Night Watchman (The Tubby Dubonnet Series Book 8) Read online

  “Hey, what!” the protester objected and shot a bird at his assailant, a person who was only a blur in the back seat.

  “Assholes!” the demonstrator’s girlfriend screamed, and more projectiles came out of the car.

  “Communist bastards!” someone shouted.

  Suddenly there was a bright flash and a pop from the back of the car.

  The boy dropped his sign and looked down at his chest in dismay. Blood was bubbling out, a red ribbon following the buttons of his neat shirt, dripping over his belt. His knees buckled.

  Everyone was screaming. The car lurched forward and bucked the curb. It swerved across the streetcar tracks, scattering people, and blasted away from the scene on Canal Street.

  Tubby dropped to the pavement and tried to stuff his own shirttails into the boy’s wound. As bystanders fled, the three undercover cops ran between cars and excitedly inspected the victim. The wounded boy squinted at the relentless sun and closed his eyes.

  A new crowd formed, trying to see what had happened.

  Tubby’s attempts to staunch the flow of blood failed miserably. His hands were covered with it. He looked up at the cops helplessly.

  “Poor Parker!” one of the girls wailed.

  It seemed to take a long time, but an ambulance finally sirened its way through traffic. It carried the pale demonstrator and two of the cops away and left everyone else milling about on the curb, except for one of the young women whom the police pushed to the sidewalk and arrested for trying to claw her way into the ambulance. The other cop dragged her around the corner.

  Tubby and Dan ran the dozen blocks to Charity Hospital while the remnants of the demonstrators dispersed, presumably in search of sympathetic doctors and the free lawyer the street people used. When Tubby and Dan eventually found the Emergency Room, they were told to sit in the Pine-Sol-smelling waiting area with the gasping sick people and all the crying kids with broken arms. Finally they were called up to the desk by a white-bonneted nurse who informed them that their friend was dead.

  “Did he have any family?” the nurse asked.

  Tubby and Dan looked at each other sadly.

  IV

  Tubby most often avoided thinking about the human condition. He had not been too sure about his own for months. He now found himself in Naples soaking up the sunset, and he didn’t have a clue what he was doing here. Once upon a time his aim had been true. Turn that sundial back ten or fifteen years, and he had known exactly what he was doing.

  In those days he was a quick-thinking New Orleans lawyer on the make, and he was succeeding at it. He had scored big in the Pan Am airplane disaster and opened his expansive and expensive office on the 43rd floor of the Place Palais Building in downtown New Orleans, with its custom millwork and a splendid conference table. He had a slick and aggressive partner in Reggie Turntide, who could bring in rich clients. And he was married to his redheaded college sweetheart, Mattie Berkenbaum. They had an excellent family, consisting of three happy little girls.

  Then it all started to unpeel, one layer at a time. Inexplicably, Mattie announced that she was moving out to find more space for herself. Actually, it was Tubby who ended up moving. Mattie got the nice house on State Street and most of the time she got the kids. Then his partner Reggie disappeared. Dan Haywood reemerged briefly in his life but soon was senselessly, terribly, shot dead during the great Mardi Gras flood. Tubby distractedly ran his fingers through his blond hair for another minute and soaked up the sun.

  After that, all the violence and corruption in New Orleans began to shove aside, in his mind, the city’s alluring beauty, color and pageantry. Tubby began to sense the existence of a criminal web, woven by a toxic spider, a truly evil presence, a crime czar. So obsessed with this evil force did Tubby become that he could almost smell it. The quest to find the Czar took him deeply into the city’s underworld and now, even with the brutal elimination of the high and mighty Sheriff Mulé, he couldn’t say for certain that the menace had been exterminated.

