Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 02 - City of Beads Read online

  “A real work of mystery art.” —New Orleans Times-Picayune

  (Tubby Dubonnet) makes a charming guide to a side of New Orleans few see.

  —Booklist

  Dunbar weaves together the many strands of his highly entertaining tale with much skill and wit. —Publisher’s Weekly

  Dunbar’s understated, syncopated delivery makes you wonder if there are enough honest men in New Orleans for a rubber of bridge. —Kirkus

  CITY OF BEADS is the SECOND BOOK IN THE TUBBY DUBONNET SERIES.

  MORE TUBBY DUBONNET MYSTERIES

  Crooked Man, G.P. Putnam’s (New York, 1994)

  Trick Question, G.P. Putnam’s Sons (New York, 1996)

  Shelter From the Storm, G.P. Putnam’s Sons (New York, 1997)

  The Crime Czar, Dell Publishing (New York, 1998)

  Lucky Man, Dell Publishing (New York, 1999)

  Tubby Meets Katrina, NewSouth Books (Montgomery, 2006)

  For more about the next Tubby Dubonnet book, go to www.booksBnimble.com

  Other Books by Tony Dunbar

  Our Land Too, Pantheon Books (New York, 1971); Vintage Books (New York, 1972)

  Hard Traveling: Migrant Farm Workers in America, Ballinger (Cambridge, 1976; Co-Authored with Linda Kravitz)

  Against the Grain, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, 1981)

  Delta Time, A Journey through Mississippi, Pantheon Books (New York 1990)

  Where We Stand, Voices of Southern Dissent (Editor), NewSouth Books (Montgomery 2004), Foreword by President Jimmy Carter

  American Crisis, Southern Solutions: From Where We Stand, Promise and Peril (Editor), NewSouth Books (Montgomery 2008), Foreword by Ray Marshall

  CITY OF BEADS

  A Tubby Dubonnet Mystery

  Tony Dunbar

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, La.

  City of Beads: A Tubby Dubonnet Mystery

  Copyright 1995 by Tony Dunbar

  eBook ISBN 9781617507229

  Cover by Nevada Barr

  www.booksbnimble.com

  Originally published by:

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, NY 10016

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: May 2012

  This book is fiction. All of the characters and settings are purely imaginary. There is no Tubby Dubonnet or Sheriff Mulé, and the real New Orleans is different from their make-believe city.

  Digital editions by eBooks by Barb for booknook.biz

  For my mother and father

  Contents

  Praise

  More Tubby Dubonnet Mysteries

  Other Books by Tony Dunbar

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  Acknowledgments

  Sign Up…

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  Tubby Dubonnet Mysteries

  Other Books by Tony Dunbar

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  Down by the river, Potter Aucoin was putting up a hell of a fight, but he was losing it quick.

  He got in a solid clip on one of his attackers, right above the ear, with a rusty black iron jack handle. The man careened backward across the room and slammed against the wall, tipping over a filing cabinet. The other assailant, the smaller of the two but still linebacker size, leapt up behind Potter and wrapped his arms around him in a bear hug. He was blowing hot gusts of garlic into Potter’s face, yelling for his partner to get off the floor and help him.

  Although he was pinned, Potter managed to jab the sharp end of the jack handle into a soft part of the man holding him from behind. It dug into flesh, high on the thigh. He did it again, and a painful howl roared out of the mouth by his cheek. Potter’s arms came free, but not soon enough. The beefy one on the floor, his yellow paisley tie tangled up in his blue polyester shirt, had stopped seeing stars and got up. His meaty fist was armored by an old-fashioned ring of aluminum knuckles, and it swung in a wild haymaker that landed hard on Potter’s forehead. Potter’s last picture of humanity was of a stranger’s face, the mouth knotted in rage, before blood covered his eyes. Then the view in Potter’s fading mind changed to a sandy blue seashore, and he collapsed with the taste of fresh mangoes and papayas on his tongue.

  “Jesus Christ,” the man with the chain-link knuckles cursed as Potter slumped down into the arms of his gasping partner, just another stranger, who held the weight for a second, then let the limp sweaty body drop to the stained concrete floor.

  He stepped back with a curse, and said something like a prayer, before he gave the limp and bleeding form a tentative kick.

  “I think he’s dead,” he said.

  “Ah, no,” the bigger man complained. “That shouldn’t have killed him. Good God almighty, what a mess.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Tubby had taken a little time off. He had picked up some money from the Sandy Shandell case, and his current clients had no pressing problems that couldn’t be solved later, so he decided to treat himself. First he talked Raisin Partlow into driving down to Florida for a couple of weeks. Tubby rented a Lincoln Town Car with a built-in CD player, stuffed the trunk full of fishing tackle and firearms, and put an Igloo full of beer, bourbon, and orange juice in the backseat. They were on their way on the afternoon of a sunny day.

  Raisin played in real estate and law and mooched off his girlfriend, who was a nurse, so his schedule was flexible. On the first leg he and Tubby made it to the Flora-Bama Lounge on Perdido Key, and after hoisting a few they ended up spending the last hours of darkness snoozing in the car. They woke up at dawn and staggered down to the beach and into the crisp aqua waves of the Gulf of Mexico for a cold bracing dip. Rejuvenated and bare-chested, they proclaimed that it was good and cruised on down the arrow of beachside highway.

