Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 06 - Lucky Man

by Tony Dunbar

  “You’re going to sue him?” Sapphire asked.

  “I don’t know,” the lawyer admitted. Sapphire’s case was not so great, if you wanted to be objective about it, and further public inquiry into the deaths of Finn and Sultana would produce the very embarrassment that Al Hughes was trying to avoid.

  “My first concern,” he said, “would be to protect you.”

  “I’m pretty good at protecting myself,” Sapphire said, sticking her lip out bravely. “I’ve got a lot of friends in this town.”

  ***

  Tubby asked Cherrylynn to come into his office the next morning for a private talk.

  “I know I may not be the world’s best boss,” he told her after she sat down. “And lately I’ve just been, I don’t know, mad at everything. So, I’m trying to say I can understand why you’ve not been very happy here. I’m going to try harder, and—”

  “Mr. Dubonnet,” Cherrylynn interrupted, “you’re not the reason I’ve been unhappy.”

  “I’m not?” he asked in surprise. “Why I thought—”

  “No, I’ve been going through some stuff of my own. It’s had nothing to do with you.”

  “Well, gee. I guess I’m relieved. Is there anything I can help you with? I would really like you to stay here, Cherrylynn. You’re a big asset, is what I mean.”

  “Oh, I know that, Mr. Dubonnet. If you must know, I’ve been having some questions abut my own sexuality. That’s all. It was nothing to do with you.”

  Mouth open, Tubby just stared at her.

  “And then Rusty, my old whatever, showed up and like an idiot I let him hang around for a few days, and then I thought I might be pregnant, but it turns out I’m not.”

  Tubby closed his mouth.

  “I was very upset, of course, and then, you know, I was listening to The Bob Show on the radio and there was this man on from the Louisiana Department of Revenue talking about how they had lots of unclaimed money and you just had to call their telephone number.”

  She smiled, for the first time, in weeks it seemed.

  “Anyway, I called the number and gave them my name and, did I ever tell you I was married once?”

  Tubby’s brow furrowed. “Of course. You eloped in the twelfth grade.”

  “Right. Well, did you know he died? He got smashed in a car wreck in Dulac, right where you turn off to Cocodrie. Amazingly, he had a life insurance policy from his J.C. Penney credit card. The money was just sitting there because he spelled my name wrong. With the interest I’m supposed to get fifty-five thousand dollars.”

  He returned her smile.

  “Anyway, I think I’m getting some things resolved. I’m a little happier about myself and my job. I expect I’ll stay around here for a while, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Why, sure. I don’t know what else I can say.”

  “Not a whole lot.” She stood up. “It’s nice talking to you like this. Maybe we should do it more often.” She beamed at him and left the room.

  Stay tuned for the next installment, Tubby told himself. Clearly, I am not the center of the universe.

  ***

  “I would like you to talk to the coroner again,” Tubby told Flowers. “What’s his name?”

  “Todd Murphy.”

  “Tell him to get off the fence on Sultana Patel. Damn right she was murdered, and the murderer is Marcus Dementhe, but Murphy doesn’t need to know that. Once he calls it a homicide, the police will get back on the case. I guarantee that they’ll find some trace of her blood on him or in his car and that will be the final scandal for our DA.”

  “Sure. I can try, Tubby. I can’t force him to make a decision, though.”

  “Yeah? Well just remind him how fifteen chips went down Finn’s throat and how, according to Murphy, only five came out.”

  “Okay, but what if Dementhe’s, you know, thoroughly cleaned the car he used to carry Sultana’s body?”

  “How the hell do I know? A guy that slimy must have left a trace somewhere.”

  “Check. By the way, did you ever find out what the connection was between your friend Jason Boaz and Max Finn?”

  “No. I haven’t had a chance. It doesn’t seem too important now.”

  ***

  He called Faye Sylvester. The kid who answered the phone dropped it on the floor, but Faye finally picked it up.

  “Hi,” he said. “I was just wondering how you were.”

  “Busy. How about you.”

  “Well, it has been hectic here. I’ve had a big fight here with the DA, Marcus Dementhe,” Tubby said proudly, “and I think I’m about to nail the sanctimonious bastard.”

  “Marcus Dementhe? What’s he into now?”

  “You know him?”

  “I’m afraid so. Did you know he was once on the board of directors of our mission?”

