Suitcase City (16 page)

While he spoke, Teach watched Battles’s eyes, the softening planes of his face, the sinking stillness of his body behind the desk. He watched for signs. Of rising anger, of a stubborn refusal to listen. He saw none of these, only a slow, gathering acknowledgment of the power of Teach’s position. “Please, Mr. Battles, let me know what you think. Am I a blackmailer?”

Battles smiled, and Teach knew they were in a courtroom again. Battles had won too many cases, had prospered too well in the law, and had suffered, Teach guessed, too many setbacks in it too. With all of this behind him, how could he answer a simple question simply?

Battles leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his balding head. “Let’s say, Mr. Teach, that I see the strength of your position.” He waved a sinuous hand. “Oh, don’t think I contest the sincerity of your interpretation of things. And I told you I admire your gift of gab.”

Teach wanted to say this wasn’t about performances, it was about lives. But he’d made his speech. It was Battles’s turn to talk.

“But I believe the good life you and your daughter live is built on a foundation that would collapse were it not for the brick-and-mortar of racism. That makes your protestations of your own goodness seem a little silly to me, Mr. Teach. But we live in a practical world, and the practical fact is that you have my nephew by his short and curly hair. I wanted very much to show you up to the city of Tampa for the racist I still believe you are, but it appears that practical concerns eliminate that possibility.” Battles collected the pictures, stacked them, slipped them back into the envelope. He opened the desk drawer in front of him and put the envelope inside. “All right, Mr. Teach. I shall do as you suggest.”

Teach contained his joy. He nodded and said, “At the risk of presumption, I suggest that you tell the newspapers you’ve investigated the matter further and you’re convinced I made . . . an honest mistake.”

Teach saw the danger in suggesting strategy to the better general, but he knew something about damage control. He wanted to help write the history of this sorry event. After all, he was the villain of the pageant. From now on, no matter what Battles said to the papers, he’d be known as Teach, the guy who got into a racial scrape in a men’s room.

Battles smiled. “And, of course, you’ll give me the negatives.”

“Of course,” Teach said, thinking,
And I’ll surrender my copies of them when pigs fly across the moon at midnight in perfect formation.
He stood and extended his hand to Battles, certain that the man would not refuse to shake it. Battles’s grip was firm and brief.

Teach turned and moved toward the door. Battles said to his back, “I underestimated you, Mr. Teach. You’ve taught me something.”

With his hand on the doorknob, Teach turned back. “I had to protect my daughter. You should have known I’d do whatever I could.” There had been other times and places when Teach had done what he’d had to do. He’d thought he was doing just that in Malone’s Bar, and some part of him still thought so. He still believed it was better not to wait and see if Charlie Manson had come for the pinot noir and the canapés.

As Teach walked the gauntlet of charcoal horses, he found that he was full of joy and a little sad too. Maybe this thing was, after all, more about winning and losing than about right and wrong. He said goodbye to the kind woman who had thought enough of his feelings to invite him into a hallway before dismissing him. He nodded to the lovely lady with the very red fingernails. Then something, call it superstition, made him stop in the men’s room to drink again the water of his recent humiliation.

His thirst abated, he turned to the toilet where he had vomited and then to the mirror. He whispered to his own glad face something he remembered from a college class, “History is the story told by the winners.”

PART TWO

NINETEEN

In his white Bronco, Bloodworth Naylor followed the delivery truck out to Suitcase City, a neighborhood of cinder-block houses, duplexes, and cheap apartments baking in the sun. He was setting up three girls in a house with a rent-to-own account that would launder what they earned with their ankles behind their ears.

The house in Suitcase City was near enough to the university for the girls to pick up college boys in the bars and clubs. It was close enough to Busch Gardens so they could troll for horny dads who left the wife and kiddies asleep in the motel room after a long day of adorable animals. Those deprived husbands out on the streets letting the real animal out of the cage. Blood Naylor loved the stories his girls told about the johns. Guys with their faces sunburned from waiting in line all day for Wet and Wild with little Susie and little Freddie and mama Mary Beth. Enough energy left to get the wild thing wet. Guys who said they wanted something special and were willing to pay for it. Guys who could always be convinced they’d gotten it.

