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back in the thirties and was damned well aware of the importance of Charlie Wall getting killed. He’d been through most of the gangland killings, and used to tell us about Tito Rubio and Jimmy Velasco and what was called the Era of Blood, as if those days had long passed.
    But Joe Antinori had been gunned down not that long ago and now there was Charlie Wall, and you knew Dunn was wondering if that war wasn’t starting to heat back up. The words to the music had changed—the Andrews Sisters were now Tennessee Ernie Ford—but turf wars would never leave a city that refused to be civilized.
    Dunn had his hands on his hips—he often stood like that during breaking news—and wore a crisp khaki suit with white shirt and tie.
    He grunted.
    “That’s all?”
    And in the middle of me talking about some of the local color I’d collected at the scene, Dunn walked away, asking Ann O’Meara, our society writer, if she ever got Wall’s attorney, John Parkhill, on the phone.
    She hadn’t.
    And Dunn groaned again and marched back to his office and his battered wooden desk covered with files and papers and little callback notes, lit a cigarette, and dialed up somebody who he damned well hoped knew more than his lazy reporters.
    I typed up what I had and slid it across Wilton Martin’s desk, knowing little or none would be used, because all we really knew was that Charlie was dead and that someone had cut his throat, according to Captain Pete Franks’s grunts as he passed the pool of reporters on Seventeenth Avenue and got into his car heading out after the hearse, sliding through onlookers who were patting their chests and shaking their heads.
    I had to take a cab back to the Times .
    Martin slid the sheet under his ashtray, lit another fourth cigarette to keep it all going, and didn’t say a word as he kept right on banging on his typewriter.
    The Blue Streak was held with the headline: CHARLIE WALL DIES VIOLENTLY. I made calls to John Parkhill, who we’d been told saw the body before the cops, and I heard a rumor that Mrs. Wall was staying at the Hillsboro Hotel, but after paying off the porter I learned it was only that—a rumor. Rumor and slices of details of Charlie are all we fed off of for the next few hours in the haze and smoke and sweat and feigned sympathy. We cobbled together the loose facts of what had made Charlie—a scarecrow version of the man I’d once met down at The Hub bar who’d tipped his hat and told me a story about Al Capone coming to Tampa and the whores he’d known in Havana cribs and how politicians used to come much cheaper.
    In my mind, I saw the thinness of his white skin and the looseness of the flap under his jaw and the broken blue-and-red veins in his nose and under his cheeks, and then I heard his Cracker drawl and saw that knowing, quick wink that let you understand that he was a hell of a guy.
    We wrote that the elder statesman of criminals was dead. We wrote of his old exploits—mainly from Hampton Dunn’s memory from when he was a young cop reporter on the Times beat—and a lot of “poor Charlie”s, but we had damned little to write about the killing itself.
    He was dead.
    It was murder.
    And we all kind of waited for the next big, violent thing to follow.

    SHE WAS narrow-hipped, with full, sensual lips and slanted brown eyes that became obscured in the brushiness of her pageboy cut. Her darkened hair fell over them like a veil as she sealed the roll on the thick tobacco leaves of the tenth cigar that day and listened to the man in the guayabera reading from A Tale of Two Cities; all the women who sat behind her whispered of revolution and a lawyer’s possible release from prison. She should no longer care for such things, she thought, rubbing the edges of her men’s brogans together under the long wooden table in the open warehouse. She should only care about America and money and beautiful new dresses that the women who wandered down Seventh Avenue wore on Saturday