Suitcase City (29 page)

“That’s right, Naylor. Nigger was her boyfriend before he went to Raiford. She made him come here, get out of his big ol’ fancy car, and sit on my porch and court her like a man ought to. He was good to her for a while. She told me she was gone make something out of him. Get him out of that crack life. But he got lawed and sent to the jailhouse. Thalia wrote him letters, and she got herself educated and went to work at that fancy white folks club, and she dropped him. Stopped writing to him. It was a dangerous thing to do. I told her that. Bad as he was, I told her she ought to stick with him while he was doing time. Them mens, they get out of jail and they come looking for the girl that runs around on them while they locked down.”

Teach cleared his throat, looked away from that one bright black eye. “Did she, uh, did Thalia take up with another man while this Naylor was in prison?”

The old lady looked at him hard. “Some white man. Met him at that club where she worked. You go to that club? You know that man?”

“No, no ma’am, I don’t know him.” He watched her, hoping she believed him. It had been a while since anything had been said about insurance. She had grown soft remembering Thalia, but the talk of Naylor, and of a white man Thalia had gone with, had made her hard again.

“Thalia told me she loved that white man.
I love him, Granmon,
she said to me. I think she was drinking that night, else she wouldn’t have said it. She known I don’t hold with white and black together like that. You know what I said? I told her lots of little black girls loved white mens, and lots of them got babies from them. That’s how you get high-yellow niggers, I told her. But you go over to the white side of town and see how many them little black girls is living with them white mens in them nice houses. You go look, and you come back and tell me about it.”

Teach saw the thing getting dangerous now. He decided to be quick, surprise her. He took the photo of the man in the Bronco from inside his jacket and held it in front of her. “Is that him? Is that Naylor?”

He saw immediately that she knew the man, even the phantom likeness Teach’s camera had captured. She pushed back from the table. Her voice was tired when she said, “You ain’t here ’bout no insurance policy, white man. You after him, you after that Naylor, ain’t you?”

She got up and shuffled away, her back to the ancient claw-foot gas stove with its blackened burners and smell of lard. Teach moved toward her, holding his hands up in front of him, trying to calm her, trying to find the words to tell her why he was here. Tell her that love was a part of it.

The old lady put her hand to her bony chest and sucked a sharp breath. He tried to read her face, struggled for something to say. She clenched her jaw and took a step past him toward the door. He had to do something. He took her by the shoulders, firm but gentle, and looked into her good eye. When she focused on him, he whispered, “Don’t tell him I was here.” She looked at him with more anger than he thought one eye could hold. He added, “Please.”

Her old arms like sticks in his hands, she shook her head at the shamelessness of men.

She knows
, he thought.
She knows it all now
.

She put her bony hands on his chest and pushed him back toward the kitchen table and whispered, “He was here. Bloodworth Naylor. Came in the middle of the night, just like you. Said he had something for me, just like you.”

God,
Teach thought,
Bloodworth. Blood Naylor.
He felt the small house grow crowded, dangerous with so many secrets. He wondered what was between the old lady and Naylor that she hadn’t told him.

“He said he loved her, told me how he missed her. Said he . . . released her. Told me it wasn’t him who made her a ho. It was that white man.”

Teach imagined the scene, Naylor and the old lady in this room, felt his anger growing. Naylor might have hurt Mary Lena Liston. He might still do it because she knew about him and Thalia. Teach would have to do something now. Maybe this was what the whole thing was really about. A second fight between Teach and a black man. A man from out of the past.

The old lady crossed her heart with her hands: “He showed me a box of pictures. Said Thalia give them to him. Now you come here trying to fool me. Telling me ’bout some insurance policy. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

Teach looked at her, glad she was so still, glad she wasn’t up and on him, beating him with with a broom like a dog. He said, “I am. I am ashamed.”

Groaning, she walked into the living room. When she returned, she placed a photo on the table in front of Teach. He and Thalia in the restaurant in Madeira Beach. Their smiles a little sad. The empty gift boxes on the table and the scraps of their meal. This one had been taken at the end of that afternoon when they were beginning to think about the hard return to separate worlds.

The old lady sighed. “I don’t care no more. Too old to care.”

