Suitcase City

by Watson, Sterling

  Aimes thinking: And the question is, how much do you know about the last part? The dead part. He decided to move on with it, see if he could get Teach to lie again. The past half hour, telling how a black girl had got her big chance with a white man and then lost it, Mr. Teach had seemed very truthful. Very sorry. Aimes wanted to see if Teach would keep on down the straight-and-narrow, or if the guy would swerve.

  Aimes said, “So you lost touch with her after she left Terra Ceia?”

  “I saw her a few more times.”

  “What’d you talk about?”

  “Once I asked her to get rid of, you know, some things . . . She said she would.” Teach glanced up at Aimes, smiled that betrayed-lover smile. Aimes didn’t smile back. There was some betrayal here, but it wasn’t a black woman saving her memories. Not unless she had used them to bring Mr. Teach to her apartment on the last night of her life.

  Aimes picked up the cocktail napkin by its corner. He showed Teach the woman’s drawing again. She’d had some talent, Aimes thought. The drawing captured something. “So, you haven’t seen this napkin since you split up with Ms. Speaks?”

  Teach looked confused.

  “Would you answer the question, please?”

  “No, I haven’t seen it.”

  Aimes watched him closely, didn’t see any of that liar’s squirm in the man’s eyes. In fact, all he saw was Teach’s wondering what the hell was going on. If Thalia Speaks had tried to blackmail him, those eyes would be different. There’d be some show-the-bitch-righteousness in there staring back at Aimes. Unless, of course, this guy was a better actor than Aimes thought he was.

  “What else did you talk about?”

  Teach held his hands out in front of him and flexed them. “We couldn’t stay away from each other for a while after . . . after she left the club.”

  “You sleep with her then?”

  “Yes, but it just . . . wore out, I guess. We tried not to talk about what had happened. She asked me to pray with her. I couldn’t. I gave her money, tried to help her find work, but she was depressed. She missed some job interviews I set up for her. I’d go over, and we’d make love, and then she’d want to talk about the club, the gossip. It got . . . strange after a while. The sex was just . . . something we did so we could lie in bed afterward and talk.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  After a pause he said, “May. The middle of May a year ago. Things hadn’t been good between us. I went over there, and she had some guy with her.” Teach hesitated again. “A black man. The guy stayed in the backroom where I couldn’t see him. Thalia talked to him through the doorway. He said he’d leave, but she insisted that he stay. Told him I’d be gone soon. What she said to the guy was, Don’t worry about him. He doesn’t stay long. Maybe the guy was a . . . client. Maybe that’s when she started . . . getting paid.”

  Aimes said, “How’d you know he was black if you didn’t see him?”

  And Teach: “By his voice.” Saying it in a way that let Aimes know he meant no offense.

  Aimes said, “Mr. Teach, where were you on the night of May 25, between ten o’clock and midnight?”

  Teach thought about it. “I don’t know. I couldn’t really tell you.” Then Teach’s head rocked back with a memory. “Wait a minute. I was on my boat at the marina. I did some cleaning and worked on the engine. After that, I fell asleep for a while. It was right after the thing with Thurman Battles was over, and I was exhausted, I guess. I was getting the boat ready for a trip with my daughter.”

  Teach looked at Aimes, at Delbert, like he wondered if he’d made some mistake mentioning Battles. Aimes gave him nothing back on that one. He said, “Anybody see you there?”

  “Not that I know of. It’s possible. Not many people around that time of night.”

  Aimes nodded at Delbert, said, “Mr. Teach, I’m going to ask you to wait here for a minute while I step outside with Detective Delbert. We’ll be right back. Would you like a cup of coffee or a glass of water?”

  Teach said, “No thanks.” The big jock looking at the paper in Delbert’s hand.

  Outside, Aimes read it. The buzz about Teach had gotten around. One of the vice cops had knocked on the door, handed Delbert a report on the arrest of some high school kids out on the Gandy Causeway. The cops had confiscated everything from marijuana and powdered cocaine to crack. Nothing unusual about that, but the vice cop had interrupted Aimes’s interrogation because of something else they’d found. Pharmaceutical methylamphetamine, diet pills. The pills were still in their wrappers. Meador Pharmaceutical wrappers.

