The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (57 page)

“What do you want to do, Dave?” Clete asked.

“We go back to St. Mary. I want to find Abelard’s daughter. I don’t think she told me everything she knew.”

“Waste of time, in my view.”

“Why?”

“She’ll go down with the ship. You already know that.”

“Somebody knows where Weingart is. His literary agent, his business connections in Canada, his publisher. He’s got a plan, and somebody knows what it is. We need to get ahold of the sheriff in St. Mary and get in the Abelard house.”

“What for?”

“Correspondence, Rolodexes, records, how do I know?”

“I don’t think we have time for that, Dave.”

I looked at him, my heart seizing up, my breath coming short. Maybe Clete was right and I was creating my own illusions about getting back my daughter. This whole case had been characterized by illusion. The St. Jude Project, Robert Weingart as reformed recidivist, Kermit Abelard as egalitarian poet, Timothy Abelard as the tragic oligarch stricken by a divine hand for defying the natural order, Layton Blanchet as the working-class entrepreneur who amassed millions of dollars through his intelligence and his desire to help small investors, a historic Acadian cottage that hid a barracoon. The Abelards had paneled their sunporch with stained-glass images of unicorns and satyrs and monks at prayer and knights in armor that shone like quicksilver, turning the interior of their home into a kaleidoscopic medieval tapestry. Or perhaps, better said, they had created a glass rainbow that awakened memories of goodness and childhood innocence, all of it to hide the ruination they had brought to the Caribbean-like fairyland they had inherited.

If she was not already dead, my daughter was in the hands of men who were among the most cowardly and cruel members of the male species, namely those who would take out their rage and self-loathing on the body of a child or a woman. I wanted to kill them. I felt a level of bloodthirst I had never experienced.

Clete seemed to read my thoughts. “Dave, just do what your judgment tells you. I don’t have any answers. But whatever we do, it’s under a black flag.”

I didn’t reply.

“No quarter, Streak. Say it. We kill every one of these bastards.”

“Whatever it takes,” I said.

He put an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth, his porkpie hat slanted down, the scar tissue through his eyebrow as pink as a rose. My cell phone vibrated on the dashboard. I opened it and placed it to my ear. “Dave Robicheaux,” I said.

“Molly gave me your number,” a woman’s voice said. “Where are you?”

“Carolyn?” I said.

“I have to talk to you. We have to put a stop to this.”

“To what?”

“To Alafair’s abduction.”

“You have some information for me?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure. I don’t know how helpful it is.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“I’ve found out some things about Weingart. I know some of the places he goes. I have to talk to you on a landline or in person. They can pull transmissions out of the air.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“The people who tried to kill you. Where are you?”

“Just outside New Iberia.”

“I’ll meet you at your house.”

I thought about it. Carolyn Blanchet was not about to go down to the department. “All right,” I said. “But in the meantime, get on a landline and call Helen Soileau.”

“Are you serious? I wouldn’t allow that bitch to wash my panties.” She clicked off.

I hit the speed dial and called home. “Carolyn Blanchet said you gave her my number. Is that true?” I said.

“Yeah, did I do something wrong?” Molly said.

“No, Molly, you’ve done everything right. Is the cruiser still out front?”

“Yes.”

“If Carolyn Blanchet shows up, tell her to wait outside. We’re on our way.”

I closed the cell phone and replaced it on the dashboard. We crossed the city limits into New Iberia. Yellow pools of electricity spilled through the clouds and spread across the sky and died without making a sound.

“Carolyn Blanchet was talking about a mysterious group of some kind that can pull cell-phone transmissions out of the air,” I said.

“Who knows?” Clete said. He removed the cigarette from his mouth and widened his eyes, unable to conceal his fatigue. “Know what I’m going to do?”

“No.”

“Watch.” He slid the cigarette back in the package, then rolled down the window and sprinkled all the cigarettes in the package into the wind stream. He took off his hat and kept his head outside the window for a long time, looking back into the darkness. Then he rolled up the window, his hair sparkling with raindrops. “Shoot me if I ever buy a pack of smokes again.”

“I promise,” I replied.

“Carolyn Blanchet would steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes.”

