Free Fat Man Blues: A Hard-Boiled and Humorous Mystery (The Tubby Dubonnet Series Book 9) by Tony Dunbar

aftermath of Katrina, Christine had been kidnapped and abused by a deranged prison escapee named Bonner Rivette. Having survived that ordeal she now considered herself bullet proof.
    Tubby didn’t argue with her. Christine was supposed to be his for the afternoon anyway.
    * * *
    The old front gate made out of galvanized roofing tin had been replaced by wrought iron welded into a pretty pattern over thick sheets of black steel. The doorbell was under a brass plate on which “Angelo’s” was handsomely engraved, but there was no response when Christine pressed it. Tubby called Angelo’s phone, but no luck. The gate wasn’t locked, however, and it creaked halfway open when pushed. Tubby stuck his head inside but there was nothing much to see except a wooden building painted turquoise with orange trim, its door ajar. Christine tried to edge past him. He elbowed her out of the way.
    “Hey, Angelo,” Tubby called, entering the yard. “Anybody home?”
    From inside the shed there was a humming noise, like a small motor running. There was no activity and no sign of people about except a bicycle leaning against the fence. Tubby went over to the shed and pulled open the barn-like door.
    The hum got louder. He peered inside. It was very bright, lit by overhead florescent lights. The sound came from a pump hooked up to pipes that ran through the wall, evidently to the well, and there was a stainless steel contraption not much bigger than a microwave that was apparently intended to channel the water through a nozzle into plastic bottles. Crates of them, empty and full, lined the walls and were stacked all over the floor, where there also happened to be the prone body of a man wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt.
    His head had been nearly severed off, but not quite. The dead eyes stared inappropriately away at a right angle to his shoulders. There was no need to check out the gaping mouth, frozen in a horrified scream, or the unblinking eyes, black pits of pain, to know that the man wasn’t living. The sound of the motor wouldn’t go away.
    Christine looked over his shoulder and gasped but caught herself. “That puddle of blood around his neck still looks wet,” she said weakly, “but that’s not Angelo.”
    Sure enough, Tubby saw nothing in the lifeless white face to resemble the healthy, fat man with wavy black hair who stared at him smiling on the labels of a thousand Elixir bottles.
    “Makes you wonder where Angelo is.” Tubby used his cell phone to call 911.
    * * *
    The policemen, who began to arrive slowly about 30 minutes after Tubby made the call, wondered the same thing. They also wondered who Tubby and Christine were but got that straightened out in a few minutes. A big African American cop checked the corpse for a pulse and herded the visitors outside. They were told to stick around. A plainclothesman eventually showed up. He went inside the shed.
    The lawyer and his daughter wandered over to the well. It was securely covered so there wasn’t much to see. It didn’t look like it could possibly be a hiding place for a killer, assuming that the stiff on the floor hadn’t cut off his own head.
    The detective emerged and approached the pair.
    “I’m Lieutenant Mathewson,” he said.
    Tubby introduced himself. “I got a call about an hour ago from a Mr. Angelo Spooner, who asked me to meet him here.”
    “Do either of you know the man inside?”
    “No,” Tubby said. Christine shook her head.
    “The name on his drivers’ license is Michael Battistella. Mean anything?”
    Again, they both shook their heads.
    There was a small commotion at the front gate, and a reporter and her photographer barged in.
    Usually, Tubby wasn’t happy to see Kathy Jeansonne, a veteran news hustler who had switched over to the
Advocate
when the
Times-Picayune
moved to Alabama. She spotted Tubby instantly and made a beeline for him.
    “Counselor,” she said hungrily, eyeing him as prey.
    “Kathy,” Tubby acknowledged