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

by Tony Dunbar

  “Because in fairness, and as compensation for your efforts, you would be entitled to be rewarded for your time, and because you could help us to avoid an unpleasant situation.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I suppose I mean the unpleasantness of my client not getting his money.”

  “I don’t see how I can help you unless you tell me whom you represent or who claims the cash.”

  Banks again paused before he spoke. He consulted his cocktail napkin and mopped up a ring on the table. “Tubby, give it back,” he whispered. His eyes came up and latched on to Tubby’s.

  “I don’t think I want to continue this conversation. I’ll be leaving now.” Tubby got up, nodded to Banks, and walked out.

  “Sorry we couldn’t do business,” Banks said to his back.

  Tubby did not see it, but Banks lit another cigarette as soon as Tubby was gone. He asked the bartender for a telephone.

  Tubby walked back across Canal Street to the garage, glad to be outside. Iberville was not a busy street at night. In fact, it was downright deserted. He had to take a tiny elevator to “green,” where his car was parked. As he got on, a tall guy in a T-shirt, shorts, and running shoes glided in with him. Tubby pressed the number of his floor and glanced at his fellow passenger. The man gave him a distant smile. He had a long scar on his cheek, which he probably thought was sexy, and a lot of muscles.

  The elevator stopped on the third floor, and when Tubby stepped out the man came with him. Tubby did not like that, so he stopped to fish around in his pocket for his parking ticket. The man also stopped and looked at Tubby serenely.

  “What do you want?” Tubby asked, having a hard time controlling his breathing.

  “Let’s get in your car, Mr. Dubonnet. Then you do what I say.” The guy’s voice was not unfriendly. He was at least a head taller than Tubby was.

  “I don’t think so,” Tubby said, not very loudly.

  The man with the scar reached behind him and pulled out a small handgun that must have been holstered somewhere in the band of his running shorts, and he held it out for Tubby to see. Tubby was reminded of a policeman showing a badge. The man was simply providing the explanation for why Tubby should do what he was told. The gun was very small, but Tubby knew it could cause pain. He was no longer into guns. He had seen a lot of their victims. Before he could react, the man with the scar suddenly grabbed Tubby’s left ear and twisted it violently, bringing him to his knees.

  “Let’s go, little man,” he hissed, and started pulling Tubby with him.

  Just then the elevator door behind them whooshed open, and a Hispanic couple stepped off. Tubby’s ear was released in an instant, and the man palmed the gun.

  “Excuse us,” said the woman, a short, dark-haired figure with deep-set eyes. She was plainly irritated that her way was blocked by two men possibly fornicating.

  Tubby started running. Faded arrows painted on the concrete showed the ramp down, and down he went. He looked over his shoulder to see three surprised faces, then saw the guy with the gun start running after him. Tubby was pumping hard, trying to keep his footing on the greasy driveway, coated with years of car exhaust and oil pan drippings. His hard-soled shoes kept sliding, and he had to push off the wall to avoid sprawling headfirst onto the cement. He heard sneakers behind him when he ran past the ticket booth and hit the street. He cut left, toward Bourbon, where there were tourists and lights. Behind him he heard a commotion when the man following him got tangled up with an old derelict who was weaving down the block. Then the sneakers pounded after him again.

  On Bourbon Street the revelry was in high gear, and he ran straight into the crush. It carried him along toward the music. He was in a current of tourists and partygoers waving cups of beer and Hurricanes, small-towners pointing out freaks and laughing.

  Tubby went with the flow, but tried to go a little faster than the rest of the crowd. He needed to catch his breath, and he was trying to find a cop. Once he looked back and he saw the face of the muscle man. It was no more than twenty-five feet away, grimly keeping pace.

  The middle of the street was blocked by a ring of partyers watching some black kids tap-dance with bottle caps nailed to their shoes, the sights of a primitive city. They kept time to the Dukes of Dixieland blasting away inside. Tubby pushed around them, feeling rather than seeing his pursuer. And then he picked out a policeman, a cop on a horse outside of a loud rock ’n’ roll club, talking to a few out-of-towners and posing for photographs. Tubby rushed up and patted the policeman’s patent-leather riding boots, trying to get the cop’s attention.

