The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (29 page)

“Maybe it’s him.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Kermit Abelard. Maybe it’s him my wife is sleeping with.”

“I’ve got news for you. Kermit has a boyfriend.”

Layton looked at me as though he were coming out of a trance. “This writer who was in Huntsville?”

You just stuck your foot in it, bud, I thought. “Yeah,
that
writer. So you know a lot more about the Abelards and their friends than you’ve been willing to admit. Right?”

“I don’t care about them one way or another.”

“I would. They’re about to take you down. You have resources, Layton. You’re an intelligent man. Don’t take the weight for these bums.”

Then he said something that convinced me I would never reach the engine that drove Layton Blanchet. “A year ago I took Carolyn to a state fair up in Montana,” he said. “I always loved fairs and carnivals and festivals and circuses and rodeos when I was a kid. It was a summer evening, and the sky was pink and green above the mountains, and this ride called the Kamikaze was lit up against the sunset. I couldn’t recall a more beautiful moment. We were eating candied apples on a bench and watching all these kids get on and off the Kamikaze, and we were surrounded by all these working-class families that were grinning up at the Kamikaze like it was a big piece of magic in the sky. But they looked like people of five hundred years ago. Their faces were just like the faces you see of peasants in paintings of fairs in the Middle Ages. And I said that to Carolyn.”

“Said what?” I asked.

“That nothing has changed. That we’re still the same people, doing the same things, not knowing any more than we knew back then. I told Carolyn, ‘We’re all dust. At a moment like this, you get to look through a glass rainbow and everything becomes magical, but when all is said and done, we’re just dust. Like the people in those paintings. We don’t even know where their graves are.’”

“Maybe life is ongoing. Maybe we all get to see one another again,” I said. “But no matter how it plays out, why not get on the square? You’ve come through hard times before. Maybe things aren’t as bad as you think.”

“She laughed,” he replied, as though he had heard nothing I’d said.

“Who?”

“Carolyn laughed and threw her candied apple in the trash. She said, ‘Honey, you’re telling this to the gal who’s seen you take an old widow for her last cent. Lose the role of the poet, will you?’”

I started the cruiser and drove us out of the park, over the drawbridge, and back onto Main Street. One of Layton’s eyes bulged from his head, like a prosthesis that didn’t fit the socket.

CHAPTER
13

I
T WAS STILL
raining when Clete Purcel went to sleep that night. He slept peacefully in his cottage at the motor court on the bayou, his air conditioner turned up full blast, a pillow on the side of his head, a big meaty arm on top of the pillow. Inside his sleep, he could hear the rain on the roof and in the trees and hear it tinking on the air conditioner inset in the window. At a little after five
A.M.
, he heard a key turn in the lock. Without removing the pillow from his head, he slipped his hand under the mattress and worked his fingers around the grips of his blue-black snub-nose .38.

In the glow from the night-light in the bathroom, he saw a figure enter the room and close the door softly and relock it. He removed his hand from the pistol and shut his eyes. He heard the sounds of someone undressing; then he felt a person’s weight next to him and a hand tugging the pillow loose from his face.

Emma Poche bent down over him and put her mouth on his and touched him under the sheet and then slid her tongue over his teeth. “How you doin’, honey-bunny?” she said.

He pulled back the covers and took her inside them and held her close against his body. He could feel the heat in her skin and the weight of her breasts against his chest. “I didn’t think you got off till oh-six-hundred,” he said.

“Somebody is covering in the log for me,” she said.

“That’s a good way to get in trouble.”

“No, oh-four-hundred to oh-seven-hundred is all dead time. The drunks are either under arrest or home, and normal people haven’t left for work yet.”

“You got it figured out,” he said.

“Always,” she said, and bit him on the ear. She placed her knee across his thigh and touched him again and blew on his cheek and neck and chest and ran her tongue down his stomach. Then she mounted him and lifted his phallus and placed it inside her, her eyes closing and her mouth opening. “Did you miss me?”

“Oh, boy,” he said, more to himself than to her.

“No, tell me. Did you miss me? Did you have dreams before I got here?”

“You bet,” he said, his voice as thick as rust in his throat.

“You like me, Clete? You like being with me?”

“Don’t talk.”

“No, tell me.”

