Suitcase City

by Watson, Sterling

  It made Blood angry and sad, looking at the pictures. In the grimy album of his mind, he could see pictures of himself at Raiford. Blood Naylor pumping iron out under that hot tin roof on the yard (Teach and Thalia sipping rum from tall glasses with little paper umbrellas in them), Blood Naylor at counting-in, standing in a long line of blue denim in the rain while the hacks checked names from a clipboard (Teach and Thalia laughing with the sun shining out on the Gulf), Blood Naylor sitting in the Rock cafeteria eating beans and greens and greasy corn bread for the thousandth time (Teach and Thalia eating lobster from that turquoise water), Blood Naylor working a sheet-metal press in the tag plant, trying like hell to keep all his fingers, stamping out plates that said, Florida State Seminoles. It made him angry and sad. It made him want to know all there was to know about Thalia’s time with Teach. Teach, his old associate in crime, the guy who had jodie’d him while he was in the joint.

  Then, holy shit, it came to Blood that she might have saved his letters. The ones he’d written her from Raiford before he’d heard she was doing the white man. Sure enough, he found them at the bottom of the box, tied with white string.

  A dozen letters scrawled out on prison stationery with a pencil stub, letters that leaked from Blood’s heart the strange, harmful truth of his love. He imagined himself accused of this crime and his letters read aloud in court by some smart-ass prosecuting attorney. Just thinking of it made his head, his chest ache like they had been beaten with a fist. His face burned at the thought of what she had been doing while he was writing to her.

  For one murderous instant, he saw her reading his letters to Teach, both of them laughing. He stood up to leave. Go straight to the man’s house. Stick that stainless steel Smith into Teach’s face and keep pulling the trigger until there was nothing but blood and smoke in the air. But Blood mastered this impulse. Mastered it because he had noticed something else at the bottom of the box.

  An envelope. Inside it, a bar napkin with some love words written on it and Thalia’s crude drawing of what looked like Mr. Teach’s face. Such a saver Thalia had been, such a saver. And Blood found a credit card receipt. On it, clear as the brightest day in heaven, was the name James Teach. The date was a year ago, about the time she’d stopped seeing the white guy, lost that country club job, and started to fall, fall, fall. It was a receipt for dinner in a restaurant on Madeira Beach (smart white man taking his black girlfriend across the bay to eat).

  And the idea came to Blood—the glorious idea. James Teach had been here tonight. The picture of what had happened here tonight formed in Blood’s mind. Teach had paid with the hundred-dollar bill. Teach had used the condoms. Blood wiped the money and the two condom wrappers clean of prints. (The brother in the tight green pants was free and clear now.) Blood pulled the album from the shelf again. He opened it to the last page where there was an empty plastic sleeve. From the contents of Thalia’s memory box scattered on the bed, he selected a picture. In the restaurant on the dock, Teach stood behind Thalia holding a scarf. There was an open gift box on the table in front of her, and there was Thalia’s sweet, grateful smile. Blood fingered through the album again, taking the journey from Thalia’s long-legged childhood, to her tender high school years, to that grandmother of hers, the woman who was supposed to keep her on the straight-and-narrow. Blood slipped the picture into the empty sleeve. He liked the story the album told. Teach was the last page. Teach who had been here tonight. He put the credit card receipt back into the envelope with the drawing of Teach’s goofy love grin. He slid the envelope into the album, marking that last page. Sticking out so that a person looking at the bookshelf would notice it. He liked that too.

  Blood went to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. The scratches Thalia had made on his cheek were small, but he had seen his share of true crime TV; he knew about the forensic cops and the fingernail scrapings they did. He went back out to the bedroom and used toilet paper and nail polish remover to clean Thalia’s fingers, careful to get way up there under the nails. He put what was strewn on the bed back into the memory box.

