Fat Man Blues: A Hard-Boiled and Humorous Mystery (The Tubby Dubonnet Series Book 9) (8 page)

So he put on khakis and a clean polo from M. Goldberg’s and drove to his old house, where his ex-wife still lived. He rang the bell and immediately Christine popped out. She said that Mattie, his ex, was “in the back,” which was just as well.

Christine was trim and shapely and had a great smile and a pile of curly hair. It was currently blond with pink highlights. She hugged her father with enthusiasm and skipped to his car.

The restaurant was only a few blocks away. Diners ate on picnic tables outside under a canopy over what used to be the driveway of a gas station, and they only served hot dogs or sausages, with just about anything you could imagine to dress them up. They also had several lavish versions of French fries. It was a New Orleans original and the owners wouldn’t disclose the source of their sausages.

Tubby got the “basic” beef wiener and had it topped with guacamole, ketchup, bacon, ranch dressing, Asian coleslaw, onions, olive salad and mustard. He also placed an order for New York Sharp Cheddar Cheese Fries for the table.

Christine got a grilled duck sausage, with the simpler, yet still adventurous, condiments of mayonnaise, sauerkraut and Pico de Gallo. They carried their orders, and a couple of Barqs, outside.

“This carnivorous stuff is something new for you,” he commented approvingly when they found a table. The day was warm for a change.

“I’ve shifted from brontosaurus food to cave man food,” she laughed. Her course of study was paleontology.

“How is school?” It was his routine opening question, and she had anticipated it.

She told him that everything was fine and described her palynology professor who was “creepy” when he lectured about the reproductive roles of spores and pollen. They dug into the mound of fries.

“And how’s your roommate?” he prompted to keep hearing her voice. “What’s her name?”

“Oh, Ariella is okay. She’s mad at me for coming home to New Orleans this weekend. She wanted to go hear some all-girl band at Bayou Blast.”

“I’m glad you came down instead. It’s been a while. This is a great hot dog, by the way. How’s yours?”

“Excellent,” she tried to say, but she was wiping her lips with a napkin. “I’m glad I came, too, but I don’t like to make Ariella upset. It’s important to keep peace in the family.”

“The family?”

“Daddy, we are living together.”

“Well, I know that, but…”

“But what?”

“It’s not like you’re married.”

There was a long pause. “Are you?” Tubby asked.

“No, we’re not,” said Christine. “But we have talked about it.”

“Hmmm.” Tubby was non-committal, but he was processing.

“You like her, don’t you?” his daughter asked.

“Sure. What I’ve seen of her. I’ve only met her twice and one of those times she had the flu or something.” What about grandchildren? he was thinking.

“I think it was cramps. Maybe you could come up to Baton Rouge. We’ll show you around all the neat places.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Tubby accepted the invitation. It was too easy to disengage when the kids got old enough to have lives of their own. You had to work at it to stay in touch. “I just want you to be happy. Did I tell you I’ve been seeing someone?” he asked.

“That lady from Chicago? The one with the bright red hair?”

Tubby had forgotten he’d ever mentioned Marguerite to Christine. “No. She moved to Florida and somehow, uh, it just didn’t work out.”

Christine pinched some melted cheese from the fries and dropped into her mouth. “So, who’s the new one?” she asked innocently.

“A very nice lady. Her name is Peggy and she lives across the Lake on a horse farm. She’s very active in several arts organizations, and we get along. There’s just one problem.”

“Isn’t there always?” Christine remarked, as if she were the wise parent.

“Yeah, I guess, but…”

The phone in his pocket buzzed. With a sigh, he dug it out. Christine took that opportunity to check her own.

“Mr. Dubonnet, this is Angelo.” The man’s voice was strained.

“What’s up?”

“I need to see you.”

“We have an appointment tomorrow at my office.”

“I’m in trouble now. Another of my delivery guys got pushed off his bike, and they dumped out all of his bottles of water on the street. All my other guys are afraid to come in.”

“Did you call the police?”

“I don’t do that. And my girl is in trouble.”

“What do you want me to do today? It’s Sunday?”

“I want you to keep me from taking my gun and shooting someone with it.”

“Where are you now?”

“At my shed, where my well is, on Lesseps Street.”

