“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 goes 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
