The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (13 page)

“The writer? I know who he is. Is he living here’bouts now?”

“He was in Huntsville the same time you were. You never buddied around with him?” she said.

“I spent most of my free time at Huntsville in the chapel or the library.”

“Who’s the little girl?” Helen asked.

“Her mother cleans for me. They’re from right up the road, where all those trailers are at.”

Helen went over to the swing. “Is your mommy home?” she said to the little girl.

“She’s at work.”

“Why’d she leave you here?”

“Mr. Vidor took me to buy clothes.”

“Is somebody else at home right now?”

“My auntie.”

“I want you to wait out front for us. We need to talk with Mr. Vidor. We’ll drive you home in a few minutes. You’re not to come back here again unless your mother is with you.”

“Ma’am, you cain’t tell that little girl what to do,” Perkins said.

Helen lifted one finger toward Perkins, then looked back at the child. “You haven’t done anything wrong. But you should be with your family and not in the home of a man you don’t know well. You understand that?”

Perkins bit on a thumbnail, his grin gone. He stuffed a huge pile of blackened leaves and moldy pecan husks into the barrel, curls of smoke rising into his face. His conked hair was oily with sweat or grease or both, and the strawberry birthmark that bled like a tail out of his hairline seemed to have darkened in the shade.

Helen waited until the little girl had left the yard. “Here are the rules,” she said. “You don’t get near any children in this parish. If you try to harass a member of my department, if you look cross-eyed at somebody on the street, if you spit on a sidewalk, if you throw a gum wrapper out a car window, I’m going to turn your life into an exquisite agony.”

He leaned on his rake, the sweat on his ridged stomach running into the waistband of his underwear. “No, you won’t,” he said. “Check my jacket. On my last jolt, I went out max time. I did twenty-seven months chopping cotton under the gun, just so I wouldn’t have some twerp of a PO telling me what I could and couldn’t do. You got no say in my life, Sheriff, ’cause I ain’t broke no laws, and I don’t plan to, either. Empty wagons always make the loudest rattle.”

Helen brushed at her nose, the smoke starting to get to her. “You have anything you want to say to Mr. Perkins?” she asked me.

“You called Clete Purcel by name at Henderson Swamp. How’d you know who he was?” I said.

“He’s got his big cheeks spread on a stool at Clementine’s every time I go in there. He’s usually drunk,” Perkins said.

“When you see Robert Weingart—” I began.

“I don’t see him,” he said.

“Tell Weingart that for a mainline con, he’s made a major mistake,” I said.

Perkins laughed under his breath and bent to his work, dropping a rake-load of leaves and wet pine needles into the fire. Then he said something into the smoke.

“What’d you say?” Helen said, stepping toward him.

Perkins walked out of the smoke, blowing out his breath as though thinking of the right words to use. “I said maybe y’all ain’t so damn smart. Maybe y’all are gonna wish you had me for a friend.”

“Want to take the collard greens out of your mouth?” I said.

“I’m saying maybe I’m not the worst huckleberry in the patch. I’m saying there’s some out yonder that is a lot worse than me,” he replied. “They’re homegrown, too, not brought from somewhere else.” He peeled a stick of gum and rolled it in a ball and placed it behind his teeth, savoring the taste, his eyes filling with mirth as he stared Helen directly in the face. He began chewing, barely able to repress his amusement at Helen, his lips purple in the shade.

“You want to tell me why I interest you so?” she said.

“You put me in mind of a woman I knew in Longview. She could pick up a hog and throw it over a fence. She had a butch haircut that looked like the head of a toothbrush. It felt just like bristles when you ran your hand acrost it. I was sweet on her for a long time.”

“Wait for me in the cruiser, Dave,” she said.

“I’d better stay here.”

“Dave?” she said. She waited. When I didn’t move, she widened her eyes at me, her anger clearly growing. I walked close to Perkins, my face within inches of his, my back to Helen. I could see the tiny red vessels in the whites of his eyes, the dried mucus at the corner of his mouth, the strawberry birthmark that was slick with sweat.

“You get the fuck in your house,” I said.

“Or what?”

