Suitcase City

by Watson, Sterling

  And where was the business? The showroom looked shabby, nobody but a couple of hangdog salesmen and some scratch-and-dent furniture. This warehouse wasn’t any better. A lot of dusty crates and boxes, sofas and sectionals wrapped in plastic. Aimes wondered how long it had been since anybody had fired up that forklift behind Naylor, moved any of these goods onto a truck for shipment.

  Aimes looked at Delbert. Their signal. Delbert showed Naylor his detective’s shield and said, “Mr. Naylor, we’re investigating the murders of some prostitutes here in Tampa. One of them was a Thalia Speaks. We understand you knew her.”

  Naylor looked sad now, and it pissed Aimes off. It was that phony sadness scumbags pulled into their eyes when they needed it. Next thing the guy would be crying the tears of an alligator.

  Naylor said, “I knew her around the neighborhood, but, you know, it was a long time ago. I don’t remember her much.”

  * * *

  Blood Naylor was standing under the crate, so close he could feel the heat from the forklift’s engine. He felt, also, the powerful urge to look up at the crate. He wasn’t sure why. He tried to concentrate on this cop’s face. Tried not to grind his jaws like the drug wanted him to do. He had heard of Aimes. They’d grown up about the same time, not far from each other. Blood getting into trouble early, running with the bad dogs. Aimes turning himself into a white man’s nigger. Football hero at Middleton High, then at A&M. Aimes one of the first black men to make detective in Tampa, twice the white cop’s age and letting the little cracker do the talking. Yassuh, boss. Yassuh, boss. Blood wanted to break into a buck and wing, sing a few bars of “Camptown Races.” He didn’t. What he did was go humble, stare at his feet, scratch the concrete floor with some shoe leather, and say, “I don’t remember her much.” Oh, Thalia.

  The little white cop said, “Do you know a Mr. James Teach?”

  Blood let them see him think about it hard. He pursed his lips and squinted, reached up to scratch his head, and . . . that’s when he felt it, something wet. “Name don’t ring a bell. Was he a friend of Thalia’s?”

  The white cop frowned, glanced over at his partner. Aimes didn’t look at him. He walked over to Blood’s left, into the corner where he kept the old record player, the stack of 45s. Little Anthony. Sam Cooke. Martha and the Vandellas. Blood turned his head very carefully and watched as the big black cop picked up some records, sorted through them, and put them back down. Aimes walked back over and stood beside the white cop.

  Carefully, Blood rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, feeling the sticky wet. He knew what it was. He could smell it. Soon, the two cops would smell it, see it. Blood felt another warm drop strike the top of his head.

  The white cop said, “We found some drugs in Thalia Speaks’s apartment. They came from Meador Pharmaceuticals. Mr. Teach works for Meador. We were wondering what would happen if we got a warrant and searched this place. Maybe we’d find some of the same stuff here. Maybe bring a dog in here, let him sniff around. You used to sell some drugs, didn’t you, Mr. Naylor? I mean, back before you became a taxpayer and all.”

  Another drop, and this time Blood felt and heard it. It hit with a little pat. Sounded like that first big drop of rain slapping your dusty sidewalk on a summer afternoon. Those drops that come cold from high up in a dark cloud. Only this wasn’t water. It was warm. It was that woman up there. Blood Naylor didn’t know what to do. If he stepped away, the next drop would hit the concrete. The two cops would see it. If he took them out to the loading dock, they’d see the newspaperwoman’s car out there. If he walked them back into the showroom where the light was brighter, they might see the blood in his hair, see it run down the back of his neck, or worse, down his forehead.

  The white cop looked angry now. Blood wasn’t taking this serious enough for him. Concentrate, Blood told himself. You can pull this off. He said, “I did the crime and I did my time. I don’t have nothing to do with drugs no more.”

  “What about the ladies, Mr. Naylor? You still sell back?”

  Blood shook his head, but not too hard. “I sell furniture. You can see that, man. I don’t have nothing to do with selling no back.” Blood looked an appeal at the black cop, Aimes. Get this cracker off my ass, man. Aimes looked back at him like he was a hole in the air. Not there.

  The white cop said, “When was the last time you saw Thalia Speaks, Mr. Naylor?”

