The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (15 page)

“I don’t think we need all this clinical detail. Look, every guy who cheats on his wife tells his girlfriend his marriage is over, his girlfriend is the best human being he’s ever met, that she has nothing to do with the breakup of his marriage, that she’s beautiful and spiritual and loving and she has no reason to feel guilty about anything. He also indicates he’s not sleeping with his wife. He usually says these things right up to the time he dumps his new pump of the week.”

Emma removed her shades and stared into the glare on the street. A drunk black man had stumbled off the sidewalk and was trying to cross through the traffic while cars blew their horns at him. Emma brushed at her nose. “Get Stanga out of the club and I’ll take care of the bowling pin out there.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself. Sometimes we lose. It’s nobody’s fault, not yours, not the other person’s. You just have to let it slide and say the short version of the Serenity Prayer. Sometimes you just have to say ‘fuck it.’”

“You like being used, Dave? Did anyone ever screw you until your eyes crossed and you woke up in the morning aching for them to do it again? Then one day in a public place, the same person tells you that you deserve someone much better than them, and you know the person has told you this in public so you can’t cry or break things or throw a drink in their face? When that happened to you, did you just say ‘Fuck it, sports fans, I think I’ll just go hit some tennis balls and go to a meeting’?”

I opened the door of the cruiser and got out on the sidewalk. The drunk black man had made it safely to the other side of the street. “I’m going to try to talk Stanga out of the club. If he gives me trouble, I want you there as a witness,” I said. “If you can’t do that for me, I need to call for backup. Tell me what you want to do, Emma.”

She got out of the cruiser and slipped her baton through the ring on her belt. She removed her shades from her shirt pocket and put them back on. Her face looked hot and glazed. Her mouth was a tight line before she spoke. “I forgot you belong to that great fraternity of all-knowing A.A. swinging dicks. If I forget again, remind me,” she said.

We found Herman Stanga at the back of the bar, where he was sipping from a demitasse of coffee, a tiny spoon and a single sugar cube on his saucer, his thin mustache winking with each sip. A big dressing was taped over the split Clete had put in his forehead, but otherwise he looked surprisingly well. “Hey, what is it, Robo?” he said. “Give my man a seltzer and ice and a lime slice, and wash out the glass good so it don’t have no alcohol in it. You ain’t got the Elephant Man out there, have you?”

“My boss wants to talk to you,” I said.

“The champ of the Muff Diver ’69 Olympics? How she been doing?”

“I wouldn’t get on her wrong side.”

“Man, I ain’t getting on no side of that broad,” he said. He looked at the bartender and laughed.

“Want to take a ride with me or sit in the cooler in St. Martinville while we work out legalities?”

Then he surprised me again. “Anyt’ing to he’p. You hear about my suit against that fat cracker? I’m gonna take both of his bidnesses, the apartment he owns in New Orleans, his car, his life insurance policy, his savings account, his guns, his furniture, and the waterfront lot in Biloxi he’s making payments on in his ex-wife’s name. When I get finished wit’ him, he’s gonna have a toot’brush and, if he’s lucky, the tube of toot’paste that goes wit’ it.”

“You’re the man, Herman,” I said.

“You got that right, Jack. You kill me, Robo Man.” He looked again at the bartender and laughed loudly, slapping the bar with the flat of his hand.

Emma Poche went back to the St. Martinville Sheriff’s Department, and Herman Stanga rode with me back to New Iberia. I didn’t like sitting next to him or talking to him or even acknowledging his presence. He smelled of hair cream and the decayed food in his teeth and the deodorant he used to overlay the sweat in his armpits. I cracked the window and kept my eyes on the road and wondered at the level of the enmity I felt toward him.

At the city limits, we entered a long corridor of oak trees. On the right-hand side of the road, set in deep shade, was a two-story antebellum home with a wide veranda, built out of wood in imitation of the columned brick Greek revival mansions down the Teche. The veranda sagged in the middle from either termite damage or settling in the foundation. The paint had turned gray in the smoke of stubble fires or dust blown out of the fields. A wash line was strung across the side yard, the clothes flapping in the wind.

“The man who built that house was a free man of color named Labiche,” I said. “He owned a brick factory in town. He also owned slaves. He got rich selling out his own people. What do you think about that, Herman?”

“Say again? I was just starting to catch some Z’s.”

