The Glass Rainbow

CHAPTER 14

The peculiarity of entering one’s eighth decade is that questions regarding theology do not sharpen but instead become less significant. Better said, need for proof of the supernatural becomes less imperative. At a certain point, perhaps we realize that we have been surrounded by the connections between the material and the unseen world all our lives, but for various reasons, we chose not to see them.

Years ago dead members of my platoon used to call me up long-distance during electrical storms. So did my murdered wife, Annie. A psychiatrist told me I was experiencing a psychotic break. But cold sober and free of all the ghosts I had brought back from a land of rice paddies and elephant grass and hills that looked like the summer-browned breasts of Asian women, I had seen my father standing in the surf south of Point Au Fer, the rain tinking on the hard hat he was wearing when he died in an offshore blowout. In the oil field, he had always been called Big Aldous Robicheaux, as though the three words were one. In his barroom fistfights, he took on all comers two and three at a time, exploding his fists on his adversaries’ faces with the dispassionate ease of a baseball player swatting balls in a batting cage. My mother’s infidelities filled him with feelings of sorrow and anger and personal impotence, and in turn his drunkenness and irresponsibility robbed her of any happiness she’d ever had and finally any possibility of belief in herself. My parents ruined their marriage, then their home and their family. But in death, when the wellhead blew out far below the monkey board on the rig where he was racking pipe, Big Aldous clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and jumped into the blackness, brave to the end, swallowed under a derrick that collapsed like melting licorice on top of him. A survivor said Big Aldous was smiling when he bailed into the stars. And that’s the way I have always remembered my old man, and I have come to learn that memory and presence are inextricably connected and should never be thought of as separate entities.

So I have never argued with people about the specters I have seen or the voices I’ve heard inside the static of a long-distance phone call. I know that the dead are out there, beckoning from the shadows, perhaps pointing the way for the rest of us. But I don’t fear them, and I conceive of them as friends whom I don’t think I’ll mind joining. It’s not a bad way to be.

Early in the A.M. the day after Vidor Perkins’s visit to my office, I woke in the grayness of the dawn to the clanking sounds of the drawbridge at Burke Street. The fog had rolled up Bayou Teche from the Gulf and hung like wet strips of gray rag on the ground and in the oak trees. I fed Tripod and Snuggs, then fixed a fried-egg and bacon sandwich and took it and a cup of coffee and hot milk and a folding chair down the slope of my backyard. I sat down by the water’s edge and ate breakfast and watched Tripod and Snuggs come down the slope and join me, sniffing at the breeze, their tails flipping back and forth. The green and red lights on the drawbridge were smudged inside the fog, the steel girders hardly visible. Evidently the great cogged wheels that raised and lowered the bridge had gotten stuck. Then I heard the machinery clank and bang loudly, and each side of the bridge rose at forty-five-degree angles into the air and what I thought was a huge two-deck quarterboat slid through the open space and came down the bayou toward me, a hissing sound rising from its stern.

But it was not an offshore quarterboat. It was a nineteenth-century paddle wheeler, with twin fluted stacks, a lamp burning inside the pilothouse. A massive bare-chested black man, wearing no shoes and dressed only in a pair of flared work trousers, was coiling and stacking a thick length of oiled rope on the bow. The side door to the pilothouse was open, and inside I could see a skipper at the wheel, smoking a cob pipe and wearing a billed mariner’s cap and a dark blue coat with big buttons. He seemed to study me, then removed his pipe from his mouth and touched the bill of his cap. I waved back at him, unsure what I was seeing. I thought the boat was a replica, one with screws under it, perhaps part of a tourist promotion of some kind. But I saw a woman in a hooped dress standing in a breezeway, looking at me as though I were an oddity she didn’t understand; then the stern passed not ten yards from me, the ground quaking with the roar of the steam engines, cascades of silt and yellow water sliding off the paddle wheel.

I put my food down and stood up from my chair and stared in disbelief as the bow and the lighted pilothouse and the rows of passenger compartments and the woman in the hooped crinoline dress and the stern of the boat were enveloped by the fog, the wake landing on the bank with a loud slap.

“Dave?” I heard someone say.

