Suitcase City (28 page)

Delbert had told Aimes there was something about Teach, and it wasn’t football. Well, this was it. Back when Delbert was a kid, his uncle had been a sheriff’s deputy in Gilchrist County, and before that his uncle had played for the Gators. Third-string tight end. The uncle and the boy, Delbert, had been watching a Gators game one Saturday afternoon, and the uncle had shown the boy an arrest warrant for James Teach, ex-Gator great. “Remember him?” the uncle asked. Young Delbert nodded, said he remembered. “Well, they don’t all end up in Hollywood,” the uncle had said.

So Teach had been a drug smuggler, or had known them, had run with them. The information Delbert had obtained by the magic of the mainframe did not specify the exact nature of the offense. But Mr. Teach would specify it in their next conversation. It and a lot more, and if the specifics didn’t sound right, maybe Teach would not leave the police station this time.

Delbert said, “It’s all part of a pattern, you ask me. Those kids out on the causeway get busted holding pharmaceutical speed. Thalia Speaks had the same kind of crank in her apartment. Mr. Teach, who used to be her sugar daddy, he’s done some time in the shade for drug-related activity, and you know what that means. They wanted him for something bigger, but they couldn’t make the case. So they slapped him with the catchall charge.”

Aimes nodded, smiled. He knew what it meant. It meant Mr. Teach just got more and more interesting all the time. He wondered if he could get Teach to come in again without a lawyer. There was still nothing to put the guy in that apartment on the night of the murder, but murder cases had been successfully prosecuted with less than Aimes and Delbert had right now. Still, he could see the city prosecutor giving him the old litany:
It’s all circumstantial. Bring me something that puts him there that night.

But
, Aimes would say,
the guy has no alibi. Says he was asleep on a boat in a deserted
marina when the woman was killed. You buy that?

I don’t buy it, but a jury might. They might call it a reasonable doubt.

Fucking ADAs,
Aimes thought. They wanted you to put the fish in the barrel, put the gun in their hands, aim it for them. They wanted you to say,
Okay, go ahead and shoot now.

Aimes said, “What about the other girls? You still like our Mr. Teach for all of them?”

Delbert shook his head, impatient. “I like him for Thalia Speaks so much I don’t care about the others anymore.”

“Easy now. We got to get as much out of this as we can. If Teach did the others, we want him for them too.”

Delbert looked at Aimes like he had a sudden gas pain, that redneck bile rumbling in his flat belly, all hot and corrosive. Teach was Delbert’s meat.

Aimes said, “
Some time in the shade?
Where’d you get that from?”

Delbert put a hand gingerly to his belt buckle, pressed it there. He looked thoughtful. “My granddaddy used to say that. It means you been in prison. You’re all pale. You know, you been in the shade.”

“Your granddaddy ever do time, Delbert?”

“No. He was a mortician, but come to think of it, he had a light complexion.”

Ah, culture,
thought Aimes.
The different ways people construct meaning.
He saw humanity as comprised of two tribes: the evildoers and the law-abiders. He was a man on a long march and his living reason was to bring down as many from the evildoing tribe as he could. It was practical for him, without theory. It was a thing he did for his wife, because when she was alive she had admired him for it, and now he lived on memories of her admiration. Delbert was a curious kid. Under all that energy, all that earnest, hard-working, up-by-the-bootstraps ambition, Aimes thought there might beat the heart of a true believer in Justice and the American Way. Sometimes the kid scared Aimes a little.

“Delbert, something I never asked you. Did you play football?”

Delbert looked at him, wondering where this was going. “No, I was in the band.”

“In the band?”

“Yeah, I played the clarinet.”

“You marched up and down the field in that uniform that looked like the army of Bolivia?”

“Yeah, I did. So?”

“So, nothing. Just curious.”

Maybe Delbert’s hard-on for Teach had something to do with football. Teach being the big star. Whatever it was, it was strong. It wasn’t clarinet music. It was a big bass drum.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Teach spent the evening in his darkroom working with the enlarger until he was sure of the Bronco’s tag number. He could do little with the shot of the man who drove it. Blown up and cleaned up, the face looked like half of a hockey mask, or the Phantom of the Opera. When Teach finished, he went out to his study and picked up the phone.

