White Shadow

I

THE DEVIL’S OWN

Charlie Wall

The crime scene

ONE

Monday, April 18, 1955

CHARLIE WALL LAID OUT the crisp white suit on his bed and wiped off his wingtips with a hand towel he’d used to dry his face after shaving with a straight razor. It was early evening and dark in the house, but the setting sun broke through the curtains and blinds and gave it all such a nice glow. He combed his hair with a silver brush, watching his eyes in the circular mirror above his dresser, and removed his bathrobe and slippers and dressed in a newly laundered shirt and pants and slipped into his coat and shoes. He checked his face for an even shave, splashed a bit of Old Spice across his sagging jowls, and decided that for a man fast approaching seventy-five he wasn’t a bad-looking character.

His last touch before closing the front door to his big, sprawling bungalow in Ybor City was to slip a straw boater on his head and check its angle in the window’s reflection.

The metal gate closed behind him with a click, and he opened the door to the waiting cab.

Charlie Wall, retired gangster, was ready to hold court.

Monday night was a slow night in downtown Tampa, and Charlie met the usual crew at The Turf.

The Turf was a solid bar at the foot of the old Knight and Wall dry goods warehouse. He talked local politics with adman Jack Lacey and women with Frank Cooper, who’d closed up shop at Knight and Wall. And Charlie opened up his money clip to hand the bartender, Babe Antuono, a twenty for the drinks. But Jack told him to put his money away, because Jack Lacey was a class guy and remembered that old Charlie had paid for the last round on Friday.

The plate-glass windows looked out onto Jackson Avenue, and it had grown dark during the conversation and dirty jokes, and pretty soon Frank had to meet his wife for a show and then Jack had to get home for dinner. The paddles of ceiling fans broke apart the smoke left from the men’s cigarettes.

Pretty soon Charlie Wall was alone. He had another Canadian Club highball, his fourth in an hour, and talked boxing with Babe. Babe used to run a tobacco stand across the street, and they talked a little about Ybor City and some of the characters they all knew.

How’s Scarface Johnny? Babe asked.

Don’t ask, Charlie said. He sipped some more drink.

Baby Joe?

He’s fine.

Soon four young women walked into the bar with a giggle, their eyes all made up with mascara and false lashes, and they sat across from Charlie at the bar. One dropped a dime into the jukebox and played Hank Williams singing Kaw-Liga, and the women chatted and giggled and squealed. Babe beat out the song’s rhythm on the wooden bar.

Charlie bought the women a round and toasted them with an empty highball that was soon refilled. They came over and talked to him for a while and they liked him. They liked the funny old man in the white suit with the white straw hat and they liked his Cracker drawl and the harmless way he flirted and stared at their chests. And they stayed for a while, listening to him talk about the places to find the juiciest steaks.

One of the girls tried on his hat.

They laughed but soon disappeared.

How were they to know?

You used to have a few of them, Babe said, cleaning off a glass with a towel and checking it against the light. Almost reading his mind. I bet you couldn’t keep them straight.

I had a few.

When did you get started? You know, in the business?

Before the war.

The first big one, Babe said. Wow.

No, Charlie said. The war with Spain. I took bets for soldiers who’d come down with Teddy Roosevelt. I ran crap games and took twenty-five percent off the whores I’d sneak into camp.

Get out of town.

Charlie shook his head and motioned for another drink. You miss it?

What?

Running bootleg hooch and rum and all that. All that business.

We made a lot of money back then. Prohibition was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Mr. Charlie Wall, King of Tampa.

Charlie laughed at that. He ate some peanuts at the bar. The jukebox had gone silent, and it began to rain and Charlie could see the water tapping against the glass glowing from the neon beer signs.

No.

Sir?

I don’t miss it. I don’t miss running hooch off Honeymoon Island or having to truck over hundreds of Cubans at election time or getting shot at every time I opened my front door.

That happen a lot?

So many times— Charlie said with a wink. That I don’t even remember.

A few salesmen types walked in from the drizzle and sat at a back booth. They ordered beers and steak sandwiches, and Babe called to the little barmaid who’d been sitting in the kitchen filing her nails and watching a show called People Are Funny with a bunch of gags and pie-throwing.

