White Shadow (31 page)

Abe was a big man, about six feet five and two-thirty, with big, hairy forearms and a bright, optimistic smile. He poured some milk into the strong Cuban coffee and handed it to Dodge, who sat across the desk from him. Out a side window, Dodge could see the brick jail and its turrets and small windows, from which prisoners could see only bail bond shops and the Oaklawn cemetery.

Dodge laid down a plastic bag with the seed he’d taken from Charlie Wall’s bedroom; the rest he’d found was still up in D.C. The Feds had identified the buckshot mixed with birdseed as a broken blackjack, and Dodge told Abe about it.

He held the mix up to the light and then fell into his chair, sipping his coffee. “You ever have hemorrhoids? Ed?”

Dodge shook his head.

“It’s all the sitting I do here and talking on the phone and sitting in jail. All I do is sit and maybe drive some. My doc says it’s exercise.”

“What do you say?”

“I say my ass hurts.”

“Have you seen a blackjack filled with that stuff?”

Abe nodded and tossed the plastic bag back toward the desk at Dodge. “Sure, but not in a long time.”

“How long?”

“Twenty years? Is that a long time?”

“Not really.”

“I never saw inside them or anything. And I don’t know much about how they’re made. They’d use the birdseed in the blackjack in the flexible part—” he said, taking one from his desk and bending it. “So it works right. You know? Get that right
smack
.”

“You think there are many still floating around town?”

“Sure,” he said, smiling. “Why not? A good blackjack never goes out of style.”

“Do you know who was making them?”

“Nah,” Abe said. “They may have been made around town or in Cleveland. I don’t even know if they were homemade.”

“You know who would know?”

Abe stood up and poured some more dark Cuban coffee from the little percolator he kept on a hot plate in the one-room office. His phone rang, and he took the call and told someone he’d be right over.

“Bail jumper,” he said. “Stiffed me for two hundred dollars and he ain’t got the nerve to get the hell out of town. He’s down at Tibbet’s Corner flirting with a waitress. I got to go.”

Dodge looked up at him. “Where should I go with this?”

“This is a real long shot,” he said. “But I remember a friend of mine was once part of this gang. The Levine Gang. You heard of them?”

Dodge shook his head.

“Bad apples, every one of them,” he said. “But Jimmy Levine was a hell of a cardplayer and pussy hound. He and some of the other fellas used to hang out here in the office. This was maybe twenty-five years ago.”

“Where is he now?”

Abe smiled as he walked to the door and opened it: “Living in comfort up at Raiford.”

I FOUND HAMPTON DUNN in his office, clipping out the articles we’d written on Charlie Wall and pasting them into a large leather-bound book. I sat in front of his desk and watched him as he rolled his hands over the newsprint and closed the volume and tucked it back onto the shelf, where he had a dozen just like it. I’d later learn he was keeping his favorite stories for a series of books he’d write as an old man. But at the time, I just thought it was pretty odd because we paid a woman to keep clippings for us. Dunn sat back in his seat and was about to speak when the big black phone rang on his desk.

He took the call, and I looked at my watch. I needed to make the rounds at the police department.

“What are you doing?”

“I was about to go down to the police station,” I said. “I heard that Pete Franks may have something new on Charlie Wall.”

Dunn gave me that look, as if saying poor, sweet, stupid young boy. And he smiled at me while narrowing his eyes and lit a cigarette and waved that annoying cluster of smoke away from his face in the haze of years that separated us. It was all done like that. Corny and all for show. I could feel the watch ticking on my wrist through all those long, dramatic pauses.

“You don’t catch these kind of killers,” he said. “Did I ever tell you about Tito Rubio?”

I shook my head.

“Tito Rubio worked for Charlie Wall,” he said. “He ran this club called the El Dorado for him. You probably read about it in my piece on Wall.”

“Sure.”

“Tito and Charlie were real tight, when some men, probably Red Italiano’s crew, sent some killers to wait at the El Dorado. Tito left his headlights on so he could see the front door, and when he walked up the steps they blasted him with shotguns. I remember they’d turned over a table and covered it with a red-and-white-checked tablecloth to hide out. It was still there when I got to the scene. Anyway, that changed Charlie.”

I nodded and started to stand.

Dunn looked straight ahead, ignoring my trying to leave. “That’s when he started to talk to us. Put up a five-thousand-dollar reward. Held a press conference. Can you imagine that? And we all came. Ask Fager about that, he was there. And so was I. Charlie Wall liked us.”

Dunn stubbed out his cigarette. And he took another phone call.

More phones rang in the small
Times
newsroom behind me and I was sitting there paralyzed, listening to mortality tales from Hampton Dunn.

He looked at me: “Charlie liked to talk. Didn’t he?”

I shrugged.

“You want to talk?”

“About what?” I kind of smiled.

