Suitcase City (26 page)

“Shoes off?”

“Yeah,” she said, “I think so.”

You think so?
Teach undid the straps of her medium-heeled sandals, revealing feet that were dainty and strangely young. Weren’t members of the fourth estate known for pounding the pavement until their feet bled?

“Do you need something to eat or drink?”

She closed her eyes. He waited, standing by the bed.

When he was sure she was asleep, Teach searched her purse for her car keys. He drove to a bar, ordered coffee, and watched thirty minutes of baseball. How long would it take her to sleep this off? What would she want when she woke up?

Teach left the bar with a diet soft drink, a carton of orange juice, and a ham sandwich. He found her car on the only street he hadn’t searched. He drove the remarkably cluttered and dirty white Taurus back to the motel and let himself in as quietly as he could. She was in the bathroom with the door closed.

Marlie Turkel emerged looking somewhat refreshed. She lifted her hand to the collar of her blouse, ran it down her bosom, and he saw not just embarrassment but anger in her eyes. Teach thinking,
Christ, somehow I’ve blown it again.
“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry . . .” But what was he sorry for? He couldn’t think of a damned thing.

She shook her head as though he ought to know how to finish his sorry story.

He shrugged and dangled her keys from his forefinger. “Found your car. It’s out front. Can you take me to mine?” 

She snatched her purse from the bedside table. “You were in my
bag
?”

“Well, yeah, I . . .”

He offered her the two drinks and the ham sandwich. She took them, tossed the soft drink on the bed, swallowed half the orange juice, and took a bite of the sandwich.

Teach made his voice as neutral as he could: “Do you take pills for this, uh . . . ?”

“Yeah, but like a lot of things in this world, they don’t always work.” She took another bite and mumbled through the food, “What do you care?” She finished the sandwich and the orange juice, looking at Teach like he was bad wallpaper. As he opened the door for her, she took out some bills from her purse. She handed him two twenties and a ten. “For the room,” she said.

“You don’t have to—”

“Take it.”

He took it.

When she let him out of the dented Taurus, he could feel the blazing concrete through the soles of his shoes. Before she drove away, Marlie Turkel said, “Don’t think this changes anything. You’ve got one week.”

* * *

The house was empty when Teach got home. He found a note from Dean in the kitchen.

Dad,

Practicing cheerleading at Missy Pace’s house. Check your messages. Weird!

XXXOOO,

Deanie

He went to the answering machine. The first message was from Walter. “How are you, old buddy? Still on that phony medical leave? Some guys have all the luck. What about an early round next Saturday . . . if you can get your lazy ass out of bed. Let me know. Ciao, buddy.”

What Teach heard next made his hackles rise. The same message, three times. It was music, a verse from an old ’50s rock tune. He remembered the song, but not the title or who had sung it.

A plaintive teenage boy soprano sang,
“You don’t remember me, but I remember you. T’was not so long ago, you broke my heart in two. Tears on my pillow, pain in my heart, caused by you . . .”

The first call had come in the morning just after he’d left for the police station. He imagined Dean waking up with those words drifting up the stairs. The other two calls had come at ten and eleven o’clock. Each time the same verse.

“Caused by you . . . whoo . . . whoo . . .”
That was where it ended. Dean was right, it was weird. Teach played the messages again. It was a scratchy old 45 RPM record, and the eerie effect was doubled by echo and background noise, some machine with a big engine. He saved the messages.

The phone rang. He waited while his greeting played, James Teach in his salesman’s voice saying no one could come to the phone, please leave a message. Then the long beep. Then the song started again:
“You don’t remember me . . .”

THIRTY-THREE

Blood Naylor had bought the little record player in a pawnshop. He’d set it up in the back of the warehouse where he’d met with Tyrone, given the boy his portion of Blood’s Special Reserve. It was quiet back here and private. Once in a while you could hear the forklift engine whining or one of the trucks pulling into the loading dock, but mostly it was calm and still. Blood owned a collection of old ’50s tunes. He had played them for Thalia, trying to interest her in the Drifters, Sam Cooke, Martha and the Vandellas, all that. She had listened with him, smiled, said she liked them. They’d even had some good, dreamy slow-dances to the tunes, but Thalia was just jiving him along. She loved the music of her own young years.