  Then came Katrina, the big one, that turned the world as he knew it upside down. He still couldn’t fathom how it had happened, but the storm had changed everything. Along with the mountains of old refrigerators, water heaters, wet sheetrock and backyard junk hauled away by the government went the assuredness that the carefree city would always be the same: that there would always be a Schwegmanns; that the Nevilles would always play “Hey Pocky Way”; that Ninth Warders would always fill the nosebleed seats in the Dome; that sleepy sunny days would always sashay along, very sweetly, in four-four time.

  And paradoxically, as a result of all that loss and destruction, Tubby found his love for the city returning.

  So what the heck was he doing in Florida, the land of the Everglades and orange juice fudge? He was here with his rich girlfriend, of course, though she was a bit larcenous. He was on the rebound, or resurface. His last love, Hope, with whom he had survived Katrina, had succumbed to a long illness that had too quickly consumed her completely. In all candor, it was probably too early for him to be dating ladies, but Tubby had been down in the dumps and wanted cheering up. And he was not a monk.

  Back in Louisiana, his daughters were all doing just fine in his opinion. Debbie, his oldest, still married, was the vice-president of a start-up investment company, and had a 12-year-old basketball player at Newman named Arnie, but called “Bat.” Christine, who had had a miserable time during Hurricane Katrina, was now a paleontologist at LSU and lived with a girlfriend. Collette, the youngest, had never strayed far from home. She was currently on her third fiancé, a rap performer who claimed to be from the Dry Tortugas. All in all, just fine. They possibly didn’t need him, hard as that was to believe. But he found that he was starting to miss them and the exuberance of the city.

  New Orleans, when you stepped back and looked at it, was also doing really great. All cleaned up. Bursting with young entrepreneurs, movie trailers blocking every street. Here by the beaches of Florida he was starting to know what it means to miss New Orleans.

  “I shouldn’t be sitting here on my butt. I don’t deserve this paradise,” he lectured himself. “I should be headed home. But first let me go see what Marguerite has on her mind.”

  V

  A few days after the shooting on Canal Street, in a cramped downtown office with nothing on the walls, the first order of business was to discuss the demonstrator they had killed.

  Mostly the young men conducted their meetings in English but it was definitely bueno to chime in with the occasional Spanish epithet or significant old saying. The meetings stuck to a strict agenda, which was always laid out by their Leader, whose father had been the Leader before him. The members were serious about the program because their mission was extremely serious. They avoided using each other’s real names at these meetings. Big Brother could be watching. No doubt about it.

  Individual assignments were handed out at their gatherings and if expenses were expected, the Leader provided the details. The Recorder kept track of it all, and Security kept them all safe. The Night Watchman saw to the purity of their ideology and the delivery of their message.

  Much of what the youth group did was secretive, naturally, but behind them were even more hidden figures, known as the “Committee.” It was the source of most of their funds. The youth group members knew who some of the men on the Committee were because those old warriors occasionally appeared before the group to give inspirational talks. One of the Committee was “Senior,” and another was known as the “Judge.” No full names, please, but of course the members knew who they were. These giants were all important public figures.

  The boys venerated them. After all, they had killed Kennedy, yes? And gotten away with it. Anyway, that was what the whisperers said. To a man, both young and old, they were steadfast and true to their cause, which was to “Free Cuba” and “Halt the March of Socialism.”

  Almost all of these boys, there were no girls, had parents who had fled the island. Their property had been
stolen by the Communists. Three of the youths had fathers, or uncles, who had sailed into the Bay of Pigs with Ricardo Duque and who had been betrayed there by JFK. These soldiers, whether they were alive or dead, were like gods.

  “Shooting deviants is a good thing,” the Leader said. “That was a good clean kill.”

  “Was that in the escalation plan?” his Second-in-Command asked. “Was that what we meant by taking the ball to the…”

  “The scum.” Another boy, the Recorder, finished his sentence.

  “Is anyone pointing a finger at us?” the Leader asked. “Should we have any fear of an investigation?”

  “No. None whatsoever,” came the deep voice of Security, the one who was in the Young Police League. “They’re going through the motions, but no one identified your car or the license plate.”

