White Shadow (28 page)

DODGE TURNED the knob and the door opened with a tight
woosh,
old dirty air escaping and still smelling like dried blood and all the shit that drained from a person when they died. He walked clear around the bloodstains from Charlie’s throat and the patch of carpet that he’d cut and sped through the FBI labs only to be told it was a man’s shoe of undetermined origin. Size unknown. He could only imagine trying to work that into court.

There was still some of that seed burrowed into the carpet, and he made a mental note to ask Audrey Wall about that, mainly just to check it off the list for McEwen, because it would be a hell of a thing if she ended up having a pet canary.

He opened the closet door and pushed Charlie Wall’s long row of starched white shirts and white suits to the side and found the metal door that Buddy Gore had noted and opened it. There was a big metal box in the closet with two switches.

He punched one, and the long, curved brick tunnel shone with light.

He punched the other, and he heard the mechanical roll of the garage door.

Dodge walked into the tunnel and Wainright followed him. He walked back and forth, ignoring the young detective, looking at the floor for anything that might have been missed, and then followed the tunnel into the rickety metal garage filled with tools and opened paint buckets and an oil-stained concrete floor worn smooth.

The garage door remained open, and as the men walked in the small space Fred Bender and Buddy Gore walked up the drive, dress shirts sweaty, with coats held in the crook of their arms.

Bender smiled in the way that only Bender could, like the man at the end of the bar ready to tell a good joke. Dodge had seen that look a million times—it was rarely during police work—when Bender was playing piano with a brandy glass stuffed with dollar bills and loose change.

“You got to see this, Ed.”

Dodge waited.

Bender laughed and shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

“I don’t think it’s much,” Gore said, his face twitching, and rubbed the stubble forming on his jaw. “He’s just some nut.”

“This guy,” Bender said. “Back there.” He pointed behind the southern edge of Charlie Wall’s fence. “He lives in his own crap. Like some kind of animal. His toilet is overflowing and he’s started to shit in his sink. He doesn’t have electricity and is living just wild. Cans of food and crap all over the floor.”

“He’s just a nut,” Gore said again.

“He say anything?”

“He said he didn’t even know Charlie,” Bender said.

“You believe him?”

“I’d like to check him out.”

Dodge nodded. “Here, hold my watch.” He unbuckled the Bulova on his wrist, the one that Janet gave him for their anniversary, and told Wainright to wait out there with Bender and Gore. “Time me.”

Dodge walked back through the tunnel and was left with the immediate silence and artificial light. He could smell Charlie on the old white suits and noticed the way the Old Man had lined up all his wingtips in a row as if he’d return any minute. The closet smelled of cologne and hair oil and powder from about twenty years back.

Dodge punched the button and heard the mechanics start to roll. He ran through the empty vacuum of space in the brick tunnel and into the little garage—a space of light narrowing to about three feet—and he made a motion to try and duck under, but it was too late.

He walked back.

Opened the door.

He came back to the garage and looked at Al Wainright holding Janet’s present to him and waited to try it again.

On the third attempt, he was able to make it under the closing door, with a roll on his side, losing his hat and tearing his pants. But he made it.

“I hope to hell the killer was faster than you, Dodge,” Bender joked, sliding his big gorilla back and shoulders into his Wolf Brothers suit. “You make me feel quick.”

Dodge looked at the tear on his pants and dusted the dirt off his knees. “It could be done.”

Bender shrugged.

CARL WALKER pulled into a long stretch of sandy-colored road in the dead center of a Pasco County orange grove. The sun was just beginning to set and kept the flowering trees in a nice hazy light with the smell of blossoms that reminded him of a whorehouse he’d once visited in Miami. The heavy cotton material of his deputy’s outfit clung to his sweating, reddened skin, and a streak of sweat rolled out of his pompadour and down his unshaven neck. He wore black cowboy boots and mirrored sunglasses and kept absolutely still in the grove, the only sound that of the police radio squawking, until he heard the grind of rubber on loose gravel and dirt and saw the black car in his rearview mirror almost swallowed by the big, dropping sun. Grit and dust kicking up loose around the tires.

Walker opened the car door and waited.

The black Ford slowed and stopped, the dirt still jangling around in the fading orange light in loose, shaky patterns in the grove.

Mark Winchester, Tampa Police Detective Bureau, emerged from his car with sleeves rolled to the elbow and a loud blue-and-yellow tie. He was a dark-skinned man with dark eyes and didn’t show much as he greeted Walker. No handshake, just a nod.

Walker looked out at the setting sun, the giant orb so orange and perfect in shape that it moved him. “You know they say an atom bomb is like two thousand suns. That’s some kick.”

Winchester nodded again.

“So what does it all matter, Winchester? If we ace each other off the face of the earth. What does it matter? Those Russians are crazy enough to do it. You know they hate us. They hate that we can make our own decisions.”

Winchester took a breath and looked back at his car.

He was alone.

Walker reached into the window of his Army green Pasco County cruiser and pulled out a manila envelope. “This is it.”

Winchester shook out the pages of typed information and the black-and-white photo, an eight-by-ten, of a teenage girl in a fancy white dress.

