Suitcase City (24 page)

“One afternoon,” Teach said, “when I was with her, with Thalia, my wife was killed in an accident on the Veteran’s Expressway.”

A fiery crash, the newspapers had called it. Paige’s Volvo had burned so badly that the City of Tampa had to repave that section of the highway. Teach never drove that stretch of road anymore. He did not want to see that new concrete.

“So what happened to Thalia after that?” Aimes asked. He did not seem interested in the death of Paige. Maybe he thought Teach was angling for sympathy.

“There was terrible grief and guilt.” The words fell dead from Teach’s mouth. Words from eulogies and sermons. There were no words for what Teach had felt. “I didn’t want to see Thalia, but I had to. We had to play our parts. To call those days awkward . . . well, there’s no word for it. Thalia had religion, and she took her guilt in a way I couldn’t. She told me she had caused Paige’s death. She told me she prayed about it.”

“She told you that?” For the first time, Aimes looked surprised. The cynical cop allowing his eyebrows to rise, his head to shake at the infinite mystery of human behavior.

“Yes, she told me. At the club we avoided each other, acted strange, exposed ourselves in ways we never had before. She came to me one day and said,
You’re falling apart, and it’s partly because I’m here, so I have to leave
. I told her that was ridiculous, but of course I was relieved. God help me, I wanted her gone. So one day she didn’t come to work. She didn’t give notice, never asked for a reference, never contacted the club again as far as I know. I think she wanted to burn her bridges so there would be no question of ever coming back. And—” Teach stopped, looked at both cops.

“And?” Aimes’s dark eyes bored into his.

“And she took something from me when she left. Drugs. Painkillers and diet pills. It was crazy the way she did it. I went to the men’s room, left my keys on the table. She took the keys and went to my car in the parking lot. In front of the whole dining room. Nobody noticed. At least nobody said anything. She wanted trouble, wanted me to turn her in. Of course, I didn’t.”

“Of course,” Aimes said.

Teach rubbed the back of his neck with both hands, then his eyes. “I told myself she’d be all right. With her brains and her . . . charm, she’d find a job.” He looked at both cops again. They knew what had happened to Thalia Speaks. “I learned something from what she did. I always thought I loved her more than she loved me, but it wasn’t true. She gave up . . . a life for me.”

“You mean
her
life,” Aimes said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, I guess so. And maybe she saved mine.”

“What’d folks at the club say? About her leaving.”

“Just what you’d expect them to say. That it was strange. After all, she was popular. Nobody but me and Thalia ever knew about the affair.” Teach looked around the bleak green interrogation room, back into Aimes’s eyes. “And now you.” He didn’t look at Delbert. Delbert was an extension of Aimes. But now Delbert held the paper in his hands.

“And your wife. She knew.” It was Delbert.

Teach couldn’t see any method in the way the two cops divided the questions. Delbert listened mostly, jumpy, nervous, seeming to want something Teach hadn’t said. Aimes’s eyes gave Teach nothing. Throughout the long telling, he had watched Teach the way he might look at a television or the pages of a book.

Teach said, “You asked me how she got to be a hooker. The job market was bad, and she couldn’t find anything. She couldn’t make it. You know more about the rest of it than I do.”

THIRTY-ONE

N
o
, Aimes thought,
no, Mr. Teach, for a country club white man, you seem to know a lot about the rest of it.
But Aimes would say it to Teach anyway, just for the record.

“The rest is that a young black woman with a turd in her personnel file at the country club and no prospects for anything better than fast food or welfare starts to drink a little, starts to hang around the wrong people a little, snorts a little coke, and then she takes her first hit from a crack pipe, just a little one, and she just happens to be one of them who can’t stop when they start, and then she’s got a big habit, and she needs a whole lot of money, and she’s selling her ass a little, and then a little becomes a lot, and then she’s dead.”

Aimes thinking:
And the question is, how much do you know about the last part? The dead part.
He decided to move on with it, see if he could get Teach to lie again. The past half hour, telling how a black girl had got her big chance with a white man and then lost it, Mr. Teach had seemed very truthful. Very sorry. Aimes wanted to see if Teach would keep on down the straight-and-narrow, or if the guy would swerve.

Aimes said, “So you lost touch with her after she left Terra Ceia?”

“I saw her a few more times.”

