The Glass Rainbow

CHAPTER 22

I had my cell phone open and was about to dial 911 when Clete came through the back door, the AR-15 held at an upper angle, his gaze fastened on Thigpin’s body. Until I had seen him through the kitchen window, just before he fired, I’d had no idea he followed me to the camp. “You calling it in?” he said.

I waited. A pool of blood was spreading outward from Thigpin’s head. I stepped aside.

“Bag him as a John Doe,” Clete said. “Let the guys who sent him wonder what happened to him. Weingart already seems to be coming apart. Let the Abelards or Weingart or Carolyn Blanchet or whoever is behind this think Thigpin is about to rat-fuck them.”

I closed my cell phone. “You warned me about Thigpin. I should have listened.”

“Think of it this way. What happens when I listen to my own advice?” He laughed without making any sound, his shirt shaking on his chest. “I need a drink.” He opened a cabinet and found Thigpin’s bottle of Johnnie Walker and poured four inches in a jelly glass. He saw me watching him. “I shouldn’t do this in front of you,” he said. “But I need a drink. I’m not like you. I don’t have your control or discipline. I don’t have your faith, either. So I’m going to put the tiger in the tank. I’ll be a lush right through the bottom of the ninth. Bombs away.”

He drank all four inches of it as though it were Kool-Aid, gin roses flaring in his cheeks, his eyes brightening, the world coming back into focus, becoming an acceptable place again.

“You saved my life, Clete. You’ll always remain the best guy I ever knew,” I said.

“That second shot? The one that flushed his grits?”

“What about it?”

“It was supposed to be my first shot. The one through the neck was five inches below where I aimed. I could have gotten you killed, big mon.”

“You pulled it off, didn’t you? You always pull it off. You’ve never let me down.”

But I was caught in my old vanity — namely, that I could convince Clete Purcel of his own goodness and heroism and the fact that the real angels in our midst always have tarnished wings. He sat down in a straight-back chair and looked wearily out the screen door at the sun setting on the bay. “We can’t keep running on luck, Dave,” he said.

“We’ve done pretty well so far, haven’t we?”

“You don’t understand. It’s like General Giáp said. He defeated the French with the shovel, not the gun. We keep playing by the rules while the other guys use a flamethrower.”

“What do you recommend?”

“I’ve got a bad feeling I can’t get rid of. Killing a piece of shit like Thigpin doesn’t change anything. He was just a tool. Right now people out there are planning our death. Maybe the guys in the rain hoods. We don’t know. That’s it, we don’t know.”

I sat down across from him. Thigpin’s cell phone was on the table. I picked it up and accessed its call lists. Then I closed it and placed it back on the table.

“What’d you find?” Clete asked.

“Nothing. It’s clean.”

“That’s my point,” he said. “We took a sack of shit off the board that nobody could care less about.”

Helen not only agreed with Clete’s suggestion about tagging Thigpin as a John Doe, DOA, she suppressed all information regarding the shooting and got Koko Hebert, our coroner, to tell an aggressive local reporter, “Yes, the body of a fisherman has been found. We’re trying to determine the cause of death as we speak. We’ll get back to you on that, muy pronto. This story definitely has Pulitzer potential.”

The next morning I received a phone call from a plainclothes NOPD detective by the name of Dana Magelli. He was a good cop, as straight as they come, and always a loyal friend. He was also a family man, one who didn’t rattle easily but who walked away when he heard a colleague telling a vulgar joke or using gratuitous profanity. This morning it was obvious he was not happy about the task he had been given.

“You remember No Duh Dolowitz?” he said.

Who could forget No Duh, once known as the Merry Prankster of the New Orleans Mob? He put dog shit in the sandwiches at a Teamsters convention. He tried to cut up a safe with an acetylene torch in Metairie and burned down half of a shopping center. He helped Clete Purcel fill up a mobster’s customized convertible with concrete; he also helped with the deconstruction of a Magazine Avenue snitch by the name of Tommy Fig. The deconstruction involved the freeze-drying and wrapping of Tommy’s parts, which were then hung from the blades of an overhead fan in Tommy’s butcher shop. But No Duh went through a life change when he creeped a house on Lake Pontchartrain owned by one of Didi Gee’s nephews, who put seven dents in No Duh’s head with a ball-peen hammer.

