The Glass Rainbow

We were both silent. Somebody opened the door and started to come in. “We’re tied up in here right now,” I said.

The door closed and the person went away. “Helen says you told her you were never on Stanga’s property,” I said.

“That’s right, I was never there.”

“Who might have taken the pen out of your office or your cottage?”

“Layton Blanchet came to my office when he hired me to follow his wife around. I’ve had a couple of female guests at the cottage. I’m not necessarily talking about the boom-boom express, maybe just for drinks or something to eat before we went to the casino.”

“Emma Poche was one of them?”

“Definitely.”

“But what?”

“That was the boom-boom express-in the sack, on the furniture, in the shower, maybe on the ceiling. I crashed into the wall with her and cracked the plaster. She deserves her own zip code down there. It was like swimming in the Caribbean. I told her she was part mermaid.”

“Will you stop that?”

“I’m trying to tell you we were occupied. She wasn’t rifling my dresser or closet or whenever I lost that damn pen.”

“You didn’t sleep?”

“I think both of us kind of passed out.”

“So you don’t know what she did?”

“She’s not that kind of person, Dave.”

“Yeah, I know. You told me she’s cute because she has a tattoo on her butt.”

“You ought to see it.”

“When are you going to grow up? Don’t you realize how serious this is?”

“What am I supposed to do, go into mourning for myself? I don’t care if I was blacked out or not. I didn’t pop Stanga. If other people don’t believe me, that’s their problem. How about I treat you and Molly and Alafair to dinner at the casino tonight? You’re giving me a headache here.”

I LEFT THE health club and called Molly and said I was working late and that I was not sure when I would be home.

“Alafair told me about her encounter with that creep Perkins,” she said. “Is this related?”

“I’m not sure where he is right now.”

“Is Clete with you?”

“No, I just left him at the health club.”

“Let Helen and the department handle this.”

“Sure.”

“Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.

“If you’re going after this guy, I want to be with you.”

“I’ll call you back later. Everything is fine. I just got a little behind in my schedule today.”

“Don’t you hang up on me.”

“I’m losing the signal,” I said.

My statement to Molly had not been a total lie. In truth, I had no plan about Vidor Perkins. He was obviously a psychopath, inured to threats and pain and deprivation by a lifetime of institutionalization. Worse, he delighted in attention, particularly when he had an audience. Any con who turns down parole from a joint like Huntsville and of his own volition does twenty-seven months in a cotton field under the tender and loving supervision of mounted Texas gunbulls has demonstrated a degree of toughness that cannot be dismissed easily. Also, I still believed that Perkins had an agenda that may have involved betrayal of either the Abelards or Layton Blanchet or Robert Weingart. But I couldn’t be sure. In fact, I could not be sure about anything in this case, except that Perkins had to leave my daughter alone.

I drove down Old Jeanerette Road through fields of waving sugarcane and past the whitewashed crypts that stood in a shady copse, the ground green with lichen that looked as soft as felt, all of it five feet from a bend in the road, like an abiding visual reminder, at least for me, of the earth’s gravitational claim upon the quick.

I pulled into Perkins’s gravel driveway. His stucco bungalow was already deep in shadow inside the pecan trees and slash pines that surrounded it, his pickup truck parked under the porte cochere. His flower beds were mulched and blooming with azaleas and impatiens and rosebushes. A water bird jittered a rainbowlike haze across the front lawn. On the far side of the two-lane, the property extended all the way down to the Teche, a long grassy slope pooled with the shade of giant live oaks that were silhouetted against a red sun. It was an idyllic scene except for the little black girl who sat on the front steps, her knees pinched close together, her hands knotted in her lap.

I got out of my pickup and walked toward her. From the backyard, I could hear a thick, whapping sound, like a hard object striking a canvas or plastic cover. The little girl was the same one Helen and I had told not to visit Vidor Perkins’s home by herself again.

“Remember me?” I said.

“Yes, suh. You and the lady drove me home,” she replied.

“You promised us you wouldn’t come back here without your mommy.”

“She dropped me off. She takes care of a sick lady. My auntie couldn’t keep me.” She spoke in a monotone, her face empty.

I sat down on the steps, one step lower than she was. I gazed at the bayou. “Your name is Clara?”

“Yes, suh.”

“Did something bad happen at Mr. Vidor’s house today, Clara?”

In the silence, I could hear the slash pines swaying in the wind, the pine needles tinkling on the rain gutters.

“Clara, nothing bad will happen to you for telling the truth. Did Mr. Vidor do something he shouldn’t have?”

“I want to go back home now.”

“I’ll take you there, I promise. But you need to tell me what Mr. Vidor did.”

“Took my picture.”

“In what way?”

“Suh?”

“How were you dressed when he took your picture?” I heard the whapping sound from the backyard again. “Were you wearing your dress and your shirt just like you are now?”

“Mr. Vidor tole me to lie on the couch. He tole me to put my thumb in my mout’. Then he tole me to put my hands behind my head.”

“How many pictures did he take of you, Clara?”

“Two or t’ree.”

“Did Mr. Vidor touch you at all in a place he shouldn’t have?”

“No, suh. He just took the pictures. I tole him I didn’t want to do that no more, and he stopped.”

“Okay, Clara. I want you to wait here while I straighten out a couple of things with Mr. Vidor. Then I’ll take you home and a lady will come out from the sheriff’s department and stay with you until your mommy gets off work. But you remember what I say: You’re a good little girl. You’ve helped out a police officer, and that’s what good guys do. You’re one of the good guys, do you understand that?”

I walked around the side of the house just as Vidor Perkins pulled back an archer’s bow and drove an arrow into a plastic bull’s-eye draped across a stack of hay bales. He glanced over his shoulder at me, then pulled another arrow from the quiver on his back and fitted the shaft on the bow string. “I figured you’d be along directly,” he said. He lifted the bow, pulling back the string, his shoulders taut with tension. A second after he released the shaft, it whapped dead center in the target, quivering with a sound like a twanged bobby pin.

“Help me out here, Mr. Perkins,” I said. “I think Robert Weingart told you to give my daughter the worst time