Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 07 - Tubby Meets Katrina (16 page)

Johnny Vodka called Tubby the next morning to report that a twenty-dollar bill heisted by Bonner Rivette from the First Alluvial Bank had turned up in the deposit envelope dropped off at the bank by the Najaf Deli on Freret Street. It didn’t lead to much, Vodka said. He had already been over to the Najaf, and the owner said he remembered nothing about the customer.

“You know, the typical thing. He doesn’t know a squid from a sea bass. He probably doesn’t even have a Health Department permit to open the restaurant. Or he might, I don’t know. I threatened him a little bit, but it didn’t improve his recollections any. He might have seen Rivette, or he doesn’t know. The point is, we know that Rivette is around, and very close by.”

“My daughter’s in town. She’s hidden away,” Tubby said. “If he comes around here, I’m carrying a gun.”

“That’s fine. It’s every man for himself these days. If you see this character, you can call me or shoot him yourself, whatever you can do.”

“Can’t we get more manpower, maybe the FBI or something?” Although threatening to pack heat, Tubby was not truly ready to assume all of the responsibilities of law enforcement.

The line was silent.

“Okay, I was just asking,” Tubby said.

“You got to understand, Mr. Dubonnet. This is a national disaster. We ain’t exactly got what you call a lot of resources. I wouldn’t even have known about the money turning up if the bank manager wasn’t related to my captain. I’m just saying this so you’ll understand.”

“Yeah. Well, I appreciate whatever you can do.”

“Sure. I’ll let you know when I find out something, and you do the same. If you do happen to shoot him, call me right away.”

“I got that part,” Tubby said.

Sardis Sanitary Supply, sub-sub-contractor in charge of appliance removal in zip code 70119, was working Florida Street. Its three inspectors worked seven days a week. Their company got two hundred dollars per refrigerator located, then more money to cart it off for refrigerant removal, then more for electrical wiring removal, then more to drop it at the refrigerator dump. At that point another company would take over and get paid to crush the white-goods into cubes for recycling. The street inspectors earned two hundred dollars a day, and were delighted to have it, even if they had to live in an old Winnebago parked at an Interstate rest area thirty miles north of town.

Jack Shimlechek had been a community college professor of biology in Crampon, Indiana, when he learned about this job on the web, his late-night companion. He did the math and was en route to the sunny south twenty-four hours later. The college simply cancelled his course.

During his career teaching at the high school level and in college, he had watched the dissection of thousands of chickens, frogs and mice, but he had never encountered anything so earthy and nostril-filling as the endless population of curb-side refrigerators in New Orleans. The worse it got, and the more his partners gagged, the more he laughed. He was a good leader for his men, two former elementary-school counselors from Nashville.

His humor was tested when he used a utility knife to take off the duct tape on a nice double-wide icebox. He stepped a few paces back and retired to his knees for personal reasons.

His assistant who carried the paper work came to help, took a look in the box and also went to sit down on the curb.

“Old Rocky Top,” he whistled, nonsensically. “Rocky Top, Tennessee.”

“Just letting you know,” Vodka told Tubby on the telephone, “I think we got your boy linked up an actual murder.”

Tubby’s nerves were numb. His face was granite. “Who is it this time?”

“Some laborer who stayed up at the campground in City Park. A guy they called Wire Nut. He was stuffed inside a refrigerator.”

“That’s unusual.” He was sweating. His concentration was failing.

“You know, you’re right. We haven’t had too many refrigerator murders that I can think of offhand. It may be unique. Or maybe this is just the start of a trend.”

“Does this bring you any closer to catching him?”

“Not really. I haven’t got a clue where the guy is hiding himself. I’m just letting you know he’s leaving lots of crapola behind him wherever he goes.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“I mean, we’re looking for him,” Vodka said defensively. “It’s just, he ain’t the only thing out there, and we’re still not up to strength at the police department.”

“I get it,” Tubby said. He was tired of hearing about all the problems. Law and order were out the window. I mean, let’s just find this guy and pop him. Simple as that.

