Suitcase City (27 page)

She pursed her lips and scrunched up her face. “Not that stuff. That’s
way
retro.”

Faintly, Teach heard the words “
sexual healing
” drift down the stairs. He sighed, sipped, tried to think. “Okay, Deanie, thanks.” Meaning she could go.

She stayed. “Dad, is somebody leaving those messages for you? I mean, are you in trouble again?”

She looked scared, her face a little pale, her hands smoothing the thighs of her razored jeans. Teach wanted to protect her, to jolly her out of the room, buy time like he had done with Marlie Turkel. See what developed. Then he thought:
She’s my daughter. She has some rights here. And what do I have, what do I have but her?
He set the bourbon on his desk, pushed the glass away from him.

“Deanie, I think somebody wants to . . . hurt me. I don’t know who it is. I don’t know why.” He had begun, and now, seeing her widening eyes, the hands that started to tremble, he felt panic. What could he tell her, what would she understand? Certainly not all of it. Not yet. Maybe never. He stumbled on: “Honey, we have to be strong, and . . . and careful, you and me. We have to take care of each other and get through this.”

And suddenly there was anger in his daughter’s eyes, a hard, impatient anger. She shoved up and stood in front of him. “Bullshit, Dad. Tell me what’s going on. You can’t just give me,
We gotta care, we gotta love
. Is Tyrone doing this? Is that what it is?”

Teach’s mind was tired. He wanted rest, but he couldn’t stop here. “Deanie, I just don’t know. It’s possible.” A part of him wanted to say:
A woman is dead. A woman I knew. The police talked to me today.
But he could see too clearly all of the questions that would follow, and he wasn’t ready for them.

Dean turned away and walked over to the shutters where a buttery light poured in. She bent and peered through, like she thought someone might be out there. She closed the shutters. When she turned back to him, a calm, cunning smile came to her face. “Wait a minute, Dad,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

Her footsteps receded in the hallway that led to the garage, then after a minute she appeared in front of him holding a manila envelope. “Damnit, Deanie,” he said, “I hid those. How did you find them?”

“I know, Dad.” Her face was resolute. “I’m sorry if you’re mad at me, but I had to look at them.”

She had snuck into his darkroom, found the photos of Tyrone where he had hidden them at the back of a cabinet. And how could he be angry? The photos had been her idea. She had saved him. Of course she was curious. She opened the envelope and sorted through the shots. Teach waited.

She found the picture she wanted. “Look at this one, Dad.”

Teach took it from her. It was the first shot he had taken, Tyrone talking to the man who had driven up in the white Bronco. The driver was only a grainy image. His left cheekbone and one eye caught some of the light from a pole on the Gandy Causeway, but the right side of his face was in Tyrone’s shadow. Teach remembered the man’s arrival and his quick departure.

He handed the picture back to Dean. “What’s the point, honey?”

She was excited, her blue eyes large and bright. “Dad, can you enlarge this? Can you get this guy’s face to come in a little clearer?”

“If I can’t, somebody probably can. Why, honey? What’s this about?”

She looked straight into his eyes. “It’s about that song, Dad.”

Teach was catching her excitement now and losing his patience too. “Damnit, Deanie, what are you trying to tell me?”

A face appeared at the study door. Tawnya Battles said, “Hi, Mr. Teach, I—”

Dean turned to the doorway. “Um, Tawnya, maybe . . .”

Teach said, “Come in.” He walked to the door with his hand extended. Tawnya Battles shook with him. She was taller than Dean and her pretty face already held some of her father’s stern bearing. She wore ripped Levi’s like Dean’s and a white T-shirt that she had scissored off five inches below her breasts. Her midriff rippled with muscles a man would envy. Teach pictured her ten years from now—an attorney like her father, and a society wife, dignified, vital, and a little grave . . . How long had she been listening out in the hallway?

She stood in front of him barefooted like Dean, her skin a little darker than Thalia’s, looking him in the eye. “Tyrone gets his drugs from the guy in the Bronco. The guy is his, whaddayoucallit,
connection
. People laugh because the Bronco’s so, you know, O.J.”

Teach liked that she didn’t know what to call it. He didn’t know the current term.
Pusher
was probably out of date. He kept his voice fatherly, measured. “What about the song?” Something was wrong here, he could see it in Tawnya’s eyes. Something was stealing her courage.

