Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 02 - City of Beads (14 page)

Tubby counted $88,000 and sat back.

“That was my grandfather’s age when he died. I’ve got to stretch my legs.” He was both exhausted and exhilarated. “Get me out of here,” he begged.

He shook hands all around, tossed a little handful to the dealer, who announced, “Taking tip,” and let Nicole help him carry his basket of chips to the window to cash in. He took a thousand in bills and the rest in a check.

“Fresh air,” he demanded, draining the last of something alcoholic from the plastic glass he found in his fist.

He was in the backseat of a taxi, jabbering about what a rush it had been, rolling his head from side to side to let the night breeze blowing in through the cab window cool him down.

Then Nicole was paying the driver and showing him into the door of her quaint and expensive Creole cottage. While he sat on a stool she mixed them each a drink and turned on some music. He raved about her beautiful paintings and choice of cookbooks.

Then they were necking while dancing in the living room. His hands roamed over her shoulder blades while she played with his sandy blond hair.

On Sunday morning, Tubby took a walk in Audubon Park by himself and tried to figure out what he felt about Nicole. He gave it up. On Sunday afternoon, he went to pick up Collette. At one time, he would have asked his daughter to meet him somewhere, the object being to avoid a run-in with the child’s dear mother. But for the time being, at least, things were all hunky-dory between Tubby and Mattie. He was current on his child support and had even come up with the bucks to send their middle child, Christine, on a three-week trek to Europe with her Newman class. Her tuition was up to date, as was Debbie’s tuition at Sophie Newcomb. This had never happened before, and might never again.

Anyhow, Mattie was sure to greet him at the door with a smile when he showed up today. He liked her much better this way. The old flame still flickered sometimes, whether he wanted it to or not, but it wore him out like nothing else to fight with her.

He rang the bell, always a strange experience at a house he had called home during the seventeen years of their marriage. It was still hard not to feel a little pang of guilt when he saw that the bushes needed a trim. All the shrubs missed his attention. Jesus, she was even letting the azaleas die.

“Hi, toots,” Mattie said from the doorway. “Checking on the flowers?” She was casually dressed in shorts and a green blouse that set off her bright red hair, and she seemed to be slightly giddy with drink.

“Come on in,” she said. “Collette is on the phone.”

“Sure.” He crossed the threshold. “You’re looking nice.” She did—still the old curves that had first gotten his attention twenty years ago. Still the big smile.

“Thank you,” she said, beckoning hint farther into the house.

“Would you like me to fix you something while you wait?”

“Oh no. I’m sure she’ll be just a minute. Does she know I’m here?”

“Yeah, but come on back. If she sees you she’ll get off quicker.”

Tubby followed his ex-wife back to the kitchen, where the soul center of the house had always been.

Collette, cross-legged on a bar stool, mouthed hello to her father and waved at him without moving the phone from her ear or interrupting her inspection of her pink toenails.

Mattie gestured at an empty stool and sashayed to the other side of the counter in the direction of a large green bottle of wine.

“Sure you won’t have something?” she asked.

“I guess I’ll drink some bourbon, and a little water,” he replied. “Since Collette’s not ready yet,” he said loudly.

Collette smiled and waved at him again. “I have to go,” she said into the phone. “I don’t really think he is serious about me though. It’s just a chemical attraction.”

Tubby blanched. Collette, oblivious, plunged back into her conversation.

“Who’s she going out with these days?” he asked Mattie.

“Nathan is the latest heartthrob. He’s a soccer goalie.”

“Hmmph,” Tubby commented. “Where does he go to school?” He took a swallow of the drink Mattie placed in front of him. As always, she had made it too weak.

“McMain,” she replied. “His parents just moved to town.”

Collette was now more interested in their conversation than her own.

“I’ve really got to go. My dad’s here, and we’re going out to eat or something. Now promise me you’ll call me before you do anything rash. Okay? Okay. Bye-bye.”

“Hi, Daddy,” she said, and got up to give him a light kiss on the cheek. He gave her a squeeze.

“I’m almost ready. Just let me get my shoes.” She ran out of the room.

“She’s growing up fast,” he said.

“Fifteen going on twenty-one,” Mattie said, which was no comfort at all.

