The Glass Rainbow

CHAPTER 24

Death comes in many forms. But it always comes. And for that reason, “inevitability” may be the worst word in the English language.

These were not thoughts I wanted to brood upon as I sat beside the bayou that evening, the water swollen above the roots of the cypress trees, the sun little more than a cinder among the rain clouds in the west. Spring had come and gone and been replaced by the heavy and languid ennui of the Louisiana summer, a season that, at the end of day, clings to your skin like a sour vapor.

I heard Molly unfold a wood chair and sit beside me. “I fixed some ice cream and pecan pie,” she said.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” I said.

“Don’t let this case pull you down, Dave.”

“It’s not. I don’t think it will be solved. I think that’s just the way it is.”

She didn’t argue. Like me, Molly had ceased to contend with the world. It wasn’t a matter of acceptance. It was a matter of disengagement. The two were quite different. “Where’s Alf?” I said.

“Why do you still call her that?”

“Because that’s the way I’ll always see her. A father never sees the woman. He always sees the little girl.”

Molly looked at her watch. “She left a message on the machine. She got stuck in the traffic coming back from Lafayette.”

“How long ago did she leave the message?”

“About twenty minutes.”

I folded up our two chairs and walked with Molly up the slope to the back porch. The ground under the trees had fallen into deep shade, the sun golden on the canopy. Tripod and Snuggs were sitting on top of Tripod’s hutch, watching us. “Can you guys handle some ice cream?” I asked.

They both seemed to think that was a good idea. I got the ice cream out of the freezer and put a scoop in each of their bowls and placed their bowls on top of the hutch and went inside the kitchen again. I noticed the red light on the message machine was still flashing. I pushed the play button.

“It’s me again,” Alafair’s voice said. “I’m in Broussard. I ran into somebody I need to talk with. I’ll be along in a little bit. Just put my dinner in the refrigerator. I’m sorry.”

I looked at Molly. “Ran into who?” I said.

She shrugged.

I dialed Alafair’s cell phone, but it went instantly to voice mail.

“It could be anyone. Don’t jump to conclusions,” Molly said.

“When Alf avoids mentioning the name of a person to me, it’s because she knows I think that person is toxic.”

Molly started to speak but instead drew in her breath and held it and looked at my face, trying to hide the conclusions she herself was already coming to.

Alafair had seen the black Saab in front of her on the two-lane highway that wound through mossy oaks in the little sugarcane town of Broussard. The highway was called Old Spanish Trail and was usually empty, and for that reason she had swung off the four-lane and driven through Broussard in hopes of avoiding the rush-hour traffic. Up ahead, by the four corners, the Saab had pulled in to a filling station, and the driver had gotten out and was filling his tank. He seemed to be gazing idly back down the road, his face clean-shaven, his jeans and sport shirt freshly pressed, the tragedy that had befallen his grandfather somehow locked temporarily in a box. Then he saw her and smiled in the boyish way she had always associated with him until he had brought Robert Weingart into their lives.

He stuck the nozzle of the gas hose back in the pump and waved her down. She looked at her watch. She could be home in under twenty minutes. Should she pass him by and pretend she had not seen him on the same day he had buried his grandfather? She had not attended the funeral service. Actually, she had hoped she would never see Kermit again. But how do you ignore someone who was once the center of your life, someone who encouraged your art and read your prose line by line and took as much pleasure in its creation and success as you did?

Without making a deliberate choice, she felt her foot come off the accelerator and step on the brake pedal, felt her hands turn the car in to the station, saw Kermit’s face looming larger and larger through the windshield. He walked to her window, the summer light trapped in the sky above his head, his dockworker’s physique backdropped by blooming myrtle bushes and oaks hung with Spanish moss. She started to speak, but he raised his hand. “You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “I know you liked and respected my grandfather. He always held you in the same regard.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t attend the funeral,” she replied.

“He’d understand. So do I.”

“Are you doing all right?” she said.

“I’m not staying in the house right now. It’s still a crime scene. I want to have it cleaned and painted. I want to start things all over. Not just at the house but in my life.”

The gas pump behind him was a dull red, solid-looking, part of the evening, part of Americana in some way. But something about it bothered her.

“Can you have a drink with me?” he said.

“I’m late for supper. I was shopping in Lafayette and got caught in the afternoon rush.”

