Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 03 - Trick Question (18 page)

Tubby said he would respond as quickly as he could. The words “big oil-drilling contract” had an extremely nice ring to them.

Hazel Whitepod, Judge Stifflemire’s secretary, unlocked the doors of Section 0 at nine o’clock on Thursday morning when the high-ceilinged corridors of the Criminal District Court for the Parish of Orleans were just beginning to echo with the quick footsteps of busy lawyers, the shrieks of little children, and the shuffle of orange-suited prisoners being escorted here and there in chain gangs. Jury selection for State of Louisiana versus Cletus Busters began an hour and a half later, at half past ten.

In the meantime, Tubby and Cherrylynn came chugging up the stairs, each carrying a black leather trial case full of Tubby’s notes, a sheaf of exhibits, and a green book that contained the Code of Evidence. There were reporters in the hall. The TV news had stayed outside where the light was better. “We expect to see justice done,” Tubby had grimly told them all. He was too worried about his lack of a case to bluster any more than that.

Judge Stifflemire arrived in his chambers and Hazel brought him some coffee in a mug that said “Krewe of Olympians” on it. He read the society page of the newspaper, then took his coffee into his private washroom and poured it down the sink, just as he did every morning. He pulled his black robe over his head and checked his thinning hair in the mirror before signaling Hazel to signal the bailiff that the judge was on his way.

“Oyez, oyez. All rise! The Criminal District Court for the Parish of Orleans is now in session. The Honorable Hector Stifflemire presiding. Order and silence are commanded.”

“Good morning,” the judge said, taking his accustomed perch behind his mahogany bench, from which he could see a younger version of himself, rendered in oils, hanging on the wall in the company of judges past.

“Good morning,” all the lawyers murmured, and everyone else sat down and hid.

He disposed of four guilty pleas and as many continuances of motions and trials before settling down to the main business at hand.

Cletus was in his workman’s clothes, handcuffed in the pews to the judge’s right where prisoners got to wait, but when his case was called the cuffs came off and he was led to the counsel table where he could sit beside Tubby. Cletus’s checkered green shirt smelled like mothballs.

“Damn, they keep it cold in here,” Cletus said by way of greeting.

“You okay?” Tubby asked. It didn’t seem cold to him at all.

“Good as I’m gonna get,” Cletus whispered.

Tubby nodded to Clayton Snedley, the assistant district attorney, and the serious young woman who was his lieutenant, when they took their places at the adjoining table.

The judge cleared his throat and received everyone’s attention. He scanned the room over the top of his glasses.

“Are we ready?” he asked in a booming voice.

“Yes, Your Honor,” the district attorney said.

“I have a motion to suppress yet to be heard, judge,” Tubby said, rising to his feet.

“Yes. Well, we’ll take that up after we impanel the jury.”

Stifflemire waited a moment until Tubby got seated again.

“Let’s bring ’em in,” the judge shouted.

The clerk gestured to the bailiff, who gestured to the policeman at the rear, and he pushed open the tall wooden doors to admit the first of the herd.

“This should take all day – maybe tomorrow, too,” Tubby confided to his client.

It took an hour and ten minutes.

The first group of twenty potential jurors yielded nine winners. The next group filled out the dozen.

With jarring regularity, almost all of the candidates seemed to be unemployed, retired, or otherwise available and anxious to do their civic duty for ten dollars a day and lunch from Mandina’s. Few had the wit to come up with an excuse that would prevent them from serving on a jury. The only good line came from a local writer who, rubbing his wrinkled forehead to squeeze out the words, said that he could not differentiate between fantasy and the real world, and that when confronted with unpleasantness, he chose fantasy. Judge Stifflemire scolded him, and then let him go.

The judge asked the next guy in line if he had any problem that might prevent jury service.

“Yeah, what he said,” the man exclaimed hopefully, pointing at the departing writer.

Stifflemire tossed his gavel in the air, caught it, and gave the whole courtroom a lecture for that.

Tubby only exercised two peremptory challenges – one on a severe French lady who glared at Cletus until she made him squirm, the other on a Presbyterian minister who benignly promised to look upon all witnesses with equal love and trust. Tubby was afraid the pastor might disapprove of Cletus’s personal religious preferences if by some unhappy turn of events these came out in court.

The district attorney excused a black man who seemed to do nothing more offensive than answer the judge’s questions in an angry tone. Tubby let it pass. That’s what peremptory challenges were for.

