“Why would you think I’d have a special interest in Layton?”
“The guy’s businesses are unraveling. I think every law enforcement agency in the government is taking a look at him.”
It took me under a half hour to meet the sheriff at an airboat dock on the edge of the great watery expanse known as the Atchafalaya Basin, and it took even less time to cross a wide, flat bay dimpled with raindrops and enter a bayou that wound between flooded gum and willow trees from which flocks of egrets rose clattering into the sky. The Basin isn’t one entity but instead an enormous geographical composite, bigger than the Florida Everglades, containing rivers, bayous, industrial canals, flooded woods, hummocks, and wetlands that bleed as far as the eye can see into the Gulf of Mexico. It is also a cultural redoubt, one where people still speak French and live off the computer. It’s a place where, if need be, you can escape through a hole in the dimension and say au revoir to the complexities of modern times.
The airboat sailed sideways over sand spits that were as slick as a wet handkerchief and dented the trees with the backdraft and scattered leaves on the bayou’s surface. Suddenly we were in open water, where a houseboat was moored between an island of hard-packed sand and a levee that was green from the spring rains and dotted with buttercups inside the gloom, all of it capped by a sky laden with clouds that still flickered with electricity from last night’s storm.
A powerboat with a crime scene investigator and two uniformed deputies in it had already arrived at the levee, and the deputies were stringing yellow tape through the cypress trees that grew in the shallows around the houseboat. The wind was blowing out of the south, and it had pushed an aluminum rowboat into the cypress knees that protruded from the water’s surface along the edge of the island. The pilot of the airboat cut the engine and let our momentum slide us up on the levee, twenty yards past the far side of the tape.
Sheriff Judice and I crossed a plank walkway onto the island and walked toward the rowboat that seemed locked inside a scrim of floating algae. “Did you talk much with Blanchet yesterday?” he asked.
“Yeah, at some length.”
“How would you describe him?”
“Depressed, not quite rational.”
“Suicidal?”
“It’s possible. But I don’t know if I’d go that far.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“My experience has been that most suicide victims want to leave behind a legacy of guilt and sorrow. They’re angry at their fate, and they have fantasies whereby they survive their death and watch other people clean up the mess they’ve made. They tend to favor shotguns, razors, and big handguns that leave lots of splatter.”
“Blanchet wasn’t angry?”
“I’m not much of an expert on these matters, Sheriff.”
“Say what’s on your mind, Dave.”
“My experience has been that when Layton’s kind lose it, they write their names on the wall with someone else’s blood, not their own.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the sheriff look at me. “You were in Vietnam?” he said.
“What about it?”
“People can dwell on the dark side sometimes. Hell, I do.”
I started to speak, then let his remark slide.
“Jesus Christ, look at this,” he said.
The rowboat was rocking slightly in the wind, the aluminum hull knocking against the cypress knees and a chunk of concrete in the shallows. Inside it lay a huge athletic man dressed in golf slacks and a tropical-print sport shirt and wearing a Rolex watch. He was on his back, as though he had been trying to find a comfortable place to rest inside an impossible environment, a hole the size of a dime under his chin. His skullcap and most of his brains were hanging in the lower branches of a willow tree that extended over the water. His eyes were open, the brilliant butanelike glow replaced by a color that reminded me of soured milk. The index finger of his right hand was still twisted in the trigger guard of a 1911-model .45 auto. The crime scene investigator stood to one side, snapping pictures. A single brass shell casing rolled back and forth in a half inch of rainwater in the bottom of the boat.
It was spring, but the air was unseasonably cool, a cloud of fog rising from a wooded island on the far side of the bay. In a tropical country many years ago, a philosophical line sergeant once told me, “You’re born alone, and you die alone. It’s a giant clusterfuck out there, Loot.” I had told my friend the sergeant he was wrong. But as I stared at the ruined and disbelieving face of Layton Blanchet, and at the expensive clothes he had died in and the way the sun-gold hairs on his wrist curled around the band on his Rolex watch, I doubted Layton would have disagreed with him.
A black Ford pickup was parked on the levee, the windows down. “We’ll run the tag, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Blanchet or his wife driving that truck around Franklin,” the sheriff said, squatting down, looking more closely at the body. He glanced at the top of the levee and at the truck again. “Why would he leave the windows down? It was raining all night and into the morning. Think he just didn’t care?”
“Good question,” I said.
The sheriff pulled a pair of polyethylene gloves over his hands and slipped the .45 from Layton’s finger, pointing the muzzle at the water, away from me and his deputies. He depressed the release button on the magazine and dropped it from the frame into a Ziploc bag, then pulled back the slide and ejected the live round from the chamber. There were flecks of blood on the steel sight and around the .45’s muzzle. There was no question about the distance of the gun from the wound it had inflicted. The hole under Layton’s chin was seared around the edges from the muzzle flash, puffed on one side from the gases that had tunneled upward with the bullet through Layton’s mouth and brain cavity.
The sheriff placed the .45 in a separate Ziploc bag and the spent casing and live round with it. “Let’s take a look in the houseboat,” he said.
