Suitcase City (22 page)

“And the woman calls Mr. Teach, says she’s got the picture and she’ll show it to his daughter if he doesn’t come across with a little casheesh.”

“And that, my young friend, gives us motive.”

Delbert was wound up now and running like a Christmas toy, batteries included. “Here’s another one I like. Our Mr. Teach, he gets into a fight in a bar with Tyrone Battles, and we find his face in a picture in this woman’s apartment. This guy really gets around with the . . .” Delbert stopped, his face going a little panicky.

Aimes knew what his partner was about to say. It was all right. It might even be true. Teach, a guy with some kind of thing for his colored brethren. A guy who liked to fight with them, fuck them, and kill them. He finished the sentence for Delbert: “With persons of color.” He looked into Delbert’s eyes, letting him know it was all right. “You might be right. It is strangely coincidental. We’ll have to look into it, won’t we?”

Delbert looked down at his shoes, up at the bulletin board, the pictures of Thalia Speaks’s weirdly smiling face. “And there’s Nate Means. Teach broke the guy’s neck. Ended his career.”

“And you think . . . ?”

“Part of the pattern. Teach taking it out on . . . people of color.”

Aimes wanted to tell Delbert,
Go ahead and pick one, your favorite, and use it. Use them all. Blacks, people of color, African Americans, hell, Negroes even
. Between them, even
Negroes
would be all right. Martin Luther King Jr. had used the word and that made it all right with Aimes. He nodded gravely. “It’s something to think about, but I like the blackmail angle better.”

“The blackmail angle doesn’t connect him to the other killings,” Delbert said. Meaning that Teach was Delbert’s number one candidate for Tampa Bay serial killer. Scourge of America’s Next Great City. Well, better a name than no name. The name for now was Teach as far as young Delbert was concerned.

Still, Aimes wasn’t convinced. Appearances could be deceiving, but Teach looked like a middle-class white man with one wing-tip shoe in the business world, the other in the country club. A guy who’d had some bad luck in a bar with Tyrone Battles. A long way from the profile of murderer and farther from serial killer.

“So,” Delbert said, “how hard you gonna push on him?”

“First thing I want to do,” Aimes said, “is make him lie to me. You think I can do that?”

Delbert looked at the file. “Sure I do.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

Teach waited in the interview room that looked just like they did on TV—a steel table, four cheap steel chairs, puke-green walls, a dirty gray tile floor, and a large mirror built into the wall facing him: obviously a two-way mirror. If he got up now and walked over and pressed his nose to the glass, would he see an assistant DA and some mystery witness sitting in the dark waiting for the interview to start?

He had been sleeping soundly when the phone rang. Aimes inviting him downtown for a friendly talk. The policeman’s voice quiet, calm, saying he was interested in anything Teach could tell him about Thalia Speaks. Teach protesting that he didn’t know anything. Aimes getting firm: “You never know what you know until we talk, Mr. Teach. I’ve seen it a hundred times.”

“Should I bring an attorney?” Teach had asked.

“With an attorney you’ll be coming in the front door. And you might be walking through a crowd of reporters. I’m suggesting you drive down here, park in the back, and I meet you. We come in the back way, and we talk. That way, nobody has to know about it.” Aimes’s voice held no edge of threat, and no particular reassurance.

For a moment, Teach had considered calling Walter Demarest and asking what to do. But what could Walter say except that Teach would be a fool to go anywhere near Aimes without a lawyer? Some other lawyer. Teach had decided to take the detective at his word. He was helping the police. You didn’t need a lawyer for that.

Aimes had met him in the parking lot and walked him to this room. Teach tried not to read too much in the eyes of the police officers they passed. Men who stopped talking, looked up from papers or computer screens as he walked by. Was there a buzz, or was it just Teach’s nerves? Aimes had left him alone in this room, said he’d be back in a few minutes.

Aimes and Delbert came in, both carrying briefcases. Aimes said, “Mr. Teach, how are you?” The black man held out his hand and Teach shook it, firm, brief. “You remember Detective Delbert?”

