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

screen of the television set. “What did you want to tell me earlier?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    “You’re a case.”
    She went into her bedroom and put on her pajamas. I heard her pull back the covers on her bed and lie down. I took a blanket and a spare pillow out of the hall closet and went into her room and spread the blanket on the floor. I lay down on top of it, my arm resting on my forehead.
    “Dave, no one is this crazy,” she said.
    “I know.”
    “I’m not ten years old anymore.”
    “You don’t have to tell me.”
    “Stop acting like this,” she said.
    “To try to control the lives of other people is a form of arrogance. The only form of behavior that is more arrogant is to claim that we know the will of God. I owe you an apology. I’ve tried to impose my will on you all your life.”
    “I appreciate what you say. But that doesn’t change the real problem, does it?”
    “What’s the real problem?”
    “You don’t approve of Kermit.”
    “I think at heart he’s probably a decent man. But that’s not my judgment to make.”
    “What about Robert Weingart?”
    “I have nothing to say about him.” The only sound in the room was the sweep of wind in the trees and the ping of an acorn on the roof. I propped myself up on my elbow. “You want to tell me something?” I asked.
    “Robert met us at Bojangles,” she said. “A Vietnamese girl works in there. She brought us our drinks, and he told her he’d ordered iced tea without sweetener rather than white wine. He said he was going to write tonight and he never drank before he wrote. But I heard him. He ordered wine. When she took it back, he watched her all the way to the bar with this ugly smile. Why would he do that?”
    “Maybe he just forgot what he ordered.”
    “No, I could see it in his eyes. He enjoyed it.”
    “Where was Kermit when this happened?”
    “In the men’s room.”
    “Did you tell him about it?”
    “No.”
    I didn’t think it was the time to force her to think about the nature of Kermit’s relationship with Weingart. “Maybe you should just forget about Weingart. Kermit will come to a resolution about him at some point in his life.”
    “What do you mean by ‘resolution’?”
    “They seem quite close.”
    “What are you implying?”
    “Nothing. They’re both artists. Kermit sees a different person in Weingart from the one you do, or at least the Robert Weingart you were sitting with tonight.”
    I heard her fix her pillow. Then she looked down at me. “Good night, Dave,” she said.
    “Good night, little guy.”
    “Little guy, yourself.”
    I rested my arm across my eyes and began to drift off to sleep. I felt her touch my shoulder. “I love you, Dave.”
    “I love you, too, Alf.”
    “Give Kermit a chance, will you?”
    “I will. I promise,” I replied.

CHAPTER
5
    I N THE MORNING I used the Google search mechanism on the department computer to find the photograph that evidently Elmore Latiolais had seen in a newspaper. It took a while, since I had no cross-references except the mention by Elmore Latiolais’s convict buddy that the man in the photo was white and a famous humanitarian. Or perhaps someone who had been in the movies.
    I typed in Robert Weingart’s name and got nothing but listings of book reviews and feature articles on the remarkable turnaround in the career of a lifetime felon whose autobiography had become the most celebrated literary work by a convict author since the publication of Soul on Ice.
    Then I entered the name of Kermit Aloysius Abelard. The article and photograph I found had been published two weeks ago on the business page of a Mississippi newspaper. But the article was less about Kermit than his co-speaker at a civic gathering in Jackson, the state capital. The co-speaker was Layton Blanchet, one of those iconic, antithetically mixed personalities the American South has produced unrelentingly since Reconstruction. In the photograph, Kermit was seated at the