“Sorry to call so late, Walter, but it’s important.” By the unspoken rules of Terra Ceia, eleven thirty was too late for a phone call. But Teach was buzzed by the darkroom work, and he wanted to keep the momentum going.

“That’s all right, old buddy.” Walter’s laugh was not entirely one of mirth. “What can I do for you? Not, God help us, another barroom altercation, is it?”

Teach put into his voice what there was of obligation between him and Walter. There wasn’t much. “I need a favor. Do you know anybody down at the Department of Motor Vehicles? I need the name that goes with an auto tag.”

Walter was silent. Teach heard in the background the sounds of the Demarest household. Letterman on TV. The thump of rock music, Walter’s teenage son, Peyton.

Walter finally said, “I, that is,
we
retain an investigator with contacts at the DMV.” Now his voice was reserved, a lawyer’s voice. “He runs things down for us occasionally. Nothing Sam Spade, you understand. Mostly vehicle registration numbers for probate cases. I’ll ask the guy to see what he can find. What’s going on?”

Teach had anticipated the question. “I’d rather not say, Walter. I can promise you it’s nothing that will ever come back and bite your butt.”
It could take my butt in one great, bloody crunch, but not yours, old buddy.

Walter thought about it. Letterman told a joke. Peyton Demarest’s brain death by heavy metal floated across the wires to Teach. “Hokay, buddy, but I hope there’s green grass on the other side of this rough patch you’re going through.”

Teach gave him the tag number. Walter Demarest explained that he could have the information by midmorning tomorrow, then he said, “By the way, Peyton tried to call Dean, and your phone was out of order. Thought you’d want to know.”

“Thanks, Walter. Some malfunction over here. We’ll fix it.” He had unplugged the phones. The messages had been coming every hour on the hour.

Teach had saved the brief obituary of Thalia Speaks. It listed two survivors: a sister, Bennie Marie Speaks, and a grandmother, Mary Lena Liston. He found the two women in the phone book. He didn’t know much about the College Hill section of Tampa, only what he’d seen on news programs: night scenes of drunks in handcuffs, splashes of blood on sidewalks, anguished faces strobing on and off in the blue-and-red lights of police cars.

He went to the foot of the stairs and called up, “Dean, I’m going out for a while.” He waited.

His daughter’s sleepy voice called down, “All right, Dad.” The TV murmured up there.

Teach drove through College Hill with a city map on his lap. The houses were frame and cinder-block boxes. TVs glowed in barred windows. Porches owned pairs of gleaming red canine eyes.

Teach stopped at the curb across the street from Benny Marie Speaks’s green and brown bungalow and opened the window of his LeSabre. The warm night air flowed in, carrying the sounds of sirens. Only a few blocks away, the worst of the ghetto began.

He wasn’t sure what he was doing here. It was too late for a reasonable knock on anyone’s door. But he had that buzz in his chest and the weird feeling that if he didn’t keep going tonight he’d just return to the waiting, waiting for Aimes to call him in again, waiting for more of those falsetto messages about not remembering someone. Thalia’s sister’s house was dark. Teach moved on to her grandmother.

Driving slowly through the night streets, he thought about connections. He had bloodied Tyrone in a bar, and Tyrone was connected to a man in a white Bronco. The man in the Bronco was calling Teach’s house leaving a message about remembering people. He had left the first message the day Teach had talked to Detective Aimes about the death of Thalia Speaks. Was Thalia connected to the man in the Bronco? Was Tyrone somehow connected to Thalia? They had both done drugs. The man in the Bronco had been out there on the Gandy Causeway feeding Tyrone’s crack habit. Teach had to assume that drugs connected all three.

Suddenly, it occurred to him that maybe meeting Tyrone in a bar was not an accident. Not a thing that had happened to him, but a thing
done
to him. By someone. For a reason. A thing that had stalked him, caught him there happy, drinking, telling football stories.
You don’t remember me
.

He drove past Thalia’s grandmother’s house twice before stopping. Mary Lena Liston lived in a bad place. There was a burned-out convenience store at the end of the block, and a house across the street stood in a weed-choked yard, its windows covered with plywood. Teach passed two groups of hard-eyed young black men. From one of them, a boy had run a few yards after Teach’s car shouting, “What you doing here, bitch?” The challenge, fading behind him, seized his chest like a cold fist and made him slip down in the seat waiting for a rock or a bullet to shatter his window.

