The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (27 page)

“Remember me?” I said.

“Yes, suh. You and the lady drove me home,” she replied.

“You promised us you wouldn’t come back here without your mommy.”

“She dropped me off. She takes care of a sick lady. My auntie couldn’t keep me.” She spoke in a monotone, her face empty.

I sat down on the steps, one step lower than she was. I gazed at the bayou. “Your name is Clara?”

“Yes, suh.”

“Did something bad happen at Mr. Vidor’s house today, Clara?”

In the silence, I could hear the slash pines swaying in the wind, the pine needles tinkling on the rain gutters.

“Clara, nothing bad will happen to you for telling the truth. Did Mr. Vidor do something he shouldn’t have?”

“I want to go back home now.”

“I’ll take you there, I promise. But you need to tell me what Mr. Vidor did.”

“Took my picture.”

“In what way?”

“Suh?”

“How were you dressed when he took your picture?” I heard the whapping sound from the backyard again. “Were you wearing your dress and your shirt just like you are now?”

“Mr. Vidor tole me to lie on the couch. He tole me to put my thumb in my mout’. Then he tole me to put my hands behind my head.”

“How many pictures did he take of you, Clara?”

“Two or t’ree.”

“Did Mr. Vidor touch you at all in a place he shouldn’t have?”

“No, suh. He just took the pictures. I tole him I didn’t want to do that no more, and he stopped.”

“Okay, Clara. I want you to wait here while I straighten out a couple of things with Mr. Vidor. Then I’ll take you home and a lady will come out from the sheriff’s department and stay with you until your mommy gets off work. But you remember what I say: You’re a good little girl. You’ve helped out a police officer, and that’s what good guys do. You’re one of the good guys, do you understand that?”

I walked around the side of the house just as Vidor Perkins pulled back an archer’s bow and drove an arrow into a plastic bull’s-eye draped across a stack of hay bales. He glanced over his shoulder at me, then pulled another arrow from the quiver on his back and fitted the shaft on the bow string. “I figured you’d be along directly,” he said. He lifted the bow, pulling back the string, his shoulders taut with tension. A second after he released the shaft, it whapped dead center in the target, quivering with a sound like a twanged bobby pin.

“Help me out here, Mr. Perkins,” I said. “I think Robert Weingart told you to give my daughter the worst time you could. But I think the motivation is more than simple jealousy. You guys want to become known as victims of police harassment because you know you’re going to be suspects in a homicide investigation. Let me take my theory one step further. You have a personal agenda, and it involves selling out both the Abelards and your jailhouse podjo and maybe even Layton Blanchet.”

“Cain’t say as I know Mr. Blanchet, although I’ve heard his name. But I’ll give your words some study and get back to you on that.”

“My daughter has applied for a concealed-weapons permit. In the meantime, I’m giving her a Smith and Wesson Airweight thirty-eight. If you come near her again, she’s going to blow your head off. If she doesn’t, I will. We’ll sort out the legalities later. But you won’t be there to see it.”

He took another arrow from his quiver but did not notch it on the bow string. He blew on the feathers, then stroked them into shape with his fingers. “She smells like peaches when you peel the skin off,” he said. “Must be a treat to have something like that around the house.”

“I want you to go inside now and get your camera and bring it back out here.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because the photos you took of that little girl probably don’t meet the standard of prosecutable evidence. In a borderline case like this, you’ll probably skate. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be allowed to keep the pictures or put them on the Internet. What that means, Mr. Perkins, is you’re going to voluntarily destroy the memory card or the film or whatever is in your camera.”

“Come back with a warrant and you can discuss it with my attorney.”

“I see,” I said.

“You look like you got shit on your nose, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“We don’t come up against your kind every day, so you’ll have to excuse me. You’re pretty slick.”

He gazed at me a long time, his skin a chemical yellow in the sun’s glow, the wind puffing his shirt, his arrow notched now, his fingers relaxed on the string. “Your daughter could have filed battery charges, but she didn’t. Know why?” he said. “She don’t want to admit in a courtroom she cain’t handle a man’s attentions. They all got the same weakness. The big V. Vanity. Like the Bible says.”