The door was unlocked. The interior was immaculate, the bunks made, the galley squared away, the pots and pans gleaming and hung from hooks, the propane stove free of even water spots, the teakwood wheel in the pilot’s compartment freshly polished, all the brass fittings rubbed as smooth and golden and soft-looking as browned butter.
By the propane stove was a paper shopping bag, and inside it were pieces of a broken drinking glass. A coffee cup and a bottle of vodka had been left on a yellow linoleum counter by the sink. In one corner I could see tiny splinters of glass that someone had not swept up.
“What do you make of it?” the sheriff asked his crime scene investigator.
The investigator shrugged. “He had a drink and then went outside and did it? Search me.”
“What do you think, Dave?” the sheriff said.
“I don’t understand why Layton would come out here to shoot himself,” I replied.
“I think you just don’t buy Blanchet as a suicide,” the sheriff said.
“I don’t. But I’m often wrong. You haven’t talked with his wife?”
“I can’t find her. From what I hear, that’s not unusual.”
“That’s my point, Sheriff,” I said. “Layton thought his wife was sleeping around. If Layton was going to punch somebody’s ticket, I think it would have been hers or her lover’s or both of them.”
“What if he was drunk?” the crime scene investigator said.
“Layton didn’t get drunk. Maybe he had a psychotic break. It happens. Maybe I don’t want to admit I grilled him pretty hard yesterday and helped push him over the edge.”
But I had lost the attention of both the sheriff and his crime scene investigator. “The coroner should be here in a few minutes,” the sheriff said. “We’ll get an estimated time of death and bag it up here. What’s bothering you, Dave?”
“Everything,” I said. “He drives out here in his truck, in the rain, with his windows down. He walks down the levee in the rain, unlocks the houseboat, and maybe has a drink by the sink. Except he doesn’t track up the floor. Then he goe
s back outside, again in the rain, and sits in a rowboat and blows off the top of his head.”
“Maybe he was never on the houseboat,” the crime scene investigator said.
“Then who left it unlocked?” I said.
“People forget to lock their doors, Robicheaux,” the crime scene investigator said. “There’s nothing rational about suicidal behavior. That’s why it’s called suicidal behavior.”
The wind had started gusting, cutting long V-shaped patterns on the surface of the bay. I was out of my bailiwick and did not want to seem contrary and grandiose. Police officers in Louisiana are underpaid and are often forced to give special consideration to people whom they despise, and I did not want to show disrespect to either the sheriff or his men. But I had known Layton Blanchet for decades, and they had not. So I simply said, “I appreciate y’all inviting me out here.”
We went back up the plank walkway onto the levee. I didn’t want to look at Layton again. I couldn’t say I had ever admired him or had been sympathetic to his problems or was even sympathetic to the fact that he, like me and others, had been born poor to parents who picked cotton and broke corn for a living. Layton was not a victim or an aberration; his way of life and his fate were of his own creation. Ultimately Layton was us. He had learned his value system from the oligarchy, people who possessed one eye in the kingdom of the blind. Like Huey Long, Layton became the dictatorial and imperious creature he hated. His egalitarian ways and personal generosity were a fraud. The antebellum home that resembled a wedding cake couched in a green arbor was now someone else’s, beckoning to the rest of us, telling us it could be ours, too. What a folly all of it was, I thought.
As we passed the rowboat, I lowered my eyes so I would not have to look upon Layton’s face. Then I stopped.
“What is it?” the sheriff asked.
The wind had divided and separated the net of algae that had blown against the rowboat and the bank. In an inch of water sliding up and down on the silt, between the aluminum hull of the boat and a cluster of cypress knees, I saw a metallic glint. I squatted down and lifted up a .45 casing with the tip of my ballpoint pen. “He either fired once and missed, or blew his head off and then fired a second time for recreational purposes,” I said.
“Or the blowback caused an involuntary trigger pull and discharged the second round,” the scene investigator said.
“Could be, but that almost never happens on the 1911-model forty-five. The grip safety on the frame requires too much pressure from the heel of the hand,” I said. “Plus, all the motors in his head were cut when the first round emptied his brainpan.”
“What do you think happened?” the sheriff asked.
“I think somebody shot and killed Layton, then put the forty-five in his hand and fired a second round so a gunshot residue analysis would show burnt gunpowder on his skin. But whoever did it couldn’t find the second casing.”
“So why didn’t he take the one in the bottom of the boat?” the sheriff said.
“Maybe he just didn’t think it through,” I replied.
“Yeah, and maybe the second casing has been lying there days or weeks,” the scene investigator said.
“That’s possible,” I said.
“So we just don’t know,” the sheriff said.
“I guess not,” I said.
I walked back to the airboat by myself and waited for the coroner and said no more on the subject. The sheriff and his investigator wanted to wrap it up. I couldn’t blame them. I turned around and faced the bay and let the wind and rain blow in my face. I breathed in the damp cleanness of the air and the smell of fish spawn and humus and wet trees back in the swamp. None of it cost five cents, and that was a thought I hoped to keep in the forefront of my mind as long as I lived.