“I really need to explain some things,” he said.

“Where’s—” she began.

“Robert is not here. That’s what I need to talk to you about. I need to clear my conscience, Alafair.”

There was a bar across the street, one with neon beer signs in the windows and a termite-eaten colonnade and a squat roof that looked like a frowning man. Her gaze returned to the gas pump and the digital indicators that showed the number of gallons. “If I drink anything, I won’t eat supper.”

“There’s a sno’ball stand on the next block. Pull in to the lot. It’ll only take five minutes.”

“Let me call home,” she said.

“Sure,” he said. He walked out of earshot, showing deference for her privacy, showing her once again the gentleman he’d been raised to be.

After she had called and left the second message of the afternoon on the machine, she restarted her engine and drove down the block to the corner, where she turned in to a gravel lot behind the sno’ball stand. The board flap on the serving window had been lowered and latched; the stand was closed. Kermit pulled his Saab up next to her car. But something was bothering her, a detail that caught in the eye the way a lash catches under the eyelid. Back at the filling station, she had been talking, or Kermit had, and she hadn’t been able to concentrate. What was the detail that didn’t fit inside the summer evening, the gold light high in the sky, the dull red solidity of the gas pump, the smell of dust and distant rain?

Kermit got out of the Saab and walked to her window. He carried a brown paper bag in his hand. It was folded neatly across the top, in the way a workingman might fold down the top of his lunch sack before heading out for his job.

“You bought less than two gallons of gas,” she said.

“Right,” he said.

“Why would you stop just to buy two gallons of gas?”

“I needed to use the restroom, so I thought I should buy something,” he replied, his expression bemused.

“Why not just buy some mints? That’s what most people would do.”

“Actually, that’s what I did.” His eyes seemed to flatten, as though he were reviewing what he had just said. “When I was inside. I bought some mints.”

“Could I have one?” she asked.

“A mint?” He touched his shirt pocket. “They must be on the seat. We need to talk. Slide over.”

He opened the driver’s door and turned off the engine and pulled the keys from the ignition. In the rearview mirror, she saw a white Mustang come from the side street and angle across the lot and jar to a stop on the opposite side of her vehicle, dust rising off the wheels, drifting in an acrid cloud through her windows. There was no one else on the street. The wind had dropped, and the leaves on the oak trees looked like the brushstrokes in an expressionist painting — glowing unnaturally, smudged, unreal, trying to disguise in the cheapest fashion the painful realities of death.

The driver of the white Mustang wore shades and a yellow felt hat, the kind a hiker might wear on the banks of Lake Louise. He was eating a hamburger with one hand. A second man, someone she didn’t recognize, sat in the passenger seat. There were three deep lines in the man’s forehead that reminded her of knotted string. The driver got out of his vehicle, glancing over his shoulder and down the sidewalks. When he sat down heavily next to her, she thought she could see the crumpled lines around his jaw and ears where a plastic surgeon’s knife had created the mask that had become the face of Robert Weingart.

Kermit Abelard shook a pair of steel handcuffs from the paper bag he had been holding, just as Weingart thrust a hypodermic needle into her thigh. In seconds, she saw the light go out of the sky and the trees dissolve into smoke. Then she heard Weingart whisper close to her cheek, his breath heavy with mustard and onions, “Welcome to hell, Alafair.”

At sunset, from the front of his cottage at the motor court, Clete Purcel witnessed a change in the weather that was audible, a sucking of air that drew the leaves off the ground and out of the trees and sent them soaring into the sky, flickering like hundreds of yellow and green butterflies above the bayou. Then a curtain of rain marched across the wetlands, dissolving the western horizon into plumes of gray and blue smoke that resembled emissions from an ironworks.

The barometer and temperature dropped precipitously. Clete went inside the cottage and heard lightning pop on the water. A half hour later, through his front window, he saw headlights in the rain, then heard a door slam and feet running, followed by a loud banging on his door. When he opened it, Emma Poche was staring up into his face, an Australian flop hat wilted on her head, the leather cord swinging under her chin like the bail on an inverted bucket, her breath smelling of beer. Over her shoulder, he could see the backseat of her car piled to the windows with her possessions.

“Let me in,” she said.

“What for?”

“You have to ask?”

“Yeah, I don’t have a clue.”

