Crooked Man: A Hard-Boiled but Humorous New Orleans Mystery (Tubby Dubonnet Series #1) (The Tubby Dubonnet Series)

by Tony Dunbar

  Darryl had installed a fantastic Sony compact disc player in the car, and she listened to Garth Brooks and Willie Nelson. She smoked cigarettes and tapped the wheel with her nails. The Rex and Endymion beads hanging on the rearview mirror danced back and forth. Darryl checked in every five minutes or so when he saw something interesting. He pointed out a restaurant he said the Mafia owned, and when they drove through a swamp he told her to look out for alligators, you might see the car lights reflected in their eyes. He also asked if she saw anybody following them. She hadn’t really been paying any attention, but she told him no. After that she started checking her mirror, but she didn’t know how you could tell one pair of headlights from another.

  They drove through the town of Houma, on the bypass, and then turned left onto a narrow blacktop running in a direct line south, to the sea. It was dark, but Monique could tell that the land they were passing through was perfectly flat. Darryl told her it was nothing but rice fields and marshes. The flashing lights in the far distance could be oil rigs out on the Gulf, he said, or maybe power lines or boats. Finally he said he was pulling over, and in a minute she saw his lights off to the side. He was idling behind a trash Dumpster in what looked to be the middle of nowhere. She crushed onto the gravel and pulled in beside him.

  Darryl got out of the truck and came around, and she rolled down her window.

  “I’m going down about five miles,” he said. “You come to a place where this road makes a T almost. The main road hooks off to the right, and there’s another road that goes left. It’s gravel. It goes to some fishing camps, maybe two miles down the road. When I call you, just drive down there and meet me. Remember, straight to the fork. Turn off left. Come to me, two miles. When you leave, just go out the way you came in. You’re just bringing me the bag. Don’t hang around. Don’t get out of the car. Nobody needs to see you. I’ll call in about an hour. You got it? Can you wait that long?”

  Monique nodded. “I live for you,” she said.

  Darryl’s eyebrows seemed to pinch together, and his eyes twitched a little bit. “You’re the one, Monique,” he said, and kissed her. “Just do like I told you.”

  He winked at her and got back in the truck. She cut off her lights and engine. Darryl rolled off, and in a couple of minutes the sound of his motor disappeared. Monique was all alone on a slender bridge of asphalt in the center of a million miles of marsh grass, salt air, and the biggest, blackest sky she could ever remember seeing. There were some stars, but no moon. It was so quiet she became conscious of the sound of her own breathing. Then some night insects, or frogs, began croaking at one another, and a mosquito hummed into the car. Something rustled around in the Dumpster. Maybe a raccoon, she thought. It sounded bigger than a raccoon. She rolled up the window quickly, put Wynonna Judd on the Discman, and smoked. She kept checking her watch.

  Because she had the music on, Monique didn’t hear the car coming. It raced past with its headlights off, and scared the bejeezus out of her. Right behind it came two more cars, whoosh, whoosh, no lights. It was black as coal outside, but she thought she saw bubble-gum machines on top. She immediately killed the stereo and slumped down in the seat. The night swallowed the sounds of the car engines, and it became as quiet as the inside of a coffin. She chewed off most of her fingernails. The phone didn’t beep. She waited an hour, and then some. When she couldn’t stand it anymore she started the car up and backed out onto the roadway. She thought for a moment about going straight back to New Orleans, but she couldn’t just desert Darryl, so she turned to the right. She kept her lights off, too. Nobody was coming, and the road went straight as a bullet. After driving five minutes she reached the T and stopped to look around. Way down the gravel road she could see lights, flashing blue ones and one steady bright white one, like she had seen on a movie set once on Canal Street. They might have been a couple of miles away, but you didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out what was going on.

  Monique jammed the shifter into the slot marked “R” and peeled out backwards. She pointed the Mazda due north and mashed the gas pedal down flat.