When Babe started wiping down the bar, Charlie grabbed his hand and said: Always the goddamned Italians. They think it’s Sicily over here and they scare the Cubans senseless. But let me tell you something, I’m glad Santo Trafficante is dead. He was a reckless, no-brain Wop, and his son is the spitting image. Let him have it. He can have the whole lousy town.

The men from the back booth looked over, and Babe’s face flushed a bright crimson. He slid his hand from under Charlie’s and walked over to the jukebox.

He dropped in some more dimes and turned off the barmaid’s TV show.

Charlie paid his tab and got back his twenty broken into a ten and two fives. He laid down a five for Babe, as was the custom.

Mr. Wall, you want an umbrella?

He shook his head and stumbled out onto Jackson Street, nearly getting run over by a brand-new Chevy Bel Air with whitewall tires. The car honked at him and slowed as it passed, a man calling him an old drunk. But Charlie dismissed the bastard with a wave and wandered down to Franklin Street, where he knew you could window-shop at night. You could watch all the beautiful televisions behind the glass lighting up the puddles on the sidewalk, and there were mechanical toys that jumped and played and barked. Down at Maas Brothers department store, a plastic woman served dinner straight from a brand-new GE oven to a smiling plastic man at a dinette set.

He thought about the days when the streets were made out of bricks and all you could hear was the clip-clop of horse hooves and the bell from the trolley. There were saloons and fistfights and chickens scratching in the mud while rich men tried to make their way in the sand with motorcars.

Another car honked its horn, and some teenagers in a convertible laughed at him as he teetered to the curb and found purchase on an old streetlamp.

Charlie fell to his knees and vomited.

Soon, the rain stopped, and the steam heated by the asphalt broke and scattered like smoke on Franklin Street, and Nick Scaglione found Charlie wandering, sauntering, down by City Hall. The old city clock chimed.

Mr. Wall, are you okay?

Nick was a slack-jawed kid with wild hair and a pudgy face who ran a bar for his old man. His father was one of the old Sicilians who’d helped edge Charlie out of the rackets years back when they took down Jimmy Velasco.

Nick walked Charlie to his bar—The Dream—and poured a few more highballs, and that made him feel good. A few times he tried to call Baby Joe but didn’t get an answer, and he wondered why he hadn’t heard from him since yesterday, when they’d watched that cockfight in Seffner with old Bill Robles and ended up eating ropa vieja at Spanish Park.

Halfway through one of the highballs, Charlie couldn’t stand it anymore and called Johnny Rivera at home, but got his girlfriend, and he cussed a storm about Johnny being a no-good bastard and sorry son of a bitch who had no honor or respect for everything he’d given him.

Charlie slammed down the black phone receiver on the bar and sat for a while in silence, breathing hard out of his nose and downing another drink.

To hell with them all.

Who?

You goddamned know who.

Nick soon offered him a ride, and he took it.

While he opened the door, Nick made a big deal about borrowing his brother’s station wagon and not having Mr. Wall ride in his old jalopy truck, making a to-do about how important Mr. Wall still was, and, for a few moments, as Nick drove, Charlie forgot about being alone at The Turf with the rain and the women who smiled out of pity.

He didn’t talk, only drummed his fingers on the armrest and watched as the building lights went black and the streetlights grew thin down by the channel and the rain tapped across the station wagon’s big, broad windshield while they rolled down Nebraska and past the tourist motels blazing with their promises of COOL A/C and TELEVISION and POOL. Nick wound the station wagon into Ybor, and they passed the cigar factories and the casitas, down to Seventeenth and Thirteenth and Charlie’s big, wide-porched bungalow of his own design.

People had told him a long time ago to live over with all the other Anglos in Palma Ceia, near the golf courses and neat little houses where old enemies and those with grudges would never go. But he had two big Dobermans and a bunch of nosy neighbors, and had been living on Seventeenth Avenue so long he couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

Mr. Wall? Nick asked as he let him out. Can you get in all right?

Charlie dismissed him with a wave, and stumbled through his iron gate and the night to his front porch. His dogs barked for a moment—stirred from their sleep—and he unlocked his door and punched on the lights.

In the kitchen, he poured out food for his dogs; they ate, and then he let them back outside in the rain that had started again.

