The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (18 page)

“What’s he want?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

“Tell him the reparation issue for pygmies is off the table.”

“Pardon?”

“Does he look like he might have a blowgun on him?”

“I’m confused, Mr. Purcel.”

“Send him in, please.”

The boy, who was not over twelve, came in and sat in a deep chair in the corner, his baseball cap sitting on his eyebrows. He gazed at the antique firearms mounted on the walls. “You cain’t afford any kind of guns except junk?” he said.

“Your first name is Buford, right?”

“You can stick with Kiss-My-Ass. Or you can call me Mr. Kiss-My-Ass.”

“You know I beat the shit out of your cousin Herman Stanga, don’t you?”

“Yeah, at the Gate Mout’. I know all about it.”

“Then why are you here?”

“My cousin wasn’t no good. ’Cause I do what I do don’t mean I liked Cousin Herman.”

“I’m pretty busy, Kiss-My-Ass.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Reading a t’rowaway magazine takes up a lot of time. There’s a lady lives up the street from me on Cherokee. She’s Vietnamese. She’s a waitress at Bojangles. Know who I’m talking about?”

“No.”

“She’s a nice lady. She don’t need no trouble from the wrong kind of guy.”

“You got to be a little more specific.”

“I was on my corner, and this white guy in a Mustang come by and wanted to buy some roofies. I tole him I don’t handle that kind of stuff. So he axed me for some X. I tole him I don’t have no X, either. I tole him that maybe I had some breat’ mints ’cause that’s what he needed.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“’Cause I seen this same car and this same guy dropping off the Vietnamese lady at her house. She don’t need this guy slipping her roofies so he can do t’ings to her in his backseat.”

“You remember what I told you I’d do if I caught you slinging dope again?”

“No disrespect, but you can go fuck yourself, too. You gonna he’p me or not?”

“Don’t be surprised if you don’t reach your next birthday. What’s this cat’s name?”

“I don’t know, but I seen him before. He was at Cousin Herman’s house. Herman said he was in the pen over in Texas. Herman said he wrote a book about it.”

“Does the name Robert Weingart ring a bell?”

Buford shook his head.

“My fee is a hundred and fifty an hour. But we offer a pygmy discount,” Clete said. He waited. “That was a joke, Kiss-My-Ass.”

The boy gazed out the French doors at a tugboat passing on the bayou. “When the guy in the Mustang stopped by the corner, I wasn’t slinging. I was waiting on some friends to go to the pool. If you want to make fun of me, go do it. But tell me if you gonna he’p or not, ’cause that man is fixing to do bad t’ings to a lady that been nice to every kid in the neighborhood.”

“Why don’t you tell her this yourself?”

The bill of the boy’s cap was tilted downward, hiding his face. “’Cause maybe I sold roofies before. ’Cause maybe I ain’t proud about having to say that to somebody.”

C
LETE CALLED ME
at the department after the boy left his office and told me of Robert Weingart’s attempt to buy the date-rape drug known on the street as “roofies.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Talk with the Vietnamese waitress and maybe chat up our celebrity ex-con scribbler.”

“The latter isn’t an option.”

“The First Amendment has been suspended and nobody told me?”

I got up from my desk and closed my office door and picked up the phone again. “Somebody did you a big favor when he helped Stanga into the next world. Don’t blow it.”

“Sounds a little cynical. You’re not lighting candles for Herman?”

“We’ll pick up Weingart and let him know his sexual behavior has come to our attention. In the meantime, you stay out of trouble. You’re the human equivalent of a wrecking ball, Clete. Except you do most of the damage to yourself. You’ve never figured that out.”

“My ex used to say the same thing. She used exactly the same words.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Take an aspirin. Think cool thoughts. Nobody rattles the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide.”

Did you ever conduct a conversation with a vacant lot?

I
HAD MADE
an appointment to interview Kermit Abelard at his house. I could have had him come in to the department, but I wanted access once again to the Abelard compound and the bizarre and insular world in which they lived, maybe for reasons I didn’t want to admit to myself. Did I buy into the notion, as Clete had suggested, that the Abelards were players in an Elizabethan tragedy? No, I didn’t. They certainly created the affectation of royalty in exile, but I doubted if even they were convinced by it. Someone once said that had Sir Walter Scott not written his romantic accounts of medieval chivalry, there would have been no War Between the States. I doubted if that was true, either. I believed the legend of the Lost Cause was created after the fact, when the graves of Shiloh and Antietam became vast stone gardens reminding us forever that we imposed this suffering on ourselves.

