White Shadow (36 page)

“I’m funny that way,” Dodge said, and walked back to his car.

Wainright seemed to have fallen asleep, but cracked one eye when Dodge got back in the car and started the engine.

“Clifton going to help us out?” Wainright asked.

Dodge looked over at him.

Wainright’s smile dropped, and he straightened up in his seat as they headed up Florida Avenue. After a while, Wainright closed his eyes again, and Dodge studied the younger man’s profile in his rearview mirror as if looking for something he’d never noticed before.

ED DODGE got the call from his wife as he sat at his desk in the detectives’ bureau. He was eating a Cuban sandwich and talking to Fred Bender about some woman Bender had met at the Tampa Terrace Hotel. Bender was telling Dodge how he really needed to come out and see his show at the piano bar tonight. This woman was something to see.

He held up his index finger to Bender and took the call. “What are you doing?” Janet asked.

“Working.”

“Well, I need you,” she said. “Come home.”

She was crying and drunk.

“It’s the middle of the day,” he said.

She kept crying and told Dodge that he didn’t love her anymore. Dodge shuffled around some reports he’d been reading and looked back through the crime scene photos of Charlie Wall. A call like this wasn’t uncommon. The only difference was that she usually called earlier in the week.

The detectives’ bureau was filled, and he watched as Mark Winchester and Sloan Holcomb walked into Beynon’s office with Pete Franks.

They shut the door. He watched and kept listening. “Uh-huh.” “Why did you marry me, then?” she asked.

“What?”

“If you don’t love me?” she asked. “Why’d you have me break my engagement and go running off with you? You don’t even know, but I do. It’s because you want to be dead. You wanted to be killed in Europe or the South Pacific and be the goddamned big hero. But instead you’re stuck with me and two kids and trying to make a real life on a policeman’s pay while our neighbors are getting new cars and televisions.”

“Go to sleep, Janet,” he said. “Okay. Call me later.”

He put down the phone.

Five minutes later, Julio Sanchez motioned to Dodge from his desk across the open room. Dodge shook his head, knowing little Julio was trying to talk nice with Janet and calm her down. Julio could always work miracles. But this time, he showed up in front of Dodge and shook his head. He leaned in and whispered, “She says she’s going to kill herself.”

Dodge had heard that, too.

Not once in the months this had been going on had Dodge even suspected Julio of letting it out. He smiled up at his friend and tucked the photographs and reports back into their files and headed back home.

He found Janet on the back steps with a butcher knife in her hand. Her eyes were red and ringed by dark circles, and she jumped to her feet when she saw Dodge and threw her arms around him, whispering and muttering incoherent love until Dodge hugged her back.

Dodge took the knife from her and tossed it into the yard.

She grabbed his hand and started kissing his neck, but he held her back. Her breath was hot on his neck as she reached for him between his legs and told him that she needed him.

He shook his head.

“You goddamned lousy bastard,” she said. She balled up a fist and hit him hard in the chest, and he held her by her elbows and she shook and elbowed and finally escaped from him, running into the house.

He stood in the backyard and looked at the high wooden fence and the dead rosebushes and where the uncut lawn hit the fresh-cut lawn from the front of the house. He took off his hat and laid it in the car and checked the time.

Dodge let himself inside the house, and it was cool and dark there. He heard the old mantel clock clicking off the seconds and saw the house was neat and tidy. Janet had vacuumed and put away the kids’ toys into their long, wooden box that always stood in the corner. He walked into the far hallway and peered into his little boy’s room and saw the pennants and his autographed pictures of Roy Rogers and Fess Parker. There was a lasso rolled in a tight coil at the foot of his bed and a toy set of six-shooters in a buckskin holster.

He followed the hallway and looked at his daughter’s things in the same way, but she kept everything in her drawers, except the minimum: a light, a fan. The only personal thing that she kept out was a ragged old stuffed toy dog with no eyes.

Dodge found his wife in a fetal position on a rug in the bathroom. She’d vomited and failed to flush the toilet and was in a relaxed state of crying and laughing. Her eyes were closed.

Dodge pulled her to her feet, and she struggled to keep her balance as he led her to the bed and took off her shoes. He could hear the clock in the silent, dark family room, and he wondered if he should stay until the kids got home. He knew he should.

He made a call to Pete Franks but only got Julio. At the end of the conversation, Julio said: “Captain Franks says he wants to have a sit-down with you.”

“Jesus,” Dodge said.

“You know the drill.”

He hung up.

