Suitcase City (11 page)

A what?

It meant, she had told him, a woman who married a gay man to conceal his nature. “But I’m not a woman,” Teach had said, still holding Bama Boyd in his arms.

“And I’m not a man,” she had replied, “but the arrangement we have . . . is the same.”

Teach moved away from her then. “I wasn’t aware we had . . . an arrangement. I thought we loved each other.”

“We do,” she said, starting to cry. “We do, but I don’t love you . . .
that
way. I can’t. I can only love women that way. But nobody can know it.”

Teach had thought she could love him that way. She had sure acted like it. In motels across two counties, she had acted like it very well. But acting was acting, and she was right. Nobody could know it. Not in that time and place.

“You have to
promise
me,” she said. “Nobody can know.”

“Sure, I promise.” And he had meant it. He asked her, “So do we keep on . . . ?”

“Yeah,” she’d said, crying hard now. “We have to keep on . . . for a while. Then,” she was sobbing so hard that he moved back to her and took her in his arms again, “then we have to break up. It’ll be in all the papers. Our breakup. It’ll be big news. And we, I mean, I won’t date anyone after that. I’ll be carrying a torch for you.”

“So I’ll be the reason we break up?”

“Yes. If you don’t mind. Please, Jimmy, I’d like it if you’d be the reason. It would be better for me.”

They both knew this meant that Teach had to find a new girl, and he had to do it publicly, and that in the public eye he would be the lout who had dumped Bama Boyd, ruining a sports-page romance.

“Okay,” Teach had said, “but I’m gonna miss you.” He held her hard in his arms, trying to press into his body the memory of hers forever, and hoping that as she wept and pressed back, holding him hard too, in some strange way she was not acting. And he did miss her. For a long time.

Now Bama backed up, gave the Alfa’s once-furious engine a couple of rumbling revs, and rolled toward Teach. He duckwalked around to the front of the Buick, hid there, his head throbbing with shame, while she rolled past. Teach tried to form in his mind the words of the apology he would phone to Bama. He would tell her about hiding. She would know about that. And he’d tell her it wasn’t her he was hiding from.

TWELVE

Meador Pharmaceuticals operated a manufacturing facility in what had once been an orange grove west of Tampa. The firm produced formulas developed by its small research division, but mostly served as an importer and distributor of offshore drugs. An anti-inflammatory from Mexico, a hypertension pill from Switzerland, and fertility drugs from France and Germany. James Teach managed the sales force, men and women who went out every day to physician’s offices, clinics, and hospitals purveying Meador drugs and the perks that went with them. Teach had started with Meador on the loading dock and had risen to sales, then to sales management, and finally to a vice presidency.

He had known for a long time that he would not be considered for the presidency. Mabry Meador, the company’s founding president and CEO, and his wife, Oona, had produced two daughters. One daughter had married well, the other not so well, but both had married ambition. Mabry Meador was as healthy a sixty-year-old as Teach had ever seen, and when he decided to step down, the top job would go to a son-in-law: Ambition A or Ambition B. Teach figured he’d be swept out in the housecleaning when Ambition ascended to the presidential suite.

As he got out of the LeSabre and stood stretching in the hot, muggy morning, he knew that even his present position was uncertain. Mabry Meador would have read the newspaper. If he had missed the article about Teach, then someone from the company would have called him, in the company’s best interest, of course.

Mabry Meador encouraged such things. He was a Southern Baptist who believed in a heaven of cottony clouds and plucking lyres, and a hell of eternal, unbearable fire. He abhorred shady dealing or sharp practice. The Meador sales force was required to balance expense accounts to the penny and to submit to vigorous questioning by company accountants should any voucher suggest lavish tendencies. Meador insisted that all members of middle- and top-level management attend biannual retreats on the campus of a Baptist summer camp to discuss research and development, sales strategies, and the fraying moral fiber of the nation. Failure to attend the retreats was career suicide.

Teach lifted his briefcase from the front seat of the LeSabre and wondered how to play his entrance. Should he breeze in like this was just another Monday, and there was no reason for him, or anyone else, to worry about the strange but insignificant events of the previous Friday afternoon? Should he enter wearing the small, grim smile that said,
What the hell, I’m in a little trouble here, but I’m still the guy you know and respect?
Or should he stride in angry? Show them the righteous combativeness of a man unjustly accused? The trouble was that he felt all of these things at once.

