Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 06 - Lucky Man (13 page)

“Let’s try this one then. Who had a reason to kill Finn?”

“So, it was murder. I thought it might be. And you know, there ain’t a single soul I can think of who would permeate such a crime.”

“The man had no enemies?”

“He was clean as a golden fleece.”

“You gave a party for Al Hughes during the election campaign?”

The change of subject caught LaFrene by surprise, and his eyes narrowed for an instant.

“I was happy to do so. Al’s my judge. I’ve always voted for Al. He’s right as a rock.”

“There was a young lady who came to that party. Her name was Sultana Patel. Do you know her?”

LaFrene scratched behind his ear.

“Can’t say as I do.”

“Short, dark, maybe twenty-five, nice looking.”

“That don’t ring a chord.”

“Then I guess you wouldn’t know who she came with.”

“How could I, Tubby. I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about.”

The lawyer could think of more things to ask, but he couldn’t see that he was getting anywhere. Either LaFrene was a fool or he could sure pretend to be one. It was probably the latter, considering all of the diamonds flashing on the car man’s fingers. But no matter how you translated LaFrene’s remarks, they were not much help. He stood up.

“Thanks for your time, Lucky. If you think of anything that might help Norella make sense out of this tragedy, please give me a call.”

“I sure will.” LaFrene swept across the room, blowing Tubby out with him. “And don’t you forget who gets that boat. We rolled the dice and I need my slice,” He guided Tubby across the showroom, slapped him hard on the back, and pushed him out the door.

Tubby looked back through the glass at the beautiful Velocitar, and there was Lucky LaFrene talking on a portable phone.

Todd Murphy was no genius. That’s why the LSU medical student was doing his residency in the morgue. No high-price surgeries here. No smooth bedside manner was required.

He made his incision with a practiced hand. There was something in that belly that shouldn’t be there. His fingers had detected it. An X-ray had confirmed it.

There was no blood. The man had been converted into a body more than sixteen hours ago. That was an educated guess, at least.

Neatly and precisely, the assistant coroner pulled apart the dermis and parted the muscles. Ah, there was the stomach, all gray and oysterlike. He prodded and squeezed the heavy organ with his latex-gloved hand, just out of curiosity.

Murphy took a deep breath and held it, anticipating the burst of gas he was about to release. Then he drew his scalpel through the unresisting tissue.

Right away, he saw something foreign. Setting aside his scalpel, Murphy gently extracted a handful of plastic golden disks, like a small treasure from the sea, from the cadaver’s gut. On each was engraved, “$1,000 Grand Mal Casino.”

“Ah,” he said again, with satisfaction.

After some more digging he found another chip stuck in Mr. Finn’s windpipe.

***

Murphy rolled the cadaver away and secured the fifteen golden chips in a clear plastic bag. He held the bag up in front of the light and thought things over.

Then he moved on to his next interesting problem, the unclaimed body in the next drawer. It was time to look at it again. It was also a peculiar case. Some evidence of trauma to the vagina and rectum. Still, that was not what had killed the young female. She appeared to have been malnourished. And she had been sliced across the neck with something sharp. But there were no obvious signs of a struggle.

He had been able to postpone admitting the difficulty of classifying this death because, conveniently, no one had shown up to claim or identify the body. So long had it been left exposed to the elements after death— at least three days, Murphy thought— that most of its features had been eaten away by bugs or rodents, further complicating identification. What was also curious was that one foot had been almost totally hacked off by a crude blade, much like a propeller, and the woman’s underwear was on backwards. Once or twice a day, Murphy would pull out the drawer and study the corpse for minutes at a time, searching for clues.

Al Hughes chose to meet in the open air. Seems he was paranoid now about eager ears in the walls, not just in his courtroom but in his house, in Tubby’s office, and everywhere else. Waking around on the street downtown wouldn’t do, because there might be surveillance cameras and long-range listening devices hidden in the high-rise buildings. He was worried about restaurants, too, because somebody might overhear his conversations.

“Well, where can we talk?” Tubby was exasperated.

