The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (23 page)

“To check on a lady I was with.”

“You mean last night?”

“Maybe.”

“Who was she?”

“Her name escapes me.”

“You were still drunk this morning. Weingart could have died of a coronary. How long was his head under water?”

“Her name is Emma Poche,” he said. “I got it on with her.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“What’s wrong with Emma?”

“Do I have to tell you? You’re not interested in any woman who doesn’t have biker tats or a history at the methadone clinic.”

“She has a butterfly on her butt. That’s the only one. I think it’s cute.”

“Cute?” I repeated.

“Lighten up, Streak. It’s only rock and roll.” His eyes were still lit with an alcoholic glaze, his throat nicked in two places by his razor, his cheeks bladed with color.

I gave it up, in the way you give up something with such an enormous sense of sadness rushing through you that it leaves no room for any other emotion. “What are we going to do, Cletus?”

“About what?”

“You.”

“We all end up in the same place. Some sooner than others. What the hell. We’re both standing on third base,” he said.

I wanted to say something else, but I couldn’t find the words. I left him there and walked down the street and got in my cruiser and returned to the office, an image in my mind I couldn’t shake: that of a flag being lifted from a coffin and folded into a military tuck by a white-gloved, full-dress marine, his scalped head and hollow eyes as stark as bone. Would Clete Purcel’s life focus into that one bright brassy point of light and then disappear with the firing of blank cartridges into the wind? Was this ultimately the choice we had made for both of us?

K
ERMIT
A
BELARD
and Robert Weingart and Kermit’s agent, Oliver Fremont, picked up Alafair in a white stretch limo, and all of them headed up the St. Martinville highway toward Breaux Bridge and the Café des Amis. Alafair wore a simple black dress and black sandals and silver earrings, and sat on the rolled leather seat close to the door, while Kermit poured drinks out of a cocktail shaker. Oliver Fremont had a degree in publishing from Hofstra University yet spoke with an accent that was vaguely British. He was blond and tall and handsome, and he had perfect manners, but it was his accent, or rather his candor about it, that became for Alafair his most engaging quality.

“Did you live in England?” she asked.

“I’ve traveled there some, but no, I never lived there,” he replied.

“I see,” she said.

“You’re wondering about my accent?”

“I thought you might have gone to school in the UK.”

“It’s an affectation, I’m afraid. When the upper echelons in publishing have a few drinks, they start sounding like George Plimpton or William and James Buckley. My father sold shoes in Great Neck. He’d be a little amused by me, I think.”

Alafair looked at his profile and the evening light marbling on his skin. He gazed out the tinted window at the oak trees and the sugarcane fields sweeping past. “This is a grand area, isn’t it? I can see why you write with such fondness of it. I love the chapters Kermit sent me. I can’t wait to read more,” he said.

“Her father is a sheriff’s detective,” Robert Weingart said. “I think he gives her a lot of material. It’s pretty feisty stuff, if you ask me.”

“No, my father’s experience doesn’t have much to do with what I write,” Alafair said.

Weingart was on his third mint julep. He wore gray slacks and tassel loafers and a blue-and-white-striped shirt with white French cuffs and a rolled white collar; his plum-colored tie had a gold pin in it. There were abrasions around his temples that disappeared like orange rust into his hairline. When he spoke, his mouth seemed to keep twisting into a bow, as though it were cut or bruised inside.

“I understand you’re writing a sequel to
The Green Cage,
” Oliver Fremont said to Weingart. “That must be a hard act to follow. I thought
The Green Cage
was a stupendous accomplishment, better than
Soul on Ice,
maybe better than
On the Yard
by Malcolm Braly. Did you ever read Malcolm? He was a great talent.”

“Why do you compare my work to prison writing only?”

“Pardon?”

“You ever see
Straight Time
? Dustin Hoffman, Gary Busey, Harry Dean Stanton. Box-office bomb. Edward Bunker wrote the novel it was based on. I knew him inside. Good writer, good story, commercial bomb. Why? All prison stories are alike. They’re about professional losers, and if there’s any sin in this country, it’s losing.
The Green Cage
deals with the entirety of the system, neoliberalism and the culture that creates criminality. It deals with the origins of the existential hero. It’s not an account about jails. If it has any antecedent, it’s
Shane,
not some crap dictated into a recording machine by an Oakland shine who doesn’t know the difference between Karl and Groucho Marx.”

“I think Oliver was saying your book goes way beyond categorical limits, Rob. That’s why it’s such a great accomplishment,” Kermit said.

