Suitcase City (20 page)

He worked her, watched her until she started to feel it too. Until he knew she was past that working-girl-faking-it thing and into her own pleasure, feeling it. Until she was his again. Only a little, only a little, but his. When she smiled that tired, take-me-on, let-me-go smile, when she raised her hand to his cheek and slowly stroked it as he drove into her, Blood reached down to the floor where his feet struggled for purchase and felt the scarf come into his hand, the one she had snatched from the lamp.

He smiled at her, working, and threw a loop of it behind her neck. She lifted her head, helping, still stroking his cheek, those dark, bright, starving eyes telling him it was all right. Saying,
Go on, go on, it’s all right
. She lifted her head and Blood threw another loop around her and began to draw it tight.

When she understood it, her hand froze on his cheek. He felt her nails dig at him for a second, the pain hot and sharp, then felt her stop it. Felt her seize his face in both hands and lock her strong, dark, starving eyes to his.

She let him do it. As he pulled the knot tight, he watched as she shuddered and gnawed her tongue, and her eyes filled with blood that doubled their size and mapped them with broken vessels, watched until her hands fell from his cheeks and her chest was still. And Blood came. It was glory and sadness, purpose and conclusion. The hot seed shot out of him for a long time.

Blood withdrew and looked at his hands. They were shaking, still holding the ends of the scarf, still pulling.
My God
, he told himself,
stop it or you’ll cut her head off.
Quickly, carefully, he loosened the scarf, letting the blood escape from her eyes, looking into them. They were terrible, yes, but they thanked him, even in the terror. They said she had understood, that she had known what he could do for her, what only he could do. Blood stood looking down at her, loving her, hearing that voice from down in the well where now the water was fouled forever, that voice saying,
You released her. You let her go.

TWENTY-FOUR

Blood sat in the little kitchenette, his back to the body on the bed until his head cleared, until he knew how stupid it would be to leave here without fixing things. He stood and turned to the bed, telling himself all the comforting things about how he had let her go, released her. A long, shuddering breath left his chest because now she wouldn’t be staggering the streets, a zombitch with that accusation in her eyes.

And she moved.

The woman moved. She thrust her legs out, and a big, sorry sigh came from her throat like some insane imitation of Blood’s own tired breath. His legs took him to the front door before his mind could stop them, tell him there was some reason for this. Something a doctor could explain.

He crept back to the bedroom, toward those flickering candles and sweet smells. He didn’t know what to expect. Maybe she’d be lying there on the bed like before, smoking, jamming to Marvin Gaye.

She lay where he had left her. Her eyes flamed with blood, their accusation fading, almost gone. He moved close and looked down at her. It must have been some last shock of the nerves, her body’s final protest against this shitty life. That convulsion and that sigh. Now she was settling, sinking. He touched her cheek with the back of his hand. She was warm, but not human warm. His hand flinched from her face.

He tried to see himself walking into this room an hour ago. What had he touched? He went to the vanity and pulled the candle he had set upright from its pool of wax, blew it out, and stuck it in his pocket. He didn’t remember his hands lighting anywhere else except on the front door latch, and he would wipe that on the way out. He didn’t think they could take prints from a scarf. The condom wrappers, the crack pipe, and the money on the night table told the story. A hooker killed by one of her johns. The used condoms were gone, flushed. The guy Blood had seen leaving here was the prime candidate for a lethal injection at Raiford. His fingerprints were on the money, the condom wrappers.
Good
, Blood thought,
good
. Then he saw the photo album.

It stuck out from a neat row of cheap paperbacks in the small bookcase near the night table. Blood remembered how she’d liked to read romance novels, a chapter or two before she fell asleep. Blood lying beside her, asking her what it was about them she liked—a bunch of white women getting chased around by men who didn’t know what their dicks were for. Thalia always smiled, shook her head at his stupidity. “They’re sweet, that’s all. You got to have something sweet in your life.”

Blood pulled down a scarf that was draped over a curtain rod, covered his hand with it, and slid the photo album from the bookcase.

