Suitcase City (25 page)

He heard the tapping of heels on the asphalt. He turned to his right. Two uniformed policemen were getting out of a cruiser. Between them and him, coming fast in a long black skirt, white blouse, and black blazer, was Marlie Turkel. When she saw that she had his attention, that in all likelihood he would not bolt, she turned back to the two cops. “Thanks, fellas. We’ll talk again, okay?”

One of the cops waved to her. His partner was already heading toward the station. Marlie Turkel turned to Teach and asked the inevitable question. “Mr. Teach, what brings you to the police station?”

Many things occurred to him at once. He could simply walk on. Ignore her. He could lie:
My little niece Emily lost her bicycle.
He could jump on the woman and commit the act Aimes thought him capable of. Joyously, quickly, brutally, he could strangle her. Teach bought time: “I could ask you the same question.”

She stood in front of him frowning . . . at what? His stupidity. In a cold, flat voice she said, “I got a call, a tip you were here.”

Jesus,
Teach thought,
a tip
. Probably one of cops he had passed on his way in. Some guy doing quid pro quo with Marlie Turkel. His tired brain told him it was time to tell the truth. “I talked to Detective Aimes about the murder of Thalia Speaks. He thought I might know something that would help with the investigation.”

“Do you?”

“Do I?” Teach was confused, wrung out. It was hot here on the asphalt. He was sweating and Marlie Turkel in her blazer was not.

“Do you know anything that can help Detective Aimes?” Keeping her eyes on Teach’s face, she pulled a notebook from her purse.

It came to him. Something he had often read in the paper. “He asked me not to mention anything about our talk. You know, official police business. He said leaks could compromise the case.” Teach knew this wouldn’t stop her from writing that he was connected to the inquiry. Unless. Unless she thought it would anger Aimes.

“Have you read my pieces about the prostitute murders?”

Teach had never met the woman, had only talked to her on the phone, seen her picture in the paper. But there was always something grimly intimate in her voice. It frightened him even more than her newspaper job, the license to destroy it gave her. Why did she want to know if he had read her articles? Was it simple vanity? Some strategy to get information from him? A lie here would not hurt him.

“No,” he said.

Of course he had read them, long, artfully constructed meditations on the misery of lives spent in the world’s oldest profession. Interviews with prostitutes (names changed), stories of childhood abuse, school failure, running away, shoplifting, drugs, and finally the sale of the body. And all of it, as Marlie Turkel saw it, the fault of men.

Teach had parked a block down and two blocks over on Cass Street, thinking that distance from the police station might somehow provide a measure of anonymity. He started walking again, and Marlie Turkel fell into step with him. He slowed. He wasn’t running from her. He was walking to his car, and he couldn’t prevent her from accompanying him if she wanted to. She carried the notebook low at her side. It reminded him of gunfighters concealing revolvers in the folds of white dusters.

After they had walked a block, she said, “I still think there was something funny with you and Thurman Battles. How that whole thing just suddenly went away. And that kid going off to prep school. You two must have discovered some very powerful common interest.” That voice, in the dark, in the alley, hot breath in your face. That hurry-up-and-do-it voice.

Teach slowed a little more. “We discovered the good of the community, Ms. Turkel. I told you that on the phone.”

“Forgive me, but . . . bullshit. There’s something going on between you guys.” Beside him, she was breathing a little raggedly. “Whew,” she said, “slow down there. I’ve had a long day. You’re walking my legs off.”

And I’ve had a long month,
Teach thought. He decided to risk it, ask her what she planned to do with his life. Get the news now rather than waiting for the morning paper. He stopped on Franklin in front of a bar, smoked-glass windows and a neon beer sign. Some country tune on the jukebox inside. “Are you going to put this in the paper, Ms. Turkel? That you saw me at the police station? That I talked to Aimes about the murder of a prostitute? Who wasn’t a prostitute when I knew her as an employee at the country club.”

Marlie Turkel stepped in front of him, reached up, and loosened the large white bow at the throat of her blouse. Breathing hard, her face flushed, she said, “
Only
as an employee, Mr. Teach?” There it was, the implication her readers would find in her next story. She wouldn’t come out and say it, but the careful reader would not miss the suggestion that Teach had frequented Thalia Speaks as a client. It occurred to him again that he would like to reach out and seize the bow at this woman’s throat and draw it tight until . . .

