Suitcase City

by Watson, Sterling

  But, Aimes would say, the guy has no alibi. Says he was asleep on a boat in a deserted marina when the woman was killed. You buy that?

  I don’t buy it, but a jury might. They might call it a reasonable doubt.

  Fucking ADAs, Aimes thought. They wanted you to put the fish in the barrel, put the gun in their hands, aim it for them. They wanted you to say, Okay, go ahead and shoot now.

  Aimes said, “What about the other girls? You still like our Mr. Teach for all of them?”

  Delbert shook his head, impatient. “I like him for Thalia Speaks so much I don’t care about the others anymore.”

  “Easy now. We got to get as much out of this as we can. If Teach did the others, we want him for them too.”

  Delbert looked at Aimes like he had a sudden gas pain, that redneck bile rumbling in his flat belly, all hot and corrosive. Teach was Delbert’s meat.

  Aimes said, “Some time in the shade? Where’d you get that from?”

  Delbert put a hand gingerly to his belt buckle, pressed it there. He looked thoughtful. “My granddaddy used to say that. It means you been in prison. You’re all pale. You know, you been in the shade.”

  “Your granddaddy ever do time, Delbert?”

  “No. He was a mortician, but come to think of it, he had a light complexion.”

  Ah, culture, thought Aimes. The different ways people construct meaning. He saw humanity as comprised of two tribes: the evildoers and the law-abiders. He was a man on a long march and his living reason was to bring down as many from the evildoing tribe as he could. It was practical for him, without theory. It was a thing he did for his wife, because when she was alive she had admired him for it, and now he lived on memories of her admiration. Delbert was a curious kid. Under all that energy, all that earnest, hard-working, up-by-the-bootstraps ambition, Aimes thought there might beat the heart of a true believer in Justice and the American Way. Sometimes the kid scared Aimes a little.

  “Delbert, something I never asked you. Did you play football?”

  Delbert looked at him, wondering where this was going. “No, I was in the band.”

  “In the band?”

  “Yeah, I played the clarinet.”

  “You marched up and down the field in that uniform that looked like the army of Bolivia?”

  “Yeah, I did. So?”

  “So, nothing. Just curious.”

  Maybe Delbert’s hard-on for Teach had something to do with football. Teach being the big star. Whatever it was, it was strong. It wasn’t clarinet music. It was a big bass drum.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Teach spent the evening in his darkroom working with the enlarger until he was sure of the Bronco’s tag number. He could do little with the shot of the man who drove it. Blown up and cleaned up, the face looked like half of a hockey mask, or the Phantom of the Opera. When Teach finished, he went out to his study and picked up the phone.

  “Sorry to call so late, Walter, but it’s important.” By the unspoken rules of Terra Ceia, eleven thirty was too late for a phone call. But Teach was buzzed by the darkroom work, and he wanted to keep the momentum going.

  “That’s all right, old buddy.” Walter’s laugh was not entirely one of mirth. “What can I do for you? Not, God help us, another barroom altercation, is it?”

  Teach put into his voice what there was of obligation between him and Walter. There wasn’t much. “I need a favor. Do you know anybody down at the Department of Motor Vehicles? I need the name that goes with an auto tag.”

  Walter was silent. Teach heard in the background the sounds of the Demarest household. Letterman on TV. The thump of rock music, Walter’s teenage son, Peyton.

  Walter finally said, “I, that is, we retain an investigator with contacts at the DMV.” Now his voice was reserved, a lawyer’s voice. “He runs things down for us occasionally. Nothing Sam Spade, you understand. Mostly vehicle registration numbers for probate cases. I’ll ask the guy to see what he can find. What’s going on?”

  Teach had anticipated the question. “I’d rather not say, Walter. I can promise you it’s nothing that will ever come back and bite your butt.” It could take my butt in one great, bloody crunch, but not yours, old buddy.

  Walter thought about it. Letterman told a joke. Peyton Demarest’s brain death by heavy metal floated across the wires to Teach. “Hokay, buddy, but I hope there’s green grass on the other side of this rough patch you’re going through.”

