Crooked Man: A Hard-Boiled but Humorous New Orleans Mystery (Tubby Dubonnet Series #1) (The Tubby Dubonnet Series) (2 page)

“How was your trip?” he asked.

“Wonderful,” Dr. Feingold said enthusiastically. “Costa Rica is such a beautiful country. We stayed in a fantastic hotel, and nearby there was a crystal clear lagoon, a perfect blue, with superb snorkeling. It was lovely. Have you ever snorkeled, Tubby?”

“Sure, when I was a kid. But I didn’t even know grown-ups did it for fun until you started going on about it.”

“It’s a great sport. You see things you never imagined.”

“Actually, Marty, I get enough of that in my law practice. What I see walking around on the streets amazes me on a daily basis. But I know what you mean.”

“You ought to give it a try. Live a little. You would enjoy the peace and quiet.”

“I’m sure I would. Too bad you have to submerge yourself in the ocean to get some.”

“Let’s talk about my case,” Dr. Feingold said, slipping an ivory bit of fish on his fork. “I really feel bad about Sandy, but don’t you think his demands are just a wee bit outrageous?”

“It does look like you botched the operation up, Marty. In all honesty, I feel funny representing him.”

“You shouldn’t. I’m much more comfortable with you doing it than one of those ambulance-chasers out there. I trust you to treat me fairly.”

“It just seems strange to me that when a guy thinks you’ve destroyed his epidermis he’d still take your recommendation for a lawyer.”

Sandy Shandell was an exotic. The first time he had come into Tubby’s office, Cherrylynn, Tubby’s secretary, had shown him to a chair and then breathlessly rushed in to tell her boss, shutting the door behind her so that Sandy wouldn’t hear, “Mr. Dubonnet. There is a man outside to see you, and he’s wearing makeup.”

“He’s an entertainer. They all wear stuff on their faces.”

“I’d sure like to see the entertainment he puts on. He’s wearing the same eye shadow as me,” she giggled, and blushed.

“Calm down, Cherrylynn. Just show him in.”

She did, but as she stood behind Sandy, a tall sinewy man who did indeed paint his face, she made hand signals and, eyes big as pies, silently mouthed, “Do you see?”

“Hold my calls,” Tubby said and closed the door on her.

The next time Sandy came for an office visit he presented Cherrylynn with a tiny cloisonné pin.

“I just thought it would match your hair,” he said, and she was completely won over. After that when he called or came by the office, he and Cherrylynn would chat like sisters until Tubby would break them up so he could get some work done.

“Sure it sounds funny for a patient to ask his doctor to suggest a malpractice lawyer,” Dr. Feingold continued, “but Sandy has this unshakable conviction, formed years ago when I adjusted his nose, that I’m the most intelligent person he knows. He still relies on me, even if the skin-darkening treatments were less than totally successful.”

“He should have been satisfied with the way he was,” Tubby said philosophically as he tried with little success to spear a pod of snowpeas.

“If everybody felt that way, Tubby, plastic surgeons would be out of a job. We exist because it is a human instinct to want to change. We aspire. Sandy’s hero, for example, is a television show cop, some guy—I can’t think of his name—with a real Caribbean, coffee-and-cream look. But Sandy’s natural pigment is paler than mine. He didn’t just want to look tan, mind you. I could have handled that easy. He wanted to look like a Creole gambler. Those were his words to me. That enchanting picture inspired me, and it’s what got me into this mess.”

“He’s kind of splotchy now,” Tubby observed.

“I told him the treatments were experimental,” Dr. Feingold said defensively. “I told him there was very little literature in the area. I told him there was a chance this could happen. God knows, I feel sorry about it.”

Tubby patted his lips with his napkin. “Look out, Marty. Sandy has got a good case. My first job is to do right by him. You and I have been friends for a long time, but I’ve got to represent Sandy to the best of my ability, just like I do every other client.”

“I understand that, and I wouldn’t expect anything less, knowing you as I do. But surely Sandy Shandell does not have a three-million-dollar case.”

Marty Feingold had sad puppy eyes below bushy eyebrows, and Tubby felt them probing his, looking for pity.

“Who knows. More than a hundred grand, probably. Juries are unpredictable. If Sandy can keep it together on the stand, those twelve noble citizens in the jury box could do you some real damage.”

