by Tony Dunbar
He grabbed his Saturday morning coffee from the Salvation Army mobile kitchen. Today there was a fresh-faced young girl he hadn’t seen before handing out the cups. She said she was from a church group in Kansas, and would just be here for a week. She asked if Bonner had been displaced by the storm.
He said, “Yes, ma’am. You want to take a tour of the city?”
“I’ve already seen a lot,” she said.
“I could show you a lot more,” he told her.
Paycheck in his pocket, Bonner set off for Carrollton Avenue, the route to the good part of the city that was above the flood. He was armed, as he always was when he ventured out into the wilderness. The gun he had taken from the Place Palais security guard was in his real pants covered by his white suit, and he carried a Buck knife taped to his ankle under his sock.
The walk took him past lots of restaurants he wished were open, because he was hungry. There was Angelo Brocato’s Italian Ice, and K-Jean’s Seafood, and New York Pizza, and Venezia Pizzeria, and the Flying Burrito, and the Lemon Grass Vietnamese, and Manuel’s Hot Tamales, and the Tastee Donuts, and the Five Happiness Chinese, and a Popeye’s, a Rally’s, a Wendy’s, and Ye Olde College Inn for po-boys.
Every one of them was messed up, crusty brown flood lines midway across the doors, plywood in some of the windows. There really were no signs of life anywhere, except for some “gutting guys” like himself who were clearing out the Catholic Book Store. They said “Buenos dias, mi amigo.”
Bonner ignored them and walked on. The face protector hung around his neck on its elastic band. The day was warming up, and he was hot inside his suit, but these white garments were his identity. No, they concealed his identity. In any case, white suits were where it’s at.
Eventually he reached a string of businesses, set among the trees and residences which lined the street. His paycheck was drawn on the First Alluvial Bank, and he knew right where that was.
The bank was open, and there was a line of cars half-way around the block trying to access the drive-up windows. Bonner paused to check that he had his ID, then he walked into the branch and got in line.
It wasn’t a bad wait, about ten minutes. The man in front of him tried to get into a conversation about the white suit Bonner was wearing, asking him if he were contaminated, ha ha, and should they keep their distance, ha ha.
Bonner shrugged, pretending not to speak English. Nothing unusual about that in New Orleans these days.
The little girl behind the counter gave him a strained smile and said good morning. She was already stressed, though only half an hour into the job, because her Friday night had been a late one, spent at the just re-opened Tipitina’s listening to Sunpie, and because every one of her customers so far had presented a problem such as an out-of-state check, a third-party check, a complaint about a service charge wrongly assessed while the account-holder was evacuated to Timbuktu, or wherever. The teller was also living with her sister in a one bedroom apartment in Harahan because her own apartment in Mid-City got flooded, and… the list went on.
But she was glad to see that Bonner was trying to cash a paycheck drawn on her own bank, which was about as simple as a transaction could get.
“Do you have an account with us, sir?” she asked politely.
Bonner had to clear his throat to say no. There was a painting on the wall behind her. It showed palm trees and golden sand. It was the beach. There were whitecaps, a blue sky, big clouds, and it came to him. That’s where the hurricane belonged. That’s where it came from. The beach. That’s where he wanted to go.
The teller interrupted this revelation. “Could I please see your identification?”
“Sure,” he managed to say. He slid his library card and deputy sheriff’s permit under the bar and through the little window.
“You are Mr. Dubonnet?” she asked, staring at the name for the first time.
“Yeah, that’s me,” Bonner said.
The girl looked at the check.
“I’ll be just one minute, sir. I have to see how much is in this account.”
She took the check and Bonner’s ID to her supervisor who was trying to fix one of the printers at the drive-up window.
Bonner watched this nervously.
It happened that this particular teller knew who Tubby Dubonnet was.
“And the signatures don’t even match,” she whispered to her supervisor. “It could be a stolen check.”
The supervisor looked at the endorsement and compared it to the specimen on file at the bank. She wiped her hands on one of the paper napkins stacked next to the box of Krispy Kreme donuts one of the girls had brought.
“I see,” she said, and pinched the documents in her fingers and led the way back to the teller window.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Dubonnet,” she said in an overly polite tone. Her glasses wiggled above her nose. “But do you have a driver’s license or any other form of identification?”
The young teller stood close behind, waiting to see how this would turn out.
Bonner knew right then the jig was up. They were not going to give him his money. They probably were not even going to give him back his check. He needed to go to the beach.
“I think I got what you want somewhere,” he said while he slowly adjusted his chemical escape mask over his mouth and nose. Now there was nothing visible about him except his eyes and ears, and not much of them.
“It’s right here.”
He whipped the revolver out of his pocket and pointed it straight between the supervisor’s eyes.
“This is a bank robbery, lady,” he wheezed through his mouthpiece. “Put all the money you got right here in my hand.”
“Give him the drawer, honey,” the supervisor said.
