White Shadow (13 page)

I’d be the mirror and would follow and gossip and laugh at jokes that weren’t funny and shake hands with men I despised because that was the way the game was played, and we would ride this thing out until our readers were goddamned sick of hearing about how the Old Man was killed.

“Where the hell have you been?” Hampton Dunn said, leaning over Wilton Martin’s shoulder, his hair Brylcreemed, tie knotted up under his fleshy neck, and shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow.

It was six a.m., and I was back in the
Times
newsroom.

He squinted his smallish brown eyes at some new notes, and I took a seat at the cop reporter’s desk, reading through some memos left there. I kept nothing on my desk besides colored pencils. The top drawer contained part of a man’s skull that my predecessor had kept from a suicide scene. It looked like a piece of polished plastic.

I took out my reporter’s notebook and jotted down some people I wanted to find. John Parkhill. Nick Scaglione. Bill Robles. Ed Dodge. Lawyers and friends to Charlie.

I’d smelled Dunn’s aftershave even before he spoke.

“Listen, head down to the station,” Dunn said. “Pronto. I want you to make yourself at home down there. I want you to stick by Franks all the way. Hang out in his office. Buy him some smokes or a Cuban sandwich. I don’t care. But I don’t want the
Tribune
to have a thing over us. Weren’t you supposed to talk to Parkhill?”

I opened my mouth.

“Who is that Charles woman with the
Trib
? She beat our ass. Hell, it doesn’t matter. Just get down there.”

Wilton Martin had yet to look up from his typewriter. I grabbed my hat and walked down Franklin, only stopping once to give a dime to an old blind man playing an accordion.

His German shepherd cocked his head at me and barked once.

NO ONE was in the third-floor detective offices except for my friend Julio Sanchez, a hell of a nice Cuban fellow who ran the front desk and slipped me information from time to time. But he didn’t have time to talk this morning because he was taking phone calls about the Wall murder. Most of them were from crackpots or nosy cop freaks who wanted to point detectives in the right direction based on something they’d heard watching a Richard Widmark movie or on
Justice. Did they check for prints? Check his pockets? You know if you rub off a pencil on a scratch pad, it’ll show what was written on the previous sheet.

Julio took it all in stride and answered the questions, was still answering them as I walked out and down to the street and my Chevy.

The wind whipped off the bay and pinballed around those tall gray buildings and into those dirty blind alleys. A row of empty black-and-whites sat parked along Lafayette, and the big twin doors to booking waited open, where cops would walk in bail jumpers and army deserters and B-girls who’d fallen on hard times. The cops looked like shadows, child’s silhouettes in the tunnel.

There was a Confederate memorial in front of City Hall, and as I left, I heard old Hortense—that’s what we called the clock atop City Hall—strike eight.

Why did I keep this thing so close to me? I knew where to go but didn’t want to admit I was scared to know. So instead I played that game that day, out of the loop and on the sidelines, pretending to be an idiot and not knowing any more about the Old Man than the next guy.

But, Jesus. Why did I keep on tasting those highballs made with Canadian blends, and hear the Old Man laugh and joke, and why couldn’t I sleep? Was I waiting for those drunken phone calls at four a.m. where he’d call me by my first name and tell me some long-as-hell story about banging some broad in Havana or Nassau and how he’d take me there one day after I’d cracked open all Ybor City and Tampa.

CALLE 12, number 20, was a fifteen-story luxury apartment building just off the Malecón in the Vedado neighborhood of Havana. The apartments were fresh and newly built in an uptight, utilitarian design. Square and boxy and slate-colored, with only a little fountain in a rock garden by the circular drive giving any hint of personality. There was a wide lobby past the bank of plate-glass windows and narrow chrome benches covered in black leather. A security guard sat behind a small desk with a clipboard and a black telephone.

As Santo Trafficante Jr. walked into the lobby, he handed his keys to a young man named Pedro, who washed and waxed his Cadillacs and often went out for his dry cleaning. He looked at Santo like he expected a tip, but Santo kept moving on.

Jimmy Longo and a man from New York they called Benny the Blade followed in step with Santo, and together they rode the elevator up to the eighth floor, where Santo had a wide view of the sea, clear over to two big Spanish turrets on top of the Nacional Hotel.

“The sky is clearing,” Longo said, slumping his big frame into one of Santo’s chairs facing the sea. The Blade settled across from him in his dirty tuxedo shirt and black pants. He was a skinny man with sharp features and slick hair who’d earned his nickname by keeping the peace up in New York until he started to get hassled by the Feds and needed to find somewhere else to work his trade.

“You hear back from Tampa?” the Blade asked.

Santo nodded.

“And?”

“It’s clean.”

“What are you going to tell El Presidente?”

“El Presidente can suck an egg,” Santo said. “His men made a mess in my town looking for some woman, and that’s the end of it.”