The screen door slammed shut and let in pleasant sounds of the night, and he listened to the patter and some orchestra music coming from a neighbor’s radio. He undressed and put on his pajamas and a robe. He placed his well-worn brown slippers by the bed before sinking into the pillow and reading a bit from a book called Crime in America by Estes Kefauver.

Then came the knock.

Charlie made his way to the front hall and looked through the peephole.

He smiled and unlocked the dead bolt and opened the door.

Hello, he said, smiling. Glad to have company. Come in. Come in.

He shook the man’s hand and the man entered. The man had dead eyes and said nothing, and just as Charlie started to close the door an unknown man followed and all three stood awkwardly in the hallway.

Charlie invited them back to his sitting area—as was his custom with his confidants—and asked if they wanted a drink. But they shook their heads and stood awkward and silent.

Take a seat, Charlie said.

Then he noticed the blackjack in the man’s hand. When he turned, the unknown man held a baseball bat loosely in his grip.

Charlie turned. He looked at the .44 on his bedside table.

He walked to his dresser and combed his hair with the silver brush. The brush had belonged to his father, a surgeon in the Civil War.

He stared at himself and the men behind him. Charlie Wall straightened his robe and nodded.

They looked at him, not as humans but as animals. Wolves.

Come on, you lousy boys, he said. Calmly. Let’s get this bullshit over with.

They walked behind Charlie and there was the flash of a blackjack in the mirror, and the weight and anger of it all dropped him to his broken knees, his eyes exploding from his head. They beat him with blackjack and bat, holding him to the edge of consciousness until he crawled. He couldn’t see, but he could hear them talking. Something had broken, and he felt small BBs under the weight of his hands.

He heard the ticking of his bedside clock.

He spit out a mess of blood and phlegm and several broken teeth. His breath wheezed out of him and his heart felt as if it would jump from his chest.

It was the long blade Charlie heard last, clicking open and slicing into the sagging flesh under his chin.

It had all been so beautiful.

Wednesday, April 20, 1955

THE BLUE STREAK edition of the Tampa Daily Times was headed to press and I was headed to a barbecue joint for lunch when I got the tip that the Old Man was dead. I didn’t believe it. People like Charlie Wall didn’t die; they’d been around Tampa since the streets were made out of dirt. But I headed down to the Tampa Police Department anyway, and five minutes after chatting up some detectives on the third floor found myself running after Captain Pete Franks down the side steps.

He cranked the black ’54 Ford with the stock radio under the dash and I jumped in beside him and didn’t say a word as we headed to Ybor City.

What do you know?

As much as you do.

Is he dead?

If not, he’s real sleepy.

My editor called his house and someone said he was just lying down.

That’s what you call a half-truth.

I’d known Franks since joining the Times fresh out from the army, where my bad eyesight and so-called aptitude had landed me in intelligence. I’d sat and waited and read reports from Seoul about sending MacArthur home and fatal errors at the Yalu River and wanted to be a pilot so badly I memorized every type of plane built since Kitty Hawk. But instead, I filed papers and listened to all-night jazz while dreaming about B-9s and Mustangs and what it must be like sailing up there and taking it all in from those blue heights.

Aren’t you too late for deadline? Franks asked.

It’s being held.

For Charlie?

Of course.

Jesus Christ.

Franks—although his real name was probably Franco or Francolini or something—was a stocky Italian who ran the pool of roughly a dozen city detectives. People thought he was from Ybor because of his dark looks, but he’d come to Tampa from Alabama and spoke Italian with a Southern drawl.

I rolled down a side window and felt the cool breeze on my arm. I used the sleeve of my shirt to wipe the sweat off my face. I took the straw hat off my head and set it on my knee.

Now, when we get there, Franks said. No offense. But you are not coming in. You know the rules, buddies or not.

I nodded.

What about the photographers?

Jesus Christ, L.B.

When we pulled up at Charlie’s house, every damned cop car in Hillsborough County was there. City cops and county deputies. Lawyers and prosecutors. Bail bondsmen and criminals. Seventeenth Avenue looked like a block party, with everyone craning their heads over Charlie’s metal gate to see what the hell was going on. Women held babies against their chests and smiled from the excitement. Men wandered around the cool shade of Charlie’s big porch, while I sweated through my shirt.