“What’d you talk about?”

“Once I asked her to get rid of, you know, some things . . . She said she would.” Teach glanced up at Aimes, smiled that betrayed-lover smile. Aimes didn’t smile back. There was some betrayal here, but it wasn’t a black woman saving her memories. Not unless she had used them to bring Mr. Teach to her apartment on the last night of her life.

Aimes picked up the cocktail napkin by its corner. He showed Teach the woman’s drawing again. She’d had some talent, Aimes thought. The drawing captured something. “So, you haven’t seen this napkin since you split up with Ms. Speaks?”

Teach looked confused.

“Would you answer the question, please?”

“No, I haven’t seen it.”

Aimes watched him closely, didn’t see any of that liar’s squirm in the man’s eyes. In fact, all he saw was Teach’s wondering what the hell was going on. If Thalia Speaks had tried to blackmail him, those eyes would be different. There’d be some show-the-bitch-righteousness in there staring back at Aimes. Unless, of course, this guy was a better actor than Aimes thought he was.

“What else did you talk about?”

Teach held his hands out in front of him and flexed them. “We couldn’t stay away from each other for a while after . . . after she left the club.”

“You sleep with her then?”

“Yes, but it just . . . wore out, I guess. We tried not to talk about what had happened. She asked me to pray with her. I couldn’t. I gave her money, tried to help her find work, but she was depressed. She missed some job interviews I set up for her. I’d go over, and we’d make love, and then she’d want to talk about the club, the gossip. It got . . . strange after a while. The sex was just . . . something we did so we could lie in bed afterward and talk.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

After a pause he said, “May. The middle of May a year ago. Things hadn’t been good between us. I went over there, and she had some guy with her.” Teach hesitated again. “A black man. The guy stayed in the backroom where I couldn’t see him. Thalia talked to him through the doorway. He said he’d leave, but she insisted that he stay. Told him I’d be gone soon. What she said to the guy was,
Don’t worry about him. He doesn’t stay long
. Maybe the guy was a . . . client. Maybe that’s when she started . . . getting paid.”

Aimes said, “How’d you know he was black if you didn’t see him?”

And Teach: “By his voice.” Saying it in a way that let Aimes know he meant no offense.

Aimes said, “Mr. Teach, where were you on the night of May 25, between ten o’clock and midnight?”

Teach thought about it. “I don’t know. I couldn’t really tell you.” Then Teach’s head rocked back with a memory. “Wait a minute. I was on my boat at the marina. I did some cleaning and worked on the engine. After that, I fell asleep for a while. It was right after the thing with Thurman Battles was over, and I was exhausted, I guess. I was getting the boat ready for a trip with my daughter.”

Teach looked at Aimes, at Delbert, like he wondered if he’d made some mistake mentioning Battles. Aimes gave him nothing back on that one. He said, “Anybody see you there?”

“Not that I know of. It’s possible. Not many people around that time of night.”

Aimes nodded at Delbert, said, “Mr. Teach, I’m going to ask you to wait here for a minute while I step outside with Detective Delbert. We’ll be right back. Would you like a cup of coffee or a glass of water?”

Teach said, “No thanks.” The big jock looking at the paper in Delbert’s hand.

Outside, Aimes read it. The buzz about Teach had gotten around. One of the vice cops had knocked on the door, handed Delbert a report on the arrest of some high school kids out on the Gandy Causeway. The cops had confiscated everything from marijuana and powdered cocaine to crack. Nothing unusual about that, but the vice cop had interrupted Aimes’s interrogation because of something else they’d found. Pharmaceutical methylamphetamine, diet pills. The pills were still in their wrappers. Meador Pharmaceutical wrappers.

Aimes and Delbert had seen drugs on the inventory of items found in Thalia Speaks’s apartment, but the manifest had not mentioned the wrappers.

Aimes looked at Delbert, “You think?”

“Why not? She was an addict. Maybe he was smuggling the stuff home from work and she was selling it. It gives the guy another reason to do her. Criminal confederates have a falling out.”

Delbert bit his thumbnail and shrugged, that nervous jump of the shoulders again. Aimes wondering if his partner didn’t have a little too much of a hard-on for Mr. Teach. Aimes handed the arrest report back to Delbert. “Take it inside but don’t mention it.”