  With the box under his arm, he stood in the middle of her little bedroom, in the glow of all those candles, looking at the story he had written. He wanted to throw back his head and crow like a big black bird. Stick his thumbs under his arms and flap his elbows like hell’s own condor. He wanted to fly like a hawk, talons bare to the wind, because James Teach was a little rabbit down there on the ground, running from bush to bush. A rabbit with no earthly notion that the shadow of death soared above him.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Aimes and Delbert parked the Crown Vic on the street in front of the dead woman’s apartment. Aimes got out and looked up and down the street. It was night, quiet in Suitcase City. People with jobs had gone to bed tired, and the ones without them were sleeping off a day of beer, weed, and Oprah. This part of Suitcase City was almost bearable with the dew falling and the smell of the night coming on. Aimes had grown up in a place like this, and it made him shiver to think of decisions he’d made that might have kept him in it. Well, he’d made the other ones too, the decisions that got you out. Last night, somebody had decided to end the life of a prostitute named Thalia Speaks.

  The speculation was that one of her johns had called it in. Some guy showing up with that special need, finding the door unlocked, going in, getting a scare that shrank his dick, then making the phone call—Uh, you don’t need to know my name, but . . . Then came the march of official Tampa through the woman’s apartment. Detectives handling the crime scene. Uniforms controlling the crowd, lab technicians, a guy from the medical examiner’s office, and finally the city morgue attendants who’d taken the woman’s smiling face away.

  Yes, smiling. A good, careful look at the crime scene photos had assured Aimes of that. She’d been strangled and showed all the signs of it—the exploded eyeballs, blackened, swollen tongue, ligature marks at the throat—but her face held a sad, eerie smile. Aimes wondered about that. Some postmortem distortion of the facial muscles, something a pathologist could explain. Nobody got strangled and died happy.

  Delbert went up the walk in front of Aimes, put on a pair of surgical gloves, and used his penknife to cut the yellow plastic seal that closed the apartment door. He opened the door and looked at Aimes. Aimes pulled his gloves from his coat pocket. The woman was their case now, the fifth dead hooker in six weeks. Aimes wasn’t sorry he’d missed seeing her the night she died. Some guys got off on a crime scene. He didn’t. The clanking of the chain of command, lots of people making sure other people saw them doing the right thing.

  Inside, it smelled like candle wax, cheap perfume, the gray fingerprint dust that was smeared everywhere, stale food, and something else that made Aimes want to step back outside for a lungful of night air. He’d smelled death and sex mixed together too many times.

  Delbert walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, peered in. “Cheese,” he said, “some kind of foreign shit. What is it, cum . . . membert?”

  “Camembert,” Aimes told him, rhyming the last syllable with chair. “It’s what the French eat instead of Velveeta.”

  “Ah.” Delbert went to the kitchen cabinets, opened them, poked a pencil between two teacups. He knelt and peered into the cabinet under the sink.

  Aimes shook his head. “Come on, let’s go to the bedroom.”

  “What you looking for?”

  Aimes knew Delbert wasn’t being impatient. Delbert knew better than that. He was just curious about Aimes’s thinking. What could they possibly find here that hadn’t already been bagged and tagged?

  “Something. Anything,” Aimes said. “We get the case, we look at the place. We’re always thorough. We give the taxpayer an honest day’s work for his hard-earned dollar.”

  Aimes was standing over the bed now. The sheets had been stripped, carried off to be vacuumed for hair and fiber. He was seeing the woman’s face again, her smile. From behind him, Delbert said, “All these candles.”

&nbs
p; “Yeah, what do you make of it?”

  “Some kind of mood, atmosphere thing? The guy did her with a scarf. Maybe it was, you know, one of those sexual-asphyxiation things. Maybe some game they were playing that got out of hand.”

  Aimes turned from the bed to the bookshelf. The fact that there was a bookshelf: that was the first thing. The kind of work he did, he saw a lot of shitty houses and apartments. Places that looked like animals lived in them and places that were clean but stupid. People from the bottom of life trying to imitate people at the top. You didn’t see a lot of bookshelves in the apartments of dead hookers, and you didn’t see books like these. Computer manuals, several of them. Some paperback romance novels and a whole rack of best sellers, mostly books about getting ahead in business. How to parlay a small capital investment into a fortune by using so-and-so’s super system. This woman was different.

  Aimes leafed though a computer manual, put it back on the shelf, and selected something else, a photo album. He opened it to some pictures of the dead woman and a fat woman who resembled her. A sister maybe.