One of the new girls, Terri, a cute little blonde with six toes on both feet and skulls tattooed on her tits, was riding in the delivery truck, sitting up there like a pit bull terrier between Mook, the driver, and Soldier, the kid who helped Mook move the furniture. The truck was weaving a little and Blood figured maybe the new girl was giving Mook head for twenty bucks. He admired her enthusiasm, and, what the hell, he’d get his cut. He’d been in the life long enough to know the girls who would pay out, the ones who would burn out, and the ones who would get sick of the life and get out.

Terri was a star. She would burn high and hard and then drop like a dead cold rock. She was shooting methedrine into the veins under her tongue. One of the other girls had caught her licking blood from her lips in the ladies’ room at the Celebrity Club and asked her what happened.
Some guy get rough with you?
Nothing,
she replied.
Nothing happened
. Smiling that gone-from-here smile. Blood Naylor would get what he could out of her and watch her closely. She was the kind who could get him into trouble.

At the house, Blood supervised the unloading while the girls watched, Terri and Marie and Severiana, the Colombian. The girls pranced around trying out the chairs and mattresses and flirting with Mook and Soldier. They told Blood they liked the Barcalounger with the built-in tray table and the early-American dining room set and the two Louis XIV bedroom suites. All of it was recently removed from a house nearby where two of Blood’s girls had lived. Redheads, twin sisters from Des Moines, a cheerleader and a majorette who had come to try out for the Busch Gardens Ice Capades show and didn’t make the cut.

When the unloading was finished, Blood tipped the two muscleheads twenty each and went into the kitchen for a beer. Severiana was in there on her hands and knees cleaning out the oven. She had on thick rubber gloves and an apron and was spraying that foul-smelling lye shit people used to clean ovens. Blood admired her ass for a while, watching her shove her head into the oven, breathing hard as she reached way back for that grime. Finally, he said, “Girl, cut that out. You keep breathing that stuff, you won’t be able to work. You want, I’ll send over a new oven. Have old Mook take that one to the landfill.”

She wiggled out and met him with those serious butterscotch eyes. She looked like a good girl, a village girl, somebody’s sister. Guys liked that look, thought they were corrupting the woman, turning her away from the path of righteousness for their dick’s sake. One of a hundred easy turn-ons. Severiana had been a steady earner for two years, and she didn’t do drugs. One of the girls had told him Severiana was sending half her money home to a sister in Cartagena who took care of her kids. When the sister got enough cash together, she was going to bribe Severiana’s husband out of prison. Then Severiana was going to bring him to the
Estados Unidos
and set him up in the restaurant business. Blood had told her if the guy came to the States, she better make sure he wasn’t one of those hotblooded Latinos, one of those guys with a butterfly knife who thought his wife was sending home a thousand bucks a month on a maid’s wages. None of that shit.

Severiana got to her feet, pulled off the rubber gloves, and dropped them in the sink, massaging her knees. “It’s okay. It’s clean now. You want to replace something, get me a new dresser. That one you brought me got roach poop in it.”

Blood said sure, sure, he’d see to it. Anything to make her happy. He wanted his girls to be happy. Happy and afraid of him and clean enough, quiet enough here in the neighborhood to do business without any trouble. They brought trouble down on Blood, he returned it to them tenfold. That was the deal. It was what they knew.

Severiana had left the newspaper open on the table, some of it lying on the floor where she’d used it to wipe up that evil shit she sprayed in the oven. Blood drank the cold Corona Severiana put in front of him and looked at the sports page, then the city section.

Holy shit, there it was! Thurman Battles dropping the lawsuit against James Teach. Saying the racial situation in the city was too volatile. A long, what was that word,
contentious
trial could take things over the top. Saying the facts of the case were ambiguous. (Why couldn’t the guy talk English?) They didn’t, in Battles’s judgment, merit the time and expense of a trial. And blah, blah, on it went. Lawyer bullshit for the simple fact that Battles was quitting. Blood and Tyrone had handed the guy a perfect opportunity for the kind of grandstanding he loved, and he was letting it slip out of his hands.
What the fuck is going on here?

