Suitcase City

  On the way across the street, Aimes says, “How come you told them we’d take it? How come you didn’t let the uniforms have it? Let them get their clothes ripped, blood on their shoes. We did that already. We are the sport coats now, Detective Delbert.”

  Delbert says, “I know we’re the coats. But that old guy that came in, he might know it too. He might be a citizen with not enough to do. The kind that writes to the Tribune, calls WFLA 970 on your dial, talks about why some people disturbing the peace in a bar have to wait twenty minutes for uniforms when they’s two detectives in a restaurant right across the street.”

  When they’s? Aimes thinks. Another grammar fart. But young Dwayne Delbert is nobody’s idiot child. He has a point about the geezer in the nose cap. A citizen with time on his hands.

  * * *

  Back outside, Aimes looked across the Crown Vic’s roof at Delbert and said, “Bet Yolanda threw away my food.”

  Delbert put a hand delicately on his stomach where, Aimes figured, the hot sauce was warming up the man’s duodenal ulcer. Delbert said, “That stuff is all waistline anyway, man.” Delbert disapproved of Aimes’s weight, but Delbert couldn’t claim the virtue of three-minute abs. The man just had the metabolism of a gerbil.

  Aimes got into the car. Delbert settled in beside him. He and Delbert had been out knocking on doors, talking to people about the murders of some local working girls. There had been three now, and the Trib was warming up to the story, calling it a string of prostitute murders, speculating about a serial killer.

  Tampa was a city with a perpetual inferiority complex. For a while, the local flacks had called it America’s Next Great City. Then somebody had stumbled over the comedy of that title. Tampa had the Bucs, and that was good. Tampa had hockey, the Lightning, but hockey was a B sport in the South and always would be. Tampa had great seafood, its own branch of Cosa Nostra, too many malls, the world’s best airport, and lately, Ybor City.

  Ybor, the old Cuban cigar-manufacturing district, had been renovated, gentrified, and reborn as the nightclub scene. Tourists walked the Ybor streets in the hot afternoon, gazed at the beautiful wrought-iron lampposts on Seventh Avenue, ate at the Columbia, witnessed the awesome rite of the hand-making of a cigar at Ybor Square. They read the historical marker that said José Martí had lived here, and wondered what all the excitement was about. They didn’t see the kids pour in for the slams and the bad poetry coffeehouses and the clubs that heated up at one a.m. That was when it got wild, and that was when it got dangerous, and that was when three prostitutes had disappeared from the streets crowded with stumbling drunks and punk ravers and university students.

  The newspapers wanted a winning football team, a nightlife better than Bourbon Street or South Beach, and, Aimes figured, they wouldn’t be happy until they had their own serial killer. If they couldn’t have one, they were going to invent the guy. Make Tampa the next great city it had always promised to be.

  Some kids playing behind a small electronics-manufacturing facility had smelled something strange, and being kids, they’d opened the lid of the dumpster and found the body of a young Vietnamese prostitute named Phuong Van Tran. The woman had been tied with curtain cord, ankles to wrists, simple square knots, slipped into two plastic bags duct taped together at her waist, and then hoisted into the dumpster. If anyone in the neighborhood Delbert and Aimes had canvassed had seen or heard anything on the night she was dumped, no one was admitting it.

  The method chosen for killing Phuong Van Tran was execution-style shooting. Phuong had a single .22-caliber bullet hole in the back of her head. The ligature marks at her wrists and ankles were not deep or abraded. They came from postmortem swelling. When she was tied up, she had not struggled. She had not been beaten. She was fully dressed in panty hose and a cocktail dress with a label from one of the low-end clothing outlets in a local mall. She had been bound and shot in a way that was matter-of-fact, or maybe curiously gentle. Looking at her, Aimes remembered thinking that she must have gone along with it, must have thought it was some sex game she’d play and get paid for, must have been smiling or at least not screaming when a firing pin had struck a primer sending a bullet into her brain. However curious or gentle or playful it had been, murder was murder, and Aimes and Delbert had been out talking to people about what they might have seen or heard.

