Suitcase City (35 page)

“Damn you, let go of me!” The girl screaming, kicking, scratching at Delbert, and the cop whispering, “Police! Police!” Trying to show her his shield.

The last thing Aimes saw before going gun-first through the front door was Delbert sitting astride her, holding her hands and talking into her ear about the danger inside the house.

* * *

Teach came through the bedroom door with the Colt out in front of him, centered it on Blood Naylor’s eyes, those cold black eyes beside Dean’s cheek. The man’s big hand covered her mouth, but her eyes told Teach it was all right. She loved him. Everything was all right. He could do what he had to do. Teach took two more steps into the room, sighting the Colt at Blood’s right eye. The bed looked untouched. Dean looked scared but not hurt.

Blood Naylor said, “We got something to do here, Mr. Teach, Mr. Wrong Guy I Fucked With, and we got to do it right. You gone kneel down right there in front of your daughter. You gone apologize to her for what you did with Thalia Speaks. What you did to her and her mother. You killed Thalia. I want you to kneel down there and tell her about it for me.”

Teach kept the pistol aimed at Blood’s eye. “What did you mean, Blood, when you said you
released
her? You said it the other night to Grandmother Liston. Tell me what you meant.”

The sick surprise in Blood’s eyes made Teach happy. Some of it going back the other way. Somebody watching you, knowing what you did, what you said when your heart was in your hands. The words made Blood’s gun move an inch away from Dean’s neck. Maybe this was the time. Maybe it was time for Carlos.

* * *

Creeping up the stairs, hoping the old wood didn’t sing under his weight, Aimes heard Blood Naylor say it again: “Kneel down there, Jimmy Teach. I want you to apologize to your daughter, and then I’m gone put this gun in your mouth and stop you talking.”

Aimes was outside the bedroom door now. It was quiet out in the yard. But soon, he knew, the street would be all noise. The neighbors seeing the police car, looking into the trunk of the Taurus, and puking in the street.

Aimes didn’t hear any of that yet. What he heard was Teach in there: “Fuck you and your kneel-down, Blood. Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? You fucked with the wrong man. I know you killed Thalia. I can prove it. There’s a cop downtown named Aimes who knows you did it too. He thinks you
released
her, Blood.”

Aimes heard nothing for a second, then Naylor’s voice sounding as cold as the bottom of a well: “She had to die. She was in too much pain. You gave her the pain, and I took it away for her. I did a kind thing. But you, white motherfucker, you gone die for it. Now kneel down.”

* * *

When Dean saw Aimes’s face at the door, she opened her mouth wide and bit down hard on the hand that covered it. She tasted hot blood, heard the man behind her scream. Aimes leveled a gun at him.

* * *

Blood’s eyes jumped to something behind Teach, and Teach fired at his forehead. Then the world went white light, screams, and shooting.

* * *

Aimes’s first shot missed. He shoved into the room, stood beside Teach, and saw Naylor already falling backward, pulling the girl with him by a hand clamped across her mouth. Naylor’s gun went off twice beside her face, and Aimes felt the smack in his chest. He dropped to his knees and put a bullet into Naylor’s armpit. Naylor spun, firing as he turned, filling the air with plaster dust and pillow feathers. As he turned, the girl spun with him, blocking Naylor from Aimes’s view. He saw Teach lunge forward, push his pistol to Naylor’s spine, and fire twice. Then he saw the bright spurt of blood from Teach’s ribs. Aimes thought,
Yes, the wrong man. Mr. Teach was the wrong man.

FORTY-SIX

Aimes sat on the mezzanine in the public library looking over the new biography of Harry Truman. It was long, and political biography wasn’t his usual fare, but Truman had fought in World War I, as an artillery battery commander, and he could look forward to that part of the story. His head was beginning to ache from the fluorescent lights, and he was hungry. His evening session on the treadmill had burned up his lunch. Maybe he’d walk up to Franklin, see if CDBs was still open. Get a pizza.

A black woman about his age, a librarian, walked over to him. Aimes had seen her in here before. She stood in front of him holding a book against her pretty chest. When he closed the biography, she said, “I thought you might like this. It just came in.”

