Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 03 - Trick Question
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Authors: Tony Dunbar
Tags: #Mystery: Thriller - Lawyer - Hardboiled - Humor - New Orleans
| Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 03 - Trick Question | |
| Tubby Dubonnet [3] | |
| Tony Dunbar | |
| booksBnimble (1997) | |
| Tags: | Mystery: Thriller - Lawyer - Hardboiled - Humor - New Orleans Mystery: Thriller - Lawyer - Hardboiled - Humor - New Orleansttt |
And with the trial less than a week away, his lawyer has made exactly two motions—heading to the bar for several rounds of Wild Turkey and begging Tubby Dubonnet for help.
Meanwhile, Tubby's taken on a new client—a female boxer with an abusive boyfriend—and referees the romantic entanglements of his ex-wife and three teenage daughters.
But as Busters' trial proceeds and the jury savors the startling evidence, the danger mounts. Revealing the murderer could prove to be Tubby's biggest triumph—or his last case ever.
“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
TRICK QUESTION is the THIRD BOOK IN THE TUBBY DUBONNET SERIES
MORE TUBBY DUBONNET MYSTERIES
Crooked Man, G.P. Putnam’s Sons (New York, 1994)
City of Beads, G.P. Putnam’s Sons (New York, 1995)
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), New South 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
TRICK QUESTION
A Tubby Dubonnet Mystery
Tony Dunbar
booksBnimble Publishing
New Orleans, La.
Trick Question: A Tubby Dubonnet Mystery
Copyright by Tony Dunbar 1996
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.
Cover by Kit Wohl
ePub ISBN 9781617500268
First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: December 2012
Originally published by:
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
eBook editions by eBooks by Barb for
booknook.biz
This book is fiction. All of the characters and settings are purely imaginary. There is no Tubby Dubonnet and the real New Orleans is different from his make-believe city.
CHAPTER 1
Traffic was light. It usually was on the old Highway 11 bridge across Lake Pontchartrain from Slidell to New Orleans. Most everyone traveled the interstate nowadays. Its straight concrete spans were visible in the distance, but if you were coming in from the fishing camps on the northshore, as Wheezy Wascomb was, the old bridge was the shortest way to the city. She was driving to town to pick up her grandchildren and take them back out to the lake for the weekend. They were at the age when going fishing for crabs off a creaking wooden dock was just about the best fun they could imagine. A light breeze carried the smell of salt from the Gulf of Mexico, and the sunshine flashing off her fenders made Wheezy squint.
The bridge was long and narrow, built sometime around World War II when they were just learning to pour lots of concrete and everybody drove slower cars. They must have designed the roadway for midgets, too, because when a pickup truck cruising at a steady seventy zoomed past Wheezy’s little Toyota, her car blew about three feet toward the battered gray stone-and-clamshell barrier. Her heart raced almost painfully as she watched the pickup fly away with a throaty roar from its chrome pipes. Truth was, she had been feeling light-headed ever since she got into the car. She had not been well all week. Those Endflu capsules, promising eight hours of relief without drowsiness, had been keeping her upright, but this morning she was feeling positively awful.
Suddenly she found it hard to breathe. A car coming at her out of the bright sunlight had to honk to shove her back into her lane. She fought to control the steering, but the bridge itself seemed to twist in front of her eyes. Sweat poured out of her and a dark red curtain fell down over her field of view. She was too scared to scream. Sparklers began going off in her head.
She hit the concrete rail at forty-five miles per hour, and the determined Toyota tried to climb over it. The metal peeled away and the frame in front collapsed loudly in a rainstorm of sparks, but the old barricade held. The crushed Toyota spun once and rolled over on its side, blocking the highway. One tire rotated furiously, and fluids, purple and orange, poured dangerously onto the pavement. Wheezy Wascomb was dumped on the floor—her heart had burst.
Moskowitz Memorial Laboratory is the last stop for lots of mice and hamsters, and now and then a monkey. It is one of the planet’s foremost facilities for isolating the things that make people swell up and die, and for wiping them out. It is a source of pride and not insignificant profit for its mother ship, the highly regarded New Orleans State University Medical School.
Most of the time the place is hopping with an irreverent crew of doctors and their research assistants, wearing white coats over their faded blue jeans and sneakers. But on Sunday night it is fairly quiet, except for the shuffling of white, furry rodents in their hutches, making little sounds in antiseptic cages.
