Suitcase City (32 page)

She said, “Missy invited some girls to sleep over tonight.”

Teach didn’t tell her that she might need to stay at Missy’s for as long as they would have her. Well, Missy had slept at the Teach house more times than he could remember.

“Is Tawnya there?” He found it comforting to think of the two girls together.

“Yeah, she’s here. She jumps higher than anybody.” Teach waited, listened to his beloved daughter’s breathing. The music in the background seemed farther away when she said, “Dad, is it bad?”

“It’s not good, Deanie, but I don’t want you to worry. Actually, I think I’ve got a pretty good chance of straightening this thing out soon.”

“You ever going to tell me what it’s all about?”

“That depends, honey.”

“On what?”

“On how it turns out.” He gave her the number of the satellite phone, told her to keep it secret, not to call unless she had to.

“Daddy, I
know
that. You need me to do anything?”

“No, honey. I love you . . . Uh, just, stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight.”

“We don’t do that one anymore, Dad. That went out with leather helmets.”

Teach called Marlie Turkel and asked for a meeting. He would be driving Bama’s Alfa, and, as far as he knew, the police had no idea he and Turkel were in touch. Still, the skin on the back of his neck prickled with the thought of returning to Tampa.

Marlie Turkel said, “Why don’t you meet me at Hugo’s? It’s a little Cuban place on Howard. Nobody but students and drywall guys. We can talk there.”

Teach had called her home number, and he could hear a small dog yapping in the background. He told her he’d need thirty minutes.

Marlie Turkel said, “It’s almost eight o’clock. They close at nine, but what the hell? I know the owner.”

When Teach got there, she was sitting in a back booth with a plate of black beans, rice, and fried
platanos
in front of her. She was drinking beer. Teach was too buzzed to eat, but the beer looked good. Crossing Tampa Bay he’d held Bama’s Alfa to the speed limit and kept one eye on the mirror. Looking for a white Crown Victoria with Aimes and Delbert in it, or maybe the military twins who’d come to his front and back doors only a few hours ago.

While Teach ordered his beer, Marlie Turkel looked around the restaurant. An old Cuban couple sat in a booth at the front windows. Across from them, a slumming yuppie couple were paying their check. That left four guys from a softball team back by the men’s room. They were drunk and arguing a slide into home plate. Marlie Turkel leaned forward and put her hand on Teach’s. “So, what you got for me?”

He had thought about this a lot, and it wasn’t simple. It put both of them into deep and turbid waters. But it seemed to him that he had to do it. He pulled the manila envelope of photos from inside his shirt and passed it to her. While she opened it, Teach considered his risk.

He had promised Thurman Battles no one would see the pictures. There was no telling what Battles would do if this got out. Teach feared the man’s wrath, but he feared Bloodworth Naylor more. Battles was ruin, Naylor was death.

Teach also risked a simple sniff of contempt from the woman who was carefully reviewing the pictures now. Maybe she’d just hand them back, tell him they proved nothing about the murders of five prostitutes. Teach waited.

Marlie Turkel examined the last photo in the stack, the one of Tyrone and Bloodworth Naylor, for a long time. Finally, she paired it with the one of Tyrone raising the crack pipe to his lips and turned both to face Teach. When he saw her eyes, the curiosity jumping out of them, he knew he had her.

She said, “I knew it. I knew there was a reason Battles dropped that action against you. You two assholes and your public spirit. Jesus H. Christ, I knew it all along.”

Teach just looked at her, knew she was enjoying this beyond measure. Knew it was what made her who she was. She had just turned over the fallen log, revealed the slimy larval things that lived under it. She reached into her purse, took out her notebook, a pen, and a pint of bourbon. She poured some bourbon into her empty water glass, knocked it back, chased it with beer, and looked a challenge at Teach. “They don’t have a liquor license here,” she explained. “Wine and beer only. It’s a damn shame.”

Lots of things are a shame,
Teach thought. “You were right,” he said, “there was a reason Battles dropped the lawsuit. His beloved nephew was a crack addict and that,” Teach pointed to the hockey mask of Naylor’s face, “is the man who supplied the drugs. His name is Bloodworth Naylor. He owns a place in Suitcase City called Naylor’s Rent-to-Own.”

