Suitcase City (6 page)

Ah,
Teach thought,
ah yes
. And his hand shook a little at the deferral of bourbon
. Ah yes, indeed
.
So speaks this minion of the unseen Malone.
Teach slid from the stool. Looked over at McLuster, who stared back at him from the bottom of the well of a fat man’s unhappiness.

“Well . . .” Teach tapped his watch. The ballet recital, his daughter spinning in bright light, in impossibly unstable shoes, surrounded by a supporting cast of the young and eager, and sometimes the beautiful. His daughter a vision of gift and light and love. Teach said to McLuster, “Well . . . I’d like to stay for one more, but I’ve got to go.”

The man’s chin trembled. “You ever,” McLuster said, his hand lifting a glass to his lips, spilling some of it, putting it down. “You ever tell
anyone
about this . . .”

Teach raised his hands, let them fall, shook his head. Why would he? Who did he know that would . . . ? But now he
could
see himself telling the story. The pee stain a necessary piece of the bizarre puzzle of this afternoon.

McLuster swiveled on the stool, his chin quivering, his eyes going moist. And then Teach felt for the man. He took a step forward, some notion of comfort gathering in his mind. A hand to rest on the man’s shoulder. A couple of pats.

But McLuster leaned back, raised his hands, made fists. “Stay away from me, man. You got some serious aggression, you know that? You got some unresolved shit in there you need to work on. You need to
see
somebody.”

McLuster tossed money on the bar and started toward the door. Teach watched him. This was not a day to let anyone get behind you. McLuster stopped at the door, his red face swollen, shaking. “You never were worth a damn in the pocket, Mr. Hot-Shit Quarterback. You had a noodle arm, and you never could pass the gut check.”

The gut check?
Teach thought, as McLuster opened the door, as the light, not so bright now at five thirty, shafted across the floor. The gut check. Check your guts at the door when you come to Malone’s Bar. Oh, how they piled on you here in Malone’s, Teach thought, and he would have laughed if his throat had not been too dry for even an exhausted croak. Benny the bartender wiped his shiny bald head with a towel and turned away.

SIX

Detective Aimes stopped beside the unmarked Crown Vic and looked at La Teresita, Tampa’s best cheap Cuban restaurant. He had left a plate of trout à la rusa on the counter before crossing the street to Malone’s Bar. From the other side of the Crown Vic, Detective Dwayne Delbert was watching him carefully. Delbert’s eyes were full of that quiet redneck seriousness, that question:
What now, boss?

Aimes and Delbert had been eating, Aimes having his usual, and Delbert addressing himself to a pressed Cuban sandwich with so much Louisiana pepper sauce on it, he was hissing, “Haaa!” with every bite. Some old guy rushes in, so skinny and brown he looks like bones in a leather bag, with one of those white plastic caps that protect your nose. This old guy comes in talking loud about some nigger boy and blood and trouble across the street at Malone’s.

Then he sees Aimes at the bar, and he thinks,
Oh Lord, I just said, “aardvark,” and there’s, by God, an aardvark sitting right there at that counter.
The old guy backs out like a fiddler crab scooting for its hole. So Aimes turns to Delbert and nods and Delbert goes, “Haaa!” waving his skinny hand in front of his mouth, and walks outside to the city car.

Aimes gets two more bites of the Russian trout, savoring the crumbled egg, the sweet breading on the fish (he is suspicious of the fish, thinks it’s mullet, but what the hell), loving that hot olive oil rolling around his mouth. Then Delbert is back, standing behind his stool, reaching over for another bite of Cuban sandwich. Delbert says somebody called in a disturbance over at Malone’s, says, “I told dispatch me an’ you’d check it out.”

Aimes turns to him. “Delbert, my young friend, would you ever say,
Me would check it out?
”

Delbert considers it, about as interested in grammar as he is in Italian light opera. Aimes thinking Delbert is only taking the question seriously so he can get another bite of sandwich.

“No, I wouldn’t, come to think of it. I’d say
I
would check it out.”

“Right. So when you add
me
, what do you say?”

Delbert thinks about it. “I say you and I . . . we’d, uh, check it out.”

Aimes pushes off from the stool, looks at Yolanda, who’s at the cash register burying some currency. La Teresita is jumping as usual. Aimes points at his plate, mouths,
Save this for me
. Yolanda frowns, looks over at the door where several kids from the university are waiting in their Reeboks and button-downs and culottes or whatever those spread-your-legs-without-fear skirts are called. Yolanda smiles sadly. Aimes smiles too for community relations, and turns to Delbert. “All right, let’s go over there.”

