Crooked Man: A Hard-Boiled but Humorous New Orleans Mystery (Tubby Dubonnet Series #1) (The Tubby Dubonnet Series) (11 page)

Tubby sped downtown on Freret Street, going too fast past school children in uniforms jumping rope at the bus stops, and vegetable vendors setting up their stands by the curbs. The day was already hot, but he had not taken the time to put up the top on the convertible. He navigated the spiral-up ramp of the parking garage in dangerous time. While riding up in the elevator, he hummed and stroked the nonexistent beard on his face.

Cherrylynn had not yet arrived. Tubby went quickly into his office and went straight to the safe. He knelt down and opened it. Yes, the gym bag was there. He pulled it out and carried it to his desk. Fishing around in the top drawer, he found a staple remover and used it to grip the little lock. Then he stuck a letter opener through the hasp and twisted it hard. The lock bent and popped, and he unzipped the bag.

He wasn’t surprised that it contained money, but the eye-appealing fact was that it contained lots of money. Tubby forgot to breathe for a minute, then he moved fast.

The bills were already sorted and separated into stacks. Most were wrinkled $100s, but some were $20s or $50s. Tubby pulled them out and did a quick count on his desk. It was impossible to be completely accurate, but it looked like about a million dollars. He stuffed everything back into the bag and was zipping it back up when Cherrylynn walked in.

“Oh, I didn’t know you were in yet, Mr. Dubonnet. I thought I heard somebody back here.” She was obviously interested in the bag.

“I just got an early start today,” he said.

“Did you see Darryl Alvarez was murdered?” she asked from the doorway, then started to walk in.

“No, I didn’t. That’s terrible. How shocking.”

“It happened at his bar…”

“Could you please fix me a cup of coffee, black.” Except when he was schmoozing with clients, he had not asked her to fix him a cup of coffee in the last three years, so she looked surprised. It stopped her, though.

“Why sure, boss. Coming up.”

She went out and pulled the door behind her. She gave him a last looking-over before the door closed. Always curious.

Clutching the gym bag, Tubby went to the door. Cherrylynn was not in the front reception area but was in the kitchen, so the path to the outside door of the office was clear. Tubby reached it in two steps. As he went out he yelled, “Forget the coffee, Cherrylynn. I need to go out for a few minutes.”

The elevator came, and no one was inside. Tubby stripped off his suit jacket and draped it over the bag. It certainly did not conceal that he was holding something, but maybe it disguised what it was. He went back to his car the way he had come. He drove, considerably slower, with the bag beside him on the passenger seat, thinking deep thoughts.

He tried to concentrate enough to analyze his various duties. First, if this money was evidence, he was supposed to turn it over to the police. There was an ethical rule on point, he was sure. Something about not engaging in conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice. He didn’t recall the details, but he thought that was the gist of it. What an obscure and misty proposition that was! He was also sworn to maintain the confidences of his clients. In this case his client was dead, a complicating factor. But did he have no responsibility to his client’s memory? Was there a duty there? It was all complex.

Anyhow, maybe it was not dirty money, just some dough Darryl had squirreled away. Maybe Darryl had won it at the track, or making book on football. If the police got hold of it, it would be gone forever. They would protect and serve themselves. Darryl had no heirs that Tubby knew about. It was doubtful Darryl was safeguarding it for someone else, because who would trust him with that much money? The best thing, Tubby figured, was to hold on to it and see what happened. It would be smartest to hide it at his house. He couldn’t think of anyplace else. Tubby headed up St. Charles Avenue.

He pulled into his driveway and parked behind the boat he stored in the carport beside his garage. Before the engine shut off he hit the automatic door opener perched on his dash. Tubby took the money into the garage, which he used for a workshop, and buzzed the door closed. He cleared a space on his workbench and dumped the money out. A careful count showed that it totaled $950,000, a little less than he had thought at first, but no problem. The bills were old and weathered and looked right at home among his hammers and hand saws. They smelled good in here, with the linseed oil and wood shavings. He thought about the bag. Should he lose it? Well, maybe it might turn out to be evidence, too. Probably better to keep it for the time being as well. Tubby packed the loot back in the bag and carried it all outside. He was starting to sweat.

