White Shadow (47 page)

I was done with Charlie Wall. I hadn’t told Hampton Dunn. I hadn’t told Wilton Martin. Nick Scaglione had been fishing. And I knew it.

I drove back to the
Times
and checked in with the sheriff’s office and the police department. I called the fire department and Tampa General. It was mundane, routine work, and I liked it.

I got roped into a City Hall story about a petition to move the railroad tracks from cutting Tampa in half during rush hour. I made a few calls to the usual folks and typed up my notes for Martin to work into a rewrite.

It was time for lunch, and I grabbed my straw hat, ready to go over to Goody-Goody for a burger and a slice of butterscotch pie.

A copyboy plunked down some mail on my desk and I sorted through it. I got two more crazy letters on Charlie Wall’s murder. One addressed to CRIME REPORTER and the other to L. B. TURNER, INVESTIGATOR. Both kind of made me laugh. Both letters asked a lot of questions, and nailed it on Mrs. Audrey Wall. One wanted to know if anyone had checked the locksmiths to see if Audrey had made a spare key. I knew the cops had already checked that angle.

I read the letter to Wilton Martin, who was tapping his foot and smoking and writing a quickie editorial on the railroads turning a potentially prospering city into an old-time cattle yard. He said we’d always just be a Cracker cow town with the current arrangement.

“You think Mrs. Wall really shot at old Charlie while he was on the crapper?”

“I bet she got his attention.”

“Damn right.” Wilton smiled, his cigarette clamped shut in his teeth, while he zinged through on his new electric Royal colored a hot pink. “Wives. Son of a bitch.”

I opened some more letters. There was a package at the bottom of the pile. I opened it, too.

I shuffled a book out into my hands.
The Fighting Cock
. Gale and Polden. It was a grubby hardcover book with fingerprint stains on the dust jacket. A rooster strutted on the cover with shiny, sharp spurs on its claws. The bird had red eyes.

I flipped through it and a letter dropped out.

LATE EVENING in Havana and the two detectives found Dodge on top of the Ambos Mundos talking to a shapely barmaid, a young Cuban woman, and holding her hand at a small table near the edge of the roof. She wore a yellow dress with red flowers and her hair was soft and black and curly, and she laughed as Dodge tried to speak Spanish to her and she just shook her head with amusement. There were four empty Cristal beer bottles on the table and two mojito glasses. The woman looked up at the cops as they approached the table and she stood and walked back to the bar. Dodge turned to them with a lazy smile, and they sat down.

“Rivera says he’ll go back with you.”

Dodge finished off the last of a mojito. He turned and looked back for the barmaid, who’d disappeared. The sun shone soft and yellow on the old stucco of Habana Viejo, and already the old Colonial fort’s roof was covered in shadow. Music had started from the bars on the narrow little Calle Opisbo, and tourists were riding in horse-drawn carriages over the cathedral plaza.

“Are you hungry?” Navarro asked.

Dodge dipped his head and said sure.

He rode with them out of the old district and down into a long tiled tunnel and then up again into the fading light as they headed east. There were big homes in the hills and shanties along the roadside. Small European cars zipped past them as Navarro kept a steady pace and played some big-band music on the Pontiac’s radio.

“You like Beny Moré?”

“Sure,” Dodge said. “Very much.”

Gonzalez passed around a pint of very dark, almost black, rum and the men took a sip. The Pontiac’s top was down and it was windy and hard to talk, so Dodge took in people walking beside the highway or riding on bicycles and boys playing baseball in the fading light on empty, sandy patches of land. They played with sticks and a ball and no gloves, and they looked like they were having a time of it, Dodge thought, knocking back more rum when it was passed to him.

The Pontiac rounded a little curve and there were more fincas and cows and chickens. Palms and large banyans with twisted roots that looked like feet lined the road; vines and pockets of jungle glowed with the last rays of the day. As soon as they hit the highway, the sky seemed to open up. It was huge. The sky was a never-ending gentle slate curve with a few white clouds covering endless fields of sugarcane. Some of the cane was being burned and the air smelled sweet. They passed men leading oxen pulling huge carts of cane with wheels fashioned out of wood. The men would walk slow, defying the traffic and the big-engine American cars. Boys on the side of the road sold big blocks of sweet cheese and old women without teeth sat in chairs selling dead turkeys and butchered goats.

