Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 07 - Tubby Meets Katrina

by Tony Dunbar

  His roommates in the garage were three cousins from Nicaragua, and they tried English with big apologetic grins, managing to ask “How’s it going?” and “You like to eat?” They all camped out on cardboard and blanket rolls on the concrete slab floor stained with oil. They had a refrigerator and an electric stove. The walls were full of lawn tools and ladders. A metal folding table served both for their meals and the Nicaraguans’ games of cards, which Bonner wasn’t interested in. What he did like was that his roommates had shoeboxes full of religious statuary and icons, bleeding Jesuses and plastic cards with stern women’s faces portrayed on them, the backs carrying frightening religious messages in Spanish. They took these out every day after work, displayed them on the table, and had prayer sessions. Rivette took part, having no idea what the Latinos were saying but fancying that they were worshipping him. He at least grasped the significance of their devotion to blood, suffering, and terrible sanctions.

  Rivette would retire early to read the old magazines his employer stacked in the garage, mostly Popular Mechanics, Bow Hunting, and the NRA News. He picked up some new ideas about weaponry, trapping, and how to make effective gun silencers from beer cans. He called his roommates “The Mexicans,” and he would pretend to fall asleep in a dark side of the garage while they kept playing their games into the wee hours. But he was actually studying them, memorizing their facial gestures, the way they laughed and ran their grimy hands through their hair when agitated. When they threw in their cards and turned off the lights, brushing teeth and saying good night to each other as they got into their bedrolls, he would stay awake listening, hearing how their breathing and coughing slowed, until they slept. Other people were interesting, but he refused to like them.

  He could hear the owner’s cat mewing outside the building, and her fury and excitement when she pounced at the mice scampering about appealed to Rivette more. He made sure everyone was fast asleep before he allowed himself to relax and enjoy private thoughts of mayhem, just as he had always done in his jail cells.

  In the morning the owner banged open the door and summoned everyone to work. Bonner was always awake already. He generally arose in the last hour of darkness and sat at the table, watching the Mexicans snore, and he sometimes fixed himself a cup of instant coffee. In those quiet moments he often thought about Christine Dubonnet, and he became convinced that she could learn to love and understand him. He imagined apocalyptic scenes he might create, and she was there, swinging a sword beside him. In some scenarios they both died, hands and hearts joined.

  But when their employer announced daylight, and the Mexicans got out of bed insulting each other and pissing loudly into the toilet, Bonner was content to stop thinking and journey forth into the moonscape where they would spend their day.

  They were carted by pickup truck to the job, someone’s flooded home or business, and set to work tearing out all the moldy slimy glop and residue of human existence and dragging it to the street. It smelled bad. It was foul beyond belief. Water, left in a house for a week or two, created a smell worse than the decaying corpse Bonner had once discovered in his father’s tool shed. It smelled worse than the effluent through which Rivette had swum when he escaped the New Orleans jail. But it didn’t bother him, because it was the evidence of the storm’s potent vengeance upon the people who lived in little boxes who Bonner hated with a passion. He equated the storm’s power with his own and its smells with virtue.

  The Mexicans didn’t complain about the work either and just joked and shouted at each other all day. Their laughter bounced off the purple and yellow fungal walls when they turned up something suggestive, like a pack of condoms or a woman’s underwear or a girlie magazine. They went positively bonkers over a black rubber dildo that came up from the mud.

  Bonner didn’t know what it was, and he feared touching something so alien and mystical. When one of his co-workers waved it in front of his face, jabbering incoherently. Rivette knocked it away and barked at the man like a dog. The Mexican backed up, then shrugged in resignation and pitched the toy into the rubble.

  Everything they handled went to the street. Wheelbarrows full, until the mountain outside on the curb was the length of the property and as high as the grossness could be thrown.

  Every other day the owner paid them in cash. The Mexicans were reluctant to go anywhere to spend their money, and Bonner suspected they were no more legal than he was. So they made shopping lists for the owner’s sister, who would go and buy them supplies at Sam’s Club on Airline Highway.