  Teach gave him the tag number. Walter Demarest explained that he could have the information by midmorning tomorrow, then he said, “By the way, Peyton tried to call Dean, and your phone was out of order. Thought you’d want to know.”

  “Thanks, Walter. Some malfunction over here. We’ll fix it.” He had unplugged the phones. The messages had been coming every hour on the hour.

  Teach had saved the brief obituary of Thalia Speaks. It listed two survivors: a sister, Bennie Marie Speaks, and a grandmother, Mary Lena Liston. He found the two women in the phone book. He didn’t know much about the College Hill section of Tampa, only what he’d seen on news programs: night scenes of drunks in handcuffs, splashes of blood on sidewalks, anguished faces strobing on and off in the blue-and-red lights of police cars.

  He went to the foot of the stairs and called up, “Dean, I’m going out for a while.” He waited.

  His daughter’s sleepy voice called down, “All right, Dad.” The TV murmured up there.

  Teach drove through College Hill with a city map on his lap. The houses were frame and cinder-block boxes. TVs glowed in barred windows. Porches owned pairs of gleaming red canine eyes.

  Teach stopped at the curb across the street from Benny Marie Speaks’s green and brown bungalow and opened the window of his LeSabre. The warm night air flowed in, carrying the sounds of sirens. Only a few blocks away, the worst of the ghetto began.

  He wasn’t sure what he was doing here. It was too late for a reasonable knock on anyone’s door. But he had that buzz in his chest and the weird feeling that if he didn’t keep going tonight he’d just return to the waiting, waiting for Aimes to call him in again, waiting for more of those falsetto messages about not remembering someone. Thalia’s sister’s house was dark. Teach moved on to her grandmother.

  Driving slowly through the night streets, he thought about connections. He had bloodied Tyrone in a bar, and Tyrone was connected to a man in a white Bronco. The man in the Bronco was calling Teach’s house leaving a message about remembering people. He had left the first message the day Teach had talked to Detective Aimes about the death of Thalia Speaks. Was Thalia connected to the man in the Bronco? Was Tyrone somehow connected to Thalia? They had both done drugs. The man in the Bronco had been out there on the Gandy Causeway feeding Tyrone’s crack habit. Teach had to assume that drugs connected all three.

  Suddenly, it occurred to him that maybe meeting Tyrone in a bar was not an accident. Not a thing that had happened to him, but a thing done to him. By someone. For a reason. A thing that had stalked him, caught him there happy, drinking, telling football stories. You don’t remember me.

  He drove past Thalia’s grandmother’s house twice before stopping. Mary Lena Liston lived in a bad place. There was a burned-out convenience store at the end of the block, and a house across the street stood in a weed-choked yard, its windows covered with plywood. Teach passed two groups of hard-eyed young black men. From one of them, a boy had run a few yards after Teach’s car shouting, “What you doing here, bitch?” The challenge, fading behind him, seized his chest like a cold fist and made him slip down in the seat waiting for a rock or a bullet to shatter his window.

  He waited in the car for fifteen minutes, watching Mary Lena Liston’s house, trying to make up his mind about what to do. Finally, the porch light snapped on, and a frail old black woman stepped out and peered up and down the street. She held a bowl in her hands, and carried a newspaper. As Teach watched, she went stiffly to a white rattan chair and sat, smoothed the newspaper out at her feet, and rested
the bowl on her knees. He drove the Buick down the block and hid it in the mouth of an alley. He got out and walked back toward the old woman’s light.

  Close enough for her to see him, he slowed his pace. He didn’t want to scare her. He had no idea who else was in the house. Closer, he saw that the bowl on her lap held field peas, and that her busy fingers were shelling them, dropping the shells onto the newspaper.

  He stopped on the sidewalk and waited for her to look up. She didn’t. “White man, what you doing here this time of night?”

  Teach said, “I’m looking for Mary Lena Liston. I have something for her. Something of value.” He had planned this on the drive over. It was cheap, tawdry, but it was all he had, and it might work.

