Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 06 - Lucky Man (5 page)

“What sort of cooperation are you talking about?”

“Who’s to say? First he should be forthcoming with us about his own misdeeds, then about those of his colleagues. Then we’ll see.”

Ms. Canary piped up, “He could be asked to record conversations with certain other judges, or put over a sting.”

“What if he doesn’t know anything?” Tubby asked.

“Then society will be better off with him in jail,” Dementhe said evenly.

“And if he does cooperate, what is his reward?”

“Other than virtue?” Dementhe chuckled. “He would not go to jail unless, naturally, there are other indiscretions we do not yet know about. He would, in any event, be required to resign from the bench.”

“Resign his judgeship?”

“Of course,” Dementhe and Canary said together.

“Over a family matter?”

“That’s an interesting concept,” Dementhe said reflectively. “A man who would betray his family, and the very institution of the family, cloaking his behavior in the mantle of family privacy. Tut-tut, Mr. Dubonnet, that just won’t do.”

“We all know that families aren’t perfect,” Tubby argued. “That’s why they need privacy.”

“Including yours, isn’t that right, counselor? Even including yours.”

“What in the world are you speaking of?” Tubby was incredulous.

“Why, your own daughter and her extramarital affairs.”

The lawyer’s face colored like a muscadine. “Are you crazy? Have you got me mixed up with somebody else?”

“And didn’t she check herself into some sort of halfway house,” Dementhe pressed. “—a so-called church mission, in Mississippi. And didn’t she there require counseling on this very subject?”

Tubby was speechless for once in his life. This man was threatening him, and he did not even know what the threat was about.

Numb, he stood up and turned toward the door, shaking his head to try to clear it. Mr. Dementhe and Ms. Canary watched his departure in sober silence.

Tubby was still in a daze when he walked out of the building into the bright sunshine on Tulane Avenue. A beggar tossing peanut shells at a horde of shuffling pigeons scowled at him from a bus stop bench. The lawyer sat down next to the man. He waved his foot to keep a bird from pecking on it, and he put his head to work.

The reference to his daughter’s extramarital affairs had to be to his oldest girl, Debbie, who had been about five months pregnant when she walked down the aisle last summer. He prayed the DA was not talking about Debbie’s younger sisters. The wedding had resolved the issue of her pregnancy, most people would agree, so all Tubby could figure was that the DA, in his zeal to crucify everybody, had missed the fact that there had been a ceremony. And yes, Debbie did have a connection with a church-type outfit over in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, so it must be her. Tubby was vague about the details, but Debbie had asked the head man of the place, the Reverend Buddy Holly, to read the vows in her wedding. The Dubonnets’ old church pastor had generously agreed to share the pulpit, and everything had gone off without a hitch. So what was so suspicious about that? How would Marcus Dementhe know about Buddy Holly’s little mission?

There was another angle here, too, if you were truly paranoid. Tubby had been quietly fantasizing about Buddy Holly’s chief-cook-and-bottle-washer, Faye Sylvester, for the past month. It had begun like this.

Tubby’s new self-improvement regimen involved more than staying off the bottle. He had also started playing softball on Saturday mornings. It was basically a church and bar league, and coed, which was why they sometimes let Tubby play. He had met Faye when the season was three games old. At that time he had yet to get a hit. It did not matter. Dressed in cutoffs and a couple of mismatched T-shirts, he was happy sitting on the bench cheering for the guys who actually had some ability. Just one more step toward a cleaner, more positive, lifestyle, he told himself, watching the Gulf Coast Lost Sheep, a ragtag assortment of sexes and ages, warm up on the field. His own team didn’t even have a name, so far as he knew.

Something about the sandy-haired pitcher for the Lost Sheep had struck him as familiar, and Tubby craned his neck to study the fellow better. Sure, it was the Reverend Buddy Holly, half of the minister duo who had performed the wedding for Tubby’s daughter. He knew only that Holly ran some sort of mission for misguided youth near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, fifty miles away.

“Howya doin’, Reverend?” Tubby yelled, poking his nose through the wire mesh backstop.

The young preacher recognized the lawyer, despite his bright, out-of-uniform attire, and waved back. After a couple more practice pitches he trotted over to the fence and they shook hands.