  They’d finished a long afternoon of walking and knocking and talking, and then they’d gone to La Teresita for that Cuban sandwich and the dubious but delicious Russian trout. Then Malone’s Bar. Now Delbert glanced over at Aimes and said, “Your sister’s boy, huh?”

  Aimes knew that Delbert, his new partner, wanted to hear about it. Knew Delbert wouldn’t push. Knew that if he just said, Yes, my sister’s boy, and a surprisingly nasty piece of work he is, Delbert would nod and that would be the end of it. Nobody pushed anybody in this car: that was Aimes’s rule with his partners. No prying and no lying. But they would learn about each other. They would learn a lot. Some of it by inference, some of it by telling, most of it by experience. And some of the experience would not be pretty. Aimes was teaching Delbert the detective business.

  Aimes didn’t look at his partner. He guided the Crown Vic through the rush-hour traffic toward the police station on North Tampa Street. He said, “Yeah, he’s my sister’s boy. I don’t know him all that well. His daddy and I didn’t get along. His daddy was in the Navy. Served on a tanker. He was killed in an accident, fueling a destroyer at sea. It happened when the boy was ten. I never got close to him after his daddy died. He’s supposed to be a good kid. The family hope. Straight As in school. All-state on the football field. Hell, the kid could ride his brain or his jockstrap to college. You don’t see that too often.”

  Aimes looked over at Delbert as they sat at the traffic light at Fowler and 30th Street. Delbert nodded, touched his stomach, leaned to the side, and belched quietly. Aimes said, “Why do you eat that stuff, man? You know it hurts you.”

  “Same reason you eat that fish in a puddle of oil. It tastes good. I like it. I’m a creature of unbridled appetite.”

  Aimes laughed. “You’re a creature of a great deal of bullshit.”

  Aimes had twisted one of his fingers when he’d grabbed Tyrone Battles by the front of his shirt, and it was throbbing now. He laughed again, and it felt good. Thinking: And a creature of some particularly fucked-up grammar. And wait a minute. Where did “unbridled appetite” come from? That isn’t the Delbert I know and educate. Aimes figured it came from some soap opera or some girl or both. One of the gum-snapping, line-dancing, short-term loan officers Delbert dated. A woman who liked to watch soap operas when she and Delbert weren’t two-stepping to the “Cotton-Eyed Joe” at Zichex or wherever it was they went in their snakeskin boots and up-the-crack jeans.

  “So,” Delbert said, looking ahead at the traffic, “the good boy was just having a bad day?”

  Aimes thought about it. What in the hell was his nephew doing in that bar? Blacks didn’t go into Malone’s. Hell, the boy wasn’t even old enough to drink. What had he been doing in the restroom with those two white men? Had the boy really said, “Give it up”? Both of the white men had said so, though the fat one had thought the boy only had to pee and was asking for a place at the porcelain. Well, something had made the fat guy piss his pants. And something had made the other one, the big handsome guy with the confidence and the aging athlete’s body, thump the boy upside the head.

  Aimes had never seen Tyrone in a scuffle, but he had seen the boy work on the football field. Aimes had played some football himself, enough to appreciate the boy’s talent. He knew it wasn’t just local. So maybe the white guy had sucker punched the boy. How else could a middle-aged pharmaceutical salesman coldcock a kid with the physical gifts of Tyrone Battles? Well, something had happened in there, something strange.

  Then Aimes thought, Wait a minute. Teach? James Teach? He knew the guy. Knew him by reputation at least. Didn’t the guy play football? Where was it, Florida? Yes, that was
it. Jimmy Teach, the walk-on quarterback from some one-light town up in the Panhandle. Teach had been good, very good. It made sense now. Tyrone had met his match in that men’s room.

  Delbert waited until they caught the next stop light. “So,” he said, “you think they gone let it go or not?”

  Aimes thinking, They gone? He said, “Delbert, my young friend, this world is full of fools. If those two have the sense God gave a tin-dick dog, they will most certainly let it go.”

  “Fools will be fools.” Delbert scratched the side of his face with the stubby ends of his fingers.