“No Duh is running a pawnshop over in Algiers,” Dana said. “Some of the items in it are a little warm. A guy came in there three days ago and sold No Duh a DVD player for twenty bucks. There was a disk in it. Out of curiosity, No Duh put it on the screen in his store. At first he thought he was watching a Friday the 13th or Halloween film of some kind. Then he realized what it was and called us.”

“No Duh called the cops?”

“He’s got his parameters. I recognized the two girls in the film, Dave. I’m sure they’re the same girls in the photos y’all sent us. I’m going to download and e-mail you the DVD. I’ve got the feeling you’re emotionally involved in this one. I’m sorry to do this.”

“What’s in it?” I said.

“See for yourself. I don’t want to talk about it,” he replied.

I went into Helen’s office and told her of Dana Magelli’s call. “I want Clete to see the video with us,” I said.

“What for?”

“This investigation is as much his as it is ours. I’ll put it another way: Outside of you and me, he’s one of the few people who cares about the fate of those girls.”

“Call him,” she said.

It took Clete only ten minutes to drive from his office to the department. We went into Helen’s office and dropped the blinds on the windows and the door. Then she hit the download button on Magelli’s e-mail attachment.

People wonder why cops get on the hooch or pills or become sex addicts or eventually eat their guns. It would be facile and self-serving to say there is one answer to that question. But even among the most degraded of police officers, unless they are sociopaths themselves, there are moments when we witness a manifestation of human evil for which no one is prepared, one that causes us to wonder if some individuals in our midst are diabolically possessed. That is what we wish to believe, because the alternative conclusion robs us forever of our faith in our fellow man.

Whoever held the video camera did not appear in the frame. The setting looked subterranean. The dirt floor was damp and shiny and green with mold. The walls were built of stones that were smooth and rounded, like bread loaves. They were not the kind of stones you would ordinarily find or see in this area. Chains were inset in the walls, the anchor pins driven deep, encrusted with rust.

There was no sound in the video, only images. The light was bad, the lens sliding back and forth over stone surfaces that seemed netted with moisture, as though they were sweating. Bernadette Latiolais and Fern Michot were clearly recognizable; their mouths were moving silently in the strobe, their eyes shuttering in the brilliance of the light.

“Jesus God,” I heard Helen say.

The video was probably not longer than forty seconds. When it was over, Helen got up and opened the blinds and turned off the monitor on her computer. Clete had not moved in his chair. His big hands rested on his knees, his fingers tucked into his palms, like paws on a bear. His mouth was small and tight, his back humped like a whale’s, his eyes fixed on the empty monitor.

Helen sat back down behind her desk, pushing her thoughts out of her eyes. “Who’s the guy who brought the DVD player into the pawnshop?” she said.

“No Duh swears he never saw him. He figures the guy for an addict or a low-rent house creep,” I said.

“What about the paperwork?” Helen asked.

“Magelli says the name and address on the bill of sale were bogus. There were no helpful prints on the player, either.”

“A professional house creep doesn’t unload one item,” Clete said.

“It doesn’t matter. I think No Duh is telling the truth. He reported the disk. He has no reason to lie about the seller,” I said.

“This is what we need to do,” Helen said. “We check all area reports of burglaries and home invasions from the time of the girls’ disappearance to the present. Maybe the thief is local and went to New Orleans to unload the player. Or maybe he’s a friend of the person who stole it.”

We were talking in a procedural fashion, spending time on issues that were perfunctory in nature, a deliberate distraction from the images that we had watched on Helen’s computer screen. But the room felt as though the air had been sucked out of it. The sunlight that fell through the window was brittle and swam with motes of dust. I could hear Clete clenching and rubbing his hands together between his thighs, the calluses on his palms as rough as horn, his face bloodless and poached-looking.