The album was full of pictures of Thalia—as a little girl on a sidewalk holding a skinny white dog, as a high school kid with girlfriends all trying to look like Diana Ross, as a granddaughter dressed for church with her grandmother, Old Lady Liston. Blood closed the album and put it back on the shelf.

Keeping his hands in the scarf, he searched the apartment. It didn’t take long to find the cardboard box under the bed. A little black girl’s pathetic stash of memories. She had saved papers from her job at the country club—pay stubs, a newsletter listing her as a new employee, a letter from the manager commending her for turning in a wallet she had found in the parking lot. But it was what he found next, that was the thing. Pictures of her and Teach. Teach and Thalia in a restaurant on a dock with boats in the background. Maybe Tarpon Springs, maybe Sarasota. Blue water, white sand, and Thalia looking like a
Jet
model in a yellow sundress. The restaurant table piled with food, the big smiling jock, Teach, using his money and his white-man sophistication to promote the pussy of Blood’s good girl. In the pictures their eyes were drunk, the white man’s and hers. Drunk with love and Bacardi.

It made Blood angry and sad, looking at the pictures. In the grimy album of his mind, he could see pictures of himself at Raiford. Blood Naylor pumping iron out under that hot tin roof on the yard (Teach and Thalia sipping rum from tall glasses with little paper umbrellas in them), Blood Naylor at counting-in, standing in a long line of blue denim in the rain while the hacks checked names from a clipboard (Teach and Thalia laughing with the sun shining out on the Gulf), Blood Naylor sitting in the Rock cafeteria eating beans and greens and greasy corn bread for the thousandth time (Teach and Thalia eating lobster from that turquoise water), Blood Naylor working a sheet-metal press in the tag plant, trying like hell to keep all his fingers, stamping out plates that said,
Florida State Seminoles
. It made him angry and sad. It made him want to know all there was to know about Thalia’s time with Teach. Teach, his old associate in crime, the guy who had jodie’d him while he was in the joint.

Then, holy shit, it came to Blood that she might have saved his letters. The ones he’d written her from Raiford before he’d heard she was doing the white man. Sure enough, he found them at the bottom of the box, tied with white string.

A dozen letters scrawled out on prison stationery with a pencil stub, letters that leaked from Blood’s heart the strange, harmful truth of his love. He imagined himself accused of this crime and his letters read aloud in court by some smart-ass prosecuting attorney. Just thinking of it made his head, his chest ache like they had been beaten with a fist. His face burned at the thought of what she had been doing while he was writing to her.

For one murderous instant, he saw her reading his letters to Teach, both of them laughing. He stood up to leave. Go straight to the man’s house. Stick that stainless steel Smith into Teach’s face and keep pulling the trigger until there was nothing but blood and smoke in the air. But Blood mastered this impulse. Mastered it because he had noticed something else at the bottom of the box.

An envelope. Inside it, a bar napkin with some love words written on it and Thalia’s crude drawing of what looked like Mr. Teach’s face. Such a saver Thalia had been, such a saver. And Blood found a credit card receipt. On it, clear as the brightest day in heaven, was the name
James Teach.
The date was a year ago, about the time she’d stopped seeing the white guy, lost that country club job, and started to fall, fall, fall. It was a receipt for dinner in a restaurant on Madeira Beach (smart white man taking his black girlfriend across the bay to eat).

And the idea came to Blood—the glorious idea. James Teach had been here tonight. The picture of what had happened here tonight formed in Blood’s mind. Teach had paid with the hundred-dollar bill. Teach had used the condoms. Blood wiped the money and the two condom wrappers clean of prints. (The brother in the tight green pants was free and clear now.) Blood pulled the album from the shelf again. He opened it to the last page where there was an empty plastic sleeve. From the contents of Thalia’s memory box scattered on the bed, he selected a picture. In the restaurant on the dock, Teach stood behind Thalia holding a scarf. There was an open gift box on the table in front of her, and there was Thalia’s sweet, grateful smile. Blood fingered through the album again, taking the journey from Thalia’s long-legged childhood, to her tender high school years, to that grandmother of hers, the woman who was supposed to keep her on the straight-and-narrow. Blood slipped the picture into the empty sleeve. He liked the story the album told. Teach was the last page. Teach who had been here tonight. He put the credit card receipt back into the envelope with the drawing of Teach’s goofy love grin. He slid the envelope into the album, marking that last page. Sticking out so that a person looking at the bookshelf would notice it. He liked that too.

