5 Crime Czar Read Online Free

frustration.
    Tubby tossed his briefcase on the desk and went to the window to squint through his red telescope. Ah, two ladies in colorful bikinis were sunning themselves beside the bright blue pool situated on the roof of the Fairmont Hotel. That could still get a rise out of him, so he must not be depressed, exactly, he thought while adjusting the knob. He was just pissed off at the whole damn city.
    “Mr. Dubonnet.” Cherrylynn was standing in the doorway. “Judge Hughes called this morning. He said it was important.”
    She was fretting, as if perhaps Tubby had missed a court date or forgotten to file a brief.
    “Really?” Tubby took his eye away from the telescope. The day had cleared, and he could see the city stretching out below him from Lake Pontchartrain to the yellow-and-blue marshes past Chalmette. He had an eagle’s eye view of the French Quarter, the sharp curve of the Mississippi where the river ate a channel six hundred feet deep, the last point of land at the Rigolets, and the endless water beyond.
    “I’ll call him right away.” Tubby smiled at his secretary reassuringly, and she nodded and slipped away. She need not have worried about him messing up his docket.
Never screw a client and never lie to the judge
were still his guidelines. And, of late, he had been avoiding taking on clients with the kind of problems he could screw up.
    “Mrs. Evans, this is Tubby Dubonnet. May I speak to the judge?” Tubby was gingerly seated at his desk, flipping nervously through a thick pile of pink message slips.
    “Counselor,” Judge Hughes’s voice boomed into his ear. “How are you today?”
    “Fine, Judge. My daughter just had a baby.”
    He got to tell the story again.
    “The Bible says ‘Fruitful will be thy issue.’ I feel this will be the first of many fine grandchildren for you.”
    “You could be right,” Tubby said, trying to sound jovial. Christine was seventeen and Collette was fifteen, and he wasn’t ready to think about either one of them getting pregnant just yet. Hell, Debbie had just turned twenty-one, but she had always been headstrong, and…
    “I’ll tell you why I called.” The judge cut into his reverie. “I want you to be the cochairman of my reelection campaign.”
    “What!” Tubby exclaimed. “Is it time for you to run again?”
    “Every seven years I must go among the public, regular as a plague of locusts.”
    “Is anybody actually going to oppose you?”
    “I’ve heard they will,” the judge said, lowering his voice. “The one that I know of is Benny Bloom.”
    “Yeah?” Tubby could see where there might be a problem. Benny Bloom was a brash young attorney who ran spectacular ads on television where oil rigs caught fire and blew up. In the next scene, Benny is handing out checks to lots of smiling widows and guys wearing hard hats. He had all sorts of name recognition.
    “Why would he want to be a judge? He’d have to take a huge cut in salary.”
    “That’s what I can’t figure out,” Hughes said sourly. “He says he wants to pay the community back, some crap like that. I really don’t know what his angle is.”
    “Well, I’ll help you in any way that I can, Al, but what does a cochairman have to do? I’ve never been one before.”
    “Oh, you know, you sign your name to all my fundraising letters, and you go to the rubber chicken dinners, and call all the right people. Nothing too strenuous.”
    “What about the fact that I’m white?”
    The judge thought that was funny. “Hell, Tubby, I don’t hold that against you. You remember the first time I ran, when you took me around and introduced me to all those high-class lawyers in the big firms downtown?”
    “Sure.”
    “It helped me then. I want you to do the same thing this time, only on a different level. Anyway, my other cochairman is gonna be black.”
    “Who’s that?”
    “Reverend Horace Weems, only he doesn’t know it yet. I’m gonna call him next.”
    “I don’t believe I know