They drove forever. They drove for twenty minutes.

Dodge could’ve gone forever. He liked leaving Havana. He liked the endless sky and the backroads of Cuba. He was offered a cigar. He didn’t want one. He wanted more rum, and he wanted to drive back to the Ambos Mundos and take the girl in the flowered dress to bed. He wanted to be kind to her and be slow with her and he wanted to take her to dinner and walk with her in alleys so rich and tangled that a man could get lost.

Navarro soon slowed.

It was night now, and the Pontiac’s headlights lit up a stone wall. They followed the stone wall for several miles until there was a break in the wall and Navarro turned. An unpaved road filled with loose rocks and crushed oyster shells ran past a shack with square windows glowing.

Near the shack, small palms lined the road.

There was a horse tied to a fence. Chickens scratched near the wooden porch and a broken refrigerator sat overturned on the closest path.

Navarro got out and stretched.

Dodge let Gonzalez out from the seat behind him.

Gonzalez bragged of
ropa vieja
and
pollo frito
with
congris
. He said there was more rum and hand-rolled cigars. And they would drink sweet cane juice that would make a man superpotent. And Dodge laughed at that and followed the men up onto the porch. He had to walk slow because it was night and it was very dark.

Navarro opened the door and called into the house.

It seemed to be one large room, and Dodge walked ahead of him. Old fishing tackle hung on the wall, and two ancient muskets were mounted above an empty bookcase. The room was lit with oil-burning lamps and it all smelled wet and moldy inside. There was a small iron bed and a nightstand.

He took another step.

Navarro stepped behind him and gripped Dodge’s arms against his body.

Gonzalez fit a plastic bag over Dodge’s head and whipped a rope around his throat.

Dodge sucked in air and the plastic bag flattened to his face. His face filled with blood and he dropped to his knees. Navarro clamped cuffs on one wrist and kicked him to the floor.

Dodge fought.

He knocked Navarro down with a backward head butt. He tore the plastic from his face and gasped for air. Gonzalez reached for the gun in his coat, but Dodge balled up his fist and punched him in the side of the head.

Dodge reached for the .38 beneath his coat just as Navarro tackled Dodge to the ground. Gonzalez ran back to them and stuck a knee hard in Dodge’s spine.

The handcuffs were clamped to his free wrist. Gonzalez pressed his knee harder into Dodge’s spine and Dodge again could not breathe.

The men pulled him by the handcuffs to his feet, and, when he resisted, dragged him along the wood floor, bumping along to a back door. The floor was coated in dust and dirt and heavy mud footprints. His shirt and skin from his shoulder tore on an exposed nail, and the men tossed him out the back door and onto the shell lot.

Navarro reached for an oil lantern.

He held it out from his body and flooded the steps and the road with light.

Gonzalez squatted down and turned Dodge over face-first. He said something quickly in Spanish that Dodge didn’t understand. Then he kicked Dodge in the head.

He pulled Dodge along by the cuffs, his shoulders feeling like they would tear loose from the sockets and his pants tearing on the sharp crushed shells. Navarro held the light of their path, and birds and insects made sounds far off into the cane fields.

He tried to dig his heels into the ground like a plow.

They dragged him for maybe thirty yards and pitched him into a cesspool. The water was brown and thick with foul-smelling shit. Dodge almost vomited as he sucked down air before he went under and tried to find bottom in the deep water.

Dodge tread water with his feet and he gasped for air. He felt for footing and tried to move around, searching for the shallow edge that he couldn’t find. The water was choked with shit and garbage and old appliances and broken tree limbs and heavy rotten trunks. As he fought to hold on to the edge of a trunk, rats skittered over the loose limbs floating in the thick brown water and crawled over Dodge’s eyes and face before squeaking and finding the higher ground.