The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (48 page)

In the silence, I could see a flush spreading across her throat.

“You think Carolyn is capable of murder?”

“You tell me. She was a bitch when she came out of the womb. I hate this stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“All of it. Everything we do for a living. I’m tired of living in a sewer. I’m tired of seeing innocent people get hurt. Go see if you can find Gus Fowler. I’m going to talk to the state attorney’s office and try to get to the bottom of the land deal.”

She got up from her desk and looked out the window at the bayou, her back stiff with anger or revulsion, I couldn’t tell which.

“We’re still the good guys,” I said.

“You know how many unsolved female homicides there are in Louisiana?”

“No.”

“That’s the point. Nobody does. Not here, not anywhere. It’s open season on women and girls in this country. You bring that asshole in. If he falls down and leaves blood on the vehicle, all the better. His DNA becomes a voluntary submission.”

“Can you repeat that last part?”

“Call me when you’re at the Abelard place,” she said. “By the way, the ligature Clete found in the Abelards’ Dumpster was clean. Bring me something I can use, Dave. I want to put somebody’s head on a pike.”

B
UT RHETORIC IS
cheap stuff when you play by the rules and the other side does business with baseball bats. No one came to the Abelards’ door when I knocked. An elderly man whose race was hard to determine was pulling weeds in the flower bed. He said he had seen no one that morning. He also said he had never heard of anyone named Gus Fowler, nor did he remember seeing anyone who fit Fowler’s description. I asked where I might find Miss Jewel.

His eyes were blue-green and scaled with cataracts. They glowed in the indistinct way that light glows inside frosted glass. His skin was a yellowish-brown, leached pink and milk-white in places by a dermatologic disease that often afflicts people of color in the South. The tattered straw hat he wore made me think of pictures of convicts taken at the prison colony in French Guiana. “Jewel Laveau?” he said.

I realized I had never known Jewel’s last name. It was not an ordinary one, either. Anyone who ever read a history of old New Orleans or visited the St. Louis Cemetery on Basin Street would probably recognize it.

“If she ain’t wit’ the family, she’s most probably at her house in the quarters,” the gardener said.

“You know where I could find Robert Weingart?”

He smiled in a kindly fashion. “No, suh.”

“You haven’t seen him?”

“No, suh, what I mean is, I ain’t sure who that is. Even if I knew, I ain’t seen nobody.”

I understood that no amount of either coercion or bribery would ever cause this man to give up a teaspoon of information about the Abelards or the people who came and went through the front door. “Can you forget I was here?” I said.

“Suh?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

I drove east on a winding road between the bay and pastureland that had become a flood zone chained with ponds that were home to clouds of gnats and dragonflies and where, for no apparent reason, cranes or egrets or blue herons did not feed or nest. A gray skein of dead vegetation left by storm surges coated the branches of the persimmon and gum trees and slash pines, and on either side of the road, the rain ditches were strewn with trash, much of it in vinyl bags that had split when they were flung from automobiles. Up ahead, among a few slender palm trees stenciled against the sky like those on a Caribbean isle, I saw the tin roofs of the community where Miss Jewel lived.

The term “quarters,” in the plural, goes back to the plantation era, which did not end with the Civil War but perpetuated itself well into the mid-twentieth century. Harry Truman may or may not have been disliked in the South for integrating the United States Army, but there is no doubt about the enmity he incurred when he made ten-thousand-dollar loans available to southern sharecroppers and farmworkers at 1 percent interest. That one program broke the back of the corporate farm system and created the Dixiecrat Party and the career of Senator Strom Thurmond. But a culture does not transform itself in a few generations. Except for the automobiles and pickup trucks parked in the dirt yards, the quarters owned by the Abelard family had changed little since they were carpentered together in the 1880s.

