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and slid kind of uneasy into an old leather chair. He then stood, looked at the seat, knowing it had been the Old Man’s, and moved into a kitchen chair brought in by one of the deputies. He’d seen the Old Man sprawled out like that with the gash in his throat, and now he had a bunch of cops ringing him with their notepads out. He rubbed his hands together and waited for the stenographer to get set up.
    Baby Joe wore blousy black pants, a white silk shirt, and a short and fat pink tie decorated with a royal flush of cards. A gold-and-ruby clip dangled from his tie while he leaned forward and chewed gum. Sure he was small—the reason for the nickname—but he was husky and strong as hell, and most folks knew the stories around Ybor about Baby Joe embarrassing men twice his size. He smiled with his black eyes at everyone watching him, struggling to find some kind of comfort in the silence.
    Captain Franks sat on the couch with his boss, O. C. “Ozzie” Beynon, inspector of detectives, and State Attorney Red McEwen. McEwen smiled at Baby Joe and adjusted the frames of his trademark tortoiseshell glasses, and asked: “Shall we?”
    The stenographer nodded and readied himself to type.
    “What’s your full name?” McEwen asked.
    “Joe Diez,” he said. His voice was honest and broken and flat. People from outside Tampa thought he sounded like he was from Brooklyn, only he was Ybor City to the core.
    “Your address?”
    “4607 Thirty-first Street.”
    “Where do you work?”
    “I feed cattle, in the cattle business.”
    Which was true, he didn’t have much to do with the rackets anymore. He’d rather run cows all day long than get mixed up in the business again. He ran a little moonshine now and then out of Pasco County, but that was different.
    “Did you carry Mrs. Wall down to the bus station last week to make her trip to Clermont?”
    “Yes.”
    “Mr. Wall went with you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Did you remember what day that was?”
    “It was Thursday, I think, or Friday—Thursday or Friday.” He nodded to himself and looked back at McEwen for approval.
    McEwen, short, with gray-and-red hair and horn-rimmed glasses, sucked on his teeth and listened. He was a high school referee on Friday nights in the fall, and stood sure-footed and confident with his arms across his chest. He reminded Baby Joe of a banty rooster as he walked, and Baby Joe knew the killing of the Old Man was going to be McEwen’s biggest thing since that waste-of-time bolita commission.
    McEwen moved on, keeping eye contact with Baby Joe, steady and smooth, as if a spider’s thread connected them and breaking away would slit it.
    “At the time she left, when were you expecting her back? Today?”
    “I don’t know when she was coming back.”
    “Have you seen Mr. Wall since then?”
    “Oh, yes, sure.”
    “Tell us when and where, each time.”
    He shifted forward in his seat, still chewing his gum, and rubbed his hands together. His eyes were red, and his voice tough and hard but cracked and broken at the same time, like a man who’d been yelling too long and was tapped out.
    “I saw Mr. Wall—the last time I saw him was Sunday. He called me and wanted to go to the rooster fight out here. I wasn’t busy and didn’t mind taking him. I said, ‘Sure.’ I picked him and a friend, Mr. Bill Robles, up about two, and from there we went to the rooster fights and stayed there until five-thirty or six, and we went to the Spanish Park and had dinner there. Then I brought him home. We stayed here and looked at TV awhile, and then I went home.”
    “That was this past Sunday night?” Ozzie Beynon asked.
    “Yes.”
    Beynon was a lumbering bald fella who used to be a star football player for the University of Tampa. Baby Joe had heard that Beynon was the only cop in the department with a college degree and that he’d trained with the Feds. Baby Joe noticed Beynon had paint all over his hands, like he’d been interrupted on his day