White Shadow (21 page)

“I talked to Jack Parrino already,” Buddy Gore said. “Checks out.”

“Anyone else?” Franks asked.

“I got one more,” Dodge said, knowing that the tests from the FBI wouldn’t turn up shit unless, just maybe, that dumb son of a bitch tracked his own footprint soaked in Charlie’s blood across the room. But who would do that? It was only a part, a piece, a little jagged cutout that may be impossible to place. Dodge looked at Bender and Gore and Franks and damned Ozzie glowering at him from across the room.

“Who is it?” Oz asked.

“Guy Rivera named in his alibi.”

“All right,” Oz said, standing. “You work that, and Bender, I want you and Buddy to work on these goddamned Cuban cops. Does anyone speak Spanish here?”

“Julio,” Gore said, jabbing his thumb to the front desk where Sanchez was typing.

“Three fucking dead cops,” Oz said. “And not a goddamned person in Ybor City seems to know why they were here.”

DODGE BOUGHT a cigar in Ybor from a street peddler along Seventh Avenue before walking past the Columbia Restaurant’s Spanish tile and thick ceramic porticos and into its bar. It was a red velvet affair with dark amber lamps that reminded him of a brothel from the old days. He knew the bartender, and he shook the man’s hand and asked about a waiter named Henry.

The bartender told him about a man named Henry Garcia who worked nights.

Dodge asked him to call Garcia—not telling him what this was about, and to meet up at the bar. Dodge toyed with the cigar, listening to the clank of silver on china in the big dining room that the manager of the place—a former concert violinist who’d married into the family—had built a few years back. Dodge had heard the room was supposed to resemble a courtyard in Spain, but he didn’t move from his bar stool to see it.

“You want a whiskey?”

Dodge shook his head.

“Rum?”

He shook his head again. He wanted a drink, even needed a drink after seeing Edy Parkhill and listening to Franks and Beynon all morning after the funeral, but it was those slipups in your discipline that would make you like the rest of them. First you take a free drink or a cigar, and pretty soon it’s dinner for your wife and then it’s a mink coat, or it’s another woman who waits for you at the Hillsboro with her pink panties and French cigarettes, and then you’re making night runs for moonshine up in Pasco with a .38 at your leg because you’re not sure if you’re going to strike it rich or get shot in the back of the head.

Fifteen minutes later, Dodge had burned down the cigar as a funny little man walked in, not compact like a midget but short with long arms and legs. Long for his body. Big comical ears and a wide Latin smile. His teeth spread like a rake, and he laughed and smiled while the bartender introduced him as Mr. Ed Dodge.

The big rake smile dropped when Dodge showed his badge.

“Yes?”

“You were with Johnny Rivera on Monday night?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Is Johnny in trouble?”

“No,” Dodge said. “But this sure will help him out. We’re just trying to clear up a few things.” He smiled at the little man. “Where did you meet him?”

“The Boston Bar,” he said, smiled back, and shook his head, like he was confused. Dodge didn’t like him already, because an Ybor waiter didn’t pretend like he hadn’t heard that a lot of people were making Johnny Rivera for killing Charlie Wall.

“Where’d you go after that?”

“Nick’s place.”

“The Dream?”

“Yes.”

“Who was with you?”

“Jack Parrino.”

“Who else?”

“No one. We saw Nick at the bar and some other people.”

“How long were you there?”

He showed his palms and had yet to take a seat. “Hey, what’s this all about?”

“We’re looking into the murder of Charlie Wall.”

He squinted at Dodge. Dodge looked at the end of his cigar. A bitter, cheap old thing that he swore was made more out of brown paper than tobacco leaves.

“What’d you talk about?”

“When?”

“With Johnny. At the Boston Bar.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the little man said, finally taking a seat next to Dodge and ordering a whiskey. “We talked about the orange groves. Business stuff. About people we knew who lost money. You know? Because of the freeze.”

“You talk about pussy?”

“What?”

“Pussy.” Dodge smiled.

Henry smiled big and nodded. This man was okay, he seemed to say. “There is always talk of that, my friend.”

“You know where a man can get a decent cigar?”

The bartender pulled out a humidor, and Dodge chose a nice one from Nuñez Y Oliva, smelled it, and then he laid down a dollar.

“What time did you leave the Boston Bar?”

“One o’clock, I think.”

“You go anywhere before that?”

“No, sir.”

“Who drove?”

“I followed Johnny, and then he took his car home. I drove after that.”

“He gone for long?”

“No, I followed him.”

“Did he ever leave you?”

“To piss.”

“What about at The Dream? What did you talk about there?”

“Nick was laughing a lot about Mr. Wall being down there. Do you know Mr. Wall?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“You should come to the fights tonight, Mr. Dodge. You like the fights? My brother is fighting at the auditorium. I can put you on a list.”

“I appreciate that, Henry,” Dodge said. “I really do. But I think I’m going to be a little busy with this. So, why was Nick laughing about Mr. Wall?”

“Oh. Because he was very drunk. Staggering around. Nick made himself talk like Mr. Wall, and even did the walk. The drunk walk. Do you want me to show you?”

“No, that’s fine.”

Dodge watched people, Anglos and Cubans, coming through the door and bright daylight cutting into the little red velvet bar with the dark orange lights made to resemble gas lamps. Fat salesmen in fifty-dollar hats patted their stomachs and picked out the roast pork from the back of their teeth.

