The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (3 page)

Herman, like a Leonardo da Vinci in reverse, had turned his own home into an emblematic masterpiece of suburban decay.

I rang the chimes, but no one answered. When I walked around back, I saw him cleaning leaves and pine needles out of the pool with a long pole, wearing Speedos that exposed his crack and his pubic hair. He had the most peculiar coloration I had ever seen in a human being. It was like black ivory that someone had poured liquefied gold inside. The afternoon sun had already dipped behind the oak trees on the bayou, and his wet hair and the oily glaze on his skin seemed touched with fire. A chicken was turning on a rotisserie over a bed of charcoals, next to a glass-topped table that was inset with an umbrella. In the shade of the umbrella was a cooler packed with crushed ice and bottles of Mexican and German beer.

“It’s my man RoboCop,” he said. “Sit yourself down, my brother, and open yourself a beer.”

A striped robe like a Bedouin would wear hung over the back of a canvas chair. I picked it up and threw it at him. “Put it on.”

“What for?”

“Your neighbor’s kids are looking through the gate.”

“You’re right, it’s starting to cool off,” he said. He wrapped the robe around his midriff and tied it like a sarong, his chin tilted up into the breeze. The late sun’s yellow glare on the bayou was like a match flame flaring just under the current. “Want to take a swim? I got a suit might fit you.”

“I need you to look at some photos, Herman.”

“Them girls over in Jeff Davis Parish that got themselves killed?”

“Why would you think that?”

“’Cause you always looking for a way to jam me up. ’Cause y’all ain’t got nobody else to put it on.”

“Nobody else has talked to you?”

“There ain’t been no ink on those girls in four months. What’s that tell you?”

“You have to explain it to me. I’m not that smart.”

“Give me them pictures,” he said, ignoring my statement, his hand upturned.

This time it was I who ignored Herman. I laid the photos one by one on the glass tabletop. He waited patiently, an amused light playing in his face.

“Do I know them?
No.
Have I ever seen them?
No.
Would they be of interest to me?
No.
Why’s that, you ax? ’Cause they’re country girls with a serious case of ugly. Don’t look at me like that.”

“Who do you think might have murdered them?”

“It ain’t a pimp. A pimp don’t murder his stable. Check out their families. They probably been killing each other.” He glanced at his watch. It was gold and had a black face inset with tiny red stones. “I got people coming over. We t’rew wit’ this?”

The underwater lights in his swimming pool had just clicked on, creating a sky-blue clarity in the water that was so pristine I could see the silvery glint of a dime at the bottom of the deep end. Banana trees and a magnificent magnolia tree hung over the spiked fence that surrounded the pool. Potted plants bursting with flowers shaded his deck chairs and filled the air with a fragrance that was heavier than perfume.

“Your home is a study in contradictions. Your yard is carpeted with dog shit, and your house is being eaten to the foundation by termites. But your pool area is snipped right out of
Southern Living
. I don’t get it.”

“The uptown nigger who built this place wanted to be a character in
Gone Wit’ the Wind
. Except Whitey on the bayou don’t got no need for niggers pretending they’re white people. So I give them a real nigger to weep and moan about. I own t’ree rentals, a condo in Lake Charles, and a beach house in Panama City, but I use this house to wipe my ass on. Every day I’m here, the value of my neighbors’ property goes down. Guess who they gonna end up selling their houses to? That is, if I’m in the market for more houses.

“Know why there ain’t been no media coverage on them girls for four months? Nobody cares. This is still Lou’sana, Robo Man. Black or white, it don’t matter—if you got money, people will take your ten-inch on their knees. If you ain’t got money, they’ll cut it off.”

“I think I’ll let myself out.”

“Yeah, fuck you, too, man.”

“Say again?”

“Everyt’ing I tole you is true. But you cain’t deal wit’ it. And that’s
your
problem, motherfucker. It ain’t mine.”

