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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.
“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.
