The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (10 page)

“No, sir,” the man said. “I was just looking at the clock.”

“Glad to hear it,” Clete said. “Ralph, give this man and his lady a drink.”

I got up from the bar stool and placed my hand on Clete’s shoulder. I could feel the heat in his muscles through his shirt. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

“Don’t let them get behind you,” he replied. “The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever. We were the only two beat cops the Panthers allowed into the Desire. Let somebody top that.”

Clete’s words would make no sense to anyone else. But what he said was true. In 1970 the Black Panthers took control of the Desire Project and reduced crime to almost zero. But the Panthers also had a violent relationship with the NOPD. Ironically, that era, in retrospect, seems innocent contrasted with the times we now live in.

Unfortunately, none of those thoughts were of comfort to me when I walked home under the glow of the streetlamps. I still had not resolved my situation with Alafair and was not sure that I could. At ten o’clock Molly went to bed and I sat in the living room and watched the local news. Then I turned out the light and sat in the darkness, the windows open, the wind sifting pine needles across our tin roof. At eleven-thirty I saw Kermit Abelard’s car pull to the curb, and I saw Kermit and Alafair kiss on the mouth. Then he drove away without walking her to the door. I could hear myself breathing in the dark.

“You scared me,” Alafair said, realizing I was in the living room.

“I was watching the news and fell asleep.”

She looked at the darkened screen of the television set. “What did you want to tell me earlier?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re a case.”

She went into her bedroom and put on her pajamas. I heard her pull back the covers on her bed and lie down. I took a blanket and a spare pillow out of the hall closet and went into her room and spread the blanket on the floor. I lay down on top of it, my arm resting on my forehead.

“Dave, no one is this crazy,” she said.

“I know.”

“I’m not ten years old anymore.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“Stop acting like this,” she said.

“To try to control the lives of other people is a form of arrogance. The only form of behavior that is more arrogant is to claim that we know the will of God. I owe you an apology. I’ve tried to impose my will on you all your life.”

“I appreciate what you say. But that doesn’t change the real problem, does it?”

“What’s the real problem?”

“You don’t approve of Kermit.”

“I think at heart he’s probably a decent man. But that’s not my judgment to make.”

“What about Robert Weingart?”

“I have nothing to say about him.” The only sound in the room was the sweep of wind in the trees and the ping of an acorn on the roof. I propped myself up on my elbow. “You want to tell me something?” I asked.

“Robert met us at Bojangles,” she said. “A Vietnamese girl works in there. She brought us our drinks, and he told her he’d ordered iced tea without sweetener rather than white wine. He said he was going to write tonight and he never drank before he wrote. But I heard him. He ordered wine. When she took it back, he watched her all the way to the bar with this ugly smile. Why would he do that?”

“Maybe he just forgot what he ordered.”

“No, I could see it in his eyes. He enjoyed it.”

“Where was Kermit when this happened?”

“In the men’s room.”

“Did you tell him about it?”

“No.”

I didn’t think it was the time to force her to think about the nature of Kermit’s relationship with Weingart. “Maybe you should just forget about Weingart. Kermit will come to a resolution about him at some point in his life.”

“What do you mean by ‘resolution’?”

“They seem quite close.”

“What are you implying?”

“Nothing. They’re both artists. Kermit sees a different person in Weingart from the one you do, or at least the Robert Weingart you were sitting with tonight.”

I heard her fix her pillow. Then she looked down at me. “Good night, Dave,” she said.

“Good night, little guy.”

“Little guy, yourself.”

I rested my arm across my eyes and began to drift off to sleep. I felt her touch my shoulder. “I love you, Dave.”

“I love you, too, Alf.”

“Give Kermit a chance, will you?”

“I will. I promise,” I replied.

CHAPTER
5

I
N THE MORNING
I used the Google search mechanism on the department computer to find the photograph that evidently Elmore Latiolais had seen in a newspaper. It took a while, since I had no cross-references except the mention by Elmore Latiolais’s convict buddy that the man in the photo was white and a famous humanitarian. Or perhaps someone who had been in the movies.