His boat, stored outside, was not an impressive craft, but a weather-beaten twenty-footer with an inboard motor that he used for pulling the girls waterskiing. He also occasionally took it out with Raisin Partlow, one of the few friends he had who still enjoyed fishing and beer. He climbed on board and rummaged around through a bunch of tangled crab traps. There was a compartment for tackle that was now empty.

Neighborhood kids, or more likely his former brother-in-law Harold, had cleaned him out of tools and gear a couple of times, and now he did not keep anything of value around the boat. There was a storage area in the bow, stuffed full of some moldy life jackets. Tubby pushed the gym bag among them and covered it up. For some reason he did not want to have the money in his house, and he thought probably all the local thieves had given up on the boat by now. This was considered a good neighborhood. Lots of trees and lawyers, close to the universities, but if you left a bicycle in the yard unguarded for more than half an hour it would be gone. The neighborhood hired an off-duty policeman to drive around at night. He was a cheerful guy. He had never caught anyone that Tubby knew about, but he’d once helped Tubby push his car down the street when the battery died, so Tubby never complained about chipping in his monthly dues.

Tubby stuffed his shirttails back into his pants and looked around. Only one of his neighbors was visible—a silver-haired lady in a flowery housedress, watering her plants under the sprawling shade of a live oak tree down the block. She was not paying him any attention. Across the street, an upstairs window curtain seemed to move, but he could not really be sure. You never could tell for certain in this neighborhood, with all the trees for cover and the houses close together, who was seeing what. It was generally a good bet that someone was looking around, as nervous as everybody permanently stayed about burglaries and other forms of mischief.

Tubby tried to look normal, though he knew he could not quite make it since he was wearing a tie and stumbling around in a parked boat in the middle of the day. Oh well. He disembarked, dusted off his hands theatrically, and hitched up his pants. He got into his car and backed it out of the driveway. As he drove downtown he passed gaily dressed groups of tourists waiting for the streetcar at every other block. They were lighthearted. He was not.

Tubby spent the rest of the day in his office. He even sent Cherrylynn out for a roast beef sandwich with extra gravy from Ditcharo’s down the street. Mainly he tried to read and write various things requiring concentration, and to stay off the phone in case anybody he wanted to talk to called. Cherrylynn announced several times that people he did not want to talk to were on the phone, but each time he told her to take a message.

He went home early and avoided his boat. He heated up a bowl of his housekeeper’s leftover gumbo for supper and ate it in front of the TV, watching an old Errol Flynn movie. The phone rang once, and his answering machine caught it. Nobody left a message. He gave up and went to bed early, but he had a hard time getting to sleep. He tried to erase all negative thoughts, any thoughts, but it didn’t work. Finally he got up and had a couple of shots of gin, and that did the trick.

The next morning was more of the same. He moved around on automatic pilot, but his mind raced. He knew that outside there was more cash than he could ever use, but somewhere another shoe was about to drop. There was a good chance it was aiming for him. When he was a kid he had gotten caught stealing a pen from a card shop, and the owner had called his mother. She sat him down on the bed and asked him why he had done it. Didn’t he have enough pens at home? Since then he had never wanted to do anything that could ever make him feel so guilty. Still, he was no asshole, and only an asshole gives up almost a million bucks before he is pretty sure he has to.

The thing to do was to go about his business and pretend it never happened. Tubby did not like moral dilemmas. He tried to avoid them whenever possible and to see things in practical terms—what worked and what didn’t. This monster had fangs, though, and a good bite on him.

He skipped breakfast at PJ’S and ate toast. Then he dressed and drove down to Broad Street, site of the imposing Criminal Courts building. Its New Deal architecture dominated an area of vacant lots, boarded-up businesses, jails, and storefronts for bail bondsmen. There was a crowd of mostly black people waiting for buses on the corner, and another squatting on the courthouse steps munching Popeye’s and drinking Cokes while waiting for the system to grind along until it was their turn. It was easy to spot the lawyers hustling across the street and trotting up the steps since they wore suits and didn’t look scared. Next door was the ancient Parish Prison where guards were posted above the sidewalk in concrete turrets like miniature lighthouses, connected to each other by strands of razor wire. Visitors queued up at one gate, waiting to be searched so they could go in and talk about money, and kids dropping out of school, and court dates being postponed, with whichever poor fucked-up loved ones of theirs had the misfortune to be locked inside. They looked like they had spent all their lives in this line or one just like it. Besides the helpless, why was it that nobody but cranks, crooks, and characters hung out around the halls of justice? It was not even nine o’clock and it was already hot.