Steve and Gastro didn’t have much to do on Monday morning so they decided to drive up to New Orleans to see if Gastro could find any of his old friends.

“Funny how this all looks so normal,” Steve commented as he piloted his Frontier up the entrance ramp to the Westbank Expressway.

“The Home Depot’s sign blew down,” Gastro pointed out.

“Sure, they had lotsa wind, but everybody’s back in business.”

They got in line to pay their toll at the Crescent City Connection Bridge and had time to check out most of the radio stations on the dial before they finally got to the toll plaza, it was that crowded.

“Look how many cars is from Texas. Guess I should come back up here and get another job,” Steve said unenthusiastically. “I liked working for Mr. Flowers. Maybe he’s got something else for me.”

“If I can find a certain somebody, I might be able to get some weed to sell,” Gastro suggested helpfully.

“I don’t know about that,” Steve said, “But you tell me where you want to go.”

They took the first exit off the bridge and did stop-and-go into the French Quarter. The traffic lights still weren’t operating, and some drivers had trouble understanding that they didn’t have to sit all day waiting for a four-way stop sign to change. Finally they crossed Canal and grabbed a place to park on Chartres Street. The sign said “Loading Zone,” but it was hard to believe that anybody was issuing tickets.

“My old hang-out’s Jackson Square,” Gastro said, and he led them walking in that direction. The October afternoon was warm. Steve had a cut-off wife-beater T-shirt over his blue jeans. Gastro had on black pants and a black button-up shirt, and looked like the caricature of a geek, though his face had so many wires implanted in it he should have been able to receive e-mails.

They strolled into the Square, where the stately Cabildo and Presbytere were still blocked off behind a plywood wall and most of the shops, even La Madeleine’s coffee and
croque monsieur
, were locked up.

“This is dismal,” Gastro said.

He brightened when he saw one tarot card reader plying her trade. Normally there were at least ten. And though he didn’t customarily relate to the portrait painters who had once hung their work on every available spot of iron fence, he was kind of glad to see that at least one had returned and even had a customer, a man who looked like George Bush, and who was having himself rendered in charcoal, en profile.

Two young men were playing guitars together on a bench, and Gastro tapped Steve on the shoulder to make him stop and listen. The musicians were also dressed in black and wore their hair long. There was an upturned cowboy hat on the cobblestones where contributions might be made.

They were having a hard time finding a tune they both knew, but approached the task seriously.

“You guys know where ‘Blues Rap’ is?” Gastro interrupted.

They looked him over.

“Don’t know who you’re talking about, dude,” one of them said in a strong western accent.

Gastro walked off, and Steve had to hurry to catch up.

“Those guys are not even from here,” Gastro complained.

“Well, man, you ain’t from here either,” Steve reminded him.

“I paid my dues in New Orleans,” Gastro said haughtily. “Those kids probably came in here after the hurricane.”

Steve followed his friend through the French Market, where there were only a few stands selling sunglasses, and over to Royal Street, which was deserted. Gastro’s eyes darted left and right at every intersection.

Finally he sat down on the curb.

“This sucks,” the street ranger said.

“What’s the matter, man?”

“Nobody’s around. It’s all empty.”

“We ain’t even knocked on no doors, dude. How you gonna find your friend if you don’t go to his house?”

Gastro looked at him like he was from another planet.

“Most of my friends don’t have no stupid houses or apartments. They hang on the streets, like we’re doing now. Only we’re the only ones hanging here.”

That was certainly true.

“The whole counterculture is gone. It’s someplace else. It isn’t here,” Gastro griped. “This is just empty city. This could be… like… Montgomery on a Sunday afternoon!” He couldn’t come up with anything worse.

“I hadn’t ever been to Montgomery.”

“I wonder where everybody went,” Gastro said, leaning back against a fluted cast iron column, feeling discouraged.

“You mean to tell me you lived here how long? A year at least. And you have friends, and you don’t know where a single one of them lives?” Steve was having trouble comprehending this.

Gastro was too bummed to answer.