  “You found her.” The old woman kept her eyes on the peas in her lap. She broke the pods with a pop, then ripped her thumb through to sprinkle the peas into an old porcelain basin. “But she don’t let no white man call her Mary Lena. You call me Mrs. Liston, or you get on out of here.”

  Teach was about to apologize, start again, when she muttered, “Coming here in the middle of the night telling an old lady you got something for her.”

  Teach blundered on: “I’m from the . . . Dixie Fidelity and Trust Company. Your granddaughter had an insurance policy with us, and she named you as beneficiary. I’d like to talk to you about it if you’ve got time.” Forgive me, Teach thought.

  The old woman looked up for the first time, revealing the milky film of a cataract across her right eye. The left eye was aimed at him like the black dot at the end of a gun barrel. “When you white mens start doing the insurance business at night?”

  Teach stood ten feet from her in the porch light, letting her see him. He tried to seem small and harmless. “I think I can smell a thunderstorm coming. Does it seem that way to you?”

  She looked at him, at the peas in her lap, set the bowl aside, and wiped her hands on her apron. “Might be right about that. I didn’t think you young’uns noticed the weather unless it blown your hair out of place or destroyed some of that nasty crack rock you always consuming.”

  Teach made his voice earnest. “Mrs. Liston, I don’t use drugs, and I notice the weather, and I wonder if you might invite me out of it so we can talk.”

  She stood up, groaning, touching the middle of her back. She picked up the bowl of peas. “I give you five minutes, white man, but you better not be wasting my time, and you better not be selling no aluminum siding. I done run off more aluminum siding mens than you got teeth in you head.”

  She gave him more than five minutes. In the cramped kitchen smelling of bacon and soap they sat under a bulb shaded by a large plastic sunflower. She offered him a glass of cream soda, took one herself, and asked if he had a cigarette. He told her he had given up the habit, and she explained that she had cut herself down to bumming. In an ungenerous world, it was a good way for an old lady to suppress a vice.

  Teach knew enough about insurance to make the thing seem plausible. After setting the hook, a ten-thousand-dollar benefit, he guided the talk to Thalia. He explained that he needed information about her to file the claim. The old woman looked at him sharply. “Thalia had her a policy with you. Ain’t you got all the information you need?”

  Teach moved the talk to the past, to Thalia’s life before she’d worked at the country club. He asked about her education, what she’d done in high school, the community college, hoping the old lady would warm to him, to the past.

  After a while, it began to work. The woman’s good eye misted as she talked about a dead granddaughter. “She was my baby. I raised her. She’d try to live with that sister of hers, but she kept coming back here to me. We got along good, and she never disrespected me. Then she got involved with that Naylor. All her trouble started with that evil nigger. When she saw the life them crack mens live, the way they throw money around and turn women out like dogs. She got shut of him when he went to the jailhouse, and things was good with me and her again for a while.”

  Naylor. Naylor?

  Teach kept his voice quiet, easy, the voice of a man representing an insurance company. “Did you say Naylor, Mrs. Liston? Was that the name you used?”

  “That’s right, Naylor. Nigger was her boyfriend before he went to Raiford. She made him come here, get out of his big ol’ fancy car, and sit on my porch and court her like a man ought to. He was good to her for a while. She told me she was gone make something out of him. Get him out of that crack life. But he got lawed and sent to the jailhouse. Thalia wrote him letters, and she got herself educated and went to work at that fancy white folks club, and she dropped him. Stopped writing to him. It was a dangerous thing to do. I told her that. Bad as he was, I told her she ought to stick with him while he was doing time. Them mens, they get out of jail and they come looking for the girl that runs around on them while they locked down.”

  Teach cleared his throat, looked away from that one bright black eye. “Did she, uh, did Thalia take up with another man while this Naylor was in prison?”

  The old lady looked at him hard. “Some white man. Met him at that club where she worked. You go to that club? You know that man?”

