On Wednesday, just before quitting time, Helen came into my office with a back section of the Baton Rouge Advocate folded in her hand. “What was the name of the convict you interviewed in Mississippi?”
“Elmore Latiolais.”
“I shouldn’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“Help you drag somebody else’s problem into our workload.” She dropped the newspaper on my desk pad.
I picked up the paper and read the story. It was four paragraphs in length. It was the kind of news story that any journalist or educated cop instantly recognizes as one that replicated a press handout or a statement made by a public information officer rather than an account based on an eyewitness interview. It was written in the passive voice and avoided specifics other than the fact that Elmore Latiolais, a man with a long criminal history, had been shot to death when he stole a pistol from a prison vehicle and threatened to kill a prison guard.
“Latiolais was a check writer and a bigamist and a thief. I don’t see this guy threatening prison personnel with a stolen firearm.”
“Pops, let the state of Mississippi deal with it.”
“So why bring me the news story?”
“Because you have a right to see it. That doesn’t mean you have a right to act on it.”
“You brought it to me because you know this story sucks.”
“Oh, boy.”
“Listen, Helen—”
She walked out the door, shaking her head, probably more at herself than at me.
I called Jimmy Darl Thigpin on his cell phone, expecting my call to go immediately to voice mail. But it didn’t.
“Thigpin,” a voice said.
“It’s Dave Robicheaux.”
“I figured.”
“I just read the story on Latiolais’s death. What happened?”
“I killed him. Somebody should have done it to that sonofabitch a long time ago.”
“He had a gun?”
“That’s right. He was getting it out of my cab.”
The image his words conjured up didn’t fit. “But he didn’t actually have the gun in hand?”
“What did the newspaper say?”
“It stated he threatened you.”
“’Cause that’s what he did.”
“How did Latiolais get access to the cab of your truck? What was an unsecured weapon doing in it?”
“A new man screwed up.”
“Tell me straight-out, Cap, this man verbally threatened you while holding a loaded weapon in his hand. That’s what happened? You were at mortal risk?”
“You’re over the line, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“The question stands. Will you answer it?”
“It what ?”
“You put him in lockup because you said he had some jackrabbit in him. Then you took him out of lockup and left him unattended around a firearm. A man of your experience did that?”
“This conversation is over.”
“Latiolais wasn’t a violent offender.”
“Did you hear me?”
“No, I didn’t, not at all. Why didn’t you call and tell me Latiolais had more information for me? I think you just killed a man who could have helped solve several homicides in our area.”
“I’ve had about all this I can take. You stay the hell away from me.”
He broke the connection. And I was glad he did. There were times in my job when I wanted to dig a hole in the earth and bury my shield and scrub my skin with peroxide.
IT’S THE CONTENTION of Alcoholics Anonymous that drinking is but the symptom of the illness. Those afflicted souls who quit drinking but do nothing else to change their way of life become what are called “dry drunks.” Often they channel their bitterness and anger into the lives of others. They also seek to control everyone around them, and they accomplish this end by the most insidious means possible: the inculcation of guilt and fear and low self-esteem in those who are unfortunate enough to be in their sway.
A person who practices the steps and principles of A.A. has little latitude in certain situations. When we are wrong about something, we have to admit it promptly. Then we have to make amends and restitution. In moments like these, a person may yearn for an easier way—say, a tall glass packed with shaved ice, stained with four jiggers of Black Jack Daniel’s, wrapped with a napkin to keep the coldness inside the glass, a sprig of mint inserted in the ice.
After supper, I watched Alafair feed Tripod and Snuggs in the backyard. She walked past me into the kitchen without speaking. I followed her inside and asked her to take a walk with me.
“I’m going out,” she said.
“It won’t take long.”
“I have to dress.”
“You going out with Kermit?”
“What about it? Should I arrange for him to pick me up somewhere else?”
“No.”
“What did you want to talk about?”
Molly was watching CNN in the living room. I heard her turn off the television and walk into the hallway that gave onto the kitchen.
