Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 06 - Lucky Man (20 page)
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Authors: Tony Dunbar
Tags: #Mystery: Thriller - Lawyer - Hardboiled - Humor - New Orleans
“I’m afraid so. Did you know he was once on the board of directors of our mission?”
“No. The possibility never crossed my mind.”
“Buddy asked him to leave after they caught him sleeping with one of our girls.”
“That’s terrible. How did he ever get involved in your organization?”
“That was my fault. I recommended him. You see, Marcus and I were married at the time.
“Are you there?” she asked after thirty seconds had passed.
“Yeah,” Tubby said. “I’m just trying to understand this picture.”
“I recognize he’s a lousy human being,” she said. “I didn’t know it until the end, though. It’s taken me a long time to understand this picture myself.”
“I’m trying to be delicate here. He’s a despicable monster, and he’s your ex-husband.”
“I know. He should be in jail.”
“He’s been trying to ruin the reputations of several judges in New Orleans.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me. I honestly think Marcus can deal with his own corruption only by imagining that others are more corrupt. If you stand for something good, he tries to bring you down into the mud. That’s what he tried to do to me. It’s taken me a lot of counseling to make me believe maybe I’m not so bad after all.”
“Was he always that way?”
“To tell you the truth, I think he was.”
“Where does that leave us?” she asked after another long silence.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Call me when you do,” she said, and hung up.
***
There was a small letter tucked in the day’s mail, so small that Tubby almost missed it. His name and address had been neatly handwritten in a fine script. Curious, he opened the envelope.
Dear Mr. Dubonnet,
I have decided to take my own life. The shame of what I have done and the shame I brought down upon Alvin is more than I can bear in this world.
When you read this I will be gone. You will know that I was found at the footsteps of the man who brought this grief upon me. I want him to witness this final act.
Please say good-bye for me to Alvin, and also to Cherrylynn.
Sultana Patel
Tubby took a deep breath. He started to reach for the phone, but his hand stopped in midair.
He folded the letter back into its envelope and placed it in the top drawer of his desk, where he kept items of a personal nature.
Detective Kronke was right, he thought. You can’t have a murder case without a murder.
***
At the Second District police station Vodka studied the paper he had just snatched from the fax machine.
“Get this,” he said to Daneel. “One of the fingerprints we took off the back door of that sheet metal works came up with a match.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“Marcus Dementhe, the new DA. All the elected officials get to have their prints on file.”
“I guess he could have been buying some sheet metal.”
Vodka just frowned at the flimsy piece of paper in his hands.
***
Tubby claimed his Chrysler at the city pound. Detective Kronke had cleared the way for that on condition that Tubby not call him any more. It was a sunny day, so he picked up Raisin and they were driving around Audubon Park looking at the river.
“Lots of bodies, but no murder,” Raisin commented. “Or are you going to frame him for the job?”
“Frame? Ahem. Well,” Tubby replied. “At some level the guilty will pay.” He watched an oil tanker round the bend while he parked the car. “ ‘I don’t care when they get buried if their souls go a-blackberrying.’ ”
“Are you quoting Chaucer at me again?”
“ ‘In legal matters he was a great help, not like a cloistered monk with a threadbare cloak, but more like a master or a pope.’ ”
“You’re a pope, all right,” Raisin snorted.
“So how’s Sapphire?” Tubby asked.
“She’s doing great. She told me to pack up and get out.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It’s time to move on.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“She’s right. I’m not together enough for her.”
“You’re writing it off?”
“Time will tell. I still like her.”
“She’s a very neat young woman. I learned some things from her.”
“Like what?”
“To look at people more closely than I’ve been looking.”
Raisin raised an eyebrow.
“I’m saying, you roam around New Orleans and you see a lot of people you wouldn’t see anywhere else. And it definitely makes life intriguing.”
A man with an Indian feather stuck in his headband fished for bottom feeders off the sidewalk. He was eating a sack of crawfish, and he threw a shell their way.
“Quite a revelation,” Raisin said dryly.
