5 Crime Czar (7 page)

With a gurgling sound, familiar at Champ’s, the potential drowning victim vomited a large amount of Lake Pontchartrain and gasped for air.

Keeping his distance, the coastguardsman whom Monique had repulsed radioed for an EMT wagon and, before you knew it, the deck was swarming with guys in green coats. Five or six cops who had been patrolling the playground on the lakefront made their appearance, and for a while you could hardly move.

Everybody congratulated Monique and got an eyeful of her bod through her soaked clothes. One of the cops finally remembered his manners and got a blanket out of his car to drape over her shoulders.

The young woman Monique had pulled from the deep got strapped to a rolling stretcher. She was awake and crying. Monique stood over her and watched curiously. Their eyes met for a moment before the EMTs hustled their patient to the van.

Monique offered all the cops a beer, but they said no. One asked Monique for a date.

“I’d think twice about that, buddy,” advised the coastguardsman whom Monique had popped. Finally they were gone.

“Man, that’s a hard way to kill yourself,” Jimmy said thoughtfully, smelling the lake water with distaste. “You didn’t even think about it. You just jumped right in,” he said, admiration showing.

“It ain’t no big deal.” Monique started to say, “Anybody would have done it,” but Jimmy was already shaking his head.

“I don’t go into that water for nobody,” he said. “It’s full of gross shit I don’t even want to imagine.”

Monique shrugged. She knew there was worse stuff than dirty water.

“Tonight you close up,” she said. “I’m going home for a shower.”

Jimmy let her out the front door. Monique still had the blanket wrapped around her. Normally she took a bicycle to and from work. Her apartment was only about four blocks away.

“You gonna walk?” Jimmy asked her as she set off down the street.

Monique just waved good-bye. She felt great, as if her life had a purpose. Like a nun in her brown habit, Monique shuffled along the deserted pavement.

The cop who had asked her for a date flashed his lights at her, and she let him give her a lift.

* * *

Flowers pulled to the curb in front of a small white house badly in need of paint in a neighborhood of welding shops and plumbing contractors. He walked to the iron-barred security door, rang the bell, and waited.

Presently, a timid voice within asked who he was.

“Sanré Fueres, ma’am. I’m the detective who works for Mr. Dubonnet. We spoke on the phone.”

Aunt Melissa Haywood, a white-haired wisp of a woman in a pink quilted housecoat, opened the inside door tentatively.

“Could I see some identification, please?” she asked.

“Sure.” Flowers got out his wallet and handed her through the bars a plastic card with his picture on it.

She inspected him and the photograph carefully. “I guess this is you,” she said and used a key to unlock the security door. “Can’t be too careful nowadays.”

She led the way into a living room crowded with a lifetime of furniture and pictures. She offered him a Coca-Cola.

“Thanks. I’d like one very much,” he said and sat on a yellow vinyl-covered chair while she slipped away to the kitchen. Flowers jumped up and quickly sniffed around the room. He glanced over the calendars and photographs on the walls and the electric bills laid out on a small desk. It was a habit with him. He was settled quietly on his chair by the time she returned with a glass of Coke and a paper napkin.

“There. Now how can I help you?” She sat down softly by the desk.

“Mr. Dubonnet has a theory that the man who killed your nephew might be somebody Dan knew, someone ‘from the old neighborhood’.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know who any of Dan’s friends are. He hasn’t lived here for, oh, twenty years or more. He was a good boy in some ways, in that he called me up on my birthday. He sometimes seemed to know when I needed cheering up, and he’d just call. But he hardly ever visited.” She frowned. “Since his father died, Dan never seemed to like it much around here. His mother ran off when he was born, I guess you know.”

“No, I didn’t. Maybe the killer was somebody Dan knew as a kid, Mrs. Haywood. Somebody named Roux?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she said, concentrating. “I do have some of his high school albums, if you think that might help.”

“Sure.” This was the exciting part of detective work.

The tiny woman made her way to the back of the house and soon came back with three dusty yearbooks from Harvey High, home of the Harlequins.

She placed them on Flowers’s lap and opened the purple one on top to a page with the corner bent over.

“That’s Dan,” she said, pointing a crooked finger to a large, fierce-looking face, surrounded by a mane of black hair, straining against a tie and a collar that were too tight for his bulging neck. A little tear fell on the page.

“He was a handsome boy,” Flowers said.

