The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (25 page)

“Because the shooter was using a forty-five?”

“That and a few remarks both you and I made about Stanga.”

“Blanchet knows I’m being looked at but you don’t? Does that make sense to you?”

“Helen Soileau doesn’t always take me into her confidence.”

“Well, that’s not my problem. Check out the day. Who cares about this stuff? We’re on the square, aren’t we? You know how many people have messed with the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide and are now in the ground? Get me a Bud from the icebox and a Diet Doc for yourself. I don’t want to hear any more about Layton Blanchet.”

“Watch your back, Cletus.”

“And take away your job? What kind of guy do you think I am?” he said. He went back to polishing his car, his leviathan shoulders rolling inside his shirt. I went into the cottage and opened a Dr Pepper and a Budweiser, and we drank them in the shade.

O
N
M
ONDAY
MORNING
, when both Molly and I were at work and Tripod was in his hutch, his hind leg had begun to tremble for no reason. Alafair had folded a soft blanket in the bottom of a cardboard box and taken him to the vet. In the rearview mirror, she noticed a pale blue pickup truck turn behind her, then reappear a block later and make a second turn with her. When she parked in front of the veterinary clinic, the truck drove on by and caught the state road leading to a drawbridge in the distance.

Tripod had a form of distemper, one that came and went and seemed to steal more of his life each time. The veterinarian gave him a shot and some medicine that was to be mixed with his food. Alafair put Tripod back in his box and placed the box on the passenger seat of her old Honda and headed home. It was a fine morning. A sun shower had left the streets damp and the trees dripping, and the new sugarcane was green in the fields and bending in the breeze. She rolled down the windows to let in the cool air, and Tripod popped his head out of the box, his nose pointed into the wind like a weathervane.

She passed a redbrick Catholic church with a spire and a cupola on the roof, and rumbled across the drawbridge and stopped at a fruit stand on the far side of the bayou. Next to the fruit stand, a man was selling shrimp and crawfish out of the back of a refrigerated truck. Alafair got out of her car and closed the door. “I’ll be right back, Pod,” she said.

But there were three people ahead of her who could not decide what they wanted, and she had to wait. The Amtrak passed on the railroad embankment behind her, and traffic stalled at the intersection. On the other side of the state road, known as Old Spanish Trail, was a dry canal that emptied into Bayou Teche. Along the banks of that same canal, unknown to most people driving by it, Confederate infantry had dug a skirmish line in the year 1863 to cover the evacuation of wounded from the Episcopalian church on the west end of the town. Kermit Abelard had been fascinated with the site and had climbed down into it with a spade and a metal detector in search of minié balls, in spite of Alafair’s warnings, streaking his skin with poison ivy. But that was months ago, when the Kermit she knew and loved was more boy than man, in the best possible way, unmarked by avarice or false pride or dependence on others. In her mind, there had been a purity about Kermit—in his vision of the world, in the books and stories he wrote about the antebellum South, in his conviction that he could change the lives of others for the better. Had she been totally wrong about him? Had the innocent boy in him died simply because of his association with Robert Weingart? Or had the innocent boy never existed except in Alafair’s imagination?

The sun had broken out from behind a rain cloud, and she had to shield her eyes against its brilliance. Across the road, the oak trees along the bayou were deep green from the rain and swelling with wind, the sound of car tires on the bridge steady and reassuring, like a testimony to a plan, perhaps a reminder that life was basically good and that she was surrounded by ordinary people who shared a common struggle. A vendor had broken open a sample watermelon that he said came from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, and he cut a slice for Alafair and put it on a napkin and placed the napkin in her palm.

“I have a sick raccoon. He’ll love this,” she said. “Let me pay you.”

“No, ma’am, I wouldn’t take a dime for that,” he replied.

Wasn’t it time to forget about Kermit Abelard? she asked herself. To leave him in the past, as she had promised both him and herself? To enjoy the day, to work on her book, to take care of animals, to give up resentment of herself and the wrong choices she may have made, to forgive Kermit Abelard for being weak and not defending her, even forgive him for allowing himself to be demeaned and humiliated in public by a man as loathsome as Robert Weingart? If she could forgive Kermit for not being what she thought he was, and forgive herself for her excess of love and trust, then she could let go of both Kermit and the past. Wasn’t that how it worked?

No, it didn’t. The man she had loved may not have been real. But the man she had given herself to, imaginary or not, would always live on the edges of her consciousness. And for that reason alone, she would always feel self-deceived and robbed at the same time, as though she had cooperated with a thief in burglarizing her own home.

“You want some shrimp or crawfish?” the vendor with the refrigerator truck asked. He was a tiny man dressed in strap overalls, his white shirt buttoned at the wrists, his spine bowed in a hump.

“Yes, I’m sorry. Two pounds of veined shrimp, please,” she said, opening her purse.

“You’re Mr. Robicheaux’s daughter, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

He raised his eyes to hers, then looked past her in the direction of her Honda. “I saw you drive up in your li’l car,” he said.

“Yes?”

“You know that fella?”

“Which fellow?”

“That one there,” the man said, nodding toward her car, his mouth down-hooked at the corners.

She turned around. The skinned-up pale blue truck she had seen earlier was parked behind her Honda. A man was leaning inside the passenger window, his shoulder and elbow making a pulling and pushing motion. She left both the shrimp and her money on the vendor’s worktable and went to the car. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said.

The man straightened up. His hair was gelled into the shape of a cupcake, the skin fish-belly white where it was shaved above the ears. A strawberry birthmark bled out of his hairline into his collar. His mouth was a wide slit not unlike a frog’s, the upper lip duck-billed. There was a rolled newspaper in his hand. “I was playing with your pet,” he said.

“Were you poking him with that paper?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it that. No, I was just letting him paw and mouth it a little bit. I wasn’t poking him at all.”

