Suitcase City (9 page)

He told the woman he believed Tyrone Battles had planned to take their money and leave them dead in a men’s room. He painted the picture vividly for her, thinking that he might appeal to a woman’s fear of just such an encounter in a parking garage, on a dark street. As he talked, she murmured, “Yes, uh-huh, yes, I see,” and he could hear her fingers chattering on a computer keyboard.

Teach finished with, “So you see, there wasn’t much I could do. I mean, except what I did. I think any man . . . Well, I mean it seems to me to be a natural reaction to the situation. The only reaction, really.” He should have stopped, but let himself say, “If you’d been there, you would have been glad I did it, Ms. Turkel.”

“What about the other man? Why didn’t he react like you did?”

Teach thought about it. From where he stood, the only true response was:
Who the hell knows?
He said, “He just froze, I guess. It happens.”
And pissed himself
.

Should he tell her that? Teach let his answer stand. And he doubted that Mr. Pee Stain would elaborate the matter much if Marlie Turkel found him.

The woman cleared her throat again. “Mr. Teach, when you saw the
boy
, did you have any idea who he was?”

“Uh, no. No, I didn’t.” Teach thinking:
For bleeding Jesus’ sake, what do I know about high school superstars?

“I see.” That purring voice, keeping him at ease, opening him up, going for the deepest part. “You’d had something to drink, is that right?”

“Yeah, sure. I had a couple of drinks. That’s what you do in a bar.”

“A couple? Do you mean two?”

“Two, three. I’m not sure exactly. I wasn’t drunk, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“The bartender says you had five bourbons.” The claws out now, flashing, then resheathed. “He said he remembered that pretty clearly.”

Teach told her his memory was as good as a bartender’s (hoping this thing didn’t get to cash register tapes, records of bourbons sold), and he remembered two or three drinks.

“I see. You were a football player, weren’t you, Mr. Teach, a long time ago? Weren’t you a very good football player?”

A long time ago? Not so long,
Teach thought. He didn’t tell Marlie Turkel that he still couldn’t walk into restaurants in Tampa without some stranger waving to him, calling,
Go Gators!
“Sure,” he said, “I guess you could say that.”

“You know, I got
interested
in you when this thing came across my desk. I looked you up in the files. You had quite a career. A conference championship and two bowl victories. Pretty impressive. And then the Atlanta Falcons.” Something hard happened to her voice when she mentioned the Falcons.

“Yeah, well, I had three pretty good years in the NFL, but it ended, and . . .” Teach summoned whimsy, regret with a little sweet nostalgia, “what can I tell you? It was a great ride while it lasted.”

“What about Nate Means? Can you tell me about that, Mr. Teach?”

Jesus, Nate Means
.
How had she, what did she . . . ?

Teach repeated what he’d told the press twenty years ago about Nate Means. It was a speech he’d memorized. “It was a clean hit. Nobody in the league ever accused me of anything illegal. It was just bad luck. If the guy with the video camera hadn’t been too close to the sidelines, Means wouldn’t have hit his head like that.”

In his third and last year in the NFL, James Teach had been moved to special teams, a wild band of suicides who ran the length of the field on kickoffs and punt returns and collided with whatever waited at the other end. That night, Teach had hit the kickoff returner, a million-dollar, first-round draft pick out of Michigan. Nate Means was a supertalent. It had been a bone-bending, white-light explosion of a tackle, and Means had caromed into the steel frame of a TV camera dolly. His third and fourth cervical vertebrae were crushed, and Means was rendered a paraplegic.

The referee had thrown no flag that night, but the instant replay had shown that Means was inches out of bounds when Teach had hit him. The press had been divided: half calling it a late hit, even an intentional maiming by a frustrated former star, the other half saying that football was a contact sport and Teach’s hit was mean but clean. Journalists said what they said, and Teach knew you just had to keep your feet under you in the storm of ink.

“But Mr. Teach, isn’t there a pattern of violence in your life?”

“Football’s a violent game, Ms. Turkel. You don’t survive in it very long without being violent yourself. But that doesn’t mean you play dirty.”

“It’s too bad your career ended that way.”