  They caught small flounder in the surf off Pensacola, camped out on Grayton Beach, and ate flaming saganaki, souvlaki, and diples in a Greek restaurant in Tarpon Springs. They went deep-sea fishing off Sarasota, and grilled redfish and wahoo on beaches all down the coast. As they went along they rented condos by the day or weekend and tried with good humor to pick up the ladies. Tubby had a little success with a divorcee from Connecticut who was down South for the season visiting her daughter. She told Tubby affectionately that his sunburned tummy reminded her of a baby’s behind. He and Raisin tossed that one back and forth all the way to Ke
y West: It was the Sunday morning of life.

  By then, however, Raisin’s nurse was getting a little strident on the telephone, and Tubby had to confess to himself that he was starting to miss the stress of work. After a last round of margaritas and postcards to the girls back home they decided to turn around.

  The trip back was fun, too. They stayed on the smallest roads they could find and kept to the interior, slowly traversing miles of sugarcane fields and orange groves, cruising past tiny hamlets built on patches of white sand carved out of the piney woods, and truckloads of migrant workers. Most of the faces they passed were black and stared with curiosity at the two voyagers sailing through in their hot-rod Lincoln. They bought boiled peanuts from every vendor they spied alongside the road and had important theological discussions as the miles slipped away.

  Nighttime on the Napoleon Avenue wharf, the warm air smelled ripe with chemical decay, rich with mud and decomposing fish and insects. Long black clouds in shapes like ravens marched through the forbidding sky and held the clean breezes from the Gulf at bay. Dark and ominous, the Mississippi River expelled organic vapors and diesel fuel. It made continuous soft sounds, the water lapping at the pier and the engines of towboats plowing steadily upstream. Even the abrupt crash of train cars starting to roll was absorbed in the night.

  Dull floodlamps posted high on the corners of the warehouse roof made sharp shadows out of rows of parked forklifts and turned the spaces between stacked packing crates into black alleyways.

  A small building a short distance from the warehouse clung to the side of the wharf, almost hanging over the water like a tree house. Low steel barges, resembling floating shoeboxes, were lashed to the pilings below, and creaked against the timbers each time a passing ship created a little wake, or a gust of wind stirred up a wave before it died. A window, grimy and shadowed now, had been built into each end of the structure, and a plastic sign bearing the legend EXPORT PRODUCTS was nailed to the door. Loud voices came from inside. They blew over the river and disappeared. No one was around to hear them anyway.

  “Shoot,” the smaller man said, and he shuddered. “Well, I guess he’s dead,” he said again. His name was Francis, but they called him Shakes because that’s what he did all the time.

  The big fellow, Courtney, caught his breath and studied his metal knuckles, the blood and little bits of skin stuck to them, then bent over and wiped them off on Potter’s pants leg.

  “This is a screwup. No way to make this look like an accident, is there?”

  “Yeah, he accidentally cracked his own head open. What are we going to do?”

  “I guess the best thing to do is try to hide him.” Courtney looked around the room, which was a small office furnished with a desk, some files, and piles of maps and rope and other maritime junk. Not many hideaways here. “Put out the lights. Let’s look outside.”

  The lights went out, and the door opened slowly with a small creak. Crickets whirred from a stand of willows growing in the mud at the end of the wharf, their trunks matted with rootlets left over from high water. A hundred yards down the wharf the towering hull of an oceangoing freighter loomed above the dock, and at some distance farther along men on a floodlit crane worked at getting a massive container positioned in its hold.

  “Let’s just toss him in the river,” the smaller man whispered.

  “Hell, no. He’ll float right down to the frigging French Quarter. Somebody’ll see him before we even get out of here.”

  “Weight him down?”

  “Maybe. But bodies have a way of coming right back up. Look here.” He pointed at the barge tied up below. “Let’s stick him in there.”

  “Genius at work,” his partner said, and they stepped quietly back to the shed to get Potter out.

  He was not hard for the two to carry, though the darkness was a handicap. They stepped clumsily over the doorsill and the rough planks of the dock. Just as they brought the body to the edge, where a steel ladder led down to the deck of the barge, a car approached slowly from behind the warehouse. The big man quickly went flat on the wharf, jerking his smaller companion down with him. Their arms linked over the dead body between them, and they got quite cozy, all but Potter.

  Headlights swept over the clock, followed by a spotlight. It was the Harbor Policeman, making his rounds, eating a Popeye’s chicken thigh while he looked over his dark domain, castles built of fifty-five-gallon drums, great spools of cable as thick as your wrist, crates of car parts it would take a crane to lift. He was feeling sorry for himself, thinking it was lonely out here—that there was nothing lonelier than prowling at night by yourself alone, listening to the drumbeat of your tires against the wooden planks, echoing off all that deep water. But he saw nothing out of the ordinary here. Lost in thought about scary things that could happen to a cop working solo, he drove on.

