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“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.
Before I could reply, he called into the interior of the house, “Hey, Carolyn, Dave’s here. Start those rib eyes I laid out.”
“I have to head back home in a few minutes. I apologize for bothering you during suppertime.”
“No, you got to eat something. Come in back while I finish my workout. You still pump iron? You look like you could tear the butt out of a rhinoceros. On that subject, how’s Purcel? What a character. I tell people about him, but nobody believes me.”
I followed him to the rear of the house, where he had turned a sunroom into a center for his Nautilus machines and dumbbells and weight benches. “Excuse me, all this fabric makes me feel like I’m inside mummy wrap,” he said, working off his shirt, dropping it on the floor.
He lay back on a bench and lowered a two-hundred-pound bar from the rack onto his sternum. His straightened his arms, his tendons quivering, his shaved armpits stiff with tension, the outline of his phallus printed against his slacks, an easy smile on his mouth as he lifted the bar higher into the air. Then he lowered it to within an inch of his sternum and lifted the bar nine more times, his chest blooming with veins.
He notched the bar back on the rack, sat up, and put his shirt on, breathing through his nose, his eyes radiant. “Who are these guys you have questions about?”
“Kermit Abelard and Robert Weingart.”
