Suitcase City

by Watson, Sterling

  But then Blood had seen the girl come home. Her girlfriends dropping her off. They had driven past and she had looked at him. She had looked right into his face, that white-girl surprise in her eyes. Nigger, what are you doing in my neighborhood? So Blood had to change his plan. He had to park the car and go into the house and take the girl. Because now, now that she had seen him, it had to be different. It had to be a murder-suicide thing. Teach losing his mind over all the trouble that had come down on him, killing the newspaperwoman, driving her car to his house, and shooting his pretty little daughter, then himself. Blood knew he could do it. He could hold the gun to the girl’s head, and make Teach kneel. Get him to take the barrel of the unregistered Smith in his mouth.

  Blood felt the girl move in his arms. She had been good, but now she was beginning to panic. He whispered to her in his sweetest voice, “Be still now, baby. He’ll be home soon. I told you I ain’t gone hurt him. I’m just gone talk to him a little. Then you two can go back to your nice little life.”

  The girl stopped struggling, went calm in his hands. Blood Naylor had a way with the ladies.

  A few minutes later, he heard Teach downstairs, the guy calling out, “Dean? Dean, are you here?” It didn’t sound right, not like Father Knows Best coming home, calling his little daughter. The man sounded scared. He must have seen the car, maybe even looked in the trunk. Blood held the girl’s face hard. Teach calling out again, “Dean? Deanie, are you here?”

  Blood whispered to the girl, “I’m gone take my hand off your mouth. You tell him to come upstairs. You mess up, and I kill you where you stand. You understand me?”

  She nodded. Blood could hear Teach down there creeping through the house. Going room to room. The phone rang. Christ, Blood didn’t want the guy answering it down there. He crossed the bedroom, pulling the girl by the arm, and whispered to her, “Stop it ringing. Don’t answer it, just turn it off.”

  She picked up the phone, hit some buttons. The phone stopped ringing. The girl’s hands were trembling. She’d almost knocked the phone off its little table onto the floor.

  Blood whispered into her ear, “Get him up here. Tell him he’s got a phone call.”

  * * *

  Aimes grabbed Delbert by the arm. “Come on.”

  “What the . . . ?” Delbert shrugged out of his grasp, a fighting cock with his ruffle up. Aimes had made him spill a forkful of grilled Cajun sausage.

  They were sitting in a booth at the Green Iguana. Aimes had gone to the men’s room, then stopped at the phone booth in the hallway to call Teach’s house. See if the daughter was there, if she knew anything.

  They ran out of the restaurant, leaving their food behind. In the car, Aimes caught his breath, thanked his treadmill, and told Delbert the story.

  The answering machine at Teach’s house had malfunctioned, or someone there had done it on purpose. Instead of James Teach’s cheery salesman’s voice with the usual message, Aimes had heard a song that he remembered from his youth. Little Anthony and the Imperials. “Tears on My Pillow.” A very pretty tune, a very sad story.

  Aimes pushed the Crown Vic through the traffic on Westshore. Delbert held onto the hand strap. “What does that mean? That song. I don’t get it.”

  “It means Bloodworth Naylor. You remember that little record player we saw in the warehouse? That song was on the turntable.” Aimes thinking, It means blood on somebody’s pillow.

  * * *

  Teach heard Dean call down, “Father, you have a phone call.” It was never Father, always Daddy. But nothing else seemed off. Her voice sounded normal, and if it were not for the car out there at the curb, a dead woman in the trunk, Teach might have walked up the stairs to ask his daughter why she had called him Father.

  He stood at the foot of the stairs with the pistol in his hand, its grip slippery with the sweat of fear. Naylor was up there in his bedroom with Dean. Some mad revenging symmetry working in the man’s brain, doing to Teach what Teach had done to him. He would not let himself think of what Blood might have done to Dean already. It had only been minutes since Blood left the Taurus at the curb, but a man with his hate could do a lot of harm in minutes.