  “That’s what I hear, too,” the Night Watchman agreed.

  “Then we’ve had good luck,” the Leader said.

  “No. It was good execution,” Security replied.

  “Lord’s will,” the Night Watchman muttered.

  “Who is available to run the mimeograph machine tonight?” the Leader asked.

  Three hands went up.

  “I’ve got to take my mother to church,” the Vice-President explained.

  VI

  After the shooting on Canal Street, Tubby lost his way for a while. He never did tell his father or his friends back home what he had seen. Witnessing the death of the boy he knew only as “Parker,” however, dramatically altered his intention of enlisting in the Marines. Somehow the mindless violence he had witnessed connected in his mind with the unending daily tragedies overseas, which were also featured stories on the 6 o’clock news.

  Unaware that his recruit had become troubled, the Tulane counselor, true to his word, got Tubby into the university.

  The French Quarter spirits he had known so briefly scattered to the winds. He got a postcard from Dan explaining that he was enlisting in the National Guard to “subvert from within.” He got into the Guard based on a recommendation from his state representative in Canton, Mississippi. One of the girls moved off to the Blue Ridge Mountains where life was simple and pure. His friend Raisin Partlow stayed in touch. He dropped out of his Mississippi college and was immediately drafted and sent to Vietnam. In his Tulane dorm Tubby received regular letters from Raisin, who was fixing helicopters near Danang in Vietnam. The consistent theme, repeated over and over, was “Don’t the fuck even think about coming over here, whatever you do!”

  But Tubby, the small town boy, thought he probably should go over there. He was supposed to join the ROTC as part of his school financial package but, wouldn’t you know it, someone burned the Tulane ROTC building down the night the Chicago 7 came to town. One problem solved.

  School started going poorly. He became involved with a sophomore English major. In the ways of the time, what initially attracted him was that she had breasts like ripe cantaloupes, a comparison that came easily to him, having grown up on a farm. She was, however, very depressed as a general rule, not about the war or anything like that, but about her relationship with her father, her mother, her sisters. She would drink wine, then come over to Tubby’s room and cry. This had a chilling effect on his libido, which in turn depressed him, too. So he broke it off.

  Events began to spin faster and faster. Dan was expelled from the Guard as an undesirable, and then went “undercover,” he said, to organize for some union. Most of the Tulane undergraduate students began to seem preppy beyond belief, or were too far into drugs to appeal to Tubby. Spirits low, he gave vent to an irrational burst of anger at a teacher about some interpretation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The professor, feeling physically intimidated, kicked him out of class. In retaliation Tubby quit school.

  In a split second he was drafted. Right before his induction ceremony, Raisin came home.

  “What the fuck did I tell you, man? Don’t go there!” he insisted over Heinekens at Fat Harry’s. Beer had become legal for 18-year-olds.

  “Of course I’m going,” Tubby said angrily. “What else am I supposed to do?”

  Two weeks after he crossed the line, leaving aimless civilian life behind, the peace accord went out the window, and the National Liberation Army raced south. In the middle of his basic training at Fort Polk, Saigon fell.

  Tubby never left the country. In fact, he never left New Jersey. Due to his size he spent what was left of his two years of national service as a Military Police trainee. As an MP, he guarded the tarmac at Fort Dix and got to salute planeloads of men, those upright and those laid flat, coming home from various parts of the globe. In his country’s service he also competed on the Army’s wrestling team, and he got every muscle in his body bruised and torn by far better athletes than the blond boy from Louisiana. After beating the crap out of him they gave him the name “Tubby”. He was cool with that. They called themselves much worse things. Then he was discharged.

  Raisin, Dan Haywood, and Tubby all came home with at least one thing in common. All three now knew there was definitely one thing that they never wanted to do again. Be in the Army. A noble calling, but…

  Tubby’s Greyhound took him back to his hometown of Bunkie. A month later he was readmitted to Tulane. Only this time around his course in life was straight. With his muscles and bones mending, and his tuition paid by the government, Tubby began to see the point of getting educated. He met another English major named Mattie, and they started sleeping over at each other’s apartments. Tubby made the grades and graduated. Then he went to law school, and the rest, as they say, is history.