He had decided to play Little Anthony and the Imperials for Teach because of the message:
You don’t remember me, but I remember you
. Teach, the guy who had picked up Thalia at the country club like she came with the dues he paid. The guy who had told Blood one night in a bar after closing time that they were going to stick to their bargain and he was going to disappear and Blood, if he knew what was good for him, would do the same thing. Well, Teach had disappeared for a while and then he had reappeared and he had prospered. He had forgotten about Blood, but Blood had not been so lucky or so smart. Blood had gone back to the university city where the load of marijuana waited for him in the rented U-Haul truck, where it had to be distributed before anybody could disappear. And before he could disappear, he had been busted. Not caught with the entire load of product—in those days he would have done life for that much dope—just caught in the act of passing a modest consignment to a couple of fraternity boys. But caught was caught, and Blood did his first jail time for possession-with-intent-to-sell at the Glades Correctional Institution. And he spent a lot of that time wondering why James Teach had shut down their operation so abruptly, and how the guy had earned that wound under his arm. That bloody bandage he’d tried to hide. Blood’s mind eventually ran to the possibility that Teach had highjacked the Guatemalans, taken money from them, and that some of that money was owed to him, to Blood Naylor, because the other part of their bargain was a fifty-fifty split of everything, every last dime.

Wearing out his first jolt in prison, Blood figured that Teach had double-crossed him. If there had never been a Thalia, never been anything between her and Teach, Blood would have found him eventually and asked him about the sudden ending of a very sweet deal. But there
was
a Thalia, or there had been, and Blood had gone to prison a second time, and she and Teach had done their thing, and Blood had two good reasons for getting back into Mr. Teach’s fortunate life.

Blood had been using every day for a week. Using his own product like it was food and water, and he was running out of it. He’d started with a little, and with a promise that a little was enough, and then like every other fool he’d moved on to a lot. That was bad enough; it was worse that he had none to sell. His customers were finding other sources, and he was in arrears to his suppliers. Up at Raiford, out in the yard where he had pumped iron and gone to crime school, the better-informed inmates had described what Blood was doing now:
Might as well put a gun to your head.

There were always bad cops, cops on drugs, cops on the take, cops who looked the other way, and Blood knew his share of them. One of them had told him that Detective Aimes had called Teach in for a little talk. So Blood knew the story he had told with Thalia’s photo album was working. And now he was playing Little Anthony for Teach, that beautiful song about how one person remembers a thing, how it becomes everything to that person, and how the other person doesn’t remember because something has disappeared. Little Anthony was letting Teach know it wasn’t just Old Bad Luck that was fucking with him. It was
somebody
. A person. Some guy Teach didn’t remember. Blood liked to think of the guy standing in his big house in Terra Ceia (he had been out there, scoped the place), standing there with blondie girl child listening to that song and trying to explain it to her. Hell, the man had no idea what it meant. Not yet. But he was going to know. He was going to remember.

Blood cut himself a line with the edge of his Visa card and sucked it through a rolled twenty. The drug was everything they said it was, and worse. High was not where it took you; it took you to another planet, and every time you did the drug that planet drifted farther away from the system where you had started your fucked-up trip. Coming down . . . that was right. Coming down was just one thing—paranoia. When the drug stopped burning your nerves, you didn’t land, you crashed. What took its place in your nervous system was the certainty that everyone and everything in the world was out to fuck with you. Paranoia was an addiction too. You started thinking that way, you couldn’t stop.

When you were high, you needed something that tied you to the old reality, the place where you had started, and for Blood vodka was that thing. So he drank when he did the blow, and when he came down to land on planet paranoia, he drank to ease the fall.

