The dead man was where I had left him, doubled over in the door way. His skin felt clammy and damp to the touch. I lifted him, draped one of his arms over my shoulder and dragged him out of the alley. His head bounced and rolled and his hand flapped like a dead fish.
I stood there, holding him at the alley entrance. I was afraid to put him down because the taxi might come any minute and I was afraid if I stayed with him, the young beat cop would come by again, making his rounds.
So I stood there, sweating, my muscles aching, and cursed taxi companies. Finally, the cab turned a corner and rolled slowly down the street. I whistled and he pulled into the curb and opened a door.
I grinned and staggered, putting on a drunk act. In the darkness, the murdered man could pass for a friend who’d had more than his limit.
I got the corpse in the back of the car and slid in beside him. In a drunken voice, I mumbled at the driver to take us down to the Bay.
While he drove, I fumbled through the dead man’s pockets, but found nothing. Finally, we reached a sandy strip under some waving palm trees, and the taxi driver stopped. I handed him a crumpled bill and dragged the corpse out again, thankful for the darkness here.
The driver stuck his head out. “Hey, he looks like he’s in bad shape. You better get him to bed.”
“Can’t hold his liquor...” I said thickly.
The man shoved his head out a couple more inches. “You look like you got blood on your face.”
“Cut myself shaving,” I said. “Beat it, friend.”
He stared at me, his face a white blur in the night. Suddenly he started looking scared. He jerked his head back in like a frightened turtle, raked the cab into gear, and got out of there.
I dragged the murdered man along the beach. This was a lonely section: a few dark fishing shacks, some palmettoes, and a row of boats tied up at a rotting pier, slapping and bumping softly in the wash of surf.
I carried and dragged the dead man until my shoulder sockets were almost pulled apart and the sweat was a dripping, slimy film all over my body.
Finally I got down to the little cabin cruiser that had brought me across the bay from St. Petersburg earlier this evening. I worked the dead man on board and into the cabin. Then I went over him again in the darkness. With a pocket knife, I ripped out his pockets, the lining of his coat. He was clean. Not a thing on him.
I played the light of a small flash over his face. An aspen of a man, thin-boned and dissipated; pinched features with an angular design of sharp bones under tight skin.
I straightened my back and swore softly in the darkness. The muggy Florida night answered me across the licking water with mocking silence.
Then I remembered the girl’s purse. I took it out of my coat pocket and emptied its contents on a bunk, and snapped on the flash again. It was a tiny bag, the kind women take with them in the evenings, that contain the bare essentials of makeup. This one had a compact, a balled Kleenex smeared with lipstick, a package of Camels with two cigarettes remaining, a gold lipstick case, and a paper book of matches.
The lipstick had a name engraved on it: “Lolita.” The matches bore a picture of a nude blonde sitting in a champagne glass, underneath which some printing assured the reader that the food at Sagura's was the best in Ybor City.
I wedged the murdered man in the cruiser’s toilet and locked the door. I didn’t want the police finding him yet. It would louse up the whole show, because he was not the man doing the blackmail. He had only been the boy who ran errands. True, he could have given me the key to the situation. But the big shot had gotten to him first, tonight, and stuck a knife in him. I needed more time — something I wouldn’t have if this dead man became police property and Grace Perring’s blackmail became a newspaper scandal.
So I went back to Ybor City, the Latin quarter that extended two miles east from Nebraska Avenue and south to Ybor estuary.
I returned and hunted up Sagura’s, a typical Spanish restaurant, a place that cooked chicken and rice, yellow with saffron, black-bean and garbanzo soups, steak catalana, crawfish and spaghetti served with wine. I ordered a bottle of wine and sat at a table under potted rubber plants and watched a string band play Cuban music.
I turned over one of their paper book matches and looked at the picture of the nude blonde sitting in the champagne glass.
“Lolita been around tonight?” I asked the waitress who brought my wine.
She put the wine down and gave me a fleeting glance. “Yo no se.” She shrugged and went away. But in a little while the manager of the place came around and sat at my table. He was a fat man with a round face that looked like a greasy coffee bean. He mopped at it with a white handkerchief.
“This is a hot one,” he said, sighing.
I drank the wine, looking at him. The band was playing a rhumba. A girl dressed in a spangled bra and ruffled split skirt came out on the floor and began shaking her rear.
“The waitress. She said you asked about Lolita.” He looked around at the floor show, trying so hard to appear casual it was ludicrous.
I nodded and lit a cigarette.
“You are a friend of Lolita?” he asked. The sweat was coming through his seersucker coat.
“Maybe,” I said. “What difference does it make?”
He made an elaborate shrugging gesture, ducking his bullet head between bulging shoulders and pushing fat, brown palms upward. “Please, Señor. I am not what you call sticking my nose in your business. Only, well, Vellutini — he’s a powerful man around here...” His voice trailed off with another shrug of his fat shoulders.
I nodded. “Of course.” I drank some more of the wine, and wondered who the hell Vellutini was. “It isn’t important. About Lolita, I mean. I’m related to her by marriage. Knew her when she was a kid in another part of the state. Just thought I’d look her up while I was in town.” I said it flatly, casually, as if the subject no longer interested me.
The cafe manager stood up. “Well,” he said, “she comes around here sometimes. But I haven’t seen her in several days.” In parting, he added, “You might try the place she works in daytime, the Veloz-Rey cigar factory...” And he walked off.
I paid for the wine and left the place.
It was past midnight now and I thought I had better not go back to the boat. So I wandered around until I found a cheap hotel on a dim street, where a man could rent a room for a dollar and a half a night. I bought another bottle of wine in the store just off the lobby and went up.
I lay there, in the hot, stinking night, with the wine bottle on the bed beside me, and, in my rig, the heavy .45 that I had brought along to kill a man.
It was close to noon the next day when I awoke. After dressing, I walked down to the Veloz-Rey cigar factory. I needed a shave and my gray suit was rumpled and the collar of my shirt had soaked itself into a shapeless rag.
Veloz-Rey was one of the many factories of its kind in this part of Tampa. Smaller than most, it was housed in a time-blackened brick building. A rickety stairway led up to the main factory room on the second floor.
Here, the cigar makers, the tabaqueros who rolled the cigars, worked at long tables in double rows.
One of them was the woman who had helped kill a man in an Ybor City alley last night...
I wandered among the workers, trying to attract as little attention as possible. Near the water cooler I started a conversation with one of the “strippers” who had paused for a drink. It was the stripper’s job to remove the stems from leaves and pass the tobacco on to boncheros who made up the inside tripa or filler of the cigar.