Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 02 - City of Beads (6 page)

“I’m very sorry to bear that,” Tubby murmured. He had the strange feeling maybe she was lying.

“That’s in the past.”

He was happy to leave it there.

“What do you do when you’re not working?” This was about as aggressive as he’d been since he got divorced.

“For fun? I like to go out in a boat, or out to the lake and lie in the sun, walk around the Quarter on Sunday, stuff like that.”

“What’s your attitude about fishing?” Tubby asked tentatively.

She laughed again. “I like to fish,” she said. “I just don’t like to clean them.”

“How about Friday morning?” he asked. “I’ll clean everything you catch.”

“Where do you go?”

“Someplace close. Maybe Delacroix. I’d pick you up real early, and we’d go down there. We put in around sunup and go out on Bayou Boeuf. You can get an early-morning suntan. You get tired, we can come back.”

“If you get me out of the city, I don’t think I’ll get tired.”

This is great, Tubby thought.

“So we got a date then?” he asked.

“Sure, okay, we’ve got a date.”

“I’m not kidding. Could you go as early as maybe five o’clock in the morning?”

“That’s okay.”

“How about four-thirty?”

“Don’t push it.”

“Great. Can I see you home?”

“No. I have to work here for a while. But you can write down my address.”

“Sure.” Tubby didn’t waste any time finding a pen.

She told him it was in the 2200 block of Royal Street, in the area known as Faubourg Marigny.

Driving past the mansions on St. Charles and feeling the aftershocks of his casino experience got Tubby thinking about money.

He usually didn’t have much in the bank. Child support for Collette and Christine, Debbie’s tuition, upkeep on his Uptown house, and a new suit here and there usually managed to soak up just about everything he collected in legal fees. True, he ate and drank quite well, but he believed that was a basic human right. In his career he had hit the jackpot only twice. The first time was an airplane crash, and his share of the check he had helped to win for the survivors had set him up in a nice office and had purchased many fine things that his ex-wife had gotten in the divorce. That’s life.

There had been a long dry spell until the second time, and it had come up unexpectedly just two months before. A large sum of money, more than $300,000, had come into his hands in the course of events he still kept to himself. Not even Raisin knew about them. They involved a death never reported to the police. The good part of the story was that his client, Sandy Shandell, an exotic dancer in the French Quarter, had won twice that much as compensation for the unattractive consequences of a botched cosmetic surgery operation designed to make her skin the color of rich café au lait. When last heard from, Sandy had bought a house on Bayou St. John, invested wisely in a Merrill Lynch mutual fund, and headed off to Sweden to have his or her gender improved. And Tubby was left with a nice nest egg, even after taking care of Uncle Sam. He could leave it in the bank and enjoy the unfamiliar feeling of security.

Or he could buy a bar.

Or he could keep running off to Florida, or maybe take some trips to places his rich friends gushed about, like Montserrat or Vittoriosa, wherever the hell they were. The only problem was he didn’t want to go to any of those places. To be honest about it, he didn’t have anybody to go with. He found himself fantasizing about Nicole Normande. He wondered if his daughters would like her.

He drove past a two-story home on Henry Clay that had once housed a rowdy college fraternity. When Raisin was a member they dug a pit in the yard on Halloween, filled it with water and goo, and enticed students and neighborhood urchins to jump in. They were so boisterous and offensive that the university, and eventually even their national fraternal headquarters, had put the whammy on them. Tubby was thinking maybe he could buy the place, dig a mudhole, and throw wild parties—shake the block up. It was fun daydreaming about things he could do, now that he had money in the bank.

Tania Thompson had been waiting almost motionless in the front seat of her car for nearly an hour. Every so often her toe would get loose and tap itself against the brake pedal, but she would calmly tell it to stop. Be a part of the wall, she reminded herself, even though there was no wall on this particular street. That was what she had successfully done for most of her life, but here it was no simple matter. Women didn’t sit by themselves in parked cars on Persephonie Street after nightfall. People in this neighborhood of pretty Victorian homes, built close together like petit fours in a gift box, separated by tall hedges and bamboo, sat indoors at night. They didn’t stay in their cars keeping their eyes on a quiet two-story house with green shutters.

