White Shadow (50 page)

“Those detectives thought you had something to do with the murder of those cops here,” he said. “They were crooked as hell, and it was an unfortunate thing.”

“The Trafficantes had that reporter killed,” Dodge said. “We all know that.”

“All we had was some old negro maid who saw someone who may have looked like Joe Bedami,” Ozzie said.

“It was Bedami.”

“She couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.”

“She was paid off,” Dodge said.

They’d worked it for weeks. Eleanor Charles’s photo had run big in the
Tribune,
and they’d gotten a lead from a scatterbrained waitress who said she’d seen Charles at the Tahitian Inn coffee shop that night with some man. She hadn’t gotten a good look at him. But an old black woman working as a hotel maid said she saw a big bald-headed man with dark circles under his eyes. The maid said he’d grabbed Eleanor Charles and that she’d put up a hell of a fight in the back parking lot before he tossed her into the trunk of a ’53 Studebaker.
And Lord, how that man sped away,
were the maid’s exact words. But the maid turned, and Dodge wasn’t sure if they’d gotten to her with money or threats or both. A month ago, Buddy Gore had sat with that scared old woman in a laundry room smelling of bleach and detergent as she folded sheets, eyes down on the creases, as she denied ever saying a bit of it.

“Everybody knows Bedami is the Trafficantes’ go-to guy.”

“She hadn’t written a thing more than every other rag in this state had written about them,” Oz said.

He stood up. He walked back behind his desk, lumbered around, and sucked on a tooth.

“We have this man,” Clifton said. “The one hired to kill you.”

Dodge looked at him.

“His name is T. W. McCleary, aka Charles White. Says he’s from Texas and worked as a bank robber before spending some time in Leavenworth. Had some trouble in Phenix City and worked a few safecracker jobs. He was shooting his hick mouth off at the Sands the other night about being hired to kill you.”

“What does he say now?”

Clifton laughed. “What do you think? He says he never heard of some son of a bitch named Ed Dodge.”

“You got anything on him?” Pete Franks asked. He crossed his arms across his chest and then uncrossed them.

“Sure,” Clifton said. “The dumb fucker confessed to a bank job from four years ago when I showed up at his hotel.”

The men laughed.

“Said he pulled a job in Birmingham and named a safecracker and his driver. I’m holding him until the FBI men can get over and ask him a few questions.”

Dodge lit a cigar from his coat pocket and looked out Ozzie’s window across the narrow alley to City Hall. Old Hortense rang off nine o’clock, and the men didn’t speak during the chimes. He smoked his cigar and waited. The small room became heavy with smoke, and the men grew uncomfortable in the waiting silence.

Ellis Clifton squinted an eye at him. “I’d get out of town, if I were you.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Dodge said.

Clifton laughed and stood. Dodge smiled, and they walked out together.

The air was clean and the sky bright that day. The two walked down to Clifton’s car, and the shorter man shook Dodge’s hand.

“Thought you should know that McEwen dropped the Gibtown charges against Johnny Rivera,” Clifton said. “John Parkhill said Scarface was at the wrong place at the wrong time and encountered three rogue deputies on the take for bolita. Can you believe that sack of bullshit? But without that Cuban girl, we’ll never know what happened for sure. Just like Charlie Wall.”

“Come on, we know that Deputy Walker beat Charlie to death with his blackjack, and Bedami was probably there, too. Maybe Rivera.”

Clifton nodded, and pulled his car keys from his pocket. “I know Santo gave you a time in Cuba.”

“It’s just all a big pissing match, Ellis.”

“But it’s a bitch when that shit rains down on your head.”

I SHAVED every day and started ironing my clothes and even took showers, and pretty soon the newsman rhythm was back. I had two dozen or more sources at the courthouse in my back pocket and knew the judges and bailiffs and secretaries. They knew my name and would call me sometimes with a tip on a case coming through the State Attorney’s Office or with the county solicitor. Red McEwen and the solicitor, Paul Johnson, would always take my phone calls, and I even got on a first-name basis with the blind man who sold coffee in the lobby of the new courthouse.

But the
Times
was a small paper, and there were days when Dunn would call me into his office or leave me a note on my L. C. Smith and Corona and I’d be off into Ybor City or Tampa Heights or Rattlesnake Point trying to fill up the pages.

That morning, he had me driving over to West Tampa on Howard Avenue to meet with Victor Manteiga, who ran the only trilingual rag in the country, with stories in English, Spanish, and Italian. Manteiga always told the story that he’d come to Ybor City from Cuba with only a ten-dollar bill and two white linen suits and that he’d found work as a reader in the cigar factories, where he translated novels and plays and often read newspapers with liberal bents.

That’s how he’d lost his job, which led to his starting the paper in the twenties.

Manteiga was a pretty good newsman and had more people in his back pocket than I could dream of. Manteiga and Dunn were pretty tight, and I figured this was one of those you-scratch-my-back kind of stories that I’d be writing. (I believe when Charlie Wall died, Manteiga was one of the first people that Hampton Dunn called.)

Apparently, there was a young man in town that Dunn said he wanted me to meet. A quick little feature, something that Manteiga was promoting through his paper,
La Gaceta
.

So, I parked across the street from a restaurant called the Fourth of July Café and walked past two old men playing chess on a concrete table in guayaberas. They smoked cigars and kept their eyes trained on the board as I moved past them across the street to the little, high-ceilinged café. A woman behind the counter was adding ham to dozens of Cuban sandwiches, and a loose group of men, maybe six or eight, sat at a corner table talking and drinking little shots of Cuban coffee with a side of Cuban toast.

I saw Manteiga and pulled up a chair. He was a dapper old gent, with his double-breasted suit and red tie with a crest. His hair was curly and silver, and he had smiling brown eyes.