Her eyes searched the room and came back on his. “I set you up.”

“On the Stanga deal?”

“I fucked you in your bed, then I fucked you behind your back.”

“You put my gold pen in Stanga’s pool?”

She shrugged and raised her face to his. “You got a drink?”

“No.”

She stepped around him, forcing him to either close the door behind her or push her back outside. “Can I look in your refrigerator? You must have a beer.”

“You clipped Stanga?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you did?”

“Is the world the less for it?”

“You clipped him for Carolyn Blanchet?”

“Don’t get me started about Carolyn.”

“We’re not talking about your love affairs, Emma. The two of you capped her poor dumb bastard of a husband.”

“It didn’t have anything to do with you. That’s the only reason I’m here. I really did a number on you, Clete. It’s the worst thing I ever did in my life.”

“Now you’re blowing town? See you around Crime Stoppers and all that sort of jazz?”

“No, I’m gonna hang around so I can do Carolyn’s time in Gonzales. I always wanted to be an ex-cop in a prison population full of bull dykes. You gonna give me a beer?”

“I think there’s one behind the mayonnaise.”

She opened the icebox and removed a bottle of Bud and twisted off the cap. She put the cap on top of the breakfast table rather than in the trash basket. She lifted the bottle to her mouth and drank, her eyes on his, two curls of hair hanging down on her brow.

“Who killed the girls?” Clete said.

“I don’t know. That’s the truth. Carolyn was in business with the Abelards and looking out for her own interests. Stanga was in the way, and so was her husband. But I don’t know who killed the girls. I think they got a rotten deal.”

“A rotten deal?” he repeated.

“That’s what I said,” she replied, not comprehending his bemusement.

He looked into her face for a long time, to the point that she broke and glanced away. “Why are you staring at me like that?” she asked.

“Because I can never tell when you’re lying.”

“That’s a lousy thing to say. Dave Robicheaux said I wouldn’t ever have any peace unless I owned up to you. So I’ve done that.”

“Yeah, you have. You got anything else to say?”

“It’s kind of outrageous.”

“So tell me.”

She lowered her eyes, then looked up into his face again, her flop hat tilted on the back of her head, the leather cord swinging under her chin. “How about a mercy fuck for a girl on her way out of town?”

He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around and led her to the door. “Get some coffee down the road. Don’t tell me where you’re going. Never contact me again, not for any reason. You find my name on anything in your possession, destroy it. I hope things work out for you, but I think you did the big flush on yourself a long time ago. Adios, babe.”

Her face seemed to recede in the darkness and rain, the disbelief and injury in her expression shaping and reshaping itself in the overhead light. He closed the door and bolted it behind her.

He heard thunder in the south and through his side window saw a sheet of rain sweep across the water and slap the trees against the roof of his cottage. He watched her drive out of the motor court, her car leaking oil smoke, one taillight burned out, and he wondered if he had developed a capacity for cruelty that, in the past, he had only feigned. Then he realized the phone on his nightstand was ringing.

I looked at my watch. It was 8:10 when Clete picked up. Rain was drumming on our tin roof, so hard I almost had to yell into the telephone to be understood. “Alafair left a message at six-twenty. She said she was in Broussard and was stopping to talk with someone she met. I haven’t heard from her since.”

“She doesn’t answer her cell?” Clete asked.

“She turned it off. I talked to the cops in Broussard. They haven’t seen a car that looks like hers. I called the state police. Same thing.”

“Why would she turn off her cell?”

“She didn’t want to be bothered while she was talking to somebody I probably don’t like.”

“Not necessarily. It could be a girlfriend or somebody who needs some help. Look, right before you called, Emma Poche was here, pretty soused, wanting to own up to planting my pen in Stanga’s swimming pool.”

“How’s that relate to Alafair?”

“She said she didn’t know who killed Bernadette Latiolais and Fern Michot. I believed her. So I let her go.”

“So?”

“I thought I should tell you. Maybe I should have sweated her. I let her get her hooks into me. I don’t think I have any judgment anymore.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked.

“I just thought I should.”

“No, you think whoever killed the girls has Alafair.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth. Turn on the TV. This storm is tearing up Lafayette. Maybe she pulled off the road. Maybe she can’t get a signal.”

