The Glass Rainbow

CHAPTER 25

The storm was still in full progress when we arrived at the accident scene, the sky roiling with blue-black clouds, the lights of farmhouses barely visible inside the rain. The state troopers had ignited emergency flares along the edge of the coulee where, according to a witness, Alafair’s Honda had been hit at high speed by a tractor-trailer that had never slowed down. The Honda had rolled over at least three times before it landed on its roof at the bottom of the coulee, the driver’s window pinched into a slit. A trooper with a flashlight in one hand and a radio in the other approached us as soon as Clete and I got out of the truck.

“You’re Detective Robicheaux?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s probably going to be another fifteen or twenty minutes before the Jaws are here. I don’t know the status of the guy inside. He’s generally incoherent and uncooperative,” the trooper said. He had a square jaw and tight mouth and eyes that kept looking at everything around him rather than at me.

“Did you get a name?”

“No. I’m trying to get a crane in here. Did you see one on the road?”

“No,” I said.

“The attempt to locate didn’t give us very much information. What’s the deal on your daughter?”

“I think she may have been abducted.”

His eyes met mine before he gazed down the road again, his expression neutral. “We don’t quite understand what happened here. The witness says two other cars seemed to be traveling with your daughter’s car. But they didn’t stop. From what we can gather, the guy driving the semi may be DUI, but the two companion vehicles fleeing the scene don’t add up.”

“What kind of description do you have on them?”

“The witness says one was white, the other dark-colored. If you want to talk to the guy inside your daughter’s car, you’d better do it now.”

“He’s not going to make it?” I said.

“We’re trying to open an irrigation lock and divert the water out of the coulee. I give it about ten more minutes before it’ll be over his nose. If we have to chain-pull the car out—” He didn’t finish his thought. “Take a look for yourself.”

Clete and I worked our way down the side of the coulee, each of us holding a flashlight the troopers had given us. The rain was warm and pattering on the exposed undercarriage of the Honda. Through the opening between the roof and the window jamb, I could see a man’s head and shoulders wedged against the steering wheel, the safety strap still in place across his chest. His face was contorted, the water in the coulee flowing thick with mud and dead vegetation through the broken windows, touching the top of his head.

“Dave, that’s Andy Swan, the guy who was on the execution team at Raiford,” Clete said.

“You’re sure?” I said.

“I ought to know. I kicked his ass.”

I got on my knees in the water and leaned down to the window. “I’m Detective Dave Robicheaux. My daughter is the owner of this car. Where is she?” I said.

Swan’s gaze would not focus. I realized that one of his eyes had been knocked askew inside the socket. “Did you hear me?” I said.

He didn’t answer. I shone the light inside the car, the beam spearing into the crevasses between the crushed metal and the seats, and over the buckled doors and the folded glass that looked like green ice blown from a fountain. I could smell gasoline and oil and brake fluid and the dirty burnt odor of rubber that had been scoured off the tires.

“What are you doing inside Alafair’s car?” I asked.

Andy Swan made no reply. Clete knelt next to me, one hand propped against the car body. “Remember me?” he said through the window.

Swan’s good eye watered in the glare of the flashlight.

“I’m going to line it out for you,” Clete said. “I’ve got no reason to deceive you. One way or another, we’re going to get Alafair back. But right now you’ve got about eight minutes before you do the big gargle. If you do the right thing now, Dave and I promise you we’ll pick up this car with our bare hands and get you out of this ditch and into federal custody and on the way to a federal hospital. Your pals screwed you with a RotoRooter, Andy. Are you going to take their weight on a kidnap and maybe a murder beef? This is Louisiana. You thought Raiford was a bitch? You know what it’ll be like on death row at Angola for a guy who was on an execution team? Every trusty in the kitchen will spit in your food before it’s brought to your cell. In the shower you’ll be anybody’s bar of soap. Think the hacks will be looking out for you? Most of them wouldn’t blow their nose on your shirt.”

