The Glass Rainbow dr-18

by James Lee Burke

  He walked around the side of the house, past a chicken coop and an ancient brick cistern that was veined with dead vines. In the backyard the black woman was hoeing in a vegetable garden, a sunbonnet tied under her chin, her big arms flexing as she notched weeds out of the rows planted with carrots and radishes. Clete did not speak when he walked up behind her, though he had no doubt she was aware of his presence. He took off his hat and studied the refracted glare of the sun inside the flooded cypress snags between the house and the bay. “Mr. Abelard home?” he said.

  The woman kept her eyes on her work, a line of sweat sliding out of her bonnet onto her forehead. “No, suh.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Gone to Lafayette for his dialysis.”

  “As his nurse, wouldn’t you normally go along with him?”

  “I got chores to do here.”

  “Is Kermit or Robert Weingart around?”

  “No, suh, they’re in New Orleans for the day.”

  “What’s the deal on our peroxided friend from Florida, Miss Jewel?”

  Locks of her hair hung outside her bonnet. They were threaded with silver, damp with her work and the humidity that seemed to rise from the composted soil and the dead water surrounding the knoll. Her hoe was rising and falling faster, thudding into the ground, flashing in the sun. “Your name is Mr. Clete, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Clete said.

  “You need to leave, suh. It’s not a good time for you to be here.”

  “You in trouble, Miss Jewel?”

  “No, suh. I been here all my life. I was born in the quarters, back up the road where the old mill use to be. I just do my job. I go my own way. Nothing bad is gonna happen to me.”

  “Who’s the dude from Florida?”

  She looked out of the corner of her eye toward the house. “I got to get these radishes hoed out. Then I’m fixing a big salad for Mr. Timothy. People have their problems and their grief, then it passes. Mess with it and it gets all over you.”

  Clete heard a screen door open and swing back on a spring. The black woman’s hands tightened on the hoe handle, her triceps knotting as she scratched and clicked the blade frenetically between the vegetable rows.

  “If you have business on the property, you need to call first and make an appointment,” the man with the peroxided hair said to Clete.

  “Give me a number and I’ll get right on that.”

  “It’s unlisted.”

  “That kind of makes it hard to call.”

  “Take it up with Mr. Abelard or his grandson. I’m just the hired help.”

  “You’re doing a heck of a job, too.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Can I park out on the road?”

  “Do whatever you want, long as it’s not on this side of the bridge.”

  “I didn’t get your name.”

  “I didn’t give it. Go start dinner, Jewel. I’ll be along in a bit.”

  “Yes, suh.”

  The man from Florida watched her walk into the shade of the house and lean her hoe against the back steps and go inside. Then he fixed his gaze on Clete. His face had the youthful tautness of an athlete’s, but there were three parallel lines across his brow with tiny nodules of skin in them, like beads on a string, that gave his face a dirty, aged look. “You a PI?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Leave me a business card. I got my job to do, but I try to give a guy a break if I can.”

  “I think your job is to keep Miss Jewel from talking to outsiders.”

  “Then you thought wrong.”

  “I think you already know my name. I think you didn’t answer the door because you were busy running my tag.”

  The man from Florida glanced at his wristwatch. “In five minutes, I’m gonna look out the front window. Leave or stay. But if you stay, you’re gonna be on your way to the parish jail.”

  “No problem,” Clete said. “By the way, Miss Jewel doesn’t give up family secrets, whatever they might be. So don’t be acting like she did after I’m gone. You got my drift on that?”

  The man from Florida stepped closer to Clete, into his shadow, his face turned up into Clete’s. His right foot was pulled behind his left and set at a slight angle, the instinctive posture of someone who was trained in at least one of the martial arts. An odor like male musk or stale antiperspirant rose from his armpits. “It’s no coincidence you got beer on your breath this early in the morning. You’re a retread, pal, way beyond your limits. Eat a big dinner and get drunk or get yourself laid. Do something you can handle. But don’t mouth off to the wrong people again. Juicer or not, a guy your age ought to know that.”