When I went outside into the coolness of the morning, I sat on a stone bench by the city library, in front of the grotto that had been built as a shrine to the mother of Jesus. The wind was blowing through the bamboo and the oak trees and the Spanish moss, and rose petals from a nearby flower bed were scattered across the St. Augustine grass. Clete sat down beside me and lit a cigarette, not speaking, the cigarette tiny inside his hand. The smoke drifted in my face, but I didn’t mind.

“When are you going to stop smoking those?” I asked.

“Never. I’m tucking away a pack of Luckies in the casket. With no filters.”

“Don’t drink today.”

“Who said I am?”

“Some days aren’t any good for drinking. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I’m going to get the guys who did this, Dave. They’re going out in pieces, too.”

“You’ll get them. But not like you say.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

“You’re not like them. Neither am I. And neither is Helen. You’re not capable of being like them.”

We sat there for a long time, neither of us saying anything, Clete puffing on his Lucky Strike, flicking his ashes so they didn’t hit my clothes, the mother of Jesus looking silently at the bayou.

Computers work wonders. By late that afternoon we got a hit on a home invasion in which silverware, the entire contents of a liquor cabinet, a flat-screen television, a frozen ham, a case of beer, an Armani suit, and a DVD player had been reported stolen. The home invasion had taken place in an upscale subdivision on the bayou, just outside the New Iberia city limits. The owner of the house was a local black attorney. His name was Monroe Stanga, the cousin of Herman Stanga.

We found him in his office, a two-story white stucco building down by the courthouse square, a building with faux balconies that had Spanish grillework overlooking the Southern Pacific railway tracks.

“Y’all found the stuff somebody stole from my house? That’s what y’all saying?” Monroe asked, his eyes going from me to Helen. It was obvious he did not comprehend why the sheriff was personally involving herself in the investigation of a comparatively minor crime.

“You listed a DVD player as one of the items stolen from your house, correct?” I said.

“Yeah, right, plus all my silverware and my flat-screen and my Armani—”

“We think somebody might have sold your DVD player at a pawnshop in New Orleans,” I said. “What was the brand?”

He told me, then waited.

“I think we’ve found your property,” I said.

Monroe was in his thirties but had his head shaved at a barbershop every two days, as an older man might. He had gotten his law degree from Southern University and specialized in liability suits that involved chemical spills along railroad tracks, pipeline ruptures, oil-well blowouts, or any kind of industrial accident that could provide large numbers of claimants. He wore a pleated white shirt with a rolled collar and a lavender tie and a gray vest. His coat hung on the back of his chair, and when he hunched forward on his elbows, his eyes darting back and forth, his arms and shoulders poking like sticks against his shirt, he made me think of a ferret being worked into a corner with a broom.

“So how about my silverware and the other stuff that was stole?” he asked.

“Do you have a receipt for the DVD player, something that would have a serial number on it or help identify it?”

“No, I don’t have anything like that.”

“That’s too bad. Did you file an insurance claim?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“You didn’t have to provide a bill of sale or an item number of some kind?”

“They stole my Armani suit and all my silverware and my flat-screen. Stealing a DVD player isn’t like hauling off Fort Knox. I’m starting to get a li’l lost here.”

“Where’d you buy the player?” Helen asked.

“I didn’t exactly buy it.”

“Then how did you acquire it, Mr. Stanga?” she asked.

“My cousin Herman told me he wanted me to have it. And his flat-screen. So after he died, see, I brought them over to my house. ’Cause of what Herman told me.”

“You ever use the player?” I said.

He seemed to search his memory. “I don’t think I plugged it in. But I’m not sure. What’s on y’all’s mind? I want to he’p, but I don’t know what we’re ruminating about here.”

“I want you to come down to the department and watch about forty seconds of video, Mr. Stanga,” Helen said. “Then we’ll have a chat.”

Outside, the Sunset Limited clattered down the railway tracks, the pictures and framed degrees rattling on the office walls.

“Herman have some porn on there or something?” Monroe said.

Helen exhaled, then looked at me. Monroe may have been a venal man, but he could not be called an evil one. Our knowledge about his cousin’s activities was probably greater than his own. After he watched the video, he was visibly shocked and frightened and sat with his arms folded tightly across his chest, his round mahogany-colored waxed head bright with pinpoints of perspiration. He wiped his forehead with a folded handkerchief, then rubbed at his nose with the back of his wrist.