  “No, no ma’am, I don’t know him.” He watched her, hoping she believed him. It had been a while since anything had been said about insurance. She had grown soft remembering Thalia, but the talk of Naylor, and of a white man Thalia had gone with, had made her hard again.

  “Thalia told me she loved that white man. I love him, Granmon, she said to me. I think she was drinking that night, else she wouldn’t have said it. She known I don’t hold with white and black together like that. You know what I said? I told her lots of little black girls loved white mens, and lots of them got babies from them. That’s how you get high-yellow niggers, I told her. But you go over to the white side of town and see how many them little black girls is living with them white mens in them nice houses. You go look, and you come back and tell me about it.”

  Teach saw the thing getting dangerous now. He decided to be quick, surprise her. He took the photo of the man in the Bronco from inside his jacket and held it in front of her. “Is that him? Is that Naylor?”

  He saw immediately that she knew the man, even the phantom likeness Teach’s camera had captured. She pushed back from the table. Her voice was tired when she said, “You ain’t here ’bout no insurance policy, white man. You after him, you after that Naylor, ain’t you?”

  She got up and shuffled away, her back to the ancient claw-foot gas stove with its blackened burners and smell of lard. Teach moved toward her, holding his hands up in front of him, trying to calm her, trying to find the words to tell her why he was here. Tell her that love was a part of it.

  The old lady put her hand to her bony chest and sucked a sharp breath. He tried to read her face, struggled for something to say. She clenched her jaw and took a step past him toward the door. He had to do something. He took her by the shoulders, firm but gentle, and looked into her good eye. When she focused on him, he whispered, “Don’t tell him I was here.” She looked at him with more anger than he thought one eye could hold. He added, “Please.”

  Her old arms like sticks in his hands, she shook her head at the shamelessness of men.

  She knows, he thought. She knows it all now.

  She put her bony hands on his chest and pushed him back toward the kitchen table and whispered, “He was here. Bloodworth Naylor. Came in the middle of the night, just like you. Said he had something for me, just like you.”

  God, Teach thought, Bloodworth. Blood Naylor. He felt the small house grow crowded, dangerous with so many secrets. He wondered what was between the old lady and Naylor that she hadn’t told him.

  “He said he loved her, told me how he missed her. Said he . . . released her. Told me it wasn’t him who made her a ho. It was that white man.”

  Teach imagined the scene, Naylor and the old lady in this room, felt his anger growing. Naylor might have hurt Mary Lena Liston. He might still do it because she knew abo
ut him and Thalia. Teach would have to do something now. Maybe this was what the whole thing was really about. A second fight between Teach and a black man. A man from out of the past.

  The old lady crossed her heart with her hands: “He showed me a box of pictures. Said Thalia give them to him. Now you come here trying to fool me. Telling me ’bout some insurance policy. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  Teach looked at her, glad she was so still, glad she wasn’t up and on him, beating him with with a broom like a dog. He said, “I am. I am ashamed.”

  Groaning, she walked into the living room. When she returned, she placed a photo on the table in front of Teach. He and Thalia in the restaurant in Madeira Beach. Their smiles a little sad. The empty gift boxes on the table and the scraps of their meal. This one had been taken at the end of that afternoon when they were beginning to think about the hard return to separate worlds.

  The old lady sighed. “I don’t care no more. Too old to care.”

  Teach knew what he had to do. It might not matter here, or anywhere, but he had to do it. He had to promise. “I’ll find out who killed Thalia,” he said. “I’ll find out, and I’ll see he gets what he deserves.” He was at the door now.

  “Thalia said she loved you.” Her voice was quiet, brittle as the heart she held. “She said it one night sitting here in this room. She never said that about him.” She looked at the door, letting him know it was time to leave. “I suppose that matter for something.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Teach woke up at midmorning with a pounding headache. After his talk with Mary Lena Liston, he had come home to a dark, quiet house. Full of guilt, full of a crazy resolve to get Thalia’s killer, full of shock at the discovery that time and fate and Thalia had connected him again to Bloodworth Naylor, he’d had three stiff bourbons and fallen asleep on the sofa in his study.