The rest the judge released because they had recently had a loved one murdered, because they would lose their jobs if they missed work, or because they seemed to have difficulty comprehending questions in the English language.

Tubby was satisfied when it was done. He had ten blacks and two whites. You always made those kinds of observations in New Orleans, even if you didn’t know how to interpret the data. It was a mixed group – a taxi driver, a housewife or two, an unemployed barber, a night clerk at a French Quarter hotel, an old seaman, a retired nurse. Cherrylynn was taking copious notes about everyone for him to study later.

Time for lunch? Nope.

“Let the jurors go out and relax,” Stifflemire said. “Let’s have your motion, Mr. Dubonnet.”

“Ah yes, Your Honor,” he began after the jury shambled out. “The state has noticed its intent to present evidence of the defendant’s prior conviction for sale of a controlled substance. It’s entirely unrelated to the matter at hand and could obviously be very prejudicial to the jury. You have my brief, Judge. We move to suppress the prior.”

“I follow, Mr. Dubonnet. How do you respond, Mr. Snedley?”

“We’re going to show that the motive for the defendant’s murder of Dr. Valentine was that the doctor caught the defendant stealing drugs from the Moskowitz medical laboratory. The prior for drug sales is directly related and shows the defendant’s state of mind at the time of the crime. Res gestae, Judge.”

“Yeah, I think it’s res gestae,” the judge said, scratching his chin.

“Race what?” Cletus whispered.

“Motion denied!” the judge ruled. “We’ll take an hour and a half for lunch. Then, Mr. Snedley, you can begin to call your witnesses.”

“But, Your Honor…” Tubby pleaded.

“I already ruled,” Stifflemire said, on his way out the door.

Cletus looked at Tubby, a frightened expression on his face. “Race what?” he asked again.

“Res gestae. He means your state of mind,” Tubby told him.

“Mine’s bad,” Cletus said.

A deputy sheriff led the disconsolate prisoner away to the courthouse jail downstairs. Tubby collected Cherrylynn, and they walked over to Ditcharo’s for a sandwich. Even the cheerful hellos from the ladies behind the counter didn’t brighten their mood. Steaming red beans and rice, a shot of hot sauce, some French bread, a nice piece of smoked sausage, and a bowl of bread pudding for after helped a little.

“Golly, I almost forgot.” Tubby went to the booth to make a call.

“Hello, Denise? Listen, I’m still in the middle of my trial, but I did talk to your Uncle Roger’s lawyer. We’ve made a lot of progress.”

“What’s happened?”

“Well, I told him I could prove your stock certificate for a thousand shares was good, and I had the law to back it up. I explained how we would decimate him in court. After quite a bit of argument, he finally offered to split the company fifty-fifty. You would have a thousand shares and so would Uncle Roger.”

“That sounds fine.”

“Not so fast. Don’t forget you have that extra certificate for a hundred shares. We could hold out for control of the company, but Guyoz made it clear they will fight us in court for that.”

“I’m willing to forget the hundred shares, Mr. Dubonnet. Roger is still family, and I’ll give up a little.”

“He also wants to keep getting his salary from the company.”

“Tell him that’s okay too, but I want the same salary.”

“Sure, fine.” Tubby liked that. “Guyoz says he wants to settle right away because there’s an oil-drilling contract to finalize.”

“I’m aware of it. The driller wants to pay us two hundred thousand this year with options for the next six years.”

“With that kind of money, you won’t have to keep boxing.”

“I wouldn’t give up boxing if I made a million bucks, Mr. Dubonnet. It’s just something I really like to do.”

“You may be the richest female fighter in Louisiana.”

“Don’t forget, I have to pay one quarter to you.”

“Oh, yeah,” Tubby said – like he would forget that.

“Mr. Dubonnet, thanks for staying in my corner.”

“You were vouched for,” he said.

“I heard,” she said. “Can you come see me at Coconut Casino Saturday night?” Her voice was eager.

“Not unless my murder trial ends tomorrow, and that won’t happen unless someone confesses.”

“Then I hope they confess.”

“The guilty always should,” he said. “Listen, I’ve got a meal on the table. I’ll call you when I know something else.”

She hung up, and Tubby hurried back to his lunch.

