White Shadow (53 page)

I ran my fingers over Charlie Wall’s scrawl on the inside cover. So many notes and numbers and a name of a bank in Miami. I’d called the bank and asked.
It was true.

I flipped through the pages of the tough old birds with bloody spurs ripping apart competitors. I saw the diagrams of the cock’s feet and sketches of birds torn and battered.

I held the book lightly in my hands.

And then I locked it up tight in my desk.

Before I left, I washed my hands twice.

I FOUND Ed Dodge in the detectives’ bureau writing reports and talking with Buddy Gore and Ralph Mills. In the typical detective fashion, they waited until they were finished talking to acknowledge I was there, and Dodge only looked mildly interested when he looked up from his desk. He was pecking at the typewriter with his two index fingers, and his hat slipped back far on his head. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye as if I’d caught him doing something embarrassing.

“You got a minute?”

“Mmm-hmm,” Dodge said, still pecking away.

“You can’t type worth a shit,” I said.

Again, he looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

Gore and Mills left.

“What are they working?” I asked.

“Why don’t you ask them,” he said.

The afternoon light had begun to fade, and Dodge turned out a crane-necked lamp on his desk. He pushed away from the typewriter, glanced back at his work, and shook his head. “You’re right,” he said. “I can’t type.”

“You want to get a cup of coffee?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said.

“You hungry?” I asked.

“What’s on your mind, Turner?”

“I need to know about Eleanor Charles.”

“You should have talked to Gore,” he said. “It’s his case.”

“I can’t talk to Gore.”

He looked at me and I looked back. I felt a heavy breaking in my throat and swallowed. I gritted my teeth and kept staring at Ed Dodge.

“You and her?” he asked.

I shook my head. “She was my friend.”

He nodded. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s take a drive.”

We rode in his black Ford through Tampa and down to Hillsborough Avenue, where he stopped off at Leo’s for a pint of Jack Daniel’s, and we circled back to Ybor City. He parked in a church’s lot. He sipped the whiskey and passed me the bottle.

“Little early,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

“No,” he said.

I took a sip.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “My watch is broken.”

“Did I tell you about finding this old pocket watch in Charlie Wall’s things?”

“No.”

I passed the bottle back to him. The church bells rang and the streets were empty. His police radio crackled to life about an accident on Gandy, and he turned down the volume.

“Did you love her?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Dodge,” I said. “Just talk to me.”

“Is this for the paper?” he asked.

“Nope.”

He nodded. The church bells kept ringing.

“Sometimes, it’s better not to think about things like this,” he said. “You understand, my friend?”

It was the first time he called me his friend.

“I have to know,” I said. “I have a decision to make.”

Dodge laughed and leaned back into the car seat. He kept laughing until he took a drink.

“You gonna shoot someone?” he asked. “Not too smart. If I shot down everyone who was crooked or wronged me, I’d have killed half of Tampa.”

“I’m not going to shoot anyone,” I said.

“Then what?”

“I just have to make my mind up about something.”

A cold wind buffeted the car and swept the Ybor streets. An old Cuban woman in black emerged from the front of the church’s doors and locked up.

“I understand that,” he said. “I have decisions to make myself.”

We finished the whiskey. I waited. When you really wanted someone to talk, you didn’t fill the silences, you let them hang. Dodge had to make a decision about what he would say.

“What do you know?”

“I don’t know anything,” I said.

“You still think it was her boyfriend,” he said. “Or boyfriends.”

“More than one?”

“Does it matter?” Dodge said. “Just leave it, L.B. Okay?”

“You ever wake up in the middle of the night just sick with worry or wondering? Maybe something you did or didn’t do. But you never can figure it out. And maybe you think that just knowing would stop that pain. Even if it was something that was your fault or something you could prevent. It’s the not knowing.”

“They thought she was friendly with Charlie Wall,” he said. Plain. Just like that. “Okay? They thought she was going to publish some stories about what Charlie Wall knew about the bolita business in St. Pete. They thought Charlie Wall had kept records and had inside information that could send them to prison.”

He didn’t have to say who
they
were.

“Why’d they think it was her?”

“They knew he’d been drinking with a newspaper reporter and shooting his mouth off again. They were edgy about the trial, and it just kind of became a mess.”

My body felt empty and cold and as if it would break apart. I didn’t breathe and am not sure if my heart beat for several seconds.

“So now you know,” Dodge said. “And I know. But we have no proof. Just like Charlie Wall. We have no weapons or witnesses, and no one is going to say a goddamned thing because they run this city. It’s all rotten, L.B. You don’t go in with guns blazing and take down the baddies. You do your job and get a paycheck and fight your battles. But we never win.”