  “Officer.” He really had to squeeze the boot to get the man to look down. He gave Tubby an angry glare.

  “Officer, there’s a man following me. He’s got a gun.”

  The cop leaned over to get a better look at Tubby. “Where is he?” he asked.

  Tubby pointed back in the direction he had come, but the guy had faded away.

  “He was right there.”

  “Do you know who it was?”

  “No.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “White male, real tall, over six feet, wearing jogging shorts and a T-shirt.” Tubby and the policeman scanned the crowd. A lot of the people on the street looked sort of like that.

  The policeman pulled his walkie-talkie off his belt and relayed the information to someone unseen.

  “We’ll look for him,” he said to Tubby.

  “Thank you, Officer,” Tubby said. Then he hung around, not sure what he was supposed to do next. The policeman stood up in his stirrups and looked around a little bit more. Then a pretty girl asked him where Pat O’Brien’s was, and then begged him to let her take his picture with her girlfriend holding the bridle. Tubby began feeling a little dumb just being there. People kept bumping into him. There wasn’t anyplace to sit.

  Maybe he could find a cab across the street from Antoine’s, he thought. Carefully looking around, he stepped back into the tourist flow. There was a row of cabs on St. Louis, down the block from the famous restaurant. Their drivers were sitting under a tall magnolia, drinking from plastic cups and playing dominoes. Tubby moved into the light with them, under a street lamp swarming with moths and lovebugs.

  “Uptown?” he asked, addressing the lounging drivers in general.

  “Taxi, here, sir.” A big fellow slid off the wall. “Finish for me, Ice Man,” he said to a skinny guy seated cross-legged on the grass, who took his place at the game. The driver opened the door of an old Cadillac painted white. Tubby got into the backseat quickly.

  “I’m going, too.” The man with the scar pushed in behind Tubby. Tubby kept on going, pulling the far door latch and popping out the other side of the cab.

  “Shit. Hey, what?” the cabdriver cried.

  Tubby was running again, but on dark streets now, nearing Jackson Square. He rounded a corner into an alleyway beside the dark cathedral, looking wildly for a weapon or someplace to hide. Some loose bricks were piled against the granite wall of the church, which a wino had probably used for a seat. Tubby picked one up and pressed himself against the wall. When the scarred man ran around the corner, Tubby hit him with it full in the face. He felt something squash, and blood sprayed out like beer foam. The man went down on his back, and Tubby kicked him in the groin. The man tried to curl up, but he was passing out. Tubby kicked him again, then stomped again and again on his head. Finally he got control of himself. The man’s face looked like a spit-out wad of chewing tobacco. He no longer had a scar, and he wasn’t moving. A hundred feet away, at the far end of the dark alleyway, silhouetted against the lights of Jackson Square, a well-dressed couple were frozen in place, trying to understand what they were looking at. The pigeons in the church eaves above fluttered and cooed. Tubby began to run again, away from the Square. “Get off the street, get where it’s air-conditioned, get a drink.” In that order, Tubby commanded himself.

  He stumbled into the back entrance of the Royal Orleans and lea
ned against the mirrored wall to catch his breath. Nobody was around. He studied his own face and tried to compose it into something he recognized. Thanking God for his Visa Gold Card, he limped upstairs to the front desk.

  He was shown to a room near the top. Room service brought him a pitcher of martinis. From his window he had a sweeping view of the lights of the Quarter and the black void that was Lake Pontchartrain beyond that. He left the curtain wide open because he needed the feel of space. He was not afraid so high up. After a while the alcohol began to take effect. Such an experience makes drinking respectable, he was sure. This was a lot deeper than he had planned to go. Life was a very nice thing to have, and money could not replace it. He had bought his little trinkets and taken care of a few pressing domestic details. Time to get off this train. Tubby fell asleep in his chair, his feet on the bed. He jerked and his glass fell to the rug, ice and whiskey melting into the carpet. An olive rolled under the window curtain, where it waited to surprise the next guest.