  Teach put his foot on the first riser and remembered how the moon had come out that night, leaving the sea and the boats that ran on her open to the sky. How he had pushed the shrimper, the Santa Maria, hard to the shore, and how glad he had been with the fisherman, Carlos, standing beside him when the moon had hidden behind the clouds. Teach saw the flames that had consumed Frank Deeks. Heard the great breath of combustion and smelled the burning boat and flesh and boiling seawater. Then he saw the pistol rising in his hand toward the side of Carlos’s head. He had known it for a while now. You never escaped. Some men could never find their way back to the maps. The charts of a good life. You were always what that time had made you do. Well, Teach had put a gun to the head of the best of three bad men and pulled the trigger. He had painted the man’s brains onto the wheelhouse window, and then things had gone from bad to worse.

  Teach checked the load in the pistol again and called up the stairs, “Blood! Blood Naylor! You don’t know what you got yourself into! You fucked with the wrong man!”

  * * *

  Dean had never heard that voice before. She didn’t know what was coming through that door, but she knew her daddy wasn’t coming unwarned. She was glad of that. For that, she had called him Father. She would die now, she thought, and in dying she would miss him. But she would do what she could before the man who held her hurt her daddy.

  * * *

  Running up the drive, Aimes pointed to the side of the house, said to Delbert, “Get the back door.”

  A car pulled up and some high school kids poured out onto the street thirty yards from the Ford Taurus. One of them was Tawnya Battles. The trunk of the Taurus was still open. Aimes had found it open and wished now he’d closed it. He hoped the kids didn’t look inside. They didn’t need that. Tawnya Battles saw Aimes and Delbert with guns in their hands, and started walking toward Teach’s house. Then she started running. “Deanie!” she called out. “Is Deanie all right?”

  Delbert tackled her in the middle of the front yard.

  “Damn you, let go of me!” The girl screaming, kicking, scratching at Delbert, and the cop whispering, “Police! Police!” Trying to show her his shield.

  The last thing Aimes saw before going gun-first through the front door was Delbert sitting astride her, holding her hands and talking into her ear about the danger inside the house.

  * * *

  Teach came through the bedroom door with the Colt out in front of him, centered it on Blood Naylor’s eyes, those cold black eyes beside Dean’s cheek. The man’s big hand covered her mouth, but her eyes told Teach it was all right. She loved him. Everything was all right. He could do what he had to do. Teach took two more steps into the room, sighting the Colt at Blood’s right eye. The bed looked untouched. Dean looked scared but not hurt.

  Blood Naylor said, “We got something to do here, Mr. Teach, Mr. Wrong Guy I Fucked With, and we got to do it right. You gone kneel down right there in front of your daughter. You gone apologize to her for what you did with Thalia Speaks. What you did to her and her mother. You killed Thalia. I want you to kneel down there and tell her about it for me.”

  Teach kept the pistol aimed at Blood’s eye. “What did you mean, Blood, when you said you released her? You said it the other night to Grandmother Liston. Tell me what you meant.”

  The sick surprise in Blood’s eyes made Teach happy. Some of it going back the other way. Somebody watching you, knowing what you did, what you said when your heart was in your hands. The words made Blood’s gun move an inch away from Dean’s neck. Maybe this was the time. Maybe it was time for Carlos.

  * * *

  Creeping up the stairs, hoping the old wood didn’t sing under his weight, Aimes heard Blood Naylor say it again: “Kneel down there, Jimmy Teach. I want you to apologize to your daughter, and then I’m gone put this
gun in your mouth and stop you talking.”

  Aimes was outside the bedroom door now. It was quiet out in the yard. But soon, he knew, the street would be all noise. The neighbors seeing the police car, looking into the trunk of the Taurus, and puking in the street.

  Aimes didn’t hear any of that yet. What he heard was Teach in there: “Fuck you and your kneel-down, Blood. Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? You fucked with the wrong man. I know you killed Thalia. I can prove it. There’s a cop downtown named Aimes who knows you did it too. He thinks you released her, Blood.”

  Aimes heard nothing for a second, then Naylor’s voice sounding as cold as the bottom of a well: “She had to die. She was in too much pain. You gave her the pain, and I took it away for her. I did a kind thing. But you, white motherfucker, you gone die for it. Now kneel down.”

