The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel Read Free

or family members using cheap cameras and one-hour development services. The backdrops were in poor neighborhoods where the residents parked their cars in the yards and the litter in the rain ditches disappeared inside the weeds during the summer and was exposed again during the winter. Two of the victims were white, four were black. Some of them were pretty. All of them were young. None of them looked unhappy. None of them probably had any idea of the fate that awaited them.
    “They all lived sout’ of the tracks, didn’t they?” he said.
    “That’s right. Do you recognize them?”
    “No, I ain’t seen none of them. You ain’t shown me my sister’s picture.”
    I removed the seventh photo from my pocket and handed it to him. The girl in it had been seventeen when she died. She was last seen leaving a dollar store at four o’clock in the afternoon. She had a sweet, round face and was smiling in the photograph.
    Elmore Latiolais cupped the photo in his palm. He stared at it for a long time, then shielded his eyes as though avoiding the sun’s glare. “Can I keep it?” he said.
    “Sorry,” I replied.
    He nodded and returned the photo to me, his eyes moist, his gold Brillo pad of a haircut popping with sweat.
    “You said you hadn’t seen any of the other victims. How did you know they lived south of the tracks?” I said.
    “That’s what I mean when I say you got your head up your ass. If they lived nort’ of the railroad track, y’all would be tearing the state of Lou’sana apart to get the man who killed them.”
    Elmore Latiolais was not a likable man. In all probability, he had committed crimes that were worse in nature than those for which he had been punished. But the fact he considered Herman Stanga a cancer indicated, at least to me, that Elmore was still held together by the same glue as the rest of us. Herman Stanga was another matter. Herman Stanga was a man I hated, maybe less for what he was personally than what he represented, but I hated him just the same, to the degree that I did not want to be armed and alone with him.
    I said good-bye to Elmore Latiolais.
    “You ain’t gonna he’p out?” he said.
    “You haven’t told me anything that could be considered of investigative value.”
    “‘Investigative value’? Yeah, I like them kind of words. Herman killed a cousin of mine ten years back. He give her a hotshot and blew her heart out. When he knowed I was onto him, he paid a guy to joog me. Y’all wasn’t interested then, y’all ain’t interested now.”
    “I’m sorry for your loss,” I replied.
    “Yeah,” he said.
    H ERMAN WAS ONE of those singular individuals for whom there is no adequate categorical description. He deliberately created addiction among his own people by giving what he called “entrepreneurial start-up flake” to teenage dealers. He encouraged his rock queens to eat fried food so their extra weight would signal to their customers that they were AIDS-free. He pimped off his white girls to black johns and his black girls to white johns. If a perv who liked it rough got into the mix, that was just the way it flushed sometimes. “Harry Truman integrated the United States Army. I’m taking multiculturalism and equal opportunity to a much higher level,” he liked to say.
    By his own definition of himself, he was always rocking to his own rhythms, high on his own rebop and snap-crackle-and-pop, and didn’t “need to slam no gram to be what I am.” He had the face of a pixie, his mustache trimmed into tiny black wings on his upper lip, his eyes bright with innocent mischief, the harmless satyr peeking out of the bushes. His physique was hard and lean, his skin stretched tight on his bones and tendons like a meth addict’s, though he used drugs rarely, and only for recreational purposes. He liked to kick off his clothes by the poolside, down to his white silk boxer shorts, and sunbathe on a floating air mattress in the middle of his swimming pool, wraparound