“Well, it was for me. Sapphire kind of opened my eyes to my surroundings. I’m feeling better about everything.”
“Fact is, Tubby, anyplace else you’d be a fish out of water. It’s not the weird people that make life in New Orleans bearable. It’s because those weird people tolerate you, strange as you are. You’re insulated from the real world here. This is the Big Easy-to-Love, man. It’s geographically incorrect. You fit right in.”
“Are you insulting me?”
Raisin just chuckled. “Whoever said, ‘In life, the race belongs to the swift,’ was obviously not from New Orleans,” he added.
“If you can’t put up with termites, mosquitoes, and floods, I wouldn’t urge you to live here,” Tubby conceded.
“Personally, I think it could just be the fall weather,” Raisin said. “The temperature is finally dropping. Everybody feels better.”
“Everybody but you, maybe.”
“I’m working through some things,” Raisin mumbled.
“What? Like getting older? We’re all on that train together.”
“You’re telling me? You’ve been groaning about the sand running through the hourglass for months now.”
“I’m coming to grips with that.”
“Great. But you’ve accomplished some things in your life.”
“So have you.”
Raisin laughed. He lit a cigarette with a wooden match, which he then flicked toward the water.
“You know, you’ve got kids and everything,” he said softly, exhaling smoke.
Tubby couldn’t think of a snappy comeback. He watched the seagulls following a tugboat.
“But then, I should be glad just to wake up and see another sunrise.”
“Me too,” Tubby agreed. “It’s a wonderful world. Most days.”
“Louis Armstrong knew a few things, didn’t he? By the way, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?”
“Don’t know yet. You?”
“I’m thinking about dishing out turkey at the Ozanam Inn. Speaking of which, how long has it been since you stopped drinking?”
“Six and a half weeks.”
“You look good.”
“Thanks.”
“Want to break your streak and go have a beer?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
He started up the car, and they drove to Mike’s Bar.
“There’s more to life than alcohol,” Tubby told him on the way.
“Hold that thought,” Raisin said.
“You know, people are a lot like stars,” Tubby began.
Raisin threw his cigarette butt out the window.
THE END
Thanks to Marilu O’Byrne, Joshua Nidenberg and Jesse Beach, who have filled glaring gaps in my knowledge, to Pat Brady and Steve Sullivan for their slants on New Orleans, to Hugh Knox and Linda Kravitz for their encouragement throughout, and especially to my editor, Jackie Cantor.
AND WE LISTEN TO OUR READERS
We’ll give you your money back if you find as many as five errors. (That’s five verified errors—punctuation or spelling that leaves no room for judgment calls or alternatives.)
If you find more than five, we’ll give you a dollar for every one you catch up to twenty. More than that and we reproof and remake the book. Email
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and it shall be done!
The first Tubby Dubonnet mystery is CROOKED MAN:
Or you might enjoy Julie Smith’s Edgar Award-winning Skip Langdon mystery series, also set in New Orleans. The first book in the series is NEW ORLEANS MOURNING:
The Tubby Dubonnet Series
(in order of publication)
Crooked Man
City of Beads
Trick Question
Shelter From the Storm
Crime Czar
Lucky Man
Tubby Meets Katrina
Envision This (A Short Story)
Also 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
We hope you enjoyed
Lucky Man
and wonder if you’d consider reviewing it on Goodreads, Amazon (
http://amzn.to/18rSyCG
), or wherever you purchased this book? The author would be most grateful. And if you’d like to see other forthcoming mysteries, let us keep you up-to-date. Sign up for our mailing list at
www.booksbnimble.com
Like Tubby Dubonnet, Tony Dunbar is a New Orleans lawyer. The seventh episode in the Tubby Dubonnet series,
Tubby Meets Katrina
, was the first novel set in the city to be published after the storm. He is the winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award, and his mysteries have been nominated for the Anthony and the Edgar Allen Poe “Edgar” Awards. He has also written non-fiction books about the South and civil rights and has lived for more than thirty years in this beautiful and complicated city.