  “Shit,” Francis and Courtney both muttered together. They got busy again, pulling Potter to the edge of the wharf, then trying to slide him down the ladder. Finally they just let him drop the few feet onto the steel lid of the floating barge. He didn’t make much noise.

  It required only brute strength to roll the hatch cover back. The barge was not empty. It lay low in the water, topped with a pond of top-grade peanut oil from Georgia, refined in Cincinnati, brought down the river for shipment to Honduras as part of America’s foreign aid to that country. That was the business of Export Products. Francis and Courtney had no idea what the barge held, but the big man gave out another expletive when he stuck his arm into the black hole to investigate and it came up dripping.

  “Is this acid?” he gasped in a panic, looking toward the starry sky while his arm dripped all over his pants. “Good God, please let this not be acid. Let’s please just get this over with.”

  With Francis pushing and Courtney steering, they got Potter over the open hatch and pointed downward.

  “Heave-ho,” Courtney whispered, and Potter slid silently into the black hold.

  “Can you see him?” Francis asked.

  “I never expect to see him again,” Courtney said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” He pulled the hatch cover shut.

  Up the ladder they crept. A quick look showed no threats on the wharf, save the work crew on the distant crane, silhouetted by sodium vapor spotlights. Like mice scampering from the scene of some midnight mischief, the two jogged away leaving behind only a trail of oily droplets.

  A few moments later an engine came alive, faintly, and a pickup truck rolled out of the shadows of the warehouse, crossed the Public Belt Railroad tracks, and drove away into uptown New Orleans. The wee-hours crowd lined up outside Tipitina’s to hear Marcia Ball’s second set paid them no attention.

  Grubby and over their legal limits, Tubby and Raisin were finally back in New Orleans. They exited the interstate on Claiborne on a weekend morning about the time the parishioners were making early Mass. Tubby dropped Raisin off at his girlfriend’s house and drove off as soon as she answered the door. He did not wait to witness the joyous reception. He made it home and opened the place up. No one was there to greet him, which was just as well because he did not look his best.

  There were twenty-four messages on his answering machine. He listened to them idly, sipping a last beer, ruminating on how the world kept running along even when you stepped off it for a while. The last message was only a couple of hours old. It was the hysterical voice of Edith Aucoin. Potter, her husband, had been found dead, down at the Napoleon Avenue wharf. Come right away, she cried.

  CHAPTER 3

  Tubby shaved quickly and put on a fresh shirt from his closet. He left the Town Car, with its litter of dirty laundry, maps, beer cans, and fishing rods, in the driveway and took his own car, the Corvair Spyder convertible, which he had bought on a whim when his Thunderbird’s motor started knocking. The autumn morning was coming on hot, with silver clouds moving fast in the blue sky like mythical gods attacking the sun. The shocking pink crape myrtles waved in the morning breeze as he drove down th
e avenue toward the river.

  Potter’s business was right past the railroad tracks. He had found his niche there. He brought corn oil, peanut oil, and soybean oil down the river, poured it into metal drums, and shipped it off to Mexico and Central America. The operation was really as hole-in-the-wall as you could get, especially compared to the major port activity going on all around it. The last time Tubby had visited this wharf he had seen a couple of Potter’s whiskery workmen, wearing white oysterman’s boots and wielding squeegees, swab the last puddle of some gray oily glop off the hull of a barge and pump it into five-gallon plastic jugs marked USDA GRADE AA.

  “Does anybody, you know, strain that stuff before it goes to Mexico?” he asked Potter. He hadn’t known at the time how ironic the question was.

  Potter had just shrugged and scratched his chin. Whenever the Coast Guard, or anyone else from the government, passed by, he was gone. He had little use for any restraints on his God-given right of free enterprise. He saluted the flag. Potter took care of most of his business his way, with a phone in his car and a fax machine at his house.

  He had gone missing about a month earlier, before Tubby had begun his Florida journey. Edith Aucoin had called Tubby and all of Potter’s other friends. She said he had disappeared a couple of times before, but only for a night at a time. She was getting worried. None of them could tell her anything, so she called the police. They checked around in the desultory way they pursue missing husbands, but had no success. Tubby hadn’t heard any more about it, and actually he had forgotten the whole thing until he got Edith’s message on the machine. The Aucoins weren’t people he saw every day.

  Early on a Sunday there was more activity on the river than on the city streets. Tubby had to wait for a Public Belt Railway train to clank past. The brakeman hanging on the last car waved him through.

  As soon as he drove through the gate in the floodwall Tubby could see the police and emergency vehicles gathered on the wharf around the Export Products shop. Only the ambulance had its flashing light on. Its two operators were sitting inside, running the engine with the windows rolled up, in a hurry to go nowhere. A Sheriff’s Department car and a Harbor Police car were parked off to one side, and uniformed men lounged around both, talking quietly, in repose. The only hustle and bustle was at dockside, where some cops were working the area, measuring and observing things and taking notes. Below them, on the deck of a barge, a pair of detectives were walking around looking for whatever they could find. Seagulls trailing an upriver-bound ship hovered over their heads laughing for handouts.