“At least let’s go have some fun,” the big fellow said. “I can find Bourbon Street, that’s for sure.”

He got up and started walking, and Gastro scooped himself out of his miasma and followed behind.

“Look,” Steve said as they got closer to the scene and encountered more people, “why don’t we call Mr. Dubonnet’s daughter, Christine, and see if she wants to come down and party with us? Maybe she’s got a girlfriend.”

“I don’t care either way,” Gastro said. Yet the appearance of open bars and people stuffing pizza in their mouths as they walked was restorative.

“Okay then. I got her number in my phone.”

Steve leaned against a wire trash can and tapped the keypad of his pocket wonder.

“Yeah, hello, this is Steve Oubre. You remember me? From Petrofoods and all that? Sure. Listen, are you doing anything this evening? Me and Gastro…”

Christine arranged to meet them at a club Gastro suggested called the Dirty Dungeon to hear a band called the Breaded Sisters at eight o’clock. Since there was a curfew at 2:00 am, the bands had to start playing early. She would try to bring her roommate Samantha.

Meanwhile Steve and Gastro had a couple of hours to kill. They pooled their money, which came to sixty-eight dollars, and decided that gave them enough to drink a few beers, so they walked around taking in the sights. It was after five o’clock and at least Bourbon Street was alive with foot traffic. There was a crowd outside the Famous Door. Music poured from the clubs as the day’s sun went down. Everyone was sporting a plastic cup of beer, and the voices were loud.

“This is the strangest thing,” Steve said, swallowing his Dixie draft. He didn’t realize it had been kegged before the hurricane flooded the brewery.

“I’ve never seen this before,” Gastro said.

Everybody on the street was male.

They promenaded on Bourbon Street in both directions. They mixed and mingled and stopped to peer into the music joints and to soak up the Dixieland Jazz and the smells of shrimp frying, but there wasn’t a woman in sight.

“These boys are all from Texas,” Steve said.

“They’re all Mexicans, you ask me,” was Gastro’s view.

“Whoo. There’s a lot of them. They ain’t no fair sex at all. We’re gonna have to protect our ladies tonight. These muchachos must be mighty lonely.”

The Dirty Dungeon on Esplanade Avenue was very crowded at seven-thirty when Gastro and Steve swaggered in. The juke box was playing loudly. The Breaded Sisters had not yet started their gig. Gastro finally found someone he knew, a bearded chemist with some sort of terminal disease that he rarely mentioned, and which had obviously not yet killed him. They screamed at each other over the noise. Steve watched the door, waiting for Christine and her friend to arrive.

At half past eight Christine showed up alone. This caused a minor sensation at the bar because she was almost the only female in the place. Steve had been on the alert, and he pushed his way through the crowd to claim the woman.

“It’s great to see you.” He gave her a bear hug. “Your friend didn’t come?”

“She’ll probably come later. She wants me to call her and tell her what kind of scene this is.”

“It’s Gastro’s scene, whatever you call it. If it was me we’d go out for country music. See, he already found somebody he knows.”

Steve directed Christine to a little table against the wall that Gastro and the chemist, wearing a red baseball cap backwards, were using for an ashtray. The guy with the cap melted away as they arrived. Gastro said “Hi” to Christine and confided to Steve that, “The dude might be able to help us.”

The juke box was playing Nine Inch Nails.

“This is the first time I’ve been out since I got back to New Orleans.” Christine had to shout to make herself heard.

“You wanna beer?” Steve asked.

She said fine, anything would do. Mindful that his treasury was getting thin, Steve barged his way to the bar in search of whatever was cheapest.

“Well, tell me what you’ve been doing since the last time I saw you,” Christine said to Gastro.

He blushed from the attention, but no one saw that in the dim Dungeon.

“Not much,” he said. “How about you?”

“Okay, well first I went to stay with my father at his house for a few days, and that was fine. We just worked to clean things up, but you know that, and then I went… .”

Bonner Rivette wedged his motorcycle between two parked cars on Esplanade Avenue. He had tracked Christine as she drove from her apartment to the French Quarter and had seen her go into the bar. This was the right time to make contact, he decided, since she was on foot and it was suitably dark.

