White Shadow (17 page)

Ed Dodge drove down Buffalo Avenue early that Thursday evening with his partner Al Wainright past the headstone makers and little farmers’ markets advertising flats of strawberries from Plant City and deals on early tomatoes. In the early, soft, pink evening light, Wainright made notes on a pad balanced on his knee as Dodge watched the cars roll past in their two and three tones of bright cherry red and seafoam green and hard-candy-shell black. The police radio under the dash squelched out a fatal car accident over on Gandy and a liquor store holdup in Ybor City. There had been two murders that morning, and a woman had been raped at the Hillsboro Hotel, and there was no end in sight. But Dodge had been permanently stuck on Wall duty, with some backup help from Bender and Gore.

They rolled into the Jackson Heights playground, the artificial lights snapping on the baseball field, and grown men in uniforms taking the field, pudgy and red-faced, cigarettes in their mouths and beaten gloves in their hands.

Dodge wandered behind the metal cage behind home plate, and Wainright waited beside him.

“You used to play ball?” the younger man asked him.

“Sure.”

“Were you any good?”

“Not really.”

“You don’t talk much, Dodge. Why is that?”

“I talk when I got something to say. Now, go run off and get me a Coke or something.”

Dodge found a seat on the wooden bleachers, feeling good to be outside interrogation rooms and smoky detectives’ offices, out of the courthouse and out of late-night bars.

Wainright came back and brought him a Coke and a sack of peanuts that he started shelling. Dodge took a few, cracking them open and watching the grown men warming up in their gray uniforms sponsored by Buck’s Plumbing Supplies, complete with a stag head for a logo. Women in tapered skirts and colorful, thin, tight sweaters that clung to their unnaturally pointy breasts waved silk handkerchiefs and whistled using their pinkie fingers. The men, still not a decade out of the South Pacific or Western Europe, waved back—maybe slightly bored—but loving doing something, because after you saved the goddamned world, what the hell was saving Jackson Heights from Buck’s Plumbing?

“You think the Feds will get anything from those knives?” Dodge shook his head.

“Maybe Rivera slipped up.”

Dodge shook his head again.

“We won’t find prints or evidence, and we sure as shit won’t find a witness.”

“Then why are we doing all this?”

“’Cause it’s a sorry-ass game,” he said.

“Something will come through,” Wainright said, smiling. “I know it.”

The sky turned purple and black and that orange-pink that only happened on spring nights in Florida, and Dodge stared down the third-base line and farther beyond the fence. A dirt road ran parallel with the foul line and past clapboard shanties and all the way out to the back of another row of cemeteries.

Out on the porch of those shanties, dozens of coloreds sat in straight-back metal porch chairs smoking cigarettes and drinking colorless liquor out of jelly jars, waiting for Thursday night to start and watching a bunch of out-of-shape white men play under the small bright lights hung from telephone poles.

A fat man in a black suit and baseball cap sat down beside Dodge. He held an umpire’s mask in the crook of his arm.

Dodge shuffled the peanut shells from his fingers and shook the man’s hand. Wainright walked off as he’d been told.

“Is this a common one?” Dodge asked, showing the umpire the broken fat part of the bat encased in clear plastic. The one found in Charlie’s backyard.

“I’ve seen them,” the umpire said. “Mainly, Louisville Sluggers.”

“Does John Rivera play in this league?”

“I can check.”

“I’d like to show this to the teams.”

“Fine by me. But we’ve got league play here three nights a week, and that’s just here at this park.”

“I know. Place to start.”

“You think it was broken when it was used?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is that what killed Charlie Wall?”

Dodge just kind of nodded to the fat man in black to let him know it was, but not to make such a big deal about it. “Can you ask around?”

“Sure, Ed. Whatever you need.”

He’d gotten through talking to most of the men, most of them scoffing at being able to identify a single Adirondack bat, when Wainright met him at the mouth of the dugout. Dodge made some notes and didn’t look up, even when Wainright got right behind his ear.

“We just got a call,” he said. “Some crabbers just found a couple of bodies over on the Gandy.”

“Our side?”

“Yeah,” Wainright said. “They’re tangled up in the mangroves, and Franks wants you down there to take some pictures before they pull them out.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dodge said, looking again at his watch. “Why do I always have to be the one with the damned camera?”

WHEN I FIRST heard about the dead men in the mangroves, I was fishing for more information on Charlie Wall at the Big Orange on Grand Central. The Big Orange was a piece of stucco fruit, as large as a house, with a surrounding drive-in where cops were known to get a little nip of whiskey in their coffee while they waited between calls or had gone off duty. A cop I knew by the name of Rivera—of no relation to Johnny; half of Ybor City was Rivera—was filling out some reports on some traffic stops. We’d moved on from Charlie Wall, and we started talking about his fishing boat and how his wife was pregnant again and how sometimes he felt like the Tampa Police Department was getting more rotten by the day. (You had to know those folks, a lot of the time they were just gripers, but if they knew they could bend your ear to let off some steam and you’d give ’em some room to do it without getting their name in print you could really have something.) I knew a half-dozen guys like Rivera back then. It was the kind of thing that when I didn’t even catch the radio call about the bodies, he made me listen to it again and told me to follow him down Memorial and then down through the neighborhoods of Beach Park, where it seemed houses were multiplying like jackrabbits with all these names like Bel Aire and Paradise Cove and Sunset Park, built all around and on top of an old mangrove lagoon.

