Текст книги "Night Watchman"

Автор книги: Tony Dunbar

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Praise for TONY DUNBAR and the Tubby Dubonnet series:

“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 Booknook.biz

Contents

Start Reading

Full Table of Contents

I

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.

II

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.

A writing instructor at a Catholic university.

A business major at UNO.

An illegal from Greece.

A woman who had been arrested with Avery Alexander when he had been dragged up the steps at City hall.

A pot smoker.

A country-music enthusiast who thought the rebel South would rise again.

Girls with unbuttoned shirts.

A parrot.

Tubby explained that he was a college wrestler, and they all laughed in disbelief.

The group was talking over the oppressiveness of New Orleans and the “shootout at Desire,” where police tanks had been deployed against the Black Panthers. But most of all, they talked about the latest news of the war, all of which dismayed and outraged them. There was supposed to be a peace accord, but the fighting continued, and now we were bombing Cambodia, providing more fuel for their daily demonstrations against the unspeakable conflict.

Tubby passed a very insightful evening with them. He slept well, his head on a young lady’s lap, and left early the next morning for his college interview. He clutched a handful of change provided by one of the women who cared little about material things. The interview went well. At its conclusion, he took the streetcar back downtown to grab his pack and figure out his next move. But as soon as he disembarked on Canal Street, he was surprised to encounter his new companions, who were demonstrating on the neutral ground.

* * *

Now, almost 40 years later, Tubby was amazed to recall how he had made friends so quickly. He wished he could have such ease again, such friends again. They all believed in a better future. The old order (the old people) would die out soon enough.

“I didn’t die out,” Tubby said, again forgetting that he was by himself on a breezy balcony over the Gulf.

The sun was setting once more, as it did every day, in a blaze of exotic colors, primary orange and azure streaks shooting across the edge of the flat blue sea.

Marguerite called to him, “Tubby, don’t you want to come inside and relax?”

Tubby closed his eyes and drifted back to that afternoon on the neutral ground.

III

Around the demonstrators, the sidewalks were full of people. Tubby had to clear a path through them to reach his group. The protesters were waving signs, like “END THE WAR!”

“What’s up?” he asked.

“The Secretary of State in town to make a speech at the World Trade Center,” one of the protestors yelled.

Pedestrians on Canal Street hustled about their business. Ladies shopping in flowery hats and white gloves were clustered outside the big department stores. Businessmen in seersucker suits and wingtips lit cigars as they walked and talked deals.

The demonstrators attracted more than a few stares because they were loud, but no one in the noontime crowd was particularly threatening. Most of the protestors were serious-looking short-haired kids. Only a couple wore colorful, grubby attire, cowboy boots and torn jeans, with fringed vests covered with protest buttons. But they made the populace aware of the intensity of their feeling and purpose. They had rallied around what they called the White Supremacy Monument, a tribute to the overthrow of black Reconstruction rule, which commanded the middle of the wide neutral ground.

Tubby’s impressions of this day had been made a little opaque by the passage of time, but he did remember a United Cab driver who shook his fist out the window and called them Pinkos. A Lucky Dog vendor pushed his cart through the protest, trying to get into the French Quarter. Tubby certainly recalled being told to take note of the three muscular men, Beatle haircuts and pressed jeans, standing across the street in front of a sprawling concrete municipal building made in the shape of a flattened white mushroom. They were joking among themselves, trying to look hip.

“Cops?” he asked.

“Chief Giarrusso’s finest,” he was told.

A block away, uniformed policemen abruptly marched into the intersection and stopped traffic to make way for a caravan of black limousines.

“That must be Kissinger!” a protester cried.

The street blockade set off a din of blaring car horns. Three blocks full of trapped vehicles maneuvered this way and that trying to get across the neutral ground on which the demonstrators stood so that they could make U-turns.

The protesters continued waving their signs and yelling for attention, but the general mayhem drowned them out. Tubby could recall the deafening uproar of the peace chants, the jeers, the sirens and horns, all the car exhaust, the heat.

Maybe that’s why he didn’t notice the car full of hecklers idling alongside them until one of them hurled a tomato. It spattered on one of the kid’s sign and dribbled onto his new faded madras shirt.

“Hey, what!” the protester objected and shot a bird at his assailant, a person who was only a blur in the back seat.

“Assholes!” the demonstrator’s girlfriend screamed, and more projectiles came out of the car.

“Communist bastards!” someone shouted.

Suddenly there was a bright flash and a pop from the back of the car.

The boy dropped his sign and looked down at his chest in dismay. Blood was bubbling out, a red ribbon following the buttons of his neat shirt, dripping over his belt. His knees buckled.

Everyone was screaming. The car lurched forward and bucked the curb. It swerved across the streetcar tracks, scattering people, and blasted away from the scene on Canal Street.