  Bonner usually ordered the same thing. Cheerios and milk and Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup—comfort food.

  The owner was extremely successful in lining up jobs. There was no end to the work. He was very happy and promised all of his men a raise. He brought the Mexicans a bottle of Tequila and gave Rivette a fifth of Jack Daniels.

  It was a mistake. The party that night in the garage got out of hand. The Mexicans forgot about their suppers in the microwave and burned their frozen El Paso Quesedillas and Bean Dip platters from Sam’s Club. They didn’t care, but whooped at the smoke pouring out of the unit and shoved each other merrily. They jostled Bonner, who was trying to stir his soup over an electric hot plate, and made him spill his saucepan. While he stared in fury at his dinner sizzling on the burner, the fools grabbed a garden rake and a shovel off the pegboard wall and dueled among themselves, circling around a lawn mower jabbing and feinting. Bonner, his hands wet with noodles, lost his temper. He took up a machete and waded into the game.

  He caught one of the Mexicans on the shoulder, slicing it like a watermelon, and the man howled in agony. That ended the fun part of the party. As they retreated before him, Bonner swung his machete in great arcs, intent on decapitating all three of them. They were cunning but helpless before his fury and found themselves pinned into a corner, on their knees, one crying in pain as blood soaked his shirt. The others were also crying, from fear. The eldest held up one of his treasures, a plaster Christ wired to a wooden cross. The Jesus perpetually writhed in agony and blood flowed from his lips. Sharp thorns circled his head, and his eyes were turned upward, searching for relief.

  Those eyes stared at Bonner, and he was moved. Throwing aside his machete, he knelt and begged the terrified Mexicans and their insensible Jesus for forgiveness. Then he rose and ran from the building and fell upon the bed of his employer’s pickup truck out in the driveway and prostrated himself in his grief. He felt a calling to serve the Lord.

  The emotions passed quickly, however. He regained his composure, as he had always managed to do. It was the Lord who should serve him. Gaining his feet, he straightened his dirty work clothes and marched back into the garage.

  The Mexicans were ready for him this time. One had the machete he had tossed aside, and the other had acquired an axe from the wall.

  “Just here to get my stuff, hombres,” Bonner said, smiling.

  They accepted that as an invitation to battle. When they tried to encircle him, he overturned the kitchen table and the box with all the saints inside. They pounced, and Bonner defended himself with vigor and great noise, and in a matter of minutes the owner had arrived, threatening to call the police, while Bonner and the Mexicans wrecked the room.

  When it was over, the police did come. The owner hid two of his Mexicans under his wife’s bed. The other, bleeding profusely, was locked inside a bathroom where he wouldn’t stain the carpets until the coast was clear. He sat on the toilet, dribbling hydrogen peroxide into his wound. The officers interrogated the homeowner about all the mess and the blood in the garage, but he explained that there had been a little fight over a poker game. Everybody had split. No harm, no foul.

  Bonner Rivette, knapsack full of clothes and some cash in one hand, had vaulted over the back fence and run through the neighbor’s yard into the next block. He was on his own in the world again.

  The City of New Orleans had filled up with professional debris-removers from Texas. They were mostly young guys, hap
py to be away from home and making good money courtesy of FEMA. They spent their days driving Bobcats and lifting the piles of debris into big dump trucks, and they got to wear orange vests. They could see that the work before them was extensive. In fact, it might last for years.

  Four of them had gathered for lunch at the Daiquiri Shop at Riverbend where roast beef sandwiches had always been the house specialty at $2.95. In their honor, the price had gone up to five bucks.

  “That’s the kind of girl I always wanted,” one of the workers remarked to his friends, referring to the barmaid who was squirting Kahlua icees into twenty-ounce plastic cups. “If she had any more tattoos I couldn’t resist.”

  “Here comes one more my style,” his buddy said, sipping his Miller Draft.

