by Tony Dunbar
Tubby was almost too surprised to speak, but he managed, “Hello, Reggie. I didn’t really expect to see you.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the way the King Cake crumbles.” He looked in the backseat and saw the gym bag. “Is that the money?” he asked.
“Most of it. You know we could have done this at the office, or your house or mine.”
“This is the way they wanted it, Tubby. I’m just doing as I’m instructed.”
“What’s your interest?”
“That’s a little complicated, Tubby.”
“Are you just the money handler, Reggie?”
“You could put it that way. Sometimes you get messed up in things that won’t let go of you.”
“And that’s when you need a lawyer.”
“I need a priest, not a lawyer, Tubby. When the DEA boys show up as planned but the treasure chest is completely empty, and suspicious people think it’s your fault, you need more than a lawyer. Let’s see what’s in the bag.”
Tubby turned around and got it out of the backseat.
“You sure got me this time,” he said to Reggie and handed over the prize. Reggie settled it on his lap and unzipped it. He took a quick look inside.
“That’s a lot of cash,” he said to himself. He didn’t dig around; he just rubbed his chin and looked at Tubby. He took off his glasses.
“Would you do me a favor?” he asked.
“What’s that?”
“Drive up Napoleon Avenue until I tell you to stop. I’ve got to turn this over to somebody else.”
“I’m not leaving here, Reggie. I’ve gone as far with this as I want to go.”
“It’s not like anything is going to happen to you. I mean, what worse could happen? I’m sorry about your chair and the painting. Honestly, Tubby, I only just found out a little while ago about your trouble in the French Quarter. I had nothing to do with that. I think they were kind of afraid to send another stranger to see you. They thought maybe you’d go off your rocker.”
“So they sent someone I trusted?”
“That’s basically it. But they really don’t trust me too much, and I’ve got to take them seriously. I’m scared as shit myself. They told me to get you to drop me off at a particular place on Napoleon, and then you drive away. That’s how I’m supposed to take the money to them. I’m the one taking the risk. It’s not like I get to make the rules. I’m under a little stress here, too.”
“Shit,” Tubby said. He started the car.
“Thanks, Tubby,” Reggie said. He zipped up the bag and put it between them on the seat. “Just drive up Napoleon toward the Lake.”
Tubby rolled out of the lot. A block from the drugstore the wide street turned residential, and a ceiling of live oaks absorbed the streetlights and urban sounds and restored the tropical night. There wasn’t much traffic.
“Where to?”
“Right up to the end, by all that construction.”
He was talking about an area where two boulevards intersected, and where the city had kept the streets torn up forever for a drainage-improvement project. No one could say when it would be finished.
“Give me a little background here, Reggie. How did you get into this?”
“Just doing what I do best,” Reggie sighed. “Putting Larry, Curly, and Moe together. You know me—slide in, slide out. Only this time I haven’t been able to slide out yet.”
“It looks like you’ve got more hands-on involvement than is your usual style, Reggie.”
“Yeah, Tubby. I made a mistake there. What I did wrong was I tipped off our esteemed Sheriff to the transaction. He has such a twisted mind, much more so than mine. He immediately liked the idea of ripping off the whole gang of thieves. Several of them were his friends, of course, but they hadn’t cut him in, so taking their money appealed to the Sheriff’s sense of justice. It was only a game to him, though. He didn’t have to put up anything to play. He just donated some dim-bulb muscle men who transformed a profitable investment venture into a murder case.”
“What were you going to get out of it, Reggie?”
“Money. Half of what’s in this bag. As you know, I love money. Now I’ll be lucky to get out of this with my good name and reputation intact. Nobody better find out about my side deal with the Sheriff.” He looked soberly at Tubby, who stared straight ahead, driving carefully.
“You were going to screw your clients,” Tubby mused.
“That I was.”
“Well, you fooled me, Reggie. You turned out to be an asshole after all.” Now what is he going to do about me? Tubby wondered.