Tubby dropped to the pavement and tried to stuff his own shirttails into the boy’s wound. As bystanders fled, the three undercover cops ran between cars and excitedly inspected the victim. The wounded boy squinted at the relentless sun and closed his eyes.

A new crowd formed, trying to see what had happened.

Tubby’s attempts to staunch the flow of blood failed miserably. His hands were covered with it. He looked up at the cops helplessly.

“Poor Parker!” one of the girls wailed.

It seemed to take a long time, but an ambulance finally sirened its way through traffic. It carried the pale demonstrator and two of the cops away and left everyone else milling about on the curb, except for one of the young women whom the police pushed to the sidewalk and arrested for trying to claw her way into the ambulance. The other cop dragged her around the corner.

Tubby and Dan ran the dozen blocks to Charity Hospital while the remnants of the demonstrators dispersed, presumably in search of sympathetic doctors and the free lawyer the street people used. When Tubby and Dan eventually found the Emergency Room, they were told to sit in the Pine-Sol-smelling waiting area with the gasping sick people and all the crying kids with broken arms. Finally they were called up to the desk by a white-bonneted nurse who informed them that their friend was dead.

“Did he have any family?” the nurse asked.

Tubby and Dan looked at each other sadly.

IV

Tubby most often avoided thinking about the human condition. He had not been too sure about his own for months. He now found himself in Naples soaking up the sunset, and he didn’t have a clue what he was doing here. Once upon a time his aim had been true. Turn that sundial back ten or fifteen years, and he had known exactly what he was doing.

In those days he was a quick-thinking New Orleans lawyer on the make, and he was succeeding at it. He had scored big in the Pan Am airplane disaster and opened his expansive and expensive office on the 43rd floor of the Place Palais Building in downtown New Orleans, with its custom millwork and a splendid conference table. He had a slick and aggressive partner in Reggie Turntide, who could bring in rich clients. And he was married to his redheaded college sweetheart, Mattie Berkenbaum. They had an excellent family, consisting of three happy little girls.

Then it all started to unpeel, one layer at a time. Inexplicably, Mattie announced that she was moving out to find more space for herself. Actually, it was Tubby who ended up moving. Mattie got the nice house on State Street and most of the time she got the kids. Then his partner Reggie disappeared. Dan Haywood reemerged briefly in his life but soon was senselessly, terribly, shot dead during the great Mardi Gras flood. Tubby distractedly ran his fingers through his blond hair for another minute and soaked up the sun.

After that, all the violence and corruption in New Orleans began to shove aside, in his mind, the city’s alluring beauty, color and pageantry. Tubby began to sense the existence of a criminal web, woven by a toxic spider, a truly evil presence, a crime czar. So obsessed with this evil force did Tubby become that he could almost smell it. The quest to find the Czar took him deeply into the city’s underworld and now, even with the brutal elimination of the high and mighty Sheriff Mulé, he couldn’t say for certain that the menace had been exterminated.

Then came Katrina, the big one, that turned the world as he knew it upside down. He still couldn’t fathom how it had happened, but the storm had changed everything. Along with the mountains of old refrigerators, water heaters, wet sheetrock and backyard junk hauled away by the government went the assuredness that the carefree city would always be the same: that there would always be a Schwegmanns; that the Nevilles would always play “Hey Pocky Way”; that Ninth Warders would always fill the nosebleed seats in the Dome; that sleepy sunny days would always sashay along, very sweetly, in four-four time.

And paradoxically, as a result of all that loss and destruction, Tubby found his love for the city returning.

So what the heck was he doing in Florida, the land of the Everglades and orange juice fudge? He was here with his rich girlfriend, of course, though she was a bit larcenous. He was on the rebound, or resurface. His last love, Hope, with whom he had survived Katrina, had succumbed to a long illness that had too quickly consumed her completely. In all candor, it was probably too early for him to be dating ladies, but Tubby had been down in the dumps and wanted cheering up. And he was not a monk.

Back in Louisiana, his daughters were all doing just fine in his opinion. Debbie, his oldest, still married, was the vice-president of a start-up investment company, and had a 12-year-old basketball player at Newman named Arnie, but called “Bat.” Christine, who had had a miserable time during Hurricane Katrina, was now a paleontologist at LSU and lived with a girlfriend. Collette, the youngest, had never strayed far from home. She was currently on her third fiancé, a rap performer who claimed to be from the Dry Tortugas. All in all, just fine. They possibly didn’t need him, hard as that was to believe. But he found that he was starting to miss them and the exuberance of the city.

New Orleans, when you stepped back and looked at it, was also doing really great. All cleaned up. Bursting with young entrepreneurs, movie trailers blocking every street. Here by the beaches of Florida he was starting to know what it means to miss New Orleans.

“I shouldn’t be sitting here on my butt. I don’t deserve this paradise,” he lectured himself. “I should be headed home. But first let me go see what Marguerite has on her mind.”