The question was whether to follow her into the bar, and he pondered that for half an hour. Rivette was reclined against his chrome seat back, but he was quite aware of what was going on around him. He recognized the television show blaring from a nearby house, “The Simpsons.” He heard a man walking his dog down the sidewalk a block away. Rivette was wearing his new white chemical suit and white gloves for his night on the town. The paper bonnet and his respirator mask were in his pouch, and he could always put those on if he went into the club.

As it turned out, Christine came to him.

The smoke and closeness of the bar were getting to Christine.

“I’m going outside to call my friend Samantha,” she told her two escorts and pushed off, fiddling in her bag for her cell phone. Outside the air was sweet, and she shook her hair to get some of the cigarette smell out.

She flipped open the phone and found speed dial to connect to her roommate.

“Hello, Christine. What’s it like?”

“It’s not too bad. There’s lots of boys. Why don’t you come down?”

“I don’t know if I’m really up for loud music.”

“Come on. You haven’t been out for months. If you don’t like it we can go somewhere else.”

“I don’t know. I’m watching an old re-run of the ‘Brady Bunch.’”

“I’m going outside to check on Christine,” Gastro said. “This isn’t the best neighborhood in the world.” Even as he said this he realized that he was caring about Christine, and that caring about someone was not how you normally survived.

“Tell her the band’s about to start,” Steve called to his back.

Christine felt the tap on her shoulder and turned around to see Bonner Rivette. She shrieked.

“What’s happening?” her roommate on the phone asked.

“It’s him! Call my daddy! Call my daddy!” was all Christine could say before the criminal knocked the phone out of her hand.

She tried to bolt, but he fastened his grip onto both of her arms.

“Don’t scream, Christine,” he said soothingly. “I just want to talk to you.”

“You go to hell!” She struggled, but he pulled her further from the bar and its lights.

He was very strong, just as she’d remembered, and he succeeded in muffling her voice against his chest as he dragged her past the quiet houses and under the live oak trees. She tried to kick at him with her sneakers and knee him in the groin, but he clutched her so tightly that she couldn’t make it work. It was like they were two lovers dancing in slow motion down the sidewalk.

Tubby was driving his big Chrysler near Lee Circle when he got the call. He had been on a mission to make copies of his insurance claim forms at Kinko’s, but he had failed, not realizing that the once twenty-four-hour-a-day establishment was now open only from nine to three on weekdays because of a labor shortage.

“Mr. Dubonnet!” It was the excited voice of Christine’s roommate, finally talking. “That awful man has got her again.”

She told him what she knew and where Christine was.

He tore at the wheel, knuckles white, blaring his horn through stop signs, racing for the French Quarter. He tried to press 911 while he steered, but his fingers couldn’t find the numbers.

Gastro did not see Christine when he stepped out of the bar. He thought she might have ditched the party and taken herself home. He was disappointed, but then people often treated him that way. Since he had come outside to see to her safety, however, he waited for a minute to see if anything appeared to be amiss. His eye caught a movement down the street, and he moseyed that way. And then he heard the muffled scream and began to run.

Bonner Rivette had Christine in the driveway of a tall deserted house. Pieces of its roof lay about the pavement. His motorcycle was right across the street, and he was trying to squeeze enough air out of the girl so that she would listen to what he had to say. Like it or not, she was going to ride with him to the Gulf Coast. They were going to blow this city, even if he had to kill her to get her there.

He saw Gastro but perceived him to be a minor problem. Still holding Christine tightly by the arm with his left hand, Rivette prepared his right to take care of the hippy squirt.

Gastro yelled, “What’s going on?” but he didn’t wait for an explanation. He flailed his way in like a windmill, the only tactic that had ever worked for him in high school. Bonner sought to use Christine as a shield, but that started her swinging and kicking at him, too, so he threw her roughly onto the driveway. Then he could use both hands on the kid. One, two, three, and Gastro was on the ground with a broken nose.