  He bit his fingernails to the quick, another thing that endeared him to Aimes. Aimes had offered to paint the fingers with quinine, something really nasty-tasting. Said he’d bring the bottle himself and the Q-tip every day, do the painting. Help Delbert break the habit. Delbert had declined, said the women he dated didn’t mind his fingers that way. Said they liked vulnerable men. Delbert said he told his women he was in a dangerous line of work, and he hoped he could be forgiven some scuffy-tuffy fingernails because in every other way he was a straight and unwavering public servant.

  “You tell them that?” Aimes had asked. “That thing about straight and, what was it, unwavering?”

  “Words to that effect,” Delbert had told him.

  Aimes: “And it works?”

  Delbert: “Sure does.”

  Aimes thinking that no self-respecting black woman would fall for a line of bullshit like that.

  They turned off North Tampa Street, drove through the gate into the parking lot at the rear of the police station. Delbert said, “Pretty weird, we go in that bar, and it’s your nephew.”

  “We didn’t need it, did we?” He wasn’t going to remind Delbert that someone could have told the dispatcher to let the uniforms handle it. You didn’t last long with a partner if you dealt in might-have-beens.

  Aimes was going to cover his and Delbert’s ass with the paper of a very carefully written report. He’d write it brief and general. It would describe an altercation in a bar. It would include the names of those involved, the names of the witnesses, the time of day. It would say that Teach had admitted drinking. It would say that both men claimed to be the victim and neither requested medical attention. It would say that Teach alleged there had been a razor which later turned out to be a comb. It would say the scene was cleared without an arrest. Period. Those were the facts, and Aimes would not move an inch beyond them.

  He collected his possessions from the front seat of the car, checked the floorboards for anything he might have dropped, then turned to Delbert. “I hope that boy has sense enough to leave our man Teach alone. No good can come from those two meeting again.”

  Delbert nodded.

  Aimes knew the people in that bar thought he had lost his temper with the boy, grabbing him by the shirt, sitting him down hard. But he hadn’t lost anything, and he knew Delbert understood what he had done. Controlling the boy a little before things got out of hand again between him and Teach. It was good police work. What bothered Aimes more than having to use force, more than the finger that throbbed steadily now, was Tyrone’s arrogance, the boy not knowing, apparently, what he was risking by getting into a fight with a white man in a bar.

  Sure, the kid came from a different generation. He lived by different rules, some combination of hip-hop and bad-ass football bravado. But shouldn’t a kid smart enough to get those good grades know how easy it is for a favored child to fall? Shouldn’t he know how fast and how far that child could fall in what was still a white man’s world? Even when you figured in the boy’s youth and inexperience and how much he had already been petted and pampered by white coaches and teachers, it still didn’t make sense. The boy being in that place, doing what he’d done, taking the attitude he’d taken with a sergeant of the Major Crimes Division of the Tampa Police Department.

  SEVEN

  Teach parked the Buick under a majestic banyan tree on the old redbrick drive of the Tampa Women’s Club. The city of Tampa had once proudly worn miles of redbrick streets, and employed men, mostly Cuban, who knew how to grade the roadways and spread the white beach sand and nestle the rich red bricks into the sand from one granite curbstone to another. The artisans were gone now, and the red bricks survived only in the best neighborhoods, saved by the vanity of the rich.

  The automobiles Teach passed as he hurried toward the old Spanish stucco and terra-cotta tile facade of the Women’s Club were the thoroughbred descendants of the Packard Roadsters and Delages and Stutz Bearcats that had lined this drive when the banyan trees were sprigs, and the sky beyond the club’s roof was not crowded with glass-and-steel skyscrapers. Ahead of Teach, the last arrivals, women in filmy tropical pastels and expensive shoes, towed in their bored husbands.

  Teach checked the bloodstain on his coat sleeve for the tenth time since leaving Malone’s Bar. He had bought film at a drugstore, then, with a few minutes to spare, he had driven to a bar on Kennedy Boulevard. The bourbon he’d tossed back while the barmaid counted out his change had steadied him, quieted the loudest voices of his headache, and sent him back out into the muggy dusk with the ramshackle house of his optimism somewhat repaired.