I typed in Robert Weingart’s name and got nothing but listings of book reviews and feature articles on the remarkable turnaround in the career of a lifetime felon whose autobiography had become the most celebrated literary work by a convict author since the publication of
Soul on Ice.

Then I entered the name of Kermit Aloysius Abelard. The article and photograph I found had been published two weeks ago on the business page of a Mississippi newspaper. But the article was less about Kermit than his co-speaker at a civic gathering in Jackson, the state capital. The co-speaker was Layton Blanchet, one of those iconic, antithetically mixed personalities the American South has produced unrelentingly since Reconstruction. In the photograph, Kermit was seated at the speakers’ table, his face turned up attentively toward Blanchet, who stood at the podium, his size and power and visceral energy as palpable in the photo as they were in real life. The cutline below the photo stated, “Self-made investment tycoon shares vision of a nation shifting its energy needs from oil to biofuels.”

Layton had grown up in the little town of Washington, Louisiana, in St. Landry Parish, during an era when the sheriff and his political allies ran not only the gambling joints in the parish but one of the most notorious brothels in the South, known simply as Margaret’s. His parents, like mine, were illiterate Cajuns and spoke almost no English and picked cotton and broke corn for a living. Layton attended trade school and business college in Lafayette, and sold burial insurance door-to-door in black neighborhoods and pots and pans in blue-collar Cajun neighborhoods. He also managed to get his customers’ signatures on loan-company agreements that charged the highest interest rates possible under the law. Later, he worked at lower levels of law enforcement in both Lafayette and Iberia parishes, which was when I met him. Even then I felt Layton was less interested in a particular line of work than in determining where the sources of power and wealth lay inside a society, not unlike a blind man feeling his way through an unfamiliar room.

His singular gift was his ability to listen to every word people said to him, his blue eyes charged with energy and goodwill and curiosity, all in a way that was not feigned, his assimilation of other people’s experience and knowledge an ongoing epistemological osmosis. He never showed anger or irritability. His square jaw and big teeth and radiant smile seemed inseparable.

I never doubted that Layton Blanchet was on his way up. But no one could have guessed how high.

When the oil economy collapsed in the 1980s, he bought every closed business, foreclosed mortgage, and piece of untilled farm acreage he could get his hands on, often at a third of its earlier valuation. Usually the sellers were only too happy to salvage what they could from their ruined finances, and Layton sometimes threw in an extra thousand or two if their situation was especially dire. Like a carrion bird drifting on a warm wind, he coasted above a stricken land, one that had not been kind to his family, and his ability to smell mortality down below was not a theological offense but simply recognition that his time had come around at last.

Layton owned a bank in Mississippi, a savings-and-loan company in Houston, a second home in Naples, Florida, and a condominium in Vail. But the center of his life, perhaps his visual testimony to the success his humble birth normally would have denied him, was the restored antebellum home where he lived on a bend in Bayou Teche, just outside Franklin.

It was a huge home stacked with a second-story veranda and dormers and chimneys that poked through the canopy of the two-hundred-year-old live oaks that shaded the roof. Every other year Layton had the entire house repainted so that it gleamed like a wedding cake inside a green arbor. He entertained constantly and imported film and television stars to his lawn parties. Stories abounded about Layton’s generosity to his black servants and the Cajun families who farmed his sugarcane acreage. He was gregarious and expansive and wore his physicality in the way a powerful man wears a suit. I did not believe he was surreptitious or hypocritical, which is not to say he was the man he pretended to be. I think in truth Layton himself did not know the identity of the man who lived inside him.

Before quitting time, I called his house and asked if I could see him. “Drive on down. I’ll put a steak on the grill,” he said. “You still off the kickapoo juice? I always admired the way you handled your problem, Dave. I didn’t catch the issue. What was that again?”

“I thought you might be able to help me with some questions I have about a couple of local guys.”

“I’ll tell Carolyn you’re on your way.”

“Layton, I can’t eat. My wife is preparing a late dinner.”

