Night Watchman (The Tubby Dubonnet Series Book 8)

“Hair-Raising… Dunbar revels in the raffish charm and humor of his famously rambunctious city.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“Dunbar has an excellent ear for dialogue… His stylish take on Big Easy lowlife is reminiscent of the best of Donald Westlake and Elmore Leonard.”

—
Booklist

“Dunbar catches the rich, dark spirit of New Orleans better than anyone.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Take one cup of Raymond Chandler, one cup of Tennessee Williams, add a quart of salty humor, and you will get something resembling Dunbar’s crazy mixture of crime and offbeat comedy.”

—
The Baltimore Sun

“The literary equivalent of a
film noir
— fast, tough, tense, and darkly funny… so deeply satisfying in the settling of the story’s several scores that a reader might well disturb the midnight silence with laughter.”

—
Los Angeles Times Book Review

NIGHT WATCHMAN

A Tubby Dubonnet Mystery

BY

TONY DUNBAR

booksBnimble Publishing
New Orleans, La.

Night Watchman

Copyright © 2015 by Tony Dunbar

All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is available in both mobi and print formats.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-9861783-2-0
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-9861783-4-4

www.booksbnimble.com

First booksBnimble electronic publication: April, 2015

Digital Editions (epub and mobi formats) produced by
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Full Table of Contents

Under baby blue skies, Tubby’s eyes roamed over a harbor full of brightly colored sailboats, looking for imperfections. There weren’t any. The sea on the horizon was flat, and the little specks of pleasure boats out beyond the pass powered across water smooth as silk under clouds like cotton balls. The harbor was framed by colorful minarets, tall condo towers, air-conditioned castles stacked high with balconies overlooking all the splendid water. Just like the balcony on which he sat, in a burnished aluminum chair tightly covered in bright yellow fabric. He was sipping a Beefeaters on ice. It was nice.

A tree-covered park below him surrounded a marina, which was neatly packed with vessels, sails furled, in repose. Sprinkled among the trees were civic artworks and popular amusements, including a canteen for selling beer and ice cream, about which children and adults clustered. The spacious public lawns were dotted with young parents, blankets on the ground, and their scampering infants.

Tubby beheld it all and lifted his heavy glass. He took a deep drink. Droplets of condensation fell onto his pants. This was, he could confirm, the most beautiful, sunny, sophisticated city on the Gulf of Mexico. Naples, Florida. It was created and must exist for no purpose but to make people happy.

“Happier by far if you have considerable assets,” he said out loud, not realizing he had done so.

All of the happiest citizens had them, assets that was. These citizens made up a majority, at least as far as this visiting tourist from New Orleans could tell, of the overall population. In any case the real people seemed to make their money feeding, watering, caring for, and selling land to the fortunate ones who had the scratch.

It was, however, quite hot here in August, reminiscent of New Orleans. Many people, he had observed, spent their days inside.

Two planes buzzed overhead, advertising Banana Tanning Oil on long banners trailing from their tails. They had taken off further inland and were off to crisscross the island beaches, hawking their beachy wares.

He watched the planes disappear behind the condo towers, through the tresses of extremely beautiful bromeliads. They hung from the roof over his head, which was itself the floor of an identical balcony above. Their orange and flaming red flowers, surrounded by tiger-striped fronds, begged, he imagined, to be pollinated. The sun was warm on his sandaled toes.

“I’m drinking again,” he observed to no one in particular and rose to go inside through the sliding doors.

All of the others, there were seven, had vodka, with olives or fruity flavors. He freshened his own drink in the kitchen and walked back through the party, winking at Marguerite in passing, and then went back to his balcony to shut them out again. A boat horn sounded across the harbor, signaling something a-coming from far away.

Even if you were hidden behind the balcony’s flowers, it was so bright outside you couldn’t open your eyes unless you were prepared to squint hard at the world. A beautiful tropical world it was, however, lush, though also quite spotless and clean. No question, things were good here. The Recession was over and high real estate prices had returned.

“Tubby, our guests are about to leave,” Marguerite interrupted from the space she had just created by sliding open the glass door, emitting a welcome gust of chill air. “Won’t you come inside?” She looked at him anxiously and hopefully, her red hair a halo.

Taking his drink along, he rejoined the party for the farewells. Though he was lost in the fog of gin and his own thoughts, he picked up the tail-end of a conversation. It was about a homicide victim, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black youth who had been pursued down the sidewalk of a nearby town by an armed neighbor. A fight ensued, and the neighbor killed the boy, claiming the protection of Florida’s “stand-your-ground” law.

“He just shot him for no reason,” said one of the guests, a pert retired interior decorator whose short hair was dyed a dark luminescent brown.

This little fragment of a conversation triggered a tiny click in his mind, which inexplicably sent him back to when he was a teenager, back to a dingy apartment in New Orleans. Back when…

* * *

The guests left. The door was closed.

“Whew, I’m exhausted,” Marguerite said. “Didn’t you have a good time, Tubby?” she asked as if the answer were important. “I’ve just met them, but they all seem like such really fantastic people. And just maybe they can be our new friends, friends just for the two of us.”

“All great. All good,” Tubby said, giving her hair a stroke. “Here, I’ll help you clean up.”

“No,” Marguerite said. “Let’s do that later. Right now I’d just like to take a shower. Then maybe, you know…” She gave him a gentle poke in the ribs.

He smiled and nodded. Marguerite affected a blush and danced away to the master bedroom.