“Okay. I’ll get over there.” He hung up.

“An upset client,” he explained to Christine with a frown.

“Who is it?”

“A guy named Angelo Spooner. He turns out some special bottled water called ‘Angelo’s Elixir’.”

“Oh, we drink it all the time!” Christine exclaimed, thrilled. “Ariella is a complete freak for the stuff.”

“Really? He wants me to come over and see him right now. At what he calls his ‘well’. I’ve never been there before.”

“I’ll go with you,” Christine stated.

“I don’t think so. It might be a little risky. I’m not sure Angelo is quite right in the head.”

Christine’s jaw dropped. “You’re kidding me, right?” she said. In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, Christine had been kidnapped and abused by a deranged prison escapee named Bonner Rivette. Having survived that ordeal she now considered herself bullet proof.

Tubby didn’t argue with her. Christine was supposed to be his for the afternoon anyway.

* * *

The old front gate made out of galvanized roofing tin had been replaced by wrought iron welded into a pretty pattern over thick sheets of black steel. The doorbell was under a brass plate on which “Angelo’s” was handsomely engraved, but there was no response when Christine pressed it. Tubby called Angelo’s phone, but no luck. The gate wasn’t locked, however, and it creaked halfway open when pushed. Tubby stuck his head inside but there was nothing much to see except a wooden building painted turquoise with orange trim, its door ajar. Christine tried to edge past him. He elbowed her out of the way.

“Hey, Angelo,” Tubby called, entering the yard. “Anybody home?”

From inside the shed there was a humming noise, like a small motor running. There was no activity and no sign of people about except a bicycle leaning against the fence. Tubby went over to the shed and pulled open the barn-like door.

The hum got louder. He peered inside. It was very bright, lit by overhead florescent lights. The sound came from a pump hooked up to pipes that ran through the wall, evidently to the well, and there was a stainless steel contraption not much bigger than a microwave that was apparently intended to channel the water through a nozzle into plastic bottles. Crates of them, empty and full, lined the walls and were stacked all over the floor, where there also happened to be the prone body of a man wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt.

His head had been nearly severed off, but not quite. The dead eyes stared inappropriately away at a right angle to his shoulders. There was no need to check out the gaping mouth, frozen in a horrified scream, or the unblinking eyes, black pits of pain, to know that the man wasn’t living. The sound of the motor wouldn’t go away.

Christine looked over his shoulder and gasped but caught herself. “That puddle of blood around his neck still looks wet,” she said weakly, “but that’s not Angelo.”

Sure enough, Tubby saw nothing in the lifeless white face to resemble the healthy, fat man with wavy black hair who stared at him smiling on the labels of a thousand Elixir bottles.

“Makes you wonder where Angelo is.” Tubby used his cell phone to call 911.

* * *

The policemen, who began to arrive slowly about 30 minutes after Tubby made the call, wondered the same thing. They also wondered who Tubby and Christine were but got that straightened out in a few minutes. A big African American cop checked the corpse for a pulse and herded the visitors outside. They were told to stick around. A plainclothesman eventually showed up. He went inside the shed.

The lawyer and his daughter wandered over to the well. It was securely covered so there wasn’t much to see. It didn’t look like it could possibly be a hiding place for a killer, assuming that the stiff on the floor hadn’t cut off his own head.

The detective emerged and approached the pair.

“I’m Lieutenant Mathewson,” he said.

Tubby introduced himself. “I got a call about an hour ago from a Mr. Angelo Spooner, who asked me to meet him here.”

“Do either of you know the man inside?”

“No,” Tubby said. Christine shook her head.

“The name on his drivers’ license is Michael Battistella. Mean anything?”

Again, they both shook their heads.

There was a small commotion at the front gate, and a reporter and her photographer barged in.

Usually, Tubby wasn’t happy to see Kathy Jeansonne, a veteran news hustler who had switched over to the
Advocate
when the
Times-Picayune
moved to Alabama. She spotted Tubby instantly and made a beeline for him.

“Counselor,” she said hungrily, eyeing him as prey.

“Kathy,” Tubby acknowledged sweetly. “There’s a dead body inside.”

