Fat Man Blues: A Hard-Boiled and Humorous Mystery (The Tubby Dubonnet Series Book 9) (2 page)

He approached the witness, stood close to him, and smiled in a friendly way.

“Tell us again, Officer, if you will, what exactly did the defendant say to you?”

“Yeah. So she said, ‘Hey, babe, do you want to do the act?’ I said, ‘How much?’ And she said, ‘Forty dollars.’ I might have joked something, like, ‘Do you take credit cards?’ Just to lighten things up and put her at ease. Which it did. She laughed and said, ‘No, babe, don’t you have any cash?’ I showed her two twenties, and she got into the car.”

“Did you do ‘the act’?” Tubby asked sternly.

“Of course not.” Officer Tuttle was offended. “I’m married. I told her she was under arrest.”

“She didn’t try to touch your body?”

“Certainly not.”

“And you didn’t touch her?”

“Just to put on the handcuffs.”

“She didn’t disrobe, or undo any buttons or anything?”

“Well, she had on a miniskirt and her blouse was pretty much already unbuttoned. But no.”

“What happened when you told her she was under arrest?”

“She just started crying, and she kept crying all the way to the station.”

Tubby turned away and took a few steps as if to think. Then he swung back around. The maneuver seemed of mild interest to the judge.

“Officer Tuttle,” Tubby asked sweetly, “what was this ‘Act’?”

“Well, you know. Everybody knows. I’ve been around a long time, and I know what the girls do for forty dollars.”

“Oh, really? I don’t know. Maybe she’s an ‘act-tress’? Could she have been offering to light your cigar? Could she have wanted to barbeque hot dogs with you?” Tubby’s voice was rising. “Could she have wanted to read your palm? Could she have wanted to shine your shoes?”

“Now hold on…” the judge began.

“No, of course not!” Officer Tuttle exploded. “She was offering, you know, unnatural sex!”

“What kind of sex exactly?”

“I don’t like to say the words.”

“Did she ever say the words?”

“No. I told you…”

“Judge,” Tubby interrupted, “the defense moves for a dismissal.”

The judge shook her head and stared at the policeman.

“Your Honor…” The ADA was on her feet, but the judge halted her with an upraised hand.

“You don’t want to say the words, Officer?” she inquired politely.

“Not really, ma’am.”

“And she didn’t say anything more descriptive than ‘the act’?”

“I guess not, Judge, but we both know what she meant.”

Her Honor took a deep breath. “Case dismissed,” she said. And the gavel came down.

Out in the hall, the Assistant DA was stuffing papers into her briefcase and scowling.

“Can you believe that?” she asked Tubby.

He just shrugged. She shouldn’t have brought the case to trial in the first place.

Carrie Mae wanted to hug him. “Does this mean it’s over? I’m free?”

“Free as a bird,” Tubby told her.

“You are a great, great lawyer!”

“Thanks. Now about my bill…”

“Oh, I’ll get the money,” Ms. Sunshine said, grinning broadly with full red lips and arching a crooked eyebrow. “And it won’t take me long.”

He watched her hurry though the hallway, out the doors and down the twenty-four granite steps to the sunny, hot and free streets of New Orleans.

The lawyer gave her a minute, then threw back his shoulders and marched briskly after her. He had, after all, just won a trial, and he had every right to strut and smile.

The incident with the church bell made a great difference in “Fat Man” Spooner’s life. To begin with, he stopped answering to “Fat Man” and became again Angelo. Other transitions also came quickly.

Immediately after his former partner and Correctional Center cellmate got squashed, Angelo had wandered aimlessly through Uptown neighborhoods, stunned and oblivious to his surroundings. He eventually found himself sitting in a cramped coffee house on St. Andrew Street. He recalled staring into his coffee cup, swirling the sugar around, looking for a message from God. He had, of course, already gotten a big one, but he was looking for some inner meaning in an otherwise unfathomable event, something that could serve as a signpost for the rest of his life.

He became aware, in time, that his eyes were fixed on a small yellow brochure tacked to a bulletin board hanging beside his table. The words slowly came into focus:

LOOKING FOR LIFE’S MEANING?

POTIONS AND CHARMS

LOVE INCENSE

HOLY WATER

PALM READINGS (SECOND OPINIONS)

There was an address for Sister Soulace on Magazine Street, and it wasn’t far away.