Swan opened his mouth to speak, and I realized that something was wrong with his throat or that something was broken inside his chest. His words were clotted, wrapped with phlegm, blood leaking over his lip from a dark gap in his teeth. “Under the hay,” he said, almost in a whisper.

“What hay?” I asked.

“Baled hay. Go through the door. It’s under the hay.”

“What’s under the hay?” I said.

“The place they were taking her. By the river.”

“What place? Which river?” I said.

“I’m not from here. There’s a tractor—” he began.

“Say it.”

The coulee was running higher, the current sweeping along the crown of his skull, startling him, his eyes opening wide. “I don’t know the name of the place.”

“Who took her?” I said.

He twisted his head and looked straight into my face, his ruined eye protruding obliquely from the socket, his good eye almost luminous, as though it were seeing through me, watching a scene or images that no one else saw.

“Talk to me,” I said. “Don’t let go. Don’t let a collection of shits write your epitaph.”

Then he did something I had seen in a dying man only two or three times in my life. His face became filled with dread, the jaw going slack, the tissue transforming to a puttylike gray, even though his blood had already drained into his head. The exhalation of his final breath was as rank as sewer gas.

I hit the side of the car with my fist.

“What was he talking about?” Clete said. “A tractor? Baled hay?”

“By a river,” I added.

Clete’s face was round and hard in the reflection of the flashlight. “What are you thinking?” he asked me.

“The video from Herman Stanga’s DVD player,” I said. “The stones in the wall. They’re not indigenous to Louisiana. They’re the kind that were carried as ballast in nineteenth-century sailing ships. The place in the video was a barracoon.”

“I didn’t get that last part,” he said.

“A jail for slaves. A lot of blackbirders were bringing in slaves from the West Indies after the prohibition of 1809. Jim Bowie and Jean Lafitte brought them up the Mermentau River and sold them into the cane fields.”

“That shack or whatever full of hay bales where we got into the shoot-out?” Clete said. “There was a rusted-out tractor next to it. You think that’s the place where the girls were?”

“Maybe,” I said.

Above us on the road, someone was setting up a generator-powered bank of flood lamps. Suddenly, the coulee was lit by an eye-watering white brilliance. The state trooper in charge of the accident scene was silhouetted against the glare, the rain blowing like bits of crystal in the wind. “We got the Jaws,” he called down. “You guys find out anything?”

“The guy’s name was Andy Swan,” Clete hollered up the slope. “He worked with the execution team that fried Bundy. He’s probably checking in with him about now.”

But Clete’s cynical remark served as a poor disguise for our mood and the hopelessness of our situation. Our investigation into the accident by the coulee had eaten up time that Alafair may not have had. While we dithered, she suffered. We got back on Interstate 10 and headed west toward Jeff Davis Parish while I tried to get through to someone in the sheriff’s department there. Finally the 911 operator patched me through to a plainclothes detective who was working an extra duty shift that night. His name was Huffinton. At first the name didn’t register. Then I remembered him. “What is it this time?” he said.

This time? “You responded to the ‘shots fired’ at the river?” I said.

“I’m the guy,” he replied, sucking on a tooth or a mint. “What do you need?”

He was the same detective who had gotten into it with Clete and who had made a remark about my history with alcohol. “Down by the river, at the same location where I had to pop those guys, there’s an old Acadian cottage. It’s stacked with bales of hay. There’s a tractor not far from it.”

“What about it?”

“My daughter has been abducted. I’m not sure where she’s being held, but one of the perps in the abduction described a house or cabin just like the one by the river. I’m on I-Ten west of Crowley, but I need you guys to jump on the place right now. You copy on that?”

“No, I don’t copy anything. A kidnap victim is being held in a shack full of hay?”

“I think it was a barracoon.”

“A what?”

“A place where slaves were kept. We have video that came from—”

“Is this a put-on?”

“I’m talking about an underground jail. It may be underneath that old Acadian house. It’s the place where Bernadette Latiolais may have been murdered.”