Delbert nodded.

Back inside, Aimes saw Teach’s eyes go to the paper in Delbert’s hand. “All right, Mr. Teach. I think that’s all we need for now. I want to thank you again for coming in.”

Aimes didn’t see what he expected in Teach’s face. He expected relief. What he saw were questions. Well, sometimes it went that way. You had to drag a guy in kicking and screaming to do his duty as a citizen, and when you were finished, when the guy looked at his thumbs and didn’t see any screws on them, he wanted to know what you were thinking.

Teach gave a tight little smile. “From what you’ve asked me, I could conclude that you think I killed Thalia.”

Aimes shrugged, looked at Delbert, whose cool blue eyes said that he had Teach measured for nailing to the barn door. “Like I told you on the phone, Mr. Teach, we’re covering all of the bases.” Aimes gave it a tired, memorized sound. He wanted Teach to think:
Routine. It’s just routine.
For a while. Then he said, “Now that’s my view of it, Mr. Teach. I see us still in the information-gathering phase. But my partner here, Detective Delbert, he thinks he might know how you fit into this. He thinks Thalia Speaks got a little down on her luck, had a little negative cash flow, and she reads about you in the paper, the trouble you had with Thurman Battles, and she thinks why not call you up and say she never did burn those . . .
things
, and she wonders if your daughter would like to see them, or would you rather come on over and talk about it? . . . And bring your checkbook. That’s what Delbert thinks could have happened. Delbert’s trying to convince me, and I’m trying to keep an open mind.”

“So I killed her to keep her mouth shut. Is that it?”

“Delbert thinks it might have gone just that way.”

“And you’re not sure?”

Aimes nodded.

“Why didn’t I take that napkin with me after I killed her?”

“Delbert thinks you panicked.” Aimes took a crime scene photo from the folder and put it on the table in front of Teach. A photo of Thalia Speaks smiling in death, her eyeballs the size of hard-boiled eggs, the ligature marks at her neck blue and crusted with blood. “After what you did to that poor woman, you panicked, and you ran like a scalded dog. That’s what Delbert thinks.”

Aimes watched Teach’s reaction to the picture. The man was upset, very upset. His throat worked for a few seconds like he might vomit. Aimes was ready to push back from the table, away from the stream Teach might spew, but the guy got hold of himself and reached up with a shaking hand and wiped a tear from the corner of each eye. It was damned good acting, Laurence Olivier stuff. Or it was real.

Teach looked at Aimes out of those wet, red eyes. “How was she killed, Aimes? Does Delbert know how she was killed?”

Aimes pulled another photo out of the file and put it down in front of Teach. It showed Teach and Thalia Speaks in a restaurant on Madeira Beach. There were pretty boats and pelicans, tourists and tall drinks with paper umbrellas in them. Spiny lobsters and rum drinks on the table. Thalia Speaks was seated and Teach stood behind her, leaning down with his chin almost resting on her shoulder. That happy love-dog look in his eyes, the face in the drawing on the napkin.

Thalia Speaks had a scarf around her neck, and James Teach held both ends of it as he leaned down over her, his strong hands resting at the sides of her neck.

Delbert said, “She was strangled, Mr. Teach. With a scarf.”

THIRTY-TWO

Teach stepped out into the hot white light behind the police station and squinted at the tall royal palms that bordered the parking lot, the gleaming black-and-white police cars with their blue signal lights and City of Tampa crests. Meeting him here an hour ago, Aimes had been all smiles and good public servant. Ready for a friendly little talk. After Teach had given them everything that was secret about Thalia, Aimes and Delbert had left him sitting at the green steel table wiping tears from his eyes. Left him to find his own way out.

Those pictures, those soul-maiming photos of Thalia’s dead face. He started walking. Walking would settle him, help him forget. He crossed the lot, vaguely aware that his head was hunched down into his collar as though something might fall from the sky and crush him. He told himself to stand straight, quicken his pace, get out of here, and hope that he did not hear from Aimes and Delbert again. Hope that they solved the crime and moved on to others, their miserable lives a procession of brutalities.

Teach lurched when he heard voices to his right, from the rows of police cars. He walked faster. The gate was twenty yards away. After that, the anonymity of the streets.

“Mr. Teach! Wait a minute, Mr. Teach! Please!”