing.”

“Not a thing.”

“But he did it.”

“You’re goddamned right.”

“Let’s see what we can turn up at his place. Let’s ride with Buddy to Ybor after we take him over to see McEwen.”

Dodge felt in his pocket, looking for another match. “Something else bothering you, Ed?”

“No, why?”

“You just look hollow, is all.”

HAMPTON DUNN moved his eyes from me to Wilton Martin and nodded as if he were already in thought about what we were about to tell him. I’d just gotten back from the courthouse and hadn’t told anybody about the birdseed yet. Martin had been on the phone talking to John Parkhill and then ordering a carton of cigarettes, two root beers, and four Cuban sandwiches from a local market. I think he was more excited about the Cuban sandwiches than anything that Parkhill had to tell him.

Dunn was a stocky kind of guy, thick around the middle and shoulders, with a solid old square jaw and slick hair. Yesterday’s evening paper had run a column by him that took the biggest byline I’d ever seen. A story cobbled together from Dunn’s ancient memories of back when Charlie Wall ran the town along with Pat Whitaker’s political machine, written in that same
Front Page
style he used every Friday in his Palm Tree Politics page. He wrote about Charlie Wall shooting his hated stepmother as a teenager and having to go to military school, but later escaping and running numbers in Ybor City. On a really good day, when Dunn was really pissed off and feeling it, he would damned near—or I believe he actually did a time or two—knock holes in the copy paper with his old Royal typewriter.