  * * *

  When Dean saw Aimes’s face at the door, she opened her mouth wide and bit down hard on the hand that covered it. She tasted hot blood, heard the man behind her scream. Aimes leveled a gun at him.

  * * *

  Blood’s eyes jumped to something behind Teach, and Teach fired at his forehead. Then the world went white light, screams, and shooting.

  * * *

  Aimes’s first shot missed. He shoved into the room, stood beside Teach, and saw Naylor already falling backward, pulling the girl with him by a hand clamped across her mouth. Naylor’s gun went off twice beside her face, and Aimes felt the smack in his chest. He dropped to his knees and put a bullet into Naylor’s armpit. Naylor spun, firing as he turned, filling the air with plaster dust and pillow feathers. As he turned, the girl spun with him, blocking Naylor from Aimes’s view. He saw Teach lunge forward, push his pistol to Naylor’s spine, and fire twice. Then he saw the bright spurt of blood from Teach’s ribs. Aimes thought, Yes, the wrong man. Mr. Teach was the wrong man.

  FORTY-SIX

  Aimes sat on the mezzanine in the public library looking over the new biography of Harry Truman. It was long, and political biography wasn’t his usual fare, but Truman had fought in World War I, as an artillery battery commander, and he could look forward to that part of the story. His head was beginning to ache from the fluorescent lights, and he was hungry. His evening session on the treadmill had burned up his lunch. Maybe he’d walk up to Franklin, see if CDBs was still open. Get a pizza.

  A black woman about his age, a librarian, walked over to him. Aimes had seen her in here before. She stood in front of him holding a book against her pretty chest. When he closed the biography, she said, “I thought you might like this. It just came in.”

  He took the book from her. It was a study of the Grenada invasion. He felt something he had not felt in a long time, years maybe. It was that confused tremor in some unnamed organ a man felt when a woman came nearer than was proper, did it for her reasons. His palm was suddenly moist holding the book. He thanked her.

  She stood looking down at him for a beat, then two, and he knew he should say more, but didn’t find anything in the confusion to say. She said, “Well, I hope you enjoy it,” and walked away. She went into a little glass-walled office, and Aimes could see her talking to another librarian, a thin young white man. Aimes took a deep breath, wiped his hands on his trousers, and opened the book, pretended to read.

  Things had been quiet at work since the shooting at Teach’s house. Aimes and Delbert had been assigned to the murder of a cab driver in Ybor City. The guy shot for a few dollars, money that had probably bought drugs. The case of the serial killer had been cracked, but not by Aimes and Delbert. Since the day Blood Naylor died, Aimes had been tired and something else he could not name. That day, Aimes and Delbert had been the center of attention, for a while anyway.

  The two of them had sat in the middle of the squad room and for thirty minutes, cops had stood around them, looking at Aimes’s vest spread out on a table, the bullet stuck in it, upper-left, over the heart. The cops making him show them the purple bruise on his left pectoral the size of a cocktail coaster. A couple of guys cracking on Delbert, asking him to show his wounds. Delbert showing them the scratches on his forearms where Tawnya Battles, who had been running to help her friend, Dean Teach, had got him. One of the cops saying, “So that was your contribution to the gunfight, Delbert? You sat on the dancer?” Another guy looking at Aimes: “You sure know how to break in a detective. Make him sit on a ballerina.”

  And then the cops drifted away, back to offices, computer screens, the coffee room. It’s quiet and Aimes picks up the vest, examines it again, sweat breaking on his forehead. Then there’s noise out in the hall, and a detective comes in with a little Asian guy in handcuffs, and suddenly the squad room is like the locker room after the Super Bowl. Winning team.