“My insurance rates will skyrocket.” Now it looked like the doctor was close to tears. He was even forgetting to eat.

“It’s just the price of doing business,” Tubby consoled him. “You’ll just raise your fees, right?”

The thought seemed to comfort Dr. Feingold. He picked up an almond slice with his fingers and nibbled it. “I suppose that’s true,” he said.

Tubby pressed ahead. “There will always be tummies to tuck.” A waiter passing with a fudge-drenched piece of chocolate cake caught his attention. “Hey, would you look at that dessert.”

“Help yourself.”

“No, I’ve got too much work to do this afternoon. I think that would put me out of commission for at least a couple of hours.”

“Then I’ll get the check.”

“No. This one is on me, Marty. You sent me a good client.”

“I have this feeling I’m going to end up paying for it.”

“I can’t argue with that.”

“Hmmm.”

* * *

Tubby and Marty Feingold strolled together across Lafayette Square in the direction of Tubby’s office and Marty’s car. A crew of gardeners, mostly Asian women wearing pointed hats, squatted around a fountain, pulling weeds from a bed of vividly colored pansies. A family of pigeons, like toy soldiers, waddled over to them hopefully, then fluttered excitedly out of the way.

“They’re doing a great job keeping the place up,” Dr. Feingold said, nodding at the industrious laborers and the neatly trimmed border around the concrete fountain.

“Yes, they are. Most of them don’t speak any English, you know. It’s hard to imagine going to a strange country halfway around the world and ending up tending flowers in the parks of a city where you don’t even speak the language. They sure can understand the flowers, though, can’t they?”

“In ten years they’ll own this town.”

“Everybody else has taken a turn at running New Orleans, why not them?”

“They couldn’t do much worse than we’ve done, could they?”

“Wake up, Marty. We’re not in charge here anymore.”

“We’re just allowed to show up for work, right?”

“Work and play,” said Tubby. “And that’s not too shabby.”

They shook hands and parted underneath the Whitney Bank clock on the street corner. A delivery kid, riding a bicycle the wrong way down the street, almost collided with Dr. Feingold in the crosswalk.

“Sorry,” the kid shouted, laughing, and kept on pedaling, a carefree two-wheeled traveler through a land of over-heated cars stuck waiting for the light and burning plenty of gas.

One of the gardeners straightened up to wipe the sweat from her forehead with the loose sleeve of her jacket. She looked at the line of cars, and in a red one not far away she saw a man that she knew. Quickly, she put her head down and buried her hands deeply in the soft dirt.

Casey pressed the horn and held it.

“What’s the problem?” he yelled out the window to nobody in particular.

Freddie leaned out his side to look.

“I think they’re letting cars out of the garage. I don’t see no accident.”

“What do women expect you to think when they go around exposed like that?” Casey muttered, looking over a pair of sharply dressed secretaries strolling along the sidewalk on their lunch break. He spied the gardener and chuckled when she ducked.

“It’s indecent,” Freddie agreed.

“You see that skinny gook over there? The one squatting by that bush?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“They call her Panda. Her brother got locked up, breaking and entering, car theft, something like that. Her family makes the right connections, and it comes around to me that they wanted him treated okay in jail. You know, where nobody bothers him, and he gets to have his cigarettes and his little personal items without any hassle. No big thing. I’m dealing with Bin Minny on this, you know who I mean?”

“I seen him around. I think I seen him talking to you.”

“Yeah, well he’s the king gook out in New Orleans East, where they all live. You know, you don’t see no dogs running loose out there.”

Freddie laughed.

Casey gunned the motor, keeping an eye on the temperature gauge. The traffic seemed permanently stalled.

“This little girl, Panda, comes to see me at the office,” Casey continued. By “office” Freddie understood him to mean BB Bail Bonds—across from the Criminal Courts building, where Casey had a desk and phone and generally hung out most of the time—not Casey’s official office at the jail. He rarely went there, but he allowed Freddie to use it if he needed a private place to take a nap or eat a pizza that he didn’t want to share.

“I don’t know how she knew who I was, but she comes in, ‘Missa Casey,’ she says. She can hardly talk English. But she tells me that Bin Minny is raising the price for looking after her brother and she can’t pay it. So he offers to let her work it out as one of his girls, and she can make lots of money that way. She don’t like that, so she comes to see me.”

“What’d you tell her?” Freddie asked.

