The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (20 page)

“What do you want?” Blanchet said.

“Maybe I should call another time. Or just send you a fax. I can do that,” Clete said.

“Sorry to sound short. I’m a little jammed up these days. You got something for me?”

“No, I’ve found nothing that could be considered significant. There’s no charge for my time. I’ll send you a bill for expenses and for the hours another guy put in. So this call in effect terminates my situation with you.”

“Hold on there. What do you mean you’re terminating the situation? What do you mean when you say you didn’t find anything ‘significant’?”

“Nothing we’ve uncovered puts your wife with another man. You know what I suggest sometimes in situations like this? I tell the husband to take his wife out to dinner. Buy her flowers. Put some music on the stereo and dance with her on the patio. Pay more attention to her and forget all this other bullshit. It’s not worth it, Mr. Blanchet. Not financially, not emotionally. If our marriages are flushed, they’re flushed. If they’re salvageable, we salvage them.”

“You said you were sending me a bill for another guy’s hours. You shared this information with other people?”

“Yeah, I pieced off the job. That’s how it works. I’m one guy, not the CIA.”

“Then I want the names of everybody involved.”

“We’re done on this.”

“Oh, no, we’re not.”

“My sympathies to your wife,” Clete said, and clicked off his cell phone. He rubbed the ennui and fatigue out of his face and rested his forehead on the steering wheel. The air-conditioning was cold on his skin, the air freshener that the repair people had hung from his mirror smelling of lilacs, of spring, of youth itself. He remembered the excitement and romance of being twenty-three and returning home in Marine Corps tropicals, a recipient of the Navy Cross and two Purple Hearts, riding the Ferris wheel high above Pontchartrain Beach, the rifles in a shooting gallery popping far below him, the waves of the lake capping on the sand, a young woman clinging tightly to his arm.

But youth was a decaying memory, and no matter what a song lyricist might say, you couldn’t put time in a bottle.

He went inside the lounge. Emma Poche was sitting by herself at a table in the corner, her canary-yellow western shirt lit by the glow of the jukebox. She had put on fresh lipstick, and her eyes were warm with an alcoholic sheen. “Sit down, handsome, and tell me about your life,” she said.

He pulled out a chair and signaled the waitress. Emma was drinking out of a tall Collins glass, one packed with crushed ice and cherries and an orange slice. “I thought you knew Dave through the program,” he said.

“Not really. Our ties go back to NOPD.”

“You’re not in the program?”

“I’ve tried it on and off. I got tired of listening to the same stories over and over. Were you ever in A.A.?”

“Not me.”

“Yeah, stop drinking today and gone tomorrow. Why not party a little bit while you have the opportunity?”

“That’s the way you feel about it?”

“I’m gonna die no matter how I feel about any of it, so I say ‘bombs away.’ If you ask me, sobriety sucks.”

He tried to reason through what she had just said, but the jukebox was playing and the long day had landed on him like an anvil. The waitress came to the table and Emma ordered a vodka Collins and Clete a schooner of draft and a shot of Jack. He poured the whiskey into his beer and watched it rise in a mysterious cloud and flatten inside the foam. He tilted the schooner to his mouth and drank until it was almost half empty. He let out his breath, his eyes coming back into focus, like those of a man who had just gotten off a roller coaster. “Wow,” he said.

“You don’t fool around,” she said.

“I spent most of the day firing in the well, then having a conversation with a world-class asshole. Plus I have complications with a dude by the name of Robert Weingart. Know anything about him?”

“I read his book. Weingart is the asshole?”

“Weingart is an asshole, all right, but I was talking about a client. Have you heard anything in St. Martin Parish about girls getting doped with roofies before they’re raped?”

“I’ve heard about it in Lafayette but not around here. Weingart is doing that?”

“I’m not sure.” Clete finished his boilermaker and ordered a refill. When it came, he sipped the whiskey from the shot glass and chased it with the beer.

“Your stomach lining must look like Swiss cheese,” she said.

“My stomach is fine. My liver is the size of a football.”

“Maybe you ought to ease up.”