I turned around. Alafair was standing twenty feet behind me in her bathrobe and slippers.

“Did you see that?” I asked.

“See what?”

“That double-decker that just went by.”

“No, I didn’t see anything. What are you doing down here?”

“The drawbridge was stuck. It woke me up. A paddle wheeler just went down the bayou.”

She walked down to the water’s edge, leaning forward, peering southward into the fog. “Just now?”

“Thirty seconds ago.”

She looked at me strangely. I took out my pocketknife and cut my sandwich in half and handed her my plate with the half on it that I had not bitten into. But she ignored the gesture. “You’re telling me you just saw a riverboat, the kind with the big paddle wheel in back?” she said.

I sat down next to her and glanced at the eastern sky. “How about that sunrise? Isn’t that something?” I said.

If you’re lucky, at a certain age you finally learn not to contend with the world or try to explain that the application of reason has little or nothing to do with the realities that exist just on the other side of one’s fingertips.

That same morning, Clete Purcel drove to the cottage on Bayou Teche that Emma Poche rented just outside St. Martinville. It was a restored cypress structure, perhaps over a century old, unpainted, set back in deep shade under live oaks, its small gallery hung with baskets of impatiens. Emma’s car was parked on the grass under a tree, a back window half down. On the seat he could see an oversize tennis racquet and a can of balls. The surface of the bayou was wrinkling in the breeze. In the distance he could see a graveyard filled with whitewashed crypts and the back of the nightclub where he had torn Herman Stanga apart.

It was Emma’s day off. When she came to the screen door, she was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, her face unwashed and lined with sleep. She gazed at him a moment and said, “What do you want, Clete?”

“To take you to breakfast,” he said.

“What’s the point? It’s over.”

“If you say so. But it shouldn’t end over a misunderstanding about that pen. Any one of a half-dozen skells could have creeped my place, somebody working for the guy who popped Stanga.”

He could barely make out her features through the grayness of the screen. Her eyes were lowered, as though she were considering his words. “I need to get in the shower. Fix some coffee if you want,” she said. She unsnapped the latch on the door and walked toward the back of the cottage. A few moments later, while he poured coffee grinds in the top of an old-time drip pot, he heard the sound of water hitting on the tin walls of the shower stall. A wood-bladed fan spun slowly on the ceiling of the living room. The furnishings in the room were sparse and looked thread-worn or purchased secondhand. A bookcase next to the television set contained mostly popular music CDs and a few paperback editions of novels that seemed to have no thematic connection and probably had been picked up at yard sales. But one book caught his eye. It was a blue hardcover and was stamped with the words THE BOOK OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS. Clete picked it up and sat down in a stuffed chair that puffed up dust when his buttocks sank into the seat cushion. He opened the book and heard the spine make a cracking sound. On the title page, someone had written:

Clete replaced the book on the shelf. Emma came out of the back dressed in a fresh pair of jeans and a cowboy shirt. She had put on makeup and perfume and earrings and looked lovely framed against the window and the view of the trees and the bayou outside.

“I fixed coffee,” he said.

“Yeah, I smelled it.”

“Where are the cups?” he said.

She rubbed her forearm, her expression a mixture of indecision and frustration. “Clete, I don’t know how else to say this. You treated me with distrust and disdain. You hurt me deeply. And you did it after we made love. The word is ‘after.’ You made me feel dirty and cheap.”

“It wasn’t intentional. It just worked out that way.” He stared hopelessly at the ceiling. “What should I have done? Not tell you that somebody planted a gold pen with my name on it at a homicide scene?”

But she made no reply.

“Who’s Tookie?” he said.

She had to think a second to make the connection. “Where’d you hear about Tookie?”

“I just saw her name in your book.”

“Which book?”

“Your A.A. book. She wrote a note in there.”

Emma was frowning, obviously not understanding. He reached up on the shelf and opened the blue hardcover on his lap and turned to the title page. “See, she wrote—”

“Tookie Goula was my sponsor for a short time. She has jailhouse tats all over her arms. She used to hook in truck stops in the Upper South. Truckers call them ‘pavement princesses.’ Tookie looks more like the Beast of Buchenwald now. Or a reverse Beast of Buchenwald. A fat, lumpy lampshade with tats.”