It was her first comment. Teach wasn’t sure if she meant too bad he’d gone from backup quarterback with prospects for a starting role to free safety (where he’d lacked the speed for success) to special teams, or too bad about Nate Means, or all of it. Teach considered his pro career all of a piece and all too bad. When he thought about football, he concentrated on his college days.

It occurred to him that he might try something different with this woman, maybe yet find a way out of this thing. Hadn’t she said she was interested in him? “Listen,” he said, “why don’t we have lunch? Talk about this face-to-face.” He was about to say,
Maybe have a couple of drinks, get to know each other better,
but recognized in time the stupidity of mentioning alcohol. “I’d like the chance to explain what happened a little more fully before you . . .” the phrase was cold in his mouth, “print this.”

Marlie Turkel sighed. “I don’t think that would be a very good idea, Mr. Teach.”

He kept trying: “Look, maybe there’s, you know, not really as much of a story here as you think. Maybe this thing doesn’t really have to be in the paper.”

“Mr. Teach, race relations have deteriorated in Tampa in the last five years. A lot of people think we’re primed for something like what happened in St. Petersburg last year. It doesn’t take much to touch off a riot. There’s going to be a story whether we have lunch or not.” The sex was gone from her voice. Now it was firm, sorry, a little righteous, the way you’d be with a kid caught breaking a rule. “I got onto this thing because I learned that Mr. Battles has already been to see Ellie Goings. He showed her some pictures of his face and said he was going to the black radio station when he finished talking to her.”

The worm in Teach’s empty stomach turned again. Ellie Goings was the local minority affairs reporter. In her weekly column, she alternated between inspiring stories about African American achievement on the local scene and scathing tales of lives blighted by racism. Teach could have written her Tyrone column himself. In the Ellie Goings version, Teach would be a knuckle-dragging troglodyte, and Tyrone would be a composite of Heroic Black Youth.

Teach felt his naked toes hit the bottom. The bottom was cold and slimy. “Look, Ms. Turkel, do you have to do this? I mean . . . ?” What more could he say? He was begging.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Teach, but yes, I do. It’s news and the public has a right to know. And I’ve given you a chance to tell your side of it.”

Right,
Teach thought,
my side as seen by Marlie Turkel. And you aren’t finished with me yet.

“I’m surprised you don’t know anything about Mr. Battles’s athletic accomplishments. Don’t you read the sports page?”

“Not much,” Teach said, aware that his voice had gone dull, cold. “Tell me what’s in the sports page.”
About our saintly Tyrone.

“A lot. He’s not just a football star who’s been contacted by over a dozen colleges and universities. He’s an honor student. His SAT scores are good enough for a full ride to college without football. He’s never been in trouble before. He’s really quite a remarkable young man.”

It sounded like she was reading from the screen in front of her, quoting herself. Teach thinking:
And what am I, just your common, drunken, middle-aged white householder with an attitude about black people?

“There’s one other thing, Mr. Teach. Do you know anything about Tyrone’s family?”

“Only what you just told me. He does sound like an exemplary boy.” But a memory was waking up, turning over in the fetid loam of Malone’s Bar. What was it the cop, Delbert, had said?
That boy’s family’s a walking history of the civil rights movement in this state.

“I see. Well, I guess I ought to tell you that Tyrone’s uncle is Thurman Battles. He’s an attorney, quite an important man here in town. His specialty is litigation involving violations of federal civil rights statutes. He’s been very successful in the courts.” The woman waited for a reaction. Teach not sure he could, or should, give one. Not sure what might be printed. Maybe he’d said too much already.

All Teach said was, “When?”

“Excuse me?”

“When will the article be in the paper?”

“Monday. It’ll be part of longer piece on local race relations.”

When Marlie Turkel said a polite goodbye, Teach sat alone in his kitchen sipping cold coffee. He could smell himself, the sweat of the last twenty-four hours heavy on him, the evil odor of bad surprises. He was confused, but one thing he knew was that he would wait as long as possible before telling Dean about his trouble. This was the morning after her triumph. He would do all he could to make it a good one, and that began with breakfast. Waffles were her favorite morning meal. He was halfway to the pantry for the batter mix when something occurred to him. He found the program for the recital on the hallway table where he had left it last night.