Perkins’s denim shirt was spread on the surface of a spool table. On top of his shirt he had placed his sunglasses, gold watch, cigarettes, and cell phone. I rolled them all in the shirt and tied it in a ball with the sleeves and dropped it into the flames. The denim burst alight and sank with its contents into the fire. “Welcome to Louisiana, Mr. Perkins. I love your place,” I said.

CHAPTER
6

T
HAT AFTERNOON AN
elderly cane farmer ten miles outside of New Iberia had been harrowing a field that was bordered by a coulee and a hedgerow of persimmon and gum trees. The lock on his gate had been broken by vandals driving ATVs, and the dirt road he used to get his machinery in and out of the field now gave access to dumpers who had thrown rubber tires and old furniture and raw garbage down the embankment of his coulee. He had called the sheriff’s office to complain and had tried to bury or haul away the trash, then finally had given up.

The breeze was warm and drowsy, and he felt himself nodding off in the tractor seat. Up ahead, a flock of crows clattered into the air above the persimmon and gum trees. The farmer cut his engine, and in the shade of a canvas umbrella he had fastened above the tractor seat, he opened his thermos and poured himself a cup of Kool-Aid. From inside the trees, he could hear horseflies buzzing and see them clustering on the ground and rising suddenly in the air. The wind shifted out of the south, and an odor struck his nostrils that made his throat clench.

He walked into the trees, shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare with one hand. At the lip of the coulee, someone had spaded the ground with a shovel and replaced the torn divots of grass with a rake, creating a broken pattern that made the farmer think of a root-bound plant in a cracked flowerpot. He found a long stick and began pushing the divots down the side of the levee, the clods of dirt rilling into the water.

Oh,
bon Dieu, bon Dieu,
he thought as the odor grew in strength and seemed to clutch at his face like a soiled hand. Then he touched something soft that made him drop the stick and step back, his eyes watering not from the odor but from what he thought he was about to see. He stumbled backward in the shade, away from the thing that was buried in the ground, unable to take his gaze from the hole his digging had created. But in the disturbed dirt, the only image he could make out was a plastic teacup that had a large piece broken out of it. The cup was painted with tiny lavender roses.

The coroner, the paramedics, a half-dozen uniformed deputies, two technicians from the Acadiana crime lab, and Helen and I all arrived at the scene within twenty minutes of one another. The body of the buried girl or woman was fully dressed and had been covered over by no more than a foot of soil. She was blond and about five and a half feet tall, and she wore the kind of tennis shoes a kid might, but because of the heat and the moisture in the ground and the piles of red ants that had been pushed into the depression with her, the decomposition was so dramatic that it was impossible to estimate her age.

Buried with her were two winter coats, an empty handbag, seven shoes, a polyester scarf, coils of costume jewelry, a tube of lipstick, two barrettes, a Bic lighter, and a saucer that matched the broken teacup the farmer had already unearthed.

The farmer had no idea when or how the body had gotten onto his land.

“Did you see any lights at night?” I asked.

“Kids running them ATVs all over my field. I called y’all fo’ times, but ain’t nobody done anything about it. You t’ink them kids done this?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I’m fixing to lose my farm. This land has been in the Delahoussaye family for a hundred and fifty years. I ain’t never seen anything like this. Why ain’t y’all done somet’ing?”

“You think someone has a grudge against you, sir?”

“You tell me. What it takes for a man to do his work and be let alone? Why ain’t y’all kept them people off my land?”

“Sir, if you didn’t want ATVs in your field, why didn’t you buy a new lock for your gate?” Helen said.

“They broke t’ree of them. What was I s’ppose to do? Weld a chain on my gate ’cause y’all cain’t do your job?” His face was wrinkled and brown and covered with sun moles, his eyes moist with tears. “She’s just a young girl.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“I just seen the coroner take off her shoe. Her toenails is painted, like young girls is always doing.”

Helen and I looked at each other.

“I want you to think real hard about something, Mr. Delahoussaye,” I said. “Did you ever throw any dishware out here? Did you ever see somebody else do it? Did you ever see any lying around on the ground?”

“No, suh, I ain’t.”

“And the last time you were in the grove was two weeks back?”

“Yes, suh.”

“And the ground was undisturbed? There was no trash lying on top of it?”

