The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (24 page)

“Just a thought or two for you to keep in mind, Ms. Robicheaux,” he said. “When I said I loved your work in progress, I meant it. I think your talent is enormous. Do whatever you wish about submission. Finish the manuscript or send it along in chunks. But send it to me, understand? No one else. I want to be your agent, and it’s not because you’re friends with Kermit. I think you’re going to be hugely successful.”

“Thank you.”

“What I’ve told you is not a compliment, it’s a fact. Second, that guy Weingart is a world-class jerk nobody in the industry takes seriously. He’s an embarrassment to his publisher and a self-important moron who will probably crash and burn on a live TV show when he’s drunk or insulting a woman or making racist remarks. But it’s going to happen, and when it does, his phone calls won’t be answered and his publishing contracts will disappear. Because he’s a megalomaniac, he’ll never figure out what brought about his downfall, and he’ll spend the rest of his life blaming everyone else. You got all that?”

“I think so,” she replied.

“You want me to escort you home?”

“No, I’m fine. You’re a nice man.”

“That looks like your cab,” he said. After the cab pulled to the curb, he opened the back door for her and closed it after she was inside. The window was open. He leaned down toward it. “You’re going to have a great career. Weingart couldn’t shine your shoes, and frankly, neither could Kermit.”

But it wasn’t over. Kermit Abelard virtually plunged out onto the sidewalk, both hands held up to stop the cabdriver. He grabbed the back door, leaning inside. “Don’t leave like this,” he said.

“Like what?” she asked.

“Mad, hurt, upset, whatever you want to call it.”

“I’m none of those things, Kermit. I made a mistake. It’s on me, not you. It’s not even on Robert in there. So now I’m going home.”

“What mistake?”

“About who you are. You’re somebody else. Or maybe you have two or three people living inside you.”

“If I’m not the person you thought I was, then I’d appreciate your telling me who I am.”

“I’m not sure. But I won’t be there to find out, either. You were the only one, and I want you to remember that as long as you live.”

“Only one what? I don’t know what you mean. You mean sexually? What are you talking about?”

“You’ll figure it out. But when you do, remember I just spoke of you in the past tense. That will never change. Good-bye, Kermit,” she said.

As she sat back in the seat and the cab pulled away, she could see the wind riffling the leaves on the trees along the bayou. The reflection of the lights from the drawbridge on the leaves and the electric glitter they created made her think of thousands of green butterflies fluttering inside a dark bowl.

O
N
S
UNDAY
MORNING
I woke before dawn. I’d had a peculiar dream, one that was actually about a dream. Many years ago on a Christmas Eve, in a Southeast Asian country, I had been asleep on top of a poncho liner, under a parked six-by. Somewhere out there beyond the elephant grass and the rice paddies and the hills that had been chemically defoliated or burned by napalm, Bedcheck Charlie was prowling through the darkness in black pajamas and a conical straw hat and sandals fashioned from the rubber strips he had sawed out of a truck tire. In his hands was the blooker he had taken off the body of a dead United States soldier who had been in my platoon. The launch tube was painted with gold and black tiger stripes. Every hour or so during the night, Bedcheck Charlie lobbed a round in our direction. Often it exploded in the paddy, sending up a geyser of water and mud and metal fragments that rained back down harmlessly. Or if it landed in the elephant grass, it blew a mixed smell of burned explosive and torn sod and root systems into the breeze, a combination that wasn’t altogether unpleasant. Once, Bedcheck Charlie got lucky and nailed the shit barrels in a latrine. But Bedcheck Charlie was a tactician, not a strategist. When he was on the job, you crosshatched your molars and slept with a frown, as though a fly were walking across your brow, waiting for the next plunking sound of a grenade leaving the launch tube. At dawn, you started the new day as though you had spent the night humping a sixty-pound pack.

Except on this particular Christmas Eve, for whatever reason, Bedcheck Charlie gave it a rest. I fell into a deep sleep and dreamed it was Christmas in New Iberia. I dreamed I was a child and in my bed, and through the window I could see the pecan and oak trees in the yard and the frost on our grass and, through the branches of the trees, the Star of Bethlehem burning brightly against an ink-black sky. It was a wonderful dream, and I wanted to hold on to it and wake to a Christmas morning that was shining with dew and filled with all the joy of the season.