“Why don’t we ask Alafair?” Weingart said. “I can’t believe at some point you haven’t been influenced by your father and his colleagues. Do they ever discuss their recreational activities? Do you know that most cops will admit, usually when they’re sloshed, that they would have ended up stacking time if they hadn’t gotten badges?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” Alafair said.

Weingart drank from his julep glass, his eyes never leaving hers. “Daddy doesn’t talk about that at the dinner table?” he said.

“Rob, Alafair isn’t responsible for any disagreements Mr. Robicheaux might have had with others,” Kermit said.

“I probably am,” Alafair said. “My father is a fine man and often comes home exhausted from dealing with people who belong in iron boxes that should be sunk in the ocean. Sometimes I lose sight of that fact and only add to his burden. I’ve done this on many occasions.”

“Oh, wilderness enow,” Weingart said. “I suspect the world of chick lit will wet its pants over sentiment like that. I often thought the best title for one of those books was
The Cave,
a title that suggests an infinitely receding vagina.”

“I’d like to see the rest of your manuscript,” Fremont said.

“That’s very kind of you,” Alafair said.

“Kermit, would you either give me a refill or pass me the bloody shaker so I can do it myself?” Weingart said.

“Sorry, Rob,” Kermit said, tilting the cocktail shaker over Weingart’s glass. “Rob took the speedboat out by himself today and ran through a tree limb. Luckily, he wasn’t hurt more seriously.”

“I don’t think anyone is interested in my boating misadventure. Unless Alafair would like to use it in her novel-in-progress. Otherwise, I’d appreciate the conversation being shifted off of me,” Weingart said.

Kermit folded his hands and gazed at the sunset and at the wind blowing on the sugarcane fields, obviously avoiding eye contact with Weingart. By the time the limo reached the restaurant in Breaux Bridge, Weingart’s resentment seemed to have hardened into silent detachment. After they ordered, he stared out the window at the elevated sidewalks and old brick buildings and wood colonnades on the main street and the rusted iron bridge that spanned Bayou Teche. He broke a breadstick and bit down on it, then winced and touched his lip.

“Hurt yourself?” Oliver Fremont asked.

“I have an impacted tooth.”

“Those are painful,” Fremont said.

“Why are we here?” Weingart said, addressing himself to no one in particular.

“We’re here because they serve fine food. Let’s enjoy ourselves, Robert,” Kermit said.

“Thanks for correcting me, Kermit. Alafair, did you know that Kermit let me read your manuscript?” Weingart said.

“Yes, I became aware of that when I saw the note you wrote on the last page,” Alafair replied.

“What note?” Kermit said.

“Evidently you didn’t see it,” Alafair said. “Why don’t you ask Robert what he had to say?”

A waitress was pouring wine into their glasses. Outside the French doors, the sky was purple, the streets thick with shadow. The lights on the drawbridge had just come on. “Robert, what did you say about Alafair’s manuscript?” Kermit asked.

Weingart lifted his eyes to the stamped ceiling of the restaurant, as though searching for a profound meaning inside the design. “No, it escapes me. Do you remember, Alafair? I hope you found it helpful.”

“I believe you said it might sell a hundred copies if it was packaged with a hygiene promotion.”

“No, I think I said ‘female hygiene.’”

Kermit Abelard looked straight ahead, his gaze focused on the other diners, the white-aproned waiters and waitresses working their way between the tables. “I think Robert probably meant that as an indictment of the industry, not your book,” he said. “Isn’t that true, Rob?”

“I’m afraid I’m clueless. I can’t even remember the story line at this point,” he said. “Can you give me a nudge, Alafair? Something about first love, teenage girls being kissed on the mouth under the trees, Daddy hovering in the background. Sound familiar? It was tingly stuff through and through.”

“That’s not the story at all,” Kermit said.

Weingart leaned forward on the tablecloth, his cheeks sunken, as though he had drawn all the spittle out of his mouth. “Did you tell Alafair what you and I were doing before you gave me the manuscript? In the boathouse? Because you couldn’t wait to go inside?”

“I think you carry a great injury in your soul, Robert. And no matter what you do or say, I forgive you for it,” Kermit said.

“Oh, good try. I think I now know where Alafair gets the unctuous goo she uses in her dialogue,” Weingart said. “You
forgive
me? Oh, that’s wonderful.”

“You shouldn’t have written that remark on her manuscript,” Kermit said.