“The guy who built that home back there was a mulatto who bought and sold slaves and used them to make bricks that went into the construction of the biggest homes in this area before the Civil War. Some people would probably say he was just a creature of his times. My feeling is that he was probably an opportunist and a Judas. Since you’re a man of considerable experience in racial matters, I wondered what your opinion is.”

“What I t’ink is you couldn’t find your own dick if you had a string tied to it. Wake me up when we’re there,” he replied.

It was almost five
P.M
. when I drove down East Main and turned in to the long driveway that led past the city library to the spacious brick building that served as both City Hall and the sheriff’s department. Between the library and the wall of bamboo was a grotto dedicated to the mother of Jesus. The street and the buildings and the grotto were already deep in shadow under the oak trees. A crowd was gathered around the grotto, and at first I thought they were tourists or religious people; then I recognized Layton Blanchet in their midst and remembered he was a member of a live oak or historical preservation society, the kind of group that he would probably find useful in his machinations.

As I drove past him, he raised his hand in recognition, but I pretended not to see him. I put Herman Stanga in one of our interview rooms and went to Helen’s office and told her I had delivered the freight. “Where you going?” she said.

“To my office, if you don’t mind,” I replied.

“I mind.”

“Talking to Stanga is a waste of time.”

“Humor me.”

“The truth is, everyone would be a lot happier if Clete had taken him off at the neck. Stanga gets high on being rousted. He’ll probably file a harassment charge against us and use it in his suit against Clete. The only thing Stanga understands is a club upside his head or a bullet in the mouth.”

“Bwana no run the department. Bwana shut up. Bwana go into the interview room now.”

Earlier in the day I had given Helen all my notes on the death of Bernadette Latiolais, my interview with her brother on the work gang outside Natchez, and my interview with the store clerk and Bernadette Latiolais’s grandmother in Jeff Davis Parish. I also had given her my files on Robert Weingart and Vidor Perkins. When we entered the interview room, Stanga was sitting at the table, gazing out the window at a speedboat that was towing a girl on skis down the bayou. He put an Altoid in his mouth and sucked on it. “I got about fifteen minutes for this, then I need a ride back to my car. Y’all cool wit’ that?”

“We appreciate your coming in,” Helen said. “You knew a convict in Mississippi by the name of Elmore Latiolais?”

“I been over that wit’ Robo Man here. The answer is yeah, I knew that lying nigger for twenty years. He got hisself capped. Do I know why? Let me guess. He shot off his mout’ to a peckerwood guard and ate a load of buckshot. Do I know anyt’ing about these girls that has gotten themselves killed? Let me guess again. They was working independent and messed wit’ the wrong john and had the kind of date they wasn’t expecting.”

“Why were you over in Jeff Davis Parish with Robert Weingart?”

“The writer?”

“Yeah, the writer,” Helen said.

“Who says I was?”

“A half-dozen people,” she lied.

He opened his hands in disbelief. “What would I be doing wit’ a writer? That’s like axing me if I’m hanging out with the IRS.”

“Maybe you were doing some work for the St. Jude Project.”

“Yeah, I he’p out the St. Jude, but I don’t know this writer. If you say I know him, then write that in my file. But I don’t know him, and I don’t know nothing about him except I seen him signing books at Books Along the Teche, and I’m tired of y’all getting in my face about this.”

“Here’s our problem, Herman,” she said. “No matter what avenue we take into this investigation, your name comes up.”

“What investigation? All them crimes, if there ever was any crimes, was in Jeff Davis Parish. But RoboCop and his friend Dumbo the flying beer barrel been trying to find a reason to drag their shit into my life.”

“We had a body dumped in our parish, and we think the victim was connected to the homicides in Jeff Davis, Herman,” Helen said, sitting on the corner of the table, her hands folded on one thigh. “If you’re not involved in this, you have a good idea who is. Most people around here have one of two attitudes about you. A lot of them just laugh when your name is mentioned, like you’re a funny hobgoblin that got loose from Railroad Avenue. Others say you’re not at fault for what you are, that you never had a father and your mother had to turn tricks in a shack behind Broussard’s bar and you grew up a raggedy-ass little boy who had to carry out the whores’ pails from the back of the cathouses on Hopkins. But I always thought you were a smart man. I don’t like what you do for a living, but there’s no denying you’re intelligent. That’s right, isn’t it? You’re a smart man, aren’t you, Herman? I knew your mother well. You were born premature, out in the hallway at Charity Hospital. I remember your mother’s words: ‘He wasn’t no bigger than a squirrel.’”

