Night Watchman (The Tubby Dubonnet Series Book 8) (6 page)

“Wait a second. I thought the whole question about how loud music clubs could be was still being debated. And isn’t the new zoning ordinance still pending final approval?”

“Yes, but no matter which decibel level applies— and you are correct, everybody seems to have an opinion about which level is best— this bar is exceeding it.”

“If you believe the neighbors’ readings. Have you done your own?”

“Our equipment has been broken for a month, but I was out there last Saturday morning at six a.m. and the music drowned out the garbage trucks coming down the street.”

The lawyer stroked his chin, pondering.

“And as far as the zoning plan,” Smith continued, “that side of the block is zoned residential and light commercial and no one gets to sell alcohol or present live entertainment to the public unless they are grandfathered in.”

“Which means, the bar has to have been in continuous operation for a long time?”

“Right, and she’s only been open for a year.”

“Well, it was closed for a while because of Katrina. There’s an exception for that.”

“You are correct again, but before the hurricane that building was a residence.”

“No ma’am, it was a bar.”

“No, sir, it was a residence.”

“So is that the real issue?”

“Correct. That and the loud music they play. It doesn’t help that crowds of college students congregate there at all hours and urinate in the neighbors’ bushes.”

Tubby was about to ask what evidence she had of that, but he caught himself in time.

Janie, it seemed, had a series of regulatory hearings coming up over the next two weeks, and that was all she wrote. The complaining neighbors’ names were not on the notices.

Raisin was enjoying the early show at Monkey Business. A solo artist was on stage, a spectrally thin man whose bushy white beard hid his mouth, and almost his nose and eyes as well, belting out the blues and loudly strumming a twelve-string steel guitar. His amp was the size of a small microwave but still made plenty of sound as he worked through “Mannish Boy.”

Raisin’s date was there with him, the oil company engineer who had given him his car. She’d told Raisin she truthfully didn’t care much for the music, but he figured she liked him a lot. Her name was Sadie, and exploring the cultural depths of New Orleans with this weathered but entertaining man with the soft curly black hair seemed to suit her just fine.

“The artist certainly looks like he lives his music,” she whispered into her boyfriend’s ear.

“That’s Scotch he’s sipping from that paper cup,” Raisin whispered back. “And believe me, honey, we’re gonna have lots of fun.” He stroked her neck lightly with his fingers, then went back to drinking. He had bought them each a beer and an order of cheese fries to share, which was about the limit of the financial contribution he planned to make to the night’s entertainment.

“Tell me about your day,” she said hopefully.

“I did some work on the boat. Mostly just cleaning it up.”

She was envious. “I bet it felt wonderful to be outdoors and on the Lake.”

“Yeah, it was. What did you do today?”

“Still working on the Centurion Project. Four months to installation, and the countdown is on. Mostly, I was in meetings all day, but I did get to take a short walk on my lunch break. I went over to Lafayette Square and, you know, just looked around.”

“You love what you do,” he said understandingly.

“There are some days I wish I could just hang out like you, uh…” she bit her lip. “I mean hang out with you.” She patted his leg, looking to see if she had hurt his feelings.

Not a chance. Raisin’s hide was tough. He changed the subject.

“I saw a funny billboard today driving up by the lake,” he said. “It was for Ochsner Hospital. It says, ‘Ochsner, #1 in the Nation for Liver transplants.’ ” He chuckled.

“I don’t get it.”

“Kind of a New Orleans specialty, don’t you think?”

“Raisin dear, you see things nobody else would see.”

“It’s my complicated mind that keeps you interested.” He reached into his shirt pocket where his cigarettes usually were, then remembered he had quit.

“That’s right,” she agreed, and she meant it.

“Where’s Janie tonight?” Raisin asked the barkeep, who had come over to check on them.

“She’s upstairs,” the young man answered. “Is your lawyer friend coming over?”

“Should be here any minute.”

“She told me to let her know.”

At that moment Tubby appeared beside Sadie’s elbow and she offered him her cheek for a quick peck.

“How is everybody?” he asked.

“Life is good,” Raisin said, raising his voice to be heard over the tinny wails of the steel guitar.

