by Tony Dunbar
“Of course, I didn’t really pay attention,” Edward said.
“Neither did I,” Wendell agreed.
Tubby’s hands rolled into fists and his eyes narrowed to slits.
Then he closed them and almost laughed.
“Did she happen to say where she was going?” he asked.
Wendell shook his head. Edward shook his head.
“She said this was one vacation she was going to remember,” Wendell added.
* * *
Fox Lane spent the last hours of daylight methodically trudging around the places where cars could pull off Wisner Boulevard to park beside Bayou St. John. Eventually she found an empty blue Ford Taurus sitting under a tall cypress tree. It was unlocked, and the ignition had been popped. There was mud all over the driver’s seat. She had not a doubt that the vehicle would soon be reported stolen, and that this was the car the man Tubby called Roux had used to get from the French Quarter to this spot. Someone had picked him up here.
There were no other signs of her quarry, so she called downtown for a tow truck. If the vehicle didn’t get stripped first, she could go over the car thoroughly at the impound lot. She was willing to bet she would not turn up a damn thing.
All in all, it hadn’t been a bad day though. Of the three men who might be charged with homicide, one was dead and one was wounded and in custody. Considering how much better this was than her department’s old averages, she might even get a commendation from the chief.
* * *
Intensive care was a quiet place. The nurse in charge, seated in the center of a circular counter in the middle of a round room, kept Tubby in view from the moment the white door whooshed open until he presented himself at her desk.
“Dan Haywood?” he inquired.
“Are you a relative?” she inquired.
“I’m a friend of his, and his lawyer,” Tubby said.
Satisfied, she pointed to a segment of the ward curtained off from view and asked him to please be very quiet.
Tiptoeing, Tubby pushed the stiff fabric aside and stared at a very sick man.
The face that was sticking out of the blue blanket was gray and pasty. Dan had tubes coming out of his nose and out of his inert, outstretched arm. There was so much equipment around him he looked like he was sleeping in a stereo store.
Tubby was following the curve of Dan’s substantial gut where he knew the bullet had gone in, when it suddenly rose and fell. The head shuddered, and the mouth exhaled. Then the body was still again.
“What’s his condition?” Tubby asked the nurse as quietly as he could.
She was filling out a chart with a red pen and did not look up when she spoke. “He’s listed as ‘critical,’” she said. “For more information you’ll have to talk to the doctors.”
“Okay. Where are they?”
“Best bet is tomorrow morning around nine o’clock. They’re all making rounds then.”
“Well, I mean is he going to live?”
“I hope so, sir. Critical means he has an extremely serious injury. All we can do is hope for the best.”
“But, like, what are his chances?”
“I’m sorry, sir.” She put down her pen and looked over the top of her glasses. “That’s all I can tell you.”
Tubby gave it up.
At the other end of the hall, a policeman sat on an uncomfortable plastic chair outside a closed door.
“Is the patient in there named Monk?” Tubby asked. Now that he was near the uniformed man he realized that he was not a city police officer, but rather a deputy from the Criminal Sheriff’s Department.
“Who are you?” The guard straightened up in the chair and thought about standing up.
“I’m a lawyer. Tubby Dubonnet. I’m trying to locate a prisoner named Monk who was shot this afternoon in the French Market.”
“Are you his lawyer?”
“Probably not,” Tubby said wearily.
“So.” The jail guard jerked his thumb as in instruction to depart.
“Well, would you mind giving him this?” Tubby offered an ivory card on which his embossed name looked far more neat and elegant than he actually felt.
“If he wakes up,” the guard said.
“You might tell him his partner, Big Top, got killed, and the man they were working for ripped the diamond necklace right off his neck.”
Tubby left the hospital and walked through dark and almost deserted streets to retrieve his car. It was time to go home and see what kind of mess the water had left him.
Except for a neighbor’s car stuck in the mud of his front lawn and some strange garbage cans lodged in his azaleas, his home was fine— or as fine as he had left it. He called his ex-wife, Mattie.