“You’re great,” he said.

“You’re my big guy. Oh, Clete, keep doing this to me. Just do it and do it and do it.” Then she said “Oh” and “Oh” and “Oh” and “Oh,” like the rhythm of waves hitting on a beach.

When it was over, his heart was pounding and his loins felt drained and weak and empty and his skin was hot to his own touch. She curled against his side and put her fingers in his hair and placed the flat of her hand on his chest. He could hear her breath rising and falling. Outside, the rain was ticking in the leaves, and through a crack in the curtains, he could see that the sky was still dark with thunderclouds, a tree of lightning blooming without sound on the horizon.

“I have to ask you something,” he said.

“You heard stories about my time at NOPD?”

“Who cares about NOPD? They almost sent me up on a homicide beef.”

“Then what is it?”

“I had a gold pen. I’m pretty sure it was in my dresser. No, I’m not just pretty sure. I know it was in my dresser.”

“Yeah?” she said.

He turned on his side so that his eyes were only a few inches from hers. Her face was heart-shaped, her pug nose tilted upward, her eyes crinkling. She lowered her hand and squeezed him inside the thigh. But he removed her hand and held it in his. “Dave is bugging me about this pen. I mean, in a good way. He wants to clear me in the Herman Stanga shooting.”

“I don’t get what you’re saying.”

“A maintenance guy found my pen in Stanga’s swimming pool.”

“So the Iberia Department is trying to put his death on you?”

“Not exactly. But they can’t ignore the evidence, either. My name is inscribed on the pen.”

“You’re asking me about it?”

“Dave won’t get off my back about it. I had to give him the names of everybody who’d had access to my cottage and office. I mentioned your name, among others. I felt rotten about it. I felt rotten not telling you.”

“You think I stole from you?”

“No.”

“Or that I tried to set you up?”

“No, I don’t think that.”

“Then why’d you give Dave Robicheaux my name? Why’d you tell him about us?”

“You care whether people know we’re seeing each other?”

“It’s not their business.”

“I was just wondering if maybe you saw the pen. I’m always dropping things or lending or handing people stuff and forgetting it.”

He could feel her draw away from him, her hands receding back into the bedcovers, her body somehow growing smaller. “You just said one of the shittiest things anyone has ever said to me.”

“I didn’t mean to. I was trying to tell you I felt guilty about mentioning your name to Dave. I felt I was disloyal not telling you about it.”

She sat up on the side of the bed, the sheet and blanket humped over her shoulders. “You don’t trust me, Clete. It’s that simple. Don’t make it worse by lying.”

“I think you’re swell. I’m crazy about you.”

“But maybe I’m a Jezebel, right? I’ll see you around. Look the other way while I dress.”

“Come on, Emma. You’re reading this all wrong.”

“Boy, can I pick them. Yuck,” she said.

After she went out to her car, he slipped on his trousers and followed her, barefoot and bareheaded and wearing a strap undershirt in the rain. “One last try: Come back inside,” he said.

“I let people hurt me only once, then I get even. With you, I don’t have to. You’ll never know the opportunity you just threw away. Bye-bye, big boy.”

She got in her car and started the engine, her face still pinched with anger through the beaded glass. He watched her taillights disappear in a vortex of rain on East Main Street. Then he went back inside and took off his wet clothes and sat naked on the side of his bed in the dark, staring at nothing, his hands like empty skillets at his sides.

T
HE CALL CAME
in from the sheriff in St. Mary Parish at 10:17 the same morning. Helen was out of the office, and the call was rerouted to my extension. The sheriff’s name was Tony Judice. He was a firm-bodied, rotund, and congenial man, less political than most public servants here, and was known for his integrity as a sugar farmer and manager of the local sugar co-op.

“Did y’all have Layton Blanchet in custody yesterday?” he asked.

“Not exactly. He and his wife were in an accident. We took them in for an interview, primarily because they were giving the responding officers a lot of trouble and trying to leave the scene. How’d you know about it?”

“One of my deputies was over there. This is out of your jurisdiction, Dave, so I don’t know if y’all want to be bothered with it or not,” he said. “A guy running a trotline in the Basin called on his cell and said he found a dead man in a rowboat. The description of the dead man sounds like Blanchet. The rowboat is close by the fish camp he owns. I’m about to head out there in a few minutes. I’ll wait for you if you’re interested in Blanchet for reasons other than traffic accidents, or I can call you when I get out there.”

