Suitcase City (14 page)

Aimes had learned long ago that a black man made it in a white man’s world by working inside the house, not chucking rocks at it from out in the yard. There was no disputing Battles’s money and success, his position in what some folks liked to call the black community. Hell, when the guy died, they’d probably erect a monument to him on the Franklin Street Mall. When Aimes bought it, he’d be lucky to afford a plot of ground in Memorial Gardens and a decent stone over his head.

But downwind from Thurman Battles, the air had a certain odor. Aimes’s cop nose knew the smell, the tang of something not exactly right. He knew he probably wouldn’t live long enough or well enough to learn what it was. And there was something smelly about Tyrone too. It wasn’t just his big, smart mouth. Every adolescent kid had one of them nowadays. They learned to talk that trash from the rappers and the politicians who told them they were entitled to everything but a day’s work. There was a bright, crazy flash in the boy’s eyes—it was anger, excitement, something.

Standing in that bar, backing Tyrone off, telling him to cool it, Aimes could have sworn the boy enjoyed the scene he was making. Enjoyed being Tyrone watching Tyrone act up. Maybe the kid would get over it. He had brains, good looks, and guts. Football guts, at least. Kids grew up and found their ways in the world, just like Aimes had done.

Aimes had done well on the high school football field and in the classroom and had graduated from Florida A&M with a degree in sociology and a winning record as a quarterback. But the pro offers had not come. In those days, black men did not play quarterback in the NFL. The book on black men was that they could run and jump and hit—oh Lord, hit you like the midnight train to Valdosta—but they couldn’t think. At least not well enough to lead white men in the NFL. It didn’t matter that Aimes had called his own plays for three winning seasons at A&M. None of that hand-waving, aircraft-carrier-landing thing from the sidelines.

After college, he had gone into the Marine Corps. It was one way a black man could get respect and security. And the military was a good background for a career in law enforcement. He hoped by the time he finished his hitch in the Corps that the Tampa Police Department would be open to the ambitions of a smart black man. And that was the way it worked out. Aimes had come along too early for a professional football career, but just in time for the Corps, and he’d been a groundbreaker in Tampa law enforcement.

Delbert was running his finger around the edges of the empty jambalaya plate, wiping up all that sausage fat, licking it. Aimes watched a purple blossom land on the windshield in front of him. The good and the ugly. You had to keep them apart, especially in your own head.

“Detective Delbert, how come you keep returning to this thing with my nephew and our Mr. Teach?”

Delbert pulled his finger out of his mouth and touched his temple, squinted, closed his left eye. “Something about Mr. Teach. Ever since I saw him, I keep thinking I’m gone remember it.”

“It’s the football,” Aimes said, yawning, already feeling that after-lunch heaviness setting in. “He’s a football star, quarterbacked the Gators.”

“Naw.” Delbert never seemed to get that after-lunch slump. The guy ate like three tapeworms in a Great Dane and still had the energy of a hummingbird on crystal meth. “Naw, it ain’t—excuse me—it
isn’t
that. It’s something else. It’ll come to me. It always does.”

Aimes chuckled at Delbert correcting his own grammar. It was like a guy splitting his foot with an ax, then buying steel-toed shoes. “The same thing?”

“The what?” Delbert looked at him, lost.

“You said it always comes to you. I asked if it’s always the same thing. You know, that comes to you?”

Delbert’s face slowly opened into a smile of recognition. “All right,” he said, “go ahead and make fun of old Dwayne, but you gone see. It’s gone come to me. There’s something about that guy and it ain’t—
isn’t—
football.”

SIXTEEN

Teach sat in his study waiting for Dean to come home. He had to tell her about his troubles. Had to prepare her for what people would say.

A car entered the driveway with a little squeal of tires and a blast of rock music. The radio stopped, and Teach heard the car door open and Dean’s familiar giggle, then the raw throb of an adolescent baritone. He looked at his watch. It was nine thirty, late for Dean to be getting home. He had no idea where she’d been. He wanted to go to the window and see who was out there with her. He looked at the empty glass on his desk next to a pile of sales projections. He poured himself another bourbon and tried not to think about Dean out in the night with her friends and everything else that was out there. Hurtling automobiles piloted by drunks, soulless thugs with guns, men who sold drugs to children. Or worse, children who handed other children drugs with the wise smile that said,
It’s all right, everybody’s doing it.