Teach shook Delbert’s hand. “I remember him.” Teach looked into Delbert’s cold, excited eyes and recalled Malone’s Bar, how he had hoped never to see these men again. He told himself to focus on what was happening now, not let his mind wander, but the image came to him of his toast with Dean in the cockpit of a sailboat on a beautiful sundown sea:
To getting away with it.
If he was publicly connected to this murder, he’d be finished in this town forever. There’d be no choice but to sell the house, take his severance from Meador, uproot Dean, and find a new place to live. A place where the name James Teach was as neutral as John Smith. Hell, Teach thought, there’d be no question of keeping the name. He’d have to have it legally changed.

Aimes sat down and opened his briefcase. Delbert put his on the floor by his chair.

Teach looked around the room. “Are you going to videotape or record this?”

Aimes removed a notebook and a file from the briefcase, smiled at Teach. “No sir, but I’ll take a few notes if you don’t mind.”

Teach wondered if he could say he did mind. He decided to shrug. “Be my guest.”

Aimes nodded. “Now, Mr. Teach, how did you know Thalia Speaks?”

“She was a waitress at the country club. A lot of people there knew her.” He wasn’t sure how much he should say. He’d never talked to anyone about Thalia, had tried not to think about her for a while now. There was a terrible power in his memories of her. Even here, in the presence of two cops, the past wanted out. He had to resist it. What was it they said about the courtroom? Answer only the questions you are asked? Don’t volunteer anything?

Aimes smiled again, glanced at Delbert who had not taken his eyes from Teach’s face. “How do you think she got to be a prostitute, Mr. Teach? A woman who worked at the country club?”

The question surprised Teach. All he could do was lower his eyes and say, not loudly enough, “I don’t know.” He forced himself to look up at Aimes, then at Delbert. They watched him carefully. He added, “It seems strange. I mean, that she fell so far.”

“Strange to us too. In March ’96, she’s employed at your club, serving some of the most prominent people in Tampa, and in July she’s picked up for soliciting.”

Teach kept his eyes down. There had been no question.

Aimes rested his hand on the file. “How well did you know the woman, Mr. Teach?”

“I knew her as a waitress. She worked lunches. I saw her on weekends when I ate in the grille after playing golf. We said hello. Small talk, that’s about it.”

“She didn’t work dinners? You and Mrs. Teach didn’t see her when you had dinner at the club?”

“Thalia worked some dinners. She filled in sometimes when one of the other . . . I really don’t remember her work schedule. Why should I?”

Teach glanced from one policeman to the other, hoping his smile seemed natural. He had tried to make it a smile of sadness for a death, and the good humor of a citizen doing his duty.

Aimes said, “You knew her only as a girl who brought you your food . . . and your drinks? Is that what you’re saying? She was not a friend?”

“Yes. That’s what I’m saying.”

Aimes opened the file and removed a cocktail napkin. Holding it delicately by the corner, he set it in front of Teach.

It was like a thumb driven into Teach’s eye. The napkin from the restaurant on Madeira Beach, Thalia’s drawing of his happy face. Teach’s head ached, his eyes watered. He had asked her to throw everything away. After it was over, after Paige died, he’d waited a decent time and asked her to throw everything away.

She had smiled, a little sad, a little remote, already moving away from him. She had said, “All right, Jimmy. Anything you say. See, all you have to do is tell me, and I do what you say. I’ll go home tonight and have me a little fire. Will that make you happy?” Teach nodding, saying he’d be happy if she’d do that. But what was happiness to a man like him at a time like that? There was no happiness, and there would be none for a long time.

Aimes looked at Delbert, some message two cops understood. The black man said, “Mr. Teach, you lied to me. Are you going to keep on doing that? If you do, we’ll have to stop this friendly talk and send you home. Who knows, maybe we’ll come to your house later with a warrant, bring you and your lawyer through the front door, through all those newspaper people.” Aimes’s voice was low, careful, patient. He was waiting.

Teach wanted to rise and take the cop by his cheap tie and throttle him. Scream into his face,
You lied to
me! You said just a friendly talk
! But how could he, a liar, do that? How could a man do that when his entire life since Thalia had been a lie? Teach stifled his rage. “I knew her better than I told you.” The words come out lame, craven. “We were . . .” He couldn’t say they were lovers. He couldn’t claim that Thalia had loved him. Not after what he had done to her. So he said, “I loved her.” It was true. Then he added, “For a while.”