There was a pause. “I tell you what. I’ll drive out there. I’ll look around, just so everybody is happy. Then I’m going to forget our conversation. But I think you need to get some help, Robicheaux.”

“Did you hear me? My daughter was abducted.”

“Yeah, I heard you. That doesn’t change anything. Every time you and your fat friend come here, you leave shit prints all over the place.”

“Call me when you get to the river.”

“No, I’ll call you when I have something to report. In the meantime, don’t patch in to my radio again. Out.”

I handed my cell phone to Clete as the truck veered toward the shoulder. “Get the state police,” I said.

“Take it easy, Dave.”

“You didn’t hear that idiot.”

“Which idiot?”

“Huffinton, that Jeff Davis plainclothes who got in your face. If this goes south for Alafair—” My throat was closing on my words, and I couldn’t finish the statement.

Clete was dialing 911 with his thumb, looking at me in the dash glow, his eyes full of pity. “We’re going to get her back, big mon. Andy Swan was working for old man Abelard. I suspect Weingart took over control of the old man’s affairs, then decided to do some payback on Alafair. But he’s a survivor, Dave. He’s not going down in flames just to get revenge against you and me.”

“What if Weingart isn’t pulling the strings?”

The 911 operator picked up before Clete could answer. He handed me the cell phone, and I made the same request to the state police that I had made to the Jefferson Davis Sheriff’s Department.

“Repeat that about Weingart. You don’t think he’s behind this?” Clete said.

“You already said it. He’s a sexual predator and a con man and a bully, but he’s not a serial killer.”

“You think the old man killed the girls?”

“Think again.”

Clete bit the skin on the ball of his thumb, his green eyes dulling over; he was obviously wondering if both of us had not been played from the jump. “Sonofabitch,” he said. Then he said it again. “Sonofabitch.”

The road was empty as we drove into the southern end of Jeff Davis Parish and looked out on the sodden fields and the gum trees bending in the wind along the river. I could see car tracks winding through the grass toward the doorless Acadian cottage that was used to store hay. But there were no vehicles in the field.

I turned off the two-lane and approached the cottage, my headlights bouncing on the rusted tractor and the tips of the grass waving in the wind. The car tracks we had seen earlier went past the cottage and down to the river. I stopped the truck and cut the headlights. Steam was rising from the hood, the engine ticking with heat. I got out and approached the front of the cottage, my flashlight in one hand, my .45 in the other. Clete was to my right, his blue-black .38 pointed in front of him with both hands. He gave me the nod, and we both went in at the same time.

The building was a typical Acadian dwelling of the mid-nineteenth century. At one time, it had probably contained two small bedrooms, a front room, a kitchen, and a sleeping loft for visitors. But all the partitions had been knocked out, and the floor was stacked to the ceiling with hay bales that had long ago become moldy and home to field mice.

Except for one area in the center of the kitchen. Three bales had been piled lopsidedly, and muddy footprints led from them through the back door into the field. Clete stuck his .38 into his shoulder holster and shoved two of the bales tumbling into the wall, then dragged the third one aside, exposing a trapdoor that looked made of oak. At the bottom of the door was a hole the size of a quarter. I inserted my finger in it and lifted.

Underneath it was another door, this one constructed of several iron plates, cross-fitted with iron bands and big rivets that were orange and soft with rust. It was the kind of door you expected to see on a Civil War ironclad, one that could resist almost any assault short of a direct hit by an exploding cannon shell. An iron ring was attached at the bottom. And so was a padlock.

“Alafair?” I called, my voice breaking.

There was no response.

“It’s Dave and Clete,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

There was still no answer. I ran to the truck and opened the steel toolbox in back and returned with a crowbar. I wedged it inside the padlock and snapped it loose, then dropped the crowbar to the floor and pulled on the ring with both hands. Clete got his fingers under the lip of the door, and the two of us flung it back on its hinges. I shone my flashlight down into the darkness.

“Jesus, I can’t believe this,” Clete said.