Tubby watched her go, then remembered his empty glass. He went to the kitchen for another refill and took it back to the balcony. Where, in the glow of the descending sun, it was perfect. Where he closed his eyes, and remembered.

As a kid, Tubby had always imagined that he might be a crop duster, spraying Clearpath, Clincher and PropiMax in toxic clouds over the rice fields back home in Bunkie. But a high school wrestling trip to New Orleans changed his perspective profoundly. With the team’s chaperone, their youth minister, leading the way, they took a walking tour down Bourbon Street. The warm springtime air was rich with the aroma of mystery and (he later learned) pot. Long-haired kids about his age confronted his group, and everyone else who chanced by, hawking The NOLA Express. It was a smudgy paper with an obscene cover that sold for a quarter a copy. The street people also sold cool buttons protesting the war in Vietnam, each for a dime. Some of these vendors seemed earnestly businesslike, but others appeared to be hippies. Tubby had heard about hippies, but these were the first he had ever seen. The girls had on face paint and weren’t wearing bras.

Lining the uneven sidewalk littered with plastic cups and fried chicken parts were older men with skinny black ties and shirt sleeves rolled tightly around their biceps, who swung open the strip club doors and yelled, “All Naked! Nothing Hidden!” The young boys got brief glimpses of the dancing beauties inside. They elbowed each other and pointed, gawking in awe.

The wrestling team’s chaperone was also brand new to this scene, but it quickly registered with him as— Horror! He slammed it into reverse and hustled his charges back to Canal Street, onto a streetcar, and uptown to their dormitory. By then, however, the damage had been done. Tubby had bitten the apple of the knowledge of good and evil, and he was no longer satisfied with his previous rural and upright teenage life. He wanted more, lots more.

As soon as he got back to Bunkie he tackled his studies with a new purpose. College was his goal. His parents noticed the change, and were impressed. While still doing his hundred push-ups before school and staying after class for sports, he actually started to do his homework. He even turned on the TV news at night and began discussing things— the oil crisis and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, and he would also volunteer to present his arguments in class— like we ought to invade Saudi Arabia and take all the oil we want.

The Assistant Warden at Angola State Penitentiary was the graduation speaker. He urged the students to keep Christ in everything they did. Then Tubby was off to college. At the church school in Mississippi, favored by his parents, he had the good fortune to room with a rugged boy from Louisiana who became a lifelong friend, Raisin Partlow. In short order, however, Tubby set his sights on Tulane University. His father had gone there.

The young student bought a ticket on a Trailways bus from Jackson to New Orleans to explore the possibility of transferring, a venture financed by his father. Tubby was supposed to be gone only a couple of days, and arrangements were made for him to bunk in a Tulane dorm. But when Tubby got off the bus, he slung his canvas knapsack over his shoulder and immediately asked directions to the French Quarter.

Walking down the hot city streets, he kept his eyes on the tops of the buildings. A few months earlier, a man had climbed to the roof of the Howard Johnson’s and made national news by shooting at people on the sidewalks below, ultimately wounding or killing twenty-two, five of them policemen. The shooter’s motive was to avenge racist oppression by killing whites.

The young traveler with his pinstriped shirt and pressed chinos managed to get to Bourbon Street safely. Even in the middle of the afternoon it was just as funky and exotic as he remembered it from his brief visit with the wrestling team. Ambling along the sidewalk, he encountered an endless supply of interesting people. He paused to study some advertisements for a naked stripper tacked on the side of a bar and happened to come to the attention of a derelict. The ragged man had a cane and a patch over one eye and he begged the teenager for some change. Something about the pathos and worldliness expressed by the man’s good eye, yellow-streaked and red-rimmed though it was, touched Tubby’s heart, and he extracted the wallet in which he kept a quarter nestled between a pair of twenty-dollar bills his father had supplied for this trip.

An urchin sprinted out of the crowd and plucked the wallet out of Tubby’s hand as neatly as a lizard zaps a passing fly. The skinny thief rocketed around the corner, with Tubby yelling after him, and he was gone. Incredulous at this sudden change in fortune, Tubby turned to confront the panhandler, but he too had disappeared.

* * *

Sitting on the balcony in Naples, Tubby could still remember the awful lonesomeness of that moment. The French Quarter, so full of promise, enlightenment and fun a moment before, had suddenly turned dark and forbidding. Tubby realized that he had no money, and no ID, and he was miles from hearth and home. He was adrift in a dangerous and very big city.

The isolated teenager was comforted over this enormous loss by one of the newspaper peddlers who had seen this crime go down. The observer was a burly guy, like Tubby, and had the scraggly beginnings of a red beard. The hair on his head was as long and disheveled as a Viking’s.

“I’m supposed to interview at Tulane tomorrow,” Tubby moaned to the universe. He was bereft. He asked the paper seller if he could borrow a dime to call his dad.

“Not too sure about that,” the big man said. He introduced himself as Dan Haywood. Tubby said, call me “Streak,” a nickname he had gotten on the wrestling team. “I’m going to the cops,” he insisted with determination.

“I don’t advise it,” the peddler said. A nearby mounted policeman was already looking them over and smacking his nightstick into his palm.

Dan walked off and Tubby followed, too disconsolate to think of a better option.

Blocks away, on a balcony at the top of a rickety staircase, they joined a group of young people hanging out over a flowered, brick-walled courtyard, wreathed in smoke. Inside the apartment two girls were making steaming pots of lentils and carrots. All of the inhabitants, Tubby’s new friends, embraced him like a brother.

He learned about each one’s situation.

There was a draft dodger.

A draft counselor.