The names of the girls in the corps de ballet were familiar to him. Theirs were the family names engraved on the brass plaques outside the law offices and doctors’ offices in the better parts of town. In the program, he found what he was looking for. The new girl in the corps, the athletic, charming black girl who could have been running a hundred-meter dash or kicking her legs out in the arc of the long jump. The girl who had promised to place her body between Dean and temptation. Her name was Tawnya Battles.

TEN

Teach put two plates of waffles topped with fresh strawberries and two glasses of orange juice on a tray and carried them to the breakfast room. Buttery sunlight streamed through the French doors that let onto the back terrace. This was his favorite room on weekend mornings. He walked to the stairs and called, “Time for breakfast, Deanie.” And standing here he felt his heart rise with the remembered joy of mornings when Dean was little and it was Paige calling her down for a meal before driving her to school. The sounds and smells of those mornings flooded over him. The dizzying sweet waft of shampoo from Dean’s hair as she passed through the foyer and hurried toward the breakfast room. The heat of the crown of her head as he briefly rested his hand there. The rubber scuff of Dean’s sneakers on the ocher Spanish tiles. The bounce of her blond ponytail on the blue and green tartan of her Episcopal school jumper.

The radio came on upstairs, a rock station blasting the quiet morning, and over it, Dean’s tired voice called down, “Okay, Dad.”

Back in the kitchen, Teach poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and a glass of milk for Dean and carried these and a pair of scissors out to the breakfast room. He opened the French doors and smelled the hot, fragrant air of the garden. Paige had told him when they’d moved into this sixty-year-old Mediterranean Revival house that she wanted a walled garden like those she had seen in old St. Augustine. She wanted high, stuccoed walls bordered by shade trees. And there must be benches and oyster shell paths and a fountain. A fountain was the heart of a garden, she had said, just as the hearth was the heart of a house. She wanted to stand by the splashing waters of her fountain and look up at the Barcelona balcony letting into the bedroom she shared with her husband.

Teach had built the garden exactly to her specifications, and her only disappointment was a city ordinance limiting the height of the walls. Walking her oyster-shell paths, Paige could see into a neighbor’s window, or glimpse the straw hat that floated along on the head of Angel Morales, the yardman who worked this neighborhood. These things, she had told Teach, harmed the illusion of isolation she wanted in her garden, but the rest of what she felt in it was wondrous. She had planted Spanish bayonet and bird-of-paradise under the Jerusalem thorns along the ivied walls. Terra-cotta jugs of dendrobia hung from low tree branches.

With the scissors, Teach snipped a beautiful yellow and orange bird-of-paradise blossom. Back in the kitchen, he put it in a crystal vase just as Paige would have done and sipped coffee while he waited.

And then Dean stood in the kitchen doorway rubbing her eyes. Her honey-blond hair was matted to her scalp in what she called “bed head.” She wore a long T-shirt and razored jeans and was barefoot. Teach looked at her poor scarred feet. She was sixteen and her feet were forty, calloused and abraded from years of dancing. There was a scud of soap along her jawline and blond wisps framed her blurry blue eyes. Dean’s eyes, people always said, belonged to Teach. The eyes of his hangovers. Had Dean been drinking at Marty Flipper’s party? Better not to ask.
Better not to tilt the fragile thing we are now, father and daughter so far from those mornings when a little blond head passed under my hand on its way to a warm winter kitchen.

Teach reached over and gently wiped the soap from her face. “I didn’t think you’d want coffee.”

“I do. With skim and a little sugar.”

And when had she started drinking coffee? Bringing back the cup, watching his daughter sip from it, make first a face of distaste, then of bored approval, Teach saw the spot of blood on the floor beside her chair. Smeared spots of it led across the tile to the chair where Dean sat now trying a sip of orange juice. When she glanced up out of the bleary vagueness that was adolescent morning, Teach had to turn away because his eyes were full of tears.

As he walked to the kitchen, he heard Dean behind him: “Wow, Dad, these waffles look great. You’re really jammin’ in the kitchen this morning. Kinda reminds me of when I was a kid.”

Teach took a copper mixing bowl from a cabinet, poured some medicated hand soap into it, and filled it with warm water. He found a fresh dish towel in a drawer, dried his eyes with it, and turned back to Dean. Her head was bent over the plate of waffles and strawberries. The fork dipped and rose with a mechanical rhythm. Teach walked over and knelt with the bowl and towel at his daughter’s feet.