Big Easy Bonanza

you do to stay in shape?”
    “I chase after love,” he said, and he kissed her on the back of her neck. A shiver ran all the way down her. “It’s wonderful exercise.”
    She ended up spending the night.
    In the morning he drove her back downtown to her apartment. He was polite enough to wait until she got inside her gate before he drove away, but she was afraid that would be the end of Darryl. No problem, it had been for kicks. But surprise, he called her later in the week and offered her a job waiting tables at Champs, which turned out to be his restaurant and bar out by the lake.
    “I don’t know if you’re interested,” he said.
    “Sure, I’d be interested. What nights would I work?”
    “Seven nights a week, if you want to. We just had a girl quit. You can do three or four, it’s up to you.” With Darryl, she would find out, a lot of things would be up to her.
    “You want to come in tomorrow night and see how it goes?” he asked.
    “Sure, fine,” she said.
    “Okay. Be here at four o’clock.”
    “I’ll be there.” She had to look in the Yellow Pages to find out where the bar was. Then she called RTA to learn how to get there on a bus. You had to go to Canal, then out to the Lake, then take a bus out Robert E. Lee. Wow! That could take two hours. She told her boss she was sorry, but she was quitting, and she dropped her green apron on the counter.

FIVE
    Tubby drove downtown on Tulane Avenue. It was after four-thirty, and the going-home traffic was beginning to build up in the opposite direction. He thought about Tulane Avenue when he first saw it as a kid, brought to town by his dad for a Pelicans baseball game. It was really something back then. There were palm trees on the neutral ground and even a streetcar line. You ate hot dogs at the stadium, maybe skipped a few rocks in the New Basin Canal where all the Irishmen had died of malaria, then watched dad drink a beer at the Home Plate Inn after the game. Now it was an eight-lane strip for commuters who rolled past a string of cheap motels and pimply street whores and kept their windows up.
    The baseball stadium was now a hotel that had changed its name so many times nobody could remember what it was. There was no place to park on the curbs. You couldn’t make a left turn for a mile. Once you got on the damn street there was no place to go but downtown. He couldn’t imagine how the Chinese groceries on each corner survived. Thinking about these things he pulled up to a light and was beeped at from alongside so loudly that he almost jumped the curb. When he swung around to start swearing he saw it was Jynx Margolis, a client of his who was widely admired for her great sense of style and impressive cleavage.
    She lowered her window, letting out a perfumed puff of air so cool that Tubby, in his convertible, could feel the draft six feet away.
    “I have to talk to you, Mr. Dubonnet.”
    That was promising. Apparently she had been doing something athletic. Her white sports shirt with a tiny penguin on it was open at the collar, and she looked like the dessert he had missed at lunch.
    “You’ve got to help me get an injunction or something on Byron. Now the creep is calling me at all hours of the night,” she yelled.
    “Get call blocking,” Tubby shouted.
    “No, really, I have to talk to you.”
    “Come to my office. But it’s going to have to be brief.” Up went her window, and she zoomed ahead.
    Tubby parked at Place Palais. It took just a minute to get to his spot. He had clocked it more than once and found it took about five seconds to navigate every floor when the garage was empty and an incredibly slow minute and a half per floor at rush hour. It gave you a chance to think—usually about places without car fumes. He parked on Level 9 and rode up in the elevator to the forty-third floor of the office building. He went through the door with TURNTIDE & DUBONNET written on it.
    Cherrylynn Resilio was the receptionist and the secretary for the firm, which was Tubby and his partner, Reggie Turntide. When she first came to work three years earlier she made it clear she expected to become indispensable, and she had succeeded. She had originally migrated, Tubby learned when he first interviewed her, from Seattle. She had eloped in the twelfth grade with a good-looking lumberjack and oil-field roustabout who had brought her to Louisiana to live in a brand-new trailer park in an overgrown sugarcane plantation outside of New Iberia while