by Tony Dunbar
But with that gunshot had come a glimpse into the terrible and final way the world could treat people, and the way it would keep right on treating people if nobody stepped in.
Tubby could never claim that he had spent a career championing the cause of the downtrodden. Like most lawyers, of course, he had saved his share of widows, orphans and fools from tragic fates, but the fact was that he had charged what the market would bear and made a pretty good living at it. He appreciated being one of the chosen few— the ones who could go past the swinging courtroom gates and approach the bench. He got to knock back a big heap of crawfish with a judge now and then. Not everybody could do that. But he had always been skeptical of the system itself, even though he was a part of it. It was troubling at this time of his life to ask what he was doing with that exceptional power. What of significance, that is?
Such heavy thoughts bothered Tubby. They didn’t bother him so much for their content but just because he didn’t like to have to deal with heavy thoughts. Somehow, however, Naples’ detached beauty had brought them up against his will and now he was stuck with thinking them through.
The warm embrace of New Orleans’ humidity hit him as soon as he walked out of the terminal and flagged a cab. It was late in the afternoon, and the sun was in full command of the heavens. The air conditioner in the cab wasn’t working.
“Sorry, man,” the driver apologized. “It sure ain’t no picnic driving this old heap.”
In the back seat Tubby tried to remain absolutely motionless, despite banging against the door as they bounced down New Orleans’ corrugated streets. The heat caressed him through the opened windows. His heavy thoughts kept him company all the way down the Earhart Expressway.
“Been raining any?” he asked the cabdriver miserably.
“Not since July. But no hurricanes yet,” he was told.
What sustained the passage was the vision of his shady house Uptown. When the cab finally got there and crunched to the curb, Tubby had his wallet ready. He paid the fare plus a tip, got his bag from the trunk, and inhaled deeply. There it was— the familiar and restorative smell of gardenias and soggy grass, coffee brewing and very close, the Mississippi River.
The house within was just as he’d left it two weeks before. He locked the front door and pushed down the thermostat, which made the air conditioner shudder on. Then he found himself a bottle of bourbon in the kitchen and fixed himself a big icy drink.
Home at last!
He sat on a kitchen stool to enjoy the solitude and quiet, looking out the window at his overgrown backyard full of red azaleas in full bloom. Why had he ever left?
He let his mind drift.
Parker, who the hell was he? What kind of person could he have become if he had lived? But really, who cared about him? Tubby was surprised that he did. What the hell was ever done about that murder?
IX
He was still on his first cup of Community coffee in the morning when the phone in his jeans started to vibrate.
“Hey, Man, are you back in New Orleans?” It was Raisin.
“Yeah. I just got in last night. How’d you know?”
“Because you called me last night and left a message? You don’t remember?”
“Uh…” No, he didn’t. Must have been somewhere between the third and fourth belt. It had taken quite a lot to put himself to sleep, after all that strenuous travel from Florida. All those heavy memories. He worried about whom else he might have called.
“You asked if I wanted to have lunch today,” Raisin continued. “I was out with Sadie at the Maple Leaf listening to Joe Krown and never heard the phone ring. But the answer is yes.”
Tubby had to dig deep to remember who Sadie was. He had been full of energy a moment ago but now, reminded that he had over-indulged the night before, he felt disoriented. Oh yeah, she was some sort of engineer at Shell, recently relocated to New Orleans from Holland. Raisin had met her at the tennis club and managed to make a good impression, as he usually did when wearing whites.
“Good. We’ll meet. I’m going to the office this morning and see if I still have a law practice. That probably won’t take very long. Where do you want to go?”
“How about out in the Bywater” You remember Janie, the bartender at Grits? I think I may have a client for you.”
Which is how they ended up at Monkey Business on St. Claude Avenue, way across the tracks. It was in one of the older parts of town, a neighborhood of shotguns hugging the Mississippi River levee, full of roughnecks, gospel-singing grannies, longshoremen, mamas in green spandex at the bus stops, po-boy shops and lots of fried chicken, noodle, and beer joints. And lately, artists, urban planners, filmmakers, and start-up entrepreneurs had moved in, creating the newest outer fringe of hip culture in New Orleans.