“Hello,” she answered loudly.
“Hi, this is me. How are y’all making out?”
“We had two feet of water in the yard. It covered up the deck, but nothing got in the house. Collette got trapped in a cab and had to spend the night with total strangers. Two of her friends are here, too. We’re all making pancakes and doing our toenails.”
“What about Debbie?”
“She’s fine. She’s at Marcos’ apartment. It’s on the second floor. Their lights were out all day, and every time I talked to her she was in bed, so I guess the marriage is still on.”
Tubby nodded. That was okay.
“Christine was trapped here all day with me,” Mattie continued. “Everybody was wondering where you were. The kids were worried.” She didn’t say she had been.
“I was stuck in the French Quarter. Dan Haywood got me a room at the Royal Montpelier. But we got involved in something, and Dan got shot in the stomach. He’s in intensive care at Charity.”
“Got involved with something. Dan got shot?”
“Yeah. Me, I’m okay.”
“What on earth happened?”
“It’s a long story. Tell the girls to call me when they get finished with their feet.” It was his story to tell, not Mattie’s.
They hung up.
Tubby stripped his clothes off on the way to the bathroom and stepped into a hot shower. Half an hour later he slipped under the covers and fell asleep, a full glass of bourbon untouched beside his bed.
CHAPTER XXIV
On Ash Wednesday the sun shown brightly in a cloudless blue sky and the world repented. Fresh breezes stirred the crape myrtle trees and lifted the flowers from the flattened grass. Children came out to play. Parishioners walked to church for their mark of Lent. The city was fresh and clean momentarily, excesses forgotten.
On Tubby’s front doorstep, the Times-Picayune lay just as it should. He stooped down to get it and, standing up, breathed deeply an elixir of sea salt, blossoming trees, rotting leaves, and the bacon he had frying in the kitchen. But for the automobiles stranded in odd places, and the line of organic matter a foot upon on the foundation of his house, there was nothing to suggest that yesterday the world had almost come to an end.
He settled down in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and chicory, five crisp strips of bacon, and a tomato he had picked up from the vegetable man on Nashville Avenue on Saturday— a long time ago. The headline on the front page was two inches tall and said, “MARDI GRAS WASHED OUT.” All other stories of international significance were relegated to the back pages. Thankfully, however, the courts of Rex and Comus had converged.
Three people had died, one story reported, and a woman’s body had been found lodged in the street drain grating near the end of Poydras where police K-9 dogs were trained. As an aside, two of the noble German shepherds had escaped drowning by sitting through the rainy day on top of their kennels. One had actually climbed a 12-foot fence topped with razor wire to get to freedom. Damage was estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The previously unsinkable French Quarter had taken a heavy hit, washing a century of crud from barroom floors. The railroad bed of the St. Charles streetcar was badly eroded, and RTA officials estimated that it would take an amount equal to the entire fe
deral appropriation for the nation’s mass transit program in each of the next six years to repair it adequately. Grant applications were in the works.
On the first page of the Metro section, he found his story.
“Local Land Company Sold to Graxxon,” the headline read. It was always a little unnerving to realize that on Fat Tuesday, when virtually every governmental and financial institution in south Louisiana was closed, commerce continued in the rest of the world. In this instance, The Great Return Land and Investment Company, owner of approximately 28,000 acres of mineral-rich marshland in Plaquemines Parish and many oil and gas leases across the region, had announced yesterday that it had been acquired by Graxxon in a complex transaction that involved the transfer of all of its stock to a group of local investors and then the outright sale of the same assets to Graxxon. The sale price was not disclosed, but industry analysts speculated that Graxxon had paid cash and stock valued in excess of $125 million.
