Big Easy Bonanza

burglar or burglars had probably cut up the oil painting and his chair just out of meanness. He walked outside and found the policeman sitting at Cherrylynn’s reception desk, writing up his report. He was tall and good-looking and very young. Cherrylynn was fawning over him. Tubby saw that the policeman had a cup of coffee, which his secretary must have fixed. The cop’s radio was on, bleating announcements of car accidents interspersed with static.
    “Do you know what you are missing, Mr. Dubonnet?”
    “Not yet.” Tubby gestured at the wreckage.
    “Do you have any idea who might have done this?”
    “Not a clue. Probably some doper.”
    “They would have taken your typewriters, and your curtains and your paper clips. Angry client?”
    “I don’t think I’ve made any that angry. Why don’t you take some fingerprints or something?”
    “I don’t know what we’d print. A lot of people probably come in here. To be honest, we can’t get the fingerprint teams out on anything but homicides or rapes. It’s a question of resources.”
    “How do you ever catch anybody?”
    “Well, you know, somebody turns them in, or, if something was stolen, it usually turns up. Also people confess. You’re not sure that anything was stolen?”
    “I’ll know better when I clean up the mess. But really there’s not much here to steal except the copier and the word processor, and they’re still here.”
    The cop looked around as if to confirm that, nodded his head, and went back to writing.
    “You find something gone, you call me,” he said. “And if you need a report for your insurance company, here’s the incident number.” He tore off a slip of paper from his notebook and gave it to Tubby.
    “And you call me if you learn anything or get a line on who might have done this.”
    Wasn’t that supposed to be the other way around? Tubby asked himself.
    “I will, Officer.” He bent over to read the man’s badge. Tucker. “I hear anything I’ll call you.”
    “Okay, and thanks. See you later, ma’am,” he said to Cherrylynn.
    “Such a nice fellow,” she said when he was out the door.
    “Very easygoing,” said Tubby. “Look, can you clean up this mess? I mean put the files in order. Call Maintenance and they can haul out the trash. I’ve got to get to court.” He couldn’t stand being there any longer, for some reason, and he needed to see Judge Hughes.

FOURTEEN
    Monique went into mourning after Darryl got killed, but she managed to get the saloon back in operation. There was nothing official about it, but she had the keys and knew the combination to the safe, which nobody else did, so they all deferred to her. One night her apartment was ransacked while she was working, but she didn’t report it. She just cleaned up the mess and went on. At least they didn’t steal her bike. A man called her on the phone right after the shooting. She thought she recognized the voice as the guy on the balcony, the one with Casey who ordered a Wild Turkey.
    “Where’s the goddamn money?” was all he wanted to know.
    She screamed incoherently into the phone long after he hung up. She did not have the fucking money, and did not know what Darryl had done with the fucking money, and did not care about the fucking money.
    She began spending most of her time at the club. Except for Ali, the bouncer where she used to work in the French Quarter, she really didn’t have any other friends or much else to do. Even during her off hours she was usually upstairs in the office, exploring Darryl’s life. She studied the ledgers and some spiral notebooks she discovered in the safe, and got a pretty good idea about the nuts and bolts of the operation—what went into the bank and what went into the cash box. She left the bag of pot and the ornate silver cocaine server where she found them in Darryl’s desk. For some reason she wasn’t much interested in dope anymore, but she still would take a drink. The employees got paid, so they were no problem. Her first challenge came from the whiskey wholesaler who showed up with his truck on Thursday morning, his usual time, and who said he wanted to deal “with the boss, now that Mr. Alvarez ain’t here no more.”
    “I guess that’s me,” Monique told him.
    “Who’s going to be taking care of my bills?” he asked.
    “I will. You’ll get paid just like always. Just send me the invoice.”
    “Invoice, shit. Who’s in charge here?” he demanded. “Where’s the