“Helpless little woman, am I?” Christine screamed. “Your soul mate, am I?” She had a brick from a fallen chimney in her hand, and she clocked Rivette on the side of the head with it. He sank to one knee, and looked at her curiously.

“I’m just someone to knock around, right?” she shouted and whacked him again. Bonner rolled away trying to control the pain. Blood from his forehead was coloring his white suit.

Christine threw her brick at him and picked up another one. Gastro was back up on his knees, shaking his head to clear it. A car screeched to the curb, horn blasting, and Rivette staggered to his feet. It was time to flee.

He ran behind Tubby’s Chrysler as the lawyer was leaping out. Christine pegged another brick which missed Bonner by several feet but which indicated to her father that she was bravely alive. He turned to give chase, but Bonner already had his Suzuki running. He kicked it onto gear and aimed himself down Esplanade Avenue.

“You’re not getting away again,” Tubby shouted and jumped back behind the wheel of his car. He burned rubber in pursuit while Christine, breathing heavily, tenderly used Gastro’s shirt to mop his crooked nose.

Bonner wasn’t feeling so good. He could make his Suzuki go fast, but he could not steer it so well. He thought his skull might be fractured, it hurt that bad. He blinked and almost ran over the curb into the shuttered Café du Monde. He righted his course. Headlights stabbed at his eyes. Drivers swerved to miss him.

More pain rushed through his right shoulder, almost causing him to crash high-speed into the iron fence around Jackson Square. Why, he’d been shot! That bastard father of Christine’s was shooting at him!

Indeed Tubby was firing away, big slugs from his .45—twenty-five years of practicing law forgotten. Nor was he the least concerned about winging bystanders, so it was lucky that the few about were Texans who knew how to take cover from a gunfight. Anytime he got within a hundred feet of the motorcycle’s taillights he pulled the trigger and the gun kicked hard. Since he was aiming out the window with his left hand, it was pure luck that he got anything into Rivette at all. Tubby had never fired a weapon at a human being before, but he had lost his mind over this one. He was cursing nonstop through his beard, intent on keeping the Suzuki in view. All he wanted was a chance to ram the son of a bitch and run him over.

Rivette went left between a parking lot and the Jax Brewery, lured there by the absence of street lights. His mind was blanking out. Tubby saw the turn and came around the corner on two tires. The street crossed the railroad tracks and ended in a small parking lot beside the Moon Walk, the little park for lovers and street musicians built atop the levee. It rambled above the rocky artificial shore of the Mississippi River. The railroad’s wooden crossing arm was down, but Rivette maneuvered his motorcycle around it. Tubby slammed on the brakes and slid to a halt next to the tracks.

He was out of the car, running after Rivette with his pistol still clutched in his hand. The criminal was just ahead. His bike, idling noisily, was pointed up the slope of the levee. Tubby hoped Rivette wasn’t dead yet because he wanted to shoot him himself.

Bonner’s strength was waning. The fire was going out. The wind inside was dying down. All he wanted to do was fly, high as he once had, clearing everything from his path. He heard that lawyer, Dubonnet, panting and cursing behind him. He gave the throttle a mighty twist and stomped the bike into gear.

He got the traction and came over the top of the levee with his speedometer sweeping toward sixty miles per hour. It went to the end of the gauge when the back tire came off the grass and Rivette sailed into the sky.

Running right behind him, Tubby clicked his useless empty gun repeatedly as Bonner soared over the rocks. He saw Rivette arc over the current and hit the water with a splash that seemed so silent because the engine roar extinguished, echoing away. The lawyer watched the motorcycle bubble around for one tiny moment before it sank beneath the surface. Bonner’s body detached. It floated away, a lump of blackness that quickly disappeared in the dark of the river.

“I didn’t know the gun was loaded,” Tubby sang to himself. “And I’ll never do it again.”

There were no recriminations from the police department. Johnny Vodka said he would notify Tubby as soon as Bonner Rivette’s body washed up. “It can’t be long,” he assured him. “That river’s got so many poisons in it he’ll die if he only had a little bitty scratch.”