“How come there’s no sound?” he asked.

“We don’t know,” I said.

He huffed air out of his nostrils, blinking like a man who couldn’t deal with the brightness of the day. “Think y’all gonna find Herman’s flat-screen?”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“If you do, give it to the Goodwill. I don’t want to ever see it again,” he said.

That evening I asked Molly to take a walk with me. The sky was piled with clouds that looked like golden and purple fruit turning red around the edges. From the bridge at Burke Street, we could see the flooded bamboo behind The Shadows and the flowers growing along the bayou and the deep shade on the water under the overhang of the trees.

“I’d like for you and Alafair to leave town for a week or so. Maybe go to Key West,” I said.

“When did we start running away from things?” she replied.

“This one is different. I’m not even sure who the players are.”

“What others do or don’t do isn’t a factor. We don’t stop being who we are,” she said.

The air was cool puffing up from under the bridge, the surface of the water crinkling in the sunset with the incoming tide. “We’re dealing with people who have no lines,” I said. “Their motivations are only partially known to us. Part of their agenda is financial. The other part of it is fiendish. It’s the last part I’m worried about.”

Then I told her about the video we had watched in Helen’s office. While I spoke, Molly continued to lean on the bridge rail, staring at the sunlight’s reflection on the bayou’s surface, like hundreds of glinting razors, her face never changing expression.

“Who would do this?” she said.

“That’s it. We don’t know. Monsters like Gacy and Bundy and Gary Ridgway and this guy Rader in Kansas torture and murder people for years and live undetected in our midst while they do it.”

“We’re not going anywhere, Dave.”

I watched a garfish roll among the water hyacinths along the bank, its dark green armored back sliding as supplely as a snake’s beneath the flowers, down into the depths, while tiny bream skittered out of its way.

I ate lunch the next day at Victor’s cafeteria on Main. It was hot and bright when I came back out on the street, the air dense, a smell like salt and warm seaweed on the wind, more like hurricane season than the end of spring.

A Lexus pulled to the curb. The driver rolled down the charcoal-tinted window on the passenger side. Carolyn Blanchet leaned forward so I could see her face. “How about a ride?” she said.

“Thanks. I don’t have far to go,” I said.

“Stop acting like an asshole, Dave.”

I stepped off the curb and leaned down on the window jamb. “What do you want, Carolyn?”

“To apologize for the way I acted when you and Helen Soileau came out to the house. I had just gotten finished with those federal auditors and wanted to take it out on somebody.”

I nodded and stepped back on the curb.

“Dave,” she said, turning my name into two syllables.

“Have a great life,” I said.

“You’d better listen to me. Helen Soileau is carrying out a vendetta. Give me two minutes. That’s all I’m asking. Then you can do whatever you please.”

Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it, a voice said.

But there was no question about Helen’s lack of objectivity toward Carolyn Blanchet. Worse, I wasn’t entirely sure that Helen hadn’t been involved in the same circle of female friends in New Orleans as Carolyn. Carolyn pulled around the corner, into the shade of a two-story building, and waited. I followed and got into the car. “Go ahead,” I said.

“I misled you about Emma Poche,” she said. “We had a brief relationship. I didn’t tell you the truth because I didn’t want Emma hurt. Men gave her a bad time at the New Orleans Police Department. She doesn’t need the same kind of trouble in St. Martinville.”

The Lexus’s engine was running, the air-conditioning vents gushing. Carolyn wore sandals and white shorts and a yellow blouse and blue contacts. She sat with her back against the door, her knees slightly spread, a gold cross and thin gold chain lying askew on her chest. Her eyes roamed over my face, her mouth parting, exposing the whiteness of her teeth. “You just going to sit there?” she said.

“Ever read Mein Kampf? Hitler explains how you tell an effective lie. You wrap it in a little bit of truth.”