Clete tried to assimilate what he had just heard. In the silence, Emma seemed to grow even more irritable. “Does that answer your question?” she asked.

“I guess. You play tennis? I saw the racquet in your car.”

“I hit a few balls on the wall at the park sometimes.”

“I’d like to take that up myself,” he said.

She began taking down cups and saucers from one of the kitchen cabinets. Then she stopped and turned around. “I’ve already moved on, Clete. I don’t hold what you did against you. But you need to find somebody else.”

“You’ve got another guy?”

“That’s my business.”

“Your friend Tookie, the one who gave you the book, you’d already read her inscription in there?”

“Yeah, she gave me the book. To tell you the truth, I think you should see a counselor. Or go to A.A. meetings or spend more time with Dave Robicheaux, because I think both of you have broken glass in your head.”

“I think you’re right.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I’ve got some terrible character defects, the chief of which is I’m a rotten judge of people.”

“Say again?”

“Nope. I’m eighty-sixing myself from your house,” he replied, blowing out his breath.

He went outside and let the screen slam behind him. He walked toward his Caddy, across the lawn, past her car, glancing inside again at the tennis racquet and the can of balls. Clete knew little about the cost of tennis racquets, but the logo on the cover of this one indicated that it was probably expensive and not of a kind that a casual player would purchase, particularly one who lived on a parish deputy’s salary. He heard the screen door open behind him.

“Clete?” she said. She was standing on the gallery, her hands on her hips. “The coffee is ready. Come back in and have a cup. We’re still friends. I didn’t mean to talk so harshly.”

A smile wrinkled at the corner of her mouth. The wind blew a strand of hair on her cheek. She squared her shoulders slightly, tightening her breasts against her cowboy shirt. Clete folded his big arms across his chest and seemed to think for a long time, as though trying to recover a detail from his memory that was of enormous importance. “I dug your butterfly tattoo. The truth is, I dug you, too, Emma,” he said. “But when somebody lies to me, it’s like somebody spitting in the punch bowl. I find another watering hole.”

Then he got in his Caddy and drove away, clicking on a CD of Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll” full-blast.

He came to my house early Saturday morning and said he wanted to go fishing, but I didn’t believe that was the reason for his visit. Clete’s external scars and his indifference to them belied the level of injury that he often carried inside him. Regardless of how badly he was treated by women, or how treacherous they turned out to be, he always blamed himself for the failed relationship. Even more paradoxically, he refused to speak ill of them under any circumstances and would not allow others to do so, either. Like most Irish, the pagan in him was alive and well, but he kept a pew in a medieval cathedral where the knight-errant genuflected in a cone of stained light, blood-soaked cloak or not.

“You think I just blew it, or maybe—” he said.

We were sitting in his Caddy, the top down, under the overhang of the trees on East Main. The morning was still cool, the sunrise barely visible through the canopy. “Maybe what?” I said.

“She’s dirty.”

“Dirty on what?”

“Everything. I started running the tape backward in my head. When I’m surveilling Carolyn Blanchet at the motel, Emma comes walking out of the lounge and sees me and says she’s waiting for her uncle. Except the uncle never shows up, and I end up getting loaded with her and in the sack with her later that night. Then my gold pen disappears and shows up in Stanga’s swimming pool. Then I see this expensive tennis racquet in her car and I start thinking about who else plays tennis. Like Carolyn Blanchet. Then Emma lies to me about seeing the inscription in the A.A. book. That book had never been opened. Then she tries to get me to come back in the house, maybe for some more high-octane boom-boom. I got to admit it was a temptation.” Clete rubbed the tops of his bare arms. “I feel like I’ve walked through cobwebs.”

“You’re trying to put yourself in the mind of a wet drunk.”

“I am a wet drunk.”

“No, you’re not. You’re still an amateur.”

“Will you stop trying to make me feel better? Do you think I got taken over the hurdles or not?”

“Why would Emma Poche want to help somebody frame you for clipping Stanga?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m asking you.”

“You think she was at the motel to meet Carolyn Blanchet?”