  She got back home in a lot less time than the trip out had taken. After riding around her block, looking for things suspicious, she parked the car and ran into her apartment carrying the blue bag, which she pushed under her bed. Then she sat in front of the TV, rocking back and forth with her arms tight around her knees. There was no one she could call.

  Monique woke up at around noon on Monday, got dressed, and went over to the restaurant. The bartender, a guy named Larry, filled her in on the news. Darryl had been busted down in the bayou. Larry didn’t know too many details yet, but it had made the radio. She tried to act as though she was extremely shocked. She made a scene about being upset, then drove back to her apartment in the Mazda and waited. She was preparing to go to work at four o’clock when the phone finally rang.

  “Hey, babe,” he said. He sounded really tired.

  “Hi, honey. Where are you?”

  “In jail. The good officer here is letting me make a phone call.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Oh yeah,” he sighed. “I’m fine. Here’s what I need you to do. I want you to go to the safe in the office and take out fifteen thousand dollars. There should be that much there. Give it to Jimmy. It’s for my bail. He’ll know what to do. He ought to have me home by tomorrow.”

  She liked the way he said “home.”

  “Have you got my car in a safe place?” he asked.

  “Yeah. It’s parked right outside. Everything is okay.”

  “All right. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be here,” she told him.

  * * *

  Darryl was naturally bummed out about his bust, but Monique sensed that he was also trying to figure something out. She could tell the pieces weren’t fitting right. He was back at work at Champs, but he was very distracted. All of the employees told him how sorry they were, and he told them to forget about it. Everything would work out. The bar still did good business, the same as always, but the guys in suits, the ones Darryl always called “the players,” disappeared completely. The phone in the office stopped ringing.

  Darryl started drinking a little bit more.

  “When this is all over, let’s take a trip,” Monique suggested.

  “Where would you like to go?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Canada, maybe.”

  “What’s in Canada?” he asked.

  “Wouldn’t it be fun to go someplace really different? I’d like to see the Yukon, and the Mounties with the red coats.”

  “It’s really cold up there.”

  “I don’t think it would be too cold in the summertime. They have to be able to pan for gold, like you see in the movies, so you know the water can’t be frozen all the time. Have you ever been?”

  “No,” Darryl said.

  “Well, I’d like to go.”

  “Suits me,” he said. “We can celebrate me getting out of prison.”

  “You’re not going to have to go to prison, are you?”

  “Being realistic, Monique, it’s a possibility.”

  “Were you in before?”

  “When I got busted?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just for a couple of months. It was one of their so-called nice places, up near Monroe.”

  “Was it real hard for you?”

  “No, just boring. You see some shitty things happen inside, though. You got to stay on your toes to keep out of trouble. You hear as little as possible, you know what I mean. I guess it’s hard to imagine if you’ve never been there.”

  It was an opening, but Monique didn’t take it. They were at Darryl’s apartment, and Monique tried to comfort him with hugs and kisses. He was so listless that it took some time to get his motor running. Trying in the only way she knew to make things up to him, she told him to lie back and forget his troubles. She slipped off her dress and knelt over him, gently trailing her hair over his face and che
st, letting his hands roam over her body until he was aroused.

  Lying in his big bed afterward, sharing a cigarette, Darryl started up again. “Did you ever wonder what it feels like to be on the moon?” he asked.

  She asked him what he meant.

  “Just circling around in orbit. No communication. Lost in space, but under the control of something bigger than you. You can’t get away from it, and you can’t get any closer to it.”

  She didn’t know how to respond, so she said, “Yeah, I kind of know what you mean.”

  “It’s really weird,” was all the comment Darryl would make. She squeezed his shoulder to encourage him, but he was finished.

  Still, he seemed to have it under control. He would tell jokes and make the customers laugh.

  He came over to Monique’s apartment and got the blue bag about a week after his arrest. First he opened it up and gave her $50,000 in cash. That was for her to hold on to, he said. It was money to take care of herself with, hire lawyers, or whatever she might need or he might want.

  The sight of all that cash really upset her. She grabbed Darryl with both hands and tried to shake him, though he was too big to shake.

