The hotel was just off the cloverleaf outside Beaumont.
It took him through the stink of the big ConocoPhillips refinery at Lake Charles, a forest of piping, giant tanks, and towering chimneys. Every Monday morning he would make the two-hour drive in his pickup from Lafayette, Louisiana, heading west on Interstate 10 through scruffy Gulf-shore farmland broken only by cell-phone towers, oil derricks, and billboards advertising motel chains, bayou restaurants, “Adult Superstores,” and other local attractions. Slender, with a close-cropped white beard and the weathered skin of a lifelong outdoorsman, he had partnered with his brother, Michael, in a thriving oil-land leasing business based in this small city east of Houston.
In middle age he had re-invented himself as a landman, a familiar occupation in South Texas, easing the exploitation of mineral rights on private property for gas and oil companies. As a young man he had worked as a chief engineer on oceangoing vessels, spending months at sea. This is where Greg was on the evening of Wednesday, September 15, 2010, in Room 348 of the MCM Eleganté Hotel, in Beaumont, Texas-lounging, smoking, snacking on a Reese’s Crispy Crunchy bar, sipping root beer, and watching Iron Man 2. He smoked and broke off candy bits while watching TV. Considerately, to avoid soiling the bedspread, he would lay out a clean white hand towel, on which he placed his ashtray, cigarette pack, lighter, BlackBerry, the TV remote, and a candy bar. He would crank up the air conditioner-he liked a cool room at night-and sit on the bed, leaning back on two pillows propped against the headboard. At the end of the day he would slide off his worn brown leather boots and line them up by the suitcase, drop his faded jeans to the floor, and put on lightweight cotton pajama bottoms. Toiletries were in the pockets of a cloth folding case that hooked onto a towel rack in the bathroom.
Shirts he wanted to keep unwrinkled hung above. After so many years on the road, he would leave his rolling suitcase open on the floor of his hotel room and use it as a drawer. Greg Fleniken traveled light and lived tidy.
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