What he feared most for Dean was out there in the driveway. The throb of that baritone that still broke from time to time, returning to its prepubescent yawp. That voice held the power that would someday call her away from him, promising a world far from the father who had carried her in his arms. Teach knew it had to happen. He had no desire to stand in the way of Dean’s dating, all the rest of it. But he wanted it to be right for her. He wished that he could somehow save her the pain of learning what a woman had to learn.

The quiet outside his study window was broken by the boy’s voice. “Cool, Deanie. See you second period.” Then Teach heard his daughter’s voice, not the high giggle, but a lower, more confident tone. The warm music women played deep in their throats to make slaves of men. Listening, Teach knew there was already a terrain of Dean’s he could not enter.

The front door burst open and her shoes slapped the tile in the foyer, then boomed on the stairs. Above him, her bedroom door closed. Teach had time to raise the bourbon to his lips before rock music shook the timbers of the old house. The door opened again up there, pouring the screech of heavy metal down the stairwell. Then the music stopped, and Dean’s bare feet descended.

She stood in the study doorway. “Daddy, I wish you wouldn’t drink so much.”

It was not what Teach had expected. “How much do I drink?”

“Too much.”

“How much is that?”

“You have at least two bourbons before dinner, and then you drink two or three glasses of wine. In driver’s ed, they said that makes you legally drunk.”

“And I seem to come and go safe and sound.”

Dean frowned. They both knew she was right. She was wearing a short pleated skirt, almost a mini, and thick white cotton socks. Her T-shirt said,
Animals Have Rights Too,
beneath a drawing of a rabbit holding out its right foot which was a key ring. Her gorgeous face—in the genetic raffle, she’d drawn the best features from him and Paige—was a little flushed and her hair, usually fresh and lustrous, looked dirty.

“What have you been up to?” Teach asked her.

“Cheerleading practice at Missy Pace’s house.”

Teach nodded. Charlie Pace was a prominent ob-gyn, and Paige had considered their daughter Missy a desirable friend for Dean. But cheerleading had been a matter of contention in the Teach household. The dance teachers said it would ruin Dean for ballet. Teach loved her dancing, but had never promoted it. She would dance if she wanted to. So far, she had shown a remarkable fire. She rehearsed long hours, endured injury and fatigue, and gave up some of the social life other kids enjoyed. Dancing burned time and energy. At Dean’s age both were dangerous, and it gave her an identity beyond being pretty or living in a wealthy neighborhood. Now, apparently, she was practicing for cheerleading tryouts in spite of her dance teachers’ warnings.

Teach wanted to ask how the boy who had brought her home fit into cheerleading at Missy Pace’s house. Was the kid an ogler? Had he (and other boys) been invited there? In Teach’s own youth, girls would have stoned any male who attempted to watch them hopping like martyrs in the fire of cheerleading practice.

Dean moved into the room, her hips swaying like her mother’s had, just enough. Her head bowed, she walked around the study, picking up things (Teach’s putter, a sleeve of Titleist golf balls, a trophy he had won in a club tournament with Walter Demarest). She examined these things thoughtfully. Teach glanced at the bourbon glass on the desk, wanted some, but didn’t pick it up. She made the circuit of the room and settled on the sofa under the casement windows that let onto Paige’s garden. The sweet odor of jasmine flowed in on the night air.

“Daddy, what’s going on? The kids at school are talking about you. Over at Missy’s tonight, Lisa Dupuy said you were in trouble with the law.”

Lisa Dupuy
, Teach thought.
The fat little cow.
A gossip just like her mother. He looked at Dean, and she stared back at him, ready to hear what he had to say, ready to believe him. Teach, who, by any standard, had been through hell the last few days, saw the pain in his daughter’s eyes and felt like crying. He fought it, could not show her the man she depended on for love and money dissolving into rheumy tears. “What else did Lisa Dupuy say?”

“Well . . .” Dean shot those blue eyes at him, then crossed her legs and dug earnestly at a cuticle with her thumb. “She was whispering to Missy and they stopped when I came over to see what the big secret was, so I said,
Look, would you two like to tell me the big secret here?
I mean, like, we’re supposed to be friends and all, and . . .”

