The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (28 page)

How can all of that be ripped loose from a young woman’s chest in moments, unexpectedly, through guile and treachery, without a psychic scream leaving the soul, a scream that is so loud it wraps itself around the world?

I closed the blinds on my windows and my office door and clicked off the overhead lighting and sat in the air-conditioned gloom, my arms motionless on top of my desk blotter. What were the two girls trying to tell me?

But I knew, in the way that all fathers who raise a teenage girl know. At a juncture in their lives, Bernadette Latiolais and Fern Michot had trusted a man they thought was special. He was probably handsome, older, better educated than they, and wise in the ways of the world. He was confident and reassuring and seemed to dismiss or solve problems in a magical fashion. At some point in their association with him, he had performed an act, seemingly unknown to himself, that was both kind and strong. After that moment, they made a compact with themselves and decided he was the one to whom they would give their entire heart and soul.

Who was the man who fit all the criteria? I saw his face float in front of me like a chimera painted on air. I saw the slyness in his eyes, the plastic surgery that had tugged his flesh back placidly on the bone, the lips that were slightly puckered to hide the smirk flickering on his cheek.

I had to blink to make sure I was not actually looking into Robert Weingart’s face. Unconsciously, I brushed my right hand against the checkered grips of my holstered .45. I lifted my hand back onto the desk, like a child in puberty obsessed with concerns about impure thoughts and touches.

I jerked open the blinds and did not let myself dwell upon the choices that I was making already, my hand clenching and unclenching at my side.

OVER THE YEARS
, I had come to believe that almost all homicides, to one degree or another, are premeditated. A man who enters a convenience store with a loaded pistol has already made a decision about its possible use. A person who commits an abduction, knowing nothing about the victim’s heart condition or that of the victim’s loved ones, has already decided on the side of self-interest and is not worried about the fate of others. Even a man in a barroom fight, when he continues to kick a downed opponent trapped on the floor, knows exactly what he is doing.

In my view, there is an explicit motivation in almost every homicide, even one committed in apparent blind rage. Was the motivation in the death of the two girls sexual? Possibly, but I doubted it. Robert Weingart was in the mix, and I believed the Abelards were, too, and possibly even Layton Blanchet. Sex was not a primary issue in their lives. Money was. When it comes to money, power and sex are secondary issues. Money buys both of them, always.

But what was to be gained financially by the deaths of two innocent girls? Perhaps the answer lay in what I considered a long tradition among people like the Abelards. Historically, they had acquired their wealth off the backs and sweat of others. Nor, when push came to shove, were they above the use of the lash and branding iron and selling off families to different parts of the country. In their journey from the role of newly arrived colonials escaping from Old World despots to a time when they themselves became slave owners, they managed to do considerable damage to the earth as well, burning out the soil by not rotating crops and turning old-growth forests into stump farms.

But how could two teenage girls with no apparent agenda, from poor families, be an obstruction in someone’s monetary scheme to the extent that their lives would become forfeit? It made little sense. I suspected the answer lay in the obvious, perhaps a detail I had missed or already passed over. As an addendum to this reflection, the word “motivation” suggests complexity that is often not there. Ask any detective who has heard the confession of a murderer. When the killer finally explains his rationale for committing the worst act of which human beings are capable, the speciousness and absurdity of his thinking is of such a mind-numbing magnitude that the detective’s response is usually one of silence and blank-faced disbelief. Fortunately, he often has a legal pad and felt pen close by, almost like stage props that he can slide across the table to the suspect while he says, simply and quietly, “Write it down.”

At 11:23
A.M.
, Helen opened my office door without knocking. “Layton Blanchet and his wife just T-boned a black woman’s car with their Lexus at Burke Street and the drawbridge,” she said.

“So?”

“They’re trying to leave the scene.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“The Blanchets aren’t going to smash up somebody’s car in our parish and drive away like their shit doesn’t stink. I’ll meet you out front.”

The drive to the accident scene was only three blocks down East Main, past The Shadows and the old Evangeline Theater where a street named for a pioneer Irishwoman fed into the drawbridge. Coincidentally, the accident scene was a short distance from the back of the brick building where Clete Purcel kept his office.