They were painted yellow or blue and resembled wood boxcars with tin roofs and tiny galleries built onto them. They were often called shotgun houses because theoretically a person could fire a single-barrel twenty-gauge through the front door and send a load of birdshot out the back without bruising a wall. But Jewel’s house was different from the rest, located at the end of a dirt street still slick from an early-morning shower, its walls painted a deep purple, the window frames and gallery posts painted green, the gallery hung with Mardi Gras beads. On the tin mailbox out by the rain ditch was the name Laveau in large black letters. She was sitting on the gallery steps, wearing heavy Levi’s and an unironed men’s shirt she hadn’t bothered to tuck in and a bandanna wrapped tightly around her hair. She was reading a shopper’s guide of some kind, the pages folded back, clutching it with one hand, turning it to catch the light as though the words contained great significance. I walked up the path and stopped three feet from her, but she never raised her eyes from the shopper’s guide.

“Are you related to Marie Laveau, Miss Jewel?” I asked.

“She was my great-great-grandmother.”

“You don’t practice voodoo, do you?”

“She didn’t, either. People used that against her ’cause she was the most powerful woman in New Orleans.”

“I need to find the man with the bandaged hand, the one who calls himself Gus Fowler.”

“I t’ink he left.”

“Do you know where he went?”

She seemed to study the question. “No, he didn’t say. He just drove away.”

“We’re going to find him. We’d like to feel you’re on our side.”

“I don’t have anyt’ing to say about him or any of the t’ings you got on your mind.”

“You knew I was coming, didn’t you?”

“Your kind don’t give up easy.”

“No, you were waiting for me. Do you see into the future, Miss Jewel?”

She rolled her shopper’s guide into a cone and stuck it under her thigh and gazed at the shimmer on the dirt lane. “I’m not part of it anymore.”

“What’s ‘it’?”

“Anyt’ing outside of my job.”

“You told Mr. Abelard of our conversation?”

Her face was as dark and smooth as melted chocolate, her eyes devoid of emotion. The sorrow and contrition she said she had felt about the deaths of Bernadette Latiolais and Fern Michot seemed to have burned away with the morning mist.

“What did your father say when you told him you called me?” I said.

She waited a long time before she spoke. “He axed me to sit down and have dinner wit’ him. He stood up from his wheelchair on a cane and held my chair for me. That’s the first time I ever sat at the table wit’ Mr. Timothy. He tole me it didn’t matter what I did, I was still his daughter.”

“This may be a surprise, but I’m not interested in Mr. Abelard’s spiritual generosity.”

“Don’t talk about him like that, suh.”

“I think he’s an evil man and should be treated as such. I think you’re making a mistake in trusting him.”

“I don’t care what you say.”

“What’s ‘the box,’ Jewel?”

“I don’t know, me.”

“You’re an intelligent woman. Don’t try to hide behind a dialectical disguise.”

“You can go now, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“Think about the faces of those girls in the photographs. You’re a highly trained medical person. You know the pain and despair those girls experienced when they died. They had no one to comfort them, to hold their hand, to tell them they were loved by God and their fellow man. But you called me on your own and stood up for them. Don’t undo a brave and noble deed, Miss Jewel. Don’t rob yourself of your own virtue.”

I saw her lips form a bitter line; she looked like a person making a choice between two evils and deciding upon the one that hurt her the most, as though her self-injury brought with it a degree of forgiveness. “I got to do my wash,” she said.

“Those girls are going to haunt you,” I said. “In your sleep. In a crowd. At Mass. In a movie theater. Across the table from you at McDonald’s. The dead carry a special kind of passport, and they go anywhere they want.”

She stared into the humidity glistening on the road and at the tin roofs of the other houses. The wind swayed the palms overhead and rattled the Mardi Gras beads that hung from the eaves of her gallery. I walked back to the cruiser, wondering at the harshness of my language, wondering if my oath to protect and serve had not finally drained my heart of pity and left only rage and a thirst for vengeance. Then I heard her voice behind me, muted against the wind and the rustling of the beads. I opened and closed my mouth to clear my ears. Her gaze was fixed strangely on my face, her eyes lit with a bizarre luminosity, her teeth white against the darkness of her tongue, her skin sparkling with moisture.

“I didn’t hear you. Say that over,” I said.

“I’m sorry.”

“About what?”

“About saying it. I didn’t mean to say it. Don’t pay me any mind.”

“Say what?”

“Go back home. Pretend you weren’t here. Keep yourself and your family away from us.”

“Tell me what you said.”

“Don’t make me.”

“You say it, damn you.”