Charlie had the biggest house on the block, maybe the biggest in Ybor. It was a big wide-porched place with a shingled roof bordered by a stone fence. There were large, healthy ferns in concrete pots near the slatted railing, where men smoked cigarettes and looked back at the spectators.

Franks soon left me on the sidewalk, by the hearse from J. L. Reed, and I listened to a couple of Cuban women prattling on about poor ole Charlie. They loved him. To the people in Ybor, he was a hero.

Leland Hawes from the Tribune was there. And although I liked Leland, I’d hoped they’d send their new female reporter, who I liked a great deal.

I interviewed neighbors and friends.

No, no, they said. Nothing. Who would kill such a sweet old man? He always waves. He always speaks to us. He gives the kids in the neighborhood his spare change.

I stood there on the hot Florida street in my wrinkled khakis and dress shirt with tie. I fanned my face with my straw hat and held my notebook in my pocket. I watched the long rows of palms bending slightly in the spring wind.

I waited for Franks to come outside, but the house kept filling. I saw the reflection of the whole scene from the spotless window of a black-and-white squad car, the figures wandering on the porch in the glass’s prism.

Is Detective Dodge in there? I asked a beat cop watching the front gate.

He shrugged. I ain’t seen him.

It was then that I saw Lou Figueredo, the big, stocky bail bondsman, let out a yell and fall to his knees. He looked up at the perfect Tampa sky and crossed his heart in the Catholic tradition.

I stepped back and made a note.

YBOR CITY was brown-skinned women with green eyes and tight flowered dresses that hugged their full fannies as they switched and swayed down the sidewalks of Broadway past the flower shops, tobacco stands, and jewelry stores. It was men in straw fedoras and children with dripping ice cream and whores standing in back alleys smart-mouthing beat cops who roamed the avenue holding cigars in their thick fingers.

Ed Dodge knew it was all a symphony of Latin jazz and sinners and bright-eyed boys who shined your shoes for ten cents, and that the feeling of the lights and the music and the smell of the roasting coffee down at Naviera Mills and of the black beans at Las Novedades was some kind of dream.

He was drawn here. He understood the Ybor people.

Before he became a city detective, Dodge had been a child of the Depression, digging out of trash cans for food, and living on Skid Row in a one-room studio with his mother, who loved bars and wandering salesmen. The only true love and respect he’d known—really, that first acknowledgment of self-worth—was from a Parris Island drill sergeant who’d called him a shit-eating pussy while he did push-ups in the rain and begged to be shipped out to the South Pacific.

Never did. He spent most of his time with his teenage wife and their young daughter out on Treasure Island near Frisco and damned near cried when Uncle Sam sent him packing back to Tampa in a ’36 Chevy he bought for three hundred bucks, returning to a Mickey Mouse job as a soda jerk at Clark’s Drug Store.

Even when they brought him back up from inactive for Korea, he’d only got as far as a troopship off the coast of Italy, where the memories came in flashes of deep red wine that made you laugh until your ears hurt, and black-haired women who had long delicate fingers and smelled of olive oil and soft flowers and made you promise them things about eternal love in all their Catholic ways.

Ybor had these same women. And they were killing him.

Dodge worked alone that afternoon, even though he’d been breaking in a new partner for the past week because he’d accused Captain Franks of playing favorites on assignments. He’d been stuck with chickenshit while Mark Winchester and Sloan Holcomb got to interview a Bayshore Boulevard heiress about a lost diamond earring.

That’s the way it worked, detectives took on all cases out of the pool. There was no homicide or robbery or vice. One big open room. What seemed like a thousand cases a week. Today, Dodge was working a Broadway smash-and-grab at a silver store next to Max Argintar’s Men’s Shop.

The radio cracked to life under his dash, and he heard the call for all detectives: 1219 Seventeenth Avenue.

He called back his response.

Only a mile or so away.

It was always something. Some man getting his pecker shot off by his wife or a radio being lifted out of an open window or some old woman thinking the man across the street was eyeing her legs a little too closely. It was rape or murder or asphalt fistfights between boys that would last until someone couldn’t move. Because in Ybor City, you didn’t lose a fight, that was as good as quitting, and your family didn’t haul their ass out of Palermo or Havana to get stuck down in some run-down ethnic soup. This was a world boiling with ambition.

