The Glass Rainbow

CHAPTER 23

Fifteen minutes later, my flasher rippling, I came up behind a utility truck and an ambulance and a St. Mary Parish sheriff’s cruiser on the two-lane that led to the Abelard house. Men in hard hats and overalls were chainsawing a fallen tree and hauling it in segments off the asphalt. The sheriff, Tony Judice, shook hands with me. “Jewel Laveau said she called me after you told her to,” he said.

“It was something like that, I guess,” I replied, not meeting his eyes.

He caught my embarrassment. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We didn’t treat people of color around here very well. I don’t know why we’re surprised when they act the way they do.”

“I couldn’t understand everything she was saying,” I said, changing the subject. “Did you get anything out of her?”

“She was yelling about her father. I thought her father died years ago,” he replied.

When the utility workers had cleared the road, I followed the sheriff’s cruiser to the Abelard home. The sun was white on the bay, the wind blowing stiffly out of the south. There was a bright smell in the air, as though the land had been swept clean by the storm. But Jewel Laveau was a quick reminder that there was no joy or sense of renewal to be found at the home of the Abelards. She sat on a folding chair in her white uniform in the shade of the boathouse, her shoulders rounded, her large hands spread like baseball gloves on her knees. Her eyes were rheumy, her nose wet, when she looked up at us. “What took y’all?”

“The road was blocked,” the sheriff said. “What’s inside the house?”

“Go see for yourself,” she replied.

“That’s not helping us a lot,” he said.

“That’s your problem. I won’t talk about it. If you talk about evil, it just makes it grow. Maybe I didn’t see what I t’ought. Maybe it was just the shadows. I tried to call Mr. Kermit in New Orleans. But he wasn’t at the hotel. Neither was Mr. Robert.” Then her gaze shifted on me and stayed there, as though the sheriff were no longer present. “You’re disappearing.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“It’s like you’re being erased — your arms, your legs. They’re thinning away, turning into air.”

“You stay here,” the sheriff said to her. “I’ll talk to you again before we leave.”

“You cain’t tell me what to do. I’m not listening to y’all anymore. I spent my life listening to you. There was evil all around us. But where were you? You were hiding in your offices, doing what you were tole, letting the people in the quarters suffer and work for nothing. Now you’re out here to clean up. ’Cause that’s what y’all been doing all your lives. Cleaning up after the people that kept you scared just like the rest of us.”

“You need to keep a civil tongue, Miss Jewel,” the sheriff said. There was no mistaking the racial resentment that even among the best of us sometimes oozed its way through the mix in our struggle with ourselves.

I walked with the sheriff back up the driveway. Two deputies had already tried the doors and windows and had found all of them locked. The sheriff examined the key slot in the front doorknob without touching it. The slot looked like someone had wedged a blade screwdriver into it. There were also two deep prize marks between the edge of the door and the jamb, as though someone had tried to force back the tongue on the lock. “Get us in,” the sheriff said to his deputy.

We had all put on polyethylene gloves. The deputy used his baton to break a glass pane out of a side panel, then he reached inside and unlocked the door. The power was still off in the house, the windows tightly sealed, the air dense and warm and smelling of moldy wallpaper and curtains and slipcovers that were never free of dust and carpet stretched over dry rot. The light that filtered through the stained glass on the sunporch seemed to burnish the woodwork and antique furniture with a red flush that was garish and unnatural.

“Smell it?” the deputy with the baton said.

“Open some windows,” the sheriff replied. He flicked a wall switch on and off, apparently forgetting that the power grid was down. His eyes traveled up the stairs and along the banister and up the wall to the landing on the second story. “I was really hoping we wouldn’t be doing this,” he said.

The blood evidence told its own story. The smears along the wall were those of a person who was wounded and had probably fallen and struggled to his feet. The linear and horsetail patterns, stippled and attenuated on the edges, as though they had been flung from a brush, were of the kind you associate with the splatter from an exit wound. The sheriff and I started up the stairs, not touching the mahogany banister that was stained in three places by the grip of a bloodied hand.

Down below, one of the deputies said, “Oh, shit.”

“How about it on the language?” the sheriff said.

“Better come look at this, sir. Watch where you step,” the deputy said.