Tubby’s detour to the office was uneventful. Cherrylynn, his long-time secretary, had kept up with the phone and emails for the past two weeks with her usual competence. Quite honestly, Tubby hadn’t really been working his law practice for a couple of years, so her job wasn’t full-time-interesting nowadays. In fact, he was considering bringing in a young lawyer to keep her occupied and to handle the business that Tubby fancied he could generate if he really put his mind to it. In the interim Cherrylynn had been taking afternoon classes at Loyola University studying philosophy, politics, and economics. Only thirty-two more credits to a college degree.
He had also picked a very good time to go on a Florida vacation. To say that August was a slow time at the courthouse would be an insult to stoned sloths. There were summer days when you couldn’t find a member of the judiciary anywhere in the building, not even at their normal midday rendezvous presiding over raw oysters and Trout Meuniere at Mandina’s.
Monkey Business, the bar, encroached on the sidewalk and was almost in the street. Its warped cypress siding was painted white with a faded advertisement for Regal Beer, a defunct brand, and it even boasted a sprayed-on “X” in a circle, the red mark left by Katrina’s first responders indicating the number of bodies and abandoned pets found within.
“This is a classic joint,” Tubby said appreciatively as he got out of the car. “Do they actually serve lunch?”
“Good fried shrimp,” Raisin replied, climbing out from behind the wheel of the used red Miata his girlfriend had picked up for him. Tubby stretched mightily, afraid he might have thrown his back out just getting into the damned thing.
Coming in from the blazing sun it was dark in the bar. When his eyes adjusted Tubby beheld a comfortably familiar layout. A long bar trailed off into a back room fitted with a stage, a handful of tables. A few patrons sat at the bar or at tables, concentrating on their beers and their private conversations.
Bustling toward these arrivals came a large brassy woman wearing an x-tra large lumberjack shirt, a dirty white Stetson hat, and flip flops.
“Here they are, the old sexy dudes!” she brayed, and gave them each a crushing hug. Tubby hadn’t seen Janie for years, since way before the hurricane. Those intervening years of two packs a day had made her voice even huskier. The dimness of her professional environment had made her skin even whiter. Her merry face was crisscrossed with tiny pink veins. The beer had made her even stouter. He wouldn’t want to arm-wrestle her.
“It’s so good to see you again, Tubby,” she rejoiced.
“What about me?” Raisin asked.
“You, too, but I already seen you last week. Here it is. My new place!” She swept it all up in the sails of her arms. “It ain’t much, but we’re doing all right. Come on. Pick a table and get a seat.”
They settled in, scratching their chairs along the wooden floor.
“Jack!” she yelled. “Bring us all a drink. I’m going to have one, too.” She winked at Tubby. “This is a reunion, right, darlin’?”
The drinks came quickly. Jack was a young guy with a plaid shirt and a trim beard who looked like he had just flown in from Portland. He was in shape. A capable bouncer, Tubby speculated.
“So
, what’s been going on with you, my love?” Janie asked loudly. “Raisin tells me you’re still the best lawyer in town.”
Tubby went over it – how he had fared in the hurricane, what he had been doing since, how his kids had grown up. “I had a bar of my own, too,” he told her. “Mike’s, down in the Irish Channel.”
“I heard about that,” Janie said. “Sorry I never made it over. You don’t still own it?”
“Yes, he does,” Raisin put in.
“No, I don’t. I sold it to Pinky Laparouse two years ago.”
“You’ve got a mortgage on it,” Raisin insisted.
“I do,” Tubby admitted. “But, Janie, how did you end up on this side of the city?”
“You remember Grits,” she began. Of course. Their old Uptown watering hole, where Janie had listened patiently to all sorts of troubles while mixing up passable Old Fashioneds. The storm closed it down for a while, and it also sent Janie fleeing for higher ground. She had bounced around for a couple of years taking care of her mother. Within the community of dispossessed imbibers she had met and married Bud Caragliano, ten years her senior, so she claimed.