“Charming.” Marlie Turkel was writing it down.

“He’s also the man who killed Thalia Speaks.”

“Thalia Speaks. Wasn’t she number five?”

Teach nodded.

“Did he do the others too?” She stopped writing.

Teach shrugged to her question.

She put down her pen. “How do you know all this? Are you sticking to what you said before about helping Aimes with the investigation?”

“I can’t tell you how I know. I can’t even tell you why I can’t tell you. But it’s the truth. The absolute truth.”

He put his hand on the photo of Tyrone standing at the window of Naylor’s white Bronco. “Pictures don’t lie. The man is obviously a drug dealer. He was Thalia Speaks’s lover before she worked at the country club. He killed her.”

“What’s your proof of that?”

Teach shook his head again. He watched as the light of Marlie Turkel’s excitement started to go out. He decided to give her the rest of the bad news. “You can’t use Tyrone’s name.”

“Why not?” Pushing her face toward his. Her voice loud enough now to stop the drunken conversation behind her about the endless slide into home. The Cuban couple by the windows rose in stiff dignity and left, the man giving Marlie Turkel a look of old-world disapproval.

Teach leaned forward until they were almost kissing, put a finger across his lips. “Why hurt the kid? He’s up north in a ritzy prep school getting his life back together. And Battles is paying for it. Why smear the good uncle with the blood of a bad nephew?” As he spoke, Teach wondered if these things meant anything to her. She had to slop the beast its daily diet of news. Did she even notice the gruel of ground-up human lives she threw into the trough?

The woman’s belligerent eyes told him she wasn’t buying his putting the Battles family off-limits. Teach said, “If you want anything more from me, you’ll leave them out of it. They aren’t central, anyway. The important thing is murder, isn’t it, not some kid messing with drugs?”

She leaned back, opened her purse, took out the pint again, and offered it to Teach. He waved it away, sipped his beer. She poured herself another boilermaker. “I could leave them out and put you in,” she said, smiling, but without mirth. “Are you willing to make that trade?”

Teach had seen this coming, had placed his faith in the ravenous appetite of the beast. “You do that, and you lose me as a source, and you piss Aimes off. Permanently.” When he mentioned Aimes, he put his hands on the photographs, hoping she’d get his message.

He watched her think it over, the heat of resentment finally giving way to a cool pragmatism. “All right, but when do we meet again? When can you give me more?”

Again, Teach shrugged, and loved the feeling of it. The loose, carefree rise and fall of his arms and shoulders. “I don’t know, but I’ll be in touch as soon as I can. And believe me, there’s more where this came from.”

Marlie Turkel pulled the photos from under Teach’s hands and put them into her purse. “Walk me out to my car.”

When it came to masculine courtesies, Teach took orders from women. This woman was tough in a restaurant with her pint of whiskey, but a little unsteady in a parking lot at night. He opened the door of the beat-up white Taurus for her, and watched her taillights disappear down Howard toward Tampa Bay.

FORTY-TWO

Marlie Turkel had been up late the night before writing her column. Working hard but the words not coming. Not like they usually did, like they used to. Before Teach and the prostitute murders had come along, she’d been in a long slump. Now she had something big and she had to milk it as hard and as long as she could. She had to because she had heard from loyal sources that there was talk among upper management of replacing her with some kid fresh out of J-school, some size-six with cleavage like a knife, a nose for news, and the lean young legs for running it down. Girls like that were pouring out of Northwestern, Emerson, and Indiana, knocking off internships from sea to shining sea, and winking their tits at managing editors who would hire them for the scenery alone. Marlie Turkel had seen them come and go with résumés and smiles that aimed to please. And she could see bad news in the eyes of her bosses. Their eyes said she was getting tired, losing that go-for-the-groin instinct that had made her Tampa’s toughest woman reporter. One of these days the girl with the résumé and the smile would arrive and stay.

Marlie Turkel had come up the hard way in a man’s profession, and she had done it without the usual comforts—marriage, children, real estate. She lived in a cluttered and drab apartment, drove an aging Ford, and had no friends. She’d worked so hard for so long she had lost her friends to neglect and she’d forgotten how to make new ones. Instead of friends she had a thousand sources and a dog. The dachshund was older than the Ford, and his bowels worked about as well. She had taught him to defecate on a stack of newspapers in the bathroom, but the poor thing had his accidents. On good days, the apartment smelled like Lysol.