  Aimes and Delbert had seen drugs on the inventory of items found in Thalia Speaks’s apartment, but the manifest had not mentioned the wrappers.

  Aimes looked at Delbert, “You think?”

  “Why not? She was an addict. Maybe he was smuggling the stuff home from work and she was selling it. It gives the guy another reason to do her. Criminal confederates have a falling out.”

  Delbert bit his thumbnail and shrugged, that nervous jump of the shoulders again. Aimes wondering if his partner didn’t have a little too much of a hard-on for Mr. Teach. Aimes handed the arrest report back to Delbert. “Take it inside but don’t mention it.”

  Delbert nodded.

  Back inside, Aimes saw Teach’s eyes go to the paper in Delbert’s hand. “All right, Mr. Teach. I think that’s all we need for now. I want to thank you again for coming in.”

  Aimes didn’t see what he expected in Teach’s face. He expected relief. What he saw were questions. Well, sometimes it went that way. You had to drag a guy in kicking and screaming to do his duty as a citizen, and when you were finished, when the guy looked at his thumbs and didn’t see any screws on them, he wanted to know what you were thinking.

  Teach gave a tight little smile. “From what you’ve asked me, I could conclude that you think I killed Thalia.”

  Aimes shrugged, looked at Delbert, whose cool blue eyes said that he had Teach measured for nailing to the barn door. “Like I told you on the phone, Mr. Teach, we’re covering all of the bases.” Aimes gave it a tired, memorized sound. He wanted Teach to think: Routine. It’s just routine. For a while. Then he said, “Now that’s my view of it, Mr. Teach. I see us still in the information-gathering phase. But my partner here, Detective Delbert, he thinks he might know how you fit into this. He thinks Thalia Speaks got a little down on her luck, had a little negative cash flow, and she reads about you in the paper, the trouble you had with Thurman Battles, and she thinks why not call you up and say she never did burn those . . . things, and she wonders if your daughter would like to see them, or would you rather come on over and talk about it? . . . And bring your checkbook. That’s what Delbert thinks could have happened. Delbert’s trying to convince me, and I’m trying to keep an open mind.”

  “So I killed her to keep her mouth shut. Is that it?”

  “Delbert thinks it might have gone just that way.”

  “And you’re not sure?”

  Aimes nodded.

  “Why didn’t I take that napkin with me after I killed her?”

  “Delbert thinks you panicked.” Aimes took a crime scene photo from the folder and put it on the table in front of Teach. A photo of Thalia Speaks smiling in death, her eyeballs the size of hard-boiled eggs, the ligature marks at her neck blue and crusted with blood. “After what you did to that poor woman, you panicked, and you ran like a scalded dog. That’s what Delbert thinks.”

  Aimes watched Teach’s reaction to the picture. The man was upset, very upset. His throat worked for a few seconds like he might vomit. Aimes was ready to push back from the table, away from the stream Teach might spew, but the guy got hold of himself and reached up with a shaking hand and wiped a tear from the corner of each eye. It was damned good acting, Laurence Olivier stuff. Or it was real.

  Teach looked at Aimes out of those wet, red eyes. “How was she killed, Aimes? Does Delbert know how she was killed?”

  Aimes pulled another photo
out of the file and put it down in front of Teach. It showed Teach and Thalia Speaks in a restaurant on Madeira Beach. There were pretty boats and pelicans, tourists and tall drinks with paper umbrellas in them. Spiny lobsters and rum drinks on the table. Thalia Speaks was seated and Teach stood behind her, leaning down with his chin almost resting on her shoulder. That happy love-dog look in his eyes, the face in the drawing on the napkin.

  Thalia Speaks had a scarf around her neck, and James Teach held both ends of it as he leaned down over her, his strong hands resting at the sides of her neck.

  Delbert said, “She was strangled, Mr. Teach. With a scarf.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Teach stepped out into the hot white light behind the police station and squinted at the tall royal palms that bordered the parking lot, the gleaming black-and-white police cars with their blue signal lights and City of Tampa crests. Meeting him here an hour ago, Aimes had been all smiles and good public servant. Ready for a friendly little talk. After Teach had given them everything that was secret about Thalia, Aimes and Delbert had left him sitting at the green steel table wiping tears from his eyes. Left him to find his own way out.