1219 Seventeenth.

Not until he turned the corner and saw the shiny curved hoods of dozens of sheriff’s office cruisers and other cops and spectators did he know this was Charlie Wall’s place. He’d run some surveillance here a few years back when they were tailing Johnny Rivera for the Joe Antinori killing.

From the moment he sifted through a crowd of deputies, beat cops, prosecutors, and detectives, Dodge understood this was going to be an A1 clusterfuck. Captain Franks met him in the living room of the house, everything smelling like mothballs and hamburgers. Franks asked him to get his camera out of the back of his car, and he did, finally following them through a long hallway to a back bedroom where deputies and uniformed cops took turns looking down at the old man sprawled out on the floor in a white nightshirt, his throat cut open and chunky blood all over the back of his head.

Old Charlie would’ve hated for anyone to see his hair sticking up like that, like some kind of rooster comb caked in a pool of coagulated blood that flowed from his neck.

A couple young deputies laughed.

Dodge turned to the deputy, a potbellied kid with a red Irish face. Who told you to be in here?

I just came to look.

Dodge stared at him for a good ten seconds, camera hanging in his left hand, and the deputy and his taller buddy walked out with their heads down.

Lacerations on the left side of the head. Deep gash in the throat.

Dodge loaded the 35 mm film into his Kodak and took a shot. Flashbulb exploding. He popped out the hot bulb and loaded in another.

You need help? Franks asked.

No. He breathed. I’m fine.

We want every possible angle.

Yes sir, Dodge said without much feeling, and looked down just outside the doorway.

You knew him, Franks said. Didn’t you?

Yeah, Dodge said. He used to come down to the theater I worked when I was a kid.

He saw two attorneys drinking coffee and talking in hushed tones. Beside one of their well-polished shoes was a dark smear of blood.

Can we please clear this room?

Franks ushered the men out.

Dodge knelt onto the carpet. Green and plush. Soft and clean. The smear wasn’t a smear at all.

It was a footprint.

Dodge loaded another flashbulb, and asked for a tape measure to run alongside the print. He snapped a shot. Loaded a bulb. Snapped another shot. And another.

Quick rhythms. Everything recorded. Every detail.

You find a knife? Dodge asked.

Franks walked back into the bedroom and shook his head. No weapon.

Dodge stared at the gash and the blood on the carpet.

Buddy Gore, a small, rotund detective who he’d never known to smile, called behind him. He pulled open a closet door and motioned to Dodge. Gore wore a wrinkled brown suit with bright green tie. His tie hit him about midchest, and his shoes were dirty and scuffed. He had a wide, pleasant face, brown eyes, and full cheeks.

I wish I had one of these to get out from my wife, Gore said.

Behind the door, Dodge looked into a long, concrete hallway. He and Gore followed the tunnel for several feet, their shoes making hollow echoes down the way to the garage. Gore knocked on the walls, ringing back the solid thud of steel.

Nifty.

Sure is, Dodge said.

One of the neighbors said he had this thing built years ago, Gore said. That way, he could walk from his car to his house without someone blasting him with buckshot.

Dodge moved through the garage tunnel and back into the bedroom. He didn’t say a word. He glanced back down at Charlie Wall, facedown in the carpet. Blood flecked his white, empty face like splattered paint or some kind of pox.

He looked over at the bed and at a green armchair.

Tiny pellets. Lead shot.

Dodge inched closer.

Birdseed scattered over the chair and deep into the carpet.

More pictures taken. Inside. Outside.

Every angle of the house. The flashes hurt his eyes.

Outside, the wind ruffled his hair and blew strong in his ears. Over the fence and into the street, there was the murmur of people talking, but a still quiet in the backyard. Somewhere a rooster crowed. There were too many people there, talking and moving around and smiling and laughing about the old days and how Charlie was quite a guy for an old gangster, and they talked a lot about bolita and shotguns and money, but no one was looking. All that noise and radio static of empty talk was hurting Dodge’s head, and he stood outside for a moment trying to think, because when you left a scene all you had left was what you took with you. So he would take the photos and would gather the evidence and then they would canvass the neighborhood and then no one would have seen anything and then they’d talk to the usual hoods and no one would know a damned thing about it.

