White Shadow (43 page)

A cut. A cut was something and Johnny Rivera always figured a scrap was better than nothing.

In the buzz of the airplane’s engines and the whir of the props, Scarface Johnny Rivera fell asleep with a smile on his face.

RIVERA WAS GONE. Dodge called into the station at midnight and they told him he’d been on the last flight out to Miami. He’d been with Santo Trafficante. Dodge walked back to the bar, the little nothing bar on Howard Avenue called the Chatterbox, where he knew he wouldn’t be spotted, and listened to a jazz combo knock it out while Edy Parkhill nearly toppled from her seat after her fourth martini since they’d gotten there. Dodge ordered a double, knowing he wouldn’t be called in, and Edy smiled and watched the combo, and Dodge was pretty sure that she had no idea that he’d even gone to use the phone.

He didn’t talk to her about his work.

He looked at her again. Dodge liked Edy’s red dress against her tan skin. He liked when she crossed her legs and he could see the nude stockings that he knew ended in a garter belt.

He paid the tab, put his arm around her, and they drove. She sunk down into the seat beside him and smiled at him while he held the wheel with his left hand. They didn’t talk.

He stopped on Memorial at a little motor lodge called Harbor Lights and registered as Mr. and Mrs. Jones and paid in advance. When they walked into the tiny little unit, Edy pulled a pint from her purse and asked Dodge to get her some ice.

He scooped some ice into the bucket and walked back into the room. The lights were dim. She’d pulled her red dress over the bedside lamp and stood in her bra and panties. Her stockings indeed led to a clip, and she sauntered over to him, cocky as hell with her curvy body, and scooped out a handful of ice. She added some with a clink to two glasses and sat on a bench at the foot of the bed.

She sipped her Lord Calvert blended Canadian whiskey and crooked her finger at Dodge.

He moved to her, she hugged his waist and felt for his gun. He moved her fingers away and pulled himself out of the leather holster and set it on the bureau. Edy watched herself in the mirror in front of the bed, and let her hair loose from a clip and took in more Calvert. She crossed her legs. She licked her lips.

She reached for Dodge again, this time reaching behind the sap he carried and grabbing his handcuffs. She rubbed the pair across his arm and looked him in the eye and just nodded.

Dodge looked at her. She cinched one of the cuffs on her wrist and lay down on the bed. Dodge locked the other cuff to the headboard. She arched her back and breathed deep. She told him to reach in her purse and to get her handkerchief. It was black and silk.

“Gag me.”

He did, tying the handkerchief around her head and sinking it into her mouth. She breathed hard through her nose and shuddered. Whatever it was, it was working at her deep inside. Dodge walked to the window of the little room and made sure the blinds were closed tight. He looked to see if the other cars were still shielding his. They were.

He walked back to the bureau and took a drink. He looked at himself in the mirror for a few seconds and then he heard her breathing. She was breathing quick and kind of shaking, this woman in a strapless bra and panties and stockings, handcuffed to a bed and bound with black silk.

HE VOMITED in the bathroom.

He took a twenty-minute shower, running it very hot and then very cold.

He left Edy Parkhill passed out in a mess of tangled sheets on Sunday morning and let himself in his house.

Janet had left him a loving note. She had apologized. She said the pills had made her sick. She said she’d taken the kids to church and would bring them back fried chicken, and maybe they could go to Lowry Park for a picnic.

Dodge shaved and brushed his teeth.

He drove back to the police station and sat in the empty squad room all day, making calls to the Miami Police Department about Johnny Rivera.

At three, he found out that Rivera, Santo Trafficante Jr., and Jimmy Longo had been on the midnight flight to Havana.

He called Captain Franks at home.

He called the police in Cuba.

He made reservations to leave for Havana later that night.

MAY WAS THE RAINY season in Cuba.

Dodge had been in Havana for five days and he’d spent most of it in the Ambos Mundos Hotel watching the rain pour on the cobblestone streets or looking out at the city from the rooftop bar drinking Hatuey beer chased with rum. He liked the roof best, because that’s where he could see the fishing boats out in the bay, the old cathedral that once held the bones of Christopher Columbus, and down into the little pockets of the faded buildings of the Habana Viejo. He smoked Chesterfields while lying on his bed with the windows swung open; he ate pollo frito with plantains at a small hotel restaurant along the Prado; he listened to mambo coming from the bars along the Calle Opisbo; he washed his socks and underwear in the hotel sink; he called Janet twice. He got drunk and felt ashamed for screwing another man’s wife.

It was noon and raining more. The hotel lobby had a long mahogany bar, black-and-white marble floors, and an old-time caged elevator that rumbled and shook the framed photographs of Hemingway on the plaster walls. The front door was set at a sharp corner point, and you could hear the horses
clip-clop
down the streets and the vendors selling flowers and candy.

In the morning, he’d awake thinking he was in Ybor City.

But he wasn’t home, and Dodge knew he was getting nowhere. Franks told him to get back to Tampa.

Johnny Rivera had disappeared after stepping off the plane from Miami.

Santo Trafficante claimed they hadn’t been traveling together and gave Dodge and two detectives from the Cuban National Police the big FO at his apartment down in the Vedado.

The detectives’ names were Gonzales and Navarro, old-timers with drooping black mustaches and black suits who looked like they’d walked out of a daguerreotype photograph from the Wild West. They treated Dodge like a hero, believing he’d come out of respect for the three Cuban cops killed in Tampa.