Angelo dropped a few coins on the table, got his ungainly body in motion, and set off searching for his purpose.

Sister Soulace helped him out. After a brief interview she welcomed this fresh innocent into her store and put him to work. And she gave him a little room in the back, since he was afraid the police would be looking for him at his own small apartment in Mid-City.

She was thin, not much bigger than Angelo’s arm, and she was often quite witchlike in appearance, covered in silk batik robes and wearing a small red turban wound tightly around her head. But when she let her black hair fall to her shoulders in the evenings and offered him a glass of Captain Morgan or peppermint schnapps, she was sultry and not unattractive.

She owned a 1988 Cadillac Brougham that had started out burgundy in color but had mellowed to purple. Sister Soulace was afraid to drive it so Angelo was tasked with delivering the many products she sold to her bedridden customers’ homes. He learned all he could about each item of merchandise so that he could interest the customers in trying the whole line, sales for which he earned a commission. He was convinced that he was atoning for his errant past and doing good for people.

Sister kept her fortune telling, or “therapy sessions” as she called them, to herself, and exiled him to the outer showroom when her special clients arrived. But Sister was generous with information about the sources of her candles and oils, the formulas she used in making some of the medicines she concocted herself, and the beneficial properties of her Holy Water.

The Holy Water intrigued him the most, since it was intended to purify the mind and the body and produce good fortune in life, all things that Angelo craved. Sister said it came from a spring near Picayune, Mississippi, and had been blessed by a priest in Waveland. Angelo sold it at the store for three dollars a cupful, and he delivered plastic liter bottles of it to shut-ins all over the Irish Channel for which he collected ten dollars apiece. People swore by it. The infirm tended to get well.

There came a time when Sister Soulace asked Angelo to drive her to Mississippi to get a new supply of Holy Water for her shelves. The drive up Interstate 59 and through the piney woods had a spiritual component, in that Sister pointed out various small shrines of significance such as a lone, tung nut tree here and an isolated eagle’s nest there, which, she solemnly confided, carried metaphysical meaning— “authority” she called it. However, the Holy Water source itself was a great disappointment.

It was, in essence, a white plastic pipe protruding horizontally from the leafy bank of a creek called Boley, from which flowed a steady stream of water. It was clear of debris, no doubt, but the pipe was presided over by a red-bearded hermit who looked anything but holy. He wore a sweat-stained T-shirt and torn, smelly jeans and he appeared to be drunk.

Their trip home, carrying a trunk load of plastic water jugs, took them quite near to Waveland, but Sister Soulace said there was no need to stop. The priest, she explained, had already performed his blessing ahead of time and sent it through the heavens. Angelo was struck with the possibility that this might be a hoax.

It got him to thinking.

He did like the water business and the wondrous effects that drinking it seemed to have on people, but he definitely didn’t want to play any tricks on God. And he was beginning to think that Sister Soulace was a little unstable.

Coincidentally, Angelo’s mother had bequeathed to him at her death a small property in the Bywater, which his father had once used to fix cars. It had on it a wobbly shed made of termite infested composition board, and over the years it had become packed with useless car parts, rusty hardware, old paint cans, and a sofa in which rats and mice nested. He remembered a scary collection of greasy tools including, now that he thought about it, a double-bladed hatchet, an axe really, since it was at least thirty inches long, which some blacksmith must have forged a hundred years ago.

A rotting fence wobbled around the perimeter. But the neighborhood was on the upswing. Some nearby houses, in this district beyond the French Quarter and close to the river, had begun to come into artsy affluence. Newer paint and younger people were appearing and beautifying the shotgun houses that shared the block with environmentally questionable automobile chop-shops and ship suppliers. The old vacant lot, however, had been allowed to grow weeds without disturbance.

When he was a young boy, no aspect of this property had ever interested Angelo except a decaying circle of orange bricks in the yard. It was about three feet high and four feet in diameter, and it was covered with an old piece of plywood.

It was, in fact, a well, hundreds of years old perhaps, and he was strictly forbidden to go anywhere near it. When curiosity got the better of him and he shoved the plywood aside, what he saw below was pure, frightening darkness and danger. Timidly, he dropped in a piece of a brick and heard it make a splash, not so far down. He quickly covered the well back up, afraid that something might escape, and forgot about it. Until now.