  “No. The possibility never crossed my mind.”

  “Buddy asked him to leave after they caught him sleeping with one of our girls.”

  “That’s terrible. How did he ever get involved in your organization?”

  “That was my fault. I recommended him. You see, Marcus and I were married at the time.

  “Are you there?” she asked after thirty seconds had passed.

  “Yeah,” Tubby said. “I’m just trying to understand this picture.”

  “I recognize he’s a lousy human being,” she said. “I didn’t know it until the end, though. It’s taken me a long time to understand this picture myself.”

  “I’m trying to be delicate here. He’s a despicable monster, and he’s your ex-husband.”

  “I know. He should be in jail.”

  “He’s been trying to ruin the reputations of several judges in New Orleans.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me. I honestly think Marcus can deal with his own corruption only by imagining that others are more corrupt. If you stand for something good, he tries to bring you down into the mud. That’s what he tried to do to me. It’s taken me a lot of counseling to make me believe maybe I’m not so bad after all.”

  “Was he always that way?”

  “To tell you the truth, I think he was.”

  “Where does that leave us?” she asked after another long silence.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  “Call me when you do,” she said, and hung up.

  ***

  There was a small letter tucked in the day’s mail, so small that Tubby almost missed it. His name and address had been neatly handwritten in a fine script. Curious, he opened the envelope.

  Dear Mr. Dubonnet,

  I have decided to take my own life. The shame of what I have done and the shame I brought down upon Alvin is more than I can bear in this world.

  When you read this I will be gone. You will know that I was found at the footsteps of the man who brought this grief upon me. I want him to witness this final act.

  Please say good-bye for me to Alvin, and also to Cherrylynn.

  Sultana Patel

  Tubby took a deep breath. He started to reach for the phone, but his hand stopped in midair.

  He folded the letter back into its envelope and placed it in the top drawer of his desk, where he kept items of a personal nature.

  Detective Kronke was right, he thought. You can’t have a murder case without a murder.

  ***

  At the Second District police station Vodka studied the paper he had just snatched from the fax machine.

  “Get this,” he said to Daneel. “One of the fingerprints we took off the back door of that sheet metal works came up with a match.”

  “Yeah? Who?”

  “Marcus Dementhe, the new DA. All the elected officials get to have their prints on file.”

  “I guess he could have been buying some sheet metal.”

  Vodka just frowned at the flimsy piece of paper in his hands.

  ***

  Tubby claimed his Chrysler at the city pound. Detective Kronke had cleared the way for that on condition that Tubby not call hi
m any more. It was a sunny day, so he picked up Raisin and they were driving around Audubon Park looking at the river.

  “Lots of bodies, but no murder,” Raisin commented. “Or are you going to frame him for the job?”

  “Frame? Ahem. Well,” Tubby replied. “At some level the guilty will pay.” He watched an oil tanker round the bend while he parked the car. “ ‘I don’t care when they get buried if their souls go a-blackberrying.’ ”

  “Are you quoting Chaucer at me again?”

  “ ‘In legal matters he was a great help, not like a cloistered monk with a threadbare cloak, but more like a master or a pope.’ ”

  “You’re a pope, all right,” Raisin snorted.

  “So how’s Sapphire?” Tubby asked.

  “She’s doing great. She told me to pack up and get out.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. It’s time to move on.”

  “How do you feel about it?”

  “She’s right. I’m not together enough for her.”

  “You’re writing it off?”

  “Time will tell. I still like her.”

  “She’s a very neat young woman. I learned some things from her.”

  “Like what?”

  “To look at people more closely than I’ve been looking.”

  Raisin raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m saying, you roam around New Orleans and you see a lot of people you wouldn’t see anywhere else. And it definitely makes life intriguing.”

  A man with an Indian feather stuck in his headband fished for bottom feeders off the sidewalk. He was eating a sack of crawfish, and he threw a shell their way.

  “Quite a revelation,” Raisin said dryly.

  “Well, it was for me. Sapphire kind of opened my eyes to my surroundings. I’m feeling better about everything.”

  “Fact is, Tubby, anyplace else you’d be a fish out of water. It’s not the weird people that make life in New Orleans bearable. It’s because those weird people tolerate you, strange as you are. You’re insulated from the real world here. This is the Big Easy-to-Love, man. It’s geographically incorrect. You fit right in.”

