Crooked Man: A Hard-Boiled but Humorous New Orleans Mystery (Tubby Dubonnet Series #1) (The Tubby Dubonnet Series)
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As soon as she was convoyed back to her trailer she dragged out her most precious belongings and threw them into her dented, still-not-paid-for Rabbit. She dropped the keys to her mobile home in the manager’s mailbox, drove out to Interstate 65 and turned south, for no reason but that Ned lived five miles to the north in Owassa and she was taking no chances on running into him again that night. A long two hours later, when only eighteen-wheelers and other lonely pilgrims were on the highway, a slender corridor through dark miles of uninhabited and forbidding pine forests, she stopped for gas and cigarettes in Mobile. Mixed in with the truck fumes she could smell the salt in the air. The road east went to Pensacola, where she and Ned had once taken a beach trip during their brief courtship. The sign to the west said New Orleans. She had never been there. It sounded a lot better than anyplace she had ever gone with Ned. If she didn’t find something there, like safety, a place to work, or romance, then she could just keep going to Texas, or maybe even California.
“How many hours is it to New Orleans?” she asked the sleepy-looking man behind the counter.
“About three, if you don’t stop,” he said. “Are you planning on going all the way through tonight?”
“Yep.” She made up her mind.
“You reckon that car of yours will make it that far?” he asked.
“It had better,” she said, pocketing her change.
“I’m just pointing out, ladies have to be careful at night. There ain’t much out there but dark for the next hundred and forty miles.”
“Thanks, I’m not worried,” she said. And the surprising thing was she really wasn’t worried. “Couldn’t I walk a hundred and forty miles?” she asked herself as she settled back behind the wheel.
Coming over a high-rise bridge into the city at daybreak took her breath away. The tall buildings, rising up in the new sun, the graceful outline of the suspension bridges over the Mississippi River, the brawling morning traffic, made a promise to her – a promise of possibilities. She opened the window to let in the cool, clean Gulf of Mexico air, exited at Franklin Avenue, and fell asleep parked in a neighborhood of proud oak trees and old brick houses.
She was rousted by a policeman at around ten a.m. He ascertained that she was alive and told her politely that she needed to move along. After they talked a little, he with his blond mustache and bulky blue jacket, she with sleepy eyes and tangled hair, he suggested a rooming house on Canal Street. He gave her directions and waved when she puttered away. She found the place without trouble. It was a lovely old mansion with a big yard, owned by a blue-haired lady who showed Monique to an immaculate room, furnished with a bed, a dresser, a television, a cherry-red throw rug, and a vase of fresh flowers. It cost as much for a week as her trailer in Evergreen had cost for a month. It was her first house in New Orleans, and there were roses in bloom outside her window.
Monique made her way. Right off the bat her car got towed from a freight-loading zone while she was using a pay phone, and she never went to pick it up. She was afraid that the finance company might have reported it stolen, and she’d get arrested. She learned the bus routes and found a job as an exotic dancer in a foul-smelling club on Decatur Street. Ali, the linebacker-sized barman, made sure the customers didn’t touch her unless she allowed them to, and the money was okay. It was basically good exercise, except that the air in the place, from the customers’ cigarettes and other noxious emissions, was roughly the flavor of car exhaust.
She moved out of the rooming house and into a cheap apartment in the French Quarter. It was nice being able to explore the Quarter before work, to walk down to the river and watch the freighters with names of countries she had never heard of painted on their bows, to mingle with tourists and sometimes buy a muffuletta, packed with Italian ham and olive salad, and eat it outdoors in Jackson Square. She bought a bike. She did what she needed to do to get by. She made some friends and picked up a little cocaine habit. A job waiting tables in a bacon-and-eggs joint on Chartres Street opened up, and she took it even though it paid less than dancing. When she walked out of the strip joint, she gave Ali her falsies and G-string, and he got a huge laugh out of that.