  The man walked back to the house, stooping to pick up the hoe from the steps and hang it on a garden-shed hook, as though Clete were not there.

  Clete went back out to his Caddy and sat behind the wheel, biting a hangnail. He drained the open can of beer that rested on the floor, but it was flat and hot and tasted sour in his mouth. He stared at the front of the house, the scaling paint on its stone columns, the dormers upstairs that seemed piled with junk, the nests of mud daubers and yellow jackets under the eaves, the loops of cobweb on the fans that hung over the upstairs veranda.

  Clete thought of his childhood in the old Irish Channel and the predawn milk deliveries he made with his father in the Garden District. He remembered a splendid antebellum home off St. Charles Avenue and the kindly woman who lived there and asked him to come back on Saturday afternoon for ice cream. When he had shown up, dressed in his best clothes, the backyard was crowded with street urchins and raggedy black children from across Magazine. He returned later with a bag full of rocks and broke out all the glass in her greenhouse. Now, as he stared at the Abelard home, he tried to think of a term that described it and the history it represented: a cheap fraud, a house of cards, a place where Whitey could boss around his darkies and live off somebody else’s sweat.

  But he knew those weren’t the appropriate words. The house meant nothing, and the people in it, such as the Abelards, were, like the rest of us, eventually dust in the wind. The real story was one that people seldom figured out. It was that the Abelards and their kind had taught others to disrespect themselves, and in large numbers they had done exactly that. Clete poured his beer out on the gravel, crunched the can in his palm, and tossed the can in the flower bed.

  As he was driving across the wood bridge, his cell phone rang. He checked the caller ID, then placed the phone to his ear. “Talk to me, big mon,” he said.

  He turned off the bridge and pulled the Caddy to the side of the road and listened. While he listened, he gazed at the blue Dumpster set back in the cleared space across the road, a bib of flattened trash scattered around its perimeter, a thick green stand of brush and persimmon trees behind it. “Andy Swan, huh?” he said. “Okay, I’m going to do some archaeological research while I’m here, and we’ll ROA for dinner when I get back to New Iberia. No, everything is copacetic. I’m extremely cool and serene and mellow and thinking only cool thoughts. Do not worry, noble mon. No, there is no problem here in St. Mary Parish that is not totally under control. Out.”

  He parked in front of the Dumpster, retrieved a pair of bolt cutters and polyethylene gloves from the trunk, and cut the cable that was locked down in a V-shaped configuration on the Dumpster’s steel lid.

  He began his search by splitting open the piled vinyl bags and shaking out their contents. Among the persimmons, he found a broken tree branch on the ground and used it to rake among the plastic bottles and tin cans and shrimp shells and Perrier and wine bottles and decayed food that the Abelards and their guest Robert Weingart had amassed in a week’s time. He was about to give it up when he spied, on the Dumpster’s floor, a strip of white plastic that was tongued on one end and notched with a hole on the other, the sides serrated like tiny teeth.

  He dropped the plastic strip into a Ziploc bag. Behind him, the pickup truck driven by the man from Florida rattled over the plank b
ridge and angled across the asphalt and pulled to a stop lengthwise behind Clete’s Caddy. The man got out and slammed the door behind him. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  “I’m about to leave. I’d appreciate you moving your truck,” Clete said.

  “What you’re gonna do is clean up this mess. What you’re also gonna do is put anything you found back where you got it.”

  Clete scratched the back of his neck as though an insect had just bitten him. “No, I don’t think that’s on the table today.”

  “Did you come out here to get beat up or drug off in handcuffs? You just like to walk into buzz saws? You get off on pissing in the punch bowl? Which is it?”

  “See, I just found what looks to be a ligature. Or maybe it’s just a strip of plastic used to hang pipe. What’s your opinion, Mr. Swan?”

  “I’m supposed to be impressed because you got somebody to run my tag?”