He took the book from her. It was a study of the Grenada invasion. He felt something he had not felt in a long time, years maybe. It was that confused tremor in some unnamed organ a man felt when a woman came nearer than was proper, did it for her reasons. His palm was suddenly moist holding the book. He thanked her.

She stood looking down at him for a beat, then two, and he knew he should say more, but didn’t find anything in the confusion to say. She said, “Well, I hope you enjoy it,” and walked away. She went into a little glass-walled office, and Aimes could see her talking to another librarian, a thin young white man. Aimes took a deep breath, wiped his hands on his trousers, and opened the book, pretended to read.

Things had been quiet at work since the shooting at Teach’s house. Aimes and Delbert had been assigned to the murder of a cab driver in Ybor City. The guy shot for a few dollars, money that had probably bought drugs. The case of the serial killer had been cracked, but not by Aimes and Delbert. Since the day Blood Naylor died, Aimes had been tired and something else he could not name. That day, Aimes and Delbert had been the center of attention, for a while anyway.

The two of them had sat in the middle of the squad room and for thirty minutes, cops had stood around them, looking at Aimes’s vest spread out on a table, the bullet stuck in it, upper-left, over the heart. The cops making him show them the purple bruise on his left pectoral the size of a cocktail coaster. A couple of guys cracking on Delbert, asking him to show his wounds. Delbert showing them the scratches on his forearms where Tawnya Battles, who had been running to help her friend, Dean Teach, had got him. One of the cops saying, “So that was your contribution to the gunfight, Delbert? You sat on the dancer?” Another guy looking at Aimes: “You sure know how to break in a detective. Make him sit on a ballerina.”

And then the cops drifted away, back to offices, computer screens, the coffee room. It’s quiet and Aimes picks up the vest, examines it again, sweat breaking on his forehead. Then there’s noise out in the hall, and a detective comes in with a little Asian guy in handcuffs, and suddenly the squad room is like the locker room after the Super Bowl. Winning team.

This detective, a guy named Orin Smithers, has the serial killer. The scourge of Tampa, America’s Next Great City, is a five-foot-two, forty-three-year-old Korean. Aimes and Delbert join the crowd, but the suspect is hustled to an interrogation room. He wants a lawyer. The watch commander calls for one. Smithers comes out for a minute to get a cup of coffee. He looks like a kid at Christmas. His face is the color of Santa’s hat. Here’s the story he tells:

“The weird thing about the dead women, you guys all know it, was how calm they seemed, and the way the blood ran down from their head wounds to the front of their bodies. Some of us were talking about how they might have been stood up in a closet after they were shot, something like that. Well, I went to New York last week to see my sister’s daughter get married, and I took a walk through Central Park. And I saw this Chinese guy giving massages, ten bucks for fifteen minutes, and he’s using this weird chair. You sit in it leaning forward with your face in this oblong slot, and he stands behind you, and you’re almost upright. It stuck in my mind. So, I get back from New York, and I’m out talking to some people about the Vietnamese girl, Phuong, and I see this guy in a little storefront place off 7th Street, giving a massage in one of these chairs.

“I don’t know, something about the guy wasn’t right. I figured I’d go in, ask him if he’s got a license. I walk in the door, and this woman’s getting her neck rubbed, and she’s Korean or Chinese, and she takes one look at me, and she pays the guy and leaves. The woman is in the life. I can tell by the way she’s dressed, the way she makes me for a cop the minute I walk in. And I can smell something. I look down. On the table by the chair, there’s a bottle of oil—peanut oil.

“I show the guy my shield. I’m about to ask for his license, and I notice there’s a back room. One of those bead curtains, no door. So I ask him if it’s okay if I look around back there. The guy gives me a big smile, says,
Of course, officer.
And Jesus, what do I find? The guy’s got a bulletin board, a regular trophy case with newspaper articles about the killings, and thumbtacked next to each article is a little plastic baggie with something in it. Well, this is getting creepy, so I draw my weapon, and I lean close to one of the baggies, and I see it’s got hair in it. They all do. And I’m no expert on hair, but I can see it’s all black and some of it’s fine and some of it’s coarse. At which point the hair goes up on the back of my neck like a rottweiler, and I’m thinking,
Holy shit
, and I hear the bead curtain behind me, and I turn and here’s this little Korean guy holding his hands out to me palms up.
I confess
, he says, and I can smell the oil on his hands.
I killed them all
, he says.
I killed them while they were very relaxed. And I only kept one thing from them. I only kept a lock of hair.
”

The captain comes out of the interrogation room wanting to know where the hell the public defender is. The excitement in the room is higher than Aimes has ever seen it. While Smithers is telling the story, Aimes buttons his shirt. Nobody interested in the bruise over his heart anymore. He turns to Delbert. “The guy sure doesn’t fit the profile. Supposed to be an angry white male, reclusive, intelligent, socially maladroit.”