She had slept later than usual after the long night of writing for her deadline, and she had risen to the dust and clutter of the apartment, an empty refrigerator, and the dog sitting beside her bed whining for something she could not give him—her time. She got up, showered, dressed, considered the day before her, and decided that she would have to rethink Mr. James Teach. She had made a bad deal with him. Why should she wait for more information from him when some reporter from the
Times
might already be ahead of her, might be writing the story of the prostitute murders while Marlie Turkel was searching her pantry for something to feed a dachshund with a spastic colon?

The animal whined and raised a paw to scratch at her, ripping her panty hose at the ankle. “Down, Pulitzer!” she snapped. “Damn it, look what you’ve done!” The dog shrank out of kicking range, watching her with sad, disappointed eyes. “I’ll go to the store, I’ll get you something and bring it back.” The dog lay down with his head on his forepaws. She had lied to him before.

She grabbed her purse and car keys. She shouldn’t have given in to Teach. Should have told him she was going to revisit the story of Thurman Battles, James Teach, and the deal they’d made. She didn’t believe the photos Teach had shown her came from Aimes. Police photos had laboratory markings on them, warning labels identifying them as evidence. Teach had taken the pictures himself, had used them to get Battles off his back. Now he was using them to keep her from writing about his connection to the murder of Thalia Speaks.

Somewhere in the tired, restless night she’d spent after finishing her column, Marlie Turkel had decided to break her bargain with Teach. She had decided to write it all up, a long, complicated, fascinating story about a prostitute, a drug dealer, an honor student, a civil rights attorney, and a corporate vice president. She had even come up with a title. She was going to call it, “The Five Shall Meet: How a Wealthy Businessman, a Community Leader, a Pimp, an Honor Student, and a Prostitute Became Entangled in a Drama of Drugs and Murder.” Hell, maybe there was a book in it. The kind of true-life crime story that could hit the best-seller list and make Marlie Turkel the name and money she had always wanted.

Sitting in her car, happy to be away from the dog’s demonic whining, she found in her notebook the address she had written down after talking to Teach at Hugo’s. Naylor’s Rent-to-Own was out on the edge of Suitcase City. It was a nasty place, but she was going there. She couldn’t write her piece without seeing Mr. Naylor face-to-face. Asking him exactly what it was that connected him and Mr. Teach and Thalia Speaks.

FORTY-THREE

When the newspaperwoman called, said she was nearby and wanted to talk, Blood Naylor told her to come to the back of the shop. He’d meet her on the loading dock. He took her into the warehouse, the room where he had sat with Tyrone, giving the boy drugs and talking to him about their plan. The old record player was there in the corner with its stack of 45s. Little Anthony.
Tears on my pillow . . .

When she flashed the picture of him and Tyrone, Blood was surprised and very angry. And of course he concealed it. The white woman, big and ugly and dick-sure of herself, whipping the picture out of her shoulder bag along with a notebook. “Mr. Naylor, I’d like to talk to you about your relationship with Tyrone Battles.”

He was glad she hadn’t come in the main entrance, done this in front of his salesmen and their moron clients. He imagined the salesmen stopping their bored sermons to the Barcalounger idiots, looking over at the boss and this pushy white lady. Wondering what the hell was going on.

Blood handed the picture back to her. “That’s not me. You can’t see it’s me from what you got there. It’s only half a face.”

“It’s half of
your
face, Mr. Naylor. Anybody can see that.”

She walked over and stood near the forklift, looked around the warehouse, taking it all in. Blood always cleaned the residue from the little table where he cut his lines, and he knew you couldn’t smell cocaine, but the half-empty bottle of Stolichnaya and the bleary glass were there for the woman to see. It didn’t look professional.

“Looks like you do quite a little business here. In
furniture
.” The woman smiling at him. Suggesting that something going on here wasn’t furniture.

A crate of damaged Taiwanese table parts rested on the forklift’s hydraulic elevator. The woman picked up a broken table leg, dropped it back into the crate. She looked around for something to wipe her hands on, looked at him like he might be the thing, then she frowned and wrote something down. Blood had to laugh. What in the hell was she writing about a forklift?