Two cruisers had arrived ahead of us. A Mazda had been crushed against a telephone pole, its passenger-side doors driven into the seats. Glass and strips of chrome molding lay in the street. Amazingly, the woman driving it was unharmed; she was sitting in the backseat of a cruiser, talking to a paramedic who kept moving a finger back and forth in front of her face.

If anyone was injured or impaired by the accident, it was Layton Blanchet. While his wife argued with a sheriff’s deputy, Layton sat behind the steering wheel of his Lexus with both the driver’s and passenger’s doors open to let in the breeze. He looked like a man afflicted with a fatal disease. Helen and I parked in front of the domino parlor on Burke Street and walked toward the accident. As soon as Carolyn Blanchet saw me, she disengaged from her argument with the deputy. “Dave, thank God you’re here. Can you do anything for us?” she said.

“Like what?”

“Layton is having a nervous breakdown. I was taking him to Our Lady of Lourdes in Lafayette,” she said.

“He’s having a breakdown but you let him drive the car?” I said.

“It was the only way I could get him out of the house,” she replied.

“So why were you downtown and not on the highway to Lafayette?” I asked. Inside the shade at the back of the brick building, I could see the umbrella on Clete’s office patio ruffling in the breeze. Carolyn’s eyes followed mine, and I knew that whatever information she was about to give me would come a teaspoon at a time and would reveal only enough to ensure that her account was credible.

“He wanted to talk to your friend Clete Purcel. About a business matter of some kind,” she said.

Carolyn had shown no acknowledgment of Helen’s presence.

“Have you met Sheriff Soileau?” I asked.

“Hi,” Carolyn said, and returned her attention to me. “I’ve got to get him to this psychiatrist who’s waiting for us at Lourdes. The black woman ran the stop sign. No one is injured. I don’t want to see her ticketed or hurt financially. We’ll fix our own car. Maybe Layton will even fix hers. But we didn’t cause this, and we don’t have time for a lot of paperwork and stupid questions. Now, are we done here?”

“No, madam, you’re not,” Helen said.

“Then tell me what I can do to make this right so I can take my husband to the hospital.”

“Normally when people try to leave the scene of an accident, it’s not for humanitarian reasons,” Helen said. “Your husband is going to take a Breathalyzer test, and you’re going to file a report at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. You’re going to do that now, not later. That means you get in the back of that cruiser by the bridge, of your own volition, and you do it without further discussion. If you say anything more, you’re going to jail in handcuffs.”

“This is ridiculous,” Carolyn said.

“Not to us, it isn’t. Would you like to say something else?” Helen said.

Carolyn Blanchet’s platinum hair looked as bright as a helmet in the sunshine, her contacts as blue as the sky. Her skin made me think of brown tallow. She held her gaze on Helen, never blinking, her expression impossible to read. “I apologize if I seemed abrupt. May I call my attorney?” she said.

“Please do. The reception in the backseat of the cruiser is excellent,” Helen said.

“This is such a lovely little city. The word ‘quaint’ comes to mind. It’s like a place out of a fable. Is it the fable about a big fish in a small pond? Or is that about something else? I’m probably confused,” Carolyn said.

But Helen was already walking away from her, her arms pumped, her attention focused on the black woman and the ruined Mazda and Layton Blanchet sitting slack-jawed behind the wheel of his Lexus. I followed her up onto the sidewalk at the edge of the drawbridge, out of earshot of Carolyn Blanchet.

“She’s been married to Layton too long,” I said.

“Forget about it. I think her problem isn’t with us or the accident,” Helen said. “I think she doesn’t want us talking to her husband.”

“I think you’re right,” I replied.

“What’s going on between Clete and Layton Blanchet?”

“Layton thinks somebody is pumping his wife. He hired Clete to find out who.”

“And?”

“Clete came up with zero.”

“But that’s not why she wants to keep us away from her husband. I want you to get Layton alone and find out what’s going on.”

“You’ve never met Carolyn?”

“Why?”

“You seem a little charged up.”