“I told her to get the hell out of my office. Like I’m gonna mess up my friendly relations with Bin Minny ‘cause this little girl, who has an asshole for a brother, can’t get along. She leaves like she don’t understand how ‘Big Missa Sheriff Casey’ can say that, but she gets the message. Right away I call Bin Minny to tell him one of his people is off the reservation and, real cool, he asks me, as a favor, to wise up the brother. I pass the word, and two of the guys at the jail work the brother over a little bit. That was right before you got here, Freddie. If you’d been on my team then, it would have been a good job for you.”

“I wouldn’t have minded,” Freddie said.

“And what do you know, the next week the payments are being made again, the brother gets over his scrapes and bruises, and Bin Minny owes me a favor. My only regret is I probably should have poked her while I had the chance, but I don’t like gooks.”

“It’s all pink on the inside,” Freddie offered.

“That’s a very humorous observation, Freddie,” Casey said. “Speaking of which, I just remembered we’re supposed to pass by the Starburst Lounge today and pick up our present.”

“I could do that this afternoon, if you’re busy,” Freddie suggested.

“You’d like to go by yourself, wouldn’t you, Freddie? That way you collect a little extra, right?”

“No, nothing like that, Casey. I was just saying I’d go. Then I’d bring it over to your office—if you got something else to do.”

“I appreciate your volunteer spirit. Some initiative is a good thing. But not too much.”

Sitting around in traffic was putting Casey in a dangerous mood, and Freddie wanted to change the subject.

“When are we going to do that job you were talking about—with the drug runner?” he asked.

“It isn’t something you need to worry about yet. The money is out there as we speak. I haven’t quite got a fix on it yet, but I will. Then I’ll let you know it’s time to answer the bell.”

“I’ll be ready, whenever.”

“Let’s move it,” Casey shouted out the window. The block-long line of cars didn’t budge.

“Let’s try out the light and see if we can get through this,” Casey said.

Freddie put the blue flasher on top of the dashboard and flipped the switch. Casey blew the horn, bounced two wheels up on the curb, and started squeezing through. This was one of the times he wished he was a city cop. He would love to have a loudspeaker he could use to make these fools get out of the way. Only thing, there wasn’t any money in being a cop.

People often asked Tubby what his day was like—how it was being a lawyer in a city like New Orleans. He knew there was no way to describe it, all the sad and comic touches. He just knew he wasn’t often bored.

He parked his red Thunderbird convertible by the abandoned, boarded-up Falstaff brewery off Broad Street and scrambled across four busy lanes to the plaza in front of Traffic Court. Inside the masses were gathering for afternoon services, reduced to the common denominator of having to explain away yellow lights that turned red, school-zone signs hidden behind crepe myrtle trees, and Breathalyzer machines that gave out faulty readings.

Courtroom C was filled with at least a hundred people, each waiting for his name to be called by the clerk up front, a balding man with a lumpy nose and a wrinkled tie named Moses Seamster, who had mastered an attitude of total indifference to everything. His foghorn voice summoned a few more offenders every few minutes to come forward and plead with him about their cases. He disposed of the vast majority in ten seconds and fewer words, accepting their plea, fixing their fine, and sending them off to pay. The judge was nowhere to be seen. A handful of bored-looking lawyers hung out on the front row and around a door leading to the back room where an assistant city attorney considered more grievous offenses and dealt with citizens who refused to plead guilty. Tubby was acquainted with a bunch of the regulars, and he walked up to join them.

“Hiya, Walter, whatcha got today?” he asked an older attorney he knew, a tall gentleman wearing a shiny gray suit and holding his briefcase across his narrow chest like it might stop a bullet.

“Hey, Tubby. DWI. Drove into the bushes off Wisner into City Park. My issue is no one saw him actually driving the vehicle, and he wasn’t on a public thoroughfare when the cops pulled him out of the shrubbery. So where’s the crime? It’s bullshit, maybe, but we’ll see. What’s yours?”

“My client is Monster Mudbug,” Tubby said.

“What, the guy you see at Mardi Gras?”

“That’s him. Oh no, here he is.”

Monster Mudbug drove a tow truck by trade. He had spotted Tubby and was walking up the aisle dressed in dusty blue jeans, a spray-painted surfer shirt, and blue sunglasses. He paused at the swinging wooden gate and waved, and Tubby went over to collect him.