I turned and walked out of the yard. “You cain’t touch me, Mr. Robicheaux,” he called at my back. “I’m floating outside your window like a hummingbird. I’ll always know where you and your family are at. But you won’t know where and when I might show up. Till one day I come peekaboo-ing by.”

I opened the door to my pickup and felt under the seat. The baton was an old one, the only souvenir I took with me when I was fired from the New Orleans Police Department. It was made of oak, knurled on the grip, lathe-troweled with three rings below the tip, drilled through the center and filled with a steel bolt, its black paint nicked, a leather thong threaded through the handle. In the old days, when Clete and I walked a beat on Canal and in the Quarter, a cop in trouble or chasing a perp would whang his baton on the pavement or a curb as a distress signal to other cops. There was no concrete in Vidor Perkins’s yard and no other cops in the vicinity. And no one else in his backyard except him and me. He had just fired an arrow at his target and didn’t hear me coming. I bent low when I swung the baton and caught him high up on the calf, right behind the knee. His mouth fell open and he dropped to the ground like a child genuflecting in church.

He breathed loudly through his mouth, as though his tongue had been scalded. Then he squeezed both hands behind his knee, his face splitting with a grin, his eyes closed in slits. “Oh, Lordy, that’s a mean stripe you lay on a man, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. He let out a gleeful howl as though blowing a storm out of his chest. “I understand she’s your foster kid. I hear that opens up the parameters. I bet when she was eighteen, a man had to tie a board acrost his rear end not to fall in.”

I could feel my fingers finding new purchase on the baton’s handle, the leather thong looped loosely on my wrist bones. I could feel a vein of black electricity crawling through my arm into my shoulder, down my right side, and through my back and chest. He made me think of a medieval jester mocking his executioner as he knelt before the chopping block. I could feel my whole body becoming a torqued spring that would find release only when I whipped the baton across Perkins’s temple and watched his eyes go senseless and dead. The procedural explanation was already available. I wouldn’t even have to use a throwdown. He had committed a crime upon a child. I had tried to search him before hooking him up. He had whirled and gotten his hands on his archer’s bow. The blows I’d delivered were in self-defense and not intended to be fatal. As I had these thoughts, I saw Vidor Perkins’s time on earth coming to an end.

Then I heard the little black girl. She was standing at the back corner of the house, weeping and hiccuping, shaking uncontrollably, unable to deal with what she had witnessed. “It’s okay, Clara,” I said.

“You lose again, Mr. Robicheaux,” Perkins said.

“I guess you could say that.”

“I ain’t hurt that little girl. Down deep inside you know it.”

“‘Better they fasten millstones about their necks and cast themselves into the sea.’ Know where that comes from, Mr. Perkins?”

“Jesus was talking about the scribes and Pharisees that misled the innocent, not the likes of me. I ain’t mussed a hair on that girl’s head. No, sir.”

“I’ll be around.”

“Come back any time.”

I went inside his house and came back out with a camera I found on the kitchen table. I set it on the back step and smashed it into junk with my foot. Perkins had pulled himself up by holding on to the trunk of a pine tree. He continued to grip it, like a man on board a pitching ship. He gazed at a black cloud moving across the sun. “The devil is fixing to beat his wife,” he said. “When you were looking at my jacket, did you check my IQ? My grammar may not be too hot, but my IQ is higher than Robert’s. Down the road, you’ll see who walks away with the most marbles. It ain’t gonna be Robert Weingart or them Abelards, either.”

I drove the little girl to her house and walked her inside just as a shower of hailstones clattered on her roof and danced on the dirt yard.

CHAPTER
12

E
ARLY
THE NEXT
morning, I went into Helen’s office and told her of my visit to Vidor Perkins’s house.

“Go over that last part again,” she said.

“Which part?”

“About the baton.”

I did, describing in detail how I pulled it from under the seat of my vehicle and went after him, whipping one leg out from under him. While she listened, she held my gaze, her face impassive. She took an Altoid out of a box on her desk blotter and put it in her mouth. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

“Because you need to know.”

“No, it’s because you think my office is a confessional.”

“Maybe.”

“There’s no maybe about it, Dave.”

I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. I suspected she had reached that point in dealing with others when we finally accept people for what they are and stop contending with their character defects.

She sucked on the mint and pushed the box toward me. “You want me to bring him in?” she asked.

