Big Easy Bonanza

from Ditcharo’s down the street. Mainly he tried to read and write various things requiring concentration, and to stay off the phone in case anybody he wanted to talk to called. Cherrylynn announced several times that people he did not want to talk to were on the phone, but each time he told her to take a message.
    He went home early and avoided his boat. He heated up a bowl of his housekeeper’s leftover gumbo for supper and ate it in front of the TV, watching an old Errol Flynn movie. The phone rang once, and his answering machine caught it. Nobody left a message. He gave up and went to bed early, but he had a hard time getting to sleep. He tried to erase all negative thoughts, any thoughts, but it didn’t work. Finally he got up and had a couple of shots of gin, and that did the trick.
    The next morning was more of the same. He moved around on automatic pilot, but his mind raced. He knew that outside there was more cash than he could ever use, but somewhere another shoe was about to drop. There was a good chance it was aiming for him. When he was a kid he had gotten caught stealing a pen from a card shop, and the owner had called his mother. She sat him down on the bed and asked him why he had done it. Didn’t he have enough pens at home? Since then he had never wanted to do anything that could ever make him feel so guilty. Still, he was no asshole, and only an asshole gives up almost a million bucks before he is pretty sure he has to.
    The thing to do was to go about his business and pretend it never happened. Tubby did not like moral dilemmas. He tried to avoid them whenever possible and to see things in practical terms—what worked and what didn’t. This monster had fangs, though, and a good bite on him.
    He skipped breakfast at PJ’S and ate toast. Then he dressed and drove down to Broad Street, site of the imposing Criminal Courts building. Its New Deal architecture dominated an area of vacant lots, boarded-up businesses, jails, and storefronts for bail bondsmen. There was a crowd of mostly black people waiting for buses on the corner, and another squatting on the courthouse steps munching Popeye’s and drinking Cokes while waiting for the system to grind along until it was their turn. It was easy to spot the lawyers hustling across the street and trotting up the steps since they wore suits and didn’t look scared. Next door was the ancient Parish Prison where guards were posted above the sidewalk in concrete turrets like miniature lighthouses, connected to each other by strands of razor wire. Visitors queued up at one gate, waiting to be searched so they could go in and talk about money, and kids dropping out of school, and court dates being postponed, with whichever poor fucked-up loved ones of theirs had the misfortune to be locked inside. They looked like they had spent all their lives in this line or one just like it. Besides the helpless, why was it that nobody but cranks, crooks, and characters hung out around the halls of justice? It was not even nine o’clock and it was already hot.
    Above twenty granite steps, towering brass-clad doors opened onto a cavernous hallway, wide and tall as a cathedral. It was cool and quiet there. Footsteps echoed off the walls, and the small knots of people congregating outside the courtroom doors spoke furtively. Other doors along the hallway were always shut, hiding places Tubby had never been.
    The courthouse crowd—the judges, magistrates, clerks, cops, secretaries, and jailers—used to be all white. Today the faces were nearly all black. It was something you noticed, no big deal. The quality of justice wasn’t much different as far as he could tell, though some of the new judges were more idealistic than their predecessors. Trouble was, the volume of business was so great that there was precious little time for fairness, compassion, mercy, all those good things. Tubby had been into most of the judges’ chambers and courtrooms here, and he could pass back and forth through the bars of the sheriff’s jail. He was part of the in-crowd, not like the folks outside on the steps, but the place still gave him the shivers, every time.
    Inside Courtroom L he saw Sandy Shandell, his medical malpractice client, sitting quiet and erect on one of the long mahogany benches, a sinner in church. Sandy turned around when the door opened and waved when he recognized Tubby, giving him a big smile. Not content with one legal problem—his spotted skin—Sandy had also