He knew he needed to think. Locked doors and drawn blinds. Lead shot. And beating and stabbing. There was money on the dresser. There was jewelry and watches and rings and a television. He just kept thinking about all that rage that came down on that old man, nearly ripping off his head and crushing in his skull like a piece of rotten fruit.

The two deputies Dodge had run out of the crime scene bent over in Wall’s backyard close to a metal cross used to hang laundry. They poked at the ground like children playing war, and Dodge sauntered up behind them.

They pulled the broken end of a baseball bat—the fat end—away from some tall grass. It was covered in dirt; he noticed no blood.

Leave it.

They got to their feet.

Two more photos. No flash.

The pieces, fragments of nothing, was all he had. Dodge collected that nothing while the lawyers and cops talked and smiled about an inevitable end to the Old Man.

DETECTIVE BUDDY GORE walked Charlie Wall’s bungalow and the grounds with Dodge and helped him tag the bat for evidence before they followed brick steps to a back door, only to see more cops, deputies, and detectives in the kitchen. The station houses for both departments had emptied out, deputies and patrol cops wandering around and checking out the Old Man’s house.

Mrs. Audrey Wall sat at a kitchen table drinking coffee and talking to one of the police detectives, Fred Bender. She was a worn old woman with stiff dyed hair and glasses shaped like cat eyes. Her chunky legs were crossed; there was a half-eaten piece of pie in front of her and another old woman—Dodge had been told was her sister—by her side.

That’s when we arrived back at the bus station, Audrey Wall said. We took the Greyhound. I will never do that again. Some of the people smelled very badly. An awful odor about buses.

When was that? Bender asked.

Oh, twelve-thirty or so? she asked, looking over at her sister. The other old woman nodded. That’s when we got hamburgers and pie.

This pie? Bender asked.

Yes, it’s butterscotch. I told Abby about the pie at the Goody-Goody on the ride back from Clermont and she just couldn’t wait.

Audrey sliced off another bite and stuck it into her mouth. She closed her eyes and chewed.

Bender looked back at Dodge and gave him the crazy eye. Bender was a thick-necked cop who practiced curling weights before going on duty. He was also a hell of a joke teller and pussy hound, and picked up extra money for his wife and kids by playing jazz piano at downtown bars. He wore only the best suits from Wolf Brothers, while Dodge alternated two he’d bought from a Penney’s catalog.

And when did you arrive back here, ma’am? Bender asked.

I don’t know. Twelve-forty? Yes, about then. We had burgers, too. Goody-Goody makes the best burgers. I told Abby about the burgers. She’s from Wetumpka, Alabama. They don’t have anything like that in Wetumpka, Alabama. Do they?

Hush, sister Abby said. Let me have some of your pie.

Ma’am, Bender said. When did you find your husband?

Mr. Wall? she said. Oh, yes. Let me think. She kept chewing and then swallowed. That nice man from the cab company brought my bags into the bedroom.

Bender nodded and made notes. So, he saw Mr. Wall?

No, she said. My bedroom is before his. I went into Mr. Wall’s bedroom to use the phone. I was going to call Baby Joe and find out where Mr. Wall had gone. I’d seen the papers on the front porch, and all the shades were down in the house. I thought he must be out of town. It was so dark all over the house.

And that’s when you saw the body.

Mmm-hmm, she said. She smiled at Bender as if she’d just passed a test or had complimented him about his wife or new car.

Mark Winchester and Sloan Holcomb walked in from the bedroom where the Old Man lay. Dodge ignored the detectives, knowing they’d try to get the case even though he was the first on scene.

Dodge held up the bat for Bender to see.

That’s not anything, Mrs. Wall said, her face shriveled and her voice shrewish. One of the kids threw that over the fence ages ago. The killer went through the front door.

She stood up and cleared away the coffee cups and pie. Dodge thought about the matter-of-fact way she’d said killer, and it sounded false and prepared, as if a line she’d read in a book.

Do you know what kid?

She brushed by, red-eyed and coffee-breathed, to the sink. She was a pinch-faced old woman, and Dodge wondered how an old hotshot like Charlie Wall had ever been turned on by something like that.

Bender shrugged his shoulders, and the sister smiled at him and offered half a hamburger. The woman smiled blankly, as if in a constant dream.

No, thank you, ma’am.

Well, okay, then, Abby Plott said. You holler if you need anything.