Teach knew what he had to do. It might not matter here, or anywhere, but he had to do it. He had to promise. “I’ll find out who killed Thalia,” he said. “I’ll find out, and I’ll see he gets what he deserves.” He was at the door now.

“Thalia said she loved you.” Her voice was quiet, brittle as the heart she held. “She said it one night sitting here in this room. She never said that about him.” She looked at the door, letting him know it was time to leave. “I suppose that matter for something.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

Teach woke up at midmorning with a pounding headache. After his talk with Mary Lena Liston, he had come home to a dark, quiet house. Full of guilt, full of a crazy resolve to get Thalia’s killer, full of shock at the discovery that time and fate and Thalia had connected him again to Bloodworth Naylor, he’d had three stiff bourbons and fallen asleep on the sofa in his study.

The silence of the house told him Dean had gone to school. He wondered if she had checked in on him before leaving. Her whiskey-reeking father lying in his study, his face tortured by evil dreams. His night hadn’t been all cringing self-accusation. In the lucid hour before first light, he had done some clear thinking. Bloodworth Naylor had to be the man behind all his trouble. He had been Thalia’s lover. He had killed her in jealous revenge to destroy James Teach. And he had arranged her apartment so that Aimes would find the napkin and the photograph.

My God
, Teach thought,
that paper Delbert left the interrogation room to get. It must hold more of what Naylor gave them.

He sat up carefully, waiting for the nausea to pass and the headache to sink its grim talons deeper into his brain. The phone rang. Teach walked to it unsteadily and snatched it from its cradle. He would talk to the man, talk to him before the message played (
“You don’t remember me, but I remember you . . .”
). He would tell Naylor he did remember. Say he knew more than Naylor could ever imagine, and he was ready to deal with it now.

Walter Demarest said, “Teach, old buddy, I’ve got the information you asked for. And a little bonus for you . . . Anybody home?”

Teach’s hands were trembling, his head throbbed like some demon homunculus was jackhammering rocks inside it. “Sorry, Walter. Go ahead. I’m all ears.”

Walter Demarest gave him the name and address of the man who owned the white Bronco. Teach knew the name already, but not that the Bronco was registered to a business: Naylor’s Rent-to-Own in Suitcase City. Walter said, “Our investigator threw in some extras for us. He’s a zealous fellow. It seems that your Mr. Naylor is a convicted felon. Two prison terms, the last one at Raiford for aggravated battery on a prostitute and living from the earnings of prostitutes. Not a nice man, apparently.” There was a pause, then Walter said, “In keeping with our usual drill, I’m not asking why you want to know about this lowlife.”

Lying for a good cause had always come easily to Teach. “Some guy ran into Dean’s car. He took off, but she got his tag number. I just wanted to find out who he is, see if it’s worth pursuing. Sounds like the scumbag is better left alone.”

“Sounds like that to me.”

Teach could hear the office business humming behind Walter. Walter’s billable time ticking on the clock. “Thanks, Walt. I owe you one.”

“You owe me a round of golf. How ’bout Saturday morning, bright and early?”

“I’ll have to call you back on that one, Walt.”

“All right, buddy.”

When Teach hung up, the doorbell rang. He wanted badly to go upstairs and sleep for an hour, ignore the bell. Ordinarily, he endured his hangover headaches until the dinner hour when he gentled them with a little wine. This one needed aspirin and rest.

The bell rang again, and Teach went quietly to the dining room window. A young man in a cheap sport coat stood on the front porch. Teach didn’t recognize him, but his military bearing and the white Crown Victoria in the driveway told him the man was of a tribe he had seen too often lately. A policeman.

Teach wondered if you could just ignore a cop. Go upstairs and take that nap. If he had not looked out the window, he would not know who was there. The bell rang again and the man called out, “Mr. Teach, it’s the police. Open the door, please.”

Suddenly, Teach’s ears became those of his neighbors, and he moved quickly. Mrs. Carlson next door was often in her yard at this time of the morning, fussing with her daylilies. He imagined her saucer-eyed look as she struggled up, dirt falling from her fat knees, craning to hear the young cop call out Teach’s name. He opened the door six inches and peeked out, shading his bleeding eyes from the sunlight.