“Somebody is fixing to die at your house.”

She took a deep breath, as though a large, thick-bodied bird had just taken flight from her chest.

I
DROVE BACK
down the winding two-lane to the Abelard home, on the odd chance I would catch someone there before I returned to New Iberia. As I neared the wood bridge that gave access to the Abelards’ island, I saw Robert Weingart in a pair of Speedos on the lawn between the boathouse and a blooming mimosa, performing a martial arts exercise of some kind. Like a flamingo pecking at its feathers, he torqued his body in one direction and then the other, his hands moving delicately in the air, his eyes closed, the breeze caressing his face and the glaze of tan and sweat on his skin.

If I ever saw a man for whom his own body was a holy grail, it was Weingart. His armpits were shaved and powdered like a woman’s. His black Speedos clung wetly to the buttermilk texture of his buttocks, his phallus outlined like a rhinoceros’s horn. His eyelids were lowered as though he was enjoying the sun through the filter of his own skin. He gave no notice of my tires rumbling across the bridge, nor did he look behind him when I parked and got out of the cruiser and stood silently watching him across the top of the roof. I had to admire his concentration and his indifference. Weingart had mastered the ethos of the cynic and, in my opinion, had successfully scrubbed every trace of decency and humanity from his soul. If he had any feelings at all, I suspected they were connected entirely with the satisfaction of his desires, and they had nothing to do with the rest of us.

Was this aging, self-absorbed product of plastic surgery the sole perpetrator behind the death of the two girls? He was the white man’s answer to Herman Stanga, the man we love to hate. He was cruel, pernicious, and predatory. He exploited the faith and trust of uneducated people and forever blighted their lives. But he was also pathetic. He’d had his head shoved in a toilet bowl by Clete Purcel. He’d been humiliated and slapped across the side of the head by one of our deputies at the bank. Later that same day, Emma Poche had brought him to his knees with a baton and then had tormented him on the ground. Weingart reminded me of the high school hood who moves to a small town from a big city and scares the hell out of everybody until someone challenges him and discovers he’s a joke.

But what did I know about him specifically, other than his criminal history and his penchant for getting into it with people who didn’t do things by the rules?

He was pulling his money out of a local bank and transferring it to a bank in British Columbia. He was planning to either blow Dodge or set up another nefarious scheme or both. Timothy Abelard had shown Alafair a photo of himself and a man who resembled Robert Weingart sitting in a café on Lake Louise in Alberta, although Abelard had denied to Alafair that his companion was Weingart. What were they doing there? Was it land investment? Were the Abelards taking their long and sorry tradition of environmental abuse and human exploitation to one of the most beautiful places in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world?

What was the box? The term conjured up images I didn’t want to think about.

I walked onto the lawn and stood no more than fifteen feet behind Weingart. He rotated slowly in a circle, opening his eyes, a smirk breaking at the corner of his mouth. “Yes?” he said.

“I’m looking for a guy by the name of Gus Fowler.”

“Let me think. No, can’t place him.”

“Guy with a big wad of bandages wrapped around his hand. He’s probably doped up on painkillers. Has a pal from Taco-Tico Land, a guy who takes offense just because somebody called him a greaseball.”

“Sorry.”

“I blew Mr. Fowler’s fingers off. I thought you might have heard about it. I guess you’re not in the loop.”

“Apparently not.”

“Heading up to Canada? Maybe Trout Lake, someplace like that?”

“No.”

“You’ve been to Trout Lake, though, haven’t you?”

“Can’t say as I have.”

“Is that where you met Fern Michot?”

“The name doesn’t make bells clang.”

“She was a Canadian girl we dug out of a landfill. She was buried with some broken teacups that Bernadette Latiolais had purchased at a dollar store just before she was abducted. Of course, you remember Bernadette?”

“Many people come to my book signings. Was she one of those?” He never paused in his exercise, his upper body rotating at the hips, his arms gliding through the air as though he were underwater.

“She caught you at the Big Stick club in Lafayette with some of your skanks. Or were they Herman Stanga’s skanks?”

His eyes were roving over my face; a tiny laugh rose like a bubble in his throat. I waited for him to speak, but he didn’t.