But if the Abelards and their peers were not created by the pen of an English novelist, what were they? Clete Purcel had said either their house or the old man smelled of death. Was that just his imagination? Except Clete was nobody’s fool and was not given to extravagant metaphors.

I signed out a cruiser and drove down to the watery rim of St. Mary Parish and thumped across the wood bridge onto the Abelard compound. The lagoon that surrounded the property was networked with algae, the moss in the dead cypress lifting in the wind off the Gulf, a solitary ventilated storm shutter slamming incessantly against an upstairs window. Out in the flooded cypress, I could see a man standing in a pirogue, his back to me, casting a lure in a long arc into the water. He was wearing a cap and a sleeveless denim shirt, and he had narrow shoulders and a suntan that had a strange yellow cast.

The black woman who let me in said Mr. Kermit was out in his boat but would be back momentarily; in the meantime, she said Mr. Timothy would like to see me out on the sunporch.

“You’re Miss Jewel?” I said.

“Yes, suh. That’s my name. I’ve taken care of Mr. Timothy for many years.”

“And you know my daughter, Alafair?”

“Yes, suh. She’s very nice.”

I took unfair advantage of my situation and asked a question I should not have asked. “I was trying to remember when Alafair was out here last. Do you recall?”

“I take care of Mr. Timothy. I don’t study on everyone who comes and goes, suh.”

She escorted me to the sunporch. Timothy Abelard was reading in his wheelchair, canted sideways to catch the sunlight on the page, his entire person bathed in the rainbow of color that shone through the stained-glass windows. He looked up at me, smiling, with the expectation one might associate with a tiny bird in the bottom of a nest. “It’s very nice of you to come out and talk with an elderly man,” he said.

I wondered if he was simply being polite or if he was confused about the purpose of my visit. But perhaps a bigger problem for me was that I wanted to like Mr. Abelard. In all ways, he was genteel and seemingly thoughtful. Yes, his eyes were like those of a hawk. But for the elderly, a mistake in judgment about other people can have dire consequences, and it’s hard to begrudge them their cautionary instincts in dealings with others. At least that was what I wanted to believe about this kindly old man.

“I’m here to see your grandson, sir,” I said.

“He didn’t run a traffic light, did he?”

“What are you reading?”

“I was just going to ask your opinion on it. Here, take a look. It’s Kermit’s new book.”

I didn’t want to see it, but he pressed it into my hand. The jacket was a wonderful collage of a plantation house burning against a plum-colored sky, a lovely woman holding the head of a wounded Confederate soldier in her lap, and a gallant officer with a plume in his hat rearing his horse in cannon smoke under the cross of St. Andrew. “Go ahead, read the first paragraph. Tell me what you think,” Mr. Abelard said.

I had read none of Kermit’s work, but I had to admit the opening scene in his new book was written by a very good writer. It described airbursts over Vicksburg in the summer of 1863, and a family of Negroes and one of poor whites trying to take cover in a cave they had dug in the bluffs with barrel staves. Kermit had even described the sound of hot shrapnel raining into the shallows of the Mississippi, a detail I would not expect a man with no war experience to know about.

“It’s impressive, sir. I’ll have to get a copy,” I said, returning the book to him.

“Will you tell me the purpose of your visit?”

“I’m trying to exclude some possibilities in an investigation.”

“Seems like you’re an expert in vagueness, Mr. Robicheaux. Have you considered a career in politics?”

I had sat down in one of his rattan chairs. The bamboo creaked under me in the silence. It is difficult to describe the accent and diction of the class of people represented by Mr. Abelard. Their dialect is called plantation English and was influenced largely by British tutors hired to teach the children of plantation society. Unlike the speech of yeomen, it does not vary through the states of the Old Confederacy. If you have heard the recorded voice of William Faulkner or Robert Penn Warren, you have heard the same pronunciations and linguistic cadence characteristic of Mr. Abelard’s generation in Louisiana. They could read from a phone book and you would swear you were listening to the cadences found inside a Shakespearean sonnet.