Herman Stanga’s face looked feverish, the skin moist, his eyelids stitched to his forehead. “Y’all t’ink you run t’ings. Y’all ain’t nothing but a bunch of ants running around on a wet log, pretending y’all in charge, when the people that’s running t’ings wouldn’t let y’all squat on their commodes. But I got you, Robo Man. Your peckerwood friend is going to Angola. When he gets in there, he’s gonna be the gift that keeps on giving. And Lady Hermaphrodite here is gonna keep using you to wipe her ass while I’m laughing at the bunch of y’all. I fucked you good, man, and you can t’ink about that all the way to your grave.”

Helen got up from the table and stood at the window, her back to us. She was silent a long time, the heel of her hand resting on the windowsill, her fingers tapping without sound on the wood. In the distance, I heard the whine of the speedboat fading, disappearing around a bend in the bayou. Without turning around, Helen said, “Make sure he gets back to his car all right.”

CHAPTER
7

W
HEN
H
ERMAN STANGA
returned home from St. Martinville, the night sky was smoky with stars and moon glow, the underwater lights burning beneath the surface of his swimming pool, the wind ruffling the canopy of the trees along the bayou. While he undressed down to his white silk boxer shorts at his wet bar, kicking his trousers onto the rug, he called the home of his lawyer. The lawyer’s message machine clicked on.

“Monroe, it’s me. Pick up the phone,” Herman said. “I got an update for you. I know you’re there, man, so stop pretending you ain’t. Dave Robicheaux ran me in this afternoon. He was talking in the car about niggers selling out niggers during the Civil War or some shit. He put me in a room wit’ Amazon Woman. She was trying to make me admit I knew somet’ing about them girls that was killed in Jeff Davis Parish. She was calling my mother a whore. She didn’t have a lot of nice t’ings to say about you, either. I’m telling you, Monroe, if I find out you’re home and deliberately ain’t picking up, your ass is grass. A couple of photos Doreen took of you wit’ her sister are gonna be on the Internet. I’ll be up late. Call me. I ain’t just blowing gas here.”

Herman slipped his feet into a pair of flip-flops and chopped up two white lines on a mirror, rolled a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill into a tube, and vacuumed up each line. He used the remote to turn on his giant flat-screen TV and flipped from channel to channel before he became bored and irritated and clicked off the set. He wiped the residue off the mirror with his finger and rubbed his gums with it and licked his finger clean.

The night was alive with sound. Leaves puffed out of the trees on the bayou. The neighbors’ kids were playing tag in the dark. In the center of it all, his swimming pool glowed with an electrified blue clarity that seemed to answer all the mysteries about life and death, at least as far as Herman ever thought about them. He opened the sliding glass door and let in the night air and the smell of the flowers. Maybe he should relax and have Doreen over for a swim. Her sister, too. But Herman’s spring was wound too tight to think very long about the recreational end of his profession.

He hit the speed dial on his cordless phone and got Monroe’s message machine again. “Don’t make me drive over there, Monroe,” he said. “They messed wit’ the wrong nigger. I’m gonna stick it to them, and you’re gonna he’p me do it. You hearing me on this? You pull your dick out of wherever it is and pick up that phone! My tolerance for your lazy-ass behavior is wearing thin.”

He opened his Sub-Zero freezer and took out a gallon container of French-vanilla ice cream and began digging chunks from it with a butcher knife, clunking each rock-hard piece into a bowl. His hand was wet and slick, his thumb hooked over the top of the knife handle, the coke singing in his blood, his ears thundering with the Herman Stanga national anthem, the latter a musical composition of angry self-righteousness that could blow windows out of buildings. Then he felt his hand slip and a sensation like an icicle slicing through his palm. The butcher knife clattered to the bottom of the sink in a rain of blood drops. He grabbed a dish towel and twisted it around his hand and cradled his arm against his chest. He picked up the phone and punched in 911 with his thumb, then thought about the consequences of his call and hung up. Coke on his wet bar, coke in his bedroom, coke in his bloodstream, paramedics and cops stomping around in his house with no need for a warrant because he had made the 911 call voluntarily. No way, offay. He sat down in a chair and stared at the towel cinched around his hand. The bleeding had stopped. Give it a few minutes and he could drive himself to Iberia General, he told himself.