A spokesman for these same “local investors,” prominent attorney Clifford Banks, who had been this year’s King of the Imbeciles of Abyssinia— one of many krewes unable to parade due to the weather— was contacted at his home. “It was a golden opportunity for local businessmen,” he said. “Old Russell Ligi was ready to sell the Great Return Company, and the investor group was able to acquire it at a reasonable price. The investors already knew, of course, about Graxxon’s interest in the property, so they immediately turned around and sold it.” Banks declined to give further particulars about the transaction or the identity of the local investors. Nor would he comment on reports that spice magnate Noel Parvelle had claimed to be the true owner of The Great Return Company. Reached at his home in Meraux, Parvelle stated, “There will be litigation over this. You can bet on it. I’ve been cheated. I own that company and can prove it.”
Elsewhere in the section there was a piece about a “Major Heist at First Alluvial Bank, Generous Bandit Pleases Crowd,” but Tubby was staring off into space, watching the ceiling fans revolve.
In time, that lost its novelty so he dialed information to get Noel Parvelle’s number. He made his call. Mr. Parvelle was quite agreeable to talking to him and suggested that Tubby drive right out to the parish and, “I’ll tell you some story.”
* * *
The old Creole lived in a big house with vast porches in the middle of a green cow pasture. It looked like open country, but if you knew how close the Gulf of Mexico lay to the backyard you would wish for more elbow room. Parvelle would also have a nice view of the Mississippi River from his verandah, or at least a view of the forty-foot high levee curving in the distance.
He was waiting for Tubby on his front porch, fastened into a wheelchair and highly agitated. He wore a purple checkered shirt and a blanket over his legs, and his round, leathery face was the color of a boiled crab.
Tubby climbed out of his fat Chrysler, and while he was still crossing the yard the old man was yelling that he had been robbed by Russell Ligi. In the middle of his tirade he told Tubby to sit down beside him and let’s hear it.
He didn’t wait but asked, “Do you know that bastard, Ligi?”
Tubby sank down into a worn white oak rocker.
“No, sir. I’ve never met him.”
“What the hell are you here for then?” Parvelle demanded, punctuating his syllables with spit. There were gaps in his teeth. He was chewing a great cud of tobacco, and the corners of his mouth were coffee-colored. He had all his hair though, and reminded Tubby of a wild boar that had almost overrun him in the swamp one time.
“Whoa,” Tubby yelled because he thought Parvelle might be deaf, he talked so loud. “Let me tell you why I called.”
Parvelle’s yellow eyes got bigger as Tubby outlined the events of the past two days. When he described seeing the counterletter that evidenced Parvelle’s true ownership of the Great Return Land and Investment Company, the old man sat back and clapped his hands.
“Russell Ligi is as devious as the devil,” Parvelle whispered in glee. “I’d hate to meet him in hell.”
“Yes,” Tubby said in his most soothing voice.
“Let me tell you about Russell Ligi,” Parvelle continued. “Him and me got political jobs from Earl Long, that shows you how honest Ligi is. A dollar pass into Russell Ligi’s hands and a dime is all that rolls out.
“But he kept his hands off anything that was mine because he knew I’d cut the damn things off at the wrist. I had an interest in several companies that did business with the state. Man we poured some concrete. I sold ’em a ton of school desks. And that’s how I got into the spice business. ’Cause a lot of my family owns land, and LSU Agriculture School set ’em up to grow tomatoes and peppers and bottle that stuff.
Parvelle rocked harder.
“So the folks in Baton Rouge were gonna auction off all these oil leases. You know the state owns all these water bottoms out here.” Parvelle stopped moving. His wrinkled arm stretched out and made a slow sweep of the horizon.
“It’s all around us. You could hit oil or gas right under this house. You just got to drill deep enough. I wanted those leases, and Ligi knew the guy who could let me know what to bid. Only it had to be in Russell’s name.” Parvelle reached out and dug his fingernails into Tubby’s wrist. “I did too much business with the state, and it would have looked bad. Russell got his income direct from the public. So that’s why we formed the”— Parvelle almost sang— “Great Return Land and Investment Company, owned by Mr. Russell Ligi. And I put up every penny of the money— including paying Ligi plenty for the use of his name.”
“And you got what?” Tubby asked.