“I don’t see why anybody would complain about the noise level in here,” Tubby yelled. “It’s just normal New Orleans music to me.”

“I think they’ll have other stuff going on later. The sign says ‘Last Rites at 11.’ ” He pointed to a pair of big Bose amplifiers, unplugged but waiting, at the rear of the stage. “This blues man is just the early show.”

Janie showed up behind the bar, a ring of silk flowers around the brim of her Stetson. Her bosom strained against the buttons of her khaki shirt. “What are y’all drinking?” she bellowed.

“I’ll have an Old Fashioned,” Tubby called over the counter, “if he can make one.”

“I don’t know about Jack, but I can. You kids want another beer?”

Raisin and Sadie both nodded.

The blues singer launched into “Seventh Son.”

“Have you ever measured the decibels in here,” Tubby asked Janie when she set the tawny red concoction in front of him on its tiny napkin.

“They keep talking about decibels, decibels,” she complained. “What are they anyway, and how do know how many you got?”

“It’s a measure of sound level. I guess you use some kind of meter,” Tubby opined.

“Where would you get one? Is there a sound store?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“I could ask around at work,” Sadie offered.

“What about your friend Jason Boaz?” Raisin suggested. “Isn’t he some kind of engineer? He’s a tinkerer and probably knows all about any crazy device you can think of. Or he could probably just invent one.”

That wasn’t a bad idea. Jason was an occasional client of Tubby’s. He invented things, like radios that masked the origin of email messages, apps that could tell you where your boss was standing in the office, blenders that could turn peach pits into livestock feed. Some were less likely to make it than others but those that did earned good money.

The blues singer got to the end of his set, to scattered applause. He came around the room with a tip jar. “Great sound,” said Tubby and tossed in a five. Sadie threw in a bill, and Raisin passed. Someone plugged in the jukebox and out came George Jones. But, comparatively speaking, the joint was quiet, and private conversations were able to resume.

Tubby stood up and stretched. “I guess I’ll call Jason while I’m thinking about it. Let’s see what he knows about measuring decibels.”

* * *

The man with the troubled past was styling his hair with an ergonomic clipper he had invented. It fit into the palm of his hand and was elongated to reach behind the head. He had a date tonight with Norella Peruna, a Honduran who often looked him up when she was in New Orleans without her current husband, whoever he might be. She had briefly been a widow when Max Finn died, but after that misfortune, she had soon walked down the aisle again. Norella liked a good time, as in casinos, fancy Latin dance parties, the tango, shopping at the outlet malls, and Jason tried his best to oblige her. Tonight he had a pair of tickets to the Azúcar Ball in the lobby of the Whitney Bank, a charity event with a big band that went on till dawn.

Of course, he was almost certain to run into some of the old crowd, but they normally ignored him. Because he wrote generous checks, when he was flush with cash, to the correct liberation organizations and churches, he was afforded some peace and quiet.

He heard the phone buzzing in the kitchen but declined to answer it. It took major concentration to trim his chin and cheeks and leave just the right aura of heavy whiskers, and only the slightest suggestion of a beard.

* * *

Tubby left a message and dropped the phone back in his pocket.

“Oh well, Janie, we’ll do something about all these decibels in good time. But to a more important problem, what was in this building before Katrina? The city is saying it was a residence.”

“No way!” she exclaimed. “Bud lived upstairs with his second wife and his mother, just like I do now, but this down here was always a club.”

“Yes!” Tubby slapped the bar. “That’s what we need to prove. Have you got any pictures?”

“Are you kidding me? This whole joint was under water. There was black mold from the floor to the roof. Hell, the roof blew off! But Bud always told me this downstairs was a happening bar. They always played live music here. Hell, his mother was a belly dancer!”

“Okay, tell me some names. Who played here?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. But they had some big shows. He talked about a New Year’s party that got raided.”

“That’s probably not too helpful. How about the neighborhood? Anybody here likely to remember?”

“The neighbors here are all new. Back in Bud’s day, this whole area was white. Then the yats moved to Kenner, darlin’. This was one of the last white bars. Not too many people were coming. At the end Bud was running it as a private club.”

“To keep it all white?”