Why not produce holy water right here in New Orleans? he thought. It could possibly, if Sister’s water was any guide, cure people.

Tubby had an old friend, a lawyer, E.J. Chaisson, whose family owned several blocks in the French Quarter. Being a lawyer himself, well-situated, and deeply absorbed in Mardi Gras society, E.J. rarely needed any legal advice. But he liked to eat lunch, and he called Tubby seemingly out of the blue to invite him to Tableau. It was a fairly new place, carved out of Le Petit Théâtre du Vieux Carré, a block off Jackson Square.

E.J. was already seated when Tubby arrived, but he stood up to shake hands. A natty dresser, favoring Italian suits from Rubensteins, he was a precise man who combed his silver hair straight back and stared intently at you with guileless eyes that strangely seemed ready to pop out of his head.

“Good to see you,
mon ami
,” he said in one of the several accents he affected.

“Same here, E.J. You’re looking well.”

“I’m staying out of jail,” E.J. bragged, as they sat across from one another.

The tables were made of solid wooden planks, the décor was French countryside. The ceilings were tiled and the wall cabinets were cypress. The restaurant featured an open kitchen and open French doors allowing the breezes and colors of St. Peter Street to flow inside. Jacquard napkins with “Tableau” embroidered upon them in French blue graced each setting. There was much to see and appreciate. It was crowded.

“I didn’t realize they served sandwiches,” Tubby said inspecting the menu.

“Yes, but that’s not for me. I’m having the BBQ Shrimp and Grits.”

Tubby’s eyes had been drawn to the fried oyster po-boy, but he decided to follow his host’s lead and select an entree. “Steak sounds pretty good,” he said. “Are you having anything to start?”

“I think a bowl of seafood gumbo. Ah, here’s our waiter.”

A tall young man with a white shirt and black pants appeared.

E.J. ordered a Pimms Cup. Tubby looked over the specialty cocktails but decided to stick with the familiar— a Bloody Mary on the rocks. He also ordered a turtle soup and Les Petits Filet Mignon and Frites. The waiter disappeared.

“How’s business?” Tubby asked.

“I should ask you. I keep seeing you in the news. Something about Lee Harvey Oswald?”

“That was nothing.” It had actually been something— a highly distressing series of events culminating in a confrontation, deadly to others, with the “Night Watchman,” and he didn’t want to rehash it. “Let’s talk about the French Quarter. Are rents good?”

“They are so high you wouldn’t believe, and that’s fantastic.” E.J. paused when the drinks came along with a basket of bread. The men each took sips. “The bars, the galleries, the men’s clubs, all are making good money so they can all afford to pay a premium rent. The only problem is some of the tenants make unreasonable demands about things we can’t control, like water and electricity.”

“Because they don’t work?”

“No, because it is sometimes impossible to detect whose pipes and wires are going through whose meter and who may be bypassing the meters entirely.”

“It’s a very old city.”

“Yes, but there are always new ideas to invest in, and that’s why I wanted to speak with you.”

Tubby sat back to hear the pitch, but at that moment the soups arrived. The roux-colored gumbo contained plump oysters, shrimp and crabmeat simmering with okra and was served over popcorn rice. The waiter splashed sherry into Tubby’s golden turtle soup.

For a minute they savored their hot first course in silence.

“I have put some money into a new business,” E.J. resumed. As he began to describe it, his eyes glowed. “Artisan beer, artisan rum, artisan cheese, all of these things are popular, but other people are already doing them. How about, I asked myself, artisan water?”

“Isn’t that what comes from Abita Springs across the Lake?”

“Sure, but those are big outfits.” A crease appeared in E.J.’s brow. “They’re also old hat. Nothing really special or new from a consumer’s point of view. What I am talking about is truly unique. Premium water, produced right here in New Orleans and coming, not from the river mind you, and not from some far distant spring, but from an ancient well, dug by hand and dating perhaps to the very founding moments of our city.”

“Ancient, artisan, artesian water?”

“Exactly. I might use that. And it has a nice label and possibly even healing properties. The producer thinks so. I estimate it can fetch six bucks for half a liter at retail.”