Praise for TONY DUNBAR and the Tubby Dubonnet series:

“Hair-Raising… Dunbar revels in the raffish charm and humor of his famously rambunctious city.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Dunbar has an excellent ear for dialogue… His stylish take on Big Easy lowlife is reminiscent of the best of Donald Westlake and Elmore Leonard.”

—Booklist

“Dunbar catches the rich, dark spirit of New Orleans better than anyone.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Take one cup of Raymond Chandler, one cup of Tennessee Williams, add a quart of salty humor, and you will get something resembling Dunbar’s crazy mixture of crime and offbeat comedy.”

—The Baltimore Sun

“The literary equivalent of a film noir— fast, tough, tense, and darkly funny… so deeply satisfying in the settling of the story’s several scores that a reader might well disturb the midnight silence with laughter.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

 

NIGHT WATCHMAN

A Tubby Dubonnet Mystery

BY

TONY DUNBAR

 

booksBnimble Publishing

New Orleans, La.

Night Watchman

Copyright © 2015 by Tony Dunbar

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.

This book is available in both mobi and print formats.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-9861783-2-0

Print ISBN-13: 978-0-9861783-4-4

www.booksbnimble.com

First booksBnimble electronic publication: April, 2015

Digital Editions (epub and mobi formats) produced by Booknook.biz

Contents

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Full Table of Contents

I

Under baby blue skies, Tubby’s eyes roamed over a harbor full of brightly colored sailboats, looking for imperfections. There weren’t any. The sea on the horizon was flat, and the little specks of pleasure boats out beyond the pass powered across water smooth as silk under clouds like cotton balls. The harbor was framed by colorful minarets, tall condo towers, air-conditioned castles stacked high with balconies overlooking all the splendid water. Just like the balcony on which he sat, in a burnished aluminum chair tightly covered in bright yellow fabric. He was sipping a Beefeaters on ice. It was nice.

A tree-covered park below him surrounded a marina, which was neatly packed with vessels, sails furled, in repose. Sprinkled among the trees were civic artworks and popular amusements, including a canteen for selling beer and ice cream, about which children and adults clustered. The spacious public lawns were dotted with young parents, blankets on the ground, and their scampering infants.

Tubby beheld it all and lifted his heavy glass. He took a deep drink. Droplets of condensation fell onto his pants. This was, he could confirm, the most beautiful, sunny, sophisticated city on the Gulf of Mexico. Naples, Florida. It was created and must exist for no purpose but to make people happy.

“Happier by far if you have considerable assets,” he said out loud, not realizing he had done so.

All of the happiest citizens had them, assets that was. These citizens made up a majority, at least as far as this visiting tourist from New Orleans could tell, of the overall population. In any case the real people seemed to make their money feeding, watering, caring for, and selling land to the fortunate ones who had the scratch.

It was, however, quite hot here in August, reminiscent of New Orleans. Many people, he had observed, spent their days inside.

Two planes buzzed overhead, advertising Banana Tanning Oil on long banners trailing from their tails. They had taken off further inland and were off to crisscross the island beaches, hawking their beachy wares.

He watched the planes disappear behind the condo towers, through the tresses of extremely beautiful bromeliads. They hung from the roof over his head, which was itself the floor of an identical balcony above. Their orange and flaming red flowers, surrounded by tiger-striped fronds, begged, he imagined, to be pollinated. The sun was warm on his sandaled toes.

“I’m drinking again,” he observed to no one in particular and rose to go inside through the sliding doors.

All of the others, there were seven, had vodka, with olives or fruity flavors. He freshened his own drink in the kitchen and walked back through the party, winking at Marguerite in passing, and then went back to his balcony to shut them out again. A boat horn sounded across the harbor, signaling something a-coming from far away.

Even if you were hidden behind the balcony’s flowers, it was so bright outside you couldn’t open your eyes unless you were prepared to squint hard at the world. A beautiful tropical world it was, however, lush, though also quite spotless and clean. No question, things were good here. The Recession was over and high real estate prices had returned.

“Tubby, our guests are about to leave,” Marguerite interrupted from the space she had just created by sliding open the glass door, emitting a welcome gust of chill air. “Won’t you come inside?” She looked at him anxiously and hopefully, her red hair a halo.

Taking his drink along, he rejoined the party for the farewells. Though he was lost in the fog of gin and his own thoughts, he picked up the tail-end of a conversation. It was about a homicide victim, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black youth who had been pursued down the sidewalk of a nearby town by an armed neighbor. A fight ensued, and the neighbor killed the boy, claiming the protection of Florida’s “stand-your-ground” law.

“He just shot him for no reason,” said one of the guests, a pert retired interior decorator whose short hair was dyed a dark luminescent brown.

This little fragment of a conversation triggered a tiny click in his mind, which inexplicably sent him back to when he was a teenager, back to a dingy apartment in New Orleans. Back when…

* * *

The guests left. The door was closed.

“Whew, I’m exhausted,” Marguerite said. “Didn’t you have a good time, Tubby?” she asked as if the answer were important. “I’ve just met them, but they all seem like such really fantastic people. And just maybe they can be our new friends, friends just for the two of us.”

“All great. All good,” Tubby said, giving her hair a stroke. “Here, I’ll help you clean up.”

“No,” Marguerite said. “Let’s do that later. Right now I’d just like to take a shower. Then maybe, you know…” She gave him a gentle poke in the ribs.

He smiled and nodded. Marguerite affected a blush and danced away to the master bedroom.

Tubby watched her go, then remembered his empty glass. He went to the kitchen for another refill and took it back to the balcony. Where, in the glow of the descending sun, it was perfect. Where he closed his eyes, and remembered.

II

As a kid, Tubby had always imagined that he might be a crop duster, spraying Clearpath, Clincher and PropiMax in toxic clouds over the rice fields back home in Bunkie. But a high school wrestling trip to New Orleans changed his perspective profoundly. With the team’s chaperone, their youth minister, leading the way, they took a walking tour down Bourbon Street. The warm springtime air was rich with the aroma of mystery and (he later learned) pot. Long-haired kids about his age confronted his group, and everyone else who chanced by, hawking The NOLA Express. It was a smudgy paper with an obscene cover that sold for a quarter a copy. The street people also sold cool buttons protesting the war in Vietnam, each for a dime. Some of these vendors seemed earnestly businesslike, but others appeared to be hippies. Tubby had heard about hippies, but these were the first he had ever seen. The girls had on face paint and weren’t wearing bras.