Читать книгу Suitcase City - Sterling Watson - Страница 16

NINE

Teach awoke to the ache in his elbow. He rolled onto his back, wondering why it hurt. Then it all came back. The bar. The men’s room, that angry ebony face, the shirttail flagging to the side for a second, showing Teach what was almost certainly the handle of a razor.

He lay staring at the ceiling, feeling the sweat of fear break on his face. How had he gotten himself into this mess? Why hadn’t he waited a moment to see what the boy would do, ask him again what he meant? Then he thought: No, damnit.

As a kid, Teach had read about the murders of Sharon Tate and her friends in a wealthy house in the Hollywood Hills. How a band of lunatics had just walked in smiling and laughing and killed everybody. No one had sounded an alarm; no one had resisted because everyone had assumed the freaks had come for the party. The story had changed Teach. Taught him that it would always be better to trust instinct and strike when the alarms went off in your head than to wait the extra second to be sure. You could die in that second. Abigail Folger had waited. Wojciech Frykowski had waited, smiling, asking if he could help Tex Watson, who drew a pistol and shot him, then jumped on his back, stabbing him as Frykowski staggered across the lawn. Teach wasn’t sure he’d done the right thing in Malone’s Bar, but he was sure he’d do the same thing again.

He worked the elbow that ached because it had split a boy’s cheek and wondered if Dean was awake.

She had come out to the auditorium dressed in jeans and a thigh-length T-shirt, still glowing with stage makeup and the excitement of her triumph. She’d brought two friends with her—Missy Pace, a cheerleader, and the black girl, new to ballet. Teach had nodded and smiled at the two girls and opened his arms to Dean who gave him a brief hug. He’d whispered into her warm, fragrant neck, “Beautiful tonight.” When she pulled away, her eyes glittering with that energy she turned into movement on the stage, Teach said, “As usual.”

“Thanks, Daddy.” She smiled at some club women passing up the aisle.

Teach said, “Time to go, Deanie. I’ve got reservations at Bern’s.” Dinner at Bern’s was their after-recital tradition.

Dean frowned, then smiled. “Daddy, would it be okay this once if I skip dinner? There’s a party at Marty Flipper’s house.” The two friends watched Teach solemnly.

He tried to think of how to say no to all three of them. He could invite the friends to dinner.

Dean fired the heavy artillery. “Daddy-please-can-I?”

Unable to come up with a good no and worried about the bloodstain on his sleeve, Teach cleared his throat to summon his Stern Father voice. “No drinking at this party, young lady. And I want you home at eleven.”

“Oh, Daddy,” Dean groaned, mortified to have drinking (or was it coming home on time?) mentioned in front of her friends.

Teach had played golf with Harold Flipper who owned the local Volvo dealership. He was a dim but affable fellow and so, Teach reasoned, must be his son, Marty. The two girlfriends examined their fingernails and studied their Doc Martens to see if the scuffing on them was just right.

Teach abandoned Stern Father in favor of Old Guy Trying to Be Humorously Hip. “Will you girls give me your word you’ll say no when the wine coolers are passed around?” Missy looked stunned, as though she did not have a word to give, but the black girl looked Teach in the eye and said, “I promise you, Mr. Teach, if Deanie tries to go the way of all flesh, I’ll place my body between her and temptation.”

Teach kept his jaw from dropping, but he could not keep from chuckling his appreciation.

She stepped forward and extended her hand. “Hi, I’m Tawnya. It’s nice to meet you.”

* * *

Teach swung his legs out of bed and sat working the aching elbow. He felt Saturday-morning sad. It was sad but not fatal that Dean had ditched their celebration dinner for the giddy delights of a party at Marty Flipper’s house. Sometimes life was losing things. He had lost Paige, and he was losing Dean to the fate nature intended for young girls. (Not, please God, Marty Flipper, but someday a young man with a future.) The phone rang. Teach hurried from bed.

“Hello, I’m trying to reach James Teach. Is he there, please?”

Teach summoned his vice president’s voice. Easy and affable. Ready to meet what the day brought to his door. “This is he.”

“Mr. Teach, my name is Marlie Turkel. I’m a reporter at the Trib. Do you have a minute?”

Teach thinking: What does a reporter want with me on a Saturday morning? Something about Dean, her dancing? There had been a couple of pieces in the Sunday supplement. Dean’s success at the American Dance Festival. Her prospects for a New York career. Teach kept his voice low, pleasant. “Sure,” he said, “I’ve got a minute. What’s this about?”

“It’s about yesterday afternoon, you and a Mr. Tyrone Battles.” The woman’s voice changed. It went from brusque efficiency to a husky purring that couldn’t hide her excitement.

Teach felt the worm of fear move in his belly. Jesus, a journalist, and a woman. How in God’s own name had she gotten hold of this thing, and so soon? And what did she plan to do with it? Teach said only, “Yes?” aware that his voice had lost its affability. Aware that he was buying time without any idea what he would do with it.

The woman cleared her throat and in a low seductive throb said, “I’d like to get your side of this thing before we go to press with it.”

She sounds like sex, Teach thought. Like she had known him for years and not in Sunday school. Like she had enjoyed knowing him in a way she wouldn’t deny, and she knew he wouldn’t either.

“Listen, uh, my daughter’s asleep. I want to take this downstairs. Can you call back in a minute or two?”

The woman—what was her name, Turkey? Surely not. Turkel, that was it, said, “Fine, Mr. Teach. It’s eight forty-five. I’ll call at eight fifty. Will that be all right?”

“Tell you what, give me ten minutes. I’ll make a cup of coffee. Wake up a little.”

Marlie Turkel said ten minutes would be fine with her, but now her tone said, You won’t fuck with me if you know what’s good for you.

Downstairs, Teach put the coffee on. With a cup in his hand, warm and reassuring, he considered simply refusing to talk to the woman. She had probably seen the police report, knew what he’d told Aimes. Elaborating might get him into more trouble than letting the facts speak for themselves. And it would be easier, at least for the time being, to ignore her.

When the phone rang again, he snatched it from its cradle thinking of Dean upstairs. She’d wonder who was calling so early on a Saturday. Teach decided that elaborating a bit would serve him better than the bare bones of a police report. And he had no idea what the cop, Aimes, had written. He said, “Hello, Ms. Turkel. What can I tell you about yesterday?”

“Anything you want to tell me, Mr. Teach. I’ve got Mr. Battles’s side of the story. I thought it was only fair to call you.”

Fair? Teach thought. Right. He told her what had happened: the good fellowship of two men who liked football, the necessary but regrettable trip to the men’s room, the boy coming in, calling them . . . Teach faltered. Should he say the word to a woman? Hell yes, he should. If she was any kind of journalist at all, she’d want the facts. So, he told it: the boy calling them white bitches, telling them to give it up. He told her about his certainty that the boy had a weapon, the probability that he would use it.

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.