Suitcase City (7 page)

“You tell them that?” Aimes had asked. “That thing about straight and, what was it, unwavering?”

“Words to that effect,” Delbert had told him.

Aimes: “And it works?”

Delbert: “Sure does.”

Aimes thinking that no self-respecting black woman would fall for a line of bullshit like that.

They turned off North Tampa Street, drove through the gate into the parking lot at the rear of the police station. Delbert said, “Pretty weird, we go in that bar, and it’s your nephew.”

“We didn’t need it, did we?” He wasn’t going to remind Delbert that someone could have told the dispatcher to let the uniforms handle it. You didn’t last long with a partner if you dealt in might-have-beens.

Aimes was going to cover his and Delbert’s ass with the paper of a very carefully written report. He’d write it brief and general. It would describe an altercation in a bar. It would include the names of those involved, the names of the witnesses, the time of day. It would say that Teach had admitted drinking. It would say that both men claimed to be the victim and neither requested medical attention. It would say that Teach alleged there had been a razor which later turned out to be a comb. It would say the scene was cleared without an arrest. Period. Those were the facts, and Aimes would not move an inch beyond them.

He collected his possessions from the front seat of the car, checked the floorboards for anything he might have dropped, then turned to Delbert. “I hope that boy has sense enough to leave our man Teach alone. No good can come from those two meeting again.”

Delbert nodded.

Aimes knew the people in that bar thought he had lost his temper with the boy, grabbing him by the shirt, sitting him down hard. But he hadn’t lost anything, and he knew Delbert understood what he had done. Controlling the boy a little before things got out of hand again between him and Teach. It was good police work. What bothered Aimes more than having to use force, more than the finger that throbbed steadily now, was Tyrone’s arrogance, the boy not knowing, apparently, what he was risking by getting into a fight with a white man in a bar.

Sure, the kid came from a different generation. He lived by different rules, some combination of hip-hop and bad-ass football bravado. But shouldn’t a kid smart enough to get those good grades know how easy it is for a favored child to fall? Shouldn’t he know how fast and how far that child could fall in what was still a white man’s world? Even when you figured in the boy’s youth and inexperience and how much he had already been petted and pampered by white coaches and teachers, it still didn’t make sense. The boy being in that place, doing what he’d done, taking the attitude he’d taken with a sergeant of the Major Crimes Division of the Tampa Police Department.

SEVEN

Teach parked the Buick under a majestic banyan tree on the old redbrick drive of the Tampa Women’s Club. The city of Tampa had once proudly worn miles of redbrick streets, and employed men, mostly Cuban, who knew how to grade the roadways and spread the white beach sand and nestle the rich red bricks into the sand from one granite curbstone to another. The artisans were gone now, and the red bricks survived only in the best neighborhoods, saved by the vanity of the rich.

The automobiles Teach passed as he hurried toward the old Spanish stucco and terra-cotta tile facade of the Women’s Club were the thoroughbred descendants of the Packard Roadsters and Delages and Stutz Bearcats that had lined this drive when the banyan trees were sprigs, and the sky beyond the club’s roof was not crowded with glass-and-steel skyscrapers. Ahead of Teach, the last arrivals, women in filmy tropical pastels and expensive shoes, towed in their bored husbands.

Teach checked the bloodstain on his coat sleeve for the tenth time since leaving Malone’s Bar. He had bought film at a drugstore, then, with a few minutes to spare, he had driven to a bar on Kennedy Boulevard. The bourbon he’d tossed back while the barmaid counted out his change had steadied him, quieted the loudest voices of his headache, and sent him back out into the muggy dusk with the ramshackle house of his optimism somewhat repaired.

Teach quickened his step and prepared his smile. It was always strange for him, stepping into the opulence of the ballroom. The varnished mahogany wainscoting, the crystal chandelier shedding its pink light on the damask tapestry with its stilted scene of serene men on horseback spearing a lion that seemed to be in no particular pain. The murmur of conversation that would suddenly quiet as the lights went down and the music began to play and the first dancers appeared on stage, shy and brave and fragile.