He had told himself to sit tight, do nothing, wait to see what happened after Thalia, so he sat in the recliner in a corner of the warehouse and comforted himself with the Visa card, the rolled twenty, the vodka, and the old 45s. He told Clara in the office out front that he was doing inventory, meditating on ways to better the business. He needed quiet. He needed to be alone. She looked at him like she knew what he needed and it wasn’t quiet, but she nodded and went back to the green glow of her computer screen. What she knew was what he paid her for, how to run the 25 percent of his business that was really cheap furniture and vig from the fools who couldn’t make their payments on time.

Blood knew he had to stop using before he looked like he was using, before people saw the changes, the weight loss, the skin going from brown to yellow, the sag under the darting eyes, the twitching hands, the clenching jaw. But all he could manage was to promise himself to stop tomorrow, to stop after his next fall to earth, after this high was over.

Twilight came to the loading dock and the parking lot, and the two zombitches came to the jacaranda tree in the alley, and the john cars rolled in, pricing poon and talking the dozens with the two half-dead girls. Blood watched and smiled sadly and said to himself,
Nigger, you might as well walk on down there and sell something. You ain’t no different from them girls now, and you need the money
. When he remembered to do it, he dialed Teach’s number and played Little Anthony, but now there was little pleasure in it. He needed something else. More.

Finally he knew what he had to do. He had to see someone. Someone who had known Thalia.

THIRTY-FOUR

Sitting in his study, Teach heard Dean come home. Whispers and giggles told him she was not alone. She turned on the message machine, that weird male falsetto singing,
“You broke my heart in two . . .”

Teach called out, “Deanie, can you come here a minute?” He was holding the thin hope that one of her friends was playing a prank.

He had drunk one bourbon and poured himself another. He sat with the glass in his hand, sighting through the amber liquid at the shafts of afternoon light cutting through the shutters Paige had installed. In honor of Teach’s nautical past, she’d decorated his study to look like a captain’s cabin on a clipper ship. A lot of brass and polished mahogany. On their last anniversary, she’d presented him with an antique sextant in a glass bell jar. “To steer the ship straight,” she’d said, raising a glass of chardonnay to him.

He spent a lot of time in the study, most of it working, some of it imagining himself a man of another time, a rover, a seagoing romantic whose ties to the land were no more substantial than the light that filtered, honey-golden, through his bourbon glass. But Teach had been a real seagoing man once, and it had not been romantic. Of course, he had never told Paige the truth of his life on the water.

Dean stuck her head into the office, saw the glass in his hand, frowned. “How many?”

“This is the second, and the last tonight.” Music started upstairs, a black man’s voice, some mellow R&B. Teach pointed at the ceiling. Dean gave him her melt-Daddy’s-heart look. “Can Tawnya sleep over? We need to practice some jumps.” She did an effortless pirouette. “Ballet girls conquer cheerleading.”

Ah
, Teach thought,
cheerleading
. His policy on sleepovers was liberal. They meant pizza delivery, which meant he didn’t have to cook, or more accurately subject healthy young people to his dubious kitchen skills. And they meant no boys. He considered briefly the question:
Why does Thurman Battles allow his daughter to sleep under the racist roof of Teach?
His mind churned up answers ranging from the man having a change of heart (unlikely but possible) to the man’s daughter simply not telling him about it, or (more likely) the daughter striking the sleepover deal with Mrs. Battles (the old divide-and-conquer).

“Sure, she can stay. You girls are getting really . . . tight, huh?”

“Yeah, Dad.” Her face said,
So?

Teach told himself not to worry about Dean and Tawnya. The forces that made friends were as mysterious as those that bound lovers. Tawnya Battles was no more likely to hurt the house of Teach than Dean was to hurt the house of Battles. They were two girls who liked each other, had things in common, could giggle and whisper. Two girls floating free in the time-out of youth. They didn’t care about two hundred years of race relations; they had a relationship. It was a good thing.

“Uh, listen, Deanie, do you know anything about those messages on the machine?”

“Know anything?” That teenage privacy kicking in. The instinct to give as little as possible to the parental question.

Teach smiled. “Come in and sit down.” His daughter walked in a little warily and sat down. “Maybe it’s one of your friends. A prank. You know anything about that?”