by Tony Dunbar
“You will always be my dreamer,” it said. “Love, Marguerite.”
A little later, Tubby called Al Hughes at home to congratulate him on his reelection victory.
“Your good wishes are appreciated, Counselor, but I’ll have to be honest. I don’t think I’m going to ask you to be chairman of any more of my campaigns.”
“Once was enough for me, too, Al. You just go out there and be a good judge, and I’ll be happy.”
“There was never any question about that,” Hughes said firmly. “And there ain’t going to be.”
“You swamped Benny Bloom.”
“Shows the voters aren’t always stupid.”
“I never did understand why he wanted the job anyway.”
“My sources say he handled payoffs for certain of my colleagues on the bench. He wanted to eliminate the middleman and get the money himself.”
“What?” Tubby asked in astonishment. “Other than maybe Trapani, there are other judges taking payoffs to fix cases?”
“Yes, according to our reporter friend Kathy Jeansonne. I’m not going to talk about it on the telephone.”
“But you’re going to report it to someone?”
“I’m going to do something, but I’m not prepared to say what. First, I’m going to wait and see if the shooting has stopped. This is a scary time to be a politician.”
“Just take care of yourself.”
“That’s Mrs. Hughes’s job. Mine is to wear the robe.”
The ghoulish visitors that had troubled Tubby’s slumbers did not visit him that night. Not even LaRue came to call. The sleeper sensed that they were gone. In their place came more pleasant images of people still warm with life. His attention, focused for too long on the dead and undeserving, returned now to the living. He breathed easily and woke up with an appetite.
* * *
It was blue skies, cool, and sunny over the Rigolets in the early morning. Two fishermen reclining in chairs at either end of a fourteen-foot fiberglass skiff cast lazily at the tall grass along the marshy shore. Mesmerized by the tiny waves rolling past the clear thread of his fishing line, Tubby Dubonnet whistled a tune.
“You’re going to scare the specks,” Raisin called from the front of the boat.
“I don’t think there are any fish around here, anyway.” The thought did not bother Tubby. He had not shaved that morning, and the hair under his hat was unbrushed. He felt good.
There had been no mention in the newspaper about the death of Willie LaRue. Running over the maniac had been an act of self-defense, Tubby was pretty sure of that. Still, this was the one part of the story that he had not shared with anyone, not even Raisin.
“I think I’m going to cut back on the booze,” Tubby said.
“That’s a damn good idea,” Raisin said. “How about tossing me a beer.”
Tubby leaned over to the ice chest and dredged out a silver can. He tossed it to his partner, who deftly snagged it with one hand, and he opened another for himself.
“I feel like I’ve just been lost in a thick fog for the past six months. Now I’m ready to get back into the world again.”
“No more talk about the crime czar?”
“It’s a committee. How can you fight a committee? A group of nameless individuals not one of whom has the guts to be the baddest guy in town? They’re not worth my time.”
“Whatever you say.” Raisin twitched his pole left and right and gently reeled in his line.
“It’s like my daughter said, ‘Daddy, it’s time you got a life’.”
“Seems to me you might worry about what the committee’s going to do to you,” Raisin said.
“I doubt they’ll come after me,” Tubby said, more bravely than he felt. If they did, he would just have to take his chances. “Committees don’t feel human emotions like revenge. Now, Frank Mulé would have burned me alive. He was a man with emotions. I think the board of directors will look at the bottom line and see there’s no profit in messing with me.” They might have enough to worry about with Bin Minny on the loose.
“You’re just a small fry.”
“Exactly. Of course they might demote Clifford Banks.”
“So what’s next?”
“I plan to get my law practice back together and start spending some more time with my girls and my new grandson.”
“Just lead the straight life.”
“That’s right.”
A white egret circled the boat and landed in the marsh grass a hundred yards away. It stood tall on one leg and pointed its beak at the fishermen, eyes searching for bait.
