“Layton Blanchet’s death is being called a suicide.”
“Well, it’s bullshit.”
“Cut loose of it, bwana. We have only one homicide to concentrate on in our jurisdiction — the murder of the Canadian girl, Fern Michot.”
“Everything we’ve talked about is part of one package. You know it, and so do I,” I replied.
“Yeah, I do, but our limitations are our limitations. That’s the way it is.”
I started to speak, but she went back to her paperwork and didn’t look up again until I was outside her door.
CHAPTER 14
The peculiarity of entering one’s eighth decade is that questions regarding theology do not sharpen but instead become less significant. Better said, need for proof of the supernatural becomes less imperative. At a certain point, perhaps we realize that we have been surrounded by the connections between the material and the unseen world all our lives, but for various reasons, we chose not to see them.
Years ago dead members of my platoon used to call me up long-distance during electrical storms. So did my murdered wife, Annie. A psychiatrist told me I was experiencing a psychotic break. But cold sober and free of all the ghosts I had brought back from a land of rice paddies and elephant grass and hills that looked like the summer-browned breasts of Asian women, I had seen my father standing in the surf south of Point Au Fer, the rain tinking on the hard hat he was wearing when he died in an offshore blowout. In the oil field, he had always been called Big Aldous Robicheaux, as though the three words were one. In his barroom fistfights, he took on all comers two and three at a time, exploding his fists on his adversaries’ faces with the dispassionate ease of a baseball player swatting balls in a batting cage. My mother’s infidelities filled him with feelings of sorrow and anger and personal impotence, and in turn his drunkenness and irresponsibility robbed her of any happiness she’d ever had and finally any possibility of belief in herself. My parents ruined their marriage, then their home and their family. But in death, when the wellhead blew out far below the monkey board on the rig where he was racking pipe, Big Aldous clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and jumped into the blackness, brave to the end, swallowed under a derrick that collapsed like melting licorice on top of him. A survivor said Big Aldous was smiling when he bailed into the stars. And that’s the way I have always remembered my old man, and I have come to learn that memory and presence are inextricably connected and should never be thought of as separate entities.
So I have never argued with people about the specters I have seen or the voices I’ve heard inside the static of a long-distance phone call. I know that the dead are out there, beckoning from the shadows, perhaps pointing the way for the rest of us. But I don’t fear them, and I conceive of them as friends whom I don’t think I’ll mind joining. It’s not a bad way to be.
Early in the A.M. the day after Vidor Perkins’s visit to my office, I woke in the grayness of the dawn to the clanking sounds of the drawbridge at Burke Street. The fog had rolled up Bayou Teche from the Gulf and hung like wet strips of gray rag on the ground and in the oak trees. I fed Tripod and Snuggs, then fixed a fried-egg and bacon sandwich and took it and a cup of coffee and hot milk and a folding chair down the slope of my backyard. I sat down by the water’s edge and ate breakfast and watched Tripod and Snuggs come down the slope and join me, sniffing at the breeze, their tails flipping back and forth. The green and red lights on the drawbridge were smudged inside the fog, the steel girders hardly visible. Evidently the great cogged wheels that raised and lowered the bridge had gotten stuck. Then I heard the machinery clank and bang loudly, and each side of the bridge rose at forty-five-degree angles into the air and what I thought was a huge two-deck quarterboat slid through the open space and came down the bayou toward me, a hissing sound rising from its stern.
But it was not an offshore quarterboat. It was a nineteenth-century paddle wheeler, with twin fluted stacks, a lamp burning inside the pilothouse. A massive bare-chested black man, wearing no shoes and dressed only in a pair of flared work trousers, was coiling and stacking a thick length of oiled rope on the bow. The side door to the pilothouse was open, and inside I could see a skipper at the wheel, smoking a cob pipe and wearing a billed mariner’s cap and a dark blue coat with big buttons. He seemed to study me, then removed his pipe from his mouth and touched the bill of his cap. I waved back at him, unsure what I was seeing. I thought the boat was a replica, one with screws under it, perhaps part of a tourist promotion of some kind. But I saw a woman in a hooped dress standing in a breezeway, looking at me as though I were an oddity she didn’t understand; then the stern passed not ten yards from me, the ground quaking with the roar of the steam engines, cascades of silt and yellow water sliding off the paddle wheel.
I put my food down and stood up from my chair and stared in disbelief as the bow and the lighted pilothouse and the rows of passenger compartments and the woman in the hooped crinoline dress and the stern of the boat were enveloped by the fog, the wake landing on the bank with a loud slap.
“Dave?” I heard someone say.
I turned around. Alafair was standing twenty feet behind me in her bathrobe and slippers.
“Did you see that?” I asked.