  The men followed his glance to a large black transvestite wearing a sequined vest and cowboy hat who entered the establishment and went straight to the video poker machine.

  “Must be the locals returning.”

  “She’s a honey.”

  “How about that dude?”

  They looked out the window.

  An Easy Rider look-alike wearing camouflage pants, and a blue and white windbreaker, and an American flag bandana tied around his head was hiking down the neutral ground where the street car had once run.

  “Just another local citizen headed off for gainful employment,” one of the men joked.

  In fact, it was true. Bonner Rivette had decided to claim New Orleans as his own, and he was on his way to apply for work. Folded neatly in his jacket pocket was a leaflet he had torn off a telephone pole seeking “Certified Hazardous Material Clean-Up Workers/Other Positions Also Available.” He thought he was the kind of guy who might fit into an “other position.”

  Tubby thought often about Bonner Rivette. It festered until, one morning looking in the mirror and not liking the care-worn face staring back at him, he resolved to do something about it. He called Flowers, who had landed a contract with Homeland Security doing background checks on the bevy of prospective law enforcers Katrina had brought into the region.

  “It’s a fantastic deal,” Flowers explained. “I’ve hired people to work the phones and the computers and run checks on people. I’m just the administrator.”

  “I never really thought of you in that capacity,” Tubby told him.

  “Actually, most of the administration is done by Eva, my assistant, but it’s like everything else, somebody’s got to be the boss.”

  “So you’re no longer a private detective?”

  “Sure I am. I can do private work. There’s just not much of it to do. I think people must be too busy surviving to worry about cheating on their husbands or getting divorced. And you’re not giving me any business. None of the lawyers are. Except someone may want to locate a relative. I’ve had a couple of those with mixed results.”

  “I want to locate the guy who kidnapped my daughter, the one called Bonner Rivette.”

  “He’s going to be hard to find until he gets arrested again,” Flowers said. “I can tell you what I already know about him.”

  “You already checked him out?”

  “Of course. I do that for anybody who shoots at me and molests the daughters of my friends.”

  “This isn’t a joke.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”

  “Because it’s not funny.”

  “Okay. Rivette is a small town boy originally from Cottonport. He has a juvenile record for something I didn’t bother trying to dig up. He has plenty of adult stuff that will give you the picture. Assault with intent to kill when he was eighteen. He attacked some poachers in the woods. Charges dropped when witnesses refused to testify. Convicted for burglary of a church when he was nineteen. All it said was he took items valued at more than a thousand dollars. He pled guilty and got probation. By then, I guess, he was getting to be a familiar face to the local cops because he has two or three more arrests right in a row for vagrancy and getting into fights, but no convictions. They were rousting him, but he was smart. Then he hits the big time and stabs his sister. Actually, he’s charged with slaughtering the girl’s preacher, too, but that gets reduced to second-degree murder, since he killed the only witness except Sis, and she’s a nutcase. He caught a break and only got ten years. He must have been up at Angola when he got a retrial, and then he escapes from some little parish jail. That’s when our boy gets arrested again in New Orleans. The storm comes along, and he escapes, again.”

  “That’s all very disturbing.” Tubby was indeed disturbed. He had a vision now of Rivette as a mad dog.

  “Yes. Christine was lucky to get away from him.”

  “He hasn’t turned up since?’

  “You mean since he jumped out of my helicopter?”

  “Right.”

  “No, he hasn’t turned up, but it won’t be long before he gets caught again. He’s too bad, or too outrageous, or too crazy. He’ll get picked up for something any day now.”

  “I’d like to be sure of that and find him myself.”

  “I guess you could go up to Pointe Croupee Parish or Archie and Bunkie where he used to live. Maybe somebody there has seen him. But detective work is very tedious and time-consuming, Tubby.”

  “I know. I’ve paid your bills for years.”

  “Exactly. Do you want me to try to find him for you?”

  “No, I’ve got more time than money these days. What are the chances that the New Orleans police are actively searching for him?”