Blood tossed the newspaper onto the floor and walked away from the stink of the oven cleaner, the spicy sweat of Severiana, the funky musk of the house (strong despite the air-conditioning he was paying for), and went out to the Bronco. Mook and Soldier had left with the truck. Blood sat in the Bronco with the engine running. It still had that factory-clean smell that reminded him of good hotel lobbies and jewelry stores. He had to think about this thing. Review his options.

He opened the glove box and put his hand on the Smith stainless steel .357. It was clean, unregistered. He kept it near to hand, had never used it. He did his job without violence or hired out the physical stuff to the dime-a-dozen thumpers you could find in College Park. What he wanted to do right now was drive over to Teach’s house, knock on the door, screw the barrel of the Smith right into Teach’s upper lip, right up his big fat white-man nose, and pull the trigger. Keep pulling it until there was nothing in front of him but a fine red mist.

Blood’s hand was trembling, hovering there in the air above the glove box. All he had to do was take a long drive and a short walk and pull that trigger. Then run like hell, back to the car, lay rubber down that fancy Terra Ceia street . . . and then what? Who would see him there, a black man in a white Bronco driving too fast in the quiet afternoon? Who would see him there?
Calm down, Blood, calm down. You got a decision to make.

He had talked to Tyrone about what Uncle Thurman was planning for Teach. The kid had told him about Teach going to his uncle’s office, pleading for his miserable white-man life. The way Tyrone told it, the guy was already in a world of shit—laid off his job, his friends at the country club turning their heads away out there on the links or the greens or whatever you called those acres where white people chased a little white ball.

Maybe the point here was that the guy had suffered enough. His name in the paper, his reputation dirty, his job on the line. Maybe Blood already had the revenge he needed. Maybe the thing to do was stay cool, let this thing heal over. Get some scar tissue on it. Blood had a good thing going, a good business. He was getting rich, and the cops were leaving him alone. Going after Teach any more was dangerous, could cost him everything if things went wrong.

Blood started the Bronco. He had to go down to College Hill, the nasty side of town, the place where the street hos strutted their butts. He had to because she’d be there and, seeing her, he’d know what he had to do. Know if that .357 was coming out of the glove box, or if he could just let this thing die away like a long, sad cry in the night.

TWENTY

Holding a toolbox and a cooler, James Teach stood on the dock, under the high tin roof of the marina, admiring his thirty-two foot Hunter. The sailboat was named
Fortunate
. He’d bought her after his promotion to vice president and named her for what he felt. Now, he felt like a man returned from the dead. He put down the toolbox and the cooler and flexed his arms and shoulders. He planned to replace the sacrificial zinc on the boat’s propeller shaft, change the engine oil, and give the cabin and head a good cleaning in preparation for a weekend sail with Dean. Across Tampa Bay to Egmont Key, then up to Caladesi Island. It would be a celebration of what he was calling—in his thoughts anyway—his new life.

It had been two weeks since Thurman Battles had dropped the lawsuit. In the press release, Battles had made himself look good and made Teach look like the luckiest man in the world. Battles had used some of the phrasing Teach had requested: merit on both sides of the case; Teach’s actions understandable given his (obviously lamentable) perspective; both of them acting for the good of Tampa. But in subtle ways, Battles had left hanging in the air the heavy odor of the probability that a lawsuit would have proven Teach to be exactly the kind of white man who’d caused the stormy racial weather of Tampa. Teach’s own statements had been terse. And, as agreed, he’d sent the negatives to Battles by registered mail.

He had talked to Marlie Turkel twice. The first time because it was necessary. The second time, as he saw it, doing the woman a favor.

She called early in the morning and asked the same question: why had Battles dropped the lawsuit? Teach could hear her fingers clicking on the keyboard, recalled the grainy photo of her narrow, news-hawk face that ran above her column.

“Did you meet with Thurman Battles?”

He figured she had already called Battles to confirm their meeting.

“Yes.”

“Will you tell me what was said at this meeting?”