On the way across the street, Aimes says, “How come you told them we’d take it? How come you didn’t let the uniforms have it? Let them get their clothes ripped, blood on their shoes. We did that already. We are the sport coats now, Detective Delbert.”

Delbert says, “I know we’re the coats. But that old guy that came in, he might know it too. He might be a citizen with not enough to do. The kind that writes to the
Tribune
, calls WFLA 970 on your dial, talks about why some people disturbing the peace in a bar have to wait twenty minutes for uniforms when they’s two detectives in a restaurant right across the street.”

When
they’s
? Aimes thinks. Another grammar fart. But young Dwayne Delbert is nobody’s idiot child. He has a point about the geezer in the nose cap. A citizen with time on his hands.

* * *

Back outside, Aimes looked across the Crown Vic’s roof at Delbert and said, “Bet Yolanda threw away my food.”

Delbert put a hand delicately on his stomach where, Aimes figured, the hot sauce was warming up the man’s duodenal ulcer. Delbert said, “That stuff is all waistline anyway, man.” Delbert disapproved of Aimes’s weight, but Delbert couldn’t claim the virtue of three-minute abs. The man just had the metabolism of a gerbil.

Aimes got into the car. Delbert settled in beside him. He and Delbert had been out knocking on doors, talking to people about the murders of some local working girls. There had been three now, and the
Trib
was warming up to the story, calling it a
string
of prostitute murders, speculating about a serial killer.

Tampa was a city with a perpetual inferiority complex. For a while, the local flacks had called it America’s Next Great City. Then somebody had stumbled over the comedy of that title. Tampa had the Bucs, and that was good. Tampa had hockey, the Lightning, but hockey was a B sport in the South and always would be. Tampa had great seafood, its own branch of Cosa Nostra, too many malls, the world’s best airport, and lately, Ybor City.

Ybor, the old Cuban cigar-manufacturing district, had been renovated, gentrified, and reborn as the nightclub scene. Tourists walked the Ybor streets in the hot afternoon, gazed at the beautiful wrought-iron lampposts on Seventh Avenue, ate at the Columbia, witnessed the awesome rite of the hand-making of a cigar at Ybor Square. They read the historical marker that said José Martí had lived here, and wondered what all the excitement was about. They didn’t see the kids pour in for the slams and the bad poetry coffeehouses and the clubs that heated up at one a.m. That was when it got wild, and that was when it got dangerous, and that was when three prostitutes had disappeared from the streets crowded with stumbling drunks and punk ravers and university students.

The newspapers wanted a winning football team, a nightlife better than Bourbon Street or South Beach, and, Aimes figured, they wouldn’t be happy until they had their own serial killer. If they couldn’t have one, they were going to invent the guy. Make Tampa the next great city it had always promised to be.

Some kids playing behind a small electronics-manufacturing facility had smelled something strange, and being kids, they’d opened the lid of the dumpster and found the body of a young Vietnamese prostitute named Phuong Van Tran. The woman had been tied with curtain cord, ankles to wrists, simple square knots, slipped into two plastic bags duct taped together at her waist, and then hoisted into the dumpster. If anyone in the neighborhood Delbert and Aimes had canvassed had seen or heard anything on the night she was dumped, no one was admitting it.

The method chosen for killing Phuong Van Tran was execution-style shooting. Phuong had a single .22-caliber bullet hole in the back of her head. The ligature marks at her wrists and ankles were not deep or abraded. They came from postmortem swelling. When she was tied up, she had not struggled. She had not been beaten. She was fully dressed in panty hose and a cocktail dress with a label from one of the low-end clothing outlets in a local mall. She had been bound and shot in a way that was matter-of-fact, or maybe curiously gentle. Looking at her, Aimes remembered thinking that she must have gone along with it, must have thought it was some sex game she’d play and get paid for, must have been smiling or at least not screaming when a firing pin had struck a primer sending a bullet into her brain. However curious or gentle or playful it had been, murder was murder, and Aimes and Delbert had been out talking to people about what they might have seen or heard.

They’d finished a long afternoon of walking and knocking and talking, and then they’d gone to La Teresita for that Cuban sandwich and the dubious but delicious Russian trout. Then Malone’s Bar. Now Delbert glanced over at Aimes and said, “Your sister’s boy, huh?”