“Shit, no! Bud wasn’t even all white. He was one of those blended Mediterranean types. He didn’t give a crap what color you were. He didn’t like wops, that’s about it. But to get the customers in here he had to offer extra entertainment.”

“You mean like…”

“I mean like girls.”

“This was a strip club?” Tubby exclaimed.

“It might have been that.” Janie lowered her voice. “But to be real about it, baby, this old joint was a back-of-town whorehouse!”

Raisin’s laugh was like a dog’s bark. “Let’s see you get a zoning variance for that,” he crowed. He happily tipped back his beer.

“A what-house?” Sadie was delighted.

“Jeez,” Tubby said. “That could give us a problem.”

“But,” Janie insisted, voice rising, “they had live music here on the weekends. I swear!”

Cherrylynn had oatmeal with walnuts and cranberries at McDonald’s on St. Charles Avenue while studying a philosophy lecture on her iPad. This breakfast was a huge splurge. She usually ate low-fat yogurt, berries, and bran with almond milk at her apartment, and would normally be at her desk by now. But this morning she was traveling on business and was entitled to get to the office late. The public library didn’t open until ten. And she would get reimbursed for the meal.

She wasn’t getting all this “Utilitarianism.” Virtue lies in a thing achieving its purpose? So, the oats achieved their purpose by being oatmeal? This was just her third week of class and her professor had promised that they would be moving fast into the post-moderns and the existentialists and the phenomenologists, “where nothing means anything at all,” he said. She certainly hoped so, because she was already getting stuck.

Cherrylynn tossed her red hair back and wrapped it up behind her neck with a rubber tie while reading the last page of the lecture. This oatmeal hit the spot, though some of the customers in here were a little sketchy. One kid with an extra-large black T-shirt stuffed into his baggy black pants shuffled in to order a vanilla ice cream cone for breakfast. He got it and shuffled back out without being asked to pay. A couple of cops were arguing loudly over their Big Breakfasts about the score of a high school football game. As their voices rose, she was a little alarmed that they were both armed.

According to her watch, it was time to go. She grabbed her gear and ran out to wait for the streetcar. Almost immediately the green car came rambling down the tracks. She hopped on to find a typical morning crowd of people headed downtown to work. One nice guy offered her a seat. He had combed blond hair and was wearing a gray suit and tie and eyeglasses with heavy black frames. She accepted with almost a curtsy and a blush. They locked eyes for a poignant minute as the streetcar lurched forward and zipped along. By the time she jumped off the car in the CBD at Gravier Street she had already learned that the guy’s name was Carl, that he had just passed the bar, and that he was working at the Corrigan and Dutch law firm. He did admiralty. She divulged her own place of employment. Maybe they would see each other around. She considered coming late to work more often.

The main library had automatic doors that only worked sometimes. Inside was a sleepy guard to keep you from stealing books and an array of lost and homeless patrons wanting to stay out of the weather. But on the third floor there was the Louisiana Collection, with thousands of books and papers too rare to ever be checked out. Cherrylynn had spent hours and hours here before, doing projects for her boss, and she liked the quiet and seriousness of the room and the many intriguing items the collection contained. This was the real stuff worth preserving. The library was moving toward digital, and must have gotten a large grant to buy the rows of new computers set out for the patrons to use, but it also had several tall black microfilm readers. You could pick out a four-inch reel of tape, fix it upon the spindles, then slowly wind it under a bright light. It was like watching an old black and white movie— page after page, for instance, of old New Orleans newspapers.

The films were in gray file drawers against the wall, organized by date, and it took Cherrylynn only a few minutes to find the reel she wanted. Several machines were available. She picked one that looked like it would work, clicked on the light, and loaded up her reel. The past flashed before her.

General Creighton Abrams is to replace General William Westmorland. He asks for more troops. The Orioles, Red Sox and Tigers are all competing for the American League East. In local news, the first Southern Decadence Party is held at Matassa’s Bar in the French Quarter. Hurricane Agnes is expected to cause damage in Pennsylvania. D.H. Holmes has a summer sale on ivory silk organza and lace wedding gowns at $229.99. The New Dick Van Dyke Show comes on at seven p.m. on CBS. Manuel’s Hot Tamale carts are available, vendors keep half of what they sell.