Mrs. Haywood backed away and sat again in her chair. Flowers kept his eyes down and started flipping pages.

There was no one with the name of “Roux,” so he started at the beginning of the alphabet. A clock on the wall whirred.

Suddenly a name jumped off the page. Willard LaRue. There they were, the big protruding ears. The LaRue boy had a crew cut. There was a cockeyed smile on his lips, but his eyes told a different story. They said, “Get out of my face.”

“Do you know this boy?” Flowers leaned over to hand the book to Mrs. Haywood.

“That’s Tex. Yes, I know him. He was always into trouble. We called him Tex because he wore a Roy Rogers hat, but I remember now his last name was LaRue. That poor boy was in a pickup truck one day and it rolled over his daddy and killed him. Can you imagine? They lived in a house on Almonaster Street. I remember it had a big tree in the front yard that they tied Dan to one time— just being boys, I guess. I don’t know what happened to Tex and his mother. Her name was Mamie.”

Flowers nodded. He stood up and stacked the albums on the desk behind Mrs. Haywood.

“Thanks a lot for the Coke,” he said. “I’m real sorry about your boy. Can you tell me where Almonaster Street is?”

“I’m going there right now,” Flowers told Tubby on his cellular phone. “I knew you’d want to hear about it right away.”

“Willard LaRue,” Tubby repeated. He was sitting in his office downtown. “Where are you now?”

“I’m turning onto Almonaster Street as we speak. We’re right by the Harvey Canal. Half the houses are boarded up. And here’s one with a really big tree in the front yard. I’ll call you when… now wait a minute.”

Flowers watched as a slight man wearing a cowboy hat emerged from 6039 Almonaster Street and turned to lock the door.

“Tubby, I think Mr. ‘Roux’ is coming out the door right now. I’m passing the house and pulling over. We’ll see what he does.”

“Follow him!” Tubby’s voice broke up in static, it was so loud.

“You got that right,” Flowers said softly and clicked the phone off.

He parked in front of a bread truck, beside an open ditch sprouting orange flags where some sewer repair project had been halted— maybe for lunch, maybe for the year. LaRue got into a sea blue Ford Taurus that could have been a rental and crunched away from the curb. He passed Flowers without a sideways glance and turned right at the next corner. Slowly, Flowers set off in pursuit.

In tandem, they got onto the West Bank Expressway and immediately got off at Manhattan Boulevard. Flowers followed his quarry past a series of gutted shopping centers and low-rise apartment complexes and saw LaRue hit his blinker once and enter the parking lot of a one-story, windowless institution.

The detective drove past. The sign out front said SWEET MADONNA MANOR.

Looking at his mother was like looking at a trapped rabbit, LaRue always thought. Same frightened, dumb expression. Even before she had started to lose it and gone to the home, he had thought of her like that. His old lady had never been someone to inspire confidence.

Visiting her was no picnic, that’s for sure. He didn’t know why he did it. Except she had been good to him— as good as anybody could be with a psycho like LeRocca LaRue for a husband.

Looking at ol’ Mom in her bed always brought it back— the endless afternoons spent practicing how to tie a lariat, how to lasso a fence post, how to be a quick draw with a chrome six-shooter. In Harvey, Louisiana, for chrissakes. Just some fantasy his old man had. But he couldn’t let it alone.

He’d beat the shit out of Willard at the drop of a hat. And beat the shit out of Mom if she got in the way. He probably wasn’t too happy when Willie popped the pickup into reverse and flattened the asshole like a pancake on the cement driveway, but with his skull cracked he wasn’t in any condition to complain.

Despite himself, LaRue chuckled. His mother, wig askew and all gums, just looked at him like he was the wolf who had come to dinner.

“You don’t have a clue, Mom,” he told her. Fact was, she didn’t.

The Hughes Campaign was rolling, and the phone in Tubby’s office was beeping nonstop.

“We appreciate your support. Al certainly won’t forget it. Lemme give your name to his campaign manager,” were becoming his main lines.

Joey Pureloin, the Assessor in the Seventeenth Ward, called to get the word out that he was also up for reelection and expected to be on the mayor’s ticket. He wanted to assure Al Hughes of his “unquantified support.”

Sam Aruba, who said he was a constable in Marrero, asked what he could do. “Tell your New Orleans friends to vote for Al,” Tubby suggested.