“Looks like you’re taking good care of her,” Tubby said, trying to remain upbeat.

“It’s a job,” she said, and drank her wine, “You must be doing okay for yourself these days.”

“I’m getting by,” he said, deftly turning aside what he thought was a probe into his finances.

“You had a nice trip to Florida, right?”

“Relaxing,” he said.

“Sorry about Potter.”

“It’s a real shame. They still don’t know what happened.”

“I dropped a gumbo off at Edith’s, but I really l haven’t talked to her.”

“I’m ready!” Collette announced from the hallway. She appeared in full makeup, big gold bangles in her ears, jeans, and leather sandals. Her hair was swept out to the sides in a perm. She was a miniature version of her mother. She hugged Mattie goodbye, and Tubby got the flash again about how much of his daughters’ lives he was missing and how much he missed them.

“Okay, let’s go.” He stood up. Mattie followed them to the front door.

“Have a good time,” she called, as Collette skipped and Tubby walked out to the car.

They were planning on a pizza and a movie she had picked out. It starred an adolescent actor with oiled muscles, a heroic soldier in a war fought over South American ruins, who learned to love and, yes, respect the gorgeous, nubile blonde who led him into battle.

On account of the company he was with, Tubby was going to enjoy it more than he would ever care to admit.

On Monday morning, Tubby began dictating an affidavit of death, domicile, and heirship and a petition to probate the testament of Potter Segnac Aucoin. He knew the legal words by heart; they came automatically from the formulary implanted in his mind by years of practice. He just had to insert the names, and that was the tough part.

He sketched out a descriptive list of assets and liabilities, using the documents Edith had dropped off. The list was short and uncomplicated enough that the succession could probably be opened and closed, all debts paid and all property delivered to Edith in a matter of days. Very tidy, Potter’s life. He had made a lot of money as a free-wheeling businessman in the realm of international welfare, and his bank accounts were easily identified and well stuffed. Tubby could be handsomely paid just for getting it all in order—pulling down the final curtain on the life of the late Mr. Aucoin. There were just a few nagging problems.

He called police headquarters and asked for Detective Kronke. He was a little surprised when he got through to him.

“Good morning, Detective, this is Tubby Dubonnet.”

“How are you today, Mr. Dubonnet? What can I do for you?”

“I wondered if you were making any progress on the Aucoin murder case.”

“We’re still actively pursuing some things. Where are you?”

“Me? At the office.”

“I would like to talk to you. Would it be convenient for me to come over now?”

“This minute?”

“If it wouldn’t be inconvenient.”

“No, sure. Forty-third floor.”

“I know. We’ll be there shortly,”

Tubby hung up. It was definitely intimidating having a police detective anxious to talk to you, however polite he was. Tubby asked Cherrylynn to hide anything incriminating while he cleaned off his desktop and generally fidgeted until Kronke arrived.

Cherrylynn made the policeman comfortable in one of the client chairs facing Tubby. Fortunately there was no “we”; Kronke was alone. He was shorter and rounder than Tubby, but Kronke had some muscle mass packed inside his gray blazer. He was clean-shaven and bald and held a guileless, friendly expression on his smooth face.

“Quite a view you have, Mr. Dubonnet.”

“It’s pretty spectacular,” Tubby agreed.

“So, I’m looking at the French Quarter. And there are the projects. Boy, from up here they look just the same.”

The distant wail of a siren, blown up by the wind, reminded Kronke of his mission.

“You’re handling Aucoin’s estate, right?” he asked Tubby.

Tubby admitted he was.

“Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary? Any unexplained transactions?”

“No. It’s all quite ordinary.”

Tubby wasn’t about to tell him about Kathy Jeansonne’s call.

“Do you know much about Mr. Aucoin’s export business?” Kronke asked.

“Only what I can tell from the books. The CPA has looked at them, too. We see money going in, money coming out. Nothing irregular. But actually how the business worked? I have only the vaguest notion. There’s a filing cabinet full of invoices and correspondence at the shop. You’re welcome to look through it. Broussard, the foreman, might know something, but I doubt he knows a lot, other than the day-to-day mechanics of shipping.”

