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

be at the precinct,” he added.
    That being the case, Tubby thought it impolite to suggest his own office. There was a coffee shop in the lobby of the Place Palais building, and that’s where they agreed to meet in half an hour.
    Mathewson was a big Scot with a ruddy face and an ill-fitting chocolate-hued suit. Once they had carried their steamy cups from the counter and gotten seated, he got quickly to the point.
    “You slipped away from our murder scene before I could talk to you,” he said in a loud deep voice. “How’d you happen to be at Angelo’s water works when we got there?”
    “Angelo called and said he needed a lawyer. We were supposed to meet at my office this morning, but he was in a hurry. So I went there yesterday.”
    “Why?”
    “He said somebody was bothering him.”
    “Like who?”
    “He didn’t tell me. I never met Angelo, and I still haven’t.”
    “And when you got there?”
    “I went in, found a dead body, and called you.”
    “That was your daughter?”
    “Yes. Leave her out of this.”
    “She’ll corroborate what you say?”
    “Of course. She knows less about it than I do. We were just coming from lunch.”
    “Do you have any idea where Mr. Spooner might be now?”
    Tubby shook his head and studied the cop’s blank eyes.
    Mathewson stirred his coffee. Here came the interesting part.
    “If he was the killer, he used something like an axe, or a very big knife. Maybe a machete. There was only one blow.”
    Tubby nodded. That sure must have been a big machete. Right.
    “You know,” the policeman said, “Angelo has a criminal record.”
    “I did not know that,” Tubby said staring with innocent eyes over his cup of dark roast.
    “Yeah. Car theft and armed robbery. He’s on probation.”
    “Did he ever kill anybody?”
    “No.”
    Tubby shrugged. “Maybe somebody else did it.”
    “Any candidates? I’m open.”
    “Like I said, I didn’t know the guy. He just called me on Friday.”
    “Why you?”
    Tubby didn’t plan to direct attention to E.J. Chaisson, whom he regarded as an unlikely candidate to be an axe murderer or an accomplice to anything more secretive than the identity of Comus. He shrugged again. “People get your name in all sorts of places. Maybe in jail.” It could be true.
    “You know,” the detective added, “that property is unsecured. We took down the crime scene tape and left it the way we found it.”
    That wasn’t good. “I’ll check around and see if anybody might want to lock it up,” Tubby said.
    “Sure. And let me know, would you, if you get a lead on your client.”
    “Not my client yet,” Tubby repeated.
    “There was a card on his desk: ‘New Orleans Smooth Deals, Ltd., Frenchy Dufour, President.’ Mean anything to you?”
    “Nope.”
    “It does to me. He’s a character. He drove an assassination van. Frenchy thinks he’s a ‘Godfather’.”
    Tubby shook his head. “Maybe I should, but I still don’t know him,” he said.
    “You ever listen to country music?” Mathewson asked.
    “Of course. I grew up in Bunkie.”
    “I heard you were a right guy,” Mathewson boomed. He stood up to go. “Maybe we should get together for a beer sometime.”
    The lawyer was caught off guard and laughed. “Who’d you hear that from?”
    “Some cop you went to law school with.” That would be Fox Lane, who was nearly killed on the job and was now retired from the force.
    “Sure,” Tubby said. “We could do that sometime.” Mathewson seemed like an okay guy, too, for a policeman. But he was surprised by the offer of friendship. He hadn’t had one for a while. “I’ll look forward to it,” he said. It never hurt to drink a beer or to know a cop.
    * * *
    The next day was Tuesday and by the afternoon Tubby found himself home alone. There was still enough daylight at 5 o’clock to undertake an overdue project, so he donned old sneakers, fixed a Bourbon and ice, no mixer, in a plastic Mardi Gras cup, and went outside to clean up