“Right over there. That’s the spot.” Reggie directed Tubby into a sort of cul de sac where the road was supposed to go but was now blocked by a steep pile of dirt. Traffic had been routed away onto a long crescent of temporary blacktop around the construction.
Tubby stopped the car and let it idle. It was very dark. “This is far enough for me,” Tubby said.
“Take a walk with me,” Reggie said. He had put his glasses back on.
Tubby looked at him and shook his head.
“Let’s go,” Reggie told him. He showed Tubby the gun he was holding in his lap. It was a medium-size .38, and Reggie cocked it.
“Why, Reggie, you surprise me again. I guess this means our partnership is over. You can have my clients.”
“Thanks a million, Tubby. A joke a minute, right? I need you to get out of the car with me.”
“If you’re going to shoot that thing, go ahead. I’m not getting out of the car.”
“If you make me shoot you here, which I will, it’s going to mess up my plans, and I’m going to have to take it out on one of your darling girls. I’m not saying which one. You want to pick her right now?”
Tubby was looking at a fiercer face than he had ever seen on his partner before. Did Reggie have this much backbone, or was he bluffing? Their eyes held. Tubby blinked first. He turned away and opened the door.
“That’s two for you tonight, Reggie. You’re showing me talent for chicanery and deception I didn’t know you had.”
“Thanks, Tub. Just keep on talking.”
They both got out of the car. Reggie pointed with his gun into the darkness, in the direction of a path around the sand pile.
“You might as well carry this for me,” he said, handing Tubby the gym bag. Tubby started walking where he was told to walk, with Reggie behind him.
The whole area was surrounded with bright-red plastic fencing, and what had formerly been a wide street was now an excavation twenty feet deep and twice that wide. Like many New Orleans boulevards, these streets were built on top of vast concrete tunnels designed to carry off millions of gallons of rainwater. In a typical deluge they would fill up quickly. If it lasted more than thirty minutes or so, the pumping stations that forced the water uphill to Lake Pontchartrain six miles away would reach capacity, the tunnels would back up, manhole covers would pop off and release geysers, and the streets would start to overflow onto lawns and over doorsills. The city’s effort to increase pumping capacity and build ever-greater drainage systems was an engineering drama that had been going on for three hundred years. The project on Napoleon Avenue seemed to local residents to have been going on for much of that time.
Tubby and Reggie stepped over the plastic fence and walked along the side of the dark ditch. Around them were cranes, bulldozers, and pile drivers, idle and caked with mud, waiting for the morning. People didn’t walk around the neighborhood here at night anymore. Tubby hoped for a watchman. The locals kept their doors and windows shut to try to block out the incessant roar of pumps and generators that labored day and night to move the sludge along. In the daytime this constant noise became background for pile drivers on tall cranes that slammed creosoted timbers, bigger than telephone poles, deep into the muck to support the concrete floor of the new expanded culvert. Construction pipes and steel reinforcement rods were stacked all over what used to be sidewalks.
There was an overgrown kids’ playground by the trench,
and Reggie took Tubby there: He sat down as if to rest on a pile of pipe next to the open chasm of the unfinished canal, the pistol held loosely in his hand. A cat, almost invisible in the night, ran across the playground and nuzzled up against Reggie’s leg. He brushed it away with the barrel of the gun.
“Take your wallet out of your pocket very carefully, Tubby, and give me whatever money is in there.”
“What for?”
“You’re being mugged. I’m afraid you’re going to be another victim of urban crime.”
Tubby reached into his pants for his wallet and as he did so asked, “Is this really necessary, Reggie?”
“I’m afraid so. I know you very well, and for a crooked man you’re straight as an arrow. Darryl’s dead, and you won’t be able to let me get away with it. All of this would have been avoided if Darryl had just had the money with him when he went for the dope, like he was supposed to. The fact that he didn’t is still confusing to me, because if he planned to rip us off, Champs would have been put out of business, all legal, in about forty-eight hours. This should have been a win-win situation for me. I would have done all right if the deal had been consummated, and even better if we had snatched the payroll. I didn’t make any plans for ending up with no dope and no dough. Now I’ve got more dissatisfied partners than you’d ever believe. And I’ve got to break up my happy marriage with you.”