Delbert nods at him, touches the scratches on his arms. “Teach didn’t fit either.”

Aimes wonders what this means. Is Delbert trying to say his hard-on for Teach was the right thing? This Korean guy, a guy as far from what you’d look for as shit is from ice cream, proves Delbert’s point about Teach? Aimes lets it go. “Well,” he says, “it’s all police work. And it’s all interesting. Isn’t it, my young friend?”

Delbert nods, that ambition of his making him crane his neck in the direction of the interrogation room where the senior detectives are all crowding around the door. Aimes decides he isn’t going to call his partner his
young friend
anymore. Just
friend
will do. Delbert’s been at it long enough for that.

* * *

Aimes lifted his eyes from the puddle of blurry words about Grenada and snuck a look at the glass-walled room where the nice-looking woman had been sitting. She wasn’t there anymore. Well, it was all right. There were ten reasons she was the wrong one: She wasn’t any Whitney Houston to start with. She was Aimes’s age at least, and her backside was bigger than it had been last year. She looked like she was hiding herself in that librarian’s dress. He could see her going to church three times a week (Sunday and Wednesday night services, and once for the Covered Dish Supper Preparation Committee). One of those sisters who had lost a man or three and settled for a dull life here, and the promise of harps and white gowns hereafter. Aimes went downstairs and checked out the book.

He was getting into his car when she walked past him on the way to hers. Something made him get back out and walk over to her. She was settled behind the wheel, had the engine running. It scared her when Aimes showed her his shield. “You ought to get one of your male colleagues to walk you out here at night. It might be the best thing.” Holding his voice low, calm. Smiling.

She looked at him for a long time out of those big, dark eyes, a little mischief sparkling around in them. “I wish I had a male colleague in there. But it’s just us ladies.”

Again, Aimes didn’t know what to say, damning himself for coming over here, bothering her if he wasn’t going to do it.

She helped him: “I see you checked out the book.”

He looked down at it, heavy in the hand that was sweating again. He looked up at the high royal palms that bordered the parking lot. A warm wind from Tampa Bay was blowing up there, making the palm fronds rustle and rub together. It sounded like a man rolling over alone in bed, groaning, an unhappy man. What was it Delbert had told him?
You ought to get out more, get your nose in the wind.
Aimes looked into the woman’s eyes and said, “How would you like to walk over to CDBs with me and get some pizza?”

She pulled her key out of the ignition and opened the door. “Detective Aimes, I thought you’d never ask.”

FORTY-SEVEN

Dean waved from the coppery water. “Dad, I’m gonna swim to the beach.” She tossed back her hair and gave him that wet devil grin.

Teach called after her, “Careful. And be back before dark.”

The
Fortunate
was anchored off Caladesi again. Continuing north in the morning. Teach was taking his daughter to Cedar Key, and on from there to wherever the wind blew them. He had quit his job. The house in Terra Ceia was up for sale. Somewhere up north where the coastline bent to the west, a new life waited for them. Maybe it was Panama City, maybe Pass Christian, maybe it was all the way to Corpus Christi or inland somewhere from there. America was full of cities, and there were phone books full of names to choose and lawyers enough to make the changes legal.

Teach and Dean had decided to leave after Teach had shot Blood Naylor dead in his bedroom, but not because they had to. Their names were in the papers and would be for weeks to come. Teach was persona non grata at the club, and most of Dean’s friends had drifted away, though Tawnya Battles had remained fiercely loyal. Teach was pretty sure Mabry Meador would fire him if he didn’t quit first. He and Dean couldn’t go to the grocery store or to a restaurant without seeing heads dip into whispers. They had lost almost everything, and James Teach felt better than he had in years. There were no more secrets. They didn’t have to leave; they wanted to.