“Ever meet Bud?” she asked. Raisin and Tubby shook their heads.
“He was a good guy, as long as he was drinking,” Janie said. “Well, anyway he used to own this little place. It took about three feet of water in Katrina. Then he got stage-four lung cancer and died. But he left this bar to me. I put together a few bucks and we got it all cleaned up. It was just a dive at first. But then the neighborhood changed.”
“Downhill?” Tubby asked.
“Hell, no!” she bawled out. “It’s a friggin’ gold mine now. This crowd you see here…” she waved at the half-a-dozen guys wearing grimy T-shirts and tool belts, “…they clear out by five, and later on tonight I get an unbelievable number of kids. They pack this joint, baby!”
“Hmmm.” Tubby tried to imagine that. The bar did have a cool atmosphere. It was dark. There was a neon Dixie Beer sign on the wall. The TV over the bar was tuned to a baseball game, and the sound was turned off. He thought he saw grass growing out of the floor over by the jukebox. Certainly traditional.
“Let me get you some lunch,” Janie offered. “How about a shrimp po-boy? We can make up other things if you’d rather. We got an eggplant mozzarella wrap, gluten free.”
“What’s gluten?”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know. But I recommend the shrimp. It’s our cook’s specialty.”
“You even have a cook?” Tubby was impressed.
“My daughter Sophia. I’ll introduce you.”
Jack brought another round. Janie didn’t get down to business until the food arrived, mountains of golden crisp shrimp piled on French bread and spilling out of the plates. Pickles, tomatoes, Crystal hot sauce. As a lagniappe, the cook had sent each of them a bowl of rich brown steamy chicken and sausage gumbo.
“What’s this in the gumbo? Potato salad?” Tubby exclaimed. Indeed the soup had been ladled over the homespun alternative to white rice. “It smells delicious,” he said, enraptured. It created the perfect moment to pitch a lawyer.
“I’m having trouble with the city,” Janie explained. “They don’t like me having live music here every night.”
“Why not?” Tubby asked, enjoying a loose shrimp. “What kind of music do you put on?” Tubby was having a hard time getting his hands around his sandwich, so he speared three errant shrimp with his fork and popped them into his mouth.
“All kinds of music,” Janie said. “We had Paul Sanchez here. And Gal Holiday. We had the Luminescent Lizards. We get folk stuff. We get Indie. We got soft and we got loud. But that’s the problem.”
“Loud?” Tubby repeated. He anticipated what was coming.
“Yes, indeed. Loud! Which has got some of the neighbors upset. Worse than that, it’s got me dealing with the zoning flunkies and the quality of life cops. It ain’t pretty.”
“They want you to turn it down?”
“They want me to turn it off! And guess what, they want to jerk my license because they say St. Claude ain’t zoned for bars and music.”
“You’re kidding me.” Tubby was incredulous. To his left Raisin glared and shook his head at such municipal stupidity. “What are we here?” Tubby continued. “The Ninth Ward? The birthplace of the brass band, the jazz funeral and the second line? The cradle of New Orleans music culture. The womb of…”
“He’s getting it,” Raisin interrupted.
“I know, it doesn’t make sense,” Janie said sadly. “But now you know my problem. And this comes when for the first time in my life I’m making lots of money.”
A paying client? Tubby sat back in his rickety chair and cleared his mind. He brushed the crumbs off his chest. “Tell me all about it,” he said.
* * *
There had been a time when Tubby had been much better connected to the police force. He had been pals with Homicide Detective Fox Lane, a five-foot-ten inch, 105 pound, marathon-running dedicated cop. About the time of Katrina, however, she had taken a bullet in the chest in the line of duty, accepted her pension, and now was chief security officer at Alluvial Bank. Chasing white-collar embezzlers and money launderers was a lot safer than chasing Seventh Ward narco gangs.
So he called up his own private investigator, Sanré Fueres, who called himself Flowers. He was still in his prime, still single, and was still going down dark alleys.