“I got that damn letter.”
“Well I guess you ain’t got it no more,” Tubby said. “Is there a copy?”
“Hell, no,” Parvelle exploded. “Are you an idiot?”
“Who was the lawyer who prepared the letter? Maybe he’s got a copy.”
Parvelle shook his head. “That was ‘Skinny’ Wormser. He went to prison. He’s been dead for years.”
“Did you get any money from the company in all this time?” Tubby asked.
“No. Me and Ligi went our separate ways.” Cruel memories crossed Parvelle’s face. “We never put the land into production. We— hell, I. I was saving it. I told him any time he asked— I’m leaving that land to my children as their inheritance. He didn’t have any say about it because I owned the company. He never would have dared pretend otherwise. He knew what I’d do to him.”
“So why did he screw you now?”
“Because of this!” Parvelle pounded his fists on the rails of his wheelchair. “I can’t get out of here to kill him. I’m stuck on this damn porch. I’d pay good money for the job.”
“No, no, no,” Tubby said quickly. “Not interested.”
“I’ll find somebody else,” Parvelle said. “How are you going to make a buck off this then?”
“Well, uh, I don’t know if I can.”
“Someone made Russell do this,” Parvelle said, staring past Tubby’s head. “Somebody he’s more afraid of than me. Because he knows I will kill him. Russell never would have thought about a bank robbery, either. He doesn’t have the brains or the balls. I’ll pay you to find out who that somebody is.”
“Maybe it’s the local investors the newspaper wrote about.”
“Yeah? And who are they?”
“The newspaper didn’t say.”
“And that’s the way it’s gonna stay. They going to be hard to find,” Parvelle said.
Tubby left him soon afterwards. Driving back to New Orleans he was thinking how fragile a handshake is. Even a handshake backed up by a legal document safely stored in the vault of a bank.
* * *
Tubby took a ride on his Harley to clear his head. In a moment of lunacy he had ordered the motorcycle months before, and he had only ridden it a couple of times.
He didn’t feel he deserved it. It reminded him of a bad episode in his life, and truth was, he thought he looked
funny on it. But then the governor got one, and even a television judge. By the time he hit River Road, speeding beside the grass-covered embankments of the levee, he didn’t care. Swooping around a long curve, flying under the Huey P. Long Bridge, what came to mind was a pretty face wrapped in straw-colored hair, a woman lying on a hotel bed, trying on his black boots, waving her legs in the air to admire them.
CHAPTER XXV
Marguerite stared past the long silver wing of the jetliner. Snow covered the ground as far as she could see. The pilot had announced just a second ago that they were on a path to land at O’Hare in thirty minutes. She had slept through most of the flight and dreamt about the man called Rue firing point-blank into the poor bellhop’s stomach. A stewardess had noticed her squirming around and had shaken her gently awake.
Marguerite had smiled weakly and accepted the offer of a ginger ale.
There was a canvas bag in the hold of the plane with her claim check on it. Unless the thieving baggage handlers at O’Hare stole it, Marguerite would soon be collecting a fortune. She would tip a redcap to cart the sack to a taxi. She had not yet figured out where she would hide her bounty once she got the bag home, but if they left her alone for even a couple of hours, she would come up with something. She always had been resourceful. One thing you learned in the commodities business was how to live on the edge.
The handsome lawyer with the broad chest came to mind, and she smiled to herself. He definitely rated as unfinished business. Her race to gather her belongings from the Royal Montpelier and to depart New Orleans had prevented any good-byes. If she managed to stay out of jail, however, she would look him up again. Meanwhile, Marguerite could imagine many wonderful things, like how her mother would cry for joy when her mortgage was finally paid off. Like her boss’s expression when Marguerite said see you later, sucker. Straightforward as Marguerite was, it would be difficult not to tell her mother, or Rondelle, about the treasure, but change is what life is all about. A smart lawyer had told her that.
* * *
Edward and Wendell were strolling on Bourbon Street, drinking good beer from plastic cups.