As he walked from his car to the door, Teach reviewed in his mind Marlie Turkel’s article. It was a masterpiece of innuendo and insinuation masquerading as objective reporting. The article followed the line of her questioning on the phone. She led her readers from Teach’s narrative of his actions in the men’s room (hotly disputed, of course, by Tyrone Battles), to Teach’s drinking, to the “pattern of violence” in his life (she devoted nearly half the article to the Nate Means incident). Artfully and subtly, she floated the implication that James Teach was a frustrated, substance-abusing white man who had pounded the shit out of Tyrone Battles, star athlete and honor student, because Battles was to Teach, in some twisted way, a reprise of Nate Means, the million-dollar athlete who had come into the NFL just as Teach was leaving it a failure.

Opening the heavy glass front door of Meador, he became aware that his lips were moving in violent debate with Marlie Turkel.
Damn it
, he thought
, pull yourself together.
He tried to compose himself for business as usual, but the exertion of his mental argument had left a sheen of sweat on his face.

“Good morning, Mr. Teach.” Celia, the receptionist with bubblegum-pink lipstick and big blond hair.

He nodded to her, smiled. She watched him carefully as he stopped for coffee, then went on down the hall. Halfway to his door, Teach realized that the building was unnaturally quiet. He could actually hear air whispering in the vents.

Inside, he stood before the desk of his secretary. Amelia Corso, an intelligent woman capable of more loyalty to her boss than to the company (an essential trait in a secretary), raised her head from the memo she was pretending to read. “Well, hello there, tough guy. Let me see those hands.”

Teach held out his hands for inspection.

“Don’t see any cuts. You use brass knuckles on that poor, innocent kid?”

Teach shrugged, feeling the ache in his elbow. “No, I used my elbow and only once. It still hurts.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go complaining about the parts of you that hurt, not today anyway.”

Teach nodded. It was good advice. Good old Amelia. An Italian transplant from the Bronx. Her husband, an ex-cop on a twenty-year pension, taught martial arts in his own karate dojo in a Carrolwood strip mall. Amelia’s bluntness had saved Teach from more than one dumb mistake.

She handed him a
While You Were Out
message. Bama Boyd had called. There was an
X
in the
Please Return Call
box. Teach winced, folded it, closed his eyes, and tried to form a few words of his apology to Bama. Not much there. Amelia made her brown eyes big and said, “
He
wants to see you, ASAP. Called first thing this morning.”

He
was Meador.
First thing
could only mean the worst. Meador spent the first half hour of every working day reading the Bible at his desk. It was an ancient leather-bound book, as scuffed as an old boot. He liked to tell people it recorded a hundred years of Meador family births and deaths. Teach wondered if he wrote the names of sacked executives and the dates of their departures in it too.

His stomach rolled like a fish dying in a bucket. He gave Amelia his brave-fellow-marches-to-the-fight smile and walked to Meador’s suite.

After Teach was announced by Meador’s secretary, Martha Grimes, Mabry Meador let him cool his heels for five minutes with nothing to look at but Martha’s stumpy ankles. Teach figured Meador was searching his Bible for a verse to guide him in his trouble with Teach. Finally, a light blinked on Martha’s desk. “Mr. Teach, Mr. Meador will see you now.”

Teach got up and squared his lapels again. “Thank you, Martha, and, may I say, you look particularly fresh this morning in that cheery spring frock.”

Actually, the dress was a shroud of Mother Hubbard design. Martha owned multiple copies in colors running the gamut from mud-brown to soot-black. Teach always complimented her appearance, and she always responded with a tightening at the corners of her mouth.

When Teach walked in, Mabry Meador undid his collar button and leaned forward in his chair. The Bible rested on a copy of the morning paper.
Jesus
, Teach thought,
the subtlety.
Meador was a fair-skinned man of sixty who had the body of a thirty-year-old pole vaulter. When he leaned forward and placed his hands on his blotter, Teach could see his biceps jump in his white shirt. No one knew what kept Meador in such good shape. No one had ever seen him exercise, or heard him talk about the delights of rowing or cycling. Yet he was hard, supple in his movements, and never winded. Teach’s theory was that rectitude taken to extremes was a fat burner. He took the chair opposite Meador’s desk and waited. Best to let the boss begin.