“I didn’t just write the remark, I
said
it to you, Kermit. To your face, two feet from your ear. Tell me I didn’t or that you didn’t hear me. The kitty cat got your tongue?”

“Why are you acting like this?”

“Because you’re just so
you,
Kermit.” Weingart drank from his wineglass and smiled at the waitress as she placed his food in front of him. “My, red snapper and a stuffed potato. Do you mind if I start now? It’s not very good if it’s cold. Alafair looks a little conflicted. What does your father call you? It’s Alf, isn’t it? Talk with Alf, Kermit.” Weingart inserted a forkful of potato and sour cream and parsley and bacon bits in his mouth.

Alafair’s gaze was fixed on the French doors and the sunset on the bayou. She waited for Kermit to speak again, to say something in his own defense if not hers, to be more than the thing she feared he was. But he remained silent. When she glanced sideways at him, his hands were limp on the table, his eyes lowered, his expression a study in gray wax. The most incongruous aspect of his demeanor was the muscular configuration of his torso, his square, blunt-tipped workingman’s hands, the cut of his jaw, the dimple in his chin, all of the physical elements she associated with his youthful masculine vigor, all of it now insignificant in contrast to the mantle of cowardice that Robert Weingart seemed to have draped on his shoulders.

“Mr. Fremont—” she began.

“It’s Oliver,” he said.

“I wouldn’t have met you without an introduction from Kermit,” she said. “Unlike many people who come to your agency, I made only a partial submission. I’m flattered by your comments about my work, but I think I’m getting special treatment. I think I’ll feel more comfortable about my submission if you can look at the finished manuscript and then tell me if you think it’s publishable.”

Fremont leaned back in his chair, a bead of light in one eye. He massaged his temple with two fingers. “Not too many writers tell me that,” he said.

“It seems like a reasonable point of view,” she said.

“Not in my world.”

Weingart had been snapping his fingers at the waitress for more tartar sauce. “Sorry, I didn’t catch that. Telling the in-house secrets, are we?”

“You’re a special kind of fellow, Robert,” Oliver Fremont said.

“Care to elaborate on that?”

“Not really. Some writers become the stuff of legends for different reasons. Harold Robbins’s agent used to lock him in a cottage at the Beverly Hills Hotel and not feed him until he shoved four pages of finished manuscript under the door. Supposedly Louis Mayer had Hemingway kicked off the MGM lot. Hart Crane threw his typewriter through a glass window into Dorothy Parker’s yard. But I think you might become one of those guys for whom the rest of us are only a footnote.”

“One of which guys?”

“Special guys. Legends. Guys people talk about at cocktail parties for many years. Their legends take on a life of their own and grow over the years. Eventually the legends become far more interesting than their work. Finally nobody remembers anything except the legend. The writer becomes something like a scarecrow in an empty field.”

Weingart had stopped eating. “Let me explain what ‘special’ is and why I’m not ‘special.’ Special people need special handling. I’m not an aberration or a curiosity. I’ve read more books than most university Ph.D.’ s. I’m more intelligent than they are, more knowledgeable of the real world, more erudite in front of their students than they are. In short, I’m a civilized man and not ‘special,’ my friend. See, ‘special’ is for the guys who stay in twenty-three-hour lockdown and get two showers a week if they’re lucky. ‘Special’ is for the guys who have to brush their teeth with their finger because they melt the handles of their toothbrushes over a Bic lighter and mold them into shanks. I’m on a first-name basis with a few cell-house acquaintances that are in the ‘special’ category. If you like, I can introduce you to them. Then you’ll be in possession of some hands-on knowledge about ‘special’ guys, and you can impress your friends with it. Want me to arrange a meeting or two before you leave for New York? These guys will love your accent.”

Alafair got up from the table and used the telephone at the bar to call a cab. Then she went outside and waited by the curb without returning to the table. It was dark now, and the lights on the iron drawbridge over the Teche were iridescent with humidity. She looked back over her shoulder. She had thought Kermit Abelard might follow her out of the restaurant. Instead, he was arguing with Weingart at the table. No, “arguing” was the wrong term, she thought. When people argued, they spoke in heat, leaning forward with wrinkled brows, their throats corded, the flesh around their mouths bloodless. But Kermit kept pausing to allow Weingart to speak, lowering his long eyelashes, his face colored by embarrassment rather than passion. Oliver Fremont rose from his chair, his gaze fixed on Alafair, and walked between the tables and out the French doors, speaking to neither Kermit nor Weingart.