Monique did not consider herself to be a genius by any means. Sometimes she wondered if God had given her any brains at all. But when she met Darryl Alvarez at a party her boss threw, she was smart enough to know that he was a step up. He was a little short for her taste, and he had kind of a Spanish look that was new to her, but he seemed real sure of himself and he said a lot of interesting things.
They left the party early and went out and had a few drinks in a crowded bar Uptown run by a friend of his. The drinks were on the house, which was impressive, and Darryl left a fat tip for the waitress, which was even more so. He was fun. They stopped off at his apartment right on Lake Pontchartrain, overlooking what he said was the yacht harbor, to snort a little coke together. His apartment wasn’t furnished like the ones most of her previous boyfriends lived in. There weren’t any Mexican bullfight pictures on the wall, for one thing. It was all very modern and clean and had wall-to-wall carpet. There was a big wooden cabinet that when he opened it revealed a television and a stereo and some carved black statues from Africa of fierce naked men and women, and he had a thick glass coffee table. She checked out the medicine cabinet while she was in the bathroom and found out that Darryl used Mitchum, Colgate, and Drakkar Noir. It was clean in there, too, which was mighty unusual for a man, and she thought he must have a maid.
Darryl pulled the curtains open, and she could see, across the street and the floodwall, all the sailboats berthed in their little slips in the harbor, illuminated by tiny lights strung along the piers. It was very romantic.
“I’ll make it a little darker and you can see the view better,” he said, and she giggled.
“That’s funny?” he asked, switching off a lamp. “What can I fix for you?”
“Oh, a beer, I guess. I don’t care.”
“Here’s a Miller Lite,” he said, handing her a pony bottle, “so you can keep your beautiful figure.”
“Thank you. What do you do to stay in shape?”
“I chase after love,” he said, and he kissed her on the back of her neck. A shiver ran all the way down her. “It’s wonderful exercise.”
She ended up spending the night.
In the morning he drove her back downtown to her apartment. He was polite enough to wait until she got inside her gate before he drove away, but she was afraid that would be the end of Darryl. No problem, it had been for kicks. But surprise, he called her later in the week and offered her a job waiting tables at Champs, which turned out to be his restaurant and bar out by the lake.
“I don’t know if you’re interested,” he said.
“Sure, I’d be interested. What nights would I work?”
“Seven nights a week, if you want to. We just had a girl quit. You can do three or four, it’s up to you.” With Darryl, she would find out, a lot of things would be up to her.
“You want to come in tomorrow night and see how it goes?” he asked.
“Sure, fine,” she said.
“Okay. Be here at four o’clock.”
“I’ll be there.” She had to look in the Yellow Pages to find out where the bar was. Then she called RTA to learn how to get there on a bus. You had to go to Canal, then out to the Lake, then take a bus out Robert E. Lee. Wow! That could take two hours. She told her boss she was sorry, but she was quitting, and she dropped her green apron on the counter.
FIVE
Tubby drove downtown on Tulane Avenue. It was after four-thirty, and the going-home traffic was beginning to build up in the opposite direction. He thought about Tulane Avenue when he first saw it as a kid, brought to town by his dad for a Pelicans baseball game. It was really something back then. There were palm trees on the neutral ground and even a streetcar line. You ate hot dogs at the stadium, maybe skipped a few rocks in the New Basin Canal where all the Irishmen had died of malaria, then watched dad drink a
beer at the Home Plate Inn after the game. Now it was an eight-lane strip for commuters who rolled past a string of cheap motels and pimply street whores and kept their windows up.
The baseball stadium was now a hotel that had changed its name so many times nobody could remember what it was. There was no place to park on the curbs. You couldn’t make a left turn for a mile. Once you got on the damn street there was no place to go but downtown. He couldn’t imagine how the Chinese groceries on each corner survived. Thinking about these things he pulled up to a light and was beeped at from alongside so loudly that he almost jumped the curb. When he swung around to start swearing he saw it was Jynx Margolis, a client of his who was widely admired for her great sense of style and impressive cleavage.
She lowered her window, letting out a perfumed puff of air so cool that Tubby, in his convertible, could feel the draft six feet away.