“I think Robert Weingart killed Timothy Abelard and the Nicaraguan. I think he tried to put it on you and, by extension, on me. I think he’s probably convinced Kermit Abelard we’re responsible for his grandfather’s death.”

“Who cares? Kermit Abelard is a fop. Stay where you are. I’m coming over.”

I couldn’t think straight. Before I could say anything else, he had broken the connection. I called the sheriff in St. Mary Parish and hit another dead end. He said he didn’t know where either Kermit Abelard or Robert Weingart was, then added, “Frankly, I don’t care.”

“Say again?”

“Because they’re not the problem,” he said.

“Who is, sir? My daughter?”

“Don’t you be laying off your anger on me, Dave.”

“Don’t call me by my first name again,” I said, and hung up.

But getting angry at a functionary in St. Mary Parish was of no help. I tried to clear my head, to think in a sequential fashion, to revisit mentally all the evidence we’d uncovered in the murder of the two girls. The video of the subterranean room we had found in Herman Stanga’s DVD player contained a detail that I couldn’t get out of my mind, one that indicated a story larger than itself. But what was it?

The stones in the walls. They had reminded me of bread loaves, smooth and heavy and rounded on the ends, not given to flaking. Emma Poche had looked at the still photos made from the video and had said they resembled pineapples. Why would she say pineapples? Because of the shape? Was her statement one of those linguistic leaps from an image to an idea based on an association in the subconscious? Did something about them call to mind breadfruit, the food that nineteenth-century plantation owners grew and fed to their slaves in the tropics?

Clete came through the back door without knocking. His slicker was dripping water, his face beaded with it. “Let’s go to Broussard,” he said. “We start talking to everybody we can along Highway Ninety and the old two-lane.”

I had already thought about it. The two-lane was a possibility. It was within the town of Broussard itself, with few places where Alafair could pull off to talk to someone. But the city cops had not seen her car, nor had anyone along the two-lane reported a scuffle or an abduction or anything unusual occurring that evening. The four-lane, also known as Highway 90, was far more problematic. It went for miles and was congested with service stations, fast-food restaurants, bars, convenience stores, and motels, plus any number of business properties where she could simply pull in to a parking lot.

Regardless, one way or another, we had to get off the dime. “We’ll each take a vehicle and divide it up,” I said.

The phone rang. Molly picked it up in the bedroom before I could reach the kitchen counter. “Dave, it’s the state police,” she said.

My heart was beating hard when I picked up. I didn’t know the trooper who had called. He said he was on a farm road not far off the interstate west of Lafayette. “We’ve got a Honda registered in the name of Alafair Suzanne Robicheaux. It’s been involved in an accident,” he said. “I saw the ATL on it earlier. Am I talking to the right party?”

“Yeah, this is Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. I’m Alafair’s father. Who’s in the vehicle?”

“We’re not sure. It’s upside down in a coulee. We’re waiting on the Jaws of Life. We had to get them from Opelousas. The vehicle is wedged, so we can’t flip it over.”

I had to close my eyes to control my frustration. “How many people are in there? Are we talking about a man or woman? Can you be specific?”

“I can see one man. I don’t know if anybody is in there with him or not. I hope he’s the only one. I sure as hell do.”

“Explain that.”

He paused. “The guy I can see has space to breathe. Most every other area of the vehicle is crushed tight as tinfoil.”

“Give me your twenty again,” I said.

After he gave me directions, I pressed down the button on the phone cradle and looked at Molly, the receiver still in my hand. “It’s Alafair’s car. There’s an injured man inside. The trooper can’t be sure if anybody else is in the car.”

“Oh, Dave,” she said.

“Clete and I are headed there now.” Before she could speak, I raised my hand. “You have to stay here in case somebody calls. Maybe it was a carjacking, maybe an abduction. Alafair would have fought. She wouldn’t have just submitted to some guy who drove off with her.”

There were other scenarios that were much less optimistic. But there was no point in reviewing them. “Weingart is behind this, isn’t he?” Molly said.

“That’s my guess. But I don’t know.”

I saw Clete look at me and tap on the dial of his watch. I called the department and asked that a cruiser be stationed in front of our house. Then Clete and I headed for Interstate 10, the emergency flasher clamped on the roof of my new Toyota truck, the rain dividing in the headlights, the highway unwinding behind us like a long black snake.