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.
The Sicilians. He always came back to the goddamned Sicilians.
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
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.
The Sicilians. He always came back to the goddamned Sicilians.
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
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