  “Are you insulting me?”

  Raisin just chuckled. “Whoever said, ‘In life, the race belongs to the swift,’ was obviously not from New Orleans,” he added.

  “If you can’t put up with termites, mosquitoes, and floods, I wouldn’t urge you to live here,” Tubby conceded.

  “Personally, I think it could just be the fall weather,” Raisin said. “The temperature is finally dropping. Everybody feels better.”

  “Everybody but you, maybe.”

  “I’m working through some things,” Raisin mumbled.

  “What? Like getting older? We’re all on that train together.”

  “You’re telling me? You’ve been groaning about the sand running through the hourglass for months now.”

  “I’m coming to grips with that.”

  “Great. But you’ve accomplished some things in your life.”

  “So have you.”

  Raisin laughed. He lit a cigarette with a wooden match, which he then flicked toward the water.

  “You know, you’ve got kids and everything,” he said softly, exhaling smoke.

  Tubby couldn’t think of a snappy comeback. He watched the seagulls following a tugboat.

  “But then, I should be glad just to wake up and see another sunrise.”

  “Me too,” Tubby agreed. “It’s a wonderful world. Most days.”

  “Louis Armstrong knew a few things, didn’t he? By the way, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?”

  “Don’t know yet. You?”

  “I’m thinking about dishing out turkey at the Ozanam Inn. Speaking of which, how long has it been since you stopped drinking?”

  “Six and a half weeks.”

  “You look good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Want to break your streak and go have a beer?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  He started up the car, and they drove to Mike’s Bar.

  “There’s more to life than alcohol,” Tubby told him on the way.

  “Hold that thought,” Raisin said.

  “You know, people are a lot like stars,” Tubby began.

  Raisin threw his cigarette butt out the window.

  THE END

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Marilu O’Byrne, Joshua Nidenberg and Jesse Beach, who have filled glaring gaps in my knowledge, to Pat Brady and Steve Sullivan for their slants on New Orleans, to Hugh Knox and Linda Kravitz for their encouragement throughout, and especially to my editor, Jackie Cantor.

  WE GUARANTEE OUR BOOKS…

  AND WE LISTEN TO OUR READERS

  We’ll give you your money back if you find as many as five errors. (That’s five verified errors—punctuation or spelling that leaves no room for judgment calls or alternatives.)

  If you find more than five, we’ll give you a dollar for every one you catch up to twenty. More than that and we reproof and remake the book. Email julie@booksbnimble.com and it shall be done!

  The first Tubby Dubonnet mystery is CROOKED MAN:

  http://amzn.to/1aUGLvp

  Or you might enjoy Julie Smith’s Edgar Award-winning Skip Langdon mystery series, also set in New Orleans. The first book in the series is NEW ORLEANS MOURNING:

  http://amzn.to/XKmrKc

  Other Books by Tony Dunbar

  The Tubby Dubonnet Series

  (in order of publication)

  Crooked Man

  City of Beads

  Trick Question

  Shelter From the Storm

  Crime Czar

  Lucky Man

  Tubby Meets Katrina

  Envision This (A Short Story)

  Also by Tony Dunbar:

  American Crisis, Southern Solutions: From Where We Stand, Promise and Peril

  Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent

  Delta Time

  Our Land Too

  Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959

  Hard Traveling: Migrant Farm Workers in America

  A Respectful Request

  We hope you enjoyed Lucky Man and wonder if you’d consider reviewing it on Goodreads, Amazon ( http://amzn.to/18rSyCG ), or wherever you purchased this book? The author would be most grateful. And if you’d like to see other forthcoming mysteries, let us keep you up-to-date. Sign up for our mailing list at www.booksbnimble.com

  About the Author

  Like Tubby Dubonnet, Tony Dunbar is a New Orleans lawyer. The seventh episode in the Tubby Dubonnet series, Tubby Meets Katrina, was the first novel set in the city to be published after the storm. He is the winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award, and his mysteries have been nominated for the Anthony and the Edgar Allen Poe “Edgar” Awards. He has also written non-fiction books about the South and civil rights and has lived for more than thirty years in this beautiful and complicated city.

  Full Table of Contents

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  Acknowledgments

  Guarantee

  Other Books by Tony Dunbar

  A Respectful Request

  About the Author

  sp; Tony Dunbar, Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 06 - Lucky Man