We went back down the stairs and walked past the entrance to the sunporch and entered a dark hallway that led to the kitchen. A man hung from the doorframe, his slippered feet barely touching the floor, a clothesline wrapped around his throat and threaded through a metal eyelet screwed into the top of the jamb. His eyes were open, his tongue sticking out of his mouth like a small, twisted green banana.

But Timothy Abelard’s ordeal had not consisted simply of being hanged like a criminal; he had also been shot, at least twice.

“Who the hell would do this?” the sheriff said.

“About half the parish, if they were honest about it,” the deputy said. The sheriff gave him a look. “Sorry,” the deputy said.

The sheriff looked up the staircase. “I hate to think what’s up there. You ready?” he said to me.

“If it will make this easier for you, I’ll show you the photos of the dead girls who I think suffered much worse than Mr. Abelard did.”

“I’m not making the connection,” the sheriff said, his expression suddenly irritable if not disdainful.

At that moment I didn’t care about the sheriff’s feelings or the conflicts he had probably never resolved regarding his role as a public servant in a fiefdom. I hadn’t liked Timothy Abelard, nor did I like the dictatorial arrogance that I associated with his class. But that did not mean I believed that an elderly, infirm man deserved to die the way he had.

I glanced at the glass case that held the photos of Abelard standing among friends of Batista and members of the Somoza family, people for whom cruelty toward others was as natural as waking in the morning. Was Abelard a monster? Or was he just an extension of the value system that produced him, a blithe spirit who turned a blind eye to the excesses of the third-world dictators we did business with? I started to share my thoughts with the sheriff. But what was the point? He didn’t create the world in which he’d grown up and wasn’t responsible for the sins of others.

Upstairs we began to see the rest of the intruder’s handiwork. An office that I suspected was Kermit’s was torn apart. Books were raked off the shelves, a computer pushed off a desk, drawers pulled out, a gun case shoved facedown on the floor and, behind where the case had stood, a wall safe with its door hanging open, the contents gone.

A trail of blood led from the doorway of the office into a small bathroom. Emiliano lay fully clothed in the bathtub on his back, one leg hooked over the tub’s edge, the shower curtain tangled in his right hand. His face and chest were peppered with bullet wounds that probably had been inflicted by a low-caliber weapon.

It wasn’t hard to find the weapon. It was by the desk, a six-shot .22 piece of junk, the serial number acid-burned, the front sight filed off, the broken grips wrapped with electrician’s tape. The sheriff picked it up and flipped out the cylinder. “The shooter took his brass with him,” he said.

I looked at the wall safe and at the dead man in the bathtub.

“What are you thinking?” the sheriff said behind me.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“You don’t think it’s a home invasion gone bad?”

I scratched the back of my neck, not looking at him. “It’s hard to read, Sheriff.”

“Maybe somebody sweated the safe combination out of them and then decided to finish the job.”

“Could be,” I said.

“But that’s not what you’re thinking.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“You’re thinking that whoever did this knew the old man and hated his guts and decided to give him a preview of hell before he saw the real thing.”

“That’s a possibility.”

The sheriff dropped the .22 into a Ziploc bag. “Does a gun like this remind you of anything?” he asked.

“You can buy one like it in any slum in America.”

“It looks like a throwdown to me. If we start counting up rounds fired, it’s more than six. So our shooter reloaded at least once, but he left no brass behind. Who always picks up his brass, Dave?”

“If a cop did this, why would he recover his brass and leave his piece?”

“Maybe he didn’t want to have it on his person if he got stopped somewhere. During the storm, emergency vehicles were all over the highways. I’ve heard that you and Clete Purcel have had a couple of confrontations with the Abelards and their associates.”

“You could call it that.”

“Is it true Purcel killed a federal informant years ago?”

“Don’t take the bait.”

“Would you repeat that?”

“Look back at everything we’ve seen. Start with the front door. Who tries to bust a lock by using a screwdriver on the keyhole? If the door was pried, the jamb would be torn up, not just dented. Why would the intruder pull open the drawers in a writer’s desk and knock the computer on the floor and rake books off the shelves? If he knew the combination on the safe, he wouldn’t have to look for it. This place is a stage set.”

“So if a burglar didn’t do this, who did?”

“Somebody who got his education on the yard. Somebody who wanted to shut some people up and make a big score while he was at it. Somebody who’d like to give Clete Purcel as much grief as he can.”