A set of steep wood steps led down into a subterranean room whose walls were made up of the stones we had seen in the video. The walls were sweating with water seepage, coated with lichen at the bottom and inset with chains at the top. But the chains were not ancient ones that had fettered rebellious slaves. They were steel-link, shiny, practical, economical in design. They had probably been purchased at a local hardware store by somebody who looked just like the rest of us.

We went down the steps into the darkness. I touched the stones in the wall with my hand, then wiped it on my shirt. The air was dense and smelled of mold and feces and stagnant water and maybe human sweat. I could hear my own breathing and feel my pulse jumping in my throat. A plain wood table and a chair stood in the middle of the room. On top of the table was an opened toolbox. I did not want to look at the contents. I did not want to do that at all.

Clete bent over and picked up a piece of crumpled paper from the floor. He smelled it. “They were here. I think we just missed them,” he said.

“What is that?”

“A hamburger wrapper.” He wiped his fingers across it. “Look, the mustard is still fresh.”

“They were eating down here?” I said.

“Let’s follow the car tracks down to the river. The state troopers ought to be here soon,” he said.

“Don’t count on it. It’s not their bailiwick.” I was trying to think and not having much success. The only words that went through my mind were Where to now? And I had no answer to my own question. “Maybe they went back into St. Mary Parish,” I said.

Then headlight beams flooded into the kitchen area above our heads. I climbed back up the steps and went outside, my .45 hanging from my right hand, the mist damp on my face. I stared into the high beams of an unmarked car driven by the plainclothes detective Huffinton. He got out of his vehicle, hitching up his pants, his shapeless fedora pulled low on his brow, his expression as blank as a dough pan. “Y’all got here, huh?” he said.

“Where’ve you been?” I asked.

“I was here. I didn’t see anything. Then we had an armed robbery and a shooting by the exit on I-Ten. I took the call.”

“You looked in the cottage?”

“I didn’t say that. I pulled up on the road and put my spot on it. There wasn’t anybody around. Then I got the shots fired on the radio.”

“Two sets of car tracks go right past the cottage and down to the river. You didn’t check them out?”

“I saw maybe one vehicle down there. But that’s not unusual. High school kids fuck down there. What’s the big deal? You didn’t find anything, either, did you?”

I could hear my breath rising in my throat again. “Go through that back door and look down into the room below the floor. That’s where I think my daughter was being held. It’s a torture chamber. I want you to go down below and put your hand on the stones. I want you to look in that toolbox on the table and tell me what’s on the tools.”

I felt myself moving toward him as though I had no willpower, as though a dark current were crawling from my brain down through my arm and hand into the grips of my .45. “Don’t just stare at me. You get your ass down those stairs.”

“Dave,” I heard Clete say softly behind me. “Maybe at least Huffinton stopped it.”

I didn’t move. My fingers were opening and closing on the grips of the .45.

“Time to dee-dee,” Clete said. “The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are keeping it simple tonight, big mon. We’re getting Alf back.”

“He’s not gonna talk to me like that,” Huffinton said.

“You shut up,” Clete said.

I felt my right hand relax, and I saw Huffinton’s face go in and out of focus then suck away from me in the wind, that quick, like an electronic blip disappearing on a screen. Then I was walking with Clete toward the truck, his arm as heavy as an elephant’s trunk across my shoulders.

We headed east, back toward New Iberia, with no plan or specific destination, the speedometer needle nearing ninety. At Crowley we picked up an Acadia Parish sheriff’s escort in the form of two cruisers with their flashers rippling. I called Molly and told her what we had found. “They took Alafair there?” she said.

“I can’t be sure, but I think so. Has anybody called?”

“Helen Soileau, that’s it. Where are you going now?”

“Maybe back to the Abelards’ place. Is the cruiser parked outside?”

“It was ten minutes ago.”

“Go look.”

“It’s there.”

“Go look, Molly.”

She set down the receiver, then returned to the kitchen and scraped it up from the counter. “He’s parked by the curb, smoking a cigarette. Everything is fine here.”