“How about at the zoo,” Hughes suggested, so finally the two men were sitting on a wooden bench watching zebras, giraffes and gazelles graze on a re-created African veldt. School kids and ladies with prams flitted around them. Al had on his idea of a disguise, which was sunglasses and a red tam-o’-shanter. They made him look like a school principal moonlighting as a cab driver.

Unwilling to starve, Tubby had picked them up a couple of soft-shell crab po’ boys at Domilise’s.

“Feel safe enough?” he asked when he sat down beside Al and opened his brown paper sack. He was being sarcastic.

“Don’t make fun of me, pal. It’s not your butt they’re after.”

“I’m not so sure,” Tubby said, thinking about the DA’s almost casual comments about his daughter’s sex life.

The judge accepted his long sandwich wrapped in white butcher paper. He carefully unfolded his lunch and lifted the bread on top to see what it was loaded with. “Did you put some hot sauce on this?” he asked.

“Yeah. I thought you liked it that way.”

Hughes nodded and took a bite. He had to use both hands to hold it together.

“How did your meeting with our friend go?” he asked, mouth full.

“Strangely. The DA seems to feel that you are guilty as charged, and I get the feeling that he has no qualms about destroying your reputation and career if you do not cooperate with his investigation.”

The judge shifted uncomfortably on the bench.

“Great news,” he said. “How am I supposed to cooperate?”

“That’s the strange part. He didn’t reveal any specific target for his snooping, so I guess you can pick and choose which judges on the court you want to incriminate. I get the feeling he thinks all of them are equally corrupt but can’t put his finger on anything specific that anybody has actually done.”

“Except for me.”

Tubby nodded.

“And the sad truth is, most of my colleagues are so honest they’re boring as Mondays. I mean they all might do a favor for a friend now and then, but nothing important, if you get me.”

“What about Judge Trapani?”

“He’s a bad apple, that’s for sure, and I’ve often heard it said you could buy him.”

Tubby did not personally know about “buy,” but he had once done a subtle arm-twist on Judge Carlo Trapani, and a client named Cesar Pitillero had miraculously gotten his sentence reduced. Pitillero was due out of state prison in three more months.

“Is that why you reported him to the Judiciary Commission?”

“Who said I did that?”

“You told me.”

“I’ve got a big mouth. No, I reported him because he pulled a gun on me in my own chambers and said he’d blow my brains out.”

“What for?” Tubby caught an errant slice of tomato from his sandwich before it hit the sidewalk.

“Because I told him I thought he was a crook. One thing led to another. I never had anything real on him. And even if I did, Marcus Dementhe did not seem to be too interested in Trapani. He’s after the other guys.”

“If they aren’t doing anything wrong, then you don’t have anything to trade.”

“That’s right. So I guess my goose is cooked.”

“Not necessarily. You were definitely set up.”

“What?” The judge’s voice was loud enough to make a curious antelope prance away and the kid who was about to feed it a peanut start to cry.

“I talked to Sultana, Al. How shall I put this? She was paid to come on to you.”

“Paid? Like with money? By whom?”

“Apparently a man named Max Finn. He paid her to go to the party at Lucky LaFrene’s house, with instructions to cozy up to you.”

“That’s unbelievable.”

“I know it must be a blow to your ego, man. If it makes you feel any better, she says she has developed a real fondness for you.”

The judge’s mouth fell open. He mopped his brow with a paper napkin.

“Do you happen to now that Max person?” Tubby asked.

“I never heard of him.”

“Too bad, because I never heard of him, either, before this week. Then the son of a bitch dies on us. You might have seen it in this week’s papers.”

Hughes shook his head.

“So that’s one promising lead that has disappeared. The really weird thing is, Max Finn was married to a woman I know, Norella Peruna. She claims to know nothing about her husband’s line of work, which to my mind would be called pimping.”

Hughes wasn’t listening. He was watching an old Galápagos turtle climb on top of another one.

“She was paid to pretend to like me?” He was indignant. “But now she says she has… what was her word?”

“She’s fond of you.”

“Holy Jesus.”

“She wants to help if she can, but she’s also afraid of the DA.”

“Why did they pick me?”

