The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (52 page)

“We’re not going anywhere, Dave.”

I watched a garfish roll among the water hyacinths along the bank, its dark green armored back sliding as supplely as a snake’s beneath the flowers, down into the depths, while tiny bream skittered out of its way.

I
ATE LUNCH
the next day at Victor’s cafeteria on Main. It was hot and bright when I came back out on the street, the air dense, a smell like salt and warm seaweed on the wind, more like hurricane season than the end of spring.

A Lexus pulled to the curb. The driver rolled down the charcoal-tinted window on the passenger side. Carolyn Blanchet leaned forward so I could see her face. “How about a ride?” she said.

“Thanks. I don’t have far to go,” I said.

“Stop acting like an asshole, Dave.”

I stepped off the curb and leaned down on the window jamb. “What do you want, Carolyn?”

“To apologize for the way I acted when you and Helen Soileau came out to the house. I had just gotten finished with those federal auditors and wanted to take it out on somebody.”

I nodded and stepped back on the curb.

“Dave,”
she said, turning my name into two syllables.

“Have a great life,” I said.

“You’d better listen to me. Helen Soileau is carrying out a vendetta. Give me two minutes. That’s all I’m asking. Then you can do whatever you please.”

Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it,
a voice said.

But there was no question about Helen’s lack of objectivity toward Carolyn Blanchet. Worse, I wasn’t entirely sure that Helen hadn’t been involved in the same circle of female friends in New Orleans as Carolyn. Carolyn pulled around the corner, into the shade of a two-story building, and waited. I followed and got into the car. “Go ahead,” I said.

“I misled you about Emma Poche,” she said. “We had a brief relationship. I didn’t tell you the truth because I didn’t want Emma hurt. Men gave her a bad time at the New Orleans Police Department. She doesn’t need the same kind of trouble in St. Martinville.”

The Lexus’s engine was running, the air-conditioning vents gushing. Carolyn wore sandals and white shorts and a yellow blouse and blue contacts. She sat with her back against the door, her knees slightly spread, a gold cross and thin gold chain lying askew on her chest. Her eyes roamed over my face, her mouth parting, exposing the whiteness of her teeth. “You just going to sit there?” she said.

“Ever read
Mein Kampf
? Hitler explains how you tell an effective lie. You wrap it in a little bit of truth.”

“Let me tell you this. A friend of mine felt bad about something she had done and called me up and made a confession. My friend had taken pictures of me at a girls-only Mardi Gras celebration. Helen Soileau wanted the pictures. When Helen Soileau wants something, she gets it. I have a feeling you’ve seen those pictures.”

I tried to keep my face neutral, my eyes empty. I looked down the street at a black kid doing wheelies on a bicycle under the colonnade.

“That’s what I thought,” Carolyn said. “Think what you want about those pictures—they’re innocent. Now let me ask you this. What kind of person would use them to blacken another person’s reputation? Also, if these pictures are immoral, how is it that Helen Soileau is friends with the woman who took them?”

“None of this changes the fact that you lied about your relationship with Emma Poche.”

“Have you told Molly everything about your various affairs over the years? Let’s face it, Dave, from what I heard, you were never very big on keeping it in your pants.”

“It’s really been good talking with you, Carolyn. I’ll keep in mind that you were protecting a working-class girl like Emma from public scandal. Tell me, how does that compute with your and Layton’s record of stealing the life savings of thousands of working-class people who trusted y’all?”

“God, you’re a sweetheart to the bitter end.” She paused. “Remember the New Year’s party at the Blue Room in New Orleans about twenty years back?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“I guess you don’t. You’d soaked your head in alcohol for two days.” She was smiling. “Who took you home that night?”

I held my eyes on hers, trying to show no expression.

“You were quite a guy back then,” she said. “Enough to make a girl straighten up and fly right and give up her eccentric ways. Remember that line from Hemingway about feeling the earth move? Wow, you did it, babe.”

I got out of the Lexus. She rolled down the window and looked up at me, laughing openly. “Had you going, didn’t I?” she said.