“It occurred to me,” he replied. “But if she’s a lesbian or a switch-hitter, she had me fooled. When you take a ride with Emma Poche, there’s no eight-second buzzer.”

“Will you grow up? This woman is trying to ruin your life, and you talk about her like you’re seventeen years old.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Vidor Perkins came to my office.”

“Are you serious?”

“He says he’s writing a book. He says Timothy Abelard, Kermit’s grandfather, was involved in the drug trade with the Giacano family. He claims Timothy Abelard stiffed the Giacanos, and they had his son and the daughter-in-law wrapped in chains and dropped in sixty feet of water.”

“Abelard got his own kid killed?”

“That’s what Perkins says.”

“And he’s putting this in a book and telling you about it?”

“That’s about it.”

“Is he trying to extort the Abelards or get himself killed?”

“I think he genuinely believes he’s a great talent. He’s already contacted a literary agency and says he and Alafair are going to be colleagues.”

Clete rubbed his forehead. He’d had a haircut the day before and a good night’s sleep, and his face looked pink and youthful, his intelligent green eyes full of warmth and mirth, the way they were years ago when we walked a beat on Canal. “We’ve had a good run, haven’t we?” he said.

“The best,” I said.

He rested the palms of his big hands on the steering wheel. He watched a solitary leaf spin out of the canopy of live oaks above us and light on the waxed hood of the Cadillac. “You don’t figure Layton Blanchet for a suicide?” he said.

“I’m not objective. Most people looking at the scene evidence would put his death down as self-inflicted. I think Layton was too greedy to kill himself. He was the kind of guy who clings to the silverware when the mortician drags him out of his home.”

“Let’s go out there,” Clete said.

“What for?”

“Maybe the guy was a butthead, maybe not, but he was my client. Maybe if I had found out who his wife was pumping, he wouldn’t be dead,” he replied.

I told Molly where we were going, and we hitched the boat to the back of my pickup, put our rods and tackle boxes and an ice chest inside, and drove down through Jeanerette and Franklin to the Atchafalaya Basin. I didn’t particularly want to revisit the scene of Layton’s death. To me, he was not a sympathetic victim. He reminded me of too many people I had known, all of whom had become acolytes in a pantheon where the admission fee was the forfeiture of their souls or at least their self-respect. But unfortunately, like drunks driving at high speed through red lights, the Layton Blanchets of the world made choices for others before they self-destructed. Bernadette Latiolais and Fern Michot didn’t get to vote when their lives were arbitrarily taken from them, and I believed I owed both of them a debt.

We drove down the same levee where Layton had parked his pickup truck on the last day of his life. The water was high from the rain, lapping across the cypress knees, the strings of early hyacinths rolling in the waves. The sky was overcast, the wind steady out of the south, and in the distance I could see a flat bronze-colored bay starting to cap and moss straightening on a line of dead cypress trees. I pulled the truck to a stop and cut the engine. Leaves were blowing on the water where Layton’s houseboat was moored, and the yellow crime-scene tape strung through the gum and cypress trees had been broken by wild animals. The aluminum rowboat was lifting and falling with the waves, clanking against a cypress knee or a chunk of concrete. For some reason, maybe because of the grayness of the day, the entire scene made me think of a party’s aftermath, when the revelers return to their homes and leave others to clean up.

Clete stared through the windshield, screwing a cigarette into his mouth. “What’s she doing here?” he said.

“Good question,” I replied.

But if Emma Poche, dressed in her deputy’s uniform and rubber boots, took notice of us, she gave no sign of it. Her back was turned, a roll of fresh crime-scene tape hanging from her left hand. She slapped at an insect on her neck and wiped her palm on her clothes. Then she seemed to see us, smiling casually, not overly concerned by our presence. On the far end of the houseboat, I saw an outboard tied by its painter to the deck rail. Clete and I crossed the plank walkway and stepped onto the island. “Aren’t you out of your jurisdiction?” he said to Emma.

“The St. Martin and St. Mary parish line runs right through this bay. In fact, no one is sure exactly where it is,” she said.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“None of your business,” she said. But she was smiling with her eyes as she said it, looking at me as though the two of us shared a private joke. “We got a call that some kids were trying to get into the houseboat.”