“Did Aucoin have any partners, any business associates?”

“None at all.”

“Oh, well,” Kronke sighed. He shrugged to say he’d tried.

“What are you looking for, Detective?”

“A place to start,” Kronke said. “We don’t really have a lead right now. The man had no enemies anyone knows about. He worked alone. I would call his death accidental—maybe a bad fall—except there were signs of a struggle in his shop, and, of course, somebody had to slide the hatch cover shut on the barge.”

“No prints on anything?”

“Footprints, drops of blood, some other interesting things, but on a wharf where men work all day… ?” He spread his hands to show what a problem it was.

“It’s a complete mystery to me, too,” Tubby said.

“Did you ever know Mr. Aucoin to take drugs?”

Ahh. Tubby had already thought about his answer to this question, and he had decided that what he knew about Potter’s secrets and personal failures was going to remain between Tubby and the dead.

“I never saw him take any, if that’s your question, but in his younger days he may well have.”

“Just casually, or on a regular basis?”

“I don’t know,” Tubby said. “I’m sure it was a long time ago, though.”

“So you wouldn’t think he bought or sold any kind of, uh, drugs or anything. He was, you know, in the export business.”

“I certainly would not think so. Why the questions?”

“I guess it won’t hurt to tell you. One of the things we found when we looked through his office, in that filing cabinet you were talking about, was a quantity of cocaine.”

“How much of a quantity?”

“About half a kilogram. That’s enough to last your social user a lifetime. What do you think?”

“I don’t know what to think. It doesn’t fit the picture I have of Potter.”

“Yeah, but there, it is.”

There it was. Detective Kronke poked and shoved it around for another ten minutes, but it didn’t go away.

“You used to be partnered up with Reggie Turntide, didn’t you?” he asked as he got up to leave.

“That’s right,” Tubby said warily.

“He disappeared, didn’t he? Did they ever find him?”

“No.”

“That was strange, wasn’t it?”

Tubby just nodded.

After Kronke left, Tubby closed his eyes and tried to relax. That didn’t work so he called Kathy Jeansonne at the paper. He talked it over again with her, but she did not tell who her source was, and she did not tell him anything else about the police investigation. Tubby got the impression she had more interesting things on her mind—that the news value of the man in the vat of oil was fading fast.

As an afterthought he also asked her if she had ever heard of Bayou Disposal or Cargo Planners. No, she hadn’t. Gotta go.

Nobody owns the land between the levee and the river. It is the property of all of the people. That’s the Napoleonic Code. You lease it from the people, represented by the Port Authority or the Levee Board. That’s the Municipal Code. Tubby got Cherrylynn to walk over to the Levee Board to see if she could get copies of the leases of each of the companies on Twink Beekman’s “bad guy” list. See what information you can pick up, he told her. And after that, if she got a chance, he asked her to review the Save Our River file to see what specific complaints had been made about the various shippers, grain elevators, warehouses, and manufacturers plying their rough and noisy trades there. It would be a challenge for her, he said, like a college research project.

“Sure, no problem,” she said.

Tubby was just checking. Cherrylynn’s resumé showed a degree from Walla Walla College, and he suspected she had just made it up. But Cherrylynn hadn’t even blinked.

He told her he would be back later. It seemed Mr. Caspar wanted to speak with him.

“It’s kind of important, Tubby,” Jake LaBreau had said, so Tubby agreed to come right over.

He had not been shown any back ways to the management offices of Casino Mall Grande so he went in the front like the rest of the tourists. The same gay, electronic, noisy scene was still playing. The patrons sitting at their machines looked interchangeable – a lot of faces telling one story. Tubby suddenly realized it wasn’t Tijuana souvenir makers they reminded him of, it was rows of women in full dresses sitting astride sewing machines in a picture from the 1920s he had seen once upon a time. It was the same unnatural look of people mating with machines. Tubby pushed these disturbing thoughts aside, remembering the large check he had that morning deposited in his bank account. He tuned into the squeal of good fortune and the hilarity of free booze and smiled contentedly.

He went upstairs with long strides and approached the guard by the door marked PRIVATE. The man made a call and pointed Tubby through. Nicole came out of Jake’s office to greet him. She looked tremendous.