The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke Page B

of the Somoza family in Nicaragua, supervising a cockfight in Batista-era Cuba, receiving a civilian medal for the productivity of munitions that his defense plant had manufactured during the Vietnam War, and finally, Timothy Abelard overseeing a group of black farmworkers in a field of wind-swirling sugarcane.
    In the last photograph, the cane cutters were bent to their work, their shins sheathed in aluminum guards. Only Timothy Abelard was looking at the camera, his pressed clothes powdered with lint from the cane. His expression was that of a gentleman who had made his peace with the world and did not consign his destiny or the care of either his family or his property to others.
    Then I realized that I was being stared at, in a fashion that is not only invasive but fills you with a sense of moral culpability, as though somehow, through a lapse of manners, you have invited the disdain of another.
    Timothy Abelard was sitting in a wheelchair no more than ten feet away, a black female nurse stationed behind him. Eight or nine years ago he had become a recluse without ever offering a public explanation of his infirmity. Some people said he’d developed an inoperable tumor in the brain; others said he had been dragged by his horse during an electric storm. His skin was luminescent from the absence of sunlight.
    “Hi, Pa’pere. Did you want to join us?” Kermit said.
    But Timothy Abelard’s eyes did not leave my face. They had the intensity of a hawk’s, and like a hawk’s, they did not occupy themselves with thoughts about good or evil or the distinction between the two. He was well groomed, his hair thin and combed like strands of bronze wire across his pate. His smile could be called kindly and deferential, even likable, in the way we want old people to be wise and likable. But the intrusive nature of his gaze was unrelenting.
    “How are you, sir?” I said.
    “I know you. Or I think I do. What’s your name?” he said.
    “Dave Robicheaux, from the Iberia Sheriff’s Department,” I said.
    “You investigating a crime, suh?” he said, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
    “I had some questions about the St. Jude Project.”
    “That’s a new one on me. What is it?” he said.
    “I guess that makes two of us,” I said. “Do you remember my father? His name was Aldous Robicheaux, but everyone called him Big Aldous.”
    “He was in the oil business?”
    “He was a derrick man. He died in an offshore blowout.”
    “I’m forgetful sometimes. Yes, I do remember him. He was an extraordinary man in a fistfight. He took on the whole bar at Provost’s one night.”
    “That was my father,” I replied.
    “You say he was killed on a rig?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said, as though the event were yesterday.
    I waited for Kermit to introduce Clete, but he didn’t. “Miss Jewel, would you get Pa’pere ready to go to Lafayette? He’s having dinner with friends this evening. I’ll have the car brought around.”
    “Yes, suh,” the nurse said.
    “Come on, Dave, let’s go out here on the porch,” Kermit said, jiggling his fingers at me, using my first name now, showing some of the imperious manner that I associated with his background. I was beginning to wonder if my earlier sympathies with him had been misplaced.
    Entering the sunporch was like stepping into another environment, one that was as different from the interior of the house as a sick ward is from a brightly lit fairground on a summer evening. The windows on the porch were paneled with stained-glass designs of bluebirds and parrots, kneeling saints, chains of camellias and roses and orchids, unicorns and satyrs at play, a knight in red armor impaling a dragon with a spear. The western sunlight shining through the panels created a stunning effect, like shards of brilliant color splintering apart and re-forming themselves inside a kaleidoscope.
    “Sorry to be late for our little repast,” Robert Weingart said behind me.
    He was wearing