Her eyes were misting now. Teach wanted the bourbon, wanted to rise and take her in his arms. Wanted to run like hell to someplace far away where his daughter would never have to see him again. He said, “Go on. Tell me the rest of it.”

“So, Lisa goes,
Don’t you read the papers, girl?
and I go,
Not lately. What’s in the papers I’d want to read?
and she goes,
Your dad, that’s what.
After that, I wouldn’t talk to her anymore.”

Teach sighed and shook his head. It had come to this. Dean, whose life should be, at least for a little while longer, like the dances she did: fantastic and colorful and loosed from the bonds of earth. She had been dragged into this dirty thing that had followed her father home from a bar.

“Deanie, I was going to tell you about it tonight.”

He told her the story. Told her he still believed he had been right, even though things had turned out badly and might get worse. Told her he was sorry this thing had touched her life, that he would have given just about anything to keep that from happening.

She listened in a grave calm. Teach waited. He thought she might complain about the cruelty of things or speculate about how the life she lived, the life of a daughter of wealth, might change, but she said, “Daddy, Tommy, he’s the boy that brought me home tonight, he’s on the football team. He knows Tyrone Battles pretty well, and . . .”

Teach thought,
Of course, of course my daughter knows Tyrone. All of her friends must know him.

“And he told me something you ought to know.”

Teach considered stopping this father-daughter talk. He could say that he appreciated her wanting to tell him about Tyrone Battles but thought it best for her to stay out of this mess. But his daughter’s eyes told him, sternly, to listen. They watched him carefully, and Teach saw something he had never seen before. It was not her love; he had seen that. Her love for him was one of the blessings of the good life that might now be passing. He saw this in his daughter’s eyes: she wanted to help him.

“Go on, Dean. Tell me what Tommy said.”

“He said Tyrone isn’t the kid people think he is.”

“Did he tell you what he meant by that? What Tyrone did that—”

“No, he wouldn’t go on about it. Those football jocks! They stick together. I had to work pretty hard just to get that out of him.” She glanced up at him from the cuticle she was surgically removing with a thumbnail. “Oh, sorry, Dad. I didn’t—”

“Forget it, sweetie, I haven’t been a jock for a lot of years, and there’s nobody much I stick together with but you.” He smiled. “Really, it’s okay.”

She bowed her head, then looked up at him from under her unruly honey-blond hair.

Teach said, “So this Tommy character wouldn’t tell you what’s not right about the honor student?”

“Nuh-uh,” Dean said, “so I asked Tawnya Battles.”

Teach sat up straight in his chair. “You
what
?”

“Dad, we’re friends. She’s a cool girl. You met her at the recital. Anyway, Tawnya, she doesn’t like Tyrone because he only dates white girls. And he tells the other black kids she’s acting white because she wants to be a ballerina. She told me he’s into some stuff that’s gonna get him in trouble.”

“What stuff, Dean?”

She looked at him, her eyes asking permission to cross some barrier, go to a place from which they would both look back at a lost world. Teach gave her a smile of careful encouragement. “Dean?”

“Drugs. Tawnya says Mr. Tyrone Football Star, Mr. Big-Deal SAT Scores, has a major crack jones.”

And that was when Teach saw it, and knew that Dean had seen it way ahead of him. “Go on, Dean, what else?”

“Tawnya says Tyrone hangs with the kids who go out on the causeway at night. You know, they do the bonfires and sit on their car hoods, jamming and playing tunes.”

Teach got the gist of it. It was the same in every place, every time. Reckless youth out on the edge of the town, the city, the village. Out where the wild river ran, the cops didn’t go, and parents didn’t see what happened. There was always that place. Out there.

“Tyrone smokes crack with that crowd, and Tawnya told you about it because he dates white girls? She told you this about her own cousin?”

Dean drew in her chin, held her hand up, and examined the cuticle. “Us chicks hang together, Dad. Don’t you know that yet?”

His daughter watched him, a smile that was pure irony, pure woman, purely inscrutable, playing at the corners of her mouth.

All right,
Teach thought,
maybe this does wash.
Maybe an allegiance of sex across racial lines is stronger than a bond between cousins. But, Teach reminded himself, Tawnya Battles was telling secrets about her father’s client. Maybe she didn’t get along with her father either. Or maybe she just didn’t give a damn about advancing the cause of civil rights by ruining the father of a friend. The thing was difficult to credit entirely, but right now it was all Teach had.