Teach closed his eyes, rubbed them. He couldn’t do that, wouldn’t do it, because he was a good man down where it mattered, and good men didn’t. But he had to take hold of something. The world he had guided back into orbit, the world he had blessed for its goodness as he watched his daughter swimming in the sundown Gulf of Mexico, was spinning into the dark again.

“Look, Mr. Teach, why don’t we step inside here and have a drink? I haven’t said I’m going to write about you.”

“Jim,” Teach said, “call me Jim, and I’ll call you Marlie.”

Inside the bar, two things surprised him. The bartender nodded to Marlie Turkel the way he’d nod to a beat cop or a fireman from the station down the street. She wasn’t just known, she was a regular. The second thing was the shot of bar whiskey and the beer she ordered. She knocked back the rye without a wince, chased it with two bites of cheap draft, and tapped her shot glass on the bar. “Another bump, Henry.” The bartender brought the bottle of generic whiskey over and poured a second shot. He glanced at Teach’s untouched Wild Turkey and went back to the baseball game on the TV behind the bar.

Marlie Turkel led him to a booth. There were no pleasantries. Teach’s mind had been going like a blender, always churning up the same question. He asked it again: “Are you going to write about seeing me today?”

She knocked back the second shot, sipped the beer. She leaned back and rested her head on the red leatherette, watching him like she was trying to make up her mind. Her face was long, and her undershot jaw was narrow. There were acne scars in the swales under her cheekbones. She wore her wispy dishwater-blond hair in a pageboy that only made her jaw seem keener. Her teeth were large, chalky, and coffee-stained.
No wonder she practiced that purring voice,
Teach thought. He could write her biography. She’d grown up poor, been abandoned either emotionally or in fact by parents, then later friends, and, finally, men. She’d discovered journalism as revenge but had convinced herself it was a social crusade. She used the voice to get information which was revenge. The voice was sex, and sex was abandonment, the thing to be revenged.

She tilted her head to the side a little, smiled, and answered his question: “I don’t know yet. I think you’re news, don’t you?”

Before she could remind him of the public’s right to know, Teach said, “Why am I news? Why now? Tomorrow Aimes could find out that some drooling perv in a house full of pickled human remains in Suitcase City killed those women. Tomorrow the fact that he talked to me could mean nothing at all.”

“You’re what I’ve got today, Jim. All I’ve got.”

“So, it’s a slow day, and you’ve got to feed the beast, and I’m the food?”

She drank some beer, looked into the glass, glanced at her watch, then at the bartender whose back was to them. “You could put it that way. I wouldn’t. I’d say that a vigilant free press is the cornerstone of a vital democracy. I’d say that the newspaper comes out every day and nobody waits to see if President Lincoln dies before they report that President Lincoln was shot by a man named Booth. The difference between murder and attempted murder doesn’t stop the presses.”

Teach took the first sip of his whiskey, obscurely pleased that Marlie Turkel was ahead of him on the alcohol highway. “But isn’t there some principle of proportion? I didn’t shoot a president. I knew a woman a year ago, and somebody killed her, and a detective talked to me about her.”

“Sure, but why you? Why not a lot of other people at the country club? Is it because Aimes knows you, Jim? And how does he know you? He knows you as the guy who beat the crap out of Tyrone Battles. The guy who paralyzed Nate Means. He might even think he knows you’ve got some serious violent tendencies.”

Jesus,
thought Teach.
Jesus Christ, look at the way this woman’s mind works.
He leaned forward, made his eyes as friendly as he could, tried to look like a good man with a reasonable question. “Look, Marlie, I need to know. Are you going to write about this or not?”

She smiled again, sipped. “I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.” She was using that voice. The not-very-pretty girl who had to be a little aggressive, had to have something the other girls didn’t have.

He wasn’t sure where the next thing came from. From desperation, from a sudden vision of Dean swimming, of him and Walter Demarest standing on the first tee at Terra Ceia, the sunrise just breaking over the dewy grass. “Will you wait if I can get you something good? Something better than me talking to Aimes?”