“Nothing. It’s a nice evening. I just thought you might want to take a walk,” I said.
I left the house and went down the street to Clementine’s, where I knew I would find Clete Purcel at the bar. He was wearing cream-colored pleated slacks and oxblood loafers and a starched short-sleeved shirt printed with big gray and white flowers, his porkpie hat tilted forward on his head. He was sipping from a frosted mug of draft beer while the bartender poured his shot glass to the brim with Johnnie Walker. Clete looked at my reflection in the yellowed mahogany-framed mirror behind the bar. His eyes were lit with an alcoholic shine.
“You see the story about Elmore Latiolais?” he asked.
“Helen showed it to me.”
“That gunbull friend of yours capped him?”
“Jimmy Darl Thigpin is not my friend.”
“But he’s the guy who capped Latiolais, right?”
“He’s the one.”
“How do you read it?”
“I’m not sure. Why are you drinking boilermakers?”
“I only do it when I’m alone or with people. It’s not a problem.”
“It’s not funny, either.”
“Give Dave a soda and lime, will you?” Clete said to the bartender.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Chasing dead ends in Jeff Davis Parish.” He squeezed his temples. “My lawyer talked to the DA in St. Martinville today. A half-dozen witnesses from the Gate Mouth club are prepared to testify against me. They photographed me with their cell phones while I was smashing Herman Stanga’s face into a tree trunk. My lawyer says if I plea out, I’ll have to do at least a year.”
“We’re not going to let that happen, Cletus.”
“You know what the DA said? ‘We’re tired of this guy wiping his ass on us.’”
The bartender set a glass of ice and carbonated water, with a lime slice floating in it, on a paper napkin by my hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t order that,” I said.
“You want coffee?” he asked.
“No, thanks.”
“Let me know when you need something,” the bartender said. He threw the carbonated drink into the sink and walked away. I had a hard time taking my eyes away from the back of his neck.
“Trouble on the home front?” Clete said.
“No, none.”
Clete looked at me for a long time. “You dream about it very much?”
“About what?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
Don’t enter into it, I heard a voice say. But I seldom take my best advice. “From time to time.”
“What’s in the dream?”
“Why be morbid? Nobody gets a pass on it. We have today. That’s all any of us gets.”
“Tell me what’s in the dream.”
“A square hole in the ground, deep in the forest. The wind is blowing, shredding leaves off the trees, but there’s no sound or color in the woods.
It’s like the sun went over the edge of the horizon and died, and this time you know with absolute certainty it’s never coming up again. When I wake up, I can’t go back to sleep. I feel like weevil worms are eating their way through my heart.”
Clete let out his breath, then drank the shot glass of Johnnie Walker all the way to the bottom, never blinking. He chased it with beer from his mug, his cheeks turning as red as apples. “Fuck it,” he said.
A man on the next stool who had been talking with a woman turned and stared at Clete.
“Help you with something?” Clete said.
“No, sir,” the man said. “I was just looking at the clock.”
“Glad to hear it,” Clete said. “Ralph, give this man and his lady a drink.”
I got up from the bar stool and placed my hand on Clete’s shoulder. I could feel the heat in his muscles through his shirt. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
“Don’t let them get behind you,” he replied. “The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever. We were the only two beat cops the Panthers allowed into the Desire. Let somebody top that.”
Clete’s words would make no sense to anyone else. But what he said was true. In 1970 the Black Panthers took control of the Desire Project and reduced crime to almost zero. But the Panthers also had a violent relationship with the NOPD. Ironically, that era, in retrospect, seems innocent contrasted with the times we now live in.
Unfortunately, none of those thoughts were of comfort to me when I walked home under the glow of the streetlamps. I still had not resolved my situation with Alafair and was not sure that I could. At ten o’clock Molly went to bed and I sat in the living room and watched the local news. Then I turned out the light and sat in the darkness, the windows open, the wind sifting pine needles across our tin roof. At eleven-thirty I saw Kermit Abelard’s car pull to the curb, and I saw Kermit and Alafair kiss on the mouth. Then he drove away without walking her to the door. I could hear myself breathing in the dark.