“Why would you think I’d have a special interest in Layton?”

“The guy’s businesses are unraveling. I think every law enforcement agency in the government is taking a look at him.”

It took me under a half hour to meet the sheriff at an airboat dock on the edge of the great watery expanse known as the Atchafalaya Basin, and it took even less time to cross a wide, flat bay dimpled with raindrops and enter a bayou that wound between flooded gum and willow trees from which flocks of egrets rose clattering into the sky. The Basin isn’t one entity but instead an enormous geographical composite, bigger than the Florida Everglades, containing rivers, bayous, industrial canals, flooded woods, hummocks, and wetlands that bleed as far as the eye can see into the Gulf of Mexico. It is also a cultural redoubt, one where people still speak French and live off the computer. It’s a place where, if need be, you can escape through a hole in the dimension and say
au revoir
to the complexities of modern times.

The airboat sailed sideways over sand spits that were as slick as a wet handkerchief and dented the trees with the backdraft and scattered leaves on the bayou’s surface. Suddenly we were in open water, where a houseboat was moored between an island of hard-packed sand and a levee that was green from the spring rains and dotted with buttercups inside the gloom, all of it capped by a sky laden with clouds that still flickered with electricity from last night’s storm.

A powerboat with a crime scene investigator and two uniformed deputies in it had already arrived at the levee, and the deputies were stringing yellow tape through the cypress trees that grew in the shallows around the houseboat. The wind was blowing out of the south, and it had pushed an aluminum rowboat into the cypress knees that protruded from the water’s surface along the edge of the island. The pilot of the airboat cut the engine and let our momentum slide us up on the levee, twenty yards past the far side of the tape.

Sheriff Judice and I crossed a plank walkway onto the island and walked toward the rowboat that seemed locked inside a scrim of floating algae. “Did you talk much with Blanchet yesterday?” he asked.

“Yeah, at some length.”

“How would you describe him?”

“Depressed, not quite rational.”

“Suicidal?”

“It’s possible. But I don’t know if I’d go that far.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“My experience has been that most suicide victims want to leave behind a legacy of guilt and sorrow. They’re angry at their fate, and they have fantasies whereby they survive their death and watch other people clean up the mess they’ve made. They tend to favor shotguns, razors, and big handguns that leave lots of splatter.”

“Blanchet wasn’t angry?”

“I’m not much of an expert on these matters, Sheriff.”

“Say what’s on your mind, Dave.”

“My experience has been that when Layton’s kind lose it, they write their names on the wall with someone else’s blood, not their own.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the sheriff look at me. “You were in Vietnam?” he said.

“What about it?”

“People can dwell on the dark side sometimes. Hell, I do.”

I started to speak, then let his remark slide.

“Jesus Christ, look at this,” he said.

The rowboat was rocking slightly in the wind, the aluminum hull knocking against the cypress knees and a chunk of concrete in the shallows. Inside it lay a huge athletic man dressed in golf slacks and a tropical-print sport shirt and wearing a Rolex watch. He was on his back, as though he had been trying to find a comfortable place to rest inside an impossible environment, a hole the size of a dime under his chin. His skullcap and most of his brains were hanging in the lower branches of a willow tree that extended over the water. His eyes were open, the brilliant butanelike glow replaced by a color that reminded me of soured milk. The index finger of his right hand was still twisted in the trigger guard of a 1911-model .45 auto. The crime scene investigator stood to one side, snapping pictures. A single brass shell casing rolled back and forth in a half inch of rainwater in the bottom of the boat.

It was spring, but the air was unseasonably cool, a cloud of fog rising from a wooded island on the far side of the bay. In a tropical country many years ago, a philosophical line sergeant once told me, “You’re born alone, and you die alone. It’s a giant clusterfuck out there, Loot.” I had told my friend the sergeant he was wrong. But as I stared at the ruined and disbelieving face of Layton Blanchet, and at the expensive clothes he had died in and the way the sun-gold hairs on his wrist curled around the band on his Rolex watch, I doubted Layton would have disagreed with him.