When Dodge told them Rivera was a suspect, they took him all around Havana. They leaned on valets and elevator operators and bartenders and casino managers. They made payoffs in plain sight of Dodge, invited him to big elaborate meals with their families, and took him to sex shows in Chinatown. They tried to get him drunk and introduced him to teenage whores.

Gonzalez and Navarro spoke flawless English and drove a brand-new Pontiac Star Chief painted bolero red. The more he knew Navarro, the more the guy reminded him of Cesar Romero from
Week-end in Havana
. He had great white teeth.

At one o’clock, Navarro walked into the lobby of the Ambos Mundos.

He shook Dodge’s hand, and they went for a drive.

Navarro waved to men selling cigars and women walking with baskets full of pineapples and mangoes in narrow little alleys. Wrought iron balconies hung from low windows, and lines of laundry had been strung across the little streets.

“You like the car?”

“Very much,” Dodge said.

“It has a V-8,” Navarro said. “They call the engine the Strato-Streak.”

He honked his horn and made his way past a boy on a bicycle, who shook his fist. They turned onto Mercaderes, passing a large Colonial fortress with strong columns and rusted iron cannons, past a big stone castle, around a cathedral, and onto Empedrado. The buildings were all European and stucco and stone, with columns and fluted towers. They held wrought iron gates to small courtyards, into which you could glimpse quickly, riding past. There were hidden pockets filled with palms and elephant’s ears and marble fountains and statues of saints.

A light rain brought a coolness to the brick streets and arch-ways leading into another century. Another conquering country. It was French and Spanish and English. It was negro slave and Spanish aristocrat. The streets smelled sickly sweet of cooking rum and large wooden doors open from the cigar factories.

Artists sold oil paintings beneath tent covers. Prostitutes, even in midday, worked street corners, some of them old women clenching cigars in their teeth and others fresh young girls with shapely, muscular legs but old, tired eyes.

Navarro reached into the glove box to grab two cigars. He handed one to Dodge while he continued to point and talk, and lit Dodge’s cigar while slowing the car down and whistling at two young girls in short skirts.

He honked the horn and they waved. The men rolled down their windows, and the misting rain felt cool as they hit potholes and the car filled with the smell of cedar and rich tobacco.

“Cuban women,” he said and sighed. “You understand?”

Dodge nodded. “Very much.”

They passed the Hotel Inglaterra right by the narrow Calle San Rafael, where merchants sold silk dresses and shoes and perfumes from Paris. They drove by a mammoth wide-open space where a large statue of José Martí pointed his finger at the sky among palm trees. It reminded Dodge of José Martí Park in Ybor and how one of his first cases involved some kids breaking off the arm of the revolutionary poet.

Navarro headed toward the Capitolio, which looked just like the Capitol Building in D.C. except the Cubans’ was bigger, with palm trees everywhere, short and squatty and tall and bending. Cubans shopped for clothes or groceries and ate at the little cafés. There were American tourists in Hawaiian shirts and ugly wives who pointed to the men, who held large cameras around their necks.

Navarro turned again, going along San Jose and the Gran Teatro, and soon they parked in front of the police station, a dour, four-story building wedged between an office of cultural affairs and a hotel. The main entrance had two cream globe lights that read: POLICIA.

The windshield wipers worked and squeaked, wiping away the rain.

“What about his office?” Dodge asked. “I know he owns a company called Dixie Amusements. They sell neon signs and slot machines. Maybe some jukeboxes.”

Navarro smiled. Smoke floated from his mouth as he examined the full cigar in his hand.

“What do you think Mr. Trafficante does here in Havana?”

“Cheats. Robs.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But we have no issue with him.”

The buildings looked blurry from where they sat in the car, and Dodge leaned back into the leather, finishing the cigar. He could see the back of the Capitolio, and it looked warped and crooked through the rain-streaked windshield before the wipers could clear it away for a slow moment.

“He may be more here than he is at home,” Navarro said. “You understand?”

Dodge shook his head. A strong wind blew off the bay and made whistling sounds by the car and bent the palms by the capitol. A man walking down San Jose lost a hat. It turned end over end until he caught up with it and shook off the water.

Gonzalez emerged from the front of the station house and took time to watch the sky as he stood by the dual cream globes. He waited underneath the awning and turned up the collar on his black suit before running to the car. He got into the back and wiped the rain from his jacket and face with a handkerchief.

“Johnny Rivera has been at the Tropicana for the past two nights,” Gonzalez said.

Navarro looked over at Dodge, and Dodge nodded.

He clenched the cigar in his teeth and smiled as Navarro knocked the big Pontiac V-8 into gear and they rolled back through the misting rain.

“I want to go back and talk to Santo,” Dodge said.

Dodge caught a quick glance in the rearview mirror of Navarro’s eyes flashing to Gonzalez.

“But you have already spoken to him,” Gonzalez said.

“I want to talk to him again.”

There was the look again in the rearview, and the bolero red Pontiac made a U-turn and they were soon traveling back along the Malecón as the waves pounded the old brick seawall. He saw the old Castillo at the point of the bay, and it looked strong and hard and ground down to become part of the rocky coast by time, rain, and sun. The sky was gray, and the long boulevard was empty except for the glowing headlights of big American cars.