“See what?”
“That double-decker that just went by.”
“No, I didn’t see anything. What are you doing down here?”
“The drawbridge was stuck. It woke me up. A paddle wheeler just went down the bayou.”
She walked down to the water’s edge, leaning forward, peering southward into the fog. “Just now?”
“Thirty seconds ago.”
She looked at me strangely. I took out my pocketknife and cut my sandwich in half and handed her my plate with the half on it that I had not bitten into. But she ignored the gesture. “You’re telling me you just saw a riverboat, the kind with the big paddle wheel in back?” she said.
I sat down next to her and glanced at the eastern sky. “How about that sunrise? Isn’t that something?” I said.
If you’re lucky, at a certain age you finally learn not to contend with the world or try to explain that the application of reason has little or nothing to do with the realities that exist just on the other side of one’s fingertips.
* * *
That same morning, Clete Purcel drove to the cottage on Bayou Teche that Emma Poche rented just outside St. Martinville. It was a restored cypress structure, perhaps over a century old, unpainted, set back in deep shade under live oaks, its small gallery hung with baskets of impatiens. Emma’s car was parked on the grass under a tree, a back window half down. On the seat he could see an oversize tennis racquet and a can of balls. The surface of the bayou was wrinkling in the breeze. In the distance he could see a graveyard filled with whitewashed crypts and the back of the nightclub where he had torn Herman Stanga apart.
It was Emma’s day off. When she came to the screen door, she was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, her face unwashed and lined with sleep. She gazed at him a moment and said, “What do you want, Clete?”
“To take you to breakfast,” he said.
“What’s the point? It’s over.”
“If you say so. But it shouldn’t end over a misunderstanding about that pen. Any one of a half-dozen skells could have creeped my place, somebody working for the guy who popped Stanga.”
He could barely make out her features through the grayness of the screen. Her eyes were lowered, as though she were considering his words. “I need to get in the shower. Fix some coffee if you want,” she said. She unsnapped the latch on the door and walked toward the back of the cottage. A few moments later, while he poured coffee grinds in the top of an old-time drip pot, he heard the sound of water hitting on the tin walls of the shower stall. A wood-bladed fan spun slowly on the ceiling of the living room. The furnishings in the room were sparse and looked thread-worn or purchased secondhand. A bookcase next to the television set contained mostly popular music CDs and a few paperback ed
itions of novels that seemed to have no thematic connection and probably had been picked up at yard sales. But one book caught his eye. It was a blue hardcover and was stamped with the words THE BOOK OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS. Clete picked it up and sat down in a stuffed chair that puffed up dust when his buttocks sank into the seat cushion. He opened the book and heard the spine make a cracking sound. On the title page, someone had written:
To Emma,
With hopes that you won’t misplace this one.
All the best from your easy-does-it friend,
Tookie
Clete replaced the book on the shelf. Emma came out of the back dressed in a fresh pair of jeans and a cowboy shirt. She had put on makeup and perfume and earrings and looked lovely framed against the window and the view of the trees and the bayou outside.
“I fixed coffee,” he said.
“Yeah, I smelled it.”
“Where are the cups?” he said.
She rubbed her forearm, her expression a mixture of indecision and frustration. “Clete, I don’t know how else to say this. You treated me with distrust and disdain. You hurt me deeply. And you did it after we made love. The word is ‘after.’ You made me feel dirty and cheap.”
“It wasn’t intentional. It just worked out that way.” He stared hopelessly at the ceiling. “What should I have done? Not tell you that somebody planted a gold pen with my name on it at a homicide scene?”
But she made no reply.
“Who’s Tookie?” he said.
She had to think a second to make the connection. “Where’d you hear about Tookie?”
“I just saw her name in your book.”
“Which book?”
“Your A.A. book. She wrote a note in there.”
Emma was frowning, obviously not understanding. He reached up on the shelf and opened the blue hardcover on his lap and turned to the title page. “See, she wrote—”
“Tookie Goula was my sponsor for a short time. She has jailhouse tats all over her arms. She used to hook in truck stops in the Upper South. Truckers call them ‘pavement princesses.’ Tookie looks more like the Beast of Buchenwald now. Or a reverse Beast of Buchenwald. A fat, lumpy lampshade with tats.”
Clete tried to assimilate what he had just heard. In the silence, Emma seemed to grow even more irritable. “Does that answer your question?” she asked.
“I guess. You play tennis? I saw the racquet in your car.”
“I hit a few balls on the wall at the park sometimes.”
“I’d like to take that up myself,” he said.
She began taking down cups and saucers from one of the kitchen cabinets. Then she stopped and turned around. “I’ve already moved on, Clete. I don’t hold what you did against you. But you need to find somebody else.”
