Fiction tails fact in mob mystery

WHEN Ace Atkins was covering the crime beat for the Tampa Tribune in the late 1990s, he developed a fascination for the city’s colorful mob-ruled past -- a post-World War II period referred to as the Era of Blood. Atkins was particularly intrigued by two yellowed clips he discovered in the paper’s morgue. One was about the 1956 murder of Eddyth Parkhill, a former beauty queen whose husband was an attorney for members of organized crime. The other concerned the 1955 bludgeoning and knifing of one of those men, Charlie Wall, an elderly mob boss who, in semi-retirement, went out of his way to ruffle the plumage of Florida Mafia don Santo Trafficante Jr. Both crimes remain unsolved.

Atkins spent 1 1/2 years researching the Parkhill case and wrote a seven-part series for the Tribune that was nominated for a Pulitzer. He was planning a similar probe of the Wall murder when the success of his novels about ex-pro-footballer-turned-jazz-historian Nick Travers (“Crossroad Blues,” “Leavin’ Trunk Blues”) convinced him to forgo journalism for the literary life. But “haunted” by Wall’s death, Atkins three years ago began gathering interviews, case records, crime scene photos and newspaper clips for an ambitious work of fiction that would include a reasonable solution to the crime. The result: a meticulously researched novel steeped in a sort of melancholy noir.

The book opens with the slaying of Charlie Wall, called the “White Shadow” by his Cuban neighbors, and goes on to examine the ways in which his death affects the book’s main characters and, possibly, the histories of this country and of Cuba.

“White Shadow” is narrated by its protagonist, a young and restless crime reporter named L.B. Turner, who presents his own sequences in the first person, switching to a more objective approach for the passages focusing on other major players. They are Ed Dodge, a hard-boiled composite of the detectives who worked the real Wall case; Johnny Rivera, the real low-life mob enforcer who was considered the primary suspect; Lucrezia, a 17-year-old undocumented waif on the run from a crime she committed in her native Cuba; and the fascinating, sinister Trafficante, not quite enjoying the high life in 1950s Havana as he tries to avoid legal “persecution” in the states.

There are enough minor characters to make one yearn for a cast list: Beynon, a police inspector; Bender, a detective who moonlights as a piano player in the Hillsboro Hotel lounge; and Belden, a city councilman who is also the distributor for Calvert whiskey, among others. The celebrity cameos are a little easier to sort out. That old smoothie George Raft shares several of Trafficante’s sequences, and both are upstaged by an exuberant Johnny Weissmuller, who leaps into a Havana hotel pool and emerges waving the top to a lady’s swimsuit. Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro each have a few key moments, and the careful reader may note an eye-blink appearance, albeit a crucial one, by Che Guevera.

In conjuring up 1955 Tampa, “a musical, mystical time and place,” Atkins occasionally tells us more than we really need to know. Turner doesn’t just park near a movie theater; the reporter has to describe “the flickering white lights and red-and-blue neon marquee advertising ‘The Gun That Won the West,’ starring Dennis Morgan and Paula Raymond.”

This excess of verbiage and personnel may make the novel seem a bit daunting at first, but Atkins’ prose style (closer to Truman Capote’s meticulous dotted i’s than to James Ellroy’s feverish italics) quickly takes hold and perseverance pays off in a beautifully constructed, multilayered tale with a powerful and satisfying finale.

Thanks to Atkins’ seamless weaving of fact and fiction, there’s an additional mystery element: What’s real and what isn’t? The author’s website (www.aceatkins.com) has a section devoted to documentation of the factual material he used for the book, including crime scene photos, newspaper clips, mug shots of Rivera and others. There’s nothing to suggest that there even was a Lucrezia, let alone that she was involved in Wall’s murder. There are, however, photos of a unique resort east of Tampa where, in the novel, Lucrezia hides from Rivera and a trio of hit men: Giant’s Fish Camp, a haven for circus folk presided over by sideshow circuit veterans “Half Girl” and her 8-foot-tall husband, the area lawman. Looking at the website’s photos of the 20-gallon-hat-wearing giant and his little half lady, one may well wonder whether everything in the book might be 100% gospel.

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Dick Lochte is author of the suspense thriller “Sleeping Dog.”