chest. He could hear her breath rising and falling. Outside, the rain was ticking in the leaves, and through a crack in the curtains, he could see that the sky was still dark with thunderclouds, a tree of lightning blooming without sound on the horizon.
“I have to ask you something,” he said.
“You heard stories about my time at NOPD?”
“Who cares about NOPD? They almost sent me up on a homicide beef.”
“Then what is it?”
“I had a gold pen. I’m pretty sure it was in my dresser. No, I’m not just pretty sure. I know it was in my dresser.”
“Yeah?” she said.
He turned on his side so that his eyes were only a few inches from hers. Her face was heart-shaped, her pug nose tilted upward, her eyes crinkling. She lowered her hand and squeezed him inside the thigh. But he removed her hand and held it in his. “Dave is bugging me about this pen. I mean, in a good way. He wants to clear me in the Herman Stanga shooting.”
“I don’t get what you’re saying.”
“A maintenance guy found my pen in Stanga’s swimming pool.”
“So the Iberia Department is trying to put his death on you?”
“Not exactly. But they can’t ignore the evidence, either. My name is inscribed on the pen.”
“You’re asking me about it?”
“Dave won’t get off my back about it. I had to give him the names of everybody who’d had access to my cottage and office. I mentioned your name, among others. I felt rotten about it. I felt rotten not telling you.”
“You think I stole from you?”
“No.”
“Or that I tried to set you up?”
“No, I don’t think that.”
“Then why’d you give Dave Robicheaux my name? Why’d you tell him about us?”
“You care whether people know we’re seeing each other?”
“It’s not their business.”
“I was just wondering if maybe you saw the pen. I’m always dropping things or lending or handing people stuff and forgetting it.”
He could feel her draw away from him, her hands receding back into the bedcovers, her body somehow growing smaller. “You just said one of the shittiest things anyone has ever said to me.”
“I didn’t mean to. I was trying to tell you I felt guilty about mentioning your name to Dave. I felt I was disloyal not telling you about it.”
She sat up on the side of the bed, the sheet and blanket humped over her shoulders. “You don’t trust me, Clete. It’s that simple. Don’t make it worse by lying.”
“I think you’re swell. I’m crazy about you.”
“But maybe I’m a Jezebel, right? I’ll see you around. Look the other way while I dress.”
“Come on, Emma. You’re reading this all wrong.”
“Boy, can I pick them. Yuck,” she said.
After she went out to her car, he slipped on his trousers and followed her, barefoot and bareheaded and wearing a strap undershirt in the rain. “One last try: Come back inside,” he said.
“I let people hurt me only once, then I get even. With you, I don’t have to. You’ll never know the opportunity you just threw away. Bye-bye, big boy.”
She got in her car and started the engine, her face still pinched with anger through the beaded glass. He watched her taillights disappear in a vortex of rain on East Main Street. Then he went back inside and took off his wet clothes and sat naked on the side of his bed in the dark, staring at nothing, his hands like empty skillets at his sides.
THE CALL CAME in from the sheriff in St. Mary Parish at 10:17 the same morning. Helen was out of the office, and the call was rerouted to my extension. The sheriff’s name was Tony Judice. He was a firm-bodied, rotund, and congenial man, less political than most public servants here, and was known for his integrity as a sugar farmer and manager of the local sugar co-op.
“Did y’all have Layton Blanchet in custody yesterday?” he asked.
“Not exactly. He and his wife were in an accident. We took them in for an interview, primarily because they were giving the responding officers a lot of trouble and trying to leave the scene. How’d you know about it?”
“One of my deputies was over there. This is out of your jurisdiction, Dave, so I don’t know if y’all want to be bothered with it or not,” he said. “A guy running a trotline in the Basin called on his cell and said he found a dead man in a rowboat. The description of the dead man sounds like Blanchet. The rowboat is close by the fish camp he owns. I’m about to head out there in a few minutes. I’ll wait for you if you’re interested in Blanchet for reasons other than traffic accidents, or I can call you when I get out there.”
“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
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.