  He dreamed that his friends were with him. Jason Boaz, the inventor, was there. So was E. J. Chaisson. So was Reggie Turntide. They were playing soldier in the rice fields around Bunkie, but it wasn’t a game after all because the guns were real. They were on their stomachs, taking cover behind a low dirt levee pushed up by a grader to hold water in the fields. The water was rising, and already it was covering the green shoots of the young plants and soaking into their boots. His partner, Reggie, was crawling through the mud, his arms wrapped around the gym bag. They were receiving mortar fire but could not tell where it came from. Enemies were crawling through the rice like alligators. The ground was exploding and dirt was showering down, covering them. Jason rigged up an irrigation pump to a fat fire hose. E.J. opened a bottle of wine and poured it, red and thick, into a cracked glass. He handed it around like a communion cup.

  “Here’s to filthy lucre,” he said, and they drank.

  It was good to be among friends. Jason rose up, exposing himself to fire, and sprayed the enemy with clouds of flame erupting from his hose. But the wind blew it back on them. Everything, the rice fields, all his friends, were burning up. He had to get them out of there alive, or else he’d be all alone.

  SIXTEEN

  Tubby woke up alone, uncomfortable and chilly in an armchair in a strange room. He checked out, a wrinkled, unshaven version of the guest who had arrived, and got a sniff from the desk clerk. Tubby was feeling groggy and painfully stiff, and he paid no attention. He took a taxi back to the Holmes garage and asked the driver to take him all the way to his car. The man obliged and got a little something extra for his trouble. He watched until Tubby got his car started, then followed him out. Nothing bad happened.

  Tubby waved the taxi away and drove home. Everything looked normal from the outside. The morning paper was on the steps. Tubby picked it up and went inside. Nothing seemed to be out of place. He showered and shaved, took some Tylenol, and wandered around the house with a towel wrapped around his waist. The housekeeper wasn’t due until around eleven o’clock, and he would be dressed by then. He poured some tomato juice and swallowed his vitamins.

  He thumbed through the white pages, then used the wall phone in the kitchen to place a call.

  “Hello. This is Tubby Dubonnet. Is Clifford Banks in, please?”

  The secretary doubted it, but she was wrong.

  “Why, hello, Tubby. How are you?” He seemed genuinely concerned.

  “I’ll survive. I’ve located the asset you were looking for.”

  “That’s wonderful. I was afraid I wouldn’t hear from you.”

  “Yeah, and I’d like to turn it over to its rightful owner. Is that you?”

  “Absolutely not. I just represent the owner.”

  “I’ll bring it to you, then. I have to be in court for a couple of hours, then I’ll come to your office.”

  “No, that’s not a good idea. I think my client will have to handle that directly.”

  “Okay, where can I meet him?”

  “Let me call you back on that, Tubby.”

  “Let’s make it soon.”

  “Time is always of the essence, isn’t it?”

  Tubby hung up. He stared into his tomato juice for a moment, considered fortifying it with vodka, but he did not. He had to see a judge, and one of his little rules was always do that sober.

  Eddie Rodrigue and George Guyoz were killing time in the narrow hallway leading to Judge Maselli’s chambers. Between them and the door was the judge’s secretary, an ancient gray-haired lady with the eye and carriage of a vulture, generally regarded by lawyers of all sexes as one of the biggest bitches in the courthouse. Behind her back you could refer to her as “The Bitch” and everybody knew who you were talking about, but to her face you called her Mrs. Maselli, since she was the judge’s mother.

  “Tubby, howya doin’?” asked Rodrigue in a syrupy singsong that was his trademark. He was a soprano on the “Howya” and a baritone on the “doin’.” Eddie was a state representative from Westwego, and one of the friendliest men in New Orleans. He had a lot of silver hair, which he wore combed up bouffant-style like Liberace. His role in the Sandy Shandell lawsuit was zero. He represented Dr. Feingold’s excess insurer, the insurance company that would have to pay off any claims over $10,000,000. There was no way that Sandy was ever going to win that much, but Tubby had sued all of Dr. Feingold’s insurance companies on the theory that the more bags of money you got together, the more chances that one of them would spring a leak. It meant that Eddie was getting paid to come to court and shake hands, which suited him fine.

