5 Crime Czar

by Tony Dunbar

  Tubby fled the hospital, found his Chrysler, and let it carry him uptown. The rain had stopped, and the clock on the dashboard said 4:03 A.M. He parked outside Grits Bar, and he could see Janie, the barmaid, through the wire mesh that covered the smoky takeout window. She was pouring drinks for some pool players who wouldn’t go home. It looked warm and comfortable there. Too comfortable for his angry thoughts. He drove on to the all-night K&B— for a bottle of Maker’s Mark and a plastic go-cup he got for a quarter. Then he made his way to the river.

  Sitting in the sand and straggly weeds, legs dangling over the bank, he drank his whiskey straight and watched dark oil tankers and grain barges moving slowly upstream toward Baton Rouge. Their rigging lights looked as delicate as fireflies. Across the wide black void of the Mississippi River, shipyards and power lines glowed like fairy castles.

  Even for Tubby, sitting in the woods drinking straight whiskey while the dew soaked his jeans was bad form. He was too downhearted to care.

  “You were a hell of a dude, Dan,” Tubby yelled at the river and hoisted his cup. Tree toads croaked.

  A scruffy mongrel, black hairs spiked in stiff clusters on his nobbly back and with a scrap of chain fastened to its scabby neck, circled the morose figure with his intoxicant, sniffing loudly and warily.

  “C’mon in,” Tubby yelled, spooking the animal back into the shadows and brush. Eventually, however, it came to sit quietly beside the lawyer, wild eyes intent on the shadowy vessels straining against the current. At some point Tubby reached over and gently unclipped the rusty chain. In time, his eyes closed. So did the dog’s.

  In his dream Tubby saw the faces of the dead. So many of them, he could not count. They stared at him through the portholes of a ship caught between the stars and the swirling black water. Some like Dan he knew, and tears squeezed from between his tight eyelids. Others, ghostlike, Oriental, dark-skinned, were strangers. Nearer and nearer they came, calling to him and singing words he could not understand. Arms, emaciated, reached out for him. He twisted and shook and cried out in his sleep.

  A wet nose in his ear woke the lawyer up. His nighttime companion was hoping for food. A man in running shorts up on the distant levee was staring down at them. Tubby waved the dog away, and it loped through the wet grass toward the new candidate. Behind him the sun was coming up, and birds were chirping in the willow trees sprouting from the riverbank.

  Tubby’s jeans and shirt were wet where he had been lying on the ground. A lot of muscles he had forgotten about hurt when he tried to get to his feet. The white clouds spun around him, and he fell down again. An orange ladybug peeped at him over a blade of grass by his nose.

  “Ah, me,” he sighed. All well and good to be drunk at night in the woods, but in the daylight it would not be long before one of those well-meaning joggers with a cellular phone called 911.

  With effort, Tubby got himself together. Trudging back to high ground he discovered, to his utter astonishment, that no one had messed with his car during the night. Sticking the correct key into the ignition, he could almost hear his daughter Collette saying to her sister, “I’m really worried about Daddy.”

  CHAPTER X

  At the Daily Grind coffeehouse on Magazine Street, Collette Dubonnet spread lemon curd on her maple walnut scone.

  “I’m really worried about Daddy,” she confessed to her sister.

  Christine blew the steam off her hazelnut latte.

  “You mean because of his drinking?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Daddy has always drunk a lot.”

  “I know, but now it’s way too much.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Have you talked to him lately?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I called him at work, two days in a row, and Cherrylynn said he wasn’t there. ‘Where is he,’ I asked, and she didn’t know. So I asked if there was anything wrong, and you could tell from her voice that something was.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothing, but you know how protective she is about her boss. It was the way she said it, though. I can tell she’s worried.”

  “Hmmm.” Christine was noncommittal.

  “So I called him at home. One time I got his answering machine, and the other time he answered, but he was real gruff.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “Yes, but his voice was kind of slurred. He said everything was fine, but he didn’t sound right. I mean, he wasn’t real conversational like he usually is.”