“I’ll bite,” the sheriff said.

Not on my meter, you won’t, I thought.

I walked downstairs and out into the sunlight, my ears ringing. He followed me into the yard. “Where you going?” he said.

“To give Miss Jewel a ride home. If I were you, I’d have a talk with Robert Weingart.”

“Who?”

Hopeless, I thought.

But that’s the way you think when you realize for certain you’re an old man and, as such, like Cassandra, destined to be disbelieved.

Clete’s secretary told me he had gone home for lunch. I found him by his cottage at the motor court on East Main, reading a book in a lawn chair under the oaks, his wire-frame glasses down low on his nose. Next to him was a card table set with a tray of sandwiches and a sweating pitcher of sangria and cracked ice. The sandwiches were cut in triangles and filled with cream cheese and chives. He lowered his book and smiled.

“Plutarch’s Lives?” I said.

“Yeah, this is great stuff. Did you know Alexander the Great was AC/DC and his sweat smelled like flowers? He also got plastered every night.” Clete picked up a glass of sangria and drank from it, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

“Where’d you get the sandwiches?”

“Somebody dropped them off.”

“Would you answer the question?”

“Emma Poche was in the neighborhood.”

“I think you have brain damage. There’s some kind of tumor loose in your head.”

“Look, she feels bad. She apologized.”

“For what? Killing Herman Stanga?”

“We don’t know she did that. This is what she told me: ‘I’ve done some hateful and bad stuff. I did it because some of the good people took a lick off me. It’s my fault, but they got their lick, and I figured I should get something for it.’”

“That’s the rhetoric of a female recidivist. What’s the matter with you?”

“Want a sandwich?”

“Where’s your throwdown?”

“In the glove compartment.”

“Check.”

“I don’t have to. I just saw it. Why are you worried about my throwdown?” He lifted his glass of sangria to his mouth.

“I came from the Abelard house. Somebody killed the old man and the guy you called a greaseball. The old man was strung up with his feet barely touching the floor. Whoever did it to him wanted him to go out slow and hard.”

Clete lowered his glass without drinking from it. “Somebody left a throwdown?”

“Yeah, they did.”

“Well, it’s not mine. Who do you make for it?”

“Weingart,” I said.

“My vote would be for the Bobster, too. I never met a cell-house bitch yet who wasn’t mean to the core. Where is he now?”

“Supposedly New Orleans.”

“What about the grandson? Kermit Dick Brain or whatever?”

“In New Orleans, too.”

Clete seemed to study my face without seeing me.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“We’re the target, not the old man and the greaseball.” His eyes came back into focus. He continued to stare at me. “Something else happened over there, didn’t it?”

“The black woman, Jewel Laveau, told me I was disappearing.”

“You’re going to be kidnapped?”

“She said I was evaporating.”

I heard his breathing quicken, saw a vein swell in his neck. “You stop listening to superstitious people. You stop believing in stuff like that.”

“I didn’t say I believed her.”

“You’ve got it painted all over you, Dave. It’s a death wish.”

He put his glass of sangria on the table and pinched his thumb and index finger on his temples as though the sun were burning down through the tree overhead, eating into his skull.

“What is it?” I said.

“If you die on me, I’m going to get really mad,” he replied. “You’re not going to do that to me. I’m not going to allow it. You understand me? I’ll beat the shit out of you.”

The murder of Timothy Abelard and his friend and the heinous nature of the slayings were all over the front pages of state newspapers and provided the lead in every local television broadcast. Because the story had Gothic overtones and involved a wealthy recluse, it was immediately picked up by the national news services. Each account emphasized Abelard’s stature in the community, his contribution as a defense industrialist, the loss of his son and daughter-in-law somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, his convivial personality, and his iconic role as a plantation patriarch who represented a bygone era.

No mention was made of his ties to the Giacano crime family in New Orleans or the Batista regime in Cuba or the Somozas in Nicaragua. The man who died with him, Emiliano Jimenez, was referred to as a “visitor” and “longtime friend” who had been “interested in developing new markets for Louisiana sugar farmers.”

Any serious student of popular media will tell you that the real story lies not in what is written but in what is left out. In this instance the omission was not simply one of airbrushing out the details of Abelard’s dealings with New Orleans gangsters and third-world despots. The bigger omission was ongoing and systemic: Timothy Abelard’s death was the stuff of Elizabethan drama; the murder of the girls in Jefferson Davis Parish didn’t merit the ink it would take to fill a ballpoint pen.