“And you are?” Detective Mathewson asked, as if there were any doubt. Nevertheless, she proudly revealed the newspaper ID card that she had clipped in the pocket of her blouse.

“Who’s the deceased?” she asked, her throat reddening.

“Don’t know yet,” the cop said.

“The name on his license is Michael Battistella,” Tubby said helpfully. It never hurt to give a freebie to the press. “And he’s been decapitated.”

Jeansonne’s eyes watered and she had to suppress a sob of joy. She pivoted away from Tubby and practically ran to the shed, photographer in tow.

“Wait! Hey!” The detective yelled.

Father and daughter were left to their own devices.

“This has turned into a pretty stimulating afternoon,” Christine observed.

Tubby’s advice was, “Don’t tell your mother.”

“Did you see a murder weapon?” she asked.

Tubby shook his head. “Let’s get out of here while we still can,” he suggested.

They nodded to the policeman guarding the front gate and kept going.

“AXE MURDER REPORTED IN BYWATER,” read the morning’s headline in the Metro section.

Tubby enjoyed reading about it over his bacon, biscuits and eggs at Ted’s Frostop, but he didn’t learn much about the murder that was new. It wasn’t necessarily an axe though, but “an instrument with a sharp blade.” There was some information about the victim. He was thirty-two, a former “correctional officer” with the Sherriff’s Department, and a member of the “7th Ward Gentlemen,” a club that marched in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. This last tidbit was courtesy of an old story about when Mr. Battistella, Budweiser in hand, had driven the club’s sound truck into the crowd on Louisiana Avenue, injuring three pedestrians. No arrest ensued.

Though his Monday schedule had been cleared by Angelo’s disappearance, Tubby nonetheless drove his black 1978 Camaro down Poydras Street and into the parking garage of the Place Palais building. Cherrylynn greeted him at the office door, always happy to see him report for duty.

“I thought you had class this morning,” he inquired. Cherrylynn was taking courses at Loyola, determined to get her college degree. It had been a long, slow process, since being a dropout from Tacoma’s Foss High, she had first to earn a GED, which she had done. She was proud, and he was proud, that with industry and application she was now the equivalent of a university junior.

“I’m skipping class,” she said brightly. “It’s philosophy, and I’m acing it. My friend, Betty, will take notes. The lectures are all online anyway.”

After he got to his desk and read the mail, which consisted of a solicitation for a Continuing Legal Education seminar on web pornography, an urgent topic, he checked his email. There was a notice of an electronic filing in a bankruptcy case where he represented the debtor in the Eastern District. A creditor wanted to examine Tubby’s client, Black Energy, LLC, which had failed to pay its bills after blowing through more than three hundred thousand dollars in its attempts to sell movie scripts to the Chinese. Tubby had collected his fees pre-filing, and no one had challenged him yet. That was about it for the daily news.

He dialed E.J. Chaisson.

“Did you see where a beheaded man showed up at your partner’s water well?” he asked.

“I did.”

“Might that affect the claim of pure organic spring water?”

“I’d rather not think about that.”

“Any idea where Angelo might have disappeared to?”

“None, but I certainly hope to hear from him soon. I have a lot of money involved in this.”

“That’s what you said. If he calls you first, please let me know?”

“I will, and you do the same.”

“If I can.”

There was another phone call. This one incoming.

It was Detective Adam Mathewson, and he wanted to talk to Tubby, in person if possible.

“Doesn’t necessarily have to be at the precinct,” he added.

That being the case, Tubby thought it impolite to suggest his own office. There was a coffee shop in the lobby of the Place Palais building, and that’s where they agreed to meet in half an hour.

Mathewson was a big Scot with a ruddy face and an ill-fitting chocolate-hued suit. Once they had carried their steamy cups from the counter and gotten seated, he got quickly to the point.

“You slipped away from our murder scene before I could talk to you,” he said in a loud deep voice. “How’d you happen to be at Angelo’s water works when we got there?”

“Angelo called and said he needed a lawyer. We were supposed to meet at my office this morning, but he was in a hurry. So I went there yesterday.”

“Why?”

“He said somebody was bothering him.”

“Like who?”

“He didn’t tell me. I never met Angelo, and I still haven’t.”

“And when you got there?”

“I went in, found a dead body, and called you.”