He could feel the alcohol taking hold in his system, restoring coherence to his thoughts, driving the gargoyles back to an unlighted place in his mind, releasing the cord of tension that often bound his chest and pressed the air out of his lungs. “I appreciated you calling Dave when I was in that holding cell. Some of those guys in St. Martin Parish carry resentments. That was a stand-up thing to do.”

“You had the same kind of trouble at NOPD as me and Dave. The unholy trinity, huh?” she said, watching him lift the shot glass to his mouth again.

“I brought most of my trouble on myself.”

“Save it for Oprah. I worked with those shitheads. What was the deal outside there?”

“What deal?”

“In your Cadillac. You were on a stakeout?”

“I wouldn’t give it that kind of depth. Anyway, I pulled the plug on it.”

“You like being a PI?”

“I don’t think about it a lot.”

“That’s a good way to be. My job is okay, but I miss life in the Big Sleazy.” She put her hand on his wrist when he started to lift his schooner again. “Better eat something.”

“Yeah, maybe.” His eyes moved sleepily over her face. She pretended to be looking at the bar, but he knew she was aware he was staring at her with more than curiosity. His gaze drifted to her ring finger. “You ever been married?”

“I woke up once with a rock-and-roll drummer who said we’d gotten hitched in Juárez, but I never saw a certificate. The guy got hit by a train, anyway. I was seventeen. I always call that part of my life the downside of that old-time rock and roll.”

She looked back at the bar, straightening her shoulders slightly, her breasts stiffening against her shirt. Clete studied the clearness of her complexion and her pug nose and the pools of color in her cheeks and the redness of her mouth and the cuteness of her profile. She removed a strand of hair from her eyebrow and looked him in the face. “Something wrong?” she said.

“Did you have dinner yet?”

“No, I was supposed to eat with my uncle.”

“Let’s have another round and I’ll buy you supper at Possum’s.”

“Dutch treat,” she said.

“No, it’s going on my expense tab, and I’m sending it to the world-class asshole.”

“Who is he?”

He upended his shot glass and winked at her. When she sipped from her vodka Collins, her mouth looked cold and hard and lovely. She fished a cherry out of the ice and held it by the stem and placed it behind her teeth. When she bit into it, the juice ran over her lip. She caught it on one knuckle, smiling. She wiped her hand on a paper napkin. “I’m a mess,” she said.

“You look good to me.”

“Ready to rock, big guy?” she said. She bit down on the corner of her lip, her eyes fixed on his.

CHAPTER
9

I
WOKE BEFORE SUNUP
the following day and fed Tripod and Snuggs on the back steps, then fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts and sliced bananas and sat down on the steps and ate breakfast with them. The dawn was a grayish-blue, the fog so thick on the bayou that I couldn’t see the oaks on the far bank, the house and yard quiet except for the ticking of moisture out of the trees. It was one of those moments in the twenty-four-hour cycle of the day when you know that the past is still with you, if you’ll only take the time to listen to the voices inside the mist or watch the shapes that are sometimes printed on a patch of green-black shade between the live oaks.

I sometimes subscribe to the belief that all historical events occur simultaneously, like a dream inside the mind of God. Perhaps it’s only man who views time sequentially and tries to impose a solar calendar upon it. What if other people, both dead and unborn, are living out their lives in the same space we occupy, without our knowledge or consent? Buried in the mudflat down Bayou Teche from me were the remains of a Confederate gunboat. I knew this to be a fact because in the year 1942 my father pulled a huge rusted spike from one of its beams and gave it to me, along with sixteen balls of grapeshot he found inside the cavity of a rotted oak not thirty yards away. On the street in front of my present home, twenty thousand Yankee soldiers marched down the Old Spanish Trail in pursuit of General Alfred Mouton and his boys in butternut, their haversacks stuffed with loot, their wounds from a dozen firefights still green, their lust for revenge unsated. As I sat on the steps with Snuggs and Tripod, I wondered if those soldiers of long ago were still out there, beckoning to us, daring us to witness their mortality, daring us to acknowledge that it would soon be ours.