When he returned to the bedroom, Janet Dodge was fully awake and standing in front of a large mirror, her hair wild. She was completely naked.

He watched from behind as she shoveled a handful of pills in her mouth and washed it down with a small toy cup. She glared at him and walked past with that hardened stare. Her large breasts shook against her, a full dark patch of hair between her legs.

He turned.

And that’s when she leapt on him and hammered at his back with her fists.

Dodge spun and tried to restrain her, but she clawed at his face, dragging her nails down right below his right eye. He knew he was bleeding, and he pushed his wife back hard with the flat of her hands until she fell with a thump into the bed.

He rushed out into the hall and closed the door and held the knob with all he had for what seemed like an hour. Finally, she stopped trying to escape, and he was left there, sweating and bleeding.

He heard her snoring.

He washed his face in the kids’ bathroom and held a cold towel to his clawed cheek. He washed out the cloth several times until the bleeding stopped, and he soaked a rag with rubbing alcohol, touching it to his cheek until it made him grit his teeth.

Dodge’s mother always used to wash him like this. She’d use a rag soaked in rubbing alcohol and clean out his ears and his face.

He thought about the last time she’d cared for him like that.

It was before they returned back to the Scrubs, and he must’ve been about five or six.

In the mirror of his children’s bathroom, Dodge looked at the marks on his face and then down at the small toothbrushes kept in a cup. He cleaned his face once more, put on two Band-Aids, and closed his mouth so tight his jaw clenched.

SANTO TRAFFICANTE hadn’t been back to the L’Unione Italiana cemetery since the hot day last August when they buried his father in that marble vault. They’d sealed him inside a solid brass casket with a glass window where you could see him shrunken and eaten away by the stomach cancer and painted up like a Skid Row whore. Santo’s brother, Henry, wanted to kill the embalmer for putting the lipstick over his father’s false smile, but Santo had calmed him down—the way it had always been since they were kids—and they’d sat among the families and listened to the priest speak in Italian while they continued to unload maybe five grand in flowers.

Santo didn’t bring flowers this afternoon. Jimmy Longo waited at the front of the empty cemetery by the iron gates, a .45 in his waistband.

Today was almost as hot as it had been back in August, and he wiped his face with a handkerchief and listened to the hard silence among the marble headstones and mausoleums. There was so much art here in all the black and gray and white marble. There were people and animals and flowers and saints. The only sound he heard came from far away in Ybor where kids were yelling at each other, fresh out of school.

From where he stood, he could see Jimmy’s back through the rusted iron gate. He stood almost framed by the loosely open gate; as he watched, a black sedan rolled by slow and deliberate.

He watched the car roll on.

Feds.

He couldn’t even go to the bathroom without them following along.

Santo looked around him at the hundreds of marble slabs for people born in another century on another continent. The afternoon light created gold pockets, but a long shadow would soon bend over all of the markers like a cool flood.

He looked back at the gate. Longo stood, arms across his chest.

He looked back at the light, seeing if it had been overtaken by the shadow.

The Feds’ car rolled past again. Jimmy walked out into the road and leaned into their car. He yelled at them in Italian, and the car squelched off. Jimmy yelled at them some more and went back to being a guard.

Santo knelt in front of his father’s crypt and pulled away some silk flowers that had been left long ago. The flowers had melded to the marble in the heat, and when he pulled them away some of the petals remained stuck.

Santo pulled the rest away with his fingernail and plucked three decent flowers from the bunch, a bit sun-faded but still flowers. He bent their wire stems together in a tight bond and laid them neatly at the base of the monument.

An oval picture of his father circled in brass stared back at him. His father before the illness, a big and strong Sicilian, in his best blue suit. White show hankie and red tie. Big, true smile. This is the way he should be remembered, the tough old man holding court at the Columbia Restaurant, drinking his café con leche and making business decisions. Santo knew his old man understood order in chaos.

SANTO TRAFFICANTE SR. MAY 28, 1886-AUGUST 11, 1954.

Santo patted the marker with the flat of his hand and walked on the smooth gravel path back to the gate where Longo stood.

“Goddamned Feds,” Longo said. “I’m sorry.”

“They’re just doing their jobs,” he said. “Right?”

“It won’t last,” Longo said, laughing. “They can’t keep this up.” A loud roar whipped overhead, almost like a low scream, and the men shielded their eyes from the sun as two Stratojets from MacDill flew over Ybor City. All the old dogs in the Ybor neighborhood started barking, startled awake by the sound.