“Are you James Teach?”

What could he say? He admitted it.

“Detective Aimes would like you to come downtown.”

“What for?”

“Just an interview.” The cop smiled, but it was the smile of a man approaching a child with a needle.
This won’t hurt much
.

“An interview?” Teach opened the door a little more. The policeman looked at the clothes Teach had slept in, his unshaven face. The man’s eyes said that his words had been perfectly clear. An interview was an interview. Teach looked at the City of Tampa car in his driveway. Mrs. Carlson was not, blessedly, rooting in her yard. Across the street, one of the idiot sons of a neighbor was mowing the lawn. The boy wore earphones, jiving as he followed the mower. Teach was not sure why he said, “Wait a minute. I have to leave a message for my daughter.”

He closed the door just as the cop stepped forward, apparently expecting to wait inside. Teach stood behind the closed door waiting to see if the man would demand to be let in. Nothing. He felt panic rising from his stomach. He tried to push it back down. Tried to remember those Saturday afternoons when the job of football was before him, and his head was as clear as a hawk’s, flying high above a field with prey in its eyes. Standing, waiting, Teach felt some of the calm come back. Enough of it.

He picked up his wallet from the table in the foyer and found his shoes where he had stepped out of them the night before at the foot of the stairs. In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator and grabbed a half-eaten turkey sandwich wrapped in cellophane. He put it in his pocket, drank some milk from the gallon jug, and went to the bay window that let onto the backyard. Gently, he lifted one of the miniblinds and looked out.

A second policeman stood by the back door. He looked and dressed like the first, a young man with short blond hair and a tough, cool face. He rocked on his heels, his right hand resting on the pistol clipped to his belt. He checked his watch, looked up at the hot sun, and tugged at his collar.

Jesus,
thought Teach.
Jesus Christ. This is it.
He went to the garage, to the darkroom. He found the photos where he had hidden them and tucked the manila envelope under his shirt. The garage had a side door that opened to a narrow passage between Teach’s house and the Chelms’s place next door. As Teach put his hand on the doorknob, he remembered that the door was rarely used, that it might groan when he opened it. It did.

And Teach was out in the hot morning, running.

He had no idea where he was going, knew little of why he was running. He just knew he had to. Had to stay free for a while longer. And if he were to lose his freedom, then it would have to be on his own terms, whatever those might be. He ran between the houses, toward the backyard. He heard the cop from the front yard shout, “Look out, Ray!” Heard the running footsteps of the cop in the backyard.

Teach lowered his shoulder as the blond cop loomed in front of him, the man going into a crouch, sweeping his jacket aside to expose his service revolver. Teach hit the man at midchest and went up the middle of his face. Two more strides and a leap at the stuccoed wall that enclosed Paige’s garden, and Teach was dropping down onto the pool deck of the Hollingsworths, an old couple recently retired from Maryland. They had a rottweiler, a beast whose deep, angry voice Teach had often heard beyond the wall. He crossed the deck, dancing to miss a fall into their blue pool. He skirted the lanai and ran for the space between the Hollingsworths and the Dyes. Behind him the dog growled then barked, and Teach heard, “Ray!” shouted twice more, but there was no sound from the wall he had just scaled. Apparently the shoulder Teach had learned to use during his year on the Atlanta special teams had laid Ray down.

Running, a good sweat breaking on his face, his headache loosening its hot ring around his skull, Teach hoped he had not hurt the man seriously. He broke into the open, angling across the Dyes’ front yard just as the rambling wreck of Angel Morales’s yard-work truck and trailer pulled out of the driveway across the street. Teach did not know who owned the house. Many people in the neighborhood employed Angel Morales. The trailer, half a pickup truck divided from its cab and fitted with a wagon tongue, was piled with royal palm fronds, their long green tails trailing ten feet behind. Angel Morales and his son, Romero, were inside the cab of the old Ford pickup and probably, Teach thought, sharing the six-pack of malt liquor Angel brought with him every day.

Teach heard running feet on the Hollingsworths’ deck, then a bark, a shout, and a splash. He dove for the bed of palm fronds in the makeshift trailer.