  This detective, a guy named Orin Smithers, has the serial killer. The scourge of Tampa, America’s Next Great City, is a five-foot-two, forty-three-year-old Korean. Aimes and Delbert join the crowd, but the suspect is hustled to an interrogation room. He wants a lawyer. The watch commander calls for one. Smithers comes out for a minute to get a cup of coffee. He looks like a kid at Christmas. His face is the color of Santa’s hat. Here’s the story he tells:

  “The weird thing about the dead women, you guys all know it, was how calm they seemed, and the way the blood ran down from their head wounds to the front of their bodies. Some of us were talking about how they might have been stood up in a closet after they were shot, something like that. Well, I went to New York last week to see my sister’s daughter get married, and I took a walk through Central Park. And I saw this Chinese guy giving massages, ten bucks for fifteen minutes, and he’s using this weird chair. You sit in it leaning forward with your face in this oblong slot, and he stands behind you, and you’re almost upright. It stuck in my mind. So, I get back from New York, and I’m out talking to some people about the Vietnamese girl, Phuong, and I see this guy in a little storefront place off 7th Street, giving a massage in one of these chairs.

  “I don’t know, something about the guy wasn’t right. I figured I’d go in, ask him if he’s got a license. I walk in the door, and this woman’s getting her neck rubbed, and she’s Korean or Chinese, and she takes one look at me, and she pays the guy and leaves. The woman is in the life. I can tell by the way she’s dressed, the way she makes me for a cop the minute I walk in. And I can smell something. I look down. On the table by the chair, there’s a bottle of oil—peanut oil.

  “I show the guy my shield. I’m about to ask for his license, and I notice there’s a back room. One of those bead curtains, no door. So I ask him if it’s okay if I look around back there. The guy gives me a big smile, says, Of course, officer. And Jesus, what do I find? The guy’s got a bulletin board, a regular trophy case with newspaper articles about the killings, and thumbtacked next to each article is a little plastic baggie with something in it. Well, this is getting creepy, so I draw my weapon, and I lean close to one of the baggies, and I see it’s got hair in it. They all do. And I’m no expert on hair, but I can see it’s all black and some of it’s fine and some of it’s coarse. At which point the hair goes up on the back of my neck like a rottweiler, and I’m thinking, Holy shit, and I hear the bead curtain behind me, and I turn and here’s this little Korean guy holding his hands out to me palms up. I confess, he says, and I can smell the oil on his hands. I killed them all, he says. I killed them while they were very relaxed. And I only kept one thing from them. I only kept a lock of hair.”

  The captain comes out of the interrogation room wanting to know where the hell the public defender is. The excitement in the room is higher than Aimes has ever seen it. While Smithers is telling the story, Aimes buttons his shirt. Nobody interested in the bruise over his heart anymore. He turns to Delbert. “The guy sure doesn’t fit the profile. Supposed to be an angry white male, reclusive, intelligent, socially maladroit.”

  Delbert nods at him, touches the scratches on his arms. “Teach didn’t fit either.”

  Aimes wonders what this means. Is Delbert t
rying to say his hard-on for Teach was the right thing? This Korean guy, a guy as far from what you’d look for as shit is from ice cream, proves Delbert’s point about Teach? Aimes lets it go. “Well,” he says, “it’s all police work. And it’s all interesting. Isn’t it, my young friend?”

  Delbert nods, that ambition of his making him crane his neck in the direction of the interrogation room where the senior detectives are all crowding around the door. Aimes decides he isn’t going to call his partner his young friend anymore. Just friend will do. Delbert’s been at it long enough for that.

  * * *

  Aimes lifted his eyes from the puddle of blurry words about Grenada and snuck a look at the glass-walled room where the nice-looking woman had been sitting. She wasn’t there anymore. Well, it was all right. There were ten reasons she was the wrong one: She wasn’t any Whitney Houston to start with. She was Aimes’s age at least, and her backside was bigger than it had been last year. She looked like she was hiding herself in that librarian’s dress. He could see her going to church three times a week (Sunday and Wednesday night services, and once for the Covered Dish Supper Preparation Committee). One of those sisters who had lost a man or three and settled for a dull life here, and the promise of harps and white gowns hereafter. Aimes went downstairs and checked out the book.

  He was getting into his car when she walked past him on the way to hers. Something made him get back out and walk over to her. She was settled behind the wheel, had the engine running. It scared her when Aimes showed her his shield. “You ought to get one of your male colleagues to walk you out here at night. It might be the best thing.” Holding his voice low, calm. Smiling.