White Shadow (32 page)

Thursday night was always a good night. You got to think about Thursday as being even better than Friday, because Thursday was for people that couldn’t hold it any longer and the week had just proved too fucking much and they needed to embalm their brains or get their pole greased with some whore out back.

He put some lemons in a basket and walked around back, where some wildcat truckers were unloading potatoes and collard greens. Johnny lit another cigarette and asked a little grocer where they kept the cherries.

He pointed and Johnny walked that way, just catching in the edge of his eye a thick-waisted Italian in a black knit shirt and high-waisted khakis nod to him from over by the Hillsborough side of the open market. Cool fans forced air down between them and blew long strands of hair in Johnny’s eyes as he squinted and walked over to the man. Because when Joe Bedami came calling, it wasn’t nothing social.

“Joe,” Rivera said.

Joe nodded, those damned ugly circles under his eyes and that thick sweat that always coated his face like he’d just dunked his head in water. Rivera looked around him just to make sure that Dodge or Ellis Clifton or one of those detective types wasn’t watching. He picked up a cantaloupe and kept looking around.

Bedami didn’t even try to conceal that he’d come to the market to talk to Johnny, and Johnny waited to know what he wanted, but down in his heart he already knew. He’d just kind of play dumb and wait it out and see how much the Old Men from the Italian Club knew.

“I’m looking for a girl who works for you.”

“Yeah?”

“Her name is Lucrezia.”

Rivera nodded and put down the fruit. The fans kept beating down on him and scattering the smoke, and Rivera extinguished a smoke under the sharp toe of his shoe and lit another. He had a nice little lighter he’d bought on Broadway, made out of silver and embossed with aces.

“What you want her for?”

“Not me,” Bedami said. The thing about Bedami was that the son of a bitch didn’t have any emotion. Johnny had heard once that Bedami’s dad, this old gambler named Angelo who was part of the old crowd down at the club, used to brag that his son was born without feelings or a threshold for pain. He used to make jokes about how he could beat the boy senseless with a razor strop and that he wouldn’t even cry.

Bedami stood there. Rivera watched that dull—but not stupid—look on his face, waiting.

“Okay,” Rivera said. “I can ask around. But I’m telling you, I ain’t seen her since last week. She hadn’t shown up for any of her shifts.”

Bedami nodded. “You know where she lives?”

Rivera shook his head. “I can ask around.”

“You do that,” Bedami said. And then like that, the big son of a bitch with those dark rings under his eyes walked back to his Plymouth and crawled behind the wheel and slowly drove off, just kind of puttering like he was in no particular hurry to find a woman that he’d been ordered to kill.

Hell, Rivera didn’t need a map for that one.

That’s the only reason the old men ever wanted Joe out there. Sure, he wasn’t a bad robber and a hell of a safecracker, but he could beat down many a man.

They—the Old Men—used Joe when they really needed him.

Why? Who had talked about Lucrezia? Why would those old sons of bitches want the girl if they didn’t know what she’d taken from him? In the cool air, that spring breeze at his back and those paddle fans spilling air on his face, Johnny Rivera started to sweat. He could feel that hot bead just roll down his neck and across his spine.

He paid for the fruit and drove back to the bar, where he’d stand all night with a sawed-off 16-gauge within an arm’s reach and a finger’s touch.

DODGE DROVE through the big stucco gate of Raiford State Prison and around to a gravel lot where a salty guard named Doolittle walked him through the yard and past the Death House over to the newly built Tuberculosis Ward. He’d called about Jimmy Levine shortly after leaving Abe Marcadis and grabbing a quick breakfast at Goody-Goody. He’d gone through Ocala and Gainesville, and up 301 toward Jacksonville, stopping short in Union County at the prison, more than three and a half hours north of Tampa. The guard led him along a gravel path—the Death House sitting in the center of the yard for all the prisoners to see—to the TB ward, where men in white shirts and coats and women in nurses’ dresses and white paper hats passed them. The building was brick, with asbestos siding and a wide-shingled roof. It was quiet on this side of the prison, but even on the other side of the Death House Dodge could hear the clamoring of restless men trying to fill out their day in their cells or walking the yard. He wondered how many of them he knew and how many would know him later.

Doolittle signed him into a front desk and introduced him to a pretty nurse with green eyes and then left him there.

The nurse handed him a doctor’s mask and told him to strap it across his face.

He swallowed and did as he was told and followed her through twin metal doors with windows that looked like portholes and opened with a
woosh
. The long corridor smelled of fresh linoleum and solvents. Pretty soon they were led into a small, locked room where they found a bald man, his head speckled with age spots. He slept with his mouth open, and he had the gaunt, hollow look of the dead, the look dead people get that caused you to get religion because you swear the soul has left the body.

The nurse wore a mask, too, and shook Jimmy Levine awake. He slept on crisp, bleached sheets, with his head on a crisp white pillow. The walls and floor were tiled and white like the porcelain drinking cup that sat before Levine.

He awoke with a gagging cough and rolled to the side. Dodge stepped back and and closed his eyes. The room smelled of bleach and had the strong odor of fish and cigarettes, a decaying ashy stench that caused him to cover his mask with a free hand and pretend it wasn’t properly attached to his face.

The nurse nodded to him and stepped back to a corner but did not leave the room.

