White Shadow (29 page)

“You don’t have some kind of license on me, okay? Let’s get that straight.”

“I got it straight,” I said. “I completely understand.”

“You do?”

“Yes, I understand what you are.”

I walked to my car and put my hand on the solid metal of the door and pushed the lock release with my thumb.

“What does that mean?”

“I got you figured out,” I said. “Now, why don’t you figure out yourself?”

I looked at the long expanse of track, past the man who now lay in pieces, and followed the track with my eyes as far as I could where it ran through the office building caverns and down past Ybor City and then on through the country and the cow fields and the orange groves.

She shook her head. “You’re a child.”

“Did you sleep with him?”

She slapped me and walked away down that curving slope of brick road, and I got in my car and turned away, started driving back toward the
Times
but instead headed right for the Stable Room.

ED DODGE and Edy Parkhill sat in her parked station wagon at the edge of Morgan Street, listening to the radio. Her Ford was one of those Country Squire wagons with the dash trimmed in pure maple, and Edy was wearing a tight-fitting blue top and a red scarf around her neck. Dodge leaned in and kissed her again, and then he reclined back in the seat and watched as a car passed, glad it was dark.

He took a deep breath, his sweaty dress shirt drying stiff on his back. She kissed him there in the station wagon as he was trying to breathe, and he couldn’t do much else but kiss her back.

“I don’t like this,” he said as they broke away.

“Me either.” But she smiled when she said it. “You want to go to the Tahiti Motel?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I’m still on duty.”

“You’ll work better later.”

He nodded.

“Were you in the war?”

“At the end.”

“Where?”

“Never made it off the California coast.”

“Do you wish you had?”

“Very much.”

Edy was in the driver’s seat and leaned into Dodge and put her head across his chest. She listened to him breathing, and he stroked her hair. The radio played the new Tennessee Ernie Ford, “Sixteen Tons,” and as the song played Dodge watched all the taillights of the sedans and other family wagons sliding down Morgan Street and heading away from downtown.

He stroked her hair and ran his finger across her jawline, and Edy Parkhill closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

They stayed there like that for a while until Dodge said he had to go. She switched the station and “Sixteen Tons” came on again.

She stayed parked there, watching his black sedan drive off.

SANTO TRAFFICANTE arrived at Tampa International Airport a little after eight o’clock that night on a flight from Havana. The plane ride had been short and sweet, and he hadn’t said a single word to Jimmy Longo since leaving the tarmac, maybe because the damned flight had been filled with a dozen loud businessmen who worked a conga line with two stewardesses while guzzling rum punches. The whole plane was shaking with their dancing and singing, and by the time it touched down in Tampa Jimmy Longo was about to pitch a couple of them out the window.

As they wandered down the plane’s steps, Trafficante’s brother, Henry, waited for them at the edge of the tarmac. They shook hands and hugged and soon were sitting together in the back of Henry’s Cadillac while Longo took the wheel.

They cut over to Armenia and headed toward the bay and Hyde Park, where Santo kept his simple home on Bristol Avenue. It was a modest ranch house with light blue shutters in a subdivision called Parkland Estates; his neighbors were doctors and lawyers and salesmen. For a while, he’d lived among them with his wife Josephine and their daughters just like any other Joe. But after the shooting, he’d erected a tall chain-link fence around the little house and kept a spare bedroom for Jimmy.

Jimmy opened the gate, and they rolled to a stop.

Josephine met them outside and spread her arms wide. His daughters tugged at his arms, and he hugged the eldest and scooped the youngest up into his arms. His wife kissed him on the cheek, again, and he handed her his coat. Jimmy Longo took their bags into the house, and Josephine returned to making dinner.

He wandered around back to a kidney-shaped swimming pool and took a seat with Henry at a table topped with an umbrella. Josephine turned on some music in the kitchen—some Dean Martin—and he could smell the garlic and sausage cooking.

He bounced his daughter on his knee. His eldest daughter, just now a teenager, had changed into a bathing suit and was performing stunts on the diving board. He knew that time was growing thin when she’d still want to show off for him. Soon, he’d be too old for her and she’d stop calling him Daddy and find boys and then she’d marry.

Henry was thin and muscular and kept the few remaining hairs on his head slicked down tight to his skull. He wore a Sea Island cotton shirt that showed off his ropy forearms and biceps, and his eyes radiated this intensity that reminded Santo much more of his father than when he looked in the mirror at himself.

“John Parkhill says he can get our case moved to Jacksonville.”

“Then all we’d have is the Feds.”

Henry shrugged.

“Watch me, Uncle Henry,” yelled Santo’s daughter from the diving board.

She did a wild cannonball, and Henry applauded and yelled, “Bravo.”

“We can wear them down.”

Trafficante nodded to his brother. He straightened up in his chair as his wife brought him a big glass of red wine and kissed him on his head, and he watched her shapely legs in her dress as she walked away.

“I worry about them,” he said, looking at his wife cooking and through the sliding glass door to the family room where his children watched television. “In Havana.”

“So, you’ve decided.”

“We keep things working here,” he said. “But yes. I can’t work here anymore.”