  “It was a long time ago. Back before I went to Raiford, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Oh, I might of seen her once or twice right after I got back. We might of talked then, but I don’t remember. She wasn’t no friend of mine after I got back.”

  “Where were you on the night of May 25, Mr. Naylor? Do you recall that?”

  “Yes sir, I was at a bar over in Ybor. It was a big crowd in there that night.”

  After arranging Thalia’s apartment for the cops, Blood had gone to the Celebrity to show his face.

  “Anybody see you there that night?”

  “Sure, I imagine so. Imagine you could find somebody saw me in there. If you look for them. You gone look for them?”

  “We’re gonna do what we have to do, Mr. Naylor.”

  Blood smiled at the cop, and another drop hit him. He could feel the warm blood pooling on his scalp. He tilted his head back an inch and it crept toward the back of his neck.

  It surprised Blood when Aimes spoke. “We’ve got your fingerprints on file, Mr. Naylor. We’re going to check them against the ones we found in the woman’s apartment. You’re telling us you were never involved with the woman, never had sex with her?”

  Had sex? Jesus Christ, Blood thought, I lived inside her body for a year. She was my eyes opening in the morning and my last waking thought at night. “No.” He shrugged, smiled. “I knew her around the neighborhood, you know. She was just some girl, that’s all. I don’t remember much about her.”

  “All right, Mr. Naylor,” Aimes said, “we’ll be in touch.”

  “I’m happy to help whenever you need me.” Another drop hit the top of Blood’s head. A warm rivulet ran into his collar, down the back of his shirt.

  The two cops started walking toward the front of the store, leaving Blood standing very still under the forklift. He sighed his thank you, then Aimes stopped, turned back. “You used to be an evil man, Mr. Naylor. You sold drugs and women. You beat up women and you went to prison for it. Now you’re a good man. Is that what you want me to believe?”

  Jesus, it was a crazy question. Blood held his head very still. “It happens,” he said. “Believe it.”

  The black cop smiled, shook his head, and walked away with his little white partner.

  * * *

  Walking across Bloodworth Naylor’s empty parking lot, Aimes turned to Delbert. “Nervous,” he said.

  “Scared,” said Delbert.

  “Lying his ass off about not knowing the woman. Her not being his girlfriend.”

  “The man has no ass,” Delbert said. “Lied it completely off.”

  “Complete crock of shit about being in the bar?”

  “Remembered it way too quick. Didn’t even have to think about it.”

  “You interested in Naylor now?”

  “I’m a blind dog in a meat house, and he’s a pork chop wrapped in bacon.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  After the two cops drove away, Blood Naylor fired up the forklift and lowered the elevator. The woman’s purse was still slung over her shoulder. He put on some work gloves and opened the purse, found her car keys. He tore a sheet of plastic from an old sectional and went out to her car, lined the trunk with it.

  Back inside, he jumped onto the forklift and drove it out to the parking lot. He stopped beside the woman’s car and lowered the lift. It was late afternoon and quiet in the back lot. Mook and Soldier were off in the truck delivering furniture. Down the alley, the jacaranda tree where the two whores plied their trade stood on its carpet of purple petals. They’d be coming soon.

  Blood
reached into the crate and put his arms around the woman’s body. She was big, and it took all of his strength to lift her. As he raised her out of the crate, her head lolled against his, and he felt her hair brush his cheek and smelled her thick, musky perfume. This, and the warmth of her body and the odor of whiskey that rose from her, sickened him. As he turned and dropped her onto the bed of plastic in the trunk, his stomach turned. He stepped back, closed the trunk, and held his heaving stomach until it steadied.

  Blood looked around again, saw no one, accepted his luck. He drove the forklift to the dumpster and lowered the elevator. He climbed up, stood on the forks, and shoved the crate into the dumpster. It fell among the scraps of plastic and cardboard with a hollow rumble and a geyser of dust.

  Inside the warehouse, in the small bathroom used by the deliverymen, he washed the blood out of his hair. With a wad of wet paper towels, he followed the trail of blood drops from the crate out of the warehouse, down the ramp, and across the lot to the woman’s car. He wiped up the drops and went back into the warehouse to flush the towels.