“I got lots of ’em. You know Bernie Fawn?” Tubby did not.

“Really? Oh, well. We’ve got a fundraiser out here at the American Legion Hall,” Aruba continued. “The judge can come if he wants to.”

“Thanks, but what’s the point? That’s not in his district.”

“It’s a blast, man. Free beer and chili. Where else you gonna get on the TV news for kissing a nutria? It’s free exposure.”

“Makes sense to me. I’ll give your name to Al’s campaign manager. And thank you for your support.”

A spokesperson for Louisianians Opposed to Offenders Now called to invite Judge Hughes to a forum on crime.

“Yeah, but you know he’s a civil court judge. He doesn’t sentence people to jail,” Tubby explained.

“Then I should report to our committee that Judge Hughes refuses to come?” the spokesperson asked indignantly.

“Not at all.” Tubby backpedaled swiftly. “Let me give your name and number to his campaign manager.”

“I think you’re going to have to screen my calls,” he told Cherrylynn, but a minute later she beeped him to say that Judge Carlo Trapani was on the line.

“I see on this letter I just got that you are chairman of the Hughes reelection campaign.” Trapani announced in his trademark voice, loud as a fish peddler’s.

“Cochairman, actually,” Tubby said.

“Anyway, I’m calling you because I want the judge’s support in my election. I am prepared to give him mine. Under the table, of course, since we judges aren’t allowed to endorse candidates. Stupid rule, huh?”

“Yeah,” Tubby said.

“Even though I’m on the criminal bench I think incumbent judges should stick together for the good of the profession.”

“I’m sure Al will be happy to hear that, Judge. Have you tried to talk to him directly?”

“I’ve called Al twice and left messages.” Judge Trapani’s tone was sour. “He has not yet returned my calls.”

“I know he has been very busy,” Tubby began. Hell, he was thinking, now I’m Al’s damn secretary.

“So am I,” Trapani yelled.

“Yes, well I will certainly see that he gets your message.”

And he would, because he had learned that one of the matters on Judge Trapani’s docket was the prosecution of Tubby’s friend, Cesar Pitillero, for the distribution of cocaine.

On a lighter note, Adrian Duplessis, beloved by the populace of New Orleans as Monster Mudbug, called with a most unexpected bit of news.

Tubby took the call with trepidation because the Monster generally was calling from jail where he frequently landed for municipal offenses like parading without a permit. By trade a humble tow-truck driver, Adrian’s claim to fame was riding the streets of the city dressed as a giant, boiled crawfish, surrounded by mermaids, in his rolling cookpot known as the Monster Mobile.

“I ain’t in jail, Mr. Tubby,” were his first words. “You’ll never guess what.”

“Marcia Ball is going to ride on your float at the Mandeville Seafood Festival.”

“Not quite that good,” the Monster laughed. “She only does that for the Moss Man.” The Moss Man was Adrian’s idol. “But I’m working on it. I just qualified to run for sheriff.”

“What?” Tubby exclaimed.

“Yeah. I just got back from City Hall. I paid my money and everything. I’m running for sheriff.”

Tubby closed his eyes and asked him why.

“Just for publicity. You know, to get on television. And I learned that, if I don’t win, I get to keep all the money people give me.”

“Who would give you money, Adrian?”

“Nobody, probably, but don’t you think it’s a terrific stunt?”

“I don’t know about that.” The sitting sheriff, Frank Mulé, was one of the most powerful politicians in the city, had about a thousand deputies on his payroll, and was not known to have the slightest touch of any sense of humor.

“My slogan is ‘A Crawfish Pot in Every Cell’.” There was a click on the line. “Excuse me,” Adrian said, and the lawyer was about to slam down the phone when Adrian came back on. “I gotta go, Mr. Tubby. Channel Six is on my other line, and they want to interview me.”

Tubby got up and strolled to his outer office to impart this little vignette to Cherrylynn. She thought it was a great idea.

“They need to do something to liven up these elections. With Monster Mudbug in it, at least we’ll get some good parades.”

The phone on her desk buzzed, and she answered it, looked surprised, and pushed the hold button.

“Sheriff Frank Mulé wants to talk to Mr. Tubby Dubonnet,” she said.

Tubby’s smile disappeared. He went back to his office. Closing the door behind him, he sat down and cleared his throat. Then he picked up the phone.