TWENTY-NINE

Teach told them the whole story. Why not? They’d caught him lying. Why not give it to them? Hope the story of a love affair convinced them that he had not killed a prostitute named Thalia Speaks.

He had met her the first day she worked at the club. She was a waitress in training, moving from table to table with Donna, the club’s senior server, getting her education in how to take orders from rich white people. That day, Teach walked into the grille intending to hurry through a club sandwich before meeting Walter Demarest on the first tee. The new girl was a little over thirty, more than pretty, and touchingly formal in her white tuxedo shirt and black vest.

Thalia played her role. She folded her shapely hands in front of her black apron, inclined her head toward Donna when the older woman spoke in her wise and serious way about how to serve from the left and clear from the right. How to be personable but not personal. How Thalia must never cross certain lines with the members. Yes, Donna actually said the thing about personable and personal, and when she did Teach felt his face warm with a blush. To save the moment, he grinned and said, “Donna, you know I’m always the soul of propriety, at least in the dining room.”

Donna, who could be a bit of a flirt herself, smiled back. “I’ve never heard the whisper of a complaint about you, Mr. Teach.”

Implying? Well, that if there were whispers, Donna would hear them. And it would matter that she heard them. Teach glanced at Thalia to see how she took all this. Seriously was how she took it.

Waitresses, bartenders, clubhouse men, and cart boys came and went at Terra Ceia, and there were the legendary few who had been around forever. Dylan the Irish bartender who talked as an equal with the wealthiest members, Juan the seventy-year-old cart boy who told dirty jokes and still ran everywhere he went, and Donna, patient, serious, and exacting, den mother of the dining room. Training Thalia, Donna made the club sound like a big happy family. Of course the members had their flaws and eccentricities, but even so, the club was a good little world. And it would be a good world for Thalia if she minded the rules.

Was Thalia a rule minder? The day Donna trained her, she looked like one. And to Teach she looked like a million bucks. Her eyes were big, brown, and bright, and her smile was shy but generous. Her walk was graceful but fetching, and her skin was a seamless cinnamon poured over gorgeous bones like frosting on a cake. She was appeal and charm and energy—she was a woman in the last bloom of youth.

Donna’s invocation of certain improprieties made Teach uneasy, but Thalia made him happy. He knew it was odd that he should feel a swelling happiness at this casual meeting with a waitress who might be gone in a week, but he did feel it, and he knew why. She was beautiful, and, as the poet had said, a thing of beauty was a joy forever. On that Saturday morning, when Teach felt joy in Thalia’s presence, he had no idea what she felt in his, but he saw something playing in her eyes. Something that was not,
Please, God, let me keep this job,
or,
God, I’m bored,
or,
Let’s get this over with as soon as possible.

Later Thalia told him what had been in her eyes. She had recognized him.

She did not wait on him for a while after that first time, so one day he asked for a table she served, and what could the hostess do but comply? Soon he became Thalia’s regular. He could say to anyone who asked (though no one would) that he wanted her to serve him because she was the best. She remembered what he liked and she took care of him. He tipped her lavishly. She never mentioned his largesse. He got the same polite “Thank you, sir” she gave to everyone. Either she didn’t care about the money or she didn’t want him to know she did. Time passed and he knew he cared about her, and he thought she, in her way, returned the sentiment.

Later, Teach tried to remember who had first touched. Probably he had congratulated her for some small thing and held out his hand for her to shake, loving the warm pressure of her slender fingers in his big hand, the half second of holding before they let go. With that handshake, he crossed a line. Thalia crossed it too. She let her hand rest momentarily on his shoulder as she leaned down to settle a plate in front of him. It was all simple and blameless, and after a while, Teach could not imagine going to the club without seeing her.

After a month at Terra Ceia, Thalia was confident, popular, and clearly bored with her job. She’d arrive at a table with a drink before it was ordered and say, “Your usual, Mr. Smith,” and you could see that her mind was miles away from bourbon Manhattans and chicken tenders. Her mood worried Teach. He was afraid she would leave, just disappear as employees sometimes did, people whose coming and going caused not a ripple on the placid surface of Terra Ceia.