Mrs. Wall, why were you in Clermont again?

Abby and I were visiting my other sister. Mrs. Margaret Weidman. I was registered at the Clermont Hotel.

Bender looked back at his notes. You were home at twelve-forty. How long before you found Mr. Wall?

A few minutes.

But you didn’t call the police for more than an hour?

Oh, no, she said. She grinned. I had to call Baby Joe and Mr. Parkhill.

John Parkhill?

Yes, I had to call his attorney.

Was the front door locked?

Why, yes, it was. All the doors were locked. I already told the nice policeman this. I already told him all of this. I told him there’s fingerprints on the door, unless he used a handkerchief. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a bite of my pie?

Dodge wandered back to the bedroom, where he said hello to Sheriff Ed Blackburn and a couple of his deputies. The sheriff’s office always worked gangland killings jointly with the Tampa Police Department. Officially because they boasted more trained detectives, but in reality because the police department had been so rotten and crooked for years that no one in Tampa trusted them.

Even Mayor Curtis Hixon moved around with a Perry Mason gleam in his eye and pointed out paintings out of line. A heavy bookend.

Sheriff, over here, the mayor said.

Dodge found himself in the Old Man’s salon watching a couple of detectives from the sheriff’s office running measuring tape under the legs of two men in gray suits Dodge had seen around the courthouse.

He took a deep breath, walked back over to the body, and bagged some of the pellets and birdseed. He handed the plastic bag to Buddy Gore, who held the bat, looked at the deputies and suits and cops around him, and said, Christ.

Dodge knelt in front of the bloody footprint that he’d squared off with yellow tape. With a pocketknife, he cut a careful square several inches around the print. He slid the piece of carpet into the bag, and walked out to the hallway and past Winchester and Holcomb.

Gore helped Dodge load the evidence, including his camera, in the back of his Ford. As he slammed shut the trunk, a reporter from the Times walked up, notebook in hand, and asked him what he’d found.

A dead old man.

How was he killed?

Dodge lit a cigar—just kind of soaking up the street parade around him—and smiled. We’re working on it.

Suspects?

For what?

Come on. Why are you guys so damned tight?

He winked at the reporter. See you around, Turner.

THE NEWSROOM buzzed with frantic typing and ringing phones in a dull haze of cigarette smoke and bourbon breath when I ran inside to write the story of my life. CRIME BOSS CHARLIE WALL SLAIN. But instead, I found Wilton Martin, our city editor and part-time reporter, already putting the finishing touches on the big 1-A piece patched together from every writer on the Times’s paltry seven-man, one-woman staff. Martin, a retired circus PR man who had been around long enough to remember Charlie when he was a crime boss and running the city, was a nervous old guy with a head of curly blond hair and a curious eye tic. That afternoon, his lid jumped up and down as if hit by a constant prick of electricity while he smoked four cigarettes at once—for fear that one might go out, I suppose—before he pulled the paper from his battered Royal.

He’d dressed that morning in striped black pants and a hot pink shirt, with green-and-blue socks tucked inside a pair of white loafers. One of his feet patted the linoleum floor with nervous energy while he worked.

I took a seat at my desk, listening to his wild typing.

My desk was one of a dozen or so old wood slabs run back-to-back in the long second story of our building, with its brick walls and checked tile floor. There were constant ringing telephones and clacking, crackle-finish Royals and wire baskets with new and old copy and bumper stickers on the city desk proclaiming positions like RIVER FRONT SLUMS MUST GO and a school clock above the door checking off the seconds of our day and cutouts of Beetle Bailey and Snuffy Smith and a few of Donald Duck with the words blacked out and new captions written about the crummy news business.

I flipped through my notes, searching for sharp details from the scene, but knew there were few besides J. L. Reed Funeral Home wheeling out old Charlie on a jumpy gurney—his body covered with a gray blanket—and loading it into a black hearse. I did not see a cold white hand or blood spots or a secret gun taken or an infamous character lurking about. Instead, I’d shared a cigarette with a fat Cuban woman, who clutched a bug-eyed Chihuahua and said things in Spanish that at the time I did not understand.

I think it was something to the effect of Poor Charlie.

As I puttered through my notes and slid a fresh sheet of paper into my Royal, Hampton Dunn, the managing editor, stood behind me