“It’s the only game in town,” I said.

He didn’t argue.

B
ECAUSE OF FLOODING
and the collapse of a sewer drain four blocks up from my house, East Main had been barricaded and the street was virtually deserted. It was strange to see Main devoid of people, like it was part of a dream rather than reality, the asphalt as sleek and black as oil under the streetlamps, rainwater coursing through the gutters, a dirty cusp surging over the sidewalks. The lawns of the antebellum and Victorian homes along the street had been windblown with camellia and bougainvillea and hibiscus petals and pieces of bamboo and thousands of leaves from the live-oak trees. The grotto dedicated to the statue of Jesus’s mother was lit by a solitary flood lamp next to the library, the stone draped by the shadows of the moss moving in the trees. I felt that I had moved back in time, but not in a good way. I felt like I had as a little boy during the war years, when I experienced what a psychiatrist would call fantasies of world destruction, of things coming apart and ending, of people going away from me forever.

The temperature had dropped, and fog was rolling off the bayou and puffing through the trees onto the street. Up ahead, I could see a cruiser parked close by my house. No other vehicles were parked on the street or in my driveway. I saw a woman come out my front door and approach the sidewalk, holding a newspaper over her head, jiggling her fingers at us the same way I had seen Kermit Abelard jiggle his fingers. At first I didn’t recognize her. She was wearing a raincoat and a bandanna over her hair. It was Carolyn Blanchet.

“Go around the block,” Clete said.

“What for?”

“I’m not sure. You called Emma a Judas goat. I think that was Emma’s teacher right there.” He picked up my cell phone from the dash.

“What are you doing?”

“Calling your house,” he said.

“Screw that.”

“They’re desperate, Dave. It’s all or nothing for them now.”

“It doesn’t matter.” I turned in to the drive and cut the engine. My front yard was flooded, the house lights burning brightly inside the rain, like the image of a snug sea shanty battered by a coastal storm, a place where a lamp stayed lit and bread baked in an oven.

I opened the truck door and got out. Carolyn Blanchet smiled at me. “Where’s Molly?” I asked.

“She’s still in the bathroom,” Carolyn replied.

Her statement didn’t compute, but I didn’t pursue it. The cruiser was parked in the shadows of the neighbor’s oak trees, backlit by a streetlamp. I could see the deputy’s silhouette behind the wheel, his hat cocked at an angle, as though he were dozing. I heard Clete get out of the truck.

“What kept you?” Carolyn said.

“Nothing. We were doing ninety all the way.”

She gave me a funny look. “You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?”

“Alafair got away. We tried to reach your cell phone, but the service was down. Molly was calling you from the bathroom. I thought she got through.”

I never took my eyes from her face. Her skin glistened with moisture. Her chin was uplifted, her eyes happy, like those of a woman waiting to be kissed. Her mouth was beautiful and alluring, exuding warmth and affection and a promise of exploration, and I suspected it had charmed many men and women out of their heart and soul.

“You’re such a crazy guy, Dave. There she is,” she said.

I saw Alafair standing motionlessly in the bedroom window, the curtains pulled back on either side of her. If there was any expression on her face, I couldn’t see it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Clete moving toward the cruiser that was parked back in the shadows. My heart was racing, my throat dry, the rain clicking on my hat. Behind me, I heard Clete rip open the front door of the cruiser.

“Dave, don’t do it!” he called out.

I knocked Carolyn Blanchet on her butt getting into the house.

CHAPTER
26

T
HE BODY OF
the deputy assigned to watch our house never moved when Clete opened the cruiser’s door. The deputy’s eyes were half-lidded, their stare forever fixed on nothing. His head was tilted slightly to one side, almost in a quizzical manner, a thread of blood leaking from his hat down one cheek. His handheld radio was gone, and the wiring had been ripped out from under the dashboard. The interior light had been manually turned off, and Clete couldn’t find the switch to get it back on again. The battery in his cell phone was dead, and a car he tried to flag down veered around him and kept going. Clete pulled the body of the deputy from behind the wheel and left it in the street to draw as much attention as possible to the scene. Then he started running through the side yard toward the back of the house, his .38 gripped in his right hand, water and mud exploding from under his shoes.