  Blood tried to remember when the city truck came to empty the dumpster. It was tomorrow—yes, tomorrow morning. His luck was holding. He walked across the parking lot and unlocked the door of his Bronco. He took the stainless Smith .357 from the glove box and put it in his waistband.

  Inside the office, he told his secretary he was going out for an early dinner. The woman turned her face from a stack of invoices and gave him the usual response, “Unh-hunh.” Her way of telling him he didn’t spend enough time around the place. Blood smiled, waved. He had an errand to run.

  * * *

  Teach drove Bama’s Alfa past a big jacaranda in the alley behind Blood Naylor’s Rent-to-Own. The white Bronco was parked at the back of the lot, by the dumpster. Ahead of Teach, a dusty Ford Taurus moved across the lot and turned into the narrow lane that led to the front of the store at the corner of Fletcher Avenue. The slanting afternoon sun gave Teach a glimpse of the face behind the wheel. It was Naylor. The years had changed him, but underneath the work time did to faces, Teach saw the same guy he had said goodbye to that dark morning in a bar in Cedar Key. I’m going to disappear. I advise you to do the same.

  Naylor turned left and headed toward I-275, and Teach saw the Tampa Tribune parking sticker on the Ford’s rear bumper. What was Naylor doing in Marlie Turkel’s car? Teach had come here thinking he would try to get into the warehouse, find something that linked Naylor to Thalia Speaks. He followed the Taurus.

  * * *

  Blood Naylor was heading north on 275, toward the open country out around Lutz. Plenty of pastures and pinewoods, sinkholes and abandoned farmhouses up that way where he could leave the newspaperwoman. Places where nobody would ever find her. He wasn’t sure why he had picked up that table leg and smacked her mouth with it. It happened so fast. The way she pulled those pictures out, stuck them under his nose. A smart-ass white lady asking him if he’d read her stories about whores. Like she wondered if he could read.

  It wasn’t until he had her in the trunk of her car that he’d placed her name. She was the woman who had written about Teach thumping Tyrone in that men’s room. She had done a good job on Teach. Blood remembered laughing his ass off reading it. Well, he had killed her without planning it, but it was a good thing she was dead. She was going to write Blood Naylor like she’d written Teach. Call the cops back into his life.

  The Ford’s air conditioner cooling his face, Blood felt himself relaxing a little. He had been thinking about just running. It was all over. He had killed the woman. The cops had come and they would be back. Now he was thinking maybe he could get away with this. Maybe the woman hadn’t told anyone where she was going today. The two cops, Aimes and his little white dog, had just been fishing, stirring up the mud to see what crawled out of it.

  When the idea came to him, and he saw its brilliance, he pulled the Taurus over. He pounded his gloved hands on the steering wheel in jubilation.

  * * *

  It took Teach by surprise when Blood Naylor jerked the Taurus off 275 and stopped, idling there on the shoulder. What was the guy doing? Teach was going too fast to stop behind Naylor, so he drove on past and pulled over just before the Lutz exit ramp. In his rearview mirror, he could see the man sitting there, a half-mile back. Then the Taurus pulled out into traffic, cut across two lanes, and bounced across the grassy median. Teach gunned the old Alfa down the exit ramp, turned left under the overpass, and headed back south. The Taurus was nowhere in sight.

  Teach cursed and beat his fists on the steering wheel. Traffic was thick, and it was dangerous weaving through the gaps, searching ahead for the Taurus. Finally, he glimpsed the Ford’s rear end swerving between a Winnebago and a city bus. The Taurus took the Westshore exit, and Teach was stuck six cars back from the intersection, waiting for the light to change.

  Teach told himself to calm down. Some traffic signal up ahead would stop Blood. He would catch up. He looked over at the pistol on the seat next to him. It wouldn’t do for him to be caught speeding in Bama’s car with a stolen handgun, an old Navy Colt .38. Teach had found it under some charts in a locker on the boat Bama looked after. He had to be careful. His felony conviction was old, but the cybershadow of his past was somewhere in a computer. He had always lived with the fear that some cop, stopping him for a traffic violation, might call in his name and get a report on his record. He had paid a lawyer a lot of money to have the record expunged, but he had always believed more in Santa Claus than in the promises of the State of Florida.