  “No chance at all. Their headquarters got flooded and the police are all living in one of those cruise ships tied up down by the Riverwalk Shopping Center. They say it’s because most of the cops lost their homes to the hurricane. I think it’s so the brass can keep an eye on them and make sure no more boys in blue desert or go around looting stores. I think they have their hands full.”

  “Doing what? We haven’t had a murder here since Katrina, and hardly any other crime, they say.”

  “I don’t know—investigating themselves, maybe, or setting up road blocks to keep people out of the Ninth Ward or fixing up their own houses. I can tell you the names of the officers who collared Rivette at the Greyhound station though, if you want to go talk to them yourself. It’s Johnny Vodka and Frank Daneel.”

  “Funny names for Irishmen.”

  “What? Yeah, funny. If you need any help, you know how to reach me.”

  “Sorry I was such a jerk the last time I saw you,” Tubby said.

  “I didn’t notice,” Flowers lied.

  22

  The Ecstasy’s berth on the Mississippi River wharf downtown had a look of permanence. The ship was almost surrounded on the land side by police and fire department cars and emergency rescue vehicles parked in orderly rows. Trailers functioning as headquarters for FEMA, Homeland Security, firefighters and cops guarded the approaches to the vessel, and electrical, water and sewer lines had been run to these makeshift offices. A companion ship, the Sensation, was docked next door. It housed unfortunate municipal employees.

  Tubby had to park half a mile away because a debris mountain had appeared on the regular cruise terminal lot. It was full of bedding and garbage and discarded MRE containers and the rest of the stuff scraped out of the nearby Convention Center after they got all the refugees out of the way and off to Houston. Tubby had heard reports of murder and rape during the days of chaos in this building. One of the old pool hustlers who hung out at a bar Tubby had begun to frequent claimed to have personally seen a man shot between the eyes and the corpse of a seven-year-old girl. City officials denied that such events had occurred, and Tubby questioned how the shark, who was admittedly a steady drinker, knew the girl was seven, but his own brief experience at the Convention Center led him to believe that any horror was possible there.

  He inquired at the police trailer where he might find a Detective Vodka. After he showed his ID and offered some wisecracks to establish that he was a serious man and a lawyer with information about a cas
e, the desk officer, hair slicked back like a young James Brown, picked up the phone and made a call.

  “He’s off duty. But they think he’s here. Have a seat.” The policeman indicated a rusty folding chair. Tubby took it and waited. He and the desk officer were not the only people around. A lady cop was doing her nails, sitting in front of a little table that had an automatic coffee pot on it. If there had been any conversation in the room, the lawyer’s arrival had stopped it. The hands on the electric clock on the wall, fifteen minutes slow according to Tubby’s cell phone, did not seem to move.

  “Pretty busy down here,” he said, trying to liven the place up.

  “It’s always busy,” the desk officer said, scratching his ear with a pencil. He didn’t catch the humor.

  “I guess you’ll be looking forward to getting back to your headquarters.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t say when. The old building is full of mold. It’s got some issues.”

  “Do you like it down here?” Tubby asked.

  “I don’t stay on the ship,” the man said. “I got an apartment across the river in Westwego. You like it here, Trylene?”

  “It’s okay,” she said, filing her pinkie. “But the cabins are too small for my style.”

  The door to the tin can opened.

  “Johnny, this man says he has some information for you,” the desk officer said, making the introduction.

  Tubby stood up. He was a head taller than Vodka, but the smaller man gave him a good crunch when they shook hands.

  “Come on outside. Let’s talk,” Vodka instructed. He was wearing jeans, running shoes and a red sweatshirt. He had long blond hair, a mustache like a toothbrush, big ears that might have invited ridicule when he was a kid, and he worked out. At least that’s what Tubby figured, judging from the bulges under the cop’s sweatshirt.

  The policeman led them down the steps to someone’s car. He sat on the hood. “Whatcha got?” he asked.