Henry nodded.

The air smelled of chlorine and bleached towels and the red wine tasted like home and big dinners with his Sicilian family at the long table with all the brothers.

“They’ll never convict us.”

He knew what Henry meant, but Trafficante would not dare talk about the man who could’ve backed up everything that St. Petersburg cop was saying. He knew all about the bribes and the free ’53 Mercury and the cases of booze.

The Old Man had bragged he had kept a book on it.

Then came the arrests, the fall of the bolita business, the trial, and then the Feds swooped down to kick them even more on tax evasion. Chances couldn’t be taken.

“Winchester turned up something on that girl.”

Trafficante looked at him.

“She used to be a barmaid for Johnny Rivera.”

“Have you asked Johnny?”

He shook his head. “I can’t get him on the phone. I called Nick, and Nick said he’d find him.”

“You go see Rivera and tell him to find the girl.”

Henry shook his head. “We don’t want Johnny in this.” “You’re right.”

Henry nodded, knowing exactly what his brother meant.

THE BOSTON BAR WAS slow on a Monday night, just a few negroes in the back shooting pool and two old men sitting at the bar with a wrinkled woman who poured them beers. Dodge asked the wrinkled woman about Rivera, and she kept laughing with the two old men and pointed into a broad storeroom without speaking or looking at Dodge. Dodge walked around a crate of shriveled limes and another crate of Jack Daniel’s and found Rivera at an adding machine with a pencil behind his ear. He was clean-shaven and drinking coffee and took a few seconds before he coolly slid his eyes up onto Dodge and then looked back down with no reaction.

“Can I sit down?”

“This ain’t Russia,” Rivera said. “Do what you want.” Dodge sat in the storeroom in the Boston Bar with the tiny bulb hanging over them lighting up the cases of bottled beer and whiskey and gin, the tins of peanuts and cashews, and the dark corner where Johnny kept a nudie calendar from 1950 up on the wall. Painted women in nighties with their legs spread.

“We don’t have anything on you, Johnny,” Dodge said. “I came here to personally tell you that.”

Rivera nodded. “Of course you don’t.”

“But you knew already.”

Rivera stopped the steady clicking of the adding machine and leaned back into his wooden chair with a hard cracking sound. “Let’s take this outside.”

Dodge nodded and followed Rivera through a little hallway with a smooth concrete floor out back of the tricornered building. Rivera had parked his car near the beaten-up metal trash cans filled to the top with empty bottles of booze and mounds of fine gray ash.

Rivera combed his hair and lit a cigarette. The back of the Boston Bar smelled of rancid beer and piss, but Rivera didn’t seem to notice.

“I know about you and Winchester,” Dodge said.

Rivera nodded.

“I understand everyone has got an angle,” Dodge said.

Rivera nodded again.

“And I’m sorry about the other night,” Dodge said. “Charlie was a friend of yours, and you shouldn’t have been treated like that.”

Rivera laughed, and smoke snorted and coughed out his nose. “You want to kiss me now, Dodge? What do you want?”

“Not much,” he said. “Just what you think about all this. You know what you are, and I know what I am. I don’t think we’ve ever confused the two. But you cut me a favor here and maybe down the line—”

Rivera shrugged and leaned against the wall by the trash cans. There must’ve been a dozen of them out there, overturned and spilling out broken bottles onto the streets. There was a pile of deviled crab shells on the ground, and a gray cat licked and chewed on the rotting meat.

Rivera threw a Jack Daniel’s bottle at the cat and he scattered, jumping from can to can and then losing himself in a maze of empty crates and bottles and boxes.

“You got to be real clear on something,” Rivera said. “Me and the Old Man weren’t friends anymore. Go talk to Baby Joe. He was the Old Man’s buddy. I got tired of driving him around to get loaded at The Turf or go watch some chickens fighting.”

“I’m not asking you for fact,” Dodge said. “I’m asking you what you think. Understand?” Dodge smiled at him, and he hated smiling at Johnny Rivera because Rivera was so arrogant and hard that he would take that as Dodge softening on him and lie awake at night staring at his cracked ceiling smoking a cigarette and smile to himself about it.

Rivera crushed the cigarette under the sharp point of a pair of two-tone lace-up dress shoes.

“I’ll tell you, Dodge,” Rivera said. “If it were me, I’d quit looking to anyone Latin.”

Now that made Dodge really smile.

“You see, because a Latin man would never kill anyone that way,” he said. “If a Latin were to kill someone, he’d do it with a gun. Not all that mess with knives.”

Dodge nodded. “That narrows it down.”

“Did you check out his wife?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“She was in Chattahoochie last year, like you said.”

“I told you she was a nut job.”

“She couldn’t have pulled that off.”

“Let me ask you this, Dodge,” Rivera said. “Why does everything have to make sense? Let’s talk straight. The Old Man had been out of the rackets for years. He’s no threat to no one. He’d been out of the bolita business for almost ten years. Christ, Dodge. You need to look outside Ybor City. This ain’t about Ybor City.”

“It’s not his wife.”

“Believe what you want,” Rivera said, walking back into the Boston Bar. “This ain’t Russia.”