“You’ve got another guy?”
“That’s my business.”
“Your friend Tookie, the one who gave you the book, you’d already read her inscription in there?”
“Yeah, she gave me the book. To tell you the truth, I think you should see a counselor. Or go to A.A. meetings or spend more time with Dave Robicheaux, because I think both of you have broken glass in your head.”
“I think you’re right.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I’ve got some terrible character defects, the chief of which is I’m a rotten judge of people.”
“Say again?”
“Nope. I’m eighty-sixing myself from your house,” he replied, blowing out his breath.
He went outside and let the screen slam behind him. He walked toward his Caddy, across the lawn, past her car, glancing inside again at the tennis racquet and the can of balls. Clete knew little about the cost of tennis racquets, but the logo on the cover of this one indicated that it was probably expensive and not of a kind that a casual player would purchase, particularly one who lived on a parish deputy’s salary. He heard the screen door open behind him.
“Clete?” she said. She was standing on the gallery, her hands on her hips. “The coffee is ready. Come back in and have a cup. We’re still friends. I didn’t mean to talk so harshly.”
A smile wrinkled at the corner of her mouth. The wind blew a strand of hair on her cheek. She squared her shoulders slightly, tightening her breasts against her cowboy shirt. Clete folded his big arms across his chest and seemed to think for a long time, as though trying to recover a detail from his memory that was of enormous importance. “I dug your butterfly tattoo. The truth is, I dug you, too, Emma,” he said. “But when somebody lies to me, it’s like somebody spitting in the punch bowl. I find another watering hole.”
Then he got in his Caddy and drove away, clicking on a CD of Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll” full-blast.
* * *
He came to my house early Saturday morning and said he wanted to go fishing, but I didn’t believe that was the reason for his visit. Clete’s external scars and his indifference to them belied the level of injury that he often carried inside him. Regardless of how badly he was treated by women, or how treacherous they turned out to be, he always blamed himself for the failed relationship. Even more paradoxically, he refused to speak ill of them under any circumstances and would not allow others to do so, either. Like most Irish, the pagan in him was alive and well, but he kept a pew in a medieval cathedral where the knight-errant genuflected in a cone of stained light, blood-soaked cloak or not.
“You think I just blew it, or maybe—” he said.
We were sitting in his Caddy, the top down, under the overhang of the trees on East Main. The morning was still cool, the sunrise barely visible through the canopy. “Maybe what?” I said.
“She’s dirty.”
“Dirty on what?”
“Everything. I started running the tape backward in my head. When I’m surveilling Carolyn Blanchet at the motel, Emma comes walking out of the lounge and sees me and says she’s waiting for her uncle. Except the uncle never shows up, and I end up getting loaded with her and in the sack with her later that night. Then my gold pen disappears and shows up in Stanga’s swimming pool. Then I see this expensive tennis racquet in her car and I start thinking about who else plays tennis. Like Carolyn Blanchet. Then Emma lies to me about seeing the inscription in the A.A. book. That book had never been opened. Then she tries to get me to come back in the house, maybe for some more high-octane boom-boom. I got to admit it was a temptation.” Clete rubbed the tops of his bare arms. “I feel like I’ve walked through cobwebs.”
“You’re trying to put yourself in the mind of a wet drunk.”
“I am a wet drunk.”
“No, you’re not. You’re still an amateur.”
“Will you stop trying to make me feel better? Do you think I got taken over the hurdles or not?”
“Why would Emma Poche want to help somebody frame you for clipping Stanga?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I’m asking you.”
“You think she was at the motel to meet Carolyn Blanchet?”
“It occurred to me,” he replied. “But if she’s a lesbian or a switch-hitter, she had me fooled. When you take a ride with Emma Poche, there’s no eight-second buzzer.”
“Will you grow up? This woman is trying to ruin your life, and you talk about her like you’re seventeen years old.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Vidor Perkins came to my office.”
“Are you serious?”
“He says he’s writing a book. He says Timothy Abelard, Kermit’s grandfather, was involved in the drug trade with the Giacano family. He claims Timothy Abelard stiffed the Giacanos, and they had his son and the daughter-in-law wrapped in chains and dropped in sixty feet of water.”
“Abelard got his own kid killed?”
“That’s what Perkins says.”
“And he’s putting this in a book and telling you about it?”
“That’s about it.”
“Is he trying to extort the Abelards or get himself killed?”
Clete rubbed his forehead. He’d had a haircut the day before and a good night’s sleep, and his face looked pink and youthful, his intelligent green eyes full of warmth and mirth, the way they were years ago when we walked a beat on Canal. “We’ve had a good run, haven’t we?” he said.
“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.
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