“I guess some people got no respect,” Clete said.

“Why are you guys out here?” she asked.

“Entertaining the bass,” I said.

“At this exact spot. My, my,” she said.

“Yeah, what a coincidence,” I said.

“Are you questioning my jurisdictional authority, two guys who have no business here at all?” she said.

“No, we’re not, Emma,” I said. “Did you know Layton?”

“I saw him around. Listen, Dave, if you have a question about my being here, call the dispatcher and have her check the log. Because I don’t like y’all’s insinuation.”

“We just happened by,” I said, walking to the rowboat. “How many shell casings did the St. Mary guys find?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she replied.

“If Layton used a semiauto, and there was a second shell casing, that would present quite a puzzle, wouldn’t it?” I said.

“You’d have to ask somebody else that. Frankly, I don’t care. That’s why I’m in uniform and not a detective. I don’t like carrying caseloads and taking the job home every day. Also, I’m not that smart.”

I faced into the wind as though I had lost interest in the subject. “It’s pretty out here,” I said.

“Yeah, it is. Or it was,” she said.

“Was?” I said.

“Fuck off, Dave,” she said.

I smelled tobacco smoke. Clete had just lit his cigarette and was staring down at the rowboat, his gaze sweeping from the bow to the stern, lingering on the dried blood from Layton’s massive head wound. “You don’t mind if we just stand here for a little bit, do you?” he said to Emma.

“Do whatever you want. After I rewrap the scene, don’t cross the tape again,” she replied.

She walked into the shallows, among the flooded trees, and strung fresh tape through the trunks. Soon she was on the other side of the houseboat, out of earshot. Clete continued to puff on his cigarette, his attention still fixed reflectively on the rowboat. I pulled the cigarette gently from his fingers and flicked it into the wind and heard it hiss when it struck the water. His concentration was such that he didn’t seem to notice. “So Blanchet was lying on his back, looking skyward, his head in the stern?”

“Right,” I said.

“And the forty-five was in his right hand?”

“He had one finger in the trigger guard.”

“Which way was the wind blowing when y’all found him?”

“Just like today, straight out of the south.”

“Was the boat more or less in the same position, or did the paramedics move it?”

“It’s exactly in the same position.”

“How do you know?”

“The bow is right by that same piece of concrete,” I said.

“Look at the willow tree.”

“Yeah?”

“There’s still exit matter on the lower branches. But the branches are three feet behind the stern. It’s too far back.”

“I’m not following you, Clete.”

“Look, I’m speculating, but if he set the forty-five under his chin and pulled the trigger, the fluids and bone matter from the wound would have gone straight up into the tree’s overhang. But what if somebody is in the boat with Blanchet and wants to distract him? Somebody with the forty-five hidden under a raincoat. He tells Blanchet to look up at a comet, a constellation, an owl or a hawk flying across the moon. Then the shooter plants one under his chin, and Blanchet’s oatmeal flies into the tree.”

“I think you’re probably right, Clete, but I tried to sell that one to the sheriff, and it didn’t slide down the pipe.”

“Yeah, well, screw the sheriff. This is still St. Mary Parish, Louisiana’s answer to the thirteenth century.” Clete squatted down, steadying himself with one hand on the gunwale of the rowboat. “Think of it this way. If you’re correct in your hypothesis about the shooter putting the forty-five in Layton’s hand and letting off a second round, where would the shot have gone?”

I could see where he was taking his re-creation of the moments that had followed Layton Blanchet’s death. Clete was still the best investigative detective I had ever known. He had the ability to see the world through the eyes of every kind of person imaginable; he knew their thoughts before they had them. The same applied to the physical world. Where others saw only an opaque surface, Clete saw layers and layers of meaning beneath it.

“Okay, so Blanchet’s brains go flying into the willow tree, and he falls backward into the stern of the boat, about two hundred and twenty pounds of hard beef,” he said. “So what is our shooter going to do at this point? He’s probably still in the boat with Blanchet. He can put the forty-five in Blanchet’s hand and try to aim it away from him toward the levee. But he’s going to blow gunpowder residue on Blanchet’s clothes, plus deafen himself. Or he can climb out of the boat and stand in the shallows and point the forty-five toward the island, above the houseboat. The bullet should have carried across the bay and into the swamp. Hang on.”