“Nice to see you, Mr. Dubonnet,” he said, socking his glove. “I didn’t know you played softball.”

“In a manner of speaking, Pastor. You guys sure traveled a long way for this game.”

“It’s just an excuse to get to New Orleans. We all go out to lunch afterwards. Some of the girls like to go shopping, you know….”

Tubby didn’t hear the rest of the reverend’s sentence. Walking toward them on the third-base path was a gangling, touchingly awkward woman about five foot nine with short black hair, outfitted in blue shorts and a crisp white T-shirt, who reminded Tubby of a lost puppy and, better, an old flame from high school.

Her aura of helplessness was quickly dispelled when she cried, “You want me to bat leadoff or cleanup today?”

While her captain considered, she said, “You’re Tubby Dubonnet, right?” Her drawl was thick with syrup.

“Sure,” he replied, flattered. “How did you know?”

“Oh, somebody mentioned your name to me. And I remembered reading about your victories in the Sonny Dan case and, what’s the name of the man they tried to nail for beheading one of the doctors at the Moskowitz Memorial Labs?”

“Cletus Busters,” he admitted, puffing out his chest. “I had a lot of luck in both of those trials.”

“I’d like to hear about it sometime,” she said. “Do you want me to play in the field, Buddy?”

Close up, Tubby could see that his fan was truthfully no spring chicken, but she had made a very favorable first impression.

“I’m going to have you start in center,” Buddy told her.

The woman— Tubby guessed she was about thirty— tapped the brim of her cap with two fingers and gave Tubby a nod.

“The sun sure is hot, huh?” she said in parting and trotted back to her bench.

“Nice lady,” Holly said. “And single, too.”

“Yeah?” Tubby had found himself oddly smitten by this woman. He gradually let his stomach back out.

“She’s been staying at our church for the last couple of months. She cooks for the kids.”

“What kids?” he asked, concerned.

“Runaways, mostly. We’ve got bunks for ten and a lot of floor space, and we usually stay full. We try to clean up a few of the problems caused by our special combination of beaches, dockside gambling, and too much plain-old Mississippi. Didn’t Debbie tell you about our mission?”

Tubby had never thought to talk to his daughter about it. “How did she, uh, meet you, Buddy?” he asked.

“She just drifted in,” the preacher said vaguely. “You should talk to her about it sometime.”

“I will.” It was frightening what parents did not know about their children’s lives.

“Turn in your rosters if you’re playing!” the umpire cried from his seat in the bleachers.

Tubby failed to bring up the subject with his daughter.

***

Tubby’s team was trailing six to zip in the bottom of the seventh inning so his captain, Square Botts, had finally told him to pick up a bat. By that time his neck was sore from stretching and twisting to keep the center fielder in view. Despite being all elbows she had caught most of the pop flies that had come her way. She also had one hell of an arm, and once she got her grip on a ball she could peg it all the way home.

With visions of knocking one over her head and out of the park, Tubby took the first pitch. He felt a bit dizzy from the excitement.

“Strike one!” the umpire yelled.

He could almost feel the high fives his teammates would give him when he tagged the home run.

“Strike two!”

He was going to swing at the next pitch unless it was three feet over his head.

Buddy floated one right over the plate, and Tubby connected with all of his convictions. Like a seventeen-year-old he pounded up the base path.

The ball sailed high— so high that it was still up there when the slugger rounded first. The shortstop backed up; the center fielder ran in.

“I got it, I got it,” Faye cried, and she did. With a solid thunk the ball landed in her glove just as Tubby thundered to second.

“Great catch!” he called happily, panting, lingering, pandering.

“Nice hit,” she called back, wiping sweat from her brow. She smiled.

“How about lunch?” he suggested.

She waved and ran back to her position.

“Batter up!” an umpire yelled, reminding Tubby where he was. He loped back to the bench.

***

Tubby caught up to her after the game and renewed the invitation. Why he liked her, he wasn’t quite sure. Maybe because she was not exactly pretty. Maybe because when he smiled she smiled back.

“Want a bite to eat?” he asked, not very elegantly.

“I’m with the gang.” She indicated her teammates who were rounding up gloves and balls and drinking victory sodas.

“The plan is to shop at the Riverwalk and eat before we head back,” Buddy Holly informed them as he walked by.