“You been out of town?” Flowers asked.
“I was down in Florida for a couple of weeks working on my tan.”
“With Marguerite?”
“How’d you know that?”
“Right.”
“I need a little help with New Orleans finest. Have you ever heard of something called a quality of life officer?”
“Sure. I don’t think I know any of them, but those are the guys who check out convenience stores selling vodka to minors, loud music, vacation rentals by owner, things like that.”
“Really? Well it’s loud music I’m concerned with. Out on St. Claude Avenue in the Ninth Ward.”
“On this side of the Industrial Canal?”
“Exactly.” The other side of the Canal was a flood-ravaged wasteland dotted with new experimental houses financed by Brad Pitt. Maybe it would be the next target for hip rejuvenation, depending on how you read the cards. Today’s leaky-roofed and abandoned fixer-upper was tomorrow’s organic juice bar or sexy clothing boutique.
“You’re going to be in the Fifth Police District. I don’t actually know any cops over there. No, wait, I know about one guy. He’s being punished for something and got transferred out there. You want to talk to him? Or do you want me to?”
“Why don’t you call him and see if he’ll talk to me? I’d like to get to know some of the police working in that area.”
“Okay. I’ll take a shot and get back to you.”
“Thanks.” Knowing Flowers, that would take about twenty minutes.
It took fifteen.
“Guy’s name is Officer Ireanous Babineaux.”
“Jesus, that’s quite a name. What do they call him?”
“Officer Ireanous Babineaux.”
“Fine.”
“I got his cell number. We swapped texts. He’s willing to meet you for coffee and a doughnut if you like tomorrow morning at Elizabeth’s Restaurant on Gallier Street.”
“I’ll have to look that one up.”
“It’s by the river. He says eight o’clock.”
“Thanks. I’ll be there.”
* * *
That frightened, scared place was buried far down in the young man’s mind. Deep, but always there. Even when he wasn’t so young anymore it was still there. His proximity to the shooting affected him in ways he didn’t fully know about. He never got married, for instance, possibly fretful of being too candid with another living soul.
Steady jobs held no allure, though with a business background and all the engineering courses he’d taken he was certainly qualified fo
r one. He took no interest whatsoever in politics, or in the causes his parents espoused, and he kept an extremely tight circle of friends. Not that he liked solitude, because he didn’t. But instead of community engagement he took to the horses.
The Fairgrounds Race Track was the best place in the whole world to him. The Racing Form meant more than the chemist’s periodic table, the broker’s NASDAQ index, the entertainer’s score or the gambler’s dice. He worshipped the odds calculator on his iPhone app, and he was working out ways to improve it— twists he could patent or copyright, ideas he could sell for a buck. His laboratory was the air-conditioned grandstand, smelling vaguely of hot dogs, mustard and hay, where he could be found every race day between Thanksgiving and Mardi Gras.
When Louisiana’s racing season ended in the spring, he might take a girlfriend up north to party and bet at Belmont or Pimlico, or he might just kick back in his Lakeside townhouse, close the curtains and work his brain. Cutting-edge, youth-oriented, consumerism fascinated him. He was always conceiving new things to sell to that market. Not everything he conjured up about caffeinated vodka or spray-on pheromones was a winner, but enough were hits that he made money and could keep his life insulated from the oh-so boring, oh-so threatening world. He drove a Lexus. He got take-out swordfish tacos and ropa vieja whenever he felt like it. Or sushi, if he wanted to forget where he had come from.
X
Elizabeth’s Restaurant was a very happening place, once you found it. Tubby went the slow route, not on purpose, but that’s the way it turned out. He piloted his newest car, a black 1978 Camaro with the spoiler on the back, which got nine miles to the gallon, all the way through the French Quarter and its throng of tourists— hurrying along to Café du Monde for their beignets and café au lait. It was still an early hour, but this was when sugary days began. The visitors were serenaded by ships’ horns, trolley bells and clanking train cars, none of which they had at eight a.m. in Chevy Chase.