“I have to talk to you, Mr. Dubonnet.”
That was promising. Apparently she had been doing something athletic. Her white sports shirt with a tiny penguin on it was open at the collar, and she looked like the dessert he had missed at lunch.
“You’ve got to help me get an injunction or something on Byron. Now the creep is calling me at all hours of the night,” she yelled.
“Get call blocking,” Tubby shouted.
“No, really, I have to talk to you.”
“Come to my office. But it’s going to have to be brief.” Up went her window, and she zoomed ahead.
Tubby parked at Place Palais. It took just a minute to get to his spot. He had clocked it more than once and found it took about five seconds to navigate every floor when the garage was empty and an incredibly slow minute and a half per floor at rush hour. It gave you a chance to think—usually about places without car fumes. He parked on Level 9 and rode up in the elevator to the forty-third floor of the office building. He went through the door with TURNTIDE & DUBONNET written on it.
Cherrylynn Resilio was the receptionist and the secretary for the firm, which was Tubby and his partner, Reggie Turntide. When she first came to work three years earlier she made it clear she expected to become indispensable, and she had succeeded. She had originally migrated, Tubby learned when he first interviewed her, from Seattle. She had eloped in the twelfth grade with a good-looking lumberjack and oil-field roustabout who had brought her to Louisiana to live in a brand-new trailer park in an overgrown sugarcane plantation outside of New Iberia while he worked off-shore on the rigs, ten days on, seven days off. The seven days off must have been mainly strenuous partying because Cherrylynn just rolled her eyes, shook her head, and grinned when she told Tubby about that part of her past.
“We were a little crazy,” she said, and smiled at Tubby like he must know what she meant. Actually, all he could do was imagine, and he knew that was probably a lot less fantastic than the real thing.
She didn’t tell him what had caused the breakup exactly, but she had packed her suitcase and grabbed a Greyhound for New Orleans, looking for work. Tubby got the impression that her husband, or ex-husband—she was a little vague on that—could be in Texas, Louisiana, or Washington State for all she cared, but that she was apprehensive he might show up on her doorstep. Tubby did know that Cherrylynn kept her phone number unlisted.
Tubby had hired her, while Reggie was out of town, on the basis of her enthusiasm and desperation, not her experience, and he was real pleased with the way it had turned out. Admittedly, Cherrylynn was taking her time mastering legal secretary-type things like preparing mortgage certificates, but she attacked filing, billing, and updating the Rolodex with a vengeance. She was also cute as a button in a windblown, wide-eyed, Puget Sound sort of way, and she made the clients feel at home.
Cherrylynn had already fixed her makeup and had her purse in her hand ready to leave for the day when Tubby walked in, but she immediately sat back at her desk.
“Here are your messages, Mr. Dubonnet,” she said, handing the slips to Tubby. “Mr. Whiting called several times and said it was urgent. I put your letter to Mrs. Prado on your desk. Do you need me to stay?”
Jynx Margolis walked in just behind Tubby. She said hello to Cherrylynn and marched right past her into Tubby’s office. Tubby smiled at Cherrylynn, who was not amused, and followed.
“I’d be glad to stay,” Cherrylynn pleaded. Tubby waved goodbye to her and closed the office door.
His office was spacious, but the floor and most of the other flat surfaces were cluttered, as usual, with stacks of files. The walls were a soft pink, sort of a subdued violet, courtesy of building management, and a Persian rug covered most of the parquet floor. Two walls were glass, providing views of the French Quarter and the crescent of the Mississippi River. The third was covered by a bookcase, and along the fourth was a sofa nobody ever used except Tubby when he sometimes slept in right before trial. The furnishings were north Louisiana—a wide cypress desk from the office of a now defunct cotton compress, and comfortable upholstered chairs, purchased from a Shreveport undertaker when he retired. There were enough law books on the shelves to put new clients at ease. The rooftop swimming pool and tennis courts of the Fairmont Hotel were directly below. Tubby kept a telescope by his window focused on a well-positioned lounge chair by the pool.