  “Hmmm.” Christine picked at her croissant. “I know he’s been feeling pretty bad about his friend Dan dying and all.”

  “Yeah, but he’s got to get over it.”

  “I’m sure he will. And you know the older generation just drinks a lot more than we do anyway.”

  “It’s so unhealthy.”

  “Look at Clarise’s father. He won’t even leave the house.”

  “Except to go sailing. And at their parties, all they do is drink like fish.”

  “And smoke. A lot of them smoke all day.”

  “They got that from their parents. All Grandad did was smoke and drink, smoke and drink.”

  “And parade at Carnival.”

  “I don’t know how they survived.”

  “We’re probably all brain-damaged from fetal alcohol syndrome.”

  “Really, it’s a wonder we’ve got any brains left.”

  “And Mom, too, as long as we’re talking about drinking.”

  “She’ll go through a bottle of wine a day.”

  “‘Where’s that damn corkscrew?’” Christine shrieked, mimicking her mother. Her sister laughed, and a law student at the next table, baseball cap backwards on his head, lifted his nose from his Black on Admiralty to shoot them a curious glance.

  “I’m worried about her just as much as I am about Daddy,” Collette said.

  “What do you think about Mom’s boyfriend?” Christine asked.

  “What? What boyfriend?”

  The law student pretended not to listen.

  * * *

  You did not have to sit in the bushes by the Mississippi River to drink seriously in New Orleans. Tubby was proving that at the graceful bar called the True Course, a chic, dimly lit grill tucked away in the Warehouse District. Raisin Partlow, his running buddy for many years, had joined him. The good thing about Raisin was he was usually available, since he himself never worked. The women in his life did that for him. If they complained, Raisin never heard it.

  Tubby’s drink of the day was an Old Fashioned. Raisin was drinking Wild Turkey over ice.

  “What’s the song that guy’s playing?” Raisin gestured at the piano player, white shirtsleeves tied high on his forearms, who was playing cabaret melodies for the scattered audience of men in jeans, sports coats, and narrow ties, and women in Moroccan-print blouses and skirts from Saks.

  “That ‘guy’ is Harry Mayronne, Raisin. He’s well known. He’s playing the ‘Surrey with the Fringe on Top’.”

  “Watch the fringe and see how it flutters,” Raisin muttered and lit a cigarette with a pack of matches from the bar.

  “Rogers and Hammerstein,” Tubby added.

  “I’m as corny as Kansas in August,” Raisin said and tossed his match into the ashtray. He proudly exhaled a soft ribbon of gray smoke.

  “Younger than springtime am I,” Tubby replied and knocked back the rest of the red drink in its heavy glass. He signaled to the barman.

  Raisin laughed and coughed.

  “They cremated Dan,” Tubby said. “I’ve got his ashes out in the trunk of my car.”

  “Jesus,” Raisin said.

  “I’m supposed to take some of them over to his aunt’s across the river in Harvey.”

  “Is that where he was from?” Raisin asked.

  “As much as anywhere, I guess. She raised him. Dan’s father was killed on an oil rig out in the Gulf when he was real little, and the mother ran off or something.”

  “He
didn’t get any money when his father died?”

  “No, the way I heard it he got killed over a card game. It really wasn’t work-related. But getting nothing is probably what got Dan started in the union business.”

  “I remember meeting him just one time,” Raisin said. He was down here ’cause of some strike. Was it shrimp peelers?”

  “Crawfish workers, I think,” Tubby said.

  “What the hell kind of union cares about crawfish workers?” Raisin asked and showed the bartender how much Wild Turkey he wanted transferred from the clear bottle to his glass.

  “He always told me it was the Industrial Workers of the World, but I think he was pretty flexible about his affiliation.”

  “He could sure drink beer,” Raisin said in admiration. “I remember that much about him. And eat. I watched him put down two roast beef po-boys with extra gravy at Domilise’s.”

  “Yeah,” Tubby said and smiled.

  “Where did you ever meet him?”

  “He was my roommate during the year or so I was at McNeese State. We were both on the wrestling team, until we got kicked off.”