“Just don’t get your hopes up. I must’ve covered twenty of these things and we never find out what happened. It doesn’t work like that. This is a different thing, L.B. Okay? It’s their own rules. Charlie stepped out of line.”

“I guess.”

“You know why?”

I shook my head.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We have a paper to fill, and Ozzie Beynon and Pete Franks can putter around all they want, but they’re not going to find out who killed Charlie Wall.”

“I thought I’d at least check out—”

“We need you at the courthouse today,” he said.

“What’s going on?”

“Goddamned Trafficante brothers still on trial for that St. Pete thing. This thing is going to be going on forever. Santo flew in Monday night.”

“Maybe I’ll ask Santo what happened to Charlie Wall,” I said, and smiled.

“You do that,” Dunn said. “And maybe he’ll just tell you.”

I left and went down to the courthouse.

LUCREZIA WOKE with the sun and dressed as the morning light crept through the ringed parking lot of the Giant’s Fish Camp motor court. She chose a blue dress that Jeanie had given her from an old trunk a carnival worker had left long ago. It was an old-fashioned kind of dress, with rough material worn smooth and small flowers and a high neck. She’d cut out the neck and washed out the mothball smell, and it had fit neatly to her knees. Her old boots had been replaced by a pair of sandals that Al had bought for her from an old man in town who made leather goods, and all was falling into a nice routine at the Fish Camp.

She wound her hair into a tight bun at the back of her head and worked with Jeanie for several hours to make biscuits and to fry bacon and scramble eggs until the old-fashioned dress was covered in sweat and grease. Soon it was time to wash the plates and dry the silverware while they listened to the radio, and then it was time for Lucrezia to lie down for thirty minutes and then come back and do it again for the lunch shift.

She helped make the coffee and the sandwiches for the truckers, and she tried to stay in the kitchen because it was always the same in the restaurant, the men looking at her legs and occasionally feeling the soft halves of her rump.

After the tables were cleared and all slowed down, Lucrezia walked back to her room and sat on her porch, that hot humid air blowing in off the bay, while she read letters from home that she kept in a bundle tied with string.

She read over the last letters she’d received from Isle of Pines. She looked at the prison’s postmark and saw it had been three months ago.

Trucks blew past the little white cottages of the motor court, and Lucrezia bundled up the letters again and hid them under her mattress. She washed her face with a rag and cleaned under her arms.

She looked at herself for a long time in the mirror, staring deep into her brown eyes.

Moments later, she was walking along the highway again, moving toward the gas station in what had been her routine.

She checked her watch and sat in the phone booth.

The man at the garage came out to fill up a long black car with fuel, and he made small talk with a woman in a hat. He wore coveralls stained with grease and smoked cigarettes with a cupped hand that shielded his face.

She looked at her watch again.

Minutes passed.

The phone rang.

She answered.

“It came.”

Lucrezia waited.

“Are you sure?”

“It’s from him.”

“Did you read it?”

There was a pause, and then: “Yes.”

“What?”

“Batista has agreed to free him. He is to be exiled.”

Lucrezia’s heart beat fast. She smiled as the long black car carrying the woman in the hat spun out of the gravel lot of the gas station. She heard the wild sounds of the birds and the crickets, and there was a static sound between her and Muriel. She smiled more.

“Lucrezia?”

“Did he say more?”

“He wants you to join him.”

She nodded, as if Muriel could see her in that tiny phone booth back in the Florida wilds.

“Where will he go?”

“He says, he will find you,” Muriel said. “Where are you, Lucrezia? Tell me that. Are you safe?”

“You are safer not to know,” she said. And she hung up, walking fast back to the Fish Camp.

JOHNNY RIVERA ran by the farmers’ market over on Hillsborough to grab about fifty limes and lemons and maybe a few oranges and cherries. Women liked the oranges and cherries in their whiskey, and sometimes the whores would feast off of them in their cheap whiskey like he was running some kind of buffet. It was the same reason he bought peanuts by the buckets, the cheap kind that may have been a little stale, from that scratch-and-dent store, because the drunks and bums and niggers who came to the Boston Bar didn’t give a shit about class, they only wanted to get loaded and laid.

Johnny walked the aisles of the market, saying hello to a few of the Italians who ran the place, and to an old man who was friends with his mother, Celia. He talked to him for a while about his mother and said she was doing fine, and the man said he was doing fine and told Johnny to give her his regards. And Johnny said he would, moving down the aisles, passing the flats of strawberries and oranges and apples that had just come down from up north and rows of grapes that had been trucked in from California. He could smell some old redneck boiling peanuts in salt, and watched an old woman who was picking at scabs as she kept hand-cracking peanut brittle and putting it in tins. The market smelled fresh and cool and of vegetables and rot. But it was a hell of a nice day, and this morning he could breathe and smoke and walk the aisles and buy the cherries and citrus and then maybe go home and make a sandwich. Take a shit and a shower before heading back to the Boston Bar to open up.