“My vote is we ignore him for the time being. He’s energized by attention. Leave him alone, and I think he’ll offer us a deal of some kind on Robert Weingart. My guess is they were buds in Huntsville, and now Weingart is an international celebrity, while Perkins gets treated like toe jam. I suspect Perkins is driven by greed and envy and resentment. I think he wants to make the big score at Weingart’s expense.”

“What is it we’re not talking about here, Dave?”

“Pardon?”

“For want of a better word,
duh
. The gold pen. The one that has Clete’s name on it that ended up at a homicide scene.”

“He doesn’t remember where he put it, and he doesn’t remember the last time he saw it. He says a number of people may have had access to it, including Layton Blanchet. Also, a number of women have been visitors at his cottage.”

“Like which women?”

I had to wonder for a second if Helen’s curiosity went beyond the professional. Years ago she and Clete had become involved romantically and had crossed lines in ways that surprised even them.

“The only one he mentioned was Emma Poche,” I replied.

“From NOPD?”

“She’s a deputy in St. Martin Parish now. What do you know about her?”

“Not much. As I recall, she had a history as a boozer.” Her eyes slipped off mine, and I knew there was something she wasn’t saying.

“What else do you know about her?” I asked.

“She sleeps around. Or she used to. Let’s talk about the gold pen.”

“Somebody planted it on Stanga’s property. You know it, Helen, and so do I. Drunk or not, Clete Purcel wouldn’t shoot down an unarmed man, even one he hated.”

“That might be true, but Clete invites chaos and self-destruction into his life at every turn. In this case, he’s making us do his enemies’ dirty work. I don’t want to be part of the script any longer.”

“I can’t blame you.”

She got up from her desk. Her windowsill was lined with potted flowers. A motorized houseboat was passing on the bayou, its deck dotted with people from a movie company who were looking for sites they could use in their film production. Helen leaned on the windowsill and gazed at the boat, her back as hard-looking as iron against her shirt. “That’s what we should all be doing,” she said. “Having fun, enjoying our lives, riding on a boat with people we like. How’d we let dope and pimps and degenerates get into our communities?”

“They’ve always been here,” I said. “They come out of the woodwork when they have sanction.”

“My ass,” she said.

You’re wrong, I thought. But I didn’t say it.

“You want to add something?” she asked.

“Nope.”

Then Helen made one of those remarks that always atomized my defenses and left me feeling that maybe I’d done something right: “You think you’re tough-minded, bwana, but your heart gets in your way. I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you.”

I
WENT BACK
to my office and stared at my file cabinet where the crime-scene and coroner’s photographs of Fern Michot and Bernadette Latiolais were tucked inside case folders. My file cabinet did not function simply as a place where I put things. In this instance, the sightless eyes and decomposed features of two homicide victims had disappeared from my view and were pressed between departmental forms and Xeroxes from the authorities in Jeff Davis Parish and fax and Internet printouts from Baton Rouge and time logs and sheets of lined paper torn from my notebook and legal pad. And all of it was encased in a rectangle of darkness bordered by the metal drawer and the shell of the file cabinet, not unlike the contents inside the sliding refrigerated tray used in a mortuary storage area, all of it safely sequestered, the degree of the victims’ suffering placed in abeyance, so I would not have to reflect upon what the world had done to them.

But I could hear their voices, even though I had never known either girl. Their killers (I was convinced now that more than one individual was involved) did not understand that the dead find a conduit into the minds of the living, particularly when they have been robbed of their lives and all the promise and happiness that had awaited them. When Bernadette’s executioners wired her body to chunks of concrete and sank her in a pond, and shoveled dirt into the eyes and mouth and over the brow and hair of Fern Michot, they had not appreciated the enormity of the theft they had just committed. I do not believe the rage the dead experience can be contained by the grave. How many people can understand what it means for an eighteen-year-old girl to be in love, to wake every morning and feel that something extraordinary and beautiful is about to happen on that particular day? How many understand the joy a young girl experiences when she is kissed on the mouth and eyes by a man who loves her, or the sensual pleasure of dancing barefoot on a lawn at an open-air concert, throwing her rump around in an innocent celebration of her sexuality, to see her own skin glow in the mirror, to see her breasts swell, and to hear her heart’s blood race when she says the man’s name in the silence of her bedroom?