  Raisin thought that was funny. “How did Dan ever get way over in Lake Charles, Louisiana?”

  “His high school coach got him a scholarship, just like mine did. Neither one of us knew anybody in Lake Charles. We hit it off right away. He wasn’t so much into politics then, but he was clearly crazy. He’d sniff shoe polish, eat shaving cream, race cars around the football field, steal the cheerleaders’ pom-poms before the game, stuff like that.”

  “What a guy.”

  “Yeah.”

  They listened to the piano for a while.

  “The last thing he said to me when I visited him a couple of weeks ago was, ‘I know him from the old neighborhood’.”

  “He was talking about you?”

  “I guess. He was looking at me.” Tubby took a swallow and grimaced.

  “You weren’t really from his old neighborhood though, were you?”

  “Hell, no. I’m from north Louisiana, or whatever you call where Avoyelles Parish is.”

  “Maybe he was talking about Jesus,” Raisin said, blowing smoke off into space.

  “Or Joe Hill.” Or maybe someone else, Tubby was thinking. He rubbed his jaw and drummed his fingers on the bar. Raisin watched him out of the corner of his eye.

  “I’m gonna go make a phone call,” Tubby said and pushed off his brass stool.

  The pay phone was in a wood-paneled alcove by the men’s room. It smelled like lemon furniture polish. He dialed Flowers’s number and, typical, got a recording that said, “This is the Fueres Detective Agency. Please leave a message.”

  “Flowers, this is Tubby. I’ve got a job for you. Can you meet me in the office tomorrow at, say…” he was going to say one o’clock, his recent arrival target, but almost against his will he was getting that old fired-up feeling. “… at nine o’clock?” he concluded.

  He hung up the phone and stared at a leaflet left in the booth advertising a riverboat with “Extreme Payoffs Every Night.” All he could see in the dollar signs were dead men’s eyes. And then his vision began to clear.

  “I’m not from Dan’s old neighborhood,” he said to himself.

  CHAPTER XI

  Tubby beat Cherrylynn to his office at the Place Palais the next morning. On her desk he found a pile of message slips from the Judge Hughes Campaign and, more alarmingly, a fresh draft of Cherrylynn’s resumé, placed neatly beside her word processor.

  He went to his private office, sat down at his desk like a man on a mission, and thumbed through a client’s lease file his secretary had thoughtfully spread out for him while he waited for Flowers.

  He heard the outer door open, but it was Cherrylynn’s head that appeared.

  “Mr. Dubonnet?” She was surprised.

  “Good morning,” he said solemnly, keeping his eyes glued to the file.

  “You sure are up early today,” she chirped.

  “Have we any coffee?” he rejoindered.

  “Why sure, boss. Give me a minute and I’ll make a pot.” She disappeared, happy to oblige his unusual request. Normally Mr. Dubonnet could flip his own switch.

  “Bring me two sugars and a resumé,” he muttered to himself.

  He heard the front door open again, and a “Why, Flowers, I had no idea you were coming” from Cherrylynn.

  She was bustling along behind the detective, unsuccessfully trying to show him the way to Tubby’s office while fixing the stray red hairs on the back of her neck.

  Flowers’s tall frame filled Tubby’s doorway. “Morning, Mr. Tubby,” he said, showing off his pearly whites. Dark-haired, tan, lean, muscular, and well dressed, Flowers was good-looking by any standard. He was also sneaky and fast. Tubby liked having him around, though his presence unaccountably kept Cherrylynn in an agitated state.

  “Can I offer you some coffee?” she asked as Tubby waved the detective forward.

  “No thanks, Cherrylynn. I’ve been drinking it all night.” Reluctantly she left and softly closed the door behind her. Flowers settled himself in one of the leather armchairs and waited expectantly.

  “I’ve got something I want you to check out,” Tubby told him.

  Flowers raised his eyebrows and nodded.

  “You know my friend Dan Haywood died.”

  “I heard,” Flowers said. “Sorry.”

  “Yeah, it’s too bad. The guy who shot him was named Roux.”