Dodge laughed. It was a sarcastic quitter’s laugh, and it pissed me off.

“That’s bullshit,” I said.

“You know I’ve never had a hard time with the crooks,” he said. “It’s the ones who stand in the middle that I can’t stand.”

“I hate them all.”

“It will eat you up,” he said.

“It already has.”

He looked at me and said: “I’m sorry.”

Dodge drove me back to the police station and let me out. As he drove off, I wondered about his sadness and his decision and why the hell he’d ever just lay it all on the line like that.

ED DODGE’S wife kept wind chimes on their back porch that she’d gotten on a trip to Miami. They were made of little metal flutes and seashells and on a windy night they’d make a hell of a racket outside their bedroom window. It was night now and cold, deep in November. The brisk wind hit Dodge’s face, and he turned up his collar as he stood in the backyard smoking a cigarette and listening for sounds of his wife making love. He knew they were making love again. He was supposed to be in Deland, and she’d sent the kids away to a neighbor’s. Her car was in the driveway, and he could hear the soft sounds of the late-night radio as it played romantic music and commercials for constipation. He smoked with one hand and kept the other in his pocket. He listened to the wind chimes and that small, faraway sound of the radio. He wanted to catch them in the act. He wanted to humiliate her and scare the life out of Al Wainright. He wanted to own Wainright and make him embarrassed to ever look him in the eye.

There was no pain when he imagined them fucking. Often-times, it was more comical and awkward. He imagined the silly gasping faces that Janet would make, and he could see Al taking her from behind and ramming her head against the headboard like they were animals. Most of the time they were sweaty and clumsy, and they’d cry with each other after they were done and talk about their poor, heartbreaking romantic situation.

Dodge crushed the cigarette under his foot. He listened. Wind rattled the brittle palm fronds. The sky was cold and bright with stars, and he found himself reaching for the back door to the kitchen and letting himself inside to find the two animals coupled together.

He didn’t feel rage or sadness. He just wanted to laugh at them and flick on the lights to show themselves. He would turn on the lights, maybe laugh, and then turn from the room.

He’d left his gun in the car. He had no need.

The kitchen was dark and so was the TV room. A bottle of pills lay open on the counter and Dodge shook his head, moving through the house. The wind chimes clanged together and the romantic music soon grew loud as he moved to the bedroom. He could hear nothing else but Perry Como as he made his way back, and Ed Dodge knew they were drunk because only drunks listened to music so loud with their heads thick with booze.

He pushed open the bedroom door and clicked on the lights.

He saw his wife, tied and bound to the bed, and from a mirror over her head he saw the men in black standing beside the door with baseball bats. Dodge turned just as the bats fell upon his head and beat him to the ground. But he didn’t fall unconscious like in the movies; he felt every blow fall on his neck and the back of his head and hard on his kidneys. He rolled to his knees and punched up hard into the man’s crotch, and he heard a great sound like breath escaping from a popped balloon.

Then he heard the click of the pistol as it rammed into his mouth. He stood on his knees with his hands up, the metal chipping a tooth. A man’s hand held on to the back of the hair on his head as the other man yanked him to his feet.

In the reflection, he saw both of their faces, not recognizing either. He smiled at his wife as she twisted and fought in her negligee. He made a promise to forgive her for all her weaknesses because Ed Dodge was a deeply religious man and knew he was about to die. And dying men should never take grudges with them to death.

The Street Preacher told him that. The Street Preacher was with him now.

THE BOOK was in hand, but Fidel was gone. I searched for him at the
La Gaceta
offices in Ybor and at the Manteiga house in West Tampa. An old woman arranging her shrine to the Virgin Mary in front of her cinder-block house told me that Victor and Roland had taken Señor Fidel to the train station. I was back in my Chevy and running toward downtown and Union Station. Along the drive, I thought of Eleanor and gin and tonics and the Tampa Smokers’ games we attended. There was Charlie Parker’s saxophone and the smell of her hair. Her laugh and the funny, pretentious way she’d hold a cigarette. I thought of her bare shoulders and soft blond hair. I thought about the crumpled form on the football field at Plant High and the people pointing and craning their necks.

The book sat in the passenger’s seat, and I parked on the curb at the big brick box that was Union Station. The building had high ceilings and long wooden benches.

Fidel and the Manteigas could not be found.

I ran to the platform and saw the
Silver Meteor
sitting along the tracks. People jostled around with cheap suitcases held together with string, and I remember seeing a woman crying with a baby in her arms.

There was a lone figure at the end of the tracks smoking a short plump cigar and holding a beaten leather suitcase. His height stood out from the rest, and he was still dressed in the pin-striped suit, more rumpled, and without the tie.