Abelard’s funeral was held on a Tuesday at a mortuary home, not a church. The lawn was green from the spring rains, the flowers in bloom. Most of the mourners were elderly and dressed in clothes that they probably seldom had occasion to wear except at religious services. Their accents and frame of reference were of an earlier generation, one that believed there was virtue in allowing memory to soften and revise the image of the deceased, that appearance was more important than substance, because ultimately appearance was, in its way, a fulfillment of aspiration.

They remembered Timothy Abelard for his acts of charity, his intercession on behalf of a Negro servant locked in jail, his kindness to a deranged woman who begged food at people’s doors, his rehabilitation of a drunkard driven from his ministry by his own congregation. Abelard’s eviction of his tenants from their homes when they tried to join a farmworkers’ union was forgotten.

From across the street, I watched Robert Weingart and Kermit Abelard and four other pallbearers carry the casket down the steps to a hearse. Kermit’s face seemed to glow with the self-induced resilience of a person who is either heavily medicated or teetering on the edge of nervous collapse. In spite of the heat, he wore a heavy navy blue suit and white dress shirt and dark tie with a white boutonniere. After the casket was rolled into the back of the hearse, he seemed at a loss as to what he should do next. His truncated workingman’s physique seemed wrapped too tight, the heat in his suit visibly climbing up his neck.

Almost as though he had heard my thoughts, his gaze traveled across the street and met mine. He disengaged from the mourners and walked through the traffic to my truck, barely acknowledging the two vehicles forced to stop in order to let him pass. “I didn’t recognize your pickup,” he said.

“State Farm bought me a new one. After my old one got shot up and hauled off by some guys I’d like to have a talk with,” I said.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Please accept my sympathies,” I said.

“Do I have to restate the question?”

“Sometimes a killer shows up at the funeral service of his victim.”

“I don’t see your friend Mr. Purcel here.”

I let my eyes drift off his face, then return again. “I’m not sure how I should take that.”

“Take it any way you wish. I resent your presence.”

“Sorry to hear you say that.”

He placed his hand on the window jamb. “I cared for your daughter. You treated me with repugnance and disrespect every time we met.”

“You ‘cared’ for her?”

“I’m going to the cemetery now. I’m going to ask that you not follow us.”

“Maybe you should do a reality check, Kermit. Your father and mother may have been killed because of your grandfather’s iniquitous deeds. Number two, you’re not going to tell a police officer what he’s going and not going to do in a homicide investigation. Do you understand that?”

“You may have gone to college, Mr. Robicheaux, but you wear your lack of breeding like a rented suit,” he said.

He walked back onto the lawn of the mortuary home. Robert Weingart cupped his hand on Kermit’s shoulder and looked across the street at me, his eyes laughing.

I talked again to the sheriff of St. Mary Parish and told him of my suspicions about Robert Weingart.

“He’s got an alibi, Dave. He was at Harrah’s hotel in New Orleans or in the casino all night,” the sheriff said.

“Say that last part again?”

“He’s a gambler. He was either at the tables or in his room. We checked the time-in and time-out at the parking garage. His car never left the premises.”

“Who told you he was at the tables?”

“Kermit.”

“Kermit was in the casino with him? All night?”

“No, Kermit says he went to bed and Weingart went to the casino. But a blackjack dealer remembers him.”

“Weingart could have been at the Abelard house in an hour and a half.”

“I don’t think he’s a likely candidate. I think you’re too personally involved in this. Maybe it’s time to butt out.”

“Drop by the office, and I’ll show you a video that will stay with you awhile.”

“Video of what?” he said.

I eased the receiver back down in the cradle. I was at a dead end again. The deaths of Timothy Abelard and Emiliano Jimenez had changed nothing. But one pattern of behavior in the players had changed. Emma Poche, while drunk, had warned me over the telephone that I and anyone with me was in danger. She had also put Robert Weingart to his knees with a baton when he tried to work his seductive routine on Tee Jolie Melton. And only a few days ago, Emma had brought Clete a tray of sandwiches and attempted to apologize to him, although her confession avoided the admission that not only had she participated in the murder of Herman Stanga, but she had planted Clete’s pen at the crime scene.