“Maybe because you’re an unsuspecting target.”

“Which is to say, dumb.”

“Could be. Maybe
naive
would be a better word.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“Keep hanging tough. Dementhe didn’t give me a deadline. He may just want you to wiggle and squirm. If he calls me, I’ll stall. Meanwhile, have you thought about telling the missus? Confession is good for the soul, they say.”

The noise the judge made could be called a growl, and he glared at his lawyer.

“Just a thought, Al. Let me keep working on who put Sultana up to this and why. If we figure that out, maybe you’d get your life back. Only problem is, I can’t find her. She hasn’t called you, has she?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, she picked a bad time to go missing because she’s already told all the bad stuff about you to a grand jury, but the only ones who heard her say she was paid to entrap you were me and Cherrylynn. By the way, have you got any money to pay me?”

Like two prairie creatures grazing on the same tuft of grass, the two lawyers put their heads together and got down to basics.

The apartment that Debbie Dubonnet shared with her husband and newborn was on Zimple, near the universities. They rented the entire upstairs of a nice house with big windows overlooking the street. She came to the door with a finger to her lips.

“He just went to sleep,” she whispered, meaning Arnaldo Bertrand, or Bat, as he was called.

Grandfather and daughter tiptoed up the stairs.

He peeked into the child’s room and saw a small pink head poking out of a blue blanket. She waved him into the kitchen anxiously, afraid he might wake her papoose up.

“I think it’s safe. We can talk in here,” she said.

“Your house looks real nice,” he complimented her, since it appeared that she had tidied up for his visit.

“Thanks.” She was pleased that he had noticed. “Let’s sit at the table. I’ll just make us some coffee. What did you bring?”

“Scones, as promised.” He gave her the bag. Tubby did not really care one way or the other about scones. They were not exactly a part of his culture. Still, all of his daughters loved them.

“Goody.” She was elated.

“You look swell.”

“I’m still too big.” She handed him coffee in a white mug he recognized as a hand-me-down from her mother. “I haven’t been sleeping much. Marcos and I take turns getting up at night, but I’m the only one who can feed him.”

“Marcos is keeping up with school?”

“Pretty much. He studies in the library as much as possible just to have some peace and quiet.” She sounded jealous. “I’ll get some more help during the Thanksgiving break.”

Tubby kept quiet.

“What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” she asked.

“Don’t know yet,” Tubby said hopefully. “What about you?”

“I guess go over to Mom’s. She’s invited everybody.”

Tubby changed the subject. “And Bat? Is he doing okay?”

“Oh, he’s just fantastic. He is sweet and happy and just so cute I can hardly stand it.”

“I hope he wakes up while I’m here.”

“Do you have to leave soon?”

“Not really.” He watched her spread lemon curd on an orange and cranberry scone. He scooped up a small spoonful and sniffed at it.

“So,” said Debbie, sipping her coffee, “was there anything special you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Not really. I just wanted to see you.”

“Overweight me.”

“You look very trim. I did have one question, though.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“You know, when you got Buddy Holly, that preacher from Mississippi, to come here to help with your wedding…”

“Of course.”

“I was just wondering, how did you get to know him?”

Debbie took her time swallowing a bit of scone before she answered.

“He has a church in Bay St. Louis. I met him over there.”

“I’ve been to the place. They said you had stayed there, but they didn’t say why. I thought I should ask you.”

“It was last spring. No big deal. I just needed to chill out. I kind of bumped into those guys. It seems a long time ago now.”

He waited for about a minute, concentrating on his coffee, but she did not add any details.

“If you don’t want to tell me about it, I guess I can understand. But the place, you now, is for homeless kids with drug problems and stuff like that. I didn’t know you were there. I didn’t even know you had any problems. I’m concerned, that’s all.”

“It wasn’t drugs, I just went through a bad time.” She pulled at her bangs. “I’m over it.”

“You won’t tell me.”

“Daddy, what got me upset was I found out I was adopted.”

Her father’s jaw dropped.

Debbie stared down at her half-eaten scone.

“You know, I never think about that anymore,” the father said quietly.