Several wooden fishing boats—old Cuban boats, blue and red and yellow and faded to shit—hustled fish. The sky was breaking far out, with patterns of sunlight bleeding through the dark patches.

“Jimmy, you miss Tampa?” Benny the Blade asked.

“I miss my bowling alley.” Jimmy sat wide-legged on his couch. “I like to bowl. I even like to polish the shoes. You know? And pour the beer.”

“I don’t miss New York,” Benny the Blade said. “Why would you miss snow? Or women from Jersey? Bowling? Are you serious?”

Santo took off his shoes, careful of his new white carpet.

“Angel tells me that girl shot one of those Cubans’ peckers off,” Longo said.

“Mother of God,” the Blade said, laughing. “That’ll teach ’im.” There was a long breakfast table by a far wall with a bowl of plastic fruit in the middle. When he looked at it, Santo thought about his daughters, laughing and drinking milk or coming in from the pool with his wife, Josephine. He thought about them eating fresh mango and trying out their Spanish, and Santo’s correcting them in Sicilian. He thought about them laughing and taking trips to the beach at Varadero, where he’d watch his wife sunbathe and the girls play in the surf.

“I’m not taking any chances,” Santo said. “Not now.”

And the men understood. When you’ve already been convicted of running bolita and bribing cops and the only thing keeping you from doing a five-year stretch in Raiford is a hustling attorney, you do what you can.

Everything was coming down on Santo and his family.
Everything.

Just last month, the Feds decided to jump in on the act and slap him and his brother Henry for not paying taxes on money he made on damned bolita. He was jumping from rock to rock and court to court, and pretty soon it was all going to crash.

“You want a drink?” the Blade asked, making a daiquiri from fresh lime and grapefruit.

“No, thanks,” Santo said.

Longo joined the Blade and dished out some ice in crystal glasses.

Santo stared out at the boats in the bay.

When his father was being eaten up by stomach cancer, lying in bed with his face slack and hands palsied, he would speak in Sicilian about order and keeping all things as they should be. Without order, there was chaos, he said, for you and for family. And Santo thought he understood that simple message until news of the old man’s weakness had spread in Tampa, and those two men had pulled alongside his Merc, smiled, and opened up with 12-gauges, with his wife sitting right there beside him.

From then on, Jimmy Longo never left his side. He stood by him, step-by-step, and helped him keep it all in check.

Back when his father or Charlie Wall ran the town, you didn’t cross certain lines. No one would think of attacking with your wife sitting right beside you in your quiet little suburban home. Everything was different.

But these were different times, and even Charlie Wall himself had become a snitch to reporters and cops. He was just a sloppy old lush who wanted Santo to take a hard fall because of what Santo’s old man had done to him.

In Florida, crooked policemen hassled Santo for nothing, and the newsmen took his picture every time he left the courthouse or jail, and it all made his kids embarrassed to go to school or his wife to shop at Maas Brothers, the women whispering behind her back.

Havana was true.

Havana was reality.

Cubans had no hang-ups or illusions.

The sun broke out from the clouds and shone bright along the Malecón.

Santo would keep the order here as the Old Men—his father’s friends—would keep order back home in Tampa. It was a cycle, and had always been that way, from Sicily to Ybor City to Havana. And sometimes those Old Men had to send out a strong message to let people know that the world had changed but the rules were the same.

It was clear and bright and crisp outside, and even the shifting of the wind, the old fishermen’s boats, and the movement of the palm trees seemed to have an orchestrated rhythm about them.

MURIEL WANTED Lucrezia to disappear. Everyone in Ybor City was talking about the shooting of the men from Habana at the cigar factory, and some of them even mentioned Lucrezia by name.

Lucrezia waited on the back of the old casita by the empty bottles and heaping piles of trash and thought about two years ago and being young and happy and fifteen in Placetas. She thought about General Gomez and her father and coming to Miami on that old steamer and of rolling cigars until she couldn’t feel her fingers and of shooting the man who had tried to rape her.

Muriel spoke behind Lucrezia on the back porch and told her she simply must go now. She tried to look serious in her skinny black pants and shirt, which looked like it’d belonged to a boy and hugged her huge breasts.

“Johnny’s looking all over for you,” she said.

She dropped a heavy canvas bag of Lucrezia’s things, some old clothes, her parents’ photograph, addresses of important people in Tampa who despised Batista, and the ledger. Lucrezia had told no one of the ledger.

“Where—”

But Muriel was gone, and the door locked behind her.

JOHNNY RIVERA DROVE BACK toward the Boston Bar, saw the black sedans of the cops, and circled around Seventh Avenue and then downtown to The Dream, where Nick Scaglione was cleaning a toilet. On his hands and knees and smiling. Rivera walked into the john and took a piss and didn’t say anything to Scaglione, who was humming to himself some tune like you’d hear playing on a carousel. Johnny needed a shower and a shave and to take a crap, but more than anything he just wanted a drink.