Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 02 - City of Beads
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Authors: Tony Dunbar
Tags: #Mystery: Thriller - Lawyer - Hardboiled - Humor - New Orleans
| Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 02 - City of Beads | |
| Tubby Dubonnet [2] | |
| Tony Dunbar | |
| booksBnimble (1996) | |
| Tags: | Mystery: Thriller - Lawyer - Hardboiled - Humor - New Orleans Mystery: Thriller - Lawyer - Hardboiled - Humor - New Orleansttt |
When he's offered a job researching the licensing requirements of the city's new gambling casino, he doesn't care if he's working for the Mob. Meanwhile, he becomes involved in executing the estate of an old friend who controls some dock leases on the wharf, and he agrees to help his daughter's environmental group stop illegal dumping into the river.
As one might expect, the three cases begin to converge: the toxic dumping, the dock leases, and the too-good-to-be-true casino job lead Tubby to the conclusion that he's been set up to be the fall guy in an effort by the casino to expand its operations. The endearing Tubby is street smart, but he's no tough guy and is sometimes betrayed by his desire to see the best in people.
“A real work of mystery art.” —New Orleans Times-Picayune
(Tubby Dubonnet) makes a charming guide to a side of New Orleans few see.
—Booklist
Dunbar weaves together the many strands of his highly entertaining tale with much skill and wit. —Publisher’s Weekly
Dunbar’s understated, syncopated delivery makes you wonder if there are enough honest men in New Orleans for a rubber of bridge. —Kirkus
CITY OF BEADS is the SECOND BOOK IN THE TUBBY DUBONNET SERIES.
MORE TUBBY DUBONNET MYSTERIES
Crooked Man, G.P. Putnam’s (New York, 1994)
Trick Question, G.P. Putnam’s Sons (New York, 1996)
Shelter From the Storm, G.P. Putnam’s Sons (New York, 1997)
The Crime Czar, Dell Publishing (New York, 1998)
Lucky Man, Dell Publishing (New York, 1999)
Tubby Meets Katrina, NewSouth Books (Montgomery, 2006)
For more about the next Tubby Dubonnet book, go to
www.booksBnimble.com
Our Land Too, Pantheon Books (New York, 1971); Vintage Books (New York, 1972)
Hard Traveling: Migrant Farm Workers in America, Ballinger (Cambridge, 1976; Co-Authored with Linda Kravitz)
Against the Grain, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, 1981)
Delta Time, A Journey through Mississippi, Pantheon Books (New York 1990)
Where We Stand, Voices of Southern Dissent (Editor), NewSouth Books (Montgomery 2004), Foreword by President Jimmy Carter
American Crisis, Southern Solutions: From Where We Stand, Promise and Peril (Editor), NewSouth Books (Montgomery 2008), Foreword by Ray Marshall
A Tubby Dubonnet Mystery
Tony Dunbar
booksBnimble Publishing
New Orleans, La.
City of Beads: A Tubby Dubonnet Mystery
Copyright 1995 by Tony Dunbar
eBook ISBN 9781617507229
Cover by Nevada Barr
Originally published by:
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
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.
First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: May 2012
This book is fiction. All of the characters and settings are purely imaginary. There is no Tubby Dubonnet or Sheriff Mulé, and the real New Orleans is different from their make-believe city.
Digital editions by eBooks by Barb for
booknook.biz
For my mother and father
CHAPTER 1
Down by the river, Potter Aucoin was putting up a hell of a fight, but he was losing it quick.
He got in a solid clip on one of his attackers, right above the ear, with a rusty black iron jack handle. The man careened backward across the room and slammed against the wall, tipping over a filing cabinet. The other assailant, the smaller of the two but still linebacker size, leapt up behind Potter and wrapped his arms around him in a bear hug. He was blowing hot gusts of garlic into Potter’s face, yelling for his partner to get off the floor and help him.
Although he was pinned, Potter managed to jab the sharp end of the jack handle into a soft part of the man holding him from behind. It dug into flesh, high on the thigh. He did it again, and a painful howl roared out of the mouth by his cheek. Potter’s arms came free, but not soon enough. The beefy one on the floor, his yellow paisley tie tangled up in his blue polyester shirt, had stopped seeing stars and got up. His meaty fist was armored by an old-fashioned ring of aluminum knuckles, and it swung in a wild haymaker that landed hard on Potter’s forehead. Potter’s last picture of humanity was of a stranger’s face, the mouth knotted in rage, before blood covered his eyes. Then the view in Potter’s fading mind changed to a sandy blue seashore, and he collapsed with the taste of fresh mangoes and papayas on his tongue.
“Jesus Christ,” the man with the chain-link knuckles cursed as Potter slumped down into the arms of his gasping partner, just another stranger, who held the weight for a second, then let the limp sweaty body drop to the stained concrete floor.
He stepped back with a curse, and said something like a prayer, before he gave the limp and bleeding form a tentative kick.
“I think he’s dead,” he said.
“Ah, no,” the bigger man complained. “That shouldn’t have killed him. Good God almighty, what a mess.”