  VII

  The boy who couldn’t work the mimeograph machine for the anti-socialist youth group didn’t take his mother to church. That was just an excuse. Instead he went home and crawled into bed where he stayed for two entire days. He told his mother he was tired, and she made him pay the price. She served him sopa de pollo and rubbed hot chili powder on his chest. She fed him nonni fruit and massaged VapoRub into his feet.

  He had not been in the car that day, the day when they shot the war protester, and he hadn’t even known it had happened until he went to the meeting. The matter-of-fact way it was reported to the group horrified him.

  “You’re missing your classes,” his mother prodded him. “Here, have some soup…”

  Yes, he was missing classes. He was supposed to be carrying a full load at the University of New Orleans, and he was blowing it. Why had he ever gotten involved with this group? They were totally loco.

  But of course he knew why he went to those meetings. His father spent all of his time listening to Cuban and Miami radio on the shortwave. Dad was so embittered by the revolution that he had barely been able to work for fifteen years.

  “Our shoe store is sitting right there, right where we left it,” he told his son. “It was my father’s store. It was my store. I have the keys, and we could walk right in tomorrow. It is the place where you were born. It is yours now, Son, just as soon as we go back.”

  But the boy had his doubts. He couldn’t remember anything much about Cuba, except for grainy mental photographs of a pink stucco house shrouded by green banana trees. And he remembered a fearsome red parrot who followed him from room to room defecating. His mother had given him birthday parties and invited lots of friends, but he wasn’t positive that they had ever happened in Cuba. Maybe it was later, in Miami or later still in New Orleans. She gave him parties like that to this day.

  His father didn’t seem to be in any of these mental pictures. Maybe it was because his father was actually or figuratively always working in that damn store. Now Pop stayed home all the time and was eternally sad. He wasn’t a lot of help when it came to planning his son’s future.

  The boy saw a career for himself in banking, or in advertising maybe. His father just wanted the family to go back to Cuba and sell shoes.

  The boy’s girlfriend dropped by on the third day.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she as
ked.

  “I’m very tired and sick,” he said.

  She checked to be sure the mom wasn’t looking and then gave him a quick kiss on the lips and a firm squeeze on his crotch through his jeans.

  “Get up and go to school,” she said. So he did.

  He caught the bus out to the lakefront the next morning and returned to class, but it wasn’t really over. The group had killed someone. The frightened student looked for FBI men in the shadows of every oak tree.

  It was an unspeakable relief, as the days went by, to find no mention whatsoever of this crime in the newspapers. No TV. No nothing. None of his fellow conspirators reported anything that would concern any of them.

  Yet over the course of a month he had lost eleven pounds worrying.

  In time, however, the event faded into the past. In spite of this, he stopped going to the meetings. He explained to the group that his mother needed help around the house, since his father was always so sad. They bought that. By plodding through every day and applying himself, he eventually got his degree and went out in search of a career. Except at family gatherings, Cuba and international socialism rarely crossed his mind.

  But as life went on there was still that little, deep, scared place in his head.

  VIII

  It was on the flight back from Florida to New Orleans that Tubby again started thinking about that murder. He wasn’t sure why, since forty years had passed. Maybe it was the more recent senseless killing of the young man, Trayvon Martin, but, for whatever reason, he couldn’t get it out of his head. He wondered whether anything had ever been done about it. He knew that he had never been questioned by the police.

  In a strange way, his grown-up personality had been shaped by that bullet. Not all of his personality, of course. Before that had been a hazy stretch of undemanding days in Bunkie, and after that there had been the army, graduate school, a family, clients by the hundreds, all with stories to tell, lost loves, tragedies, and mysteries galore.