He waited in the car for fifteen minutes, watching Mary Lena Liston’s house, trying to make up his mind about what to do. Finally, the porch light snapped on, and a frail old black woman stepped out and peered up and down the street. She held a bowl in her hands, and carried a newspaper. As Teach watched, she went stiffly to a white rattan chair and sat, smoothed the newspaper out at her feet, and rested the bowl on her knees. He drove the Buick down the block and hid it in the mouth of an alley. He got out and walked back toward the old woman’s light.

Close enough for her to see him, he slowed his pace. He didn’t want to scare her. He had no idea who else was in the house. Closer, he saw that the bowl on her lap held field peas, and that her busy fingers were shelling them, dropping the shells onto the newspaper.

He stopped on the sidewalk and waited for her to look up. She didn’t. “White man, what you doing here this time of night?”

Teach said, “I’m looking for Mary Lena Liston. I have something for her. Something of value.” He had planned this on the drive over. It was cheap, tawdry, but it was all he had, and it might work.

“You found her.” The old woman kept her eyes on the peas in her lap. She broke the pods with a pop, then ripped her thumb through to sprinkle the peas into an old porcelain basin. “But she don’t let no white man call her Mary Lena. You call me Mrs. Liston, or you get on out of here.”

Teach was about to apologize, start again, when she muttered, “Coming here in the middle of the night telling an old lady you got something for her.”

Teach blundered on: “I’m from the . . . Dixie Fidelity and Trust Company. Your granddaughter had an insurance policy with us, and she named you as beneficiary. I’d like to talk to you about it if you’ve got time.”
Forgive me,
Teach thought.

The old woman looked up for the first time, revealing the milky film of a cataract across her right eye. The left eye was aimed at him like the black dot at the end of a gun barrel. “When you white mens start doing the insurance business at night?”

Teach stood ten feet from her in the porch light, letting her see him. He tried to seem small and harmless. “I think I can smell a thunderstorm coming. Does it seem that way to you?”

She looked at him, at the peas in her lap, set the bowl aside, and wiped her hands on her apron. “Might be right about that. I didn’t think you young’uns noticed the weather unless it blown your hair out of place or destroyed some of that nasty crack rock you always consuming.”

Teach made his voice earnest. “Mrs. Liston, I don’t use drugs, and I notice the weather, and I wonder if you might invite me out of it so we can talk.”

She stood up, groaning, touching the middle of her back. She picked up the bowl of peas. “I give you five minutes, white man, but you better not be wasting my time, and you better not be selling no aluminum siding. I done run off more aluminum siding mens than you got teeth in you head.”

She gave him more than five minutes. In the cramped kitchen smelling of bacon and soap they sat under a bulb shaded by a large plastic sunflower. She offered him a glass of cream soda, took one herself, and asked if he had a cigarette. He told her he had given up the habit, and she explained that she had cut herself down to bumming. In an ungenerous world, it was a good way for an old lady to suppress a vice.

Teach knew enough about insurance to make the thing seem plausible. After setting the hook, a ten-thousand-dollar benefit, he guided the talk to Thalia. He explained that he needed information about her to file the claim. The old woman looked at him sharply. “Thalia had her a policy with you. Ain’t you got all the information you need?”

Teach moved the talk to the past, to Thalia’s life before she’d worked at the country club. He asked about her education, what she’d done in high school, the community college, hoping the old lady would warm to him, to the past.

After a while, it began to work. The woman’s good eye misted as she talked about a dead granddaughter. “She was my baby. I raised her. She’d try to live with that sister of hers, but she kept coming back here to me. We got along good, and she never disrespected me. Then she got involved with that Naylor. All her trouble started with that evil nigger. When she saw the life them crack mens live, the way they throw money around and turn women out like dogs. She got shut of him when he went to the jailhouse, and things was good with me and her again for a while.”

Naylor.
Naylor?

Teach kept his voice quiet, easy, the voice of a man representing an insurance company. “Did you say Naylor, Mrs. Liston? Was that the name you used?”