  Those pictures, those soul-maiming photos of Thalia’s dead face. He started walking. Walking would settle him, help him forget. He crossed the lot, vaguely aware that his head was hunched down into his collar as though something might fall from the sky and crush him. He told himself to stand straight, quicken his pace, get out of here, and hope that he did not hear from Aimes and Delbert again. Hope that they solved the crime and moved on to others, their miserable lives a procession of brutalities.

  Teach lurched when he heard voices to his right, from the rows of police cars. He walked faster. The gate was twenty yards away. After that, the anonymity of the streets.

  “Mr. Teach! Wait a minute, Mr. Teach! Please!”

  He heard the tapping of heels on the asphalt. He turned to his right. Two uniformed policemen were getting out of a cruiser. Between them and him, coming fast in a long black skirt, white blouse, and black blazer, was Marlie Turkel. When she saw that she had his attention, that in all likelihood he would not bolt, she turned back to the two cops. “Thanks, fellas. We’ll talk again, okay?”

  One of the cops waved to her. His partner was already heading toward the station. Marlie Turkel turned to Teach and asked the inevitable question. “Mr. Teach, what brings you to the police station?”

  Many things occurred to him at once. He could simply walk on. Ignore her. He could lie: My little niece Emily lost her bicycle. He could jump on the woman and commit the act Aimes thought him capable of. Joyously, quickly, brutally, he could strangle her. Teach bought time: “I could ask you the same question.”

  She stood in front of him frowning . . . at what? His stupidity. In a cold, flat voice she said, “I got a call, a tip you were here.”

  Jesus, Teach thought, a tip. Probably one of cops he had passed on his way in. Some guy doing quid pro quo with Marlie Turkel. His tired brain told him it was time to tell the truth. “I talked to Detective Aimes about the murder of Thalia Speaks. He thought I might know something that would help with the investigation.”

  “Do you?”

  “Do I?” Teach was confused, wrung out. It was hot here on the asphalt. He was sweating and Marlie Turkel in her blazer was not.

  “Do you know anything that can help Detective Aimes?” Keeping her eyes on Teach’s face, she pulled a notebook from her purse.

  It came to him. Something he had often read in the paper. “He asked me not to mention anything about our talk. You know, official police business. He said leaks could compromise the case.” Teach knew this wouldn’t stop her from writing that he was connected to the inquiry. Unless. Unless she thought it would anger Aimes.

  “Have you read my pieces about the prostitute murders?”

  Teach had never met the woman, had only talked to her on the phone, seen her picture in the paper. But there was always something grimly intimate in her voice. It frightened him even more than her newspaper job, the license to destroy it gave her. Why did she want to know if he had read her articles? Was it simple vanity? Some strategy to get information from him? A lie here would not hurt him.

  “No,” he said.

  Of course he had read them, long, artfully constructed meditations on the misery of lives spent in the world’s oldest profession. Interviews with prostitutes (names changed), stories of childhood abuse, school failure, running away, shoplifting, drugs, and finally the sale of the body. And all of it, as Marlie Turkel saw it, the fault of men.

  Teach had parked a block down and two blocks over on Cass Street, thinking that distance from the police station might somehow provide a measure of anonymity. He started walking again, and Marlie Turkel fell into step with him. He slowed. He wasn’t running from her. He was walking to his car, and he couldn’t prevent her from accompanying him if she wanted to. She carried the notebook low at her side. It reminded him of gunfighters concealing revolvers in the folds of white dusters.

  After they had walked a block, she said, “I still think there was something funny with you and Thurman Battles. How that whole thing just suddenly went away. And that kid going off to prep school. You two must have discovered some very powerful common interest.” That voice, in the dark, in the alley, hot breath in your face. That hurry-up-and-do-it voice.

  Teach slowed a little more. “We discovered the good of the community, Ms. Turkel. I told you that on the phone.”