“He’s sick and he’s old and he doesn’t need anyone messing with him. You step back from my car.”

“You don’t remember me?”

She gazed at him as one does at a pornographic image thrust unexpectedly before one’s eyes, not wanting to engage him, not wanting to enter the moral vacuity of his eyes, not wanting to look at the flare of his mouth and the wetness on his teeth and the yellowish discoloration in his skin that affected a suntan. “You were fishing out at the Abelard place,” she said.

“That’s right. My name is Vidor Perkins. I’m pleased to formally meet you. I’m one of the many unfortunates that is being he’ped by Robert Weingart and the St. Jude Project. I know a lot about coons. This one don’t look sick. If you ask me, he looks fat enough for roasting. Spoiled is what I’d call him. We’re not doing animals a favor when we spoil them.” He reached inside the window with the rolled newspaper and tapped it up and down between Tripod’s ears. “Bet he’s a twenty-pounder.”

“You get away from my animal or I’m going to slap you cross-eyed.”

“I’m just trying to be kindly. When critters are sick, and I mean real sick, like you’re telling me about this one, you got to put them down. Cheapest and best way to do it is with a burlap bag and some rocks.”

She reached in her purse for her cell phone.

“Calling your daddy? He burned up my gold watch, my cell phone, my sunglasses, and my cigarettes. Know why he did that? He was protecting that lesbian he works for. He thought she was gonna lose it and try to hit me upside the head. I admire a man like that.”

Alafair’s hand trembled as she punched in 911 on her phone.

“You’re a excitable thing, aren’t you?” he said. He wiped two fingers along her jaw and stuck them in his mouth, licking them from the knuckle to the nail as he removed them. “You doin’ anything tonight?”

T
EN
MINUTES LATER
she was at my office, carrying Tripod with her, his head sticking out the top of the box. She told me everything that had just happened by the fruit stand. “I want to get a concealed-weapons permit,” she said.

“It’s not a bad idea,” I said.

“I stopped by the restroom and washed my face. My skin feels like a snail crawled across it. Are you going to have him picked up?”

She waited for my answer. I realized I was gazing at her without seeing her. “It’s what he wants,” I said. “It’s obvious Robert Weingart sicced him on you, but I think Weingart’s motive has less to do with you than me.”

“How do you know this?”

“Because they’re both con-wise. They have an agenda. It’s about the St. Jude Project or the deaths of the girls in Jeff Davis Parish or the Canadian girl we found buried on the Delahoussaye property. It also involves the Abelards and, I think, Layton Blanchet. The connections are all there, but I can’t get a net over them.”

I saw Helen through the glass window in my door. She pointed at me and mouthed the words “My office,” then walked away.

“How dangerous is this guy Perkins?” Alafair asked.

“He has no moral bottom. He’s probably killed people. He and Weingart both jack-rolled Social Security recipients. He was a suspect in an apartment-house fire that killed a child.”

Her eyes filmed. “You’re telling me I’ve been a fool?”

“No, I’m saying you’re like most good people, Alafair. Our greatest virtue, our trust of our fellow man, is our greatest weakness.”

Tripod had started to climb out of his box. She picked him up and straightened his blanket and forced him to lie down again.

“I think he’s feeling better,” I said.

“How do I get the gun permit?”

I took an application form out of my desk drawer. Many years ago I had started keeping the forms there for one reason and for one reason only: I had finally stopped pretending to people who had been stalked, terrorized by mail and over the phone, sexually degraded, assaulted with a deadly weapon, tortured, and gang-raped. No, that’s badly stated. I had stopped lying about how our system works. Perpetrators of horrific crimes are often released on bond without either the victims or the witnesses being notified. Witnesses and victims are told they need only to testify in a truthful manner and the person who has made their lives a misery will be put away forever. In law enforcement, bromides of that kind are distributed with the blandness of someone offering an aspirin as a curative for pancreatic cancer. Visit a battered women’s shelter and come to your own conclusions about how successfully our system works. Or chat up a judge who releases child molesters to a counseling program and lectures a rape victim on her provocative way of dressing.

These aren’t hyperbolic examples. They’re as common as someone spitting out his bubble gum on a sidewalk.

“You’re not going to bring Perkins in?” Alafair said.

“I’m not sure. While you fill this out, I need to talk to Helen.”

“About bringing in Perkins?”

“So far we haven’t found any handles on these guys, Alf.”

When I entered Helen’s office and saw her face, I knew we were not going to be talking about Alafair’s encounter with Vidor Perkins. A gold pen, inside a small Ziploc bag, was sitting on top of Helen’s desk blotter. “Recognize that?” she asked.

“Not offhand.”

“Look at it closely.”

I picked up the Ziploc bag and, with two fingers, held it up against the light from the window.

“Can you read the inscription?” she said.

“It says ‘Love to Clete from Alicia.’”

“Who’s Alicia?” she asked.

“Alicia Rosecrans, an FBI agent Clete was involved with in Montana.”

“Involved with?”

“They were an item for a while. What’s the big deal about the pen?”

“A pool cleaner found it at the bottom of Herman Stanga’s swimming pool this morning.”

“What’s the pool cleaner doing at the house of a dead man?”

“Stanga had paid three months in advance for the service. Why is the first thing out of your mouth a question about the maintenance man rather than how the pen got in Stanga’s swimming pool?”

“Maybe Clete went to see him.”

“I talked with Clete two days after Stanga was murdered. He said he had been by Stanga’s house but had never been on the property. You look a little uncomfortable.”

“Clete wouldn’t shoot somebody in cold blood.”

“By his own admission, he was in a blackout the night Stanga died. He doesn’t know what he did. How is it that you do? Tell me how you acquired this great omniscience, Dave.”