Above twenty granite steps, towering brass-clad doors opened onto a cavernous hallway, wide and tall as a cathedral. It was cool and quiet there. Footsteps echoed off the walls, and the small knots of people congregating outside the courtroom doors spoke furtively. Other doors along the hallway were always shut, hiding places Tubby had never been.

The courthouse crowd—the judges, magistrates, clerks, cops, secretaries, and jailers—used to be all white. Today the faces were nearly all black. It was something you noticed, no big deal. The quality of justice wasn’t much different as far as he could tell, though some of the new judges were more idealistic than their predecessors. Trouble was, the volume of business was so great that there was precious little time for fairness, compassion, mercy, all those good things. Tubby had been into most of the judges’ chambers and courtrooms here, and he could pass back and forth through the bars of the sheriff’s jail. He was part of the in-crowd, not like the folks outside on the steps, but the place still gave him the shivers, every time.

Inside Courtroom L he saw Sandy Shandell, his medical malpractice client, sitting quiet and erect on one of the long mahogany benches, a sinner in church. Sandy turned around when the door opened and waved when he recognized Tubby, giving him a big smile. Not content with one legal problem—his spotted skin—Sandy had also been busted for assaulting a policeman. He had somehow raised his own bail and was now due to be arraigned. Tubby could have instructed him on the telephone how to enter a plea of not guilty all by himself, but Sandy had a volatile personality, to say the least, which seemed to produce an immediate allergic reaction in law enforcement personnel, so Tubby came down.

Sandy was at his theatrical best. He was wearing a silky bright-yellow blouse with horizontal black stripes, and burgundy slacks with vertical white stripes. Thus he made your eyes cross even if you just glanced at him. He also had a purple scarf wrapped around his neck and thrown back over his shoulder. Tubby knew he was sensitive about his appearance since Dr. Feingold’s treatments. Where it was visible, on his cheeks and hands, you could tell there were pronounced chocolate drops on his otherwise cream-colored skin. His case, Tubby knew, would be worth substantially more if Sandy were a pretty young Sophie Newcomb grad instead of a flamboyant French Quarter cross-dresser. A jury might wonder why a few dozen liver spots would matter to someone like Sandy, but Tubby knew how vain she was. (Depending on the context, Tubby sometimes envisioned Sandy as a he, and sometimes as a she. He had quit fighting it, and now used whatever pronoun came out naturally at the time.)

“Hey, Sandy, where y’at?” Tubby squeezed in next to him.

“Tubby, thanks for coming,” Sandy gasped. That fruity touch was one of his mannerisms, which he sometimes turned off. He launched into his story.

“This was absolutely not my fault. I was smoking a cigarette—I could use one now—outside of Major Cee’s on Bourbon Street, when this asshole cop, I think his name is Matthews, comes up and asks me what kind of pistol I’m packing. That’s right. I thought he meant a gun. I said, ‘What on Earth do you mean?’ and he taps my crotch with that plastic club they all carry and says, ‘Have you made your trip to Sweden yet for your operation?’”

“You’re kidding.”

“No! And you know how sensitive I am about that. And I don’t like anybody, especially some cretin cop from Arabi, touching my genitalia without an invitation.”

“So what did you do?”

“I called him a stupid honky yat motherfucking pig. Tubby, I know I shouldn’t have done that, but I was really mad. And then as soon as I said it I was scared, and I knew I was in trouble.”

“What did he do?” Tubby caught sight of Sandy’s ring, a cameo. It was an ivory profile of a woman, her hair braided above her forehead, on a faint pink field. Was it something Sandy’s mother might have given him, or was it one of those pieces of other people’s history that you bought in a flea market or the antique shops that lined Chartres Street? Tubby didn’t know a lot about Sandy’s private affairs, thank God. He had heard, however, that Sandy had a significant other who was HIV positive. Sandy’s life was not all peaches and cream.