“Why didn’t you ask Darryl for a refund?”
“Darryl refused to give it back until he saw what we were going to do to take care of his case. He knew you weren’t in on the transaction, but he was unusually clever when he gave you the money to hold. He knew it wouldn’t occur to us right away that you had it. At least that’s what I think Darryl was thinking. He never told me. Then the fool got killed.”
Tubby handed over the few bills from his wallet. Reggie took them and said, “Toss your wallet on the ground and hand me the bag, homeboy. You’re staying here.”
“It’s all yours,” Tubby said and passed the bag like a basketball right at the gun. He stepped in with it and tried for a field goal at Reggie’s crotch. He connected at the same time Reggie fired. The muzzle was in the gym bag so some of the sound was trapped. Tubby felt a pain in his side but it did not stop him from catching Reggie on the chin with his right fist. It was a solid shot, making upward contact while Reggie was bending downward to deal with the pain in his groin, and it caused Reggie to stumble backward over the stack of pipe and into the hole behind him. He didn’t even yell. And he had the gym bag with him.
Was that it? Tubby’s adrenaline was pumping. He boxed the air, looking for an opponent. Come on, Reggie. Stand up and fight, he was thinking. You’re not going down that easy, are you? It’s all on the line now, partner. He pivoted, fists up, but nobody was sneaking up behind him. He faced off to the sides. Nothing. So he dropped his hands.
Tubby leaned over the grimy pipes and tried to see down in the ditch. There was a little light from the boarded-up convenience store on the corner, and he thought he could make out something floating around that could be Reggie. There was a rough wooden ladder leaning against the side of the excavation. Tubby was tempted to leave Reggie where he was, but the thought that he might need medical attention bothered Tubby. Also, he hated the idea of leaving all that cash down there for some Boh Brothers employee to find.
He got on the ladder and started down. It was like a cave. After his first step, he remembered that his right side was hurt. He felt the area around his belt, and it smarted, but it did not feel too serious. He went down a little farther. The bottom rungs were in gray soupy water, being sucked gently along by the pumps making the racket overhead. He tentatively put one foot into the water and connected with something solid about calf deep. It all smelled like ripe sewage, but it was cool down here. Tubby splashed along until he reached Reggie’s legs, which were sticking up out of the water. The rest of Reggie was submerged. The gym bag bobbed up and down by his feet.
“Looks like one for me,” Tubby muttered to Reggie’s feet. “You were a hell of a lawyer, but not much of a street fighter.”
Tubby picked up the wet bag and sloshed over to the ladder with it. He lodged it against the wall. Then he went back and got Reggie. He floated him over to the ladder and hoisted him onto his shoulders. Good thing he wasn’t a heavy guy. “Looks like my ol’ partner ain’t going to make it,” Tubby told himself out loud. Being around death was uncomfortable. Tubby’s hands were shaking. But he had been there before. He collected himself.
It took a struggle, but he got the body and the money back up the ladder. He lay beside the quiet form on the grass and panted. Nobody seemed to have taken any notice of anything that had happened. Cars still drove by on the other side of the construction, and the pumps droned on. What could he do with Reggie?
Tubby looked around while he caught his breath. The gray cat came over to investigate, then leaped away when Tubby blew at it. He started to pay attention to a pile driver at the far end of the playground. It was cordoned off by plastic fencing. What he was looking at was its massive cylindrical weight, taller than a man, suspended by cables in the air. He got to his feet and went over to get a closer look. Climbing over the fence, he saw that the weight was positioned over a hole bored in the ground. Tubby couldn’t see what was down there, but it must be one of the pilings. The hole was about eighteen inches in diameter. He scraped some gravel down it, but he heard no sounds of the rocks hitting. It looked like the crew had knocked off in the middle of the job.
Tubby went back and got Reggie. He dragged his partner to the fence, rolled him under it, and got him up to the hole. He placed Reggie’s legs in the shaft, and then slid the rest of Reggie in. Poor Reggie made no complaint. Tubby pushed some dirt into the hole after him. Then a lot more dirt. Then he crossed himself.