This time he didn’t answer but simply walked away, like a man who no longer cared what the world thought or did not think about him.

“What’s the importance of the broken teacup?” Helen said.

“On the last day of Bernadette Latiolais’s life, she went into a dollar store and bought two teacups and saucers. The cups were painted with lavender flowers.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“I talked with a sheriff’s detective in Jeff Davis Parish. A clerk in the store said she was carrying the cups and saucers in a paper bag. She walked past a bar with them and was never seen alive again.”

Helen put on her sunglasses and looked at the yellow crime-scene tape vibrating in the wind. There were tiny beads of perspiration on her forehead and upper lip. The paramedics were zipping up the body bag on the remains of the female who had been buried among the trees. Red ants were crawling on the outside of the bag; the paramedics averted their faces when they picked up the bag and set it on the gurney, then one of them bent over and gagged in the weeds. Our coroner, Koko Hebert, a huge, sweaty, fat man, was blowing his nose into a dirty handkerchief. I could see Helen’s chest rising and falling, her hands opening and closing at her sides. “The day it doesn’t bother you is the day you should quit,” I said.

“We’re going to get whoever did this,” she said.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Koko Hebert came into my office wheezing, a folder in his hand. When he sat down in a chair, his body seemed to deflate, like a giant air bladder collapsing upon itself. He smoked more cigarettes than anyone I had ever known, and he ate the most unhealthy food that was available in New Iberia’s restaurants. He waged war against his own body and seemed to take pleasure in alienating himself from others. After his son was vaporized by a roadside bomb in Iraq, Koko attended the funeral service in Virginia by himself and told no one where he was going. He also refused to acknowledge the condolences of friends and colleagues. He lived alone in a house that was sheathed with broken asbestos shingles, and often occupied his time driving his lawn tractor up and down his two-acre lot on the bayou, mowing great swaths through the buttercups that tried to bloom on his property.

“Mind if I smoke?”

“There’s no smoking anywhere in this building.”

“Somebody just spat tobacco in the water fountain. Which habit do you think is worse?”

I gazed out my window at Bayou Teche and at the live oak trees in City Park. A young mother was sailing a Frisbee with her children by one of the picnic shelters. The children were leaping in the air and rolling in the grass and chasing one another in the shade. Their voices made no sound coming across the water, as though their lives were completely sealed off from the work we did in our building. I looked back at Koko. When I dealt with him, I had to remind myself that no matter what happened in my life, I would probably never be as unhappy a man as he was.

He leaned forward and pitched the folder on my desk. “She was mush inside,” he said. “Approximate date of death is hard to say. My guess is she was in the ground at least two weeks. Age between nineteen and twenty-two. Evidence of rape? Not per se. Vaginal penetration? Almost any young girl these days has a train tunnel down there. A tattoo on the butt, one on the ankle, one on the shoulder. No traces of drugs. You got any coffee?”

I had to think before I could answer his question. “Downstairs.” I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. I tried to hide my exasperation with both his callousness and his passive-aggressive behavior. I opened the folder on my desk blotter and glanced at autopsy forms he had filled out. His handwriting was indecipherable. “What’s the cause of death?”

“What do you want?”

“What do
I
want?”

“Because it’s take your choice. It wasn’t blunt trauma. She wasn’t shot or stabbed. Was she asphyxiated? Could be. But I doubt that’s what did her in. It could have been an aneurysm or heart failure, maybe brought on by prolonged fear, asphyxiation, and general abuse. The big word in there is ‘fear,’ as in scared shitless.” He was wearing an oversize Hawaiian shirt, and he began pulling at the fabric as though it was stuck to his body, shifting his shoulders around, putting on a performance. “Is your air-conditioning working?”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“It’s written there on the first page, if you care to look at it. She had ligature marks on her wrist, deep ones. I think she was bound up for a long time. Her stomach was empty. Whoever grabbed her didn’t feed her too good.”

“Why do you say ‘grabbed’?”

“She was obviously held against her will. That means she was probably abducted. Her tox screen was clear, which tells me she wasn’t a prostitute. So I suspect she was grabbed off the street or lured into a captive situation. Maybe she met a guy on the Internet. You know how many bimbos are out there now flirting with guys who can’t wait to tear them apart?”