“The best,” I said.
He rested the palms of his big hands on the steering wheel. He watched a solitary leaf spin out of the canopy of live oaks above us and light on the waxed hood of the Cadillac. “You don’t figure Layton Blanchet for a suicide?” he said.
“I’m not objective. Most people looking at the scene evidence would put his death down as self-inflicted. I think Layton was too greedy to kill himself. He was the kind of guy who clings to the silverware when the mortician drags him out of his home.”
“Let’s go out there,” Clete said.
“What for?”
“Maybe the guy was a butthead, maybe not, but he was my client. Maybe if I had found out who his wife was pumping, he wouldn’t be dead,” he replied.
I told Molly where we were going, and we hitched the boat to the back of my pickup, put our rods and tackle boxes and an ice chest inside, and drove down through Jeanerette and Franklin to the Atchafalaya Basin. I didn’t particularly want to revisit the scene of Layton’s death. To me, he was not a sympathetic victim. He reminded me of too many people I had known, all of whom had become acolytes in a pantheon where the admission fee was the forfeiture of their souls or at least their self-respect. But unfortunately, like drunks driving at high speed through red lights, the Layton Blanchets of the world made choices for others before they self-destructed. Bernadette Latiolais and Fern Michot didn’t get to vote when their lives were arbitrarily taken from them, and I believed I owed both of them a debt.
We drove down the same levee where Layton had parked his pickup truck on the last day of his life. The water was high from the rain, lapping across the cypress knees, the strings of early hyacinths rolling in the waves. The sky was overcast, the wind steady out of the south, and in the distance I could see a flat bronze-colored bay starting to cap and moss straightening on a line of dead cypress trees. I pulled the truck to a stop and cut the engine. Leaves were blowing on the water where Layton’s houseboat was moored, and the yellow crime-scene tape strung through the gum and cypress trees had been broken by wild animals. The aluminum rowboat was lifting and falling with the waves, clanking against a cypress knee or a chunk of concrete. For some reason, maybe because of the grayness of the day, the entire scene made me think of a party’s aftermath, when the revelers return to their homes and leave others to clean up.
Clete stared through the windshield, screwing a cigarette into his mouth. “What’s she doing here?” he said.
“Good question,” I replied.
But if Emma Poche, dressed in her deputy’s uniform and rubber boots, took notice of us, she gave no sign of it. Her back was turned, a roll of fresh crime-scene tape hanging from her left hand. She slapped at an insect on her neck and wiped her palm on her clothes. Then she seemed to see us, smiling casually, not overly concerned by our presence. On the far end of the houseboat, I saw an outboard tied by its painter to the deck rail. Clete and I crossed the plank walkway and stepped onto the island. “Aren’t you out of your jurisdiction?” he said to Emma.
“The St. Martin and St. Mary parish line runs right through this bay. In fact, no one is sure exactly where it is,” she said.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“None of your business,” she said. But she was smiling with her eyes as she said it, looking at me as though the two of us shared a private joke. “We got a call that some kids were trying to get into the houseboat.”
“I guess some people got no respect,” Clete said.
“Why are you guys out here?” she asked.
“Entertaining the bass,” I said.
“At this exact spot. My, my,” she said.
“Yeah, what a coincidence,” I said.
“Are you questioning my jurisdictional authority, two guys who have no business here at all?” she said.
“No, we’re not, Emma,” I said. “Did you know Layton?”
“I saw him around. Listen, Dave, if you have a question about my being here, call the dispatcher and have her check the log. Because I don’t like y’all’s insinuation.”
“We just happened by,” I said, walking to the rowboat. “How many shell casings did the St. Mary guys find?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she replied.
“If Layton used a semiauto, and there was a second shell casing, that would present quite a puzzle, wouldn’t it?” I said.
“You’d have to ask somebody else that. Frankly, I don’t care. That’s why I’m in uniform and not a detective. I don’t like carrying caseloads and taking the job home every day. Also, I’m not that smart.”
I faced into the wind as though I had lost interest in the subject. “It’s pretty out here,” I said.
“Yeah, it is. Or it was,” she said.
“Was?” I said.
“Fuck off, Dave,” she said.
I smelled tobacco smoke. Clete had just lit his cigarette and was staring down at the rowboat, his gaze sweeping from the bow to the stern, lingering on the dried blood from Layton’s massive head wound. “You don’t mind if we just stand here for a little bit, do you?” he said to Emma.
“Do whatever you want. After I rewrap the scene, don’t cross the tape again,” she replied.
She walked into the shallows, among the flooded trees, and strung fresh tape through the trunks. Soon she was on the other side of the houseboat, out of earshot. Clete continued to puff on his cigarette, his attention still fixed reflectively on the rowboat. I pulled the cigarette gently from his fingers and flicked it into the wind and heard it hiss when it struck the water. His concentration was such that he didn’t seem to notice. “So Blanchet was lying on his back, looking skyward, his head in the stern?”
“Right,” I said.
“And the forty-five was in his right hand?”
“He had one finger in the trigger guard.”
“Which way was the wind blowing when y’all found him?”
“Just like today, straight out of the south.”
“Was the boat more or less in the same position, or did the paramedics move it?”
“It’s exactly in the same position.”
“How do you know?”
“The bow is right by that same piece of concrete,” I said.
“Look at the willow tree.”
“Yeah?”
“There’s still exit matter on the lower branches. But the branches are three feet behind the stern. It’s too far back.”
“I’m not following you, Clete.”
“Look, I’m speculating, but if he set the forty-five under his chin and pulled the trigger, the fluids and bone matter from the wound would have gone straight up into the tree’s overhang. But what if somebody is in the boat with Blanchet and wants to distract him? Somebody with the forty-five hidden under a raincoat. He tells Blanchet to look up at a comet, a constellation, an owl or a hawk flying across the moon. Then the shooter plants one under his chin, and Blanchet’s oatmeal flies into the tree.”
“I think you’re probably right, Clete, but I tried to sell that one to the sheriff, and it didn’t slide down the pipe.”
“Yeah, well, screw the sheriff. This is still St. Mary Parish, Louisiana’s answer to the thirteenth century.” Clete squatted down, steadying himself with one hand on the gunwale of the rowboat. “Think of it this way. If you’re correct in your hypothesis about the shooter putting the forty-five in Layton’s hand and letting off a second round, where would the shot have gone?”
I could see where he was taking his re-creation of the moments that had followed Layton Blanchet’s death. Clete was still the best investigative detective I had ever known. He had the ability to see the world through the eyes of every kind of person imaginable; he knew their thoughts before they had them. The same applied to the