  “No, there’s nothing interesting about me. But you, that’s a different deal. You were a member of the execution team at Raiford back when they were still using the chair. You were one of the guys who shaved their head and put a diaper on them so they wouldn’t mess themselves in front of the witnesses. That’s major-league impressive. Is it true y’all packed cotton and lubricant up their anus before you put on the diaper? That’s what I’ve always heard. Y’all have to train much for that?”

  “I usually try to stay objective about my job and not get personalities mixed up in it. But for you, I think I’m gonna make an exception,” Andy Swan said.

  Clete lifted his arms away from his sides. “No piece, no slapjack, no cuffs, no shank, no weapons of any kind. I’m no threat to you, Mr. Swan.”

  “I know. You’re just a jolly fat man, probably a guy who got kicked off the force somewhere for taking freebies from crack whores or going on a pad for greaseballs. Now you carry a badge anybody can buy in a pawnshop and stick your dick in Bourbon Street skanks and pretend you’re still a player. Maybe I didn’t get it all exactly right, but I’m close, aren’t I?”

  “Take your hand out from under the seat and step back from your vehicle,” Clete said.

  “Or?”

  “I’ve got enough room to get my Caddy out,” Clete said. “When I’m gone, you can call the locals or go about your business. No fuss, no muss.”

  “You asked about stuffing cotton up their ass. I never did that. I shaved their head and put the electrode paste on and strapped the mask on their face. I strapped it so tight they couldn’t breathe. I think some of them suffocated before the electricity cooked their insides. I know for sure blood ran out of their nose and mouth and sometimes their eyes. And I hope every one of them suffered. Why? Because they deserved it. What do you think of that?”

  Clete didn’t answer. Andy Swan straightened up and turned around, the stun gun in his hand buzzing with a blue-white arc. “Let’s trim a little of that fat off you,” he said.

  “Why don’t we do this instead?” Clete said. With all his weight, he rammed the branch he had been using as a rake into Andy Swan’s face, the dried, sun-hardened tips spearing into the man’s eyes and nostrils and mouth and cheeks. Andy Swan crashed against the side of his truck, dropping the stun gun, pressing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. Clete grabbed him by the back of the collar and spun him around and drove his face against the truck cab. Then he did it again and again, his fingers sunk deep into the back of Swan’s neck, Swan’s nose bursting against the metal. When Clete stopped, Andy Swan could barely stand.

  Walk away, walk away, walk away, a voice kept repeating in Clete’s head.

  He stepped back, his hands at his sides. The blue Dumpster, the garbage on the ground, the persimmon trees and the Caddy and the pickup truck were all spinning around him now. Andy Swan’s face resembled a red-and-white balloon floating in front of him.

  “I’m done,” Swan said. He tried to cup the blood running from his nose. “I take back what I said. I don’t want any more trouble.”

  “Who killed the girls?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who tried to kill Dave Robicheaux?”

  Andy Swan shook his head and spat a broken tooth into his palm.

  “Are you deaf? Do you think I enjoy this? Answer me,” Clete said.

  “I don’t know anything, man. I just do security.”

  “You dissing me again? You think I’m stupid? You think I get off knocking around gumballs?”

  “Suck my dick.”

  Clete drove his fist into Swan’s stomach, doubling him over, dropping him to his knees. Strings of blood and saliva hung from Swan’s mouth. His back was shaking. He raised his left hand in the air, signaling Clete not to hit him again. “I got here three days ago from Florida. Check me out. I work for a security service in Morgan City. I’m just an ex-cop. I’m no different from you.”

  “You ever say that last part again, you’re going to have some serious problems.”

  Clete picked up the stun gun, walked out into the trees, and threw it into a pond. When he returned to the Dumpster area, Andy Swan was still on his knees. Clete lifted him up by one arm.

  “What are you doing?” Swan said.

  “Nothing. And neither are you. You’re going to get a lot of track between you and Louisiana. And you’re going to do that now. You’re not going back to the Abelard house and give that black woman a lot of grief. You’re changing your zip code as we speak.”

  “If that’s what you say.”