But well-spoken elderly gentleman or not, he had asked for it, I told myself. “In one way or another, my visit is related to your house guest, Robert Weingart. What kind of fellow would you say he is?”

“His prison background, that kind of thing?”

“For openers.”

“The man’s a mess. What else do you want to know?”

“Do you think it’s good for Kermit to be hanging around with a fellow like that?”

“That’s a bit personal, isn’t it?”

“Have you checked out Weingart’s criminal history?”

“You don’t have to convince me of the evil that’s in this world, Mr. Robicheaux. I’ve dealt with it in every form for a lifetime. Do you have a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Jewel!” he called.

Immediately, the black woman was at the door, waiting, her eyes not quite meeting his, her muscular body held straight and motionless, as though the virtue of patience had been ironed into the starch of her uniform.

“Get me a cigarette. Don’t argue about it, either. Just bring me the cigarette and a match before Kermit comes back and starts fussing at me,” Mr. Abelard said. He turned to me. “Don’t get old, Mr. Robicheaux. Age is an insatiable thief. It steals the pleasures of your youth, then locks you inside your own body with your desires still glowing. Worse, it makes you dependent upon people who are a half century younger than you. Don’t let anyone tell you that it brings you peace, either, because that’s the biggest lie of all.”

Jewel returned and placed a single cigarette in his hand, then lit it for him with a paper match. He puffed on it, wetting the filter, seemingly more pleased by the acquisition of the cigarette than his smoking of it. He continued talking about almost every subject imaginable except the presence of a career criminal like Robert Weingart in his house. I looked at my watch. “Where’s your grandson, sir?”

“Out yonder, almost to the salt. They’ll be back momentarily,” Mr. Abelard said.

“They?” I said.

“Jewel, will you bring me an ashtray?” he called out.

“Sir, who is ‘they’?”

But he turned his attention away from me to acquiring the ashtray, then began fumbling with it until he had positioned it in his lap. “You’d think by this time the woman could figure out that a man in a wheelchair can’t smoke a cigarette without something to put the ashes in.”

I had given up trying to find out who was in the boat with Kermit. Or maybe I didn’t want to know. “Miss Jewel seems like a devoted caretaker,” I said.

“I wish Jewel had a better life than the one she was given. But how many of us see the consequences when we step over forbidden lines?”

“Pardon?” I said.

“The racial situation of the South is one we inherited, and for good or bad we did the best we could with it. I just wish I had shown more personal restraint when I was in my middle years.”

“I’m not following you, sir.”

“The woman is my daughter. What did you think I was talking about?”

There was a long silence, then I felt my stare break and I looked away at the flooded trees that had been killed by saltwater intrusion, the petrochemical sheen that glistened on his lagoon, the flaking paint on the pillars that supported his second-story veranda, the decay and sickness that seemed to infect the entirety of the Abelards’ property, and I wondered why we had concentrated so much of our lives on hating or envying or emulating people such as the Abelards and the oligarchy they represented. Then I saw a motorboat with two figures in it come across the bay and enter the cypress trees, riding on its wake, passing the man who was fishing in the pirogue. Kermit sat behind the wheel, wearing Ray-Bans and a sky-blue cap with a lacquered black brim tilted on the side of his head. Alafair was sitting next to him, her hair and face damp with salt spray.

I got up from the chair, keeping my face empty of expression. “I’ll walk down to your dock, if you don’t mind,” I said. “I enjoyed talking with you.”

“You seem offended.”

I looked at the boat and at Alafair sitting close to Kermit, clenching his arm. “You withheld information from me, Mr. Abelard.”

“What your daughter does or does not do isn’t my business, sir. I resented your indicating that it is.”

I looked at him a long time before I spoke. He was infirm and, I suspected, visited in his sleep by memories and deeds no one wishes to carry to his grave. Or perhaps I was endowing him with a level of humanity that he didn’t possess. Regardless, I had concluded that Timothy Abelard was not someone I would ever come to like or admire.

“Robert Weingart is in your home with your consent, sir,” I said. “You’re an intelligent man. That means his agenda is your agenda. That’s not a comforting thought.”