Teach rested the old Minolta SLR on his right coat sleeve, concealing the bloodstain. He would look, he hoped, perfectly natural entering this way. A club woman gave him a program and a gentle frown for his lateness. Teach deferred the pleasure of opening the program to see Dean listed as principal dancer. He stood behind the last row of seats, imagining his wife, Paige, somewhere in the sea of organdy and silk. That she had not lived to see their daughter in this role seemed a crime of fate, a sin worse than any of Teach’s own. He closed his eyes and saw Paige where he knew she would have sat, halfway down on the aisle. In his mind’s eye, she lifted her head to look around for him, her shining honey-blond hair in the usual chignon. She’d had a good neck, long and smooth, and a heartbreaking wisp of hair had always escaped the chignon just under her left ear.

As he started down the aisle to find a seat, a hand took his arm, turning him. A red-faced man in a pink blazer looked petulantly at him and said, “Please.”

Teach stepped aside as the man ushered a tall, fiftyish black man and his wife down the aisle to the reserved front row.
Stately
was the word that formed in Teach’s mind. The way the couple moved, the way they claimed the usher’s deference and the attention of this prosperous audience. The black man walked with a musical grace, and his dark suit was rakishly cut for a man of his age.

The man’s wife carried herself with regal dignity. The entire ballroom watched them settle in the first row next to a couple Teach recognized as the mayor of Tampa and his wife. The two couples smiled and greeted each other comfortably, and the lights began to go down.

Teach hurried down the aisle in the half dark, excused himself across the knees of a sixtyish couple, and dropped down next to a diamond-beglittered matron. He smiled at the woman, who inclined her head toward him and sniffed. Her nose worked on the air between them, then she frowned. The bourbon. And if she could smell it, so, probably, could others. Well, what the hell? Other men had come here straight from work after a bump from the office bottle or a stop at Eric’s in the Franklin Street Mall. Teach took a good comprehensive whiff of himself and got it all: the musky sweat of violence and fear, the tang of blood and whiskey.

After a brief overture, the curtain rose on a woodland scene Teach thought must have been painted by a descendant of the tapestry maker. A line of girls flowed onto the stage in pink tutus, white tights, and pink toe-shoes. Their hair was blond and bunned, and each wore a white blossom on the crown of her bun. These girls, Teach had learned, were the corps de ballet.

Several of them were pretty. They were all earnest and deeply imbued with the seriousness of The Dance. But none of them, Teach knew from years of these evenings, was talented. And wait a minute, there was a new girl. A black girl. She tottered in on uncertain toes, her movements a little too robust for the corps. Watching her, Teach knew she was an athlete. He could see her running the hurdles or doing the Fosbury flop over a high-jump bar. A spirited girl, she seemed trapped up there on the stage, her eyes a little panicky, her energy too large for this subtle rite.

Sitting here amongst these complacent burghers, listening to the lilting music, watching these daughters of wealth and privilege move in stately patterns on the stage, Teach shuddered and thought,
I could be handcuffed in a police station, could be fumbling through the Tampa phone directory for the name and number of an attorney, could be leaving a phone message for my daughter: “Uh, it’s Dad. Sorry I didn’t make it, honey. Something’s happened. I’ll be home as soon as possible.”

And then the entire vista of disaster opened up before James Teach: himself in prison, a lost man in a world of grinding stupidity and violence, all because of a few seconds of bourbon-inspired heroism in a men’s room.

And there was gorgeous Dean. She had swept onstage in a swell of violins, turning on
pointe
with her arms sweetly arched above her head, the stiff tutu flaring out to reveal the clean line of her thigh. God, she was beautiful. God, what gifts she had given and been given.

She had inherited Teach’s athletic talent, but that wasn’t all of it. She was the perfect combination of his power, reflexes, and concentration, and something ineffable and inexpressibly fine that was Paige. Teach watched as Dean commanded the stage, turning and twirling in front of the other girls. Behind her, they were no more animate than the trees and shrubs of the backdrop. When the solo was finished, Dean moved to the wing and three other girls danced in unison—wood nymphs, shepherdesses? Teach wasn’t sure. He looked at the program. There would be three more moments for Dean, and one of them had to be Teach’s too. He would rise in false apology, hurry, bent-backed, down the aisle, and kneel at the foot of the stage. As unobtrusively as possible, he would snap the Minolta’s shutter, capturing the elusive art of Dean.