  The speed limit was thirty-five on Westshore and Teach was going fifty. He’d glimpsed a white Taurus crossing Kennedy. It resembled Turkel’s car, but there were a thousand like it in Tampa and a hundred just as dirty. He reached over and put his hand on the revolver. What the hell was Naylor doing in Turkel’s car? Were the two of them together now in some scheme? Up ahead, the Taurus crossed San Rafael, still heading south.

  When Teach crossed the intersection at Westshore and Sunset Boulevard, he was only a few blocks from home. He’d lost the Taurus, but a cold dread had crept into the pit of his stomach. It seemed that Bama’s Alfa turned of its own will onto Sunset. It would be stupid to drive to his own house, the cops could be there watching for him, but Teach had to do it. He could not shake the ugly thought that Blood Naylor was in this part of town for a reason. And the reason was Teach.

  He coasted past the house. The Taurus was parked two houses down from his, in front of the Winstons’. Teach felt the sickness of fear sap his strength as he turned into Mrs. Carlson’s driveway, backed out, and stopped at his own curb. He looked up and down the street. There was no sign of Naylor. Maybe he had left the car on this street as some weird message or threat. Left it for the cops to find, and walked away. But a black man like Naylor would stand out in this neighborhood. Just seeing him, someone might call the police. Teach slipped the Navy Colt into his waistband and walked to the Taurus.

  In the front seat, he saw nothing but dust, coffee stains, scraps of paper with notes scrawled on them, and credit card receipts. Nothing in the backseat but old newspapers. He stepped back and looked at the car, at his house. A strange quiet came from the house, and the weak sickness in Teach’s limbs grew. He felt exposed standing here, like some night creature forced out into the daylight. He opened the car door and pulled the trunk release lever.

  Seeing the face through the wrapping of dusty, blood-smeared plastic made Teach sink to his knees. Holding onto the bumper, he closed his eyes, steadied his head, and peered into the trunk, unable to identify the face that stared up at him through layers of dust and blood. He thought of Dean, of safety, of a good life lived in quiet and reason and law, and he peeled aside the smeared plastic.

  “Oh God. Oh my Christ,” whispered Teach. “You poor, poor woman.” All she had done to him, all he had hated her for, left him now as he looked at the mess of her face. Someone had dealt her two huge strokes with a heavy weapon. Strangely, the phrase blun
t trauma came to him, and with it a curious calm. He reached into his waistband and drew the Navy Colt. He released and spun the cylinder, rested the hammer on the chamber he had left empty. There they were, five messages for Mr. Naylor.

  FORTY-FIVE

  The man held her hard, and Dean stood in front of him trying to give her body a calm compliance. To tell him with her limbs what she had already told him in words. She would do anything he asked of her if he would not hurt her father.

  Her father was here somewhere. He was close. She had heard nothing, and she knew from the way the man held her mouth, from the way his mouth breathed against her neck, that he had heard nothing. But she knew Teach was here. She could feel his secrets in the air, hear his mind whisper that he was coming. She wished she could send to him what she knew, that he was walking into death in his own house. She closed her eyes and, breathing as calmly as she could, wished her message to her father: Look out, Daddy. Beware, my dear Daddy.

  * * *

  Blood held the girl’s mouth, pressed the gun barrel to her throat, and whispered to her, “You be quiet, you understand me? You don’t say nothing when he comes in here. I only want to talk to him. You make noise, anything could happen, you understand me? Anything.” The girl moved her head in his hands, trying to nod.

  Out there on the road, the plan had hardened in Blood’s mind. He had decided not to take the body to a sinkhole, not to run. How the hell could a man who owned as much as Blood did just pull up and run? It would be like calling in a confession. So he had turned around and driven to Teach’s house. The plan, the beautiful plan, was to leave the car in Teach’s neighborhood, not exactly at his curb, but near it, then get one of the whores to call the cops, talk in a snotty white-lady voice, tell them there was something suspicious in her neighborhood, a car that didn’t belong there. She thought something might be wrong. Then the cops come, and they look in the trunk, and there’s the poor dead newspaper bitch, and they want to know who killed her. Who in this nice white neighborhood has a motive? James Teach, the man whose life she pissed on in print.