I have had visions of them that I do not try to explain to others. Sometimes I thought I heard cries and shouts and the sounds of musket fire in the mist, because the Union soldiers who marched through Acadiana were turned loose upon the civilian populace as a lesson in terror. The rape of Negro women became commonplace. Northerners have never understood the nature of the crimes that were committed in their names, no more than neocolonials can understand the enmity their government creates in theirs. The pastoral solemnity of a Civil War graveyard doesn’t come close to suggesting the reality of war or the crucible of pain in which a soldier lives and dies.

But in spite of the bloody ground on which our town was built, and out of which oak trees and bamboo and banks of flowers along the bayou grew, it remained for me a magical place in the predawn hours, touched only cosmetically by the Industrial Age, the drawbridge clanking erect in the fog, its great cogged wheels bleeding rust, a two-story quarter boat that resembled a nineteenth-century paddle wheeler being pushed down to the Gulf, the fog billowing whitely around it, the air sprinkled with the smell of Confederate jasmine.

I heard the screen door open behind me. I turned and looked up into Alafair’s face. She was still wearing her nightgown, but she had washed her face and combed her hair. I had not spoken to her since my confrontation the previous day with Kermit Abelard on the lawn of his house. “Got a minute?” she said.

I made room for her beside me. Both Tripod and Snuggs looked up from their bowls, then resumed eating. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?” I asked.

“I’ve made a couple of decisions. I don’t know how you’ll feel about them,” she said.

The tenor of her voice was of a kind I never took lightly. Alafair made mistakes, particularly of the heart. She could be emotional and impetuous, but once she made up her mind about a matter of principle, she stayed the course, no matter how much she got hurt.

“I didn’t go to the Abelard house because of your relationship with Kermit,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter. One way or another we’re at a juncture, Dave. Until I work my way through a couple of things, I think it’s better I move out.”

“This is your home, Alafair. It’s been your home since I pulled you out of a submerged plane.”

There was no question I was using emotional blackmail against her, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t believe that either the Abelard family or my own ineptitude had brought us to this point. Also, there are times when loss is not acceptable under any circumstances.

“This has less to do with you and Molly than it does me,” she said. “I know you want what’s good for me, but no amount of reasoning has any influence on you. Yesterday Kermit and I went out in the boat to talk about my novel. His agent is flying in today. Kermit has already sent him a couple of chapters. The agent thinks he can sell my novel as a work in progress. Kermit’s agent is with William Morris. I should be delighted. But I have a serious problem. Know what it is? I think maybe I shouldn’t let Kermit’s agent represent me. Why? Because maybe you’re right and I shouldn’t be around the Abelards or Robert Weingart. Maybe I’m taking advantage of my relationship with Kermit to get an introduction to a publisher in New York. Or maybe the opposite is true. Maybe I’m about to throw it all away to satisfy my father’s obsession about people who he thinks have too much money and power.”

“Listen, forget Weingart and the Abelards. Yesterday there was a man fishing in a pirogue out in the cypress trees in front of the Abelard house. Do you know who that man was?”

“Somebody Robert is trying to help.”

“His name is Vidor Perkins. He did time with Weingart in Huntsville Pen. He’s the same guy who told me I had an emergency call at the bait shop on Henderson levee.”

“Are you sure?”

“You think I’d forget the guy who said there was a fire at our house and that you were in trouble and that I’d better haul my ass up to the levee?”

She leaned forward on the step, clasping her ankles. She was barefoot and the tops of her feet were pale, and there was a solitary mosquito bite on her skin just above her left big toe. Her hair was raven-black with shades of brown, and I could smell the odor of shampoo in it. “Kermit isn’t a bad person,” she said.

“I have some photos at the office that maybe you should look at. One shows the body of a girl named Bernadette Latiolais. She was an honor student and about to enter the nurses’ program at UL. The guy who killed her virtually sawed her head loose from her shoulders. I also have a picture of a Canadian girl named Fern Michot. She was probably abducted, bound with ligatures, starved, and kept in a state of constant fear, at least according to the coroner. The same person or persons killed both girls. Kermit knew the Latiolais girl but did not indicate that to anyone until we got the information on our own. Robert Weingart was in the Latiolais girl’s neighborhood, probably with Herman Stanga. Maybe these guys are innocent of any wrongdoing, but no matter which turn the investigation takes, their names keep coming up again and again.”