Marlie Turkel had been sitting with her head back, turning her beer glass slowly on the table. Now she lowered her gaze, her eyes boring at him. “What? Get me what? Something Aimes told you?”

Teach nodded. “I can’t tell you now. I’ve got some things to . . . confirm.”

“When?”

“A week, two at the most. What do you say?”

She looked at him with skepticism and a ravening interest and, Teach thought, a little hatred. Because she would have to agree, because, as she would see it, in his way he had won again. She leaned forward, put her hand on the back of his. “You can’t tell me anything now? Not even a hint?”

“Not yet, but you won’t be disappointed.”

She pushed back from him, turned to the bar. “Henry, another round here, please.”

She thought about it till the drinks came, making him wait. Finally, she knocked back her third generic and said, “All right. It’s a deal. I don’t usually do this, and I want you to know that if you don’t deliver, I’m going to be, let’s say, very interested in you for a very long time. But I’ll do it. Neither of us mentions this talk to anyone. And remember, there’s a time limit. It’s one week, not two.” She wrote something in her notebook, tore out the page, and handed it to him. “Here’s my home number. Call me anytime, day or night.”

Teach took the paper and looked down at his whiskey. Knew he couldn’t drink it now without gagging because he had no idea what he could possibly dig up for Marlie Turkel. He’d had to do something, say something. He had pulled this crazy idea out of that fading vision of the good life, of Dean dancing and sailing with him and growing up good and straight and tall. Out of Hope itself. But what, in God’s name, could he give Marlie Turkel to keep his name out of the paper?

He was about to head for the door, when she said, “You’re a charming bastard, aren’t you, Teach?” Her voice was grim and a little slurry. “You’ve always gotten your way with the charm, haven’t you, Teach?”

She was hitting his name with extra emphasis now, saying
Teach
like it was a curse or a bad condition. The whiskey had hit her harder than he’d expected it to, or something else had hit her. She seemed to be having some sort of realization about him, and that could be a good thing. Surely a charming Teach was an improvement, better than a racist Teach or a violent one. Seeing people and things in a new light, he had been told, was the meaning of life. They’d taught that in college. It was what all the important books said. The books he had read on team buses and planes when other people were thumbing through comic books or puzzling out articles in
Sports Illustrated
.

Teach offered to walk her to her car, hoping the gesture would bank him some good will. She’d had three shots and two beers, and this wasn’t the best of neighborhoods. When she didn’t argue with him, he knew she wasn’t herself. When she stopped, spun a three-sixty on the hot sidewalk, and said she couldn’t remember where she’d left her car, Teach got a little worried. He figured the police station was the place to start. His hand under her elbow, he said, “You were talking to some cops when you . . . stopped me.”

“Naw,” she replied, “they don’t let me park in that lot. I’m somewhere on . . . Zack, I think.” She leaned on his shoulder for balance. “It’s my blood pressure. These things . . . just hit me sometimes. I get . . .” She twirled a finger in the air between them.

When they passed Teach’s car, he said, “Let’s get out of this heat. I’ll drive you to your car.”

“You’re not all right to drive,” she muttered.

“I’m all righter than you are.”

“It’s a Taurus, white. Well, it used to be.”

But he couldn’t find her car. He drove up and down the grid of streets, farther and farther away from the police station.

Teach said, “Look, you’re not feeling well enough to drive. Maybe you need to see a doctor.”

A look of panic came into her eyes. Her face was gray. “No doctors.” They passed a motel. “Take me . . . there!” She hooked her thumb back at the motel. “I need to lie down.”

Teach slowed the Buick and thought it through. If he took her to the ER, she’d be in hands other than his. Good hands. If they stopped at the motel and something bad happened, fate or Turkel could assign him the blame. Probably she was shy of the ER because they might draw blood and she could imagine the headlines.
Local Reporter Collapses, Blood Alcohol Level Higher Than IQ.
He couldn’t take her to the hospital against her will.

He registered and paid cash in advance. The clerk insisted on a credit card impression. The room was in the back, away from the street. Teach helped her out of the car and into the plain, clean room. She stared at the bed like it was a boat on a stormy sea, and her knees buckled. He caught her and laid her on the bed. He took the liberty of tugging her skirt down to cover her knees. She lifted an arm and rested it across her eyes.