“Mr. Teach,” Tawnya said, “the guy in the Bronco always plays that ’50s rock. It’s his thing. He’s way nuts about it. That song, it’s his favorite.”

Listening, Dean rubbed the slashed denim at her thighs.

Teach said, “And you know this how, Tawnya? That he
always
plays that song?”

He saw the grim decision come into the girl’s eyes.

“I was out there one night, on the causeway, and the guy came, and Tyrone talked to him, and he played that song. It’s not a song you forget.”

Dean shook her head and wiped at her eyes, suddenly red and swollen. “I swear, Dad, we didn’t do any drugs. We just had a beer, and we left right after that.”

We.
Of course.
Us chicks hang together.

Teach turned to her, a war going on in his heart. What should he say, what should a father say?

He took a deep breath, sighed it out. “Thanks for telling me the truth, Tawnya, Deanie. I’m not happy to hear you were out there, but I’m glad you were honest with me.”
And,
Teach thought,
maybe someday I can be honest with my daughter.

“Sexual Healing” had ended upstairs. Out in the foyer, the phone rang and Teach’s voice answered, saying nobody could come to the phone. Then the kid sang it again,
“You don’t remember me . . .”

PART THREE

THIRTY-FIVE

Blood put Thalia’s box of memories on the porch behind him, knocked, and called out, “Granmon Liston? You in there? Please come to the door. I got something for you.”

It was his mournful voice, a complaint searching for sympathy. He’d drunk enough vodka to tie himself to earth, but the coke was still confusing his nerves. He thought he could cover his condition with the look and the sound of his grief. And who could blame a man for using a little at a time like this? He knew exactly who could blame him. She was shuffling across the floor inside, probably wearing those slippers that looked like two dead rats.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Bloodworth, Granmon. You know my voice. It ain’t been that long. I want to talk to you.”

“Nigger, what you want here this time of night?”

Blood could not keep his voice from changing, something bent, a little crazy coming into it. “I brought you my con . . . condolences for Thalia. My sweet little Thalia. Can’t you let me in, Granmon?”

“Just a minute then.”

Blood listened as she released two dead bolts. She opened the door six inches, and he tried to read her face in the narrow slice of light, wondered what his own fucked-up face said to her. The old lady’s one good eye was hard black, the other one the color of egg custard. Her back was straight, her jaw clenched. She opened the door and stepped out of his way. He remembered Thalia telling him her grandmother had cataracts, needed surgery, but wouldn’t or couldn’t pay for it.

Blood had never liked Mary Lena Liston, but he had stopped short of hating her. Stopped there for Thalia’s sake. He picked up Thalia’s box, smiled sadly, and walked in. Standing on the worn living room rug, he put the box down again and pulled the old lady into a hug. She was like nothing in his arms, a weightless bony nothing. When he let her go, he saw that her face had not changed while he held her.

She said, “It’s too late at night for you to be in my house. Say what you want to say and go. I’m old and I’m tired.”

The worn pine floor groaned when Blood walked to the sofa. He sighed. “Ah, Granmon, I just come to tell you how sorry I am about Thalia. I miss her so much, and I know you do too, and—”

“I miss her now and I missed her then. When you took her away and shown her them evil nigger ways. All that drinking and running around. Newspapers say she was a ho. If she was, you made her one. Now you tell me you miss her. What kind of fool you take me for?”

Blood didn’t say anything, but he could feel his anger like the swelling of a bruise. It occurred to him that maybe he had come here to finish something, end the story of Thalia and all that went with it. This old woman knew more than anyone else about Thalia and him. She hated him. He could see it in the black light of her good eye, and he knew she could tell the cops plenty about him if she wanted to. She could point them in his direction like an old quail dog pointing a covey before she dropped to her belly with the crack of the shotguns behind her. His voice was sullen when he said, “It wasn’t me made her a ho. It was that white man she run with when I was in the joint. You ask anybody around here about that. They tell you.”

The old lady sighed. “I don’t believe she had no white man. No man but you, and I ain’t sure you a man.” She waved her hand in front of her like someone shifting smoke in the air. “Anyways, I’m too old to care. You done told me how you feel, now go.”

“I brought you something. I know you love boiled peanuts. I brought you some, just like I used to when I come here to see Thalia.”

Blood sat on the sofa and the old springs complained beneath his weight. He took the bag of peanuts from Thalia’s box and held it out to the woman. She eyed it carefully. The gift changed hands. She gave him a grudging, “Thank you, Bloodworth. Now . . .”