“Let me tell you this. A friend of mine felt bad about something she had done and called me up and made a confession. My friend had taken pictures of me at a girls-only Mardi Gras celebration. Helen Soileau wanted the pictures. When Helen Soileau wants something, she gets it. I have a feeling you’ve seen those pictures.”

I tried to keep my face neutral, my eyes empty. I looked down the street at a black kid doing wheelies on a bicycle under the colonnade.

“That’s what I thought,” Carolyn said. “Think what you want about those pictures — they’re innocent. Now let me ask you this. What kind of person would use them to blacken another person’s reputation? Also, if these pictures are immoral, how is it that Helen Soileau is friends with the woman who took them?”

“None of this changes the fact that you lied about your relationship with Emma Poche.”

“Have you told Molly everything about your various affairs over the years? Let’s face it, Dave, from what I heard, you were never very big on keeping it in your pants.”

“It’s really been good talking with you, Carolyn. I’ll keep in mind that you were protecting a working-class girl like Emma from public scandal. Tell me, how does that compute with your and Layton’s record of stealing the life savings of thousands of working-class people who trusted y’all?”

“God, you’re a sweetheart to the bitter end.” She paused. “Remember the New Year’s party at the Blue Room in New Orleans about twenty years back?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“I guess you don’t. You’d soaked your head in alcohol for two days.” She was smiling. “Who took you home that night?”

I held my eyes on hers, trying to show no expression.

“You were quite a guy back then,” she said. “Enough to make a girl straighten up and fly right and give up her eccentric ways. Remember that line from Hemingway about feeling the earth move? Wow, you did it, babe.”

I got out of the Lexus. She rolled down the window and looked up at me, laughing openly. “Had you going, didn’t I?” she said.

That night black storm clouds swollen with electricity had sealed the sky from the Gulf to central Louisiana. Waves crashed across the two-lane road at the bottom of St. Mary Parish, and a tornado made a brief touchdown and knocked out a power line. During the night, several emergency vehicles passed the Abelard house and noticed nothing unusual about it other than a few broken tree limbs that had blown into the yard. At around four-fifteen A.M., a deputy sheriff thought he saw flashes of light inside the windows, both upstairs and downstairs. He slowed his cruiser by the wood bridge that gave onto the compound, but the house had returned to complete darkness. He concluded that he had seen reflections of lightning on the window glass or that someone had been carrying a candelabrum between the rooms.

At 8:43 A.M. Friday, the phone on my desk rang. The caller was someone I had not expected to hear from again. “Mr. Dave?” she said.

“Jewel?”

“I need he’p.”

“What is it?”

“I was late getting to work ’cause trees limbs were down on the road. When I got to the house, my key wouldn’t go in the front lock.”

“Which house?”

“The big house, Mr. Timothy’s. The key wouldn’t work. The lock looked like somebody drove a screwdriver in it. I went around back, but the door was bolted from inside. I banged on all the doors, but nobody answered.”

“Who’s supposed to be there besides Mr. Timothy?”

“The maid and the gardener, but they probably couldn’t get t’rew on the road.”

“What about Kermit and Weingart?”

“They went off to the casino in New Orleans for a couple of days. I put a ladder up to the window. I could see a shape inside one of the doors, just standing there, not moving.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m telling you what I saw. There’s a shape in the doorway. It’s not moving. I’m scared, Mr. Dave.”

“Where are you now?”

“Right outside the house.”

“I’m heading over there. Call the sheriff’s office in Franklin.”

“No, suh.”

“Why won’t you call the sheriff?”

“This is still St. Mary Parish. It doesn’t change. Y’all want to believe it has, but you’re just fooling yourself.”

“Look, Mr. Timothy doesn’t stay at night by himself. Who else was there?”

“Mr. Emiliano, the Spanish man from Nicaragua.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. But you have to call the St. Mary sheriff. I don’t have authority outside Iberia Parish.”

“Yes, suh. I’m putting the ladder up by the sunporch now. I can see to the hallway,” she said. “Oh, Lord, that t’ing is still standing there.”

“What thing?”

“Hurry up, Mr. Dave,” she said. Then I heard her crying just before she dropped the cell phone.