Clete climbed into the rowboat. His weight caused it to rock violently back and forth, then he sat down on one of the seats, stabilizing the hull, and eased himself into the position Layton’s body had been in when we found it. Clete rested his head on the stern and let his right arm flop over the gunwale. He configured his thumb and index finger into the shape of a pistol and sighted as though aiming at a target. The tip of his finger pointed directly at the houseboat.

“Y’all didn’t find anything in there that looked like a bullet hole, did you?” he asked.

“I didn’t.” Then I thought about it. “Good Lord.”

“What?”

“In the galley there was a paper trash sack with pieces of a broken drinking glass inside it. But there were also some slivers of glass in one corner, under a window. I thought they were from the drinking glass and somebody had overlooked them when he was sweeping up.”

Clete climbed back out of the boat, the water soaking his tennis shoes and the bottoms of his khakis. “Let’s have a look,” he said.

But Emma Poche was not in a cooperative mood. “You guys aren’t going inside that boat,” she said. “Number one, I don’t have a key. Number two, you have to get permission from my boss or the St. Mary sheriff. Number three, I know how y’all think and operate, and I’m not gonna let either of you pick that lock.”

“Do you mind if we look around outside?” I asked.

“Why, for God’s sakes?” she said.

“I don’t know. When we arrived here, I got the feeling you were looking along the bank for something,” I said. “Maybe we’ll find it for you.”

“I just remembered why I don’t go to A.A. anymore,” she said.

“I’ll bite. Why’s that?”

“Because of the sexist male pricks I met there,” she replied.

“We’ll be out of your way in just a minute,” I said.

“Be my guest. Take all the time you want. Like five minutes. And ‘bite’ is the word,” she said. She stiffened an index finger and pointed it at me. Her cheeks were bright with color as she went back to work stringing tape in the trees, jerking it hard through the limbs.

“You’ll never win their hearts and minds,” Clete said to me.

“You wouldn’t pick a lock at a crime scene, would you?”

“Emma might be a little nuts, but she’s one cute, smart little package,” he replied.

“I can’t believe you.”

“Give the devil her due. Look at the ass on her.”

“I give up, Clete.”

He slapped me between the shoulder blades, his face full of play. Clete Purcel would never change. And if he did, I knew the world would be the less for it.

We stepped up on the houseboat and worked our way forward, examining the molding around the windows in the galley. A long chrome-plated bar that a person could use as a handhold was anchored along the roof of the cabin. At the approximate spot where I had seen glass slivers on the other side of the wall, I saw what looked like an empty screw hole in one of the metal fastenings on the bar. Except it was not a screw hole. I stuck my little finger inside and felt the rough edges of torn wood and a sharpness like splintered glass.

I removed my finger and put one hand on Clete’s shoulder and stepped up on the deck rail so I could see across the top of the cabin roof. Eighteen inches from the chrome-plated bar was an exit hole in the roof. The .45 round had punched through the hand bar’s fastening and clipped the top of the glass inset into the window, before surfacing obliquely from the treated plywood that constituted the ceiling to the galley.

“You were dead-on right,” I said.

“You found it?”

“We’ve got the entry and exit holes, but no slug.”

Clete pushed himself up on the deck rail so he could see. Emma Poche was watching us from out in the water. “You think this is going to make any difference with the sheriff in St. Mary?” he asked.

“Like you say, this is still a fiefdom,” I replied.

“What are y’all doing up there?” Emma called.

We both stared at her without replying. The sun had come out, and her hair and face and uniform were netted with light and shadow.

“Did you hear me?” she said.

“Why’d you bring crime-scene tape on a 911 possible break-in?” I said.

“Because it was already in my goddamn boat,” she replied.

I drummed my fingers on the cabin roof. “You ever carry a forty-five auto as a drop, Emma?” I asked.

She began to gather up the strips of crime-scene tape broken by deer or bear, and stuff them into her trouser pockets. “When I turn around again, you two cutie-pies had better be out of here,” she said.

“My flopper just started flipping around,” Clete said.