“I was taking graduate courses at LSU when that snooty bitch was a cheerleader. She got a friend of mine kicked out of her sorority because my friend was a lesbian.”

“I see,” I said, my gaze shifting off Helen’s face to the oaks on the lawn of the old convent across the bayou.

“You see what?”

“Nothing.”

“Dave, do you think you’re the only person in the world who resents rich people treating us like we’re their personal servants?”

“I’ll see what I can get out of Layton,” I replied.

“Do that,” she said. She put on her sunglasses and placed her hands on her hips, her gaze riveted on Carolyn Blanchet. “They’re not going to wipe their feet on us. Not this time.”

“When did they do it before?”

“Everybody does.”

“You sound like me.”

“I know. It’s depressing,” she replied. Then she hit me on the arm.

Layton took the Breathalyzer test and came up negative. Helen rode back to the department with a deputy, and I put Layton in our cruiser and drove across the drawbridge, past the former convent, and into City Park.

“What are we doing?” he asked.

“It’s time for a sno’ball. You’d rather sit in an interview room down the hall from a holding cell or have a sno’ball with me in the shade?”

For the first time since we had arrived at the accident, he tried to smile. Then the humor faded from his eyes and he stared at some children turning somersaults on the grass in the park. “I was a good cop, wasn’t I?” he said.

In my opinion, Layton had used police work solely as a threshold into more lucrative enterprises. “I didn’t know you real well back then, Layton. I suspect, like most of us, you did the best you could.”

“I mean, I never jammed anybody. I never knocked the blacks around.”

“That’s right.”

“When I sold pots and pans and burial insurance in black neighborhoods, I tried to give them a break, at least as far as my boss would allow.”

I parked on the grass under a spreading oak that shadowed a long concrete boat ramp that dipped down into the Teche. I bought two sno’balls from the concession truck and walked back to the cruiser with them, the spearmint-stained ice sliding over my fingers. “Try this, podna. It’s like a cool breeze blowing through your chest,” I said.

“What I’m saying is, I never set out to screw anybody,” he said. “I tried to be a decent man. I worked hard for what I got.”

“Who said otherwise?” I said, sitting down in the driver’s seat, leaving the door open and putting down all the windows with the power buttons.

“These federal investigators, they’re taking me apart. Look, I wasn’t running a Ponzi scheme. It’s like any kind of investment. The people who get in early make the big money. The ones who come along later don’t always do as well. All investment is speculative in nature.”

It was time to change the subject. “Why’d you want to see Purcel?”

“I think my wife is having an affair. I think Purcel knows who it is.”

“If that’s true, why wouldn’t Clete tell you?”

“Maybe somebody got to him.”

Layton kept staring straight ahead, the sno’ball melting in his hand. At one time or another, we have all met someone whose fate we secretly pray will never be our own. The person upon whom a premature death sentence has been imposed will use every medical procedure he can afford to repurchase his life; he will be brave and humble and for a while will even pretend that willpower and prayer and holistic medicine will give him back the sunlit mornings that he once took for granted. But eventually a shadowy figure will step in front of his eyesight and his face will forever be darkened by the experience. I believed that Layton Blanchet had become that man, and it was very hard to feel anger or indignation toward him.

“Clete didn’t stiff you. He’s an honest man,” I said. Then I shifted the direction of the inquiry again. “Did Clete lend you his gold pen?”

I could see Layton’s mouth moving, as though repeating my question. “Gold pen? Why would I want his pen? What are we talking about?”

I was convinced his confusion was not manufactured. “It’s not important,” I said. “I don’t believe the possibility of your wife’s infidelity is the issue, Layton. I think those dead girls are. Maybe it’s time to come clean and get it behind you. Your parents were honest working people. What would they tell you to do?”

“Don’t you try to use my family against me,” he replied. But he spoke without passion, the sno’ball melting and running down his wrist. I took it from his hand and threw it out the window.

“You denied a personal relationship with the Abelards,” I said. “But Kermit Abelard was with you when you gave a talk on biofuels in Jackson, Mississippi. You also have stained glasswork in your house that either he or his father gave you.”