Fat Man Blues: A Hard-Boiled and Humorous Mystery (The Tubby Dubonnet Series Book 9) Read Online Free PDF

it for kicks, but the sheriff saw it otherwise.
    “What the hell was that about?” Nordie wondered.
    “Whatever,” Riego said. “Anyway the police confiscated that thing. Dufour’s into investing now,” he told Nordie. “He could use some help.”
    “Yeah? What kind of help would that be?”
    “He could tell you better than me,” Riego said ducking the question, and he downed his glass. “You got a card or something? Or a number where he can reach you?”
    “Sure, got a pen?”
    Riego had a gold-plated Parker and he was careful to get it back.
    * * *
    At that moment Frenchy Dufour was happily counting out $100,000 in cash he had just picked up from a special investor he had met by chance. They had encountered each other at the Pachyderm start-up incubator on Elysian Fields. The bright work space was overrun with young people with high hopes and apps to perfect, one of whom was Cisco Bananza. Frenchy, who had no skills other than a compulsion to make money, had felt extremely out of place until he got into a conversation with the eager Latino. All Cisco had to do was to suggest that he had money and was looking for a place to invest it, and Frenchy Dufour was all over him.
    Dufour laid out a business plan he had previously been storing in the back of his mind and, in a flash, not the same day but soon, Cisco handed over a package full of hundred dollar bills to invest. What Frenchy had no way of knowing was that Cisco had borrowed the dough from something called the Rosary Box.
    “You’d better not lose it,” Cisco had told him.
    “Yeah, right. This is absolutely going to work out. This is an unbeatable angle,” Dufour had assured him.
    “Your pecker’s in a crack if anything happens.”
    “Don’t talk to me that way,” Dufour had told the younger man. “There’s only so many ways you can launder cash legitimately, and they’ve all got some risk. This one, however, is a dead cinch.”
    * * *
    Angelo did not immediately take to Aimee’s kid, the little boy named Carter, but he sure did like Aimee. So he took Carter for a walk down to Hansen’s and got them both a snow cone. As they strolled up Bordeaux Street hand-in-hand Carter sang a song about boats and tigers, which Angelo thought was a very good sign— liking music took brains. He taught Carter the words to “Let’s do the Cajun Twist.”
    He bragged on Carter when they got back to the apartment, and Aimee warmed up to Angelo even more. It wasn’t long before he spent the night at her place. Not too much happened at first because the kid crawled into bed between them.
    They laughed about that in the morning while she made coffee, and then she had to drop Carter off at day care and go to work. Angelo provided the transportation in the Brougham, but as soon as Carter was off to school he detected a sadness coming over Aimee. He made an issue of it, apologizing profusely since he assumed it was because he had slept in her bed and maybe she didn’t like a fat man in skivvies, but she finally told him that the problem was that her boss was a pig. Angelo went into a fury, and it was all she could do to keep him from jumping out of the car when they got to the Subright.
    “Just come and pick me up after work,” she suggested. “He’ll be around then, and if he meets you, maybe he’ll get scared and quit messing with me.
    * * *
    The first time Nordie Magee met Frenchy Dufour he didn’t think much of the businessman. It was at the Davenport Lounge in the Ritz Carlton Hotel. Nordie figured that Dufour probably picked the place, an upscale, hoity-toity lounge, to show off how important he was. Bar brands cost eleven dollars, so maybe this Frenchy had money.
    Dufour was sitting at a little table nursing a drink when Nordie walked in and gave the man his stare. It was meant to be intimidating.
    “You Nordie?” Dufour asked, unperturbed, a grin filled with pearly-whites. “Have a seat.” Dufour’s hair was long but neatly combed; there was a