Teach pushed himself up and apologized his way to the aisle. When he got to the foot of the stage, the music was swelling for Dean’s second solo. Teach knelt and the corps de ballet moved into his viewfinder. In the middle was the black girl, and, as she entered Teach’s field of vision, he heard to his right a small squeal of pleasure, a whispered, “There she is. Isn’t she just so sweet?”

Teach lowered the camera and looked over at the black couple. They had melted in delight at the sight of the girl. Beside them, the mayor and his wife looked on with dutiful appreciation. The black man slowly turned his head. He looked mildly annoyed to see Teach crouching in the dark. Teach lifted his chin in greeting, held up the camera, shrugged. The music swelled. The man nodded and turned back to the stage. Teach focused the camera on the dark space in the wings where Dean would enter, bringing magic.

EIGHT

Bloodworth Naylor aimed the camera and snapped the picture. “Oh yes,” he said. “Oh my, my, yes. I love it. I do love it. Turn the other way. To the light. That’s right. Now hold it just like that.”

The boy, Tyrone, turned his pretty head to the side, that sullen, pouty look on his face. That injured-party look. The shutter clicked. The Polaroid that rolled from the camera looked like a mug shot. Bloodworth Naylor moved closer, getting the wound on the boy’s cheek into clear focus. Blood liked the wound. It was lucky. More than he could have asked for if he’d written the story himself, the story of what happened in a bar between a black boy with an attitude and a white man with a bad temper. He told the boy to hold still, adjusted the light from a standing lamp so that it was harsh on the nasty, bruised-mango gash. The pictures were turning out very
True Detective
, very
National Enquirer
. Blood took the last picture, then sorted through them all. Lord, weren’t they wonderful?

He put the camera on the table by the lamp. He had the boy in the warehouse behind his rent-to-own furniture store. Back here among the cardboard boxes and the packing crates and the repossessed mattresses and the bedroom suites tagged for the loading dock, nobody would bother them. Nobody would see the splash of light from the camera each time Blood Naylor took a shot of that lovely, ragged little mouth of flesh on the boy’s cheek.

“And you didn’t put no ice on it?” Blood asked for the second time.

“No, man. I told you. I didn’t put no ice on it.”

“That was smart,” Blood Naylor said. Compliment the boy. Keep him in the spirit of the thing. “You know we want it to look as bad as it can look.”

The boy nodded.

“And you didn’t go to the emergency room because they might take some blood, and we know what they might find in it.”

Tyrone nodded again, and Blood thought it would have been nice for the boy to go to the emergency room, get that medical-records thing going, but they couldn’t risk it. A boy with blood like this boy had.

Tyrone had told him the story twice, but Blood wanted to hear it again, at least some of the details. “You just decided to follow those white men into the men’s room—the idea just come to you, just like that?”

Tyrone nodded once more, looked at Blood with those nervous, ready eyes. Blood knew what the kid wanted. Blood’s Special Reserve. And, Lord knew, he’d earned it.

Blood said, “You want to do up?”

The kid looked almost angry now, that big, scary football anger. It made Blood want to laugh, thinking about angry boys on a football field doing angry things by the rules with some referee in a striped shirt and funny pants blowing his whistle when somebody got too specifically angry at somebody else. Blood Naylor knew the real anger, the one that walked the yard at Raiford. It was specific. Someday he might show it to the boy. If he had to.

With Tyrone watching, that baby anger, that nervous impatience, Blood pulled the plastic baggie out of his pocket and stuck the blade of his penknife into it, dipping out the white powder. Bloodworth Naylor’s Special Reserve. The Colombians gave it to him uncut, a small amount for his special customers. None of that baby formula mixed in this shit. Jam up your sinuses, make you shit like a goose. This was the pure extract of the coca leaf, and you had to be very careful with it. A little of it went a long way. A little of it had taken Tyrone Battles, honor student and football hero, a long way indeed.

Blood Naylor had tailed his old friend James Teach for a month, using a car he borrowed from one of the men who worked on the loading dock. Teach had no idea what was happening. What white man would notice a middle-aged nigger in a beat-up Camaro riding along behind him on Bayshore Boulevard and parking outside a doctor’s office when he went in to check on his salesmen? Blood knew Teach’s patterns, knew how he spent the mornings at the office, then went out in the afternoons to bird dog the sales force. How he liked to make the early afternoon pit stops in the local bars, talk some of that jock talk with the Corona-and-lime crowd.