I sat next to his son, Roland, who I knew well, and shook his hand.

All the men were listening to a skinny young Cuban with a scraggly matinee idol mustache talking hurriedly in Spanish. He used his hand, and spoke in that rolling, hammering cadence that only the Cubans have. He would pause, making a guttural sound, and keep rolling into his words. The old men grunted and nodded.

A wizened old fella with huge ears said:
“Sí. Sí.”

Another grunted along and plugged a fat cigar into the side of his mouth.

I sat for a while, listening. There were four black fans high in the ceiling of the Fourth of July and they worked on the smoke and the early morning humidity. The doors were open, and a man in an apron swept the honeycomb tile of the floor and under the café chairs.

I made a few notes, catching only a few words.

The man with the scraggly mustache looked at me and nodded. He kept speaking.

The edges of his pin-striped suit jacket were frayed and his white shirt stained with sweat at the collar. His black necktie hung loose, and his hair looked as if it hadn’t been washed in weeks. He had not touched the bread or coffee that had been put before him and only stopped speaking to take a big puff of a cigar by his elbow.

When we all stood, maybe thirty minutes later, Victor pumped my hand and thanked me for coming and told me there would be a speech by this young man on Sunday.

“I am not sure about the location,” he said. “There was some trouble at the Italian Club.”

He gripped my elbow and led me over the floor. The man’s words flowed through the room and rebounded off the tile and up into the fans like smoke. Early morning light crawled through the front door and covered the candy counter.

The man turned to me and took my hand. I remember his grip was strong and firm, and he looked me directly in the eye. His English was weak and shaky and oddly higher-pitched than the way he spoke in Spanish. “It is nice to me you,” he said. “Thank you.”

He smiled, satisfied he’d spit out the words, and kept shaking my hand.

I introduced myself.

He stopped shaking my hand and pointed to his chest, proudly. With his tie askew and unshaven face, he smiled more. “I am Fidel.”

ED DODGE and his boy watched the first card of the wrestling matches later that night at the Homer Hesterly Armory. Tom Thumb took on Little Beaver, and the midgets chased each other around the ring before tossing each other to the mat and scrapping around the canvas. The crowd in wooden folding chairs howled with laughter, and the little men, slick with oil, tried to flip each other on their backs. Their short legs and arms made them seem like children fighting with speed and violence.

Dodge bought his kid a hot dog and a Coke, and the boy held the food close as they walked back to the dressing rooms. At the gym, Harry Smith had given Dodge a couple of freebies and said he’d be wrestling tonight as either Flash Gordon or Golden Hercules.

Smith taped a bad ankle he’d gotten while playing football at the University of Georgia and maybe aggravated a little while being a dive-bomb gunner in the Pacific. He smiled and stood up from a boxing stool and shook Dodge’s hand and said hello to his son. He wore a red silk robe over his trunks. He was thick and muscled and brown with black eyebrows and bleached blond—almost white—hair.

Other men were getting dressed in the locker room. There was Eddie Graham, the Kangaroo Brothers, the Van Brauners (evil Germans), Mr. Moto (evil Japanese), and Don Eagle, who wrestled in full Indian headdress. Harry was taking on the Red Menace, a muscleman from California who claimed to be the illegitimate son of Joseph Stalin. He’d come onstage with his hands thrown in the air, threatening to take over the country and the World Championship.

And then there was the promoter, Cowboy Luttrall. Luttrall walked into the locker room and told the wrestlers that he had a lot of goddamned money coming in tonight and if he saw any loafing he’d take even a larger cut. None of the big men said anything back to Luttrall, because he was a tough son of a bitch who could put you in your place by looking at you with his good eye. His other eye had been gouged and disfigured by Jack Dempsey during an ancient grudge match.

Luttrall wore a cowboy hat and western shirt and western-cut pants with boots and patted Harry on the shoulder, who was oiling up his thick biceps and chest before he went on.

Tom Thumb and Little Beaver wandered in, and Dodge saw his son notice the oddity of Thumb, the short legs and body. Little Beaver was just a very small, but perfectly formed, man. He winked at the kid and walked to his locker, where he lit a cigarette and wiped his chest with a towel.

Dodge and his boy found a front-row seat. The canvas was hot with white lights, and the armory smelled like gun oil and sweat. His boy ate the hot dog but did not take his eyes off the ring, where Harry Smith entered with the crowd cheering and hollering. He wore gold lamé trunks and flexed his biceps to the women in the front row.

And then the crowd turned and booed, some throwing boxes of popcorn, as the Red Menace emerged from the locker room, with his shaved head and sharply defined Vandyke beard. When he stepped on the canvas, he acted like he was spitting on the ground.

The loudspeaker played a Soviet anthem and the Red Menace twirled his red cape off his shoulders. Soon the bell rang and the men ran for each other, the Menace taking Smith off the ground and slamming him back to the mat.

But Smith soon had the larger man’s head in the crook of his arm and twisted him like a steer.

Dodge took his eyes off the ring and looked back into the seats. In the far corner, the crowd thinned, and he saw Joe “Pelusa” Diaz in his black suit and shades, chomping on popcorn and booing down the Russian. The Russian was freed from Smith’s grip and was stalking him around the mat with heavy footsteps.

“I’ll be back,” Dodge said. His son just smiled, standing in his seat and yelling for Golden Hercules. Harry Smith winked down at the kid and launched into a flying dropkick, sending the fake Russian to the floor to screams from the fans.

Dodge walked through the aisle and over the smooth concrete floor. Banners for the National Guard hung high in the rafters, and two green Willys Jeeps sat parked by the ticket takers.

He took a seat in the shadowed piece of the armory as the men fought on the canvas in the light. Cowboy Luttrall wandered by the ring and down the rows, taking a loose head count of the fans. It was a good Tuesday night.