They became still for a moment when the door to the animal care laboratory slid open, sucking a puff of cool air out into the hallway before the seal was restored. Cletus Busters, the custodian, trudged in, tugging behind him his cart full of brooms and mops and the bags of trash he had collected as he made his way from room to room. He parked the cart by the door and, with an air of innocence, wandered around the lab without any apparent objective in mind.
“Hello, little rat,” he whispered, brushing the front of one of the metal cages with his fingers. The occupant twisted its nose at him and flicked a long whisker.
Cletus surreptitiously opened a drawer in one of the stainless steel counters that ran the length of the room and poked around inside. He checked the labels on several of the bottles he found there and then put them back as they were. He looked around the room and pretended to whistle a tune.
A white-enameled, closet-sized door attracted his attention. It was kind of like the narrow cover of a ship’s hatch. There was a big red-lettered sign taped to it which he did not have much trouble reading. His lips moved as he worked it out: SAMPLES/CAREFUL. Below that someone had written in pencil, maybe as a joke, “Dressing Room—No Peeking.” Above the sign there was a small round glass gauge that registered interior temperature in degrees centigrade. It was fixed at minus 180.
Cletus sneaked a backwards glance toward the sliding door where he had left his cart, and then he grabbed the cold chrome handle of the closet with both hands and gave it a good pull.
Harsh cold air blew around him, and the dead man inside came out.
The body teetered, hard and solid as a statue, and fell directly at Cletus. He jumped back in terror, gasping, and the head missed striking him by an inch. The corpse’s frostbitten eyes grabbed at Cletus’s in passing, glinting with recognition and accusation it seemed to him, but then sailed past, and it didn’t matter. The body smacked against the white-tiled floor with the sound a 175-pound ice cube might make.
On impact it did an atrocious thing. The head snapped off and flipped into the air, making another pass at Cletus. He dodged, choking a scream, and it bounced a few feet away, coming to rest at the base of a steel hotel full of hamsters. The dead eyes, oblivious to the squeals and panic they had caused, stared blankly at the ceiling. A mustache on the face, like a graffiti smudge on a marble sculpture, was fuzzy with ice crystals.
Cletus smashed spread-eagled in fright against a rack of rat cages, his fingers grasping the wire mesh for support. The animals inside cowered. He recovered slightly and crouched down to inspect the object at his feet.
“Dr. Valentine!” he exclaimed.
He grabbed the head and crawled over the tiled floor to try to stick it back on the shoulders where it belonged, right where a frozen nub of bone protruded from the stiff white lab coat.
The piece wouldn’t fit the puzzle. His hands shaking, Cletus lifted the frosty head to stare again into those glacial eyes. Then, cradling it like a football, he rushed back to his cart to find some cleaning rags to wrap it in. He hit the silver plate to make the door slide open.
“Anything wrong here?” asked the security guard. “I thought I heard some noise.”
Cletus just looked at him, breathing hard and licking his lips.
The guard took a step forward. He peered past Cletus. His eyes roamed the lab. Then they moved downward to see what Cletus had in his arms, and grew wide with interest.
Victory is the reward for perseverance, that was Jason Boaz’s theme. Three races into the afternoon and he was finally waving a winning ticket into the air.
“Blue Femme! What a doll!” he shouted into Tubby’s ear. He waved his arms exuberantly, forcing people out of his path.
“I’m happy for you,” Tubby grumbled. He tore up his ticket to place on Nutria Challenger, the horse that had come in fourth, and scattered the pieces on the grandstand steps.
It was a sunny winter afternoon, fading toward evening. The crowd milled about while the horses were led away and trainers ran around preparing for the next race. Both Jason and Tubby had dates, so to speak, but the ladies had retired to the clubhouse half an hour earlier after the initial thrill of the Fairgrounds had worn off.
“Let’s go collect my dough and find the babes,” Jason said happily, and Tubby followed him up the steps. He left Jason in the line to cash in and headed off toward the bar. He fancied that he cut a nice figure. Healthy enough, tanned, with blond hair cut maybe a little bit too long for a lawyer, he felt good about the way he was holding up—even forty-something years into the game. Maybe there were a few extra ounces padding his broad frame, but he could still suit up for tennis. He still looked at home behind the wheel of his sports car.
His companion for the day was Jynx Margolis, lately divorced, and flush with the bucks of her former husband, the gynecologist. And his friend, the local inventor Jason Boaz, had brought Norella Peruna, recently of Honduras, who had fudge-colored skin, gleaming white teeth, and a pink hibiscus in her raven hair. The women were head to head over margaritas, framed by the window with the blue sky and the snapping pennants of the racetrack as their backdrop. Lovely, lovely, Tubby thought.