Except when I awoke under the six-by, I was not looking at the Star of Bethlehem. On the far side of the rice paddy, a pistol or trip flare had popped high in the air and was floating down to the earth, trailing strings of smoke, its phosphorescent glow swinging back and forth, illuminating the landscape with the trembling white-and-black severity of a filmstrip that has gone off track inside the projector. Then three other flares popped in succession right after the first one. On the slope of a low hill that had traded hands a half-dozen times, a piece of worthless defoliated real estate the marines later named Luke the Gook’s Slop Chute, thirteen grunts returning from an ambush had been caught in a burned-out area where the tree trunks looked like skeletal fingers protruding from the ash. The column froze, and each man in it tried to transform himself into a stick. But their disguise was to no avail. VC sappers were in the elephant grass, and their automatic-weapons fire turned the column into a bloody mist.

Now, on a Sunday morning in the spring of 2009, I woke from a dream about a dream in a small sugarcane town on Bayou Teche, the slope behind the house white with ground fog, the overhang of the trees dripping on the tin roof. Freud said our dreams are manifestations of our hopes and fears. Did my dream represent a desire to return to the childlike innocence of the Cajun world in which I was born? Or did it indicate a warning from the unconscious, a telegram from the id telling me to beware of someone whose behavior I had been too casual about?

I looked through the window and saw a large man coming around the side of the house, his suit streaked with moisture from our camellia bushes, his eyes as cavernous as inkwells, his jaw crooked with indignation.

Molly was still sound asleep, the sheet molded by her hip. I slipped on my khakis and loafers and unlocked the back door and went outside. The man in the suit stood deep in the shadow of the house, opening and closing his fists, oblivious to the moisture leaking from the rain gutter on his head and shoulders. “You want to tell me what you’re doing in my yard at six on Sunday morning?” I said.

“I need some information, and I need it now. And I don’t want any mouth off you about it, either,” he said.

“How about putting your transmission into neutral, Layton?”

“Where’s Clete Purcel?”

“How would I know?”

“You’re his buddy. You’re the one who recommended him to me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Don’t lie.”

“You’re not going to talk to me like that.”

“I’m not, huh? You got some damn nerve. I’m an inch from flattening you on your butt.”

I propped my hands on my hips and looked at Tripod’s hutch and at the trees in the fog and at an empty rowboat floating down the bayou, its bow turning slowly in the current. “You’re a more intelligent man than this. Regardless, it’s time for you to go.”

For just a second, he seemed to take heed of my words. “I can’t find my wife. She didn’t come home last night. But I found this in her dresser.” He pulled a business card from his shirt pocket. “It’s Clete Purcel’s. There’s a phone number on the back. The phone number belongs to the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans. How did Purcel’s business card get in my wife’s dresser drawer?”

“I don’t know.”

He threw the card at my chest. “I’ll tell you how. While I was paying him to follow her around, he was sleeping with her. That pile of offal was in the sack with my wife.”

“You’re dead wrong. Now get out of here.”

“I’ve got the goods on your friend, Robicheaux, and maybe you, too. I’ve got sources inside your department. They say Purcel is being investigated for the killing of that black pimp. The word is maybe you’re not above suspicion, either. Maybe the two of y’all capped the pimp together because he was about to send Purcel to Angola.”

I heard the bedroom window slide open. “What’s the trouble, Dave?” Molly said.

“It’s Layton Blanchet. He’s about to leave. Right, Layton?” I said.

“This doesn’t concern you. Close the window,” he said to Molly. He faced me, his feet spread slightly, his height and breadth and the corded tension in his body not to be taken lightly. “Where is Purcel? I’m not going to ask you again.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Molly’s face leave the window, then I heard the window close and the shade go down on it.

“I’m going inside now. I’ll call either a cab or a cruiser for you. Tell me which you prefer,” I said.

“You were a guest in my home. Carolyn fixed supper for you. What kind of people are you?”

“Who are you talking about?”

“You. All of you.”

His face was dilated, his breath rank, an odor like testosterone or dried sweat wafting off his body. His fists looked like big rocks at his sides.

