White Shadow (19 page)

DODGE AND Red McEwen met early that morning, dressed in black for Charlie’s funeral, at John Parkhill’s office in the Gaslight Building. The Gaslight was a triple-story, wide brick number directly behind the First National Bank and looked gray and dour in the slight mist of the morning. The Tampa Nuggets billboard on top of the Knight and Wall Building steamed with fake cigar smoke as they walked.

Red wore rubbers over his loafers and carried an orange-and-blue University of Florida umbrella. Dodge knew Red had been a pretty good football player at the university before going to law school and later taking over as the new guard after the Kefauver Commission.

Parkhill had a corner office overlooking the dark, dirty Hillsborough River and the Switchyards—hulking gray warehouses full of trucks and trains—and into the little room where his wife typed, filed, and talked on the phone.

As he walked in, Dodge’s face turned red, and he looked away from her.

“He’ll be right out,” Edy Parkhill said. “Would you gentlemen like some coffee?”

“No, ma’am,” Red said, and dabbed a thin drop of rain off his snap-brim hat. His hair looked like steel, cut sharp against the sides of his head.

Edy smiled up at Dodge as she loaded her typewriter with paper in a way that made him nervous, slow and sexy, and held the gaze until he smiled back. Her dress was blue with white polka dots, and her tanned breasts swelled as she shifted in her chair.

He smiled at her and felt his throat tighten.

They met in Parkhill’s office scattered with old photos of his grandfather, the captain in the Confederate Army who’d died in battle; his father, the solemn-faced Florida Supreme Court justice in black robes; and John, the weekend tennis player in white shorts and shirt, racket in hand, finishing in the latest Palma Ceia Country Club tournament.

Parkhill was hound-dog-faced and red-cheeked, and he wore his dark hair oiled and slicked back. He had a heavy stomach from too many cocktails after his days in London during the war and then trying to put two unsuccessful runs to be state attorney out of his mind.

“Fred Bender says hello,” Dodge said.

Parkhill smiled. “Fred’s a good fella. You know his wife, Ruth?”

“Sure.”

“Edy and I just think the world of them.”

Parkhill kept on his feet, not offering anyone chairs, and looked out onto the Switchyards. Smoke and steam rose up out of the brick and a whistle sounded from a train rumbling back through the heart of the city. His breath smelled of alcohol and toothpaste, and his eyes were bloodshot and tired.

“John, we need some help,” Dodge said.

He was cool and smiled. But he didn’t care much for Parkhill because he was known to be a drunk and a lawyer for the hoods, including the Trafficante brothers and Charlie.

“We need to see everything on Charlie. His safe-deposit box. His financial records.”

“You know Mr. Wall was retired,” Parkhill said. “I provided you with his account information at First National.”

“Yes, sixty-seven hundred dollars and some change,” Dodge said.

“I didn’t know much about his old business,” Parkhill said. “But even when he was active, his expenses were tremendous.”

“John, can we get to it?” Dodge asked. “We’re not in court. The Old Man is dead, and we’re just trying to make some sense of it. He had to have had millions hidden somewhere.”

“Mr. Wall never had a million dollars in all his life, much less that much hidden in a cache.”

“Cache,” Dodge repeated. He placed his hands in his pockets and rocked forward on his toes.

“I saw the deposit of a five-thousand-dollar check last summer in the papers you gave us,” Red said. “This was from a Miami bank. Did he still have business there?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Parkhill said. “All I knew Mr. Wall to do was watch his new television set and join the boys for a few drinks at The Turf. Keep in mind, the account at First National includes a fifteen-hundred-dollar tax refund made by the U.S. government on April first. I don’t see why you need more than that.”

“If we know about what Charlie was involved in lately, maybe we can find who nearly sliced his head off,” Dodge said.

Parkhill frowned and stepped forward. His voice was flat and slow, with a small palsy to it. “I don’t have his income tax figures yet, but I do know that Mr. Wall was investigated from
A
to
Izzard
by the Internal Revenue Bureau three years ago. If there had been any hidden millions scattered anywhere, the income tax men would have found it. They don’t leave millions lying around very long.”

Edy started to type again, and there was a constant pecking and zinging of the typewriter. Then the phone rang in the outer office and Dodge heard her sweet voice talking and then laughing, and Dodge wished he was outside talking to her instead of to her boozy, fat husband.

“Shall we?” McEwen asked. “The bank is waiting. Do you have the key, John?”

John Parkhill nodded slowly and grabbed his briefcase and umbrella.

THE MEN walked outside the Gaslight Building into the breaking gray day, puddles of rainwater being splashed by whitewall tires, and shop owners just opening up along Madison and east up on Franklin Street. They soon found their way into the First National Bank’s broad marble lobby filled with busy tellers at brass cage windows and officers in paneled rooms of dark wood and glass, counting the city’s money and dreaming of this wonderful future as the land boom continued and Tampa was marked to be the South’s next great hub.

McEwen and Dodge followed behind Parkhill as he wound through the lobby, waving to bank officers and winking at cute tellers, and toward the mezzanine and down a curving marble staircase into the earth, where a young man in a blue blazer and a big, toothy smile nodded them through an open accordion gate.