  “Forgive me, but . . . bullshit. There’s something going on between you guys.” Beside him, she was breathing a little raggedly. “Whew,” she said, “slow down there. I’ve had a long day. You’re walking my legs off.”

  And I’ve had a long month, Teach thought. He decided to risk it, ask her what she planned to do with his life. Get the news now rather than waiting for the morning paper. He stopped on Franklin in front of a bar, smoked-glass windows and a neon beer sign. Some country tune on the jukebox inside. “Are you going to put this in the paper, Ms. Turkel? That you saw me at the police station? That I talked to Aimes about the murder of a prostitute? Who wasn’t a prostitute when I knew her as an employee at the country club.”

  Marlie Turkel stepped in front of him, reached up, and loosened the large white bow at the throat of her blouse. Breathing hard, her face flushed, she said, “Only as an employee, Mr. Teach?” There it was, the implication her readers would find in her next story. She wouldn’t come out and say it, but the careful reader would not miss the suggestion that Teach had frequented Thalia Speaks as a client. It occurred to him again that he would like to reach out and seize the bow at this woman’s throat and draw it tight until . . .

  Teach closed his eyes, rubbed them. He couldn’t do that, wouldn’t do it, because he was a good man down where it mattered, and good men didn’t. But he had to take hold of something. The world he had guided back into orbit, the world he had blessed for its goodness as he watched his daughter swimming in the sundown Gulf of Mexico, was spinning into the dark again.

  “Look, Mr. Teach, why don’t we step inside here and have a drink? I haven’t said I’m going to write about you.”

  “Jim,” Teach said, “call me Jim, and I’ll call you Marlie.”

  Inside the bar, two things surprised him. The bartender nodded to Marlie Turkel the way he’d nod to a beat cop or a fireman from the station down the street. She wasn’t just known, she was a regular. The second thing was the shot of bar whiskey and the beer she ordered. She knocked back the rye without a wince, chased it with two bites of cheap draft, and tapped her shot glass on the bar. “Another bump, Henry.” The bartender brought the bottle of generic whiskey over and poured a second shot. He glanced at Teach’s untouched Wild Turkey and went back to the baseball game on the TV behind the bar.

  Marlie Turkel led him to a booth. There were no pleasantries. Teach’s mind had been going like a blender, always churning up the same question. He asked it again: “Are you going to write about se
eing me today?”

  She knocked back the second shot, sipped the beer. She leaned back and rested her head on the red leatherette, watching him like she was trying to make up her mind. Her face was long, and her undershot jaw was narrow. There were acne scars in the swales under her cheekbones. She wore her wispy dishwater-blond hair in a pageboy that only made her jaw seem keener. Her teeth were large, chalky, and coffee-stained. No wonder she practiced that purring voice, Teach thought. He could write her biography. She’d grown up poor, been abandoned either emotionally or in fact by parents, then later friends, and, finally, men. She’d discovered journalism as revenge but had convinced herself it was a social crusade. She used the voice to get information which was revenge. The voice was sex, and sex was abandonment, the thing to be revenged.

  She tilted her head to the side a little, smiled, and answered his question: “I don’t know yet. I think you’re news, don’t you?”

  Before she could remind him of the public’s right to know, Teach said, “Why am I news? Why now? Tomorrow Aimes could find out that some drooling perv in a house full of pickled human remains in Suitcase City killed those women. Tomorrow the fact that he talked to me could mean nothing at all.”

  “You’re what I’ve got today, Jim. All I’ve got.”

  “So, it’s a slow day, and you’ve got to feed the beast, and I’m the food?”

  She drank some beer, looked into the glass, glanced at her watch, then at the bartender whose back was to them. “You could put it that way. I wouldn’t. I’d say that a vigilant free press is the cornerstone of a vital democracy. I’d say that the newspaper comes out every day and nobody waits to see if President Lincoln dies before they report that President Lincoln was shot by a man named Booth. The difference between murder and attempted murder doesn’t stop the presses.”

  Teach took the first sip of his whiskey, obscurely pleased that Marlie Turkel was ahead of him on the alcohol highway. “But isn’t there some principle of proportion? I didn’t shoot a president. I knew a woman a year ago, and somebody killed her, and a detective talked to me about her.”