Forty-five minutes later he met me at his front door, wearing a muscle shirt and tennis shoes and beltless slacks that hung low on his hips. His swollen deltoids and his flat-plated chest and the slabs on his shoulders were like those of a man thirty years his junior. “Dave, you look great,” he said.

Before I could reply, he called into the interior of the house, “Hey, Carolyn, Dave’s here. Start those rib eyes I laid out.”

“I have to head back home in a few minutes. I apologize for bothering you during suppertime.”

“No, you got to eat something. Come in back while I finish my workout. You still pump iron? You look like you could tear the butt out of a rhinoceros. On that subject, how’s Purcel? What a character. I tell people about him, but nobody believes me.”

I followed him to the rear of the house, where he had turned a sunroom into a center for his Nautilus machines and dumbbells and weight benches. “Excuse me, all this fabric makes me feel like I’m inside mummy wrap,” he said, working off his shirt, dropping it on the floor.

He lay back on a bench and lowered a two-hundred-pound bar from the rack onto his sternum. His straightened his arms, his tendons quivering, his shaved armpits stiff with tension, the outline of his phallus printed against his slacks, an easy smile on his mouth as he lifted the bar higher into the air. Then he lowered it to within an inch of his sternum and lifted the bar nine more times, his chest blooming with veins.

He notched the bar back on the rack, sat up, and put his shirt on, breathing through his nose, his eyes radiant. “Who are these guys you have questions about?”

“Kermit Abelard and Robert Weingart.”

“I wouldn’t say I know Kermit Abelard well, but I do know him. I never heard of the other guy.”

“He’s a celebrity ex-convict. He wrote a book called—”

“Yeah, I remember now. One of those books about how the world dumped on the author by making him rich.”

“You and Kermit are doing presentations on biofuels?”

Layton was still seated on the bench, his knees spread. He pulled at an earlobe. “Not exactly. You’re asking about the talk I gave in Jackson?”

“I saw something about it in a newspaper.”

“Yeah, Kermit Abelard was there. But I’m not making the connections here. What are we talking about?” He sneaked a glance at his wristwatch.

“You ever hear of the St. Jude Project?”

“In New Orleans? I thought Katrina shut down all the welfare projects.”

I didn’t know whether he was being cynical or not. After Katrina made landfall and the levees burst and drowned over one thousand people, a state legislator stated that God in His wisdom had solved the problems in the welfare developments that man had not. The state legislator was not alone in his opinion. I knew too many people whose resentment of blacks reached down into a part of the soul you don’t want to see. “The St. Jude Project is supposed to be a self-help program for people who have addiction problems. Junkies, hookers, homeless people, battered wives, whatever,” I said.

“The big addiction those people have is usually their aversion to work. Not always but most of the time. I’m not knocking them, but you and I didn’t have a charitable foundation to take care of us, did we?”

“Kermit Abelard never talked to you about the St. Jude Project?”

“Dave, I just said I’ve never heard of it. Hey, Carolyn, you got the meat on the fire?”

“You ever hear of Herman Stanga?”

“No, who is he?”

“A pimp and a dope dealer.”

“I haven’t had the pleasure. Before we go any farther with this, how about telling me what’s really on your mind?”

“Seven dead girls in Jeff Davis Parish.”

Layton’s hands were resting in his lap. He gazed at the back lawn. It had already fallen into deep shade, and the wind was flattening the azalea petals on the bushes. The sun had started to set on the far side of the trees, and its reflection inside the room had taken on the wobbling blue-green quality of refracted light at the bottom of a swimming pool. Then I realized that the change of color in the room had been brought about by the sun’s rays shining through a large dome-shaped panel of stained glass inset close to the ceiling.

“I’m not up on homicides in Jeff Davis Parish,” Layton said. “Kermit Abelard is mixed up in something like that?”

“I was wondering why Kermit is doing biofuel presentations with you.”

“He’s interested in saving the environment and rebuilding the coastline. He’s a bright kid. I get the sense he likes to be on the edge of new ideas. You drove all the way down here about Kermit Abelard? He’s a pretty harmless young guy, isn’t he? Jesus Christ, life must be pretty slow at the department.”