“You scared me,” Alafair said, realizing I was in the living room.
“I was watching the news and fell asleep.”
She looked at the darkened 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
IN 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 speakers’ table, his face turned up attentively toward Blanchet, who stood at the podium, his size and power and visceral energy as palpable in the photo as they were in real life. The cutline below the photo stated, “Self-made investment tycoon shares vision of a nation shifting its energy needs from oil to biofuels.”
Layton had grown up in the little town of Washington, Louisiana, in St. Landry Parish, during an era when the sheriff and his political allies ran not only the gambling joints in the parish but one of the most notorious brothels in the South, known simply as Margaret’s. His parents, like mine, were illiterate Cajuns and spoke almost no English and picked cotton and broke corn for a living. Layton attended trade school and business college in Lafayette, and sold burial insurance door-to-door in black neighborhoods and pots and pans in blue-collar Cajun neighborhoods. He also managed to get his customers’ signatures on loan-company agreements that charged the highest interest rates possible under the law. Later, he worked at lower levels of law enforcement in both Lafayette and Iberia parishes, which was when I met him. Even then I felt Layton was less interested in a particular line of work than in determining where the sources of power and wealth lay inside a society, not unlike a blind man feeling his way through an unfamiliar room.
His singular gift was his ability to listen to every word people said to him, his blue eyes charged with energy and goodwill and curiosity, all in a way that was not feigned, his assimilation of other people’s experience and knowledge an ongoing epistemological osmosis. He never showed anger or irritability. His square jaw and big teeth and radiant smile seemed inseparable.
I never doubted that Layton Blanchet was on his way up. But no o
ne could have guessed how high.
When the oil economy collapsed in the 1980s, he bought every closed business, foreclosed mortgage, and piece of untilled farm acreage he could get his hands on, often at a third of its earlier valuation. Usually the sellers were only too happy to salvage what they could from their ruined finances, and Layton sometimes threw in an extra thousand or two if their situation was especially dire. Like a carrion bird drifting on a warm wind, he coasted above a stricken land, one that had not been kind to his family, and his ability to smell mortality down below was not a theological offense but simply recognition that his time had come around at last.
Layton owned a bank in Mississippi, a savings-and-loan company in Houston, a second home in Naples, Florida, and a condominium in Vail. But the center of his life, perhaps his visual testimony to the success his humble birth normally would have denied him, was the restored antebellum home where he lived on a bend in Bayou Teche, just outside Franklin.
It was a huge home stacked with a second-story veranda and dormers and chimneys that poked through the canopy of the two-hundred-year-old live oaks that shaded the roof. Every other year Layton had the entire house repainted so that it gleamed like a wedding cake inside a green arbor. He entertained constantly and imported film and television stars to his lawn parties. Stories abounded about Layton’s generosity to his black servants and the Cajun families who farmed his sugarcane acreage. He was gregarious and expansive and wore his physicality in the way a powerful man wears a suit. I did not believe he was surreptitious or hypocritical, which is not to say he was the man he pretended to be. I think in truth Layton himself did not know the identity of the man who lived inside him.
Before quitting time, I called his house and asked if I could see him. “Drive on down. I’ll put a steak on the grill,” he said. “You still off the kickapoo juice? I always admired the way you handled your problem, Dave. I didn’t catch the issue. What was that again?”
“I thought you might be able to help me with some questions I have about a couple of local guys.”
“I’ll tell Carolyn you’re on your way.”
“Layton, I can’t eat. My wife is preparing a late dinner.”
Forty-five minutes later he met me at his front door, wearing a muscle shirt and tennis shoes and beltless slacks that hung low on his hips. His swollen deltoids and his flat-plated chest and the slabs on his shoulders were like those of a man thirty years his junior. “Dave, you look great,” he said.