Tubby pushed past him and went into the living room with all of its orange and lime aluminum furniture. Tubby was packing a pistol this time, stuck in his belt by the small of his back and concealed by his jacket.
“Jeez, Tubby! This is a relief. I thought you might be dead.”
“You tried hard enough to kill me, and you almost took out Raisin and a whole crowd of people parading in the street.”
“No, I don’t think the phone had sufficient range to take out a crowd. Three feet circumference, max.”
“What are you talking about?” Tubby got in his face. “You’ve attempted murder.”
Boaz cracked a little and collapsed back into a purple chair, almost tipping over backwards. “I tried to stop it, Tubby. I called you but you didn’t answer. I tried to disconnect it remotely, but I just wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to do it. I admit my offense. And here you are. My friend. I am so happy. How can you forgive me?”
“I can’t forgive you, you crazy nutcase. We’ve known each other for years. I’m turning you over to the police. Really, you ought to be locked up in a padded cell.”
“Tubby, please. Think of all the good times. All the winners I tipped you to at the Fairgrounds.”
“Who were you afraid of enough to make you do this, this crazy thing?”
Boaz buried his head in his hands. “I can’t tell you,” he moaned. He recovered enough to pat his new beard.
“Last chance, Jason. I’m not fooling around, not with a maniac like you on the loose. Who was it? Pancera?”
At that name, Boaz hid his eyes behind the crook of an elbow and started to sob.
“This dude is stranger than a ‘610 Stomper,’ ” Tubby thought. Yet, strangely, his heart was starting to melt.
“This is all about something that happened when you were young, isn’t it, Jason? Were you the one who shot the boy, the peace demonstrator? That day when all the traffic was stopped on Canal Street because Kissinger was in town. It’s understandable. Back then there were only two worlds right? The Oakies from Muskogee and the hippies from San Francisco. You had to pick a side, right?”
“No,” Jason whispered. His voice was almost inaudible. “None of that made sense to me. It was the ‘Night Watchman.’ ”
Tubby wasn’t sure he had heard right. “The Night Watchman?” he repeated.
“I didn’t say that,” Boaz whispered.
“Yes, you did. Who is that?”
“Forget that. It was just a title. We all had some dumb title. I was the Viper.” Short for vice-president. The Night Watchman, I made that up. He was in charge of the mission. Makes no sense, right?”
“So? What was his name?”
“That I can’t say.”
“Why not?”
“I took an oath, and they would kill me.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Tubby said. “Was Pancera involved in all this?”
“He was the Recorder.”
“What’s that mean?”
“He kept the records. I don’t know. I made it up.”
“Who was the Leader?”
“I can’t say his name.”
“Nuts. What was the name of your group?”
“The ‘Boys’ Club.’ I don’t know. I can’t say.”
“Who was in it?”
“I can’t say.”
“You’d better say!” Tubby pulled the .45 out of his pants and pushed it into Boaz’s forehead just below his bushy hairline.
“Go ahead and pull the trigger, Tubby. I deserve it. I’ve led a miserable life. I have sinned. Oh yes, I have…”
“Oh, shut up,” Tubby cursed him. He holstered his automatic and yanked open the door to let in some fresh air. “Just look out for Raisin,” he said in parting. Raisin had it in him to be mean, and sometimes he was cold enough to leave you holding a handful of your own teeth.
The ‘Night Watchman,’ ” Boaz had said. So, the shooter hadn’t been Pancera.
But Pancera knew who it was.
XXV
In the morning Tubby met Flowers for a cup of coffee at the Trolley Stop, a busy 24-hour joint on St. Charles Avenue where no one ever bothered you. Tubby had his coffee with half-and-half. Flowers had his coffee with the “Southern Special,” consisting of three eggs over easy, hot biscuits and sausage gravy, four pieces of bacon, grits and butter, a slice of ham, and God knows what else.
“Very hungry,” he said. “I was up all night.”
He had gotten inside Pancera’s house when the old man went out to nighttime mass. Then after Pancera went home, Flowers got inside the church.
“This was not exactly legal.” He mentioned the obvious. “But I wasn’t observed.”
At the house Flowers had encountered, unfortunately, a housekeeper puttering about in the kitchen. Nevertheless, without being noticed, the detective was able to snoop around in Pancera’s den, or office. The room held a worn brown leather couch piled high with papers, a matching leather chair pulled up to a desk also covered with same, lots of books and no computer. Undoubtedly Pancera had a safe somewhere, but Flowers didn’t have time to look for it. Aside from bank statements and bills, there was unopened junk mail from dozens of political non-profits with names like the American Society for Tradition, Family and Property and the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights; in short, nothing very enlightening.
There were two intriguing items, however. At the very bottom of one of the ceiling-high bookcases was a box of yellowing newspapers from Father Charles Coughlin’s Little Flower Church in Detroit.
“I don’t know what that is,” Flowers admitted, “but the Father obviously hated Roosevelt and the Communists.”
“Pancera must be a collector,” Tubby said. “Those are from the 1930s. Coughlin was competing with Huey Long for the protest vote.”
“Okay, so then it’s way too dated to matter, but I thought maybe it was relevant.”
“What else?”
“A plaque on the wall from ‘The Marti Patriotic League’ with the inscription, ‘For Faithful Service’, and below that the initials ‘ACNI.’ ”
“So?”
“It had a date on it of June, 1977. I just thought, since it was from your time period, that I would mention it.”
“I see. That’s good. What about the church?”
“De nada. Pancera does have an office there, but it hasn’t got a thing in it except bulletins and old orange peels. There is a safe on the floor and I popped it. Inside was a pile of little bills, maybe a thousand dollars, and a jelly jar full of loose change.”
“Lots of dead ends.”
Flowers was mildly crestfallen.
“Crossing possibilities off the list is important, too,” he said. “At least that’s what they teach us in detective school.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest it wasn’t,” Tubby said contritely. “That ‘patriotic league’ thing may be worth something. Let’s call Cherrylynn.”
Flowers didn’t appear to be entirely pleased with this course of action, but Tubby dialed her up anyway. She was at the office, of course, and he gave her the name.
“Add it to your list,” he said.
* * *
Cherrylynn was fully engrossed in her list. She was coming up with a lot of information about Cuban-American youth groups in the 1960s and 70s, but most of them were centered around Miami. There was not much on the web about the Cubans of New Orleans, except for a brief mention in a footnote to a Wikipedia article and some references to the Special Collections material at Tulane University. Maybe it would be worth a trip uptown to see what the Tulane campus library had to offer. That, however, would probably require coordinating with Mr. Dubonnet and his alumni ID card to get access.
But this last name, ACNI, struck a small but rich vein. It stood for Association for Cuban Nationalist Infantry, and there was an extensive write-up about it in something called the “CIA Counter-Revolutionary Handbook, Second Edition, 1985.” She couldn’t find any explanation of what this so-called CIA document actually was or how it had found its way onto the Internet, but sure enough, it identified the founders of ACNI as one Hector Boaz (b. 1932) and Pablo Pancera (b. 1930) in Santiago, Cuba. Were these the fathers of two currently suspicious characters? She’d bet her paycheck that Tubby would think so.