“You could catch up with your crew there in two hours, easy,” Tubby said.

“We’re sweaty,” she pointed out.

“Not a problem,” Tubby laughed. He knew lots of great places where nobody would mind.

He ended up taking her to Liuzza’s by the Track, and they had cups of andouille gumbo with four shrimp and two oysters each for appetizers. A couple of young women from Kentucky came in to celebrate winning some money at the Fairgrounds. They had already kicked their shoes off and were talking loudly in accents clearly Southern, so Faye, in her MISSISSIPPI— A LAID-BACK STATE T-shirt, must have felt quite at home.

She ordered barbecued shrimp, which she said she had never had before. The waitress pleased her by tying a plastic bib around her neck so she would not get spots on her clothes. Tubby ordered baked garlic oysters.

By the time they had finished their soup, Faye had learned about Tubby’s divorce and the names and ages of his children.

By the time he was sliding a fork under his first baked oyster, careful not to prick its tender surface, he had found out that her job as den mother for Buddy Holly’s bad boys and girls was in the nature of a retreat from the demands of the real world. She was apparently recovering from troubles of her own, and, for her, the Mississippi countryside was the place to do so.

She had a few bad things to say about New Orleans, “Crime— stuff like that.”

They inadvertently touched feet under the table. He looked up from his plate long enough to see on the television hanging by the bar a replay of Mark McGuire hitting his sixty-first home run to top Roger Maris.

In a happy mood, Tubby ordered bread pudding for dessert. It came topped with whipped cream from a can.

Conversation was secondary but successful. A few meaningful personal details were exchanged between satisfied murmurs. In short, they got along.

Tubby ran her back downtown to meet her teammates and asked if she would like to get together again sometime. Sure, she said, and they left it at that. The topic of his daughter Debbie never came up then either.

Lucky LaFrene was having a great time rolling dice at the Casino Grand Mal, but his buddy, Max Finn, was all the way into outer space.

“Eeeaat Me!” Finn screamed, face flushed, eyes fiery, when he pitched his ivory cubes down on the table. A ring of chattering, hopped-up guys and dolls egged him on.

“Point,” the croupier said, to cheers and laughter. The security man with his coat and tie watched without expression. He was used to Max Finn, the wild bunch that collected around him, and the noise they needed to make to have fun.

Finn grabbed his eighth Jack Daniel’s and Diet Pepsi and gargled it. “Eyee!” he cried to the cameras on the ceiling. He rubbed the dice between his palms like prayer beads.

A showgirl with shiny white hair and a low-cut cocktail dress kissed him on the mouth for luck, and Finn swatted her rump.

Repeating his war cry, he flung the dice again.

“Point!” the croupier intoned, and cheers erupted.

“He’s got the Morgus touch,” LaFrene, a master of miscommunication, shouted into the blonde’s ear, and she cackled merrily at his malapropism.

Finn threw handfuls of chips at the croupier and his circle of friends and swept the rest into his coat pockets and his lady’s handbag. He put an arm around her so far that he cupped a dazzling jewel-encrusted breast in his hand and jerked her back from the table.

“Magnifico!” he blared to anyone who was listening, barging through the crowd with the woman in tow. He reached for a drink off a passing tray but missed.

“Ain’t life grand,” Lucky LaFrene proclaimed, trying to keep up.

Finn stumbled into the last row of slot machines by the wall and fell against the woman, pressing her back against 777 DEVIL’S DELIGHT. He stuck his tongue between her wet lips and she tried to swallow it. His fingers pulled her tight dress up her thighs, and she pushed a hand down his pants.

Lucky LaFrene found them.

“About that money you owe me, Max,” he began. “Jeez oh flip!” he cried. “You’ll get us all exhumed.”

***

Telling Raisin to get out was easier than Tubby had expected.

He caught his disheveled but winsome guest with his head stuck in the refrigerator searching for more bottles of beer, and the words just popped out.

“It’s been fun, Raisin, but the time has come for you to move on.”

“How much time do I have?” The vagrant dug out a Bud and straightened up. The cap twisted off easily.

“How does a day or two sound?”

Raisin stuck out his chin and took a swig. “No problem. Maybe I can hang out at Sapphire’s until something else opens up.”