  Guyoz, by contrast, represented Feingold’s primary liability insurer, and his company would have to ante up whatever the jury awarded, minus the doctor’s deductible, of course. Guyoz always looked like there was something sour in his mouth. He had a neat toothbrush mustache, and reminded Tubby of Adolf Hitler. He did not seem to have much sense of humor, and none at all about this lawsuit, which did have comic possibilities.

  “All right, Eddie. How you been?”

  “Very fine, Tubby. Everything is just fine. Business is good.”

  Tubby said hello to Guyoz, and got a nod and a throat-clearing in reply.

  “Where’s the judge?” he asked Eddie.

  “He’s on the bench, but he keeps slipping back to his office. There’s some unfair trade practices trial going on, and Mrs. Maselli here,” Eddie smiled at Mrs. Maselli, “just told me they are reading forty-seven depositions to the jury. Can you believe that? Forty-seven depositions.”

  “You’re kidding me.” Tubby cracked open the side door to the courtroom and, sure enough, a lawyer at a podium was slowly reading questions from a transcript to another lawyer playing the role of the witness, who tonelessly read the answers from the same script to twelve jurors in various stages of catatonia. The judge had his face covered by his hands like he was weeping at a funeral. Boredom had driven off any spectators, but there were at least ten attorneys at the counsel table, staring off into space. One was surreptitiously reading a magazine folded on his knees.

  Tubby shut the door. “How long has this been going on?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Maselli says for two days, and one more day to go.”

  “How do you suppose they stay awake?”

  “They don’t. Hey, did you ever hear this story? Did you ever know Vick Borzey? He was Judge Christmas’s clerk for maybe twenty years. I think he’s retired now. Anyway, the judge is on the bench, and Fred Boudreau, or one of the lawyers with him, is examining this witness. It’s a maritime case. It’s dragging on, and they’ve just had their lunch break. Everybody’s sleepy, and Vick, you know, nods out. Boudreau asks the witness a question, and the other side’s lawyer cries out ‘Objection.’ Vick, the clerk, jerks his head up and yells, ‘Overruled.’ Judge Christmas holds up his hand and gets everybody up to the bench. ‘Victor,’ he says, ‘that ain’t your job. I’m the one who gets to rule on the objections.’” Eddie let out a whinny.

  “That’s
funny,” Tubby said. “No, I never heard about that. Vick must have been dreaming he was the judge.”

  “Don’t we all, Tubby?”

  “Not me. I couldn’t stand the tedium.”

  “Sugar!” The judge’s voice boomed from his office. The Bitch jumped up—spry for a lady of advanced years—and pranced past the lawyers with her habitual triumphant sneer, like she had just beaten everybody in the room in some contest.

  “Yes, Judge,” she said when she disappeared inside. A moment later she stuck her head back out and asked whether everyone was present for the Sandy Shandell pretrial. Eddie said they were all here, and she told them to come on back into chambers.

  Judge Maselli was no intellectual wiz, nor was he especially hardworking. His day began late and ended early. Real court was held at the restaurant at the Warwick Hotel down the street, where he ate breakfast and lunch and enjoyed the afternoon happy hour, often in the company of lawyers who had cases on his docket. He held conferences in his chambers as rarely as possible because his mother was there. He genuinely appreciated her ability to manage that aspect of his life, but preferred to be elsewhere while she did it. Still, local rules of court adopted by his fellow judges required assembling lawyers shortly before trial to hash out details and arguments and, most importantly, to try to compel a settlement that would avoid trial. Already it took three or more years to get a jury trial. Without settlements it would take twenty.

  Maselli was scowling at the pretrial memoranda he was reading when the lawyers filed in and said, “Good morning, Your Honor.” They took seats in front of his massive desk like pupils at the feet of some great sage. The judge was in a foul mood because he had to be near the courtroom, if not physically in it, for at least four or five hours each day, trapped by impossible litigants presenting the thoroughly uninteresting testimony of accountants and engineers who were accused of cornering the market on some arcane piece of oil-field equipment the judge did not understand. The parties had rejected his settlement advice, and he was angry about that, especially with a defendant insurance company that had refused to pony up a million or two at his suggestion. There was only so much he could do to punish this defendant, since this was a jury trial, but he was getting in his jabs from the bench every chance he got.