I
LIVED WITH
my wife, Molly, who was a former Catholic nun, in a modest frame house with a peaked tin roof among live oaks and pecan trees and slash pines and windmill palms on East Main, a half block from the famous plantation home known as The Shadows. There was rust on the roof and in the rain gutters, and it turned orange and purple in the late-afternoon sunset. Our lot was one acre in size and part of a historical alluvial floodplain that sloped down to Bayou Teche. The topographical contour of the land along the bayou had never been altered, and as a consequence, even though we were located close to the water, the houses in our neighborhood never flooded, even during the worst of hurricanes. Equally important for one who lives in the tropics, our house stayed in deep shade most of the day, and by the front walk, where we got full sun, our camellias and hibiscus stayed in bloom almost year-round, and in the spring our azaleas powdered the lawn with petals that looked like pink confetti.

It was a fine house in which to live, cool in the summer and warm in the winter, the ceiling-high windows outfitted with ventilated storm shutters, our new veranda a grand place to sit in wood rockers among our potted plants and house pets.

Alafair, our adopted daughter, had graduated from Reed College with a degree in psychology, and now had taken off one semester from Stanford Law School to rewrite a novel she had been working on for three years. She had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed and was carrying a 3.9 GPA at Stanford. She was a good writer, too. I had no doubts about the level of professional success that awaited her, regardless of the field she entered. My concern for Alafair’s well-being was much more immediate and without any solution that I could see. In this case, the specific name of the concern was Kermit Abelard, the first man I believed Alafair was actually serious about.

“He’s coming over here?
Now?
” I said.

I had just come home from work and had parked my pickup under the porte cochere. She was sitting in the rocker on the veranda, wearing a flowery sundress and white shoes, her skin dark with tan, her Indian-black hair burned brown on the tips. “What do you have against him, Dave?”

“He’s too old for you.”

“He’s thirty-three. He calls it his crucifixion year.”

“I forgot. He’s also grandiose.”

“Give it a rest, big guy.”

“Is the convict coming with him?”

She made a face that feigned exasperation. Kermit Abelard, whose family at one time had owned almost half of St. Mary Parish, could not be accused of decadence or living on his family name. He had gone to acting school in New York and had published three novels, one of which had been adapted as a film. He had worked in the oil field when he could have been playing tennis and fishing for marlin in the Keys. Unfortunately, his egalitarian attitudes sometimes required others to pay a price, as was the case when he encouraged the entire crew on his drilling rig to join the union and got them and himself fired. Two years past, he had managed to work a parole from the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville for a celebrity convict author, a man who had been in and out of reformatories and jails since he was sixteen.

“Have you read
The Green Cage
?” Alafair asked.

“I have. I got it from the library. I didn’t buy it.”

“You don’t think it’s a brilliant piece of writing?”

“Yeah, it is, for reasons the author and his admirers don’t seem to understand.”

She wasn’t taking the bait, so I slogged on. “It’s a great look inside the mind of a sociopath and narcissist and manipulator. Count the number of times the pronouns ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine,’ and ‘myself’ appear in each paragraph.”

“Somebody must have liked it. Robbie was a finalist in the National Book Awards.”

“Robbie?”

“Argue with someone else, Dave.”

I looked out at the evening traffic, at the birds gathering in the trees against a mauve-colored sunset. “Want to go for a run?” I said.

“I’m going to the park with Kermit. He’s reading the revision I did on the last chapter in my novel.”

I went inside the house. Molly had left a note on the kitchen table to the effect she was in Lafayette and would bring supper home. I changed into my gym shorts and a T-shirt and my running shoes, and in the backyard, under the supervision of our warrior cat, Snuggs, and our elderly raccoon, Tripod, I did fifty push-ups with my feet propped on a picnic bench, five reps of sixty-pound curls, three reps of military presses, and one hundred stomach crunches. It was cool and warm at the same time inside the shade of the trees, and the wind was blowing through the bamboo that separated our property from the next-door neighbor’s, and wisteria was blooming in big blue and lavender clumps on the side of her garage. I had almost forgotten my worries regarding Alafair and her willingness to trust people she shouldn’t; then I heard Kermit Abelard’s black Saab convertible pull into the driveway and a car door open and close. I did not hear it open and close and then open and close again. Which meant Kermit Abelard did not get out of his vehicle and approach the gallery and walk Alafair back to the car and open the car door for her. In my view, no one could accuse Kermit Abelard of going out of his way to be a gentleman.