  “How do you spell that?”

  “I don’t know for sure. When I heard it, I thought r…o…u…x, like you make gumbo with, but hell, it could be short for kangaroo for all I know.”

  “Okay.”

  “You probably know part of the story, since it was in the papers. I got mixed up with Roux when he took me and Marguerite Patino hostage after robbing a bank. It was during the flood, and Dan introduced me to the lady who gave me shelter from the storm. When I needed his help, he came looking for us, and Roux shot him. Then the police found a corpse that could be Roux, but it’s so burned up it’s hard to tell. Anyhow, the cops closed the case.”

  “Which makes them happy.”

  “Exactly. But before he died, Roux showed me a certain document he stole from the safe-deposit boxes at First Alluvial Bank that proved that Noel Parvelle down in Chalmette was getting screwed out of about five million dollars in an oil deal.”

  “This is getting complicated. Let me take some notes.” Flowers fished a small pad and gold pen from the breast pocket of his jacket.

  “It is complicated,” Tubby said, “but I’m not asking you to understand the whole deal necessarily. I just want to find the people who were behind Roux. Or, on the off chance that it was somebody else’s body that got burned up, I want you to find Roux himself.”

  “Okay, what can you tell me about him?” Flowers was starting to write.

  “I can tell you he was shorter than I am and real thin. He dressed like he was from Texas— fancy boots, polyester jacket. He might be thirty-five years old. He’s got big ears. And he’s got these funny eyes.”

  “Funny how?”

  “Scary, to me. They’re hooded almost, like a lizard, and they’re green, and when you try to look in them there’s nothing there.”

  Flowers looked up for a second. “Good thing he’s dead,” he said.

  “Yeah, if he is.”

  “Where would I start?”

  “A couple of weeks ago, when I was visiting Dan, he suddenly says to me, ‘I know him from the old neighborhood.’ I was so blown away that he spoke that I didn’t even think about what he was saying. But now, I think he might have been talking about Roux. Maybe he recognized the guy. That might explain why Roux was so quick to shoot Dan as soon as he saw him.”

  “What’s the old neighborhood?”

  “Dan was raised by his aunt in Harvey. Here’s the address.” Tubby slid a piece of paper across the desk.

  “Okay, I’ll talk to her, and then what?”

/>   “And then, I don’t know. Sniff around.”

  Flowers closed his notebook. He was frowning.

  “I really want to nail the people who are behind all this,” Tubby said seriously. “They’re big shots, and they’re screwing up this town.” He met Flowers’s eyes. “Those were actually his last words to me.”

  “ ‘I know him from the old neighborhood’?”

  “Right.”

  “Must mean something.” Flowers stood up.

  “Find out for me, please,” Tubby said and watched the detective sweep out of the room with two long strides.

  A moment later, Cherrylynn appeared from the office’s combination file room and kitchen with Tubby’s mug of coffee. She was somewhat perplexed to find Flowers’s chair empty.

  “Missed him,” Tubby said.

  “He left already?” She looked around the office as if the detective might be concealed somewhere.

  “Well,” she said, recovering. She put the coffee carefully on the corner of the desk blotter. “Should I open a new file?”

  “No, I’ve sent him out to find the men who killed Dan.”

  “Did you learn something new?”

  Before he could try to explain it all, the telephone rang. Cherrylynn reached across Tubby’s desk and grabbed it.

  “Dubonnet and Associates,” she shouted. “Oh, hello, Mr. Partlow.” She checked Tubby for a sign. He nodded. “Yes, he’s right here.” She handed Tubby the receiver and discreetly slipped out of the room again.

  “Hey, Raisin.”

  “I’ve got some bad news, pardner.”

  “What’s that?” Tubby asked in alarm.

  “I think Cesar was busted last night.”

  “Really? What for?” Cesar was an artist whose drawings of blues singers and street bums were semi-famous. Tubby had known him since college, too. In fact, he was staring at one of Cesar’s prints on the wall while he talked to Raisin. It was a drawing of people eating beignets in the Café du Monde.