  “I need to know what we’re into here,” she shouted in his face. She wasn’t thinking when she said “we,” but Darryl picked up on it. He looked at her funny and sat on the bed. He took her hand.

  “It really was stupid for me to get you involved,” he said. He fumbled around for a cigarette, as usual.

  “I don’t care about that. I just want to know what’s really going on.” She took one of his hands in both of hers.

  He ran his fingers through his thick black hair. “I’m not sure what I can tell you, babe. Something definitely went wrong. I was supposed to be protected. It was arranged for the Terrebonne Parish deputies to be somewhere else. I’ve done this before, and there’s never been a problem. But all of a sudden the place is full of federal men, I don’t know how they found out about it, but it was just them at first.

  “When the local law showed up later they were almost apologetic about the whole thing. But at the start it’s just these federal yo-yo’s, and they were so interested in me they lost the boat. It just backed up and gunned out of there as soon as the cars with the blue flashers rolled in. You’d have thought they could have stopped it down the bayou, but they didn’t. Maybe they were shorthanded. This one cop, he has on no uniform, he keeps pushing and shoving me, getting right in my face, going, ‘Where’s the money?’ He kept yanking me around saying, ‘Where’s the cash?’ He didn’t care at all about any drugs. ‘Give me the cash. It’s your ticket out of here,’ he was saying. And there was a guy in one of the cars who never did get out. I couldn’t see who he was. Him and the guy who was hassling me drove away while the DEA federales were still taking pictures of the pot.”

  “And all the time the money was with me,” Monique said.

  “Yeah, good thing.”

  “Who does it belong to?”

  “You don’t want to know. Hey, maybe it’s mine now.”

  EIGHT

  Reggie Turntide was slightly built, had thinning hair, wore square, tinted wire rims, and maintained a good tan. The glasses were mostly for effect. He liked to polish them, or twirl them around, or suck on one of the earpieces while he was talking to a client. Reggie had a lot of hustle, but he was never seen in court. His favorite clients were local and state politicos, and the kind of people who hung around them, and he had made his reputation in zoning permits, municipal ordinances, and state construction regulations. He had a keen eye for the fine line dividing permitted public profiteering from out-right fraud, and he got paid to show it to his clients before they heard it from the state attorney general.

  Reggie liked to say he complemented Tubby. Rarely did their work overlap. They had started off as social friends, through their wives, before they had been law partners. What Tubby liked about Reggie was his gift for gab and his unshakable cynicism. Reggie could walk into any room full of people and find hands to shake. He would have been naturally suited to politics if he hadn’t thought it was beneath him. He liked to be the guy who put things together, and he was out for bigger game—bigger money—than public office offered, even in Louisiana, where it offered a lot.

  The only time Tubby had ever seen Reggie nonplussed was when they were both in moot court back in law school. The occasion was a trial—not a real one but a student enactment to learn from experience the feel of the courtroom—but the judge’s role was being played by an honest-to-God federal judge named Sealey, whose teaching method was to kick ass. Tubby was one of the jurors, and Reggie was the defense attorney. When time came for his opening statement, Reggie came from behind his counsel table and approached the jury. As the words, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” came out of his mouth, he lazily took off his jacket—with visions, no doubt, of a folksy William Jennings Bryan clouding his senses. Judge Sealey’s eyes bugged out. Reggie popped his suspenders and got no further than, “This case is about greed,” when the judge began pounding his gavel on the bench, like there was a rattlesnake he wanted dead, and bellowed, “Young man, turn around.”

  Reggie complied so swiftly that he almost tripped and had to brace himself against the jury box for support. Great circles of perspiration suddenly appeared on his shirt.

  “You will never,” shouted the judge, “never, never, take off your coat in my courtroom. If you ever seek to practice in my courtroom again without your coat on, I will cite you for contempt and have you ejected by the bailiff.” Never mind that there was no bailiff present among the dramatis personae; the point was made. Reggie dove for his coat and got into it posthaste.