Tubby limped back to his car and drove home, trying to make the sick feeling go away. Wait until later. He left the muddy gym bag in the front hall, put his clothes and his shoes in the washing machine, then walked naked to the shower. He stayed under the hot water for a long time trying to get rid of the smell. When he got out, dawn was just beginning to break. He dressed and got back in the car. He picked up a large coffee at the McDonald’s drive-through on Claiborne, then cruised slowly back up Napoleon. Traffic was beginning to move downtown. A paper boy worked steadily up the street pitching the Times-Picayune at front doors. Tubby parked two blocks away from the detour.
To others it might have been a lovely morning. The air was clean, like it had just rained, but Tubby didn’t notice it. On the other side of the drainage excavation from the playground, along the one-lane roadway through which traffic was temporarily herded, was a bus stop bench. He sat down and opened his coffee. There was a sweet olive tree in bloom somewhere close by. Its floral perfume drifted past in the little gusts of a morning breeze.
Tubby watched a work crew assemble across the job site. They were also drinking coffee and talking to each other. One of the helmeted black guys started gesturing, and the group broke up. A worker wearing blue jeans and a khaki shirt climbed up into the cab of the pile driver. The machine awoke, letting out a loud pop of steam. It popped again. Then the hammer came down, the sound of another day of work beginning. Tubby took a swallow of coffee and swirled it around with his tongue. Each blow was punctuated by a loud explosion of compressed air. Tubby counted twenty blows before he got up and walked back to his car. Rest in peace, Reggie.
He drove back to the K&B drugstore. As soon as he parked, a pickup truck towing Monster Mudbug’s Rolling Boiler on a flatbed trailer pulled in beside him, taking up three spaces. The Monster himself leaned out the window.
“I saw your car, Mr. Tubby, and I wanted you to see my flatbed.”
“That’s great, Adrian. I’m glad to see you’re not driving the Boiler on the highway.”
“I’m just using the trailer for long trips. I didn’t think I should try to drive the Boiler all the way to Lafitte. I got an appearance at a seafood festival
today. And you know I can’t afford another ticket right now.”
“If you’re going to be on the road, it’s much better to be legal,” Tubby said wearily.
“I know, but it’s not always practical.” Adrian laughed.
“Very philosophical, Adrian.”
“Well, see you later, Mr. Tubby. I just wanted you to see that I was taking your advice. And guess what? I got insurance, too.”
“Don’t kid me, Adrian.”
Adrian laughed again and pulled away slowly. Tubby fished a handful of change out of his pocket and went to use the pay phone at the side of the building. He didn’t like talking business on his car phone. He punched in Dr. Feingold’s home number.
“Jesus, Tubby, you’re up early this morning.”
“Sorry if I woke you up, Marty, but listen. I got a way to settle your lawsuit.”
“Why are you calling me about that at 7:30 in the morning?”
“Because it’s a very good way, but I have to do it quickly. It ends up costing you just five thousand dollars, plus you get to take a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar tax loss.”
“Tell me more, Santa Claus.”
“It’s like this. You put up five thousand dollars. Your insurance company puts up maybe fifty thousand, and an anonymous donor puts up nine hundred thousand in your name.”
“What’s this about an anonymous donor?”
“Let’s just say it’s someone with an interest in Sandy’s welfare.”
“Who would be that interested in his welfare?”
“Maybe his mother. What do you say?”
“I need to think this over, Tubby.”
“What’s to think over? Besides, you have to decide now. This offer won’t wait around.”
“All I would put up is five thousand dollars?”
“Correct.”
“Well, gee, Tubby, what am I missing here? How can I get hurt?”
“I don’t see how. Whether you take the tax write-off is up to you. I’m not saying yes or no. It might be better to forget that part. All I’m saying is the anonymous donor is never going to come forward and say it was his money. Five thousand dollars from you, and a yes right now, and this case is over as far as you’re concerned.”