Blood went to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. The scratches Thalia had made on his cheek were small, but he had seen his share of true crime TV; he knew about the forensic cops and the fingernail scrapings they did. He went back out to the bedroom and used toilet paper and nail polish remover to clean Thalia’s fingers, careful to get way up there under the nails. He put what was strewn on the bed back into the memory box.

With the box under his arm, he stood in the middle of her little bedroom, in the glow of all those candles, looking at the story he had written. He wanted to throw back his head and crow like a big black bird. Stick his thumbs under his arms and flap his elbows like hell’s own condor. He wanted to fly like a hawk, talons bare to the wind, because James Teach was a little rabbit down there on the ground, running from bush to bush. A rabbit with no earthly notion that the shadow of death soared above him.

TWENTY-FIVE

Aimes and Delbert parked the Crown Vic on the street in front of the dead woman’s apartment. Aimes got out and looked up and down the street. It was night, quiet in Suitcase City. People with jobs had gone to bed tired, and the ones without them were sleeping off a day of beer, weed, and Oprah. This part of Suitcase City was almost bearable with the dew falling and the smell of the night coming on. Aimes had grown up in a place like this, and it made him shiver to think of decisions he’d made that might have kept him in it. Well, he’d made the other ones too, the decisions that got you out. Last night, somebody had decided to end the life of a prostitute named Thalia Speaks.

The speculation was that one of her johns had called it in. Some guy showing up with that special need, finding the door unlocked, going in, getting a scare that shrank his dick, then making the phone call—
Uh, you don’t need to know my name, but . . .
Then came the march of official Tampa through the woman’s apartment. Detectives handling the crime scene. Uniforms controlling the crowd, lab technicians, a guy from the medical examiner’s office, and finally the city morgue attendants who’d taken the woman’s smiling face away.

Yes, smiling. A good, careful look at the crime scene photos had assured Aimes of that. She’d been strangled and showed all the signs of it—the exploded eyeballs, blackened, swollen tongue, ligature marks at the throat—but her face held a sad, eerie smile. Aimes wondered about that. Some postmortem distortion of the facial muscles, something a pathologist could explain. Nobody got strangled and died happy.

Delbert went up the walk in front of Aimes, put on a pair of surgical gloves, and used his penknife to cut the yellow plastic seal that closed the apartment door. He opened the door and looked at Aimes. Aimes pulled his gloves from his coat pocket. The woman was their case now, the fifth dead hooker in six weeks. Aimes wasn’t sorry he’d missed seeing her the night she died. Some guys got off on a crime scene. He didn’t. The clanking of the chain of command, lots of people making sure other people saw them doing the right thing.

Inside, it smelled like candle wax, cheap perfume, the gray fingerprint dust that was smeared everywhere, stale food, and something else that made Aimes want to step back outside for a lungful of night air. He’d smelled death and sex mixed together too many times.

Delbert walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, peered in. “Cheese,” he said, “some kind of foreign shit. What is it, cum . . . membert?”

“Camembert,” Aimes told him, rhyming the last syllable with
chair
. “It’s what the French eat instead of Velveeta.”

“Ah.” Delbert went to the kitchen cabinets, opened them, poked a pencil between two teacups. He knelt and peered into the cabinet under the sink.

Aimes shook his head. “Come on, let’s go to the bedroom.”

“What you looking for?”

Aimes knew Delbert wasn’t being impatient. Delbert knew better than that. He was just curious about Aimes’s thinking. What could they possibly find here that hadn’t already been bagged and tagged?

“Something. Anything,” Aimes said. “We get the case, we look at the place. We’re always thorough. We give the taxpayer an honest day’s work for his hard-earned dollar.”

Aimes was standing over the bed now. The sheets had been stripped, carried off to be vacuumed for hair and fiber. He was seeing the woman’s face again, her smile. From behind him, Delbert said, “All these candles.”