There was even less of a reason for an African-American lady to be there, on this particular block. Lucky she was hard to see. It was after eight o’clock at night, and Tania’s parking place was shielded from the distant street lamp by overhanging tree branches. She was a small person and hoped she blended into the shadow of her seat.

A man and a woman passed by, walking their dog. She heard a fragment of their conversation.

“Her dress was slit way up her thigh,” the man said, but they did not notice Tania. She was used to that.

Tania was studying about a problem, which was how to kill Charlie Van Dyne. It was not an easy question because Charlie Van Dyne was a careful man and surely well guarded. He was powerful, and she was small potatoes. But she approached it analytically and optimistically, which was her nature. Tania had learned a lot of practical survival skills in her thirty-one years. Though she had never left the Irish Channel where her mother had raised her, she had grown up to be a branch manager for First Alluvial National Bank. She had not worked herself into that position on her good looks, though she was very pretty, and prim like a schoolteacher. She was just a competent manager and could make her boss look good.

You solved problems, she knew, by thinking them through, by keeping your cool. Holding your reactions under control. Quite a talent to have when you had seen your own baby brother nearly chopped in half, until that moment having a good time watching the Saints game on her front porch with the whole family hanging around, by 9 millimeter bullets spat out from some gun that when the police named it sounded like a kind of computer or foreign car.

Tania had been coming out the front door, bringing chips and dip, when the car drove by and her brother began howling and spouting blood all over the shiny white siding of the house. Somehow she didn’t remember hearing any shots, but she remembered the excited, serious face of the man leaning out the car window with his gun on fire. She didn’t know the man, but it was the same ugly, nameless, violent face she had secretly been afraid of all her life.

At the hospital, then the police station, then the wake, she heard several possible gunslingers mentioned. Her brother Kip had been dealing drugs on the street. Tania had known that for a long time. She thought he had quit, but she had just been misled by his bullshit and her affection for him. From various relatives and friends of Kip’s she picked up clues to the identity of her brother’s assassins, names like Coco and Hambone, and for the first time she heard the name Charlie Van Dyne. That name wasn’t mentioned to the police, but her brother’s grieving widow, Charmaine, damned Charlie Van Dyne from the lonely privacy of her tiny living room, accusing him of being the boss who ran things, or at least the boss that Kip knew about. It was Van Dyne or someone higher whom Kip had offended, and he had ordered her man killed.

Tania thought about her loss, the injustice of it, almost all the time. Even when she was carrying out her duties at the bank she dwelt upon it. The police had made no discernible progress. In fact, they seemed to lose all interest after the first day. Just one more drive-by shooting, one more horrible homicide in what was shaping up to be a record year in the Big Bad Easy.

“This city is a dangerous place.” That’s what the police detective had told her when she had last called to see if they were getting closer to arresting anybody.

“People think New Orleans is just Mardi Gras beads and Bourbon Street, but there’s a world of hurt out there, too. I don’t have to tell you,” the policeman said sadly.

She knew all about that hurt. The unsolved crime insulted her sense of rightness, and she stayed awake at night, unable to fit it into her life.

She wished all sorts of evil on Coco and Hambone. They came to her in nightmares. Tania prayed almost constantly about what to do.

Finally, one Sunday morning during services at the church in the neighborhood where she had always gone and where they called her Sister Thompson, a peaceful sensation washed over her in the middle of the preacher’s sermon. Her muscles relaxed and the creases disappeared from her forehead. She exhaled a great gust of anger and it was gone. In no more time than it took to inhale again, she was able to forgive Coco and Hambone. They were God’s children, too, and God’s business. They would haunt her dreams nevermore. Charlie Van Dyne, on the other hand, was her personal responsibility. He was beyond the reach of the law, and he deserved to die.