Aimes knew that Delbert, his new partner, wanted to hear about it. Knew Delbert wouldn’t push. Knew that if he just said,
Yes, my sister’s boy, and a surprisingly nasty piece of work he is,
Delbert would nod and that would be the end of it. Nobody pushed anybody in this car: that was Aimes’s rule with his partners. No prying and no lying. But they would learn about each other. They would learn a lot. Some of it by inference, some of it by telling, most of it by experience. And some of the experience would not be pretty. Aimes was teaching Delbert the detective business.

Aimes didn’t look at his partner. He guided the Crown Vic through the rush-hour traffic toward the police station on North Tampa Street. He said, “Yeah, he’s my sister’s boy. I don’t know him all that well. His daddy and I didn’t get along. His daddy was in the Navy. Served on a tanker. He was killed in an accident, fueling a destroyer at sea. It happened when the boy was ten. I never got close to him after his daddy died. He’s supposed to be a good kid. The family hope. Straight As in school. All-state on the football field. Hell, the kid could ride his brain
or
his jockstrap to college. You don’t see that too often.”

Aimes looked over at Delbert as they sat at the traffic light at Fowler and 30th Street. Delbert nodded, touched his stomach, leaned to the side, and belched quietly. Aimes said, “Why do you eat that stuff, man? You know it hurts you.”

“Same reason you eat that fish in a puddle of oil. It tastes good. I like it. I’m a creature of unbridled appetite.”

Aimes laughed. “You’re a creature of a great deal of bullshit.”

Aimes had twisted one of his fingers when he’d grabbed Tyrone Battles by the front of his shirt, and it was throbbing now. He laughed again, and it felt good. Thinking:
And a creature of some particularly fucked-up grammar. And wait a minute. Where did “unbridled appetite” come from? That isn’t the Delbert I know and educate.
Aimes figured it came from some soap opera or some girl or both. One of the gum-snapping, line-dancing, short-term loan officers Delbert dated. A woman who liked to watch soap operas when she and Delbert weren’t two-stepping to the “Cotton-Eyed Joe” at Zichex or wherever it was they went in their snakeskin boots and up-the-crack jeans.

“So,” Delbert said, looking ahead at the traffic, “the good boy was just having a bad day?”

Aimes thought about it. What in the hell was his nephew doing in that bar? Blacks didn’t go into Malone’s. Hell, the boy wasn’t even old enough to drink. What had he been doing in the restroom with those two white men? Had the boy really said, “Give it up”? Both of the white men had said so, though the fat one had thought the boy only had to pee and was asking for a place at the porcelain. Well, something had made the fat guy piss his pants. And something had made the other one, the big handsome guy with the confidence and the aging athlete’s body, thump the boy upside the head.

Aimes had never seen Tyrone in a scuffle, but he had seen the boy work on the football field. Aimes had played some football himself, enough to appreciate the boy’s talent. He knew it wasn’t just local. So maybe the white guy had sucker punched the boy. How else could a middle-aged pharmaceutical salesman coldcock a kid with the physical gifts of Tyrone Battles? Well, something had happened in there, something strange.

Then Aimes thought,
Wait a minute. Teach? James Teach?
He knew the guy. Knew him by reputation at least. Didn’t the guy play football? Where was it, Florida? Yes, that was it. Jimmy Teach, the walk-on quarterback from some one-light town up in the Panhandle. Teach had been good, very good. It made sense now. Tyrone had met his match in that men’s room.

Delbert waited until they caught the next stop light. “So,” he said, “you think they gone let it go or not?”

Aimes thinking,
They gone
? He said, “Delbert, my young friend, this world is full of fools. If those two have the sense God gave a tin-dick dog, they will most certainly let it go.”

“Fools will be fools.” Delbert scratched the side of his face with the stubby ends of his fingers.

He bit his fingernails to the quick, another thing that endeared him to Aimes. Aimes had offered to paint the fingers with quinine, something really nasty-tasting. Said he’d bring the bottle himself and the Q-tip every day, do the painting. Help Delbert break the habit. Delbert had declined, said the women he dated didn’t mind his fingers that way. Said they liked vulnerable men. Delbert said he told his women he was in a dangerous line of work, and he hoped he could be forgiven some scuffy-tuffy fingernails because in every other way he was a straight and unwavering public servant.