Through the darkness, my hands were eerily lit from the glow of my Chevy’s little dash, the tiny radio playing some Patsy Cline as I rode down this long road past all the cattle fields and orange groves and then down to Gandy Boulevard and cruised on toward the bridge where my friend—the cop—said we’d find the dead men.

I pulled into a loose circle of black-and-whites with their headlights glowing near the bridge’s pilings, the light shining into the twisted thick red branches of the mangroves.

Behind me, another car stopped, and I saw Ed Dodge get out with another detective I did not know.

A small billboard for the Sunken Gardens in St. Petersburg glowed from a couple of metal lamps. EXOTIC. INCREDIBLE. TROPICAL PARADISE.

THE FIRST BODY had a big air-pocket hump in the back of its black suit coat as it buffeted and swayed against the branched roots of the mangroves. A uniformed officer held it still with a long stick and another squatted down on the sandy edge of the bay, pointing a flashlight into the face of another corpse. One eye was glazed over with a jellyfish material, and the other was bloody and partially gnawed away by fish. He swished the flashlight beam over toward me as I walked down off a bank of wood pilings and through a dirty mess of empty beer bottles, sardine cans, paper sacks of half-eaten hamburgers, and parts of gutted fish, with big bottle flies scooting and buzzing around the fish heads. The same flies had found the eye sockets of the dead man and zoomed in and out of the orifices and into his wide-open mouth, a fat mess of a black tongue sticking out from his head and down onto the smeared messy wound coloring the front of his black suit. The two men were wearing the same thing.

“Get back, please,” Dodge said, moving past me and squatting down near the dead men, telling the uniformed officer to move back and use the patrol cars to light up the mangroves. The man did, and the other detective joined Dodge down by the water’s edge, with me looking down from the shoulder of the road a few feet from the Sunken Gardens billboard.

I heard motors start, and the lights punched on from three squad cars. Suddenly, there were endless rows of twisted, swampy red branches running away from the shore and toward the bridge. Another body—same black suit—hung in midair, washed into the branches as if being held by a parent’s arms.

I waited there for three hours that Thursday night, the day before they put Charlie Wall in the ground at Oaklawn. I found a gas station down Gandy toward Dale Mabry Highway and called Hampton Dunn at home. He was watching
Gunsmoke,
and told me to hold on a few seconds because apparently James Arness was about to kill someone, and so I did, waiting there at that crummy little gas station phone booth till he came back on. I told him Tampa police had found three bodies of men wearing identical black suits—whether or not this was crucial for the detectives didn’t matter because it was a hell of a quirky point for a story—and Dunn listened and listened, and I told him Ed Dodge was there, and that they were now taking photographs in the swamp, with Ed Dodge taking off his shoes and leaving them on the beach and hiking into the water with his britches hauled up toward his ass.

“You got an ID yet?”

“No.”

“Stay there till you do.” Then he hung up and went back to his little glowing box and the Old West, and I drove back to the mangroves, where Dodge’s flashbulbs were going off like tiny pockets of lightning in the tangled roots of the swamp. I lit a cigarette there and sat on my car and tried to chat up Pete Franks when he got there, but he swore to God they had no ID on the men yet. And so I went back to smoking and watching the Sunken Gardens sign and thinking that maybe that was a hell of a place to visit, with all those plants and parrots and all, like you’d find down in the Caribbean.

And then I saw my girl Eleanor Charles in her cherry red ’52 Merc convertible roll in beside Franks. She parked, leaned into his car, with Franks smiling under the little bulb of light in that Ford while they talked. And I watched her in the darkness as the salty wind kicked up off the bay, wondering what the hell he was telling a pretty girl that he wouldn’t tell me.

WHEN ELEANOR had tapped out Franks on information and patience, I felt her move behind me, kind of loose walking and kicking at the sandy dirt and shells, as the policemen covered in muck and mangrove water tugged the dead to shore. The moon was high over the bay, and the air smelled of salt and marsh, and by the time she was standing beside me I could smell her clean, soapy smell, too. She didn’t smile at me or even look at me for that matter, her eyes trained on the dead men, notebooks hanging loose in both of our hands.

“Franks said they don’t have an ID yet.”

“That’s right.”

The wind skirted through the bay and up through the mangroves and made whistling sounds under the bridge. The lights of the police cruisers held the scene, and we blocked some of the light in small, jagged shadows.