  “You may continue,” the judge said, mildly. And Reggie did, in a weak voice, but he kept it short. He never repeated the mistake. In fact, Tubby noticed that over the years, you hardly ever saw Reggie without a coat, a blazer, or at least a sweater covering his shoulders. If he was caught somewhere where it would look odd, like on a beach or a golf course, Reggie might let his shirtsleeves show, but he seemed ill at ease when he did.

  Tubby and Reggie rarely crossed paths after graduation, since Tubby concentrated on trial work and Reggie was generally allergic to courtrooms. They kept track of each other through their wives, who were both active in the Friends of the New Orleans Museum of Art. The Pan Am airplane crash in Kenner brought them back together professionally.

  Reggie had inserted himself into the plaintiffs’ team, though he made no pretense—to the other lawyers at least—that he knew anything whatsoever about personal injury law. One of the bereaved families there were about two hundred of them had hired Reggie, due to some misunderstanding of his competence, which gave him the right to sit at the counsel table. He immediately began organizing the lawyers, moderating such questions as to how to apportion shares of the recovery and who would do the actual work, and negotiating with insurance companies. Whenever there is money in the parish, the politicians get theirs, and Reggie helped to cut up and serve that piece of the soufflé, too. Inspired by the proximity of their husbands, the wives arranged a dinner together, and then a lake trip, and everybody became friends. When the complicated financial settlement was finally reached, Reggie did very well. As did Tubby, who actually put in a lot of courtroom hours and handled several depositions and witnesses. Over drinks at the celebration dinner in the Rex Room at Antoine’s, beneath the framed portraits of past Carnival royalty going back through decades of civic service, the two victors decided to throw in together.

  Since Tubby’s and Mattie’s divorce, however, they hardly ever saw each other after hours, but they got along fine as partners. They didn’t argue about money, but split it all. Tubby sometimes thought Reggie got the better of the deal, just because he never saw Reggie working very hard. But he had a talent for bringing in the business. And, to be honest, Reggie was better at collecting his bills than Tubby was. Whenever a new client found the firm, Reggie would smile and say, “Pennies from heaven,”
and he would keep smiling till they fell.

  This morning Reggie was in Tubby’s office wanting to talk about Darryl Alvarez, a client he had given to Tubby. Darryl, Tubby knew, was the manager of a bar at the lakefront and always had plenty of cash. He flashed it for lots of politicos and Jefferson Parish real estate developers, who all loved Darryl, and since Reggie hung out with the same group of pals, he loved Darryl, too. Darryl was great for free meals, tickets to Saints games at the Dome, and tips on horse races. He also made a buena margarita. But, Reggie had sadly told Tubby a couple of weeks before, Darryl had a problem.

  He had been caught with a new Ford wide-body pickup truck in Terrebonne Parish, unloading fifteen bales of marijuana from a shrimp boat. Where it had started its journey was anybody’s guess, but it ended with Darryl staring into a DEA agent’s spotlight. He called Reggie from the Parish Jail. Reggie, like most of Darryl’s buddies, suddenly didn’t want to know him at all, but he did at least wake Tubby up at home. Tubby drove down early in the morning. It took a while, but he eventually got the bond lowered from its initial million dollars to a measly $150,000. By some means Tubby never learned about, Darryl got a bondsman to post the bail, and he was soon back in his nightclub.

  Reggie wanted to know how Darryl’s case was coming, and Tubby told him.

  “I offered Fred Stanley, the U.S. Attorney, five years, simple possession, but he laughed. He’s trying for life. What he wants is for Darryl to turn around.”

  “Turn around on whom?”

  “I don’t know. I guess whoever he bought the pot from. He hasn’t told me.”

  “No chance of getting him off?”

  “He’s working on the ‘It was my twin brother’ defense, and the ‘I thought it was hay for a Halloween hayride’ defense. So far no takers.”

  “I appreciate your handling this, Tubby. Has he been paying you?”

  “No problem there. He’s ahead of the game. When he comes in this afternoon I may ask for another deposit.”