“All right. All right. I hear you.” He shifted toward her on the sofa. “I just wanted to see you, Granmon. Nothing bad in that, is it?”

“Nothing bad in that,” she muttered. “Plenty bad though, plenty bad all around.”

“All right. All right.” His heart’s sadness in his voice now. “You still got that picture of Thalia in there? In your bedroom?”

The old lady shook her head. “You ain’t going in my bedroom, and I ain’t letting you have no picture.”

“No, no,” Blood said. “You don’t understand me. I come to trade. I got some pictures. Thalia give them to me. You take as many as you want, and I’ll take that picture in the bedroom, the one where she a little girl. So, it’s a trade, not . . .” He let the words die in the silence. He shifted the box to his lap, took out the sheaf of photos, and handed them to the old woman. “I think Thalia wanted you to have these.”

Not even that hard eye could resist the envelope.
Ah, curiosity
, Blood thought.
It killed more than the cat. Killed everything alive on earth one time or another.
He watched her sift through the pictures, tried to read her as she took in the story of Thalia and James Teach, businessman, vice president, husband, and father.

Finally, she looked up at him, the eye full of sadness. She shook her head. “Why you bring these here? I don’t want see this.”

“So you see your little angel was a ho while I was up at Raiford where I couldn’t hurt her one bit, couldn’t hurt nobody. She hoing with a married white man, man lives in Terra Ceia with his blondie wife and his blondie daughter. Man has everything, and he still take your angel, my angel, my Thalia.” Blood could feel his eyes swelling, getting wet, and he didn’t want the old lady to see it. See him like that. He cleared his throat so loud it was almost a scream. “So, which ones you want keep? You decide yet? Take your time. I got plenty time. Keep some so you remember your Thalia like she really was. Not like that picture in your bedroom.”

Mary Lena Liston walked to the front door with the sheaf of pictures and the bag of boiled peanuts and threw them as far as her feeble hands could out into the night beyond the porch.

Blood followed her to the door. She stepped aside for him.

“Well . . . Granmon, I’m glad I came by. It . . . did me good to see you. We both loved her. We loved Thale, didn’t we?”

The old lady looked up at him, pure hatred in that one dark eye. “I loved her, Bloodworth, and I know what you did. Now, good night.”

Standing on the porch, he heard the door shut behind him. He said to the night, the darkness, “I loved her . . . but I let her go.” He turned back and said it to the closed door. “Want you to know that. I released her.” He knew she was listening. He said it again, louder, “I released her.”

He collected the pictures from the dewy grass, picked one, and left it on the porch for the old lady to find in the morning.

THIRTY-SIX

It woke you up?” Aimes stopped the Crown Vic at the traffic light on Kennedy and Armenia and looked over at Delbert.

“I shot right up in bed.” Delbert stared straight ahead into the intersection. “I don’t know why it came to me when it did, but I told you it would.”

“It wake her up too?”

“Who?” Delbert looked over at Aimes, confused.

“Her. Betty Sue. Ellie Lou. Fanny Blue. Cindy Clueless. The one you go line dancing with down at Zichex. The one who bought you that whole case of Cholula hot sauce for your birthday. It wake her up too?”

“I was sleeping alone.” Delbert going sulky, unappreciated. “And they don’t line dance at Zichex. Zichex is a disco for ’70s burnouts. Travolta wannabes, I don’t know. You ought to get out more often, get your nose in the wind, see what’s going on out there in the land of the living.”

Aimes hadn’t been out, had his nose to the wind, since his wife died of cancer a year ago. He had stayed home, watched TV, read books on military history, and worked out on his treadmill, trying to control his weight. He knew Delbert didn’t mean anything with his reference to the land of the living. And now, nose to the wind or not, he was glad Delbert had finally remembered.

After Delbert had remembered it, Aimes had cajoled his way into some supposedly sealed records. Back in 1979, James Teach had been convicted, sentenced, and incarcerated on a charge of drug-related activity. He had served eleven months of a two-year sentence in the Federal Prison Camp at Eglin Air Force Base. After his release, Teach had had the record of the felony conviction legally expunged. It was one of the weird anomalies of Florida law. If you had money for a lawyer, and the lawyer knew the right judge, and you kept your nose clean for a year, you could eliminate every trace of the offense from the public record. From all records except the mind of a persistent policeman.