A
S SOON AS
I came through the front door, a man I had never seen kicked the door shut behind me and swung a blackjack at my head. I raised my arm and took part of the blow on my shoulder and the rest just behind the ear, enough to bring me to my hands and knees but not enough to knock me unconscious.

Through our bedroom door, I could see Molly in an embryonic position on the floor, her mouth duct-taped and her arms stretched behind her, her wrists duct-taped to her ankles. The room was in disarray, a sewing box and the cosmetics that had been on her dresser broken and stepped on and tracked across the throw rugs. It was obvious she had put up a fight. Robert Weingart was pointing a .25 auto straight down at the side of her face. Alafair stood in the shadows, staring at me, blood patina’d on the tops of her bare feet, her pink dress streaked with mud, her hair matted. “I couldn’t warn you. He was going to shoot Molly,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it, Alf,” I said.

“Lie down on your face, sir,” the man who had hit me said. “Arms straight out. You know the drill.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

He reached down, ignoring my question, pulling my .45 from its holster.

“You were one of the guys at the river?” I said.

“Just a guy doing a job. Don’t make it personal, sir,” he said.

“What did they do to you, Alafair?” I said.

“They took my shoes and my feet got cut, but that’s all that happened,” she said.

“You sure have a way of blundering into things, Mr. Robicheaux,” a voice said from the kitchen.

I twisted my head around so I could see the figure silhouetted in the hallway. Kermit Abelard stepped into the light. “Waiting on Mr. Purcel, are you?” he said. “I wouldn’t. This time your friend went way beyond his limits.”

“You think you can create a clusterfuck like this and just walk away from it?” I said.

“Let’s wait and see,” he replied. His expression was serene, his cheeks splotched with color as though he were blushing, his eyes warm. He seemed to be waiting on something, like a man whose prescience is confirmed with each tick of the clock. “Ah, there it is. That guttural, puffing sound, like a man with strep throat trying to cough? That’s Mr. Purcel eating a couple of rounds from a silenced forty-caliber Smith and Wesson. You put him up to killing my grandfather, didn’t you? The quixotic knight-errant, waging war on a crippled old man.”

“That’s really dumb, Kermit,” I said. “I hate to tell you this, but your trained yard bitch in there has put the slide on you. He hung your grandfather up like a side of beef. Think about it. Who else would do something like that? Not me, not Clete Purcel, not anybody you know except the guy you sprung from Huntsville and who paid you back by offing your grandfather.”

“I have no illusions about Robert. But he respected my grandfather. He didn’t kill him. Your fat friend did, and you and your family are going to pay for it.”

The man who had hit me began taping my wrists behind me. “Better talk to your employer, bud,” I said. “You guys are pros. This is Louisiana. You pop a cop, you’re going to the injection table, provided you ever make the jail.”

I could hear the man breathing as he worked, his fingers winding the tape around my wrists, notching it into the bones. Then he taped my ankles. “Who are you guys?” I said. “Mercs? You know the score. Use your head.”

But he made no reply.

“Hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, are hanging in the balance, Mr. Robicheaux,” Kermit said. “Somebody will end up owning that money. It might be the government or the state or plaintiffs in a civil suit or me and Robert and Carolyn. But somebody will own it. And whoever owns and keeps it will have these kinds of men working for them. Are you so naive that you don’t believe the most powerful families in this country aren’t guilty of the same crimes Robert and I might have committed?”

He began to rake through a litany of collective sins that ranged from the Ludlow massacre to support of the Argentine junta to the abandonment of a girl in a submerged car by a famous United States senator. Paradoxically, he seemed oblivious that his grandfather had been friends with some of the very people he was denigrating.

“You had better get done with this, sir,” said the man who had wrapped my wrists.

“See what’s going on in back,” Kermit said.

“We can take care of this, sir. I think you should go.”

Kermit gazed at Alafair through the doorway, his eyes wistful. “Do everybody except her,” he said.

“You’re taking her with you, sir? I wouldn’t advise that.”

“No, Robert will be handling Alafair before we leave.”