“Call me if you hear from anybody. I’ll update you as soon as anything develops.”

“What did they do to her in that room, Dave?”

“There’s no way to know. Maybe nothing. Maybe they didn’t have time,” I said, forcing myself not to think about the toolbox.

The Acadia escort turned off at the Lafayette Parish line, and a Lafayette Parish deputy picked us up and stayed with us almost all the way to New Iberia.

“What do you want to do, Dave?” Clete asked.

“We go back to St. Mary. I want to find Abelard’s daughter. I don’t think she told me everything she knew.”

“Waste of time, in my view.”

“Why?”

“She’ll go down with the ship. You already know that.”

“Somebody knows where Weingart is. His literary agent, his business connections in Canada, his publisher. He’s got a plan, and somebody knows what it is. We need to get ahold of the sheriff in St. Mary and get in the Abelard house.”

“What for?”

“Correspondence, Rolodexes, records, how do I know?”

“I don’t think we have time for that, Dave.”

I looked at him, my heart seizing up, my breath coming short. Maybe Clete was right and I was creating my own illusions about getting back my daughter. This whole case had been characterized by illusion. The St. Jude Project, Robert Weingart as reformed recidivist, Kermit Abelard as egalitarian poet, Timothy Abelard as the tragic oligarch stricken by a divine hand for defying the natural order, Layton Blanchet as the working-class entrepreneur who amassed millions of dollars through his intelligence and his desire to help small investors, a historic Acadian cottage that hid a barracoon. The Abelards had paneled their sunporch with stained-glass images of unicorns and satyrs and monks at prayer and knights in armor that shone like quicksilver, turning the interior of their home into a kaleidoscopic medieval tapestry. Or perhaps, better said, they had created a glass rainbow that awakened memories of goodness and childhood innocence, all of it to hide the ruination they had brought to the Caribbean-like fairyland they had inherited.

If she was not already dead, my daughter was in the hands of men who were among the most cowardly and cruel members of the male species, namely those who would take out their rage and self-loathing on the body of a child or a woman. I wanted to kill them. I felt a level of bloodthirst I had never experienced.

Clete seemed to read my thoughts. “Dave, just do what your judgment tells you. I don’t have any answers. But whatever we do, it’s under a black flag.”

I didn’t reply.

“No quarter, Streak. Say it. We kill every one of these bastards.”

“Whatever it takes,” I said.

He put an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth, his porkpie hat slanted down, the scar tissue through his eyebrow as pink as a rose. My cell phone vibrated on the dashboard. I opened it and placed it to my ear. “Dave Robicheaux,” I said.

“Molly gave me your number,” a woman’s voice said. “Where are you?”

“Carolyn?” I said.

“I have to talk to you. We have to put a stop to this.”

“To what?”

“To Alafair’s abduction.”

“You have some information for me?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure. I don’t know how helpful it is.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“I’ve found out some things about Weingart. I know some of the places he goes. I have to talk to you on a landline or in person. They can pull transmissions out of the air.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“The people who tried to kill you. Where are you?”

“Just outside New Iberia.”

“I’ll meet you at your house.”

I thought about it. Carolyn Blanchet was not about to go down to the department. “All right,” I said. “But in the meantime, get on a landline and call Helen Soileau.”

“Are you serious? I wouldn’t allow that bitch to wash my panties.” She clicked off.

I hit the speed dial and called home. “Carolyn Blanchet said you gave her my number. Is that true?” I said.

“Yeah, did I do something wrong?” Molly said.

“No, Molly, you’ve done everything right. Is the cruiser still out front?”

“Yes.”

“If Carolyn Blanchet shows up, tell her to wait outside. We’re on our way.”

I closed the cell phone and replaced it on the dashboard. We crossed the city limits into New Iberia. Yellow pools of electricity spilled through the clouds and spread across the sky and died without making a sound.

“Carolyn Blanchet was talking about a mysterious group of some kind that can pull cell-phone transmissions out of the air,” I said.