SOMETIMES IN POLICE work you get an undeserved break. Or the bad guys do something that’s really dumb. Or the bad guys turn out to be more deranged than you thought they were. The day after Layton Blanchet’s death, our dispatcher buzzed my extension. “There’s a guy out here to see you,” he said.
“Who?” I asked.
Wally, our three-hundred-pound hypertensive dispatcher, was known as the department’s comedian and professional cynic. Essentially he was a good soul, but he invested most of his energy in trying to convince people otherwise. “He won’t give his name. He says he’ll only talk to you.”
“What’s he look like?”
He thought about it. “I’d say he looks like the bore brush you run through a gun barrel. He’s also got a birthmark running out of his hair down the back of his neck, like maybe a bird with the red shits sat on his head.”
“What’s this fellow doing now?”
“Eating a Big Mac and drinking a soda and wiping his mout’ on the paper towels he got out of our can.”
“Get a deputy to escort him up here. Also tell Helen that Mr. Vidor Perkins is in the building.”
Then Wally said something that was unusual even for him. “Dave, who is this guy?”
“The real deal, Wally.”
When Vidor Perkins sat down in front of my desk, he was holding a clipboard in one hand and a ballpoint in the other, his idiot’s grin firmly in place. “Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “Let me explain the purpose of my visit.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“I’m writing my own book. Folks have always tole me I have a flair for it.”
“That’s interesting. How can I help you with that?”
Aside from their moral vacuity, Perkins’s eyes had another abiding and singular characteristic: The pupils seem to remain the size of pinheads, regardless of where he was. I remembered something Elmore Latiolais had said when I interviewed him on the prison work gang in Mississippi: “There’s no money in selling cooze no more. Herman Stanga is into meth.”
“Where were you educated, Mr. Robicheaux?” Perkins asked, crossing his legs at the knee, his expression anticipatory, respectful, his pen poised over his clipboard.
“I don’t think my background will be of great interest to your readership.”
“Don’t underestimate either yourself or my book. This is gonna be a humdinger of a story. I’ll let you in on a secret. Rob Weingart’s book got wrote mostly by his female attorney. Mine is gonna be written by my own hand, without no he’p from people who have no idea how things really work.”
I looked at his eyes and the manic way he smiled and the twitches under his facial skin, and I had little doubt that Vidor Perkins not only had an addiction but that it had moved into overdrive. “Something happen between you and Weingart?” I said.
“I wouldn’t say exactly between me and him. More like between me and that nasty old man.”
“Mr. Abelard?”
“He tole Rob he don’t need the likes of me hanging around his island. I bet you think that’s ’cause of my prior troubles with the law.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Over his shoulder, I saw Helen look through the glass in my office door. Then her face went away.
“It don’t have anything to do with my history. It’s because of the class of people I come from. In Mr. Abelard’s mind, I’m po’ white trash from a tenant farm in north Alabama. It’s in my diction and my frame of reference. For a man like Mr. Abelard, those things are worse than the mark of Cain. It ain’t much different here’bouts, is it?”
“I have no idea what goes on in Mr. Abelard’s mind.”
“Let me set y’all straight on a couple of things. I never intentionally harmed a person in my whole life.”
“Your sheet seems to indicate otherwise.”
He nodded as though agreeing with me. “When we lived in the projects, I took Social Security checks from some old people’s mailboxes. But it was two other boys done the beating up on them, not me. And I got a lot of gone between me and them boys later on.”
“You were also arrested in an arson that killed three people. One of them was a child.”
“No, sir, I had nothing to do with t
hat fire. I knew who did, but I kept my mouth shut. That wasn’t easy for a boy who was fifteen years old and getting hit upside the head with the Birmingham telephone directory.”
“Why are you here, Mr. Perkins?”
As he gazed around my office, his pale blue eyes shone with the self-satisfied pleasure of a man who knew that he was one of the very few who understood the complexity of the world. “You think I’m trying to fool you about my book. I called a literary agent. Man from the William Morris Agency. Same man your daughter had dinner with when he was visiting here. He said soon as I’m done to fire off my manuscript to him. What do you think about that? Your daughter and me might end up colleagues.”
“That last part isn’t going to happen.”
“Maybe not. But I know a bunch of people that’s going down. And I’m gonna put it all in my book. I’ll give you a little tidbit here, Mr. Robicheaux. About twenty years back, Kermit Abelard’s parents disappeared from their yacht out in the Bermuda Triangle, didn’t they?”
“The story is they were lost in a storm off Bimini.”
“‘Story’ is the word. That nasty old man who don’t want me on his island was doing business with the Giacano family in New Orleans. Their business was running weed and coke into Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. Mr. Abelard didn’t pay his tab with the dagos, and the dagos had both his son and his daughter-in-law wrapped with chains and sunk in about sixty feet of water.”
“Was Weingart mixed up with this?”
“Ask him, or read my book when it comes out. Now, tell me a little bit about your education and service record and war experiences, if you’ve had any. Stuff I can kind of soup up the description with.”
“Who killed the Canadian girl and Bernadette Latiolais, Mr. Perkins?”