Tubby had taken a little time off. He had picked up some money from the Sandy Shandell case, and his current clients had no pressing problems that couldn’t be solved later, so he decided to treat himself. First he talked Raisin Partlow into driving down to Florida for a couple of weeks. Tubby rented a Lincoln Town Car with a built-in CD player, stuffed the trunk full of fishing tackle and firearms, and put an Igloo full of beer, bourbon, and orange juice in the backseat. They were on their way on the afternoon of a sunny day.
Raisin played in real estate and law and mooched off his girlfriend, who was a nurse, so his schedule was flexible. On the first leg he and Tubby made it to the Flora-Bama Lounge on Perdido Key, and after hoisting a few they ended up spending the last hours of darkness snoozing in the car. They woke up at dawn and staggered down to the beach and into the crisp aqua waves of the Gulf of Mexico for a cold bracing dip. Rejuvenated and bare-chested, they proclaimed that it was good and cruised on down the arrow of beachside highway.
They caught small flounder in the surf off Pensacola, camped out on Grayton Beach, and ate flaming saganaki, souvlaki, and diples in a Greek restaurant in Tarpon Springs. They went deep-sea fishing off Sarasota, and grilled redfish and wahoo on beaches all down the coast. As they went along they rented condos by the day or weekend and tried with good humor to pick up the ladies. Tubby had a little success with a divorcee from Connecticut who was down South for the season visiting her daughter. She told Tubby affectionately that his sunburned tummy reminded her of a baby’s behind. He and Raisin tossed that one back and forth all the way to Key West: It was the Sunday morning of life.
By then, however, Raisin’s nurse was getting a little strident on the telephone, and Tubby had to confess to himself that he was starting to miss the stress of work. After a last round of margaritas and postcards to the girls back home they decided to turn around.
The trip back was fun, too. They stayed on the smallest roads they could find and kept to the interior, slowly traversing miles of sugarcane fields and orange groves, cruising past tiny hamlets built on patches of white sand carved out of the piney woods, and truckloads of migrant workers. Most of the faces they passed were black and stared with curiosity at the two voyagers sailing through in their hot-rod Lincoln. They bought boiled peanuts from every vendor they spied alongside the road and had important theological discussions as the miles slipped away.
Nighttime on the Napoleon Avenue wharf, the warm air smelled ripe with chemical decay, rich with mud and decomposing fish and insects. Long black clouds in shapes like ravens marched through the forbidding sky and held the clean breezes from the Gulf at bay. Dark and ominous, the Mississippi River expelled organic vapors and diesel fuel. It made continuous soft sounds, the water lapping at the pier and the engines of towboats plowing steadily upstream. Even the abrupt crash of train cars starting to roll was absorbed in the night.
Dull floodlamps posted high on the corners of the warehouse roof made sharp shadows out of rows of parked forklifts and turned the spaces between stacked packing crates into black alleyways.
A small building a short distance from the warehouse clung to the side of the wharf, almost hanging over the water like a tree house. Low steel barges, resembling floating shoeboxes, were lashed to the pilings below, and creaked against the timbers each time a passing ship created a little wake, or a gust of wind stirred up a wave before it died. A window, grimy and shadowed now, had been built into each end of the structure, and a plastic sign bearing the legend EXPORT PRODUCTS was nailed to the door. Loud voices came from inside. They blew over the river and disappeared. No one was around to hear them anyway.
“Shoot,” the smaller man said, and he shuddered. “Well, I guess he’s dead,” he said again. His name was Francis, but they called him Shakes because that’s what he did all the time.
The big fellow, Courtney, caught his breath and studied his metal knuckles, the blood and little bits of skin stuck to them, then bent over and wiped them off on Potter’s pants leg.
“This is a screwup. No way to make this look like an accident, is there?”
“Yeah, he accidentally cracked his own head open. What are we going to do?”
“I guess the best thing to do is try to hide him.” Courtney looked around the room, which was a small office furnished with a desk, some files, and piles of maps and rope and other maritime junk. Not many hideaways here. “Put out the lights. Let’s look outside.”
The lights went out, and the door opened slowly with a small creak. Crickets whirred from a stand of willows growing in the mud at the end of the wharf, their trunks matted with rootlets left over from high water. A hundred yards down the wharf the towering hull of an oceangoing freighter loomed above the dock, and at some distance farther along men on a floodlit crane worked at getting a massive container positioned in its hold.
“Let’s just toss him in the river,” the smaller man whispered.
“Hell, no. He’ll float right down to the frigging French Quarter. Somebody’ll see him before we even get out of here.”
“Weight him down?”
“Maybe. But bodies have a way of coming right back up. Look here.” He pointed at the barge tied up below. “Let’s stick him in there.”
“Genius at work,” his partner said, and they stepped quietly back to the shed to get Potter out.
He was not hard for the two to carry, though the darkness was a handicap. They stepped clumsily over the doorsill and the rough planks of the dock. Just as they brought the body to the edge, where a steel ladder led down to the deck of the barge, a car approached slowly from behind the warehouse. The big man quickly went flat on the wharf, jerking his smaller companion down with him. Their arms linked over the dead body between them, and they got quite cozy, all but Potter.