“Have you had the chance to look at that video tape your detective swiped from Clifford Banks’ office yet?”
“Can’t say as I have.”
“It’d give us something to do when we get home,” Raisin suggested.
“No man, we’re going to be frying fish,” Tubby said with confidence. His line went taut and his rod bowed. The egret’s beak twitched, imagining lunch.
THE END
Dedication
To Sam, Sam,
the working man.
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the thoughtful comments of Hugh Knox and Linda Kravitz, the tavern of Ned Hobgood, and the coffee of Theone Perloff-Velez.
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Other Books by Tony Dunbar
Crooked Man
City of Beads
Trick Question
Shelter From the Storm
Lucky Man
Tubby Meets Katrina
Envision This (A Short Story)
Other Works by Tony Dunbar
American Crisis, Southern Solutions: From Where We Stand, Promise and Peril
Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent
Delta Time
Our Land Too
Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959
Hard Traveling: Migrant Farm Workers in America
A Respectful Request
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About the Author
TONY DUNBAR started writing at quite a young age. When he was 12, growing up in Atlanta, he told people that he was going to be a writer, but it took him until the age of 19 to publish his first book, Our Land Too, based on his civil rights experiences in the Mississippi delta. For entertainment, Tony turned not to television but to reading mysteries such as dozens of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories. Among his favorites are: Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, and Tony Hillerman, and John D. MacDonald, and Mickey Spillane, and…
He has lived in New Orleans for a long, long time, and in addition to writing mysteries and more serious fare he attended Tulane Law School and continues an active practice involving, he says, “money.” That practice took a hit in the Hurricane Katrina flooding, but the experience did produce a seventh Tubby Dubonnet mystery novel, Tubby Meets Katrina
The Tubby series so far comprises seven books: Crime Czar, City of Beads, Crooked Man, Shelter from the Storm, Trick Question, Lucky Man, and Tubby Meets Katrina. The main character, Tony says, is the City of New Orleans itself, the food, the music, the menace, the party, the inhabitants. But Tubby Dub
onnet is the actual protagonist, and he is, like the author, a New Orleans attorney. Unlike the author, however, he finds himself involved in serious crime and murder, and he also ears exceptionally well. He is “40 something,” the divorced father of three daughters, a collector of odd friends and clients, and he is constantly besieged by ethical dilemmas. But he is not fat; he is a former jock and simply big.
Tony’s writing spans quite a few categories and is as varied as his own experiences. He has written about people’s struggle for survival, growing out of his own work as a community organizer in Mississippi and Eastern Kentucky. He has written about young preachers and divinity students who were active in the Southern labor movement in the 1930s, arising from his own work with the Committee of Southern Churchmen and Amnesty International. He has written and edited political commentary, inspired by seeing politics in action with the Voter Education Project. And he has had the most fun with the mysteries, saying, “I think I can say everything I have to say about the world through the medium of Tubby Dubonnet.”
Hurricane Katrina and the floods, which caused the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans for months, blew Tony into an off-resumé job serving meals in the parking lot of a Mississippi chemical plant to hundreds of hardhats imported to get the complex dried out and operating. It also gave Tony time to write Tubby Meets Katrina, which was the first published novel set in the storm. It is a little grimmer than most of the books in the series, describing as it does the chaos in the sparsely populated city immediately after the storm. “It was a useful way for me to vent my anger,” Tony says. Still, even in a deserted metropolis stripped of electric power. Tubby manages to find a good meal.
The Tubby Dubonnet series has been nominated for both the Anthony Award and the Edgar Allen Poe Award. While the last one was published in 2006, the author says he is now settling down to write again. But about what? “Birds and wild flowers,” he suggests. Or “maybe television evangelists.” Or, inevitably, about the wondrous and beautiful city of New Orleans.
Full Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Guarantee
Try More Great New Orleans Authors
Other Books by Tony Dunbar
Other Works by Tony Dunbar
A Respectful Request
About the Author