“Pretty,” he said.

“I’d fuck her in front of the preacher on Sunday morning,” Walker said, reaching for a toothpick that he kept in the loose flap of his shirt near his gold star. “Yes, sir. I’d split that little girl in half.”

Winchester tucked the photo back in the envelope. “We’ll ask around.”

“It’s considered a favor.”

“I know what it’s considered, Carl.”

“Just so you know,” Walker said, staring directly into the half-dissolved sun at the end of the sandy orange grove road. “Two thousand suns.”

Winchester walked back to his car, slugged it into reverse, and gently turned a circle, knocking it back into drive.

Walker sat for a while on the hood of the car until it was all over and only a gray light remained, and the heat and warmth of the sun had been replaced with a harsh breeze that smelled like gentle whores.

WHEN YOU HAVE nowhere else to go, sometimes you just hang around the newsroom, reading back through paper and taking phone calls and maybe waiting for some of the boys to get off work so you can go hit T.J.’s Stable Room. I made a few cop checks from my desk late that afternoon, puttered through my notes, and made another call to Dodge, who hadn’t returned a call all day. It was a slow news day, and I’d only filled up the paper with a small story about a woman who’d given birth at Tampa International after coming off a plane from Cleveland. It was late, but I had eaten and I thought about going home and getting drunk and reading my dictionary or watching the planes out on Davis Islands, anything but thinking about Eleanor Charles.

But I had a call from Julio Sanchez telling me about a train that had hit some poor bastard down by the Switchyards and I hadn’t waited two seconds before grabbing my hat and smoothing down my tie and heading out the door. I kind of hated myself for that, because at that time a lot of people got hit by trains and it was way past rush hour and way past my deadline.

I rode in my two-seater Chevy and found the police cars and the hearse and a black ambulance, where two men in white smoked cigarettes and looked bored. Late-afternoon light crept behind the old brick office buildings, hotels, and warehouses in Tampa and came through the Switchyards running alongside the Hillsborough River. The streets were wet and smelled of rotting meat from the slaughterhouses, and I heard the cows raising hell in the cars with the locomotive stalled while policemen took notes and wandered around looking for parts from the man who took a wrong step.

Drunks do this a lot. They step in front of trains or go swimming in the river or decide to walk down the middle of the highway in high traffic.

They don’t get a lot of room in the afternoon edition unless they’re famous or have caused a major disruption or the train stalled for a while and cut off Tampa straight down the middle, stopping people from getting home from work, and they’d want to know what the hell had happened.

“You got an ID?” I asked a sergeant, who was drinking coffee and leaning against his squad car.

“Nah, not yet,” he said. “We ain’t found his ass yet.”

And there were about five cops around him who laughed a lot at that.

But I didn’t. I just kind of took a breath and walked away, not because I was morally twisted about the dead man’s fate and cops joking about it, but because I’d heard the same sorry jokes before about a dead man floating in the bay or hanging from a rope of his own design.

Dan Fager photographed what he needed and gave me the two-fingered salute, camera in hand, before crawling back in his car, with the sweat and muscle still shoveling and moving the Switchyards. Steam pushed out of smokestacks and across the Hillsborough River, which flowed down past the electric company and into the mouth of the bay.

I looked down and saw something.

A leg, cut clean at the knee, still covered in heavy cotton khaki, and a foot holding the boot of a soldier.

I looked at the foot for a few moments and whistled for the cops, pointing. Downtown, the big billboard for the Hav-a-Tampa company with the giant cigar puffed out fake smoke, and that huge billboard for Early Times whiskey invited us all out for a fun-filled weekend.

Down a sloping brick street that runs smack down into the base of the river, past a great hulking warehouse, I saw a woman walking toward me.

Eleanor Charles smiled at me that morning in the Switchyards in her blue sweater set and long plaid skirt that I knew hid some wonderful legs. And soon she was standing next to me, looking down at the leg as if it wasn’t a leg at all but maybe just an old log that had fallen off a truck. She raised her eyebrows and tucked a pencil behind an ear and stifled a yawn.

“Mr. Turner,” she said.

“Miss Charles,” I said.

“Interesting.”

“You ever wish you’d gotten into another trade?”

“This isn’t a trade,” she said, with a small smile. “It’s a game.” I tipped my old straw hat.

She walked off and I watched her walk, and then I noticed that fat sergeant sitting on top of his squad car get up off his ass and take off his hat and start pointing to that giant, long, still train cutting Tampa right in two and blabbing off and not making jokes, and I watched Miss Eleanor Charles with the blond hair and brown eyes and sharp-pointed nose start taking notes.

“Did I see you the other night?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“At the Sapphire Room?”

I stared at her and smiled.

“Ah.”

I made some notes on something about the scene and looked away.

“Poor boy.”

“What are you talking about?”

She laughed and patted her hands on my face and they felt cool and electric and I was so damned mad at myself because I wanted to kiss her.

“Mr. Turner.”

I just shook my head and walked away, tucking my reporter’s notebook into my back pocket. I felt her following me, and heard the familiar clack of her uncomfortable shoes.