  Teach quickened his step and prepared his smile. It was always strange for him, stepping into the opulence of the ballroom. The varnished mahogany wainscoting, the crystal chandelier shedding its pink light on the damask tapestry with its stilted scene of serene men on horseback spearing a lion that seemed to be in no particular pain. The murmur of conversation that would suddenly quiet as the lights went down and the music began to play and the first dancers appeared on stage, shy and brave and fragile.

  Teach rested the old Minolta SLR on his right coat sleeve, concealing the bloodstain. He would look, he hoped, perfectly natural entering this way. A club woman gave him a program and a gentle frown for his lateness. Teach deferred the pleasure of opening the program to see Dean listed as principal dancer. He stood behind the last row of seats, imagining his wife, Paige, somewhere in the sea of organdy and silk. That she had not lived to see their daughter in this role seemed a crime of fate, a sin worse than any of Teach’s own. He closed his eyes and saw Paige where he knew she would have sat, halfway down on the aisle. In his mind’s eye, she lifted her head to look around for him, her shining honey-blond hair in the usual chignon. She’d had a good neck, long and smooth, and a heartbreaking wisp of hair had always escaped the chignon just under her left ear.

  As he started down the aisle to find a seat, a hand took his arm, turning him. A red-faced man in a pink blazer looked petulantly at him and said, “Please.”

  Teach stepped aside as the man ushered a tall, fiftyish black man and his wife down the aisle to the reserved front row. Stately was the word that formed in Teach’s mind. The way the couple moved, the way they claimed the usher’s deference and the attention of this prosperous audience. The black man walked with a musical grace, and his dark suit was rakishly cut for a man of his age.

  The man’s wife carried herself with regal dignity. The entire ballroom watched them settle in the first row next to a couple Teach recognized as the mayor of Tampa and his wife. The two couples smiled and greeted each other comfortably, and the lights began to go down.

  Teach hurried down the aisle in the half dark, excused himself across the knees of a sixtyish couple, and dropped down next to a diamond-beglittered matron. He smiled at the woman, who inclined her head toward him and sniffed. Her nose worked on the air between them, then she frowned. The bourbon. And if she could smell it, so, probably, could others. Well, what the hell? Other men had come here straight from work after a bump from the office bottle or a stop at Eric’s in the Franklin Street Mall. Teach took a good comprehensive whiff of himself and got it all: the musky sweat of violence and fear, the tang of blood and whiskey.

  After a brief overture, the curtain rose on a woodland scene Teach thought must have been painted by a descendant of the tapestry maker. A line of girls flowed onto the stage in
pink tutus, white tights, and pink toe-shoes. Their hair was blond and bunned, and each wore a white blossom on the crown of her bun. These girls, Teach had learned, were the corps de ballet.

  Several of them were pretty. They were all earnest and deeply imbued with the seriousness of The Dance. But none of them, Teach knew from years of these evenings, was talented. And wait a minute, there was a new girl. A black girl. She tottered in on uncertain toes, her movements a little too robust for the corps. Watching her, Teach knew she was an athlete. He could see her running the hurdles or doing the Fosbury flop over a high-jump bar. A spirited girl, she seemed trapped up there on the stage, her eyes a little panicky, her energy too large for this subtle rite.

  Sitting here amongst these complacent burghers, listening to the lilting music, watching these daughters of wealth and privilege move in stately patterns on the stage, Teach shuddered and thought, I could be handcuffed in a police station, could be fumbling through the Tampa phone directory for the name and number of an attorney, could be leaving a phone message for my daughter: “Uh, it’s Dad. Sorry I didn’t make it, honey. Something’s happened. I’ll be home as soon as possible.”

  And then the entire vista of disaster opened up before James Teach: himself in prison, a lost man in a world of grinding stupidity and violence, all because of a few seconds of bourbon-inspired heroism in a men’s room.

  And there was gorgeous Dean. She had swept onstage in a swell of violins, turning on pointe with her arms sweetly arched above her head, the stiff tutu flaring out to reveal the clean line of her thigh. God, she was beautiful. God, what gifts she had given and been given.