“Dat man’s robbin’ da bank,” the customer behind Rivette informed everyone in line around him. The normal decorum of the lobby disintegrated. The customers bashed into one another scrambling for the exits, and the ladies in the side office ran out to see what was happening. The other tellers ducked behind their counters, and the ones serving the drive-though customers screamed for help into their speakers and ran for the back room.
The girl in front of Rivette was nervously counting out twenties into his hand.
“Just give it all to me!” he demanded, admiring the scene he had created.
She gave him stacks of bills with paper wrappers, presenting Bonner with the problem of how to carry his loot.
“Give me a bag!” he yelled.
The teller looked blank.
“We don’t have any bags,” the supervisor explained. “Or maybe there’s something in the back room. Would you like to wait while I go look?”
Bonner realized this was getting out of hand. The lobby was now empty except for one woman whose high-heeled shoes stuck out from under the customer service desk. He could practically feel the police on the way.
“Get on the floor, you!” he commanded the teller and her boss. Frantically he crammed the packs of bills under his jump suit and into the pockets of his regular pants. Some missed and slid down his leg where they were trapped by his elastic anklets.
Bonner discharged his gun one at one of the wall cameras zooming in on him, and, clumsy with money, he burst out of the bank.
He ran down a side street into what in normal times was a busy residential neighborhood. Now it was uninhabited because of the flood, except for one roofing crew and some men gutting out one of the homes. A fire had taken out a couple of houses on the block, and only their brick porches and solitary chimneys remained, towering over collapsed piles of burned timbers and rubble.
That is where Bonner hid himself, in one of the burned-out shells. He immediately stripped off his white suit and tossed it aside. The money came pouring out. No sooner did it hit the ground than one of the packages of money exploded and showered his legs and much of the cash with blue dye. Now he looked like a house painter which was not such a bad disguise, but a lot of the bills looked like the fifty dollar p
lay-money in a Monopoly game.
He kicked all of the cash, good and bad, under some roofing shingles and hid his white suit in the crawl space underneath what had been the porch. He heard sirens in the distance.
Rivette climbed out of the burned-out house and ambled down the block to where some men wearing little white dust masks were hauling wet sheetrock out of a home.
“Y’all need any help?” he asked.
The men spoke no English, but they pointed upstairs where he found the contractor sitting in the living room talking on his cell phone. He waited patiently until the man’s call was finished, then asked him for a job.
“It’s dirty work,” the contractor said.
“I don’t mind,” Bonner told him, and nobody looking at him would doubt that. He had on a sweaty T-shirt, green and brown duck-hunters’ pants, and blue paint stains from his knees to his toes. There were also white booties around his shoes, which gave him that professional “gutting” look.
“What’s the job pay?” he asked.
“Ten bucks an hour.”
“Can I start now?”
“Sure. Go on downstairs and pitch in.”
Which is what he did, moving in step behind the other men who were tearing chunks of wet sheetrock off a wall and dumping it into wheelbarrows. He quickly got in the rhythm. The boss poked his head in the door and said he would be back in one hour. Bonner and one of the Latinos each took charge of a full wheelbarrow and rolled them out to the street where they were building a great pile of refuse.
A patrol car approached. A police lady wearing aviator sunglasses leaned out the window.
“You see anybody in a white suit come running by here,” she asked.
The Latino worker almost bolted. Seeing no escape, however, he controlled himself and smiled “No hablo Ingles,” he said and pointed at Bonner.
“I didn’t see anything,” Bonner said.
“If you see anyone strange, call us. There was a bank robbery in the next block.”
“Will do,” Bonner replied. The police car drove slowly away.
The Latino smiled at him and shrugged.
Bonner shrugged back. No, there weren’t any strange people around here.
25
Tubby got a personal visit from Detective Johnny Vodka. The lawyer was on his stomach, replacing another wall outlet he thought might have gotten wet in the hurricane.
“The door’s unlocked,” he called out when he heard the knock.
Vodka obliged. “Are you all right down there?” he asked, standing over Tubby.
“Oh, it’s you. Yeah, I’m just doing some wiring.” He got to his feet and dusted his trousers off.
“Have you been robbing banks, Mr. Dubonnet?” the policeman asked.
“No, I’m too dumb for that, except that I have represented banks and charged as much as I could get away with. Why the question?”
“At 9:58 this morning a man presented a check made out to you at the First Alluvial Bank on Carrollton, and when they wouldn’t cash it he stuck up the place.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“I knew it wasn’t you. The teller says she knows you, and that’s why she wouldn’t cash the check. Besides, the robber was described as tall and thin. That lets you off the hook.”
Tubby knew it was true. He considered himself reasonably tall, but since he started wrestling in the 180-pound class in high school, nobody had ever called him thin.
The policeman filled Tubby in on what had happened.
“Why was he using my name?”
“Don’t you see? He’s bound to be your boy. I got a description from the people he worked for, some clean-up crew over in City Park, and he sounds just like Bonner Rivette. We took some prints from the bank, and I’ll bet you a bag of beignets they come back a match.”