Meador looked at him for a long time. Finally, he pressed his lips together until they whitened, and shook his head. “Jim, do you know how I found out about this?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Teach answered anyway. “You read the paper?”

Meador frowned.

Teach tried again. “One of my good friends from the company called and
suggested
you read the paper?”

Meador was not a man to suspect comedy in others; nor was he equipped to deal with it. He simply shook his head. “
She
called me. At home. This woman . . .” Stabbing a forefinger at the newspaper. “This Marlie Turkel. She called Saturday morning at ten o’clock to ask me what I thought about you getting into a fistfight in a bar with some—”

“It wasn’t a fistfight, Mabry. If you read the article, you know
I
said the boy was trying to stick up two men in a restroom. I was in that bar having a perfectly cordial drink and—”

“Having it on my time,” Meador said.

Four o’clock on a Friday afternoon was no man’s time, but Teach decided to let that pass. Ownership of that hour depended on what you’d accomplished, and Teach had had a good week. Maybe he should point that out to his boss.

Meador waved an impatient hand and leaned forward. His tight little eyes and wiry, short-cropped hair were the same color, a corroded gray. “Jim, I’m putting you on sick leave until we have some sort of disposition of this thing.”

Meador waited, but Teach did not know what to say.
Disposition?
He tried to recall the company’s sick-leave policy. What were you entitled to?
Jesus, a salary?
Had the time come for Teach to negotiate, or was he supposed to throw himself on the majesty of Meador’s generosity and get the hell out of here? He took a deep breath.

“Mabry, I didn’t expect this. It seems a little . . . extreme to me. I don’t see why you think it’s—”

“Jim, I know Thurman Battles, and I know what he’s capable of doing if he gets a bee in his bonnet about this thing.”

Teach thinking,
Jesus, a bee in his bonnet
. It occurred to him that he knew nothing about Thurman Battles except what he had been told by a white policeman, a golfing lawyer named Walter Demarest, and now this man, a Baptist druggist. None of what he’d heard was reassuring, but maybe there was more, or less, to this Battles character than people thought. The more, Teach hoped, might be the milk of human kindness. The less might be something Teach could use against him.

“While you’re on leave and we, ah, we see how this thing works out, I want you to consider some counseling. Dan Boyle can recommend somebody, I’m sure.”

Teach sat there numb and nodding. Dan Boyle was director of HR, a reformed alcoholic who gave speeches at the retreats on subjects ranging from “Courtesy in the Workplace” to “Substance Abuse and What It Costs Your Employer.” Teach had wondered at first why Meador tolerated Boyle, a dullard who had no particular gift for handling personnel. He had finally concluded that Meador loved nothing more than the sinner who had grasped the lifeline. Boyle was the company’s chief sinner. Maybe that was what Meador wanted from Teach now. A vice president who could talk about “How Counseling Helped Me Overcome the Demons of Alcohol-Related Violence” or “How I Learned to Stop Quitting Work an Hour Early on Friday Afternoons.” James Teach: Assistant Chief Sinner. Teach shook his head, sighed. Maybe there was room for a repositioning here.

“Look, Mabry, I realize how you feel about this. It hurts the company, and it offends you personally, but I have to insist that I told the truth about what happened in that bar. I went into the restroom, the kid came in and demanded money or else, and I decked him. Mabry . . .” Teach heard the note of anger in his own voice, “I saved my own ass and the other guy’s. And he, by the way, did nothing but stand there with his dick in his hand and let the thing happen.”

Meador leaned back, shook his head again, his mouth as tight as a line of small print in a severance agreement. Teach knew he shouldn’t have said
ass,
and certainly not
dick
. As far as he knew, Baptists did not acknowledge the existence of such parts.

“Jim, you know I don’t like that kind of talk from people who work for me. We run a family company here.”

“Mabry, the family’s not here right now. It’s just you and me, and I’m telling you this kid is a scumbag.”