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“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 goe
s 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 wind and rain blow in my face. I breathed in the damp cleanness of the air and the smell of fish spawn and humus and wet trees back in the swamp. None of it cost five cents, and that was a thought I hoped to keep in the forefront of my mind as long as I lived.
SOMETIMES IN POLICE work you get an undeserved break. Or the bad guys do something that’s really dumb. Or the bad guys turn out to be more deranged than you thought they were. The day after Layton Blanchet’s death, our dispatcher buzzed my extension. “There’s a guy out here to see you,” he said.