Mrs. Margolis settled into one of the upholstered chairs facing the desk and began cooing over a framed photograph of one of Tubby’s daughters.
“That’s Debbie. She just turned twenty. Has her own apartment and everything. It’s really great to see you, Jynx. You’re looking just fantastic,” he made a little contact with her bright eyes, “but I’ve got to be leaving soon.” This wasn’t really true, and Tubby wondered why he said it. Maybe because it made him sound important or maybe because the woman radiated a strong magnetic field that he instinctively tried to shield himself from for fear of getting helplessly polarized.
“Tubby, I think I’m going crazy. He’s calling day and night.”
“What does he say?”
“He curses at me. He says things like I’m a rotten mother, that I’m a cheap whore, that I’m sleeping with his best friend—what a joke that is—that he’ll take the kids away. He only does it when he’s been drinking, which he seems to be doing a lot of these days. I really should tape-record him and send it to the Boston Club.”
“Maybe that’s not a bad idea.” Tubby looked at his watch but felt the pull. “Would you like a little drink yourself?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said emphatically. She crossed her legs and found a cigarette in her purse. Tubby came around the desk and lit it, and then went to the miniature side bar concealed behind a closet door next to the sofa. He fixed her a gin and tonic, and a glass of tonic water with a slice of lime for himself.
She took a big sip and sighed happily. She leaned back in her chair, and her bosom rose and fell magnificently.
“These things reach a point of climax and taper off after a while,” Tubby said soothingly. “You’re at an emotional peak right now. Believe me. Everything is going to blow over and quit pounding on you soon.” Better get back to business, he thought. “You’ve won the custody battle. He’s not going to open up that whole soap opera of misdeeds again.”
“He doesn’t care about the kids. Now that we’re dividing up the property, Byron’s true colors have come out.”
“He can’t delay the process much longer, or keep his assets hidden unless he’s a lot smarter than I think he is. I’ve got an investigator checking on his jewelry purchases. Everybody always leaves a trail.” She had perfect cafe-au-lait skin, courtesy of extended weekends at Perdido Key and Destin. He could have studied any part of her for a long time. Her armpits, paler than the rest of her, were interesting. The faint brown wrinkles circling her knee caught his attention. The sandal straps starting up her ankle had a clever knot.
“I just want this to be over,” Jynx said.
“You need to be patient,” Tubby counseled. “It will take a while. Look after yourself. Take a trip.”
“You’re good for the long haul, I know,” Tubby said. “I hate to talk about money, but I must. My partner has been fussing at me for not collecting my unpaid bills. I’d appreciate it if you could make some sort of payment to cut the balance.”
“Tubby,” she said, putting her glass, emptied of all but a mashed lime, on his desk. “You know everything I have is tied up. The kids are literally eating the bank account. When we finally tag Mr. M, we can settle up on everything. But for now there’s just little me against the world.”
“Still I must be fair to my partner. There must be something you can do.”
Jynx stood up and leaned over the desk. She stroked Tubby’s face so gently he wasn’t sure he had felt it. “You’re the sweetest little lawyer in New Orleans,” she said. “You’ve been patient and understanding from the beginning. When this is over, you’ll get payment in full, I promise.” A force moved him to cover her hand with his own. “Keep on looking out for me, Tubby,” she whispered, her wounded brown eyes dissolving his.
Suddenly she straightened up. “Oh, naughty me.” She waved goodbye on her way out the door.
Tubby stared for a few minutes at the empty space she had left. Then he finished his drink and tapped out the number of his ex-wife, Mattie. His middle daughter, Christine, answered.
“Hi, baby doll.”
“Howya doin’, Daddy?”
“What’s happening?”
“Nothing much. We’re going to Florida this weekend.”
“Who’s we?”
“Oh, me and some friends.”
“Where?”
“Fort Walton.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, Daddy. Mom’s not home.” He noticed how she changed the subject, but he let it pass.
“Where is she?”