  Delbert was over by the window. He pulled aside the blinds, looked out, turned back to Aimes. “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?” Aimes was trying to think, trying to find something here that made sense, because very little did. The woman had not been shot like the other four. She had not been hauled to a dumpster. She had been strangled with a scarf, one of her own by the look of things. Following the usual procedure, the department had withheld information about the manner of death. Aimes didn’t think she’d been done by the guy who’d killed the other four. And the woman had died smiling.

  “That . . . in the book there.”

  Aimes looked down at the photo album in his hands. Something, an envelope, had been placed between the pages like a bookmark. He pulled it out, opened it. Smiled. Oh yes. Oh Lord, yes. He handed the envelope to Delbert, watched him read, his lips moving.

  Delbert smiled. “Teach. James Teach. I’ll be damned.”

  Aimes thumbed through the pictures, stopped at the last one. He handed the album to Delbert. “Remember the pictures? Her face?”

  Delbert studied the happy picture of James Teach and the dead prostitute in a restaurant somewhere on the beach. “I remember.” Delbert’s eyes going cool, his mouth tightening at the thought of the woman’s face in the crime scene photos.

  “What’d you notice about it?”

  “You mean the smile?”

  Aimes nodded.

  Delbert tucked the envelope back into the album and closed it. “Our Mr. Teach with his condoms and his hundred-dollar bill and his credit card. He’s some piece of work, that guy.”

  Aimes nodded. “Did you remember it?”

  Delbert winced. Aimes knew he didn’t like to be confused as often as he was. It bothered him. Delbert was going to be a good cop someday. Good cops resolved their confusions, got things straightened out.

  Aimes said, “What you told me you were going to remember about Mr. Teach. The thing that wasn’t football.”

  Delbert shook his head, serious, trying to retrieve that thing right now, whatever was lost back there in the gumbo and ham gravy of his memory. “Not yet,” he said, “but I will. Now I know I will.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Dean was up in the bow with a flashlight, poking its long beam down the narrow channel between the slips. Teach had taught her to tie a bowline, and she was proving she could do it under pressure. Docking was always the dicey part of the cruise. Many a marina had rung with the angry words of husbands at the wheel and wives in the bow; marriages had ended with the sound of fiberglass tearing as big boats sailed inches too far in the last seconds of a long day.

  Teach and Dean had had a good cruise. They’d trolled for sea trout and caught some. He’d taught her the rudiments of chart reading and some knots and splices. They’d taken the inflatable Zodiac ashore to explore an old Spanish sugar mill that was part of the state park system.

  They’d had some good talks, mostly about what Dean wanted to do with her life. To Teach’s surprise, his daughter had said she didn’t want to dance in New York. Maybe, she’d told him, she’d go to law school after college. Teach cringed, and they both laughed. Dean said, “Well, if not a lawyer, maybe a cop. I’m interested in the crazy things people do.” She looked at him, serious, questioning. Was this all right with him?

  He smiled, showing her the face of approval while he tried on the idea of his daughter wearing a badge and a gun.

  Teach turned the boat in its slow ponderous swing to the slip.

  “Watch this!” Dean called. He watched her lean, strong legs run to the pulpit, her golden arms fend the bow away from a piling. Then she jumped to the dock with a mooring line, flipped it into a quick bowline, held the knot up for him. “Ta-DAH!” She fed the bight through the loop of the bowline, made a lasso, and slipped it over a cleat.

  Teach shifted the auxiliary into reverse, gave the screw a rev that snubbed the line and brought the Hunter to a shuddering stop. He cut the engine.

  Dean jumped back aboard, stood in front of him. “Dad, that was great. Let’s do it again soon.” She reached up, and he bent to her quick hard hug.

  “Sure, baby,” he said, struggling for more, the right thing. “You’re growing up so fast now, and we won’t . . .”

  But she had already turned away to pick up some gear. What the hell, Teach thought, you don’t have to say everything. People know what you mean. Still, picking up a tackle box and some dirty clothes for the walk to the car, he wished he possessed the skill with words he had with a boat, had once had with a football. And he wished Paige had been here for this, had shared Dean with him these few sunny days. She would have seen that his recent trouble had done nothing to damage Dean’s spirit.