I walked to the edge of the backyard so I could see through the porte cochere into the front. Kermit was backing into the street, the top down on his convertible, the dappled shade sliding off the hand-waxed surfaces, as though the cooling of the day and the attenuation of the light had been arranged especially for him. Alafair sat next to him on the rolled-leather seat. In back was a man whose face I had seen only on the flap of a book jacket.

I jogged down East Main, under the canopy of live oaks that spanned the entirety of the street, past The Shadows and the bed-and-breakfast that had been the residence of the plantation’s overseer, past the massive old brick post office and the Evangeline Theater, across the drawbridge at Burke Street and into City Park, where people were barbecuing under the shelters along the bayou and high school kids were playing a work-up softball game on the ball diamond.

I jogged for four miles, circling twice through the park. At the end of the second lap I hit it hard toward home, my blood oxygenated now, my breath coming regular, my heart strong, the sweaty glaze on my skin a reminder that once in a while you’re allowed to reclaim a libidinal moment or two from your youth. Then I saw Kermit Abelard’s Saab parked by the tin pavilion, checkered cloth and newspapers spread on a table, a mound of boiled crawfish and artichokes and corn on the cob piled in the center.

I didn’t want to stop, but Alafair and her friends Kermit Abelard and the convict-author whose name was Robert Weingart had seen me, and now Alafair was waving, her face full of joy and pride. I tried to shine her on, to pretend I was committed to my run and couldn’t stop. But under what circumstances do you embarrass your daughter in front of her companions, or indulge your enmity toward them at her expense? Or pass her by when perhaps she needs your presence for reasons she may not be able to acknowledge, even to herself?

I slowed to a walk, wiping my face with the towel I carried.

Kermit was a stocky man of medium height, with vascular, short arms and a cleft in his chin. He was built more like a dockhand than a descendant of local aristocracy. The top of his shirt was unbuttoned, his tanned, smooth skin exposed for others to look at. He had wide, square hands and fingers that were blunt on the tips. They were the hands of a workingman, but incongruously, the red stone of a Kappa Sigma ring twinkled on his finger.

“Come meet Robert, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.

“I’m pretty overheated. I’d better not get too close to you guys,” I said.

Robert Weingart was sitting on top of the wood table, smiling good-naturedly, his alpine-booted feet planted solidly on the bench. He had fine cheekbones, a small mouth, and dark hair that was clipped neatly and wet-combed with a part that created a straight gray line through his scalp. His eyes were hazel and elongated, his cheeks slightly sunken. His hands were relaxed on his knees, his fingers tapered, like a pianist’s. He conveyed the sense that he was a man with no hidden agenda, with no repressed tensions or problems of conscience. He seemed to be a man at peace with the world.

But it was the lack of balance or uniformity in his physiognomy that bothered me. He didn’t blink, the way screen actors never blink. His mouth was too small, too quick to smile, his jaw too thin for the size of his cranium. His eyes stayed fastened brightly on mine. I kept waiting for him to blink. But he didn’t.

“Looks like you’ve been pouring it on,” he said.

“Not really.”

“I thought your speed was pretty impressive.”

“Have I seen you in the movies?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You remind me of an actor. I can’t call his name to mind.”

“No, I’m just a scribbler.” He got up from the table, extending his hand. “Rob Weingart. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“It’s not Robbie?”

“Just call me Rob if you like.”

His handshake was boneless, unthreatening, cool and dry to the touch. There was a white shine on his teeth. He picked up a peeled crawfish and put it in his mouth, his cheekbones working slowly, his gaze never leaving my face. He touched at his lips with a paper napkin, his expression as benign as the weather was temperate, a bit like a man thinking of a private joke. “Is there something on your mind I can help you with?” he asked.

“I got it. It wasn’t an actor. You remind me of Chet Baker,” I said.

“The musician?”

“That’s right. A tragic one, at that. His addictions ate him alive. You like jazz, Mr. Weingart? Have you done any professional performing? I’m sure I’ve seen you in a professional capacity.”