Another kid opened a second locked gate, and the men wandered into a room humming with air-conditioning through a single small vent. The room was walled with small and large stainless steel lockboxes. One had been slid out and waited on a long, steel table that reminded Dodge of bodies waiting on slabs at the morgue in Tampa General.

Parkhill turned his key on the box, maybe the size of two fat shoe boxes stacked on top of each other, and pulled out several papers. McEwen sorted through tax receipts on the Ybor City house, a fire insurance policy, canceled checks, a car title, and a leather billfold—a thick one like people carried before the Depression—which held only an old five-dollar bill inside. Beside it, he found a lighter matching the wallet, both monogrammed with CW.

He passed them to Dodge, who inspected them and laid them flat on the table. They were fancy and worn and spoke of wealth and power in a Tampa that had died long ago.

“In their investigation, the tax men asked that an inventory be made,” Parkhill said.

“Did Mr. Wall ever mention someone or any such organization who would want to do him harm?” McEwen asked, taking off his tortoiseshell glasses and refracting the lenses in the artificial light to check their clarity.

“He came by the office once or twice a week,” Parkhill said, stepping back from the table and casting his shadow on the table’s contents. “The only persons we discussed would be people he would have something nice to say about.”

Dodge sifted back through the first pile of papers and was about to dig into the next batch when he heard an odd ticking in the room, a sudden sound that jumped out of the air and reached Dodge’s ears like those moments when a person was calm and could feel his own heart beating.

He pulled out a thin gold pocket watch, dangling by a chain, and felt the soft smoothness in his hand as the ticking grew weak; somehow the mechanism had been jump-started for a few moments by the rattling of the metal box. The
tick-tick-tick
was slower and slower until a final
tick
. Dodge felt the smooth, warm gold in his hand as he wound the stem and started a regular ticking, a quick, healthy beat that filled the room.

“It was his father’s,” Parkhill said.

“Why’d he keep it here?” Dodge asked.

“He respected his father very much,” Parkhill said. “This was from his family, and he respected them too much to show it off. You know if he passed women in his family, even a distant cousin on the street, he’d walk on by because he felt he had too much respect for them to acknowledge that they knew him.”

“Is there anything missing from the inventory?” McEwen asked.

Parkhill searched through the papers. “I don’t seem to see a War Bond he had. Maybe for a thousand.”

Dodge kept sifting through the papers, the ticking of the watch and wooshing sound of the air conditioner making the room seem even more cold, hollow, and cavernous beneath Tampa at the bottom of the bank.

There were some matchbooks for the old El Dorado Club and pictures taken from the old Lincoln, back when Charlie ran the city. His hair dark, face smooth. There was a newspaper clipping about CHARLIE WALL NOT GUILTY back in 1938 for running a gaming joint.

Below the photos, Dodge pulled away an envelope and ran his thumb over an unused stamp. He unfolded a short, handwritten letter on the table and read the few paragraphs dated only a few weeks ago. He looked at the men, and then folded it back up, tucking it inside the envelope and then inside his jacket.

“Come now, Red,” Parkhill said. “You can’t just take things I don’t know about.”

Dodge looked at Red. “This letter in my possession is to be kept completely confidential.”

Red nodded and Parkhill frowned.

EXPLANATIONS COME more easily later. I never knew the Old Man trusted me that much, and I wouldn’t learn until years later what was in that envelope that was addressed to me. You’d think that Dodge would’ve walked right into the
Times
newsroom and taken me to the station house and talked late into the night about what happened to Charlie. But that wasn’t Dodge’s way. He wanted to have me followed, wanted to see what I’d trade to him in the way of information on the case, all the while figuring out that I was just Charlie’s latest and last drinking buddy and that maybe there were late-night talks about Prohibition and the rum and the blood and the hard death of his old partner Tito Rubio and jokes about how many times he’d evaded death, all done with a wink until Charlie ordered that fifth highball mixed with Canadian whiskey and he’d start talking about the goddamned Sicilians.

About the federal case against the Trafficante brothers and how he knew enough to send the bastards to Raiford for twenty years.

Just like a man who wants to believe that he was the first to get his hands into his girlfriend’s panties, part of me wanted to believe Charlie hadn’t shared these things with anyone else, with Red Newton at the
Tribune,
Ellis Clifton at the sheriff’s department, Ed Dodge, or maybe even Eleanor Charles. But I knew—and Dodge knew—that Charlie liked talking, and had gotten sloppy as hell. Because in Tampa—and especially Ybor City—you could talk about Italians, but you goddamned well didn’t say Sicilians, because that narrowed it down a lot to those old men from the old country who’d kept vendettas for centuries, and just because they lived down the road from each other in Ybor and shared in the bolita rackets and booze market didn’t mean that things had changed.

We’d had conversations after Trafficante’s old man had kicked off in ’54 about the blood that would follow—and did—and we’d talked about Joe Antinori just a week before he’d walked into the Boston Bar with that plate-glass window and was left with his mind shattered, pouring blood out onto that black-and-white-checked linoleum. Johnny Rivera saying he was in back, not seeing a thing.

So, I’d later learn what Dodge knew about me and about the letter and what Charlie had to say. But out of all his good-time audience, I never did figure out why he wrote the letter to me. From The Dream to The Turf to The Hub, there were others who bought him that fifth drink, the one that did something to him.