There was no Charlie Van Dyne in the phone book, however. According to her sister-in-law, Van Dyne lived somewhere uptown off Jefferson Avenue. At least that’s what Charmaine recalled Kip saying. On her lunch break, Tania went to the public library and studied the city directory. Every house in the whole city was listed by house number, as well as the name of the person who lived there. She checked the addresses on Jefferson from the river to Tonti Street, but no Van Dyne was to be found. Tania kept at it, and she finally discovered one R. C. Van Dyne on Persephonie Street, just a few blocks from Jefferson.

The next night after work, and after she had eaten a light supper, Tania drove up and down Persephonie until she found the address. The house was hidden behind a tall hedge but you could see it was well lit up. A semicircular driveway permitted direct entry into the front door from a car.

Tania parked where she could watch the door. A compact black Cadillac sat empty in the driveway. Barely had she cut off her engine, however, when two men in loud suits came outside. One opened the passenger-side door for the other, let him in, then came around and got behind the wheel. The Cadillac started, headlights came on, and it swung around the driveway suddenly, its lights sweeping over Tania. She was too surprised to do anything but stare straight ahead. The Cadillac accelerated up the street. Tania got her own mind working quickly, and pulled out to follow.

Assuming that Van Dyne was the passenger, she now knew that he was handsome, tall, and strong-looking. She followed the Cadillac to Derbigny Street, then across Tulane to Mid City. It pulled into the dim parking lot of the Bouligny Steak House, and Tania, from across the street, watched the two men get out and go into the neon-lit restaurant.

Tania parked outside under the streetlights for almost an hour and a half. A panhandler spotted her and tried to engage her in conversation, but she refused to open the car window. After tapping on the glass and making a face he went away. To occupy herself she went over the day’s events, thought about a customer who had complained about one of her tellers, and wondered where she would get a gun.

Finally the two men came outside again, laughing. Charlie paused to light a cigarette. Then he was let back into the Cadillac. They drove away, and Tania followed them back uptown to Persephonie Street. The car entered the driveway, and the men got out and went back inside the house. She maintained her vigil outside until almost eleven o’clock. When she caught herself falling asleep, she decided to go home.

She repeated much the same program on the following two nights, and Charlie’s routine stayed constant, except that he went to Ruth’s Chris one night and Pascal’s Manale the next. He was a very satisfied-looking man.

A plan began to form in Tania’s mind. It was nothing complicated, because she had learned in her professional life that the simplest approach was the one most likely to succeed. And she remembered where to get a gun. Her brother Kip had had one. He kept it in the table beside his bed. Tania went calling on the widow Charmaine that evening after supper, and, when she was left alone for a minute, she found the pistol and furtively put it in her pocketbook. Things were falling into place, and she went to bed that night eager to wake up and face the day.

Her boss came by her desk and complimented her.

“How have you been?” he asked.

“Busy,” she said with a smile.

“You know I always think you do a good job, Tania, but lately I’ve thought you’re putting out some real extra effort, like you are enjoying your work.”

“Why, thank you, Jerry,” she said.

“I just wanted you to know I noticed,” Jerry said.

On the day following Tubby’s return from Florida, after he had made his visit to the morgue, slept and washed the stars out of his eyes, he had called up his oldest daughter, Debbie, to invite her out for a meal. It took them about a week to get together. They met for an early supper at Crêpe Nanou uptown, a favorite of hers. He ordered crabmeat crêpes, and he had to admit that, though real men had trouble pronouncing “crêpe,” they weren’t bad. The spicy mixture wrapped in a light pancake was quite tasty. Debbie liked sweets, and tonight she had crêpes with sour cream and peaches. She dug in while he told her about Florida, and seemed to enjoy her choice immensely.

“It sounds like the two of you had a lot of man-fun,” she said, smirking as if she knew what that was.

“That about sums it up,” Tubby said. “Much more fun and we couldn’t have made it back.”

“Did Raisin have a good time?”

“The best.”

“Doesn’t he have a girlfriend now?” Debbie always seemed interested in Raisin. A lot of people did. How did he get away without ever having a steady job? How the hell did he pull it off? Seeing him any day of the week looking fit on the tennis courts at Tulane or the club on Jefferson Avenue was enough to make accountants and doctors shake their heads in wonder. Tubby knew Raisin’s secret. Don’t worry. Be happy. Just say No.