My Juliet: A Novel

by John Ed Bradley

  Sonny watches him.

  “Old woman in a big house. Drug dealers and gangbangers thick as cockroaches in the neighborhood. They might not catch the guy but it won’t be hard to figure who did this one.”

  Sonny is quiet. He nods to let the man know he’s interested.

  “I was at the scene of a homicide nearly identical to this one about a month ago in the Lower Garden District,” the photographer continues. “You know that area?”

  Sonny nods. “Sure.”

  “Only difference there, the guy rapes the old broad before clobbering her on the head.”

  “They ever find him?”

  “Shit no. But they never find half of ’em. Not in this city.” The man snaps off a few more shots. “People call it the Big Easy, but you’ll never hear a homicide cop say that.”

  “No, you won’t,” Sonny says for no reason that he can make out.

  “Ask one of them, the Big Pain in the Ass is more like it.”

  “The Big Pain in the Ass,” Sonny repeats.

  The man smiles and leans in closer as if to let Sonny in on a secret. “You know what I say?” And now his eyes trace back to the Beauvais. “I say it’s what you get for trying to keep the past alive. Antebellum mansion, big trees dripping moss. Look over there at that little building. Nowadays real estate folks like to call that a dependency unit. I suppose it lessens the sting in certain ears. But what that is, it’s a slave house. A family—black people—actually lived in that thing, and now it’s where they store the lawn mower and hedge clippers. Unlike you and me, my friend, not everyone sees beauty when they look at this place. History for one person might be glorious, but for another it’s chains.”

  Sonny leaves through the front gate. Nobody calls for him to turn around and come back. Nobody says anything.

  As he’s crossing the neutral ground he hears a commotion and wheels around in time to witness Juliet’s arrival. She drives up in a convertible with the top down and parks behind a line of police cruisers. She doesn’t see him. He’s too far away by now.

  She’s wearing a little black fuck-me dress and the same clunky shoes that she seems never to be without. A pair of Jackie O sunglasses, black and owl-like, hides her eyes.

  Patrolmen hold the crowd back, and photographers form a loose escort around her. She could be arriving for a movie premiere or an awards show, and not to visit the place where her mother was slain only hours before.

  It would be no great surprise to Sonny to see her spin around and blow kisses, to wave in the obnoxious, high-handed fashion that Hollywood stars do.

  Sonny glances at Lieutenant Peroux and Anna Huey, curious to observe their reaction. They’re standing under the blossoms, his expression as ripe with loathing as hers. They make no move to greet Juliet, and Juliet makes none to them.

  She travels along the path as far as she’s able before encountering crime scene tape and the street cop who ushers her off to the side.

  Alone now on the lawn, Juliet stands with both hands covering her mouth, sobs racking her body. The wind blows dust from the crape myrtles and it sticks to her hair and clothing. Sonny finds himself framing the image with his hands, envisioning it on canvas. “The dress a size too small,” he mumbles out loud. “The yellow and the pink. Detectives in their booties.”

  He is watching as the ambulance starts for the rear drive gate, leaving parallel troughs in the grass. Juliet pushes past the cops and begins running along the side of the house. Past the garden statuary, sprinting now. Past the fountain covered with leaves. Past the outbuildings and the stone barbecue. “Mama! Mama, don’t go! Oh, Mama! Mama!”

  Juliet collapses as the ambulance disappears around the brick wall. A splash of rainwater comes up as her body meets a puddle.

  On his way down Esplanade Sonny glances back once more, just in time to see Lieutenant Samuel Peroux lifting her in his arms.

  They cover her shoulders with a grass-green army-issue blanket and lead her to the front door. “Can we go in the study there?” Lentini says past yellow tape. He’s leaning to see through the open door. “Hey, listen, I got the lady’s daughter here . . .” At last he waves her inside.

  The house is crowded with people but not a one familiar. Juliet sits in the library in the same place where she sat the night before. Her teeth chatter and her hair drips water.

  “I bet if you check the closet in my old bedroom Mother still has it full of clothes,” Juliet says to a female police officer.

  “Ask Jerry to reach in there and get her something,” Lentini says.

  “And also a towel, please,” Juliet says.

  Minutes later the policewoman returns carrying clothes that smell of mothballs. She brings hip-hugger jeans, a cowboy shirt with snap buttons and leather piping, gray athletic socks and shoes that look as if they’ve never been worn. The woman drops the bundle on the couch.

  “Much obliged,” Peroux tells the officer, then nods toward the door.

  Juliet removes her wet things. The cops in the room, dedicated to the pretense that only the case involves them, feign indifference. Slipping off her brassiere, Juliet glances in Peroux’s direction but he’s standing at a window, facing outside in a contemplative pose.

  She doesn’t remember the pants or the shoes. But the shirt’s familiar. She was never the cowgirl type, but she did wear it once, as she recalls, to a Sadie Hawkins dance her junior year. Her date that night was Dickie Boudreau. He wore a length of rope through his belt loops and boots with steel toes. Incredible how an old shirt can get her mind on Dickie when something as serious as a police interrogation is moments away. And now another flash: “Sonny thinks it’s his.”

  “Good.”

  “You don’t want your own baby?”

  She finishes dressing and pats the water out of her hair with the towel. Peroux, turning from the window, levels his gaze on the other cops in the room, and suddenly everyone but Lentini seems to understand that it’s time to leave.

  “How come you like this old house so much, Miss Beauvais?” the detective begins, standing now in the middle of the floor halfway across the room. “I been looking it over and it could use a lot of work.”

  “All cosmetic,” she says quietly. “Nothing that a little TLC won’t fix.”

  “I always heard it was cheaper to build yourself a new house than to renovate an old one. You might be smart to tear this thing down and start over. Build yourself something with fiberglass insulation instead of horsehair and with lower ceilings so you don’t have to climb a ladder every time you need to get at a cobweb.”

  “I’ll be sure to take that under advisement, Lieutenant.”

  “Look at all this cypress millwork. That medallion up on the ceiling where the chandelier meets the plaster. What’s the point of that anyway? Who looks at a ceiling? Some people are always showing off, aren’t they, Miss Beauvais? Some people can’t abide the simple life.”

  “I agree with you one hundred percent.”

  He’s taking in every piece of furniture, every framed photograph, every title of every book. Everything but Juliet. Once he seems to have seen enough, he says, “You like this old barn so much you went and killed your mother for it, didn’t you?”

  “Don’t be bashful, Lieutenant. We’re all adults here.”

  “How’s that?”

  “If you have an opinion about recent events please feel free to share it.”

  Now he’s looking at himself in the mirror over the fireplace. “Recent events. Is that what happened here last night? A recent event?”

  Juliet doesn’t respond. She pulls her shoes off and glances at Lentini, who’s standing by the door. “Officer, would you do me a favor? These shoes are too small. Would you mind going upstairs and getting me a different pair? And bring some eights this time.”

  “You must think you have the shoe department,” Lentini says. “In case someone forgot to tell you, lady, we’re the police department.”

  “Miss Beauvais, look at me.” Peroux is f
acing her now in the mirror. “Miss Beauvais, you know what just occurred to me? Your mother got along fine in this house without any trouble for years and years. Then one day you come home to visit and all of a sudden she’s dead on the floor upstairs. That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “I admit it’s a pretty big one, yes.”

  “You sent Sonny LaMott here last night to do what you couldn’t do yourself, didn’t you?”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant. But you must have me confused with somebody else.”

  “So you didn’