“You stayed there for how long?”

“We left about three.”

“You take Johnny home?”

“We were quite drunk, you see. We got some sandwiches and coffee after Nick closed up. It was day when I drove Johnny home.”

“Where’d you have the sandwiches?”

“The White House. On Twiggs.”

“And he never left your sight?”

“No.”

“You go on a lie detector to prove that?”

“Sure.”

Henry Garcia greeted a man who clasped his shoulder, and he turned and stood and shook the man’s hand and kissed the man’s wife’s knuckles, rattling on in Spanish, with Dodge catching a little about the woman’s beautiful smile and shapely body. If Dodge ever did that, he’d get slugged.

Henry’s face saddened when he sat back down with Dodge, catching the detective’s eye in the big framed mirror behind the bottles of liquor. “Why are you bothering my friend over this? He liked Mr. Wall very much. He is very troubled by this killing. Mr. Wall was like his father.”

“You ever read any books by Greeks?” Dodge asked.

Henry looked at him.

“Thank you, Henry,” Dodge said, shaking the man’s hand and keeping eye contact to let the man know he could be trusted and be fair, but also that he was smart and would be watching him, too. Dodge picked up his change for the cigar, laid his suit coat over his arm, and perched his hat on his head. “I’ll be in touch.”

ON THE THIRD floor of the new Hillsborough County Courthouse, light showed through the crack under Red McEwen’s office door. I sat on a long bench with my photographer, Dan Fager, who ate an apple while balancing a camera in his lap as I went back through my reporter’s notebook. Red’s office was up by the grand jury room, but there was no grand jury in session, so several of the newsmen had used the room’s benches to lie down and wait for the next witness to arrive or the old one to finish testifying. I’d had word late last night that, in order, we’d see: Audrey Wall, her sister Abbie Plott, Babe Antuono, and John Parkhill.

The hallway on the third floor seemed to stretch out forever past a big broad bank of windows facing east and past the modern escalator and then down to the long row of judge’s offices. The whole floor smelled of new white paint and freshly cut wood, and the linoleum floors gleamed with a fresh waxing. I took the escalators downstairs, closed myself into a phone booth and checked in with Hampton Dunn, and then rode back upstairs and took the same seat.

“You want a Coke?” Fager asked me, standing and stretching. He’d left his coat hanging over by the big window, still wet from the funeral.

“Sure.” I looked down at my watch. “I’ll get it. Don’t miss the shot.”

“I’m getting dead ass,” he said. “You know what dead ass is?”

“I can imagine.”

He nodded and checked his film for the tenth time in twenty minutes.

I watched the door, a simple white wooden break in the yellow-tiled wall, and heard voices. Fager stood and checked his bulb for the flash. And then here came Mrs. Audrey Wall in her polka-dot dress and white gloves and white purse, looking angry and dazed and staring right at us as she fixed that purse on her arm, gave her shabby hair a neat patting, and walked almost right through me as if I were a cloud or an apparition that asked her: “Mrs. Wall, do you have any idea who could have killed your husband?”

She brushed by me, eye fixed on the endless hallway of the third floor, and Dan Fager moved several steps ahead and cracked off a shot, the instant smell of burned bulb in the air. Then came the frantic swinging of that white purse and Mrs. Audrey Wall beating the tar out of Dan Fager’s back while he tried to get away, but she was following and muttering something that sounded dirty but kind of jumbled up with phrases like “shit ass” and other bizarre combinations. I tried to get her to stop, Dan Fager just repeating “Jesus, lady” until the door opened and Red McEwen walked out, laughing with Captain Franks and Ozzie Beynon until he saw the melee and grabbed Mrs. Wall’s arm calmly and held on to her purse. And without a word from McEwen, the dead bootlegger’s wife—just as calmly as she did walking out of McEwen’s office—fixed her purse back on her forearm, patted her hair, and waddled down the hall in that polka-dot dress and disappeared.

Franks grinned at Fager, who was reshaping his hat, and Mc - Ewen waited. A couple of radio men, a newsman from Tallahassee, and Eleanor Charles, among a few others I didn’t know, moved out into the hall for the latest.

Eleanor first asked: “How’d she check out?”

McEwen nodded and smiled. “She was completely cooperative.”

“I’ve heard that Mrs. Wall may have returned shortly before Mr. Wall’s death.”

“I’ve heard those rumors and there is nothing to them,” Mc - Ewen said. “Someone just got their days and times mixed up. At the time of the killing, Mrs. Wall was in Clermont. The Clermont police have verified her whereabouts.”

“What about the neighbors?” I asked. “Any word from the neighbors about what happened Monday night?”

McEwen shook his head. “No.”

“Are you still convinced it was someone Charlie Wall knew?” asked one of the newsmen from Miami.

“We are.”

“Was there any sign of forced entry?” I asked. I knew the answer to this but wanted it clarified. Again.

“There was not and Mrs. Wall has told us that all the doors were locked and the shades were closed. But I think that has already been reported. That is all. We have more witnesses.”

“Are Joe Diez and Johnny Rivera considered suspects?” Eleanor asked.

“No, and that’s it. That’s it.”

Franks and McEwen disappeared back in the office, and Fager rubbed his shoulders, repeating “son of a bitch,” and the
Tribune
photographer ribbed him about always letting him be in front. And I wandered back into the grand jury room, where Eleanor had taken a seat behind the judge’s bench to write down some notes, a pen behind her ear.