“So he is still around,” Tubby said. He wiped his brow,
“Sure is, and close by, too. He’s still on the loose, and get this. They found the security man at your office building, the Place Palais, across the street in the Bunny Biscuit with a concussion. He’s in a coma. The man’s name is Manuel…”
“Manuel Oteza. I’ve known him for years. He let me into my office the day before the storm hit.”
“Right. Of course, it could be a coincidence, but I make Bonner Rivette a suspect. He hasn’t tried to contact you?”
“Hell, no!” It was now apparent to Tubby that this Rivette individual was a banshee that had been released by the storm.
“Or your daughter? What’s her name?”
“Christine. No. There’s been no contact.”
“Do you think he might know where you live?”
“Of course he could. He’s been in my office. Christ, I’m in the phone book.”
“Then you might want to lock your doors and not just let people like me come walking in.”
That was helpful. “Sure, I see what you’re saying.” Tubby’s mind was seething. Maybe his somber imagination was right. Maybe there was evil afoot, and just maybe it had the Dubonnet family’s number.
Not an hour after Vodka had left, the call came in. It was from Christine, and she was hysterical.
“He phoned me, Daddy. That same man.”
“Rivette?” Tubby knew whom she meant.
“Yes,” she shrieked. “I answered the phone, and there he was. He asked me if I had a place where he could stay.”
“If you had a place?” Tubby knew he sounded dumb.
“Yes. He said he didn’t have a place to stay. And then he said we could take a trip together.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m driving back to town with my friend, Samantha. We’re on the Interstate coming home.”
“To this house?”
“Actually, I was planning to stay with Samantha in an apartment she’s got on First Street. The landlord told her the electricity was turned on and she had to start paying rent.”
Christine was calming down. “She asked if I would move in and share.”
Tubby’s mind raced nowhere. Was Christine safer back in Jackson, Mississippi? Would she be safer with him where he could keep watch? Had Samantha started talking again?
“Has Samantha begun to talk yet?”
“She’s starting to, Daddy. I think she’ll be normal soon.”
“Who knows her address?”
“Huh? Well, I guess she does. I’ll ask her.”
“No! No!” Tubby shouted. “I’m not being clear. What I mean is, Rivette’s been involved in a bank robbery and possibly killing people. He’s very dangerous. If you stay at Samantha’s, is there any way he would know where you are?”
“I don’t see how. I didn’t know where I was going until today.”
“Look, you call me every hour until you get here. There’s a policeman interested in this case. I’ll ask him what he thinks you should do.”
“Okay. He sounded real creepy. It was just the strange way he acted like there was nothing wrong. Like it was the most natural thing to call me out of the blue. Like he was asking me out for a date.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I told him no, he couldn’t stay with me. I asked him if he thought I was nuts.”
“And?”
“He laughed and said he’d bet I would like the beach.”
“The beach?!” Now Tubby was shouting.
“Really. Who goes to the beach in October?”
Tubby counted to three silently. “If he calls back, don’t speak to him, okay?”
“It might be one way to find him, Daddy, if I do talk with him some.”
“Yeah, well don’t.”
“I’m scared of him. I think about his ‘I am Katrina’ thing all the time.”
“Well, he’s not Katrina,” Tubby said. Or maybe he was—just as senseless, just as out of control. “I’m going to hang up and call the police.”
“Okay. Love you.”
Tubby told her he loved her, too.
He called the number John
ny Vodka had given him. It rang, but no answer. He called the number of the First District Police. Detective Vodka was not in. They would give him a message.
He opened the front door and looked outside. It was nighttime now. He had the yard almost cleared of branches. Only one twenty-foot length of magnolia trunk still lay across the lawn. It was more than a foot in diameter, and he had not had a chance to whack it up into manageable pieces with his chain saw. There were lots of places to hide in his yard, lots of places he couldn’t see. None of the streetlights on the block were working yet. His daughters meant so much to him. Even though he might not be such a prize, his daughters made up for it. They had to be shielded from harm. Christine had already had a narrow escape from Rivette’s clutches. He didn’t believe she had even told him the whole story of what the man had done to her. She was such a sweet smart girl. Nothing more could happen to her.
He had always derived great strength from his place in New Orleans, his network of friends, his seat at the bar. Now it was broken, dispersed, in disarray. He had never felt so powerless, so all alone, so angry.
Bonner Rivette put in a good day’s work, and the boss handed him three twenty-dollar bills out in front of the house they were gutting, two blocks away from the First Alluvial Bank he had robbed.
“Tomorrow morning, eight o’clock, right here,” he told his crew, and everybody said yes, sir. With the downstairs stripped almost to the walls and the upstairs green with creeping mold, the contractor did not bother to lock the place. There was nothing inside anybody would want to steal.
“I’m waiting for my ride,” Bonner informed everybody and sat on the steps. After the rest of the men left, he remained there for another half an hour picking dirt off his clothes. When it started to get dark he ambled down the sidewalk to the burned-out shell of a building where he had hidden his money. He climbed back into the charred ruin and kicked aside the roofing shingles that covered his hoard.