  When all the gear was stowed in the car, Teach and Dean stopped in at the Stone Crab, a restaurant and bar across from the marina. On the way in, he bought a copy of the Tampa Tribune. Reading the paper was beginning to feel friendly again, now that he wasn’t Marlie Turkel’s daily meat and potatoes.

  One headline announced: Fifth Prostitute Murder Disturbs Black Community. Teach’s eyes drifted over the article, then lurched back to a name. It took him a second to connect the shock that lit up his nerves to anything that could be called recognition. It was like being stung—the blinding pain, then the realization that a wasp was driving its barb into the back of your neck. Thalia Speaks. Thalia Speaks was dead.

  “What’s the matter, Dad? You don’t look so good.”

  Dean watched him from under a pinched brow, her mouth puckered around the straw that drew iced tea into her mouth.

  “Nothing,” Teach said, “I’m just tired, honey.”

  He put the paper down, lifted his coffee cup, set it back down, and looked at the bar. The glittering bottles were stacked in rows under an elaborate blue neon facsimile of a school of fish. Teach wanted a bourbon so badly that his throat ached. Someone put a coin in the old jukebox, and Jimmy Buffet started singing, “It’s been a lovely cruise . . .” And Teach thought, Christ, that restaurant in Madeira Beach. Some German tourist playing that song over and over again. Some Hans or Dieter at the end of a holiday, stretching out the last hours of the cruise. Teach and Thalia raising their eyebrows and laughing. Thalia happy with the gifts he’d given her, a scarf and a pair of pink coral earrings.

  That afternoon, Thalia was beautiful and smart, and she was going somewhere because Teach had promised to help her. She had been a ghetto girl with about as much future as a stray cat when she had lucked into the job at Terra Ceia Country Club. Lucked into Teach. That day he had told her, promised her, that he would find a way to hire her at Meador Pharmaceuticals. The more they talked about it, the more Teach believed it could happen. He would be her Henry Higgins. He would reinvent her. Her beauty, brains, energy, and charm were beyond question. All she lacked was education and experience. If he picked her as his intern in the company’s business opportunity program, gave h
er a shot at selling, who would question it? He would teach her business etiquette, sales strategies, show her how to use her gift for looking people in the eye, talking straight to them. She was a natural, and she’d be grateful to him, and she’d want him to know it.

  Dean’s straw gurgled at the bottom of her glass. “Daddy, are you sure you’re okay? We can go now if you like. I’m not that hungry and—”

  “Yes, honey, I’m okay. Like I said, just a little tired.” And thirsty, Teach thought, so thirsty. “Deanie, why don’t you go ahead and order that cheeseburger and another iced tea. I’m just going to have a drink. I’ve been awfully good with the beer and all.”

  Teach smiled, knowing the smile was rotten on his face, knowing she’d be disappointed about the whiskey. She knew him better now. But what the hell? Thalia, a prostitute? It couldn’t be true. It was harder to believe than the fact of her death. There must be some mistake.

  He waved the waiter over and ordered a double Turkey and a Heineken back. Dean looked away, out the window at the crushed oyster-shell road, the marina beyond. She looked so much like her mother now, Teach thought.

  While Dean ate, he reread the newspaper article. Marlie Turkel had written it. He recalled that she’d been assigned to what the paper was calling a string of prostitute murders, but he hadn’t paid much attention to her articles. A detective named Aimes (surely it was the same man) was quoted, giving the usual vague descriptions.

  Police had found Thalia Speaks dead after an anonymous caller had alerted them. She had been murdered, but the killer’s method was being withheld. She had been arrested twice for prostitution and possession of narcotics. A grandmother and sister were listed as surviving her. Teach searched his memory. Had Thalia ever mentioned them?

  The article said that Thalia Speaks had taken community college courses and that she had worked as a waitress at the Terra Ceia Country Club. It occurred to Teach that right now people all over the city were reading about her death. The same people who had read about James Teach and an altercation in a men’s room. Who could possibly connect the two people, a vice president and a prostitute murdered in Suitcase City? Teach knew with a certainty that hurt like a fishhook in his face, like a swallow of some evil poison, that two people would make the connection: Marlie Turkel was one, and a detective named Aimes was the other.