T
HAT NIGHT BLACK
storm clouds swollen with electricity had sealed the sky from the Gulf to central Louisiana. Waves crashed across the two-lane road at the bottom of St. Mary Parish, and a tornado made a brief touchdown and knocked out a power line. During the night, several emergency vehicles passed the Abelard house and noticed nothing unusual about it other than a few broken tree limbs that had blown into the yard. At around four-fifteen
A.M.
, a deputy sheriff thought he saw flashes of light inside the windows, both upstairs and downstairs. He slowed his cruiser by the wood bridge that gave onto the compound, but the house had returned to complete darkness. He concluded that he had seen reflections of lightning on the window glass or that someone had been carrying a candelabrum between the rooms.

At 8:43
A.M
. Friday, the phone on my desk rang. The caller was someone I had not expected to hear from again. “Mr. Dave?” she said.

“Jewel?”

“I need he’p.”

“What is it?”

“I was late getting to work ’cause trees limbs were down on the road. When I got to the house, my key wouldn’t go in the front lock.”

“Which house?”

“The big house, Mr. Timothy’s. The key wouldn’t work. The lock looked like somebody drove a screwdriver in it. I went around back, but the door was bolted from inside. I banged on all the doors, but nobody answered.”

“Who’s supposed to be there besides Mr. Timothy?”

“The maid and the gardener, but they probably couldn’t get t’rew on the road.”

“What about Kermit and Weingart?”

“They went off to the casino in New Orleans for a couple of days. I put a ladder up to the window. I could see a shape inside one of the doors, just standing there, not moving.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m telling you what I saw. There’s a shape in the doorway. It’s not moving. I’m scared, Mr. Dave.”

“Where are you now?”

“Right outside the house.”

“I’m heading over there. Call the sheriff’s office in Franklin.”

“No, suh.”

“Why won’t you call the sheriff?”

“This is still St. Mary Parish. It doesn’t change. Y’all want to believe it has, but you’re just fooling yourself.”

“Look, Mr. Timothy doesn’t stay at night by himself. Who else was there?”

“Mr. Emiliano, the Spanish man from Nicaragua.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. But you have to call the St. Mary sheriff. I don’t have authority outside Iberia Parish.”

“Yes, suh. I’m putting the ladder up by the sunporch now. I can see to the hallway,” she said. “Oh, Lord, that t’ing is still standing there.”

“What thing?”

“Hurry up, Mr. Dave,” she said. Then I heard her crying just before she dropped the cell phone.

CHAPTER
23

F
IFTEEN MINUTES LATER
, my flasher rippling, I came up behind a utility truck and an ambulance and a St. Mary Parish sheriff’s cruiser on the two-lane that led to the Abelard house. Men in hard hats and overalls were chainsawing a fallen tree and hauling it in segments off the asphalt. The sheriff, Tony Judice, shook hands with me. “Jewel Laveau said she called me after you told her to,” he said.

“It was something like that, I guess,” I replied, not meeting his eyes.

He caught my embarrassment. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We didn’t treat people of color around here very well. I don’t know why we’re surprised when they act the way they do.”

“I couldn’t understand everything she was saying,” I said, changing the subject. “Did you get anything out of her?”

“She was yelling about her father. I thought her father died years ago,” he replied.

When the utility workers had cleared the road, I followed the sheriff’s cruiser to the Abelard home. The sun was white on the bay, the wind blowing stiffly out of the south. There was a bright smell in the air, as though the land had been swept clean by the storm. But Jewel Laveau was a quick reminder that there was no joy or sense of renewal to be found at the home of the Abelards. She sat on a folding chair in her white uniform in the shade of the boathouse, her shoulders rounded, her large hands spread like baseball gloves on her knees. Her eyes were rheumy, her nose wet, when she looked up at us. “What took y’all?”

“The road was blocked,” the sheriff said. “What’s inside the house?”

“Go see for yourself,” she replied.

“That’s not helping us a lot,” he said.

“That’s your problem. I won’t talk about it. If you talk about evil, it just makes it grow. Maybe I didn’t see what I t’ought. Maybe it was just the shadows. I tried to call Mr. Kermit in New Orleans. But he wasn’t at the hotel. Neither was Mr. Robert.” Then her gaze shifted on me and stayed there, as though the sheriff were no longer present. “You’re disappearing.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“It’s like you’re being erased—your arms, your legs. They’re thinning away, turning into air.”