A bearded man wearing a black leather vest and a pound of silver buckles and buttons sat on the wall and played his guitar softly. He was trying out “Mr. Bojangles.” He had placed a soft hat on the pavement, begging for change, and pigeons walked around it eating crumbs.

There were not so many tourists today in Spanish Plaza, where Canal Street meets the Mississippi River. Three Japanese couples were shooting photographs of each other by the fountain. Had they looked closely, they would have seen in the background two nicely dressed men leaning on the rail over by the water, deep in conversation.

“Many things in life do not go as we would hope,” Mr. Flick was saying. His eyes followed a bright red towboat, radar revolving, churning upstream.

Walter was thinking that Flick’s age was showing. He had observed the concern his employer exhibited over those little crevices around his eyes and lips – the care he took to avoid letting the muscles of his face do what they pleased when they tried to express what Flick felt. But whatever creams and tonics the man worked into his flesh had failed him this afternoon. He was revealing some very unattractive tension.

“I have always looked forward to my visits to New Orleans,” Flick continued. “It’s the sense you get of unreality. Something that is very difficult to induce in Fort Worth.”

What’s wrong with reality? Walter was thinking. He stood a head taller than Flick. He was keenly aware of his own ability to survive in a world that favored strong, handsome, fast, and smart men.

“It is possible to lose yourself here, and at the same time look for who you are, if you follow.”

Walter nodded. He tapped his shoe on the concrete to warn away a pigeon that was pecking about too close.

“And I don’t want to let that go, Walter.” Flick turned away from the river and looked at the young man. “I cannot bear the thought of losing this.”

Walter saw the anger behind Mr. Flick’s pale blue eyes, and he felt suddenly nervous.

He kept his voice steady, however, when he said, “I’m not making any excuses. I took the best opportunity that presented itself. It was nothing short of a miracle that the lawyer walked away from the accident. If you had been there you would see I’m right.”

Flick shuddered.

“I have no wish ever to be there,” he said. “I am deathly afraid that I have already involved myself too deeply. You may know that my least favorite emotion is fear. It was your task, Walter, to protect me from fear.”

“I’m sorry if you feel I’ve let you down,” Walter said earnestly. “I guarantee it won’t happen again. I’ll take care of him tonight – simple as that.”

“It’s too late,” Flick said sharply. “If he gets killed now, there’s bound to be some inquiry. At the very least it will delay the trial. That’s the problem, Walter.” He spread out the fingers of his hand and pressed them gently against Walter’s chest, as if he might conjure him over the railing and into the water.

“We can solve the problem,” Walter pleaded, mad at himself for letting his composure crack.

“Come walk with me,” Flick said. He set off, strolling slowly in the direction of the landing for the ferry to Algiers.

“I think that what we must do now is destroy all of the evidence.”

“You mean in the lab?” Walter asked, trying to follow.

“Exactly,” Flick said. “Now put your mind to work figuring out how to accomplish that.”

A panhandler with burgundy pants and a pink tank top noticed their approach and came to life to intercept them.

“Betcha I can tell you where you got them shoes.” He grinned desperately.

Flick pressed a dollar into the thin hand and brushed past. Walter gave the man a menacing scowl and a push.

“Well, access to the lab should be no problem,” he began as they walked on, leaving the vagrant teetering on wobbly legs.

“Hush, Walter,” Flick interrupted him. “I don’t want to know your plan. Your future with me is determined by your success, not by the means you employ to achieve it.”

“I understand,” Walter said.

“But do it quickly. I cannot tell you what this means to me.” The sweep of his hand took in the approaching ferry boat, horn blasting, the seagulls squawking above it; the Asian children running across the plaza to an ice cream vendor; the faces in the clouds; two lovers with rings in their lips telling secrets on a bench. “Please approach this as if your life depended on it.”

“Consider it done,” Walter said. He wished now he had never gotten mixed up with this crazy old man.

That afternoon the wheels of justice rolled relentlessly on. Clayton Snedley began to deal out his cards. The case of the headless ice man was interesting enough to merit the attention of the parish’s chief medical examiner, who so proficiently and methodically described the frozen state of the body and the interesting phenomenon of its head cracking off like an icicle that there was hardly anyplace to go on cross-examination. The jury was entranced. Since Tubby knew the good Dr. Jazz socially, he asked only a couple of perfunctory questions. Their purpose was to let the jury see that the defense counsel was the kind of man who received cordial and respectful treatment from bigwigs like the coroner.