Suitcase City. Sterling Watson

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       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. СКАЧАТЬ