“You stay here,” the sheriff said to her. “I’ll talk to you again before we leave.”

“You cain’t tell me what to do. I’m not listening to y’all anymore. I spent my life listening to you. There was evil all around us. But where were you? You were hiding in your offices, doing what you were tole, letting the people in the quarters suffer and work for nothing. Now you’re out here to clean up. ’Cause that’s what y’all been doing all your lives. Cleaning up after the people that kept you scared just like the rest of us.”

“You need to keep a civil tongue, Miss Jewel,” the sheriff said. There was no mistaking the racial resentment that even among the best of us sometimes oozed its way through the mix in our struggle with ourselves.

I walked with the sheriff back up the driveway. Two deputies had already tried the doors and windows and had found all of them locked. The sheriff examined the key slot in the front doorknob without touching it. The slot looked like someone had wedged a blade screwdriver into it. There were also two deep prize marks between the edge of the door and the jamb, as though someone had tried to force back the tongue on the lock. “Get us in,” the sheriff said to his deputy.

We had all put on polyethylene gloves. The deputy used his baton to break a glass pane out of a side panel, then he reached inside and unlocked the door. The power was still off in the house, the windows tightly sealed, the air dense and warm and smelling of moldy wallpaper and curtains and slipcovers that were never free of dust and carpet stretched over dry rot. The light that filtered through the stained glass on the sunporch seemed to burnish the woodwork and antique furniture with a red flush that was garish and unnatural.

“Smell it?” the deputy with the baton said.

“Open some windows,” the sheriff replied. He flicked a wall switch on and off, apparently forgetting that the power grid was down. His eyes traveled up the stairs and along the banister and up the wall to the landing on the second story. “I was really hoping we wouldn’t be doing this,” he said.

The blood evidence told its own story. The smears along the wall were those of a person who was wounded and had probably fallen and struggled to his feet. The linear and horsetail patterns, stippled and attenuated on the edges, as though they had been flung from a brush, were of the kind you associate with the splatter from an exit wound. The sheriff and I started up the stairs, not touching the mahogany banister that was stained in three places by the grip of a bloodied hand.

Down below, one of the deputies said, “Oh, shit.”

“How about it on the language?” the sheriff said.

“Better come look at this, sir. Watch where you step,” the deputy said.

We went back down the stairs and walked past the entrance to the sunporch and entered a dark hallway that led to the kitchen. A man hung from the doorframe, his slippered feet barely touching the floor, a clothesline wrapped around his throat and threaded through a metal eyelet screwed into the top of the jamb. His eyes were open, his tongue sticking out of his mouth like a small, twisted green banana.

But Timothy Abelard’s ordeal had not consisted simply of being hanged like a criminal; he had also been shot, at least twice.

“Who the hell would do this?” the sheriff said.

“About half the parish, if they were honest about it,” the deputy said. The sheriff gave him a look. “Sorry,” the deputy said.

The sheriff looked up the staircase. “I hate to think what’s up there. You ready?” he said to me.

“If it will make this easier for you, I’ll show you the photos of the dead girls who I think suffered much worse than Mr. Abelard did.”

“I’m not making the connection,” the sheriff said, his expression suddenly irritable if not disdainful.

At that moment I didn’t care about the sheriff’s feelings or the conflicts he had probably never resolved regarding his role as a public servant in a fiefdom. I hadn’t liked Timothy Abelard, nor did I like the dictatorial arrogance that I associated with his class. But that did not mean I believed that an elderly, infirm man deserved to die the way he had.

I glanced at the glass case that held the photos of Abelard standing among friends of Batista and members of the Somoza family, people for whom cruelty toward others was as natural as waking in the morning. Was Abelard a monster? Or was he just an extension of the value system that produced him, a blithe spirit who turned a blind eye to the excesses of the third-world dictators we did business with? I started to share my thoughts with the sheriff. But what was the point? He didn’t create the world in which he’d grown up and wasn’t responsible for the sins of others.