I said, “I think you need help, partner. Clete hasn’t harmed you, and neither have I. I’ll drive you home myself. Maybe your wife will be there when you get back. Everybody has marital problems, but they pass. How about we let go of all this backyard bebop?”

Molly opened the screen door and came out on the steps, her robe cinched around her hips, her red hair hanging in her eyes. Layton turned and stared at her as though he had forgotten who she was or why she had come outside. She stepped into the yard, pushing her hair back with her fingers. “Listen to my husband, Mr. Blanchet,” she said. “He’s a truthful man, and he has nothing but good intentions toward you. You can leave or you can stay and have coffee with us, but you’re not going to come here and threaten people.
That
ends right now.”

He looked at her a long time, a behemoth of a man in a stained three-thousand-dollar suit, the shame of the cuckold as visible on his face as antlers painted on canvas in medieval portraiture. “Thank you,” he said.

“Do you want to come in?”

“No,” he replied. “No, I’m sorry for coming here like this. I’m sorry for many things.” He bent over and picked up Clete’s business card from the apron of bare ground around Tripod’s hutch. He stared at it blankly, then inserted it in his shirt pocket and walked down our driveway to his vehicle, brushing against the side of my pickup, oblivious to the muddy smear it left on his clothes. Molly continued to gaze down the driveway as Layton drove away. “You once quoted a convict about the relativity of doing time,” she said.

“His name was Dock Railroad. He was an old-time Pete man who did scores for Didoni Giacano. Clete and I caught him burning a safe in the back of Nig Rosewater’s bail bond agency. Dock was already a four-time loser. Clete offered him a cigarette and said, ‘Sorry about this, Dock. You’re probably going away on the bitch.’ Dock said, ‘Don’t worry about it, Purcel. Everybody stacks time. Inside the fence or outside the fence, we all stack the same time.’”

“Do you believe that?” she asked.

“No,” I replied.

“Let’s fix some breakfast, troop. Then we can both use a little more sack time. Are you up for that?”

CHAPTER
11

W
HEN I FOUND
Clete that afternoon, he was polishing his Caddy at the motor court, dressed in a freshly ironed sport shirt printed with tropical birds and an outrageous pair of scarlet nylon Everlast boxing trunks that extended to his knees. He was humming a tune, passing a clean cotton rag back and forth across the dried wax on the finish, pausing to blow a bug off the starched top so he would not have to smack it and stain the immaculate starchlike whiteness of the canvas. Behind him, under the trees, a pork roast was cooking on his rotisserie barbecue pit. “How’s it hanging, big mon?” he said.

Without all the deleterious influences of booze and weed and cigarettes in his system, Clete looked ten years younger, his eyes clear, his skin rosy. I hated to ruin his day. “Layton Blanchet was in my backyard this morning. He seemed a little unhinged.”

“Tell me about it. He’s left a half-dozen messages on my machine.”

“Are you going to talk to him?”

“I tried that. If you ask me, the guy is a head case. He’s got some other problems as well. I did a little checking on him. His bank in Mississippi is under SEC investigation. The fed I talked to said Blanchet has been running a Ponzi scheme since back in the nineties. He gets retirees to roll over their pension plans and SEP-IRAs into his bank and promises them a minimum of ten percent on their investment. Most of them are going to lose every penny they gave him.”

“He says he found your business card in his wife’s dresser.”

Clete had been polishing a back fin on the Caddy. He hand slowed and then stopped. He popped the rag clean and seemed to study the smoke drifting off his barbecue pit into the trees and the way the sunlight glittered like yellow diamonds on the bayou. “What would she be doing with my business card?” he asked.

“Evidently he’s convinced himself that you and Carolyn Blanchet were getting it on while you were working for him.”

“Not that I wouldn’t like to, but he’s full of shit.”

“The number of the Monteleone Hotel was on the back of the card,” I said.

“Layton Blanchet thinks I hang out at the Monteleone on my income? What an idiot.”

“Where do you think she got the card?”

“From any one of half the lowlifes in South Louisiana.”

“He said a couple of other things, Clete. He says he has a source inside the department. He says you’re still getting looked at for the Stanga homicide, and maybe I am, too.”