“Who knows?” Clete said. He removed the cigarette from his mouth and widened his eyes, unable to conceal his fatigue. “Know what I’m going to do?”

“No.”

“Watch.” He slid the cigarette back in the package, then rolled down the window and sprinkled all the cigarettes in the package into the wind stream. He took off his hat and kept his head outside the window for a long time, looking back into the darkness. Then he rolled up the window, his hair sparkling with raindrops. “Shoot me if I ever buy a pack of smokes again.”

“I promise,” I replied.

“Carolyn Blanchet would steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes.”

“It’s the only game in town,” I said.

He didn’t argue.

Because of flooding and the collapse of a sewer drain four blocks up from my house, East Main had been barricaded and the street was virtually deserted. It was strange to see Main devoid of people, like it was part of a dream rather than reality, the asphalt as sleek and black as oil under the streetlamps, rainwater coursing through the gutters, a dirty cusp surging over the sidewalks. The lawns of the antebellum and Victorian homes along the street had been windblown with camellia and bougainvillea and hibiscus petals and pieces of bamboo and thousands of leaves from the live-oak trees. The grotto dedicated to the statue of Jesus’s mother was lit by a solitary flood lamp next to the library, the stone draped by the shadows of the moss moving in the trees. I felt that I had moved back in time, but not in a good way. I felt like I had as a little boy during the war years, when I experienced what a psychiatrist would call fantasies of world destruction, of things coming apart and ending, of people going away from me forever.

The temperature had dropped, and fog was rolling off the bayou and puffing through the trees onto the street. Up ahead, I could see a cruiser parked close by my house. No other vehicles were parked on the street or in my driveway. I saw a woman come out my front door and approach the sidewalk, holding a newspaper over her head, jiggling her fingers at us the same way I had seen Kermit Abelard jiggle his fingers. At first I didn’t recognize her. She was wearing a raincoat and a bandanna over her hair. It was Carolyn Blanchet.

“Go around the block,” Clete said.

“What for?”

“I’m not sure. You called Emma a Judas goat. I think that was Emma’s teacher right there.” He picked up my cell phone from the dash.

“What are you doing?”

“Calling your house,” he said.

“Screw that.”

“They’re desperate, Dave. It’s all or nothing for them now.”

“It doesn’t matter.” I turned in to the drive and cut the engine. My front yard was flooded, the house lights burning brightly inside the rain, like the image of a snug sea shanty battered by a coastal storm, a place where a lamp stayed lit and bread baked in an oven.

I opened the truck door and got out. Carolyn Blanchet smiled at me. “Where’s Molly?” I asked.

“She’s still in the bathroom,” Carolyn replied.

Her statement didn’t compute, but I didn’t pursue it. The cruiser was parked in the shadows of the neighbor’s oak trees, backlit by a streetlamp. I could see the deputy’s silhouette behind the wheel, his hat cocked at an angle, as though he were dozing. I heard Clete get out of the truck.

“What kept you?” Carolyn said.

“Nothing. We were doing ninety all the way.”

She gave me a funny look. “You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?”

“Alafair got away. We tried to reach your cell phone, but the service was down. Molly was calling you from the bathroom. I thought she got through.”

I never took my eyes from her face. Her skin glistened with moisture. Her chin was uplifted, her eyes happy, like those of a woman waiting to be kissed. Her mouth was beautiful and alluring, exuding warmth and affection and a promise of exploration, and I suspected it had charmed many men and women out of their heart and soul.

“You’re such a crazy guy, Dave. There she is,” she said.

I saw Alafair standing motionlessly in the bedroom window, the curtains pulled back on either side of her. If there was any expression on her face, I couldn’t see it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Clete moving toward the cruiser that was parked back in the shadows. My heart was racing, my throat dry, the rain clicking on my hat. Behind me, I heard Clete rip open the front door of the cruiser.

“Dave, don’t do it!” he called out.

I knocked Carolyn Blanchet on her butt getting into the house.