Dodge walked forward and introduced himself to the old man. The man nodded and nodded, but his eyes brightened when Dodge dropped the name Abe Marcadis.

Dodge’s voice sounded muffled and hollow, but Levine nodded to let him know it was okay; he was used to people talking with masks.

Dodge pulled out the birdseed from his coat and showed it to Levine, who grabbed hold of the plastic bag and looked at the contents. He held it to the light and nodded, staring at the little pieces of buckshot and seed.

“Abe says this may be your work.”

The old man shrugged, and the shrugging made him go into a coughing fit. He covered his hand with a fist and grabbed a small bucket at the side of the bed, where he spit up a handful of gray mucus.

He wheezed and then spit into the bucket again.

“Not anymore,” he said.

“But you did,” Dodge said. “Make blackjacks.”

“Sure.”

He coughed small now and closed his eyes. His breath wheezed out of the small hollow chest that looked as thin as a bird’s in his nightgown. Dodge looked back at the nurse and felt his own breathing tighten in the mask. He realized he’d been holding his breath. He took a small bit of air, trying to breathe through his nose.

“Do you know Johnny Rivera?”

Levine nodded.

“Did you make him a blackjack?”

He shook his head.

“You know Joe Diez?”

He shook his head.

“How ’bout Charlie Wall?”

Levine’s eyes got big, and he nodded and nodded. He raised up in bed and put a fist to his mouth for a cough that didn’t come. “You work for Mr. Wall?”

Dodge shook his head. “No,” he said. “Somebody killed him.”

Levine understood. “Somebody finally took down Charlie Wall? Christ. That’s why you’re here.”

“Charlie had been retired for some time.”

Levine launched into another fit of coughing and bent almost his entire body over the edge of the bed, spitting and coughing phlegm and blood into the bucket. Dodge backed up and stood there and waited. The air in the room seemed tight, and his lungs seemed to constrict.

“Have you made one of these blackjacks in a while?”

“I can’t,” Levine said, shrugging his light bird shoulders. “Against the rules.”

“I am not trying to get you into any trouble,” Dodge said. But he wanted to say to the dying man: What the hell do you care with the life sucked all out of you and dying like a broken criminal in the Rock’s TB ward? But he kept it easy and slow.

“You put in a good word for me?”

“Sure,” Dodge said.

“What kind of word?”

“I’ll tell the warden you helped me out a lot. I’ll tell him it was an important killing.”

“I killed a man in 1924,” he said. “I shot him in the heart. We were robbing the First National. Is it still there?”

“The bank?” Dodge asked. “Sure.”

“It was a beautiful thing,” Levine said. “I was free for two days before they caught up with me in Deland.”

“I’m going to name some names,” Dodge said. “You tell me if you recognize them.”

“I don’t know anyone from Tampa,” he said, and stared up at the white ceiling. “I’ve been away for almost thirty years. I don’t know any people left besides Abe. I think I have a cousin and a wife, but I may not.”

“Can I do anything for you?”

“Can you give me a cigarette?”

He looked behind him at the nurse. She shook her head. Her eyes were very green against the white mask.

“How did Charlie get it?” he asked in almost a whisper.

“Someone beat him to death with a blackjack filled with birdseed and shot and then they slashed his throat.”

“I’m glad,” he said. “Charlie Wall was an evil son of a bitch. I hated him and I hope he rots in hell. All you cops are the same. Always looking out for big shot Charlie Wall. Why don’t you just do your job?”

Dodge looked at him.

“One of my boys once robbed one of Charlie’s bars in Ybor City. A nothing little shithole on Broadway that he maybe got twenty bucks out of. This was back when you couldn’t drink, and Ybor was wide open back then. He didn’t do nothing. He took the twenty and split it between the rest of the boys. It must’ve been a week later that Charlie had him hauled over to him by these big Cubans. Those boys beat him with their fists and chains. They broke two arms and his jaw. He couldn’t eat or shit right for almost a year.”

Dodge nodded.

“Charlie Wall wasn’t upset about the money,” Levine said. “He was upset about me and the gang and about order. So, to hell with Charlie Wall. And to hell with you for asking me to help.”

“Thank you for your time.” Dodge started to turn for the door.

“Actually, it’s funny,” Levine said, and Dodge stopped. “I ain’t made a one of them things for no hoodlum. I never did.”

“Who’d you make them for?” Dodge asked in the tiny window-less room. He still couldn’t breathe.

“I made them for cops for twenty years,” he said. “The guards gave me the leather and stuff to do it. I bet I made blackjacks for half the cops in this state.”

Levine laughed for a while until the laughing broke into such a harsh wheezing and coughing that Dodge backed up almost flat to the door. Dodge looked at Levine, whose head now rested on the pillow.

He wiped the spit off his face and smiled. “Funny. Ain’t it?”

I TOOK OFF my jacket and slung it over my shoulder, my straw hat down in my eyes as I leaned against the marble wall along the steps leading up to the Tampa Federal Courthouse. The front of my shirt and back were soaked in sweat, and around me newsmen and photographers waited for the Trafficante brothers and their known negro associates from St. Petersburg to come rolling down the steps and try and evade our questions. Of course, we didn’t quote the negroes back then. We saved that for the special edition of our paper only to be sold on Central Avenue, down at the soul food shops and honky-tonks.