  Clete’s gaze lifted into the trees, his eyelids fluttering. “I don’t recommend equivocation and a lack of specificity at this time. Are we connecting here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Say again?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good man. Take this in the right spirit. Those guys you fried at Raiford? You’ll see them again.”

  “They’re dead. We electrocuted them.”

  “That’s the point,” Clete said. “Turn east at the four-lane. You got a straight shot all the way to Pensacola.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Clete’s call asking me to run the tag of the Florida pickup had come in before Helen and I left the department for Carolyn Blanchet’s house outside Franklin. It had been no problem to run the tag; nor had it been a problem to call a friend in the state attorney’s office in Tallahassee and ask for a background check on Andy Swan. But I did not tell Helen what I had done until we were almost at the Blanchet home. My timing was not only bad, I think it contributed in the worst possible way to the events that were about to follow.

  “Not only is Clete conducting his own investigation in St. Mary Parish, but you’re helping him, even asking a personal favor from the Florida state attorney’s office?” Helen said.

  Her knuckles had whitened on the steering wheel. When I didn’t reply, she shot me a look, the cruiser slipping over the yellow stripe.

  “We’re all on the same side, Helen.”

  “Clete’s on his own side, and so are you.”

  “Not so.”

  “I’m really pissed off, Dave.”

  “I gather that.”

  “Not adequately. Believe me, we’ll talk more about it later.”

  She turned off the four-lane and drove down a service road to the Blanchet property and the lovely green arbor in which Layton’s tribute to himself still rose through the oaks like a Tudor castle covered with cake icing. We were not the only people there. Two SUVs and a silver sedan with a United States government plate were coming toward us through the two columns of oaks that lined the driveway, the sedan out in front. Helen stuck her hand out the window and signaled the driver to stop.

  “Helen Soileau, Iberia Parish sheriff,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  The driver of the sedan was young and wore a white shirt and tie and had a fresh haircut. “Nothing now,” he said. “We just got served. Somebody ought to explain to you people that this isn’t 1865.”

  “Carolyn Blanchet got an injunction against the United States governmen
t?” Helen said.

  “You got it. We’ll be back later. Have fun, Sheriff,” the driver said.

  I watched the convoy drive onto the service road. “She probably got a local judge to create some temporary obstacles for the IRS or the SEC. But they’ll cut through it with a couple of phone calls,” I said.

  “Anything these guys wanted from her has already gone through a shredding machine. Carolyn Blanchet gets what she wants and makes few mistakes.”

  I hated to ask the question that had been hanging in the air every time Carolyn Blanchet’s name was mentioned. “Helen, how well do you know her?”

  “If you haven’t heard, Pops, when we’re on the job, I’m your boss. You don’t question your boss about her personal life. That said, when we’re off the job, you still do not question me about my personal life. Understood?”

  “No.”

  “You want to explain that?”

  We were still stationary in the driveway, the sunlight spangling inside the oak canopy overhead. I kept my eyes straight ahead, the side of my face almost wrinkling under Helen’s gaze. “I think you know more about Carolyn than you’ve let on,” I said.

  When I looked at her, I saw a level of anger in her face that made me wince. “I have a circle of friends in New Orleans you probably haven’t met,” she said. “Carolyn Blanchet has had relationships with some of them. All of them were the worse for it. She uses people and throws them away like Kleenex. She’s also a degenerate. Black leather, masks, chains, boots. Would you like more detail?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

  “Because she hasn’t been an active part of the investigation of a crime committed in Iberia Parish.”

  “That’s pretty disingenuous, if you ask me.”

  And in that mood, not speaking, we parked the cruiser in front of the house and walked through the side yard to the tennis court, where we could hear someone whocking balls that were being fired over the net by an automatic ball machine.

  Carolyn was wearing blue sweatpants and a sports bra and was hitting the balls two-handed, her platinum hair shiny with perspiration, her skin sun-browned with freckles, her baby fat wedging over her waistband as she put all her weight into her swing.