I looked at my watch. It was 4:56 P.M. When I was on the dirty boogie, what was I always thinking about when the clock inched toward five? It came in frosted mugs and tumblers of ice and bottles that were smoke-colored or dark green or reddish-black or glowing with an amber warmth. A softly lit, air-conditioned bar with tropical sunsets painted on the walls was not an oasis in the desert. It was a Renaissance cathedral, a retreat for wayward souls whose secular communion waited for them in the first glass they could raise to their lips.

It wasn’t hard to find Emma. She had changed into street clothes and was drinking in the same lounge where Clete had met her during his surveillance of Carolyn Blanchet, outside St. Martinville. I sat down next to her at the bar and ordered a Dr Pepper in a glass of ice with a lime slice.

“I always thought that stuff tasted like iodine,” she said.

“It does,” I said. “You give up on meetings altogether?”

“Stop drinking today, gone tomorrow.”

“You know why drunks go to meetings?” I asked.

“Let me guess. Because they drink?”

“Because they feel guilty.”

“What a breakthrough, Dave.” She was drinking Wild Turkey on the rocks, cupping her hand all the way around the tumbler when she drank from it. Her cheeks looked filled with blood, the fuzz on them glowing against the light.

“Do you know why they feel guilty?”

“I’ll take another big leap here. Because they went through severe toilet training?”

“No, because they still have their humanity. The greater the pain, the greater the indication that they’re basically decent people.”

“Put it on a postcard and send it to the penguins, will you? I mean it, Streak. Let a girl come up for oxygen.”

“I have three still photos here. A guy in the department made them from a video that belonged to Herman Stanga. Take a look.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I think you should.”

“You don’t have to tell me about Herman Stanga.”

“This isn’t about Herman Stanga. It’s about the two girls in the video.”

“I’m off the clock. Bring them by the department.”

“No, this is between you and me. No histrionics. No throwing coffee in my face. Look at the pictures, Emma.”

“No.”

I spread the printouts on the bar right by her glass. “I need to know where that place is. Look at it.”

“No.”

“You stopped Robert Weingart from harming the girl named Tee Jolie. Your conscience is eating your lunch, Emma. You have to help me on this. It’s not up for discussion.”

Her eyes dropped to the first photo. She drank from her tumbler, the ice rattling against the glass, the whiskey clotting in her throat. “I don’t know what that is. I’ve never seen that before.”

“What do you mean by that? What is that? The terror in their faces? The collars on their throats? The ooze coming out of the wall?”

“Whatever that place is. Whatever is going on there. I don’t know what any of that is.”

“Yes, you do. You warned me that I was in danger. You were right. A Mississippi gunbull by the name of Jimmy Darl Thigpin tried to clip me. He was hired by somebody you know. The same person or persons who murdered these girls.”

She was shaking her head. “You’re all wrong. I didn’t have anything to do with this.”

“Tell me where the girls were held.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why you’re showing me this. I don’t know that place. The rocks in the walls look like pineapples. I think that photo is a fake. Why are you doing this to me?”

“Is everything all right here?” the bartender asked.

“Sheriff’s detective,” I said, reaching for my badge holder.

“What?” he said.

“Get out of here,” I said.

Emma was holding her tumbler in both hands now, staring down into the whiskey as though reading words in the ice melt. “You said this gunbull tried to clip you. If that’s true, where is he?”

“Put it this way: A guy who’s been abusing convicts for forty years doesn’t want to go inside. A guy like that cuts any deal he can. At anybody’s expense.”

“You’ve got a cooperative witness?”

“What do you think I’m saying to you, Emma? Wake up. You want to do these people’s time? Haven’t you been hurt enough? They made their money off the backs of the blacks and poor whites. They repair their own lives by destroying the lives of others. How bad do you have to get hurt before you get the message?”

She stared down at the photos. Then she covered them with her forearm, staring rigidly in the mirror. “I did what I was told. I didn’t know anything about this. But no matter how it plays out, I’m the one who loses.”

“No, these girls lost. You still have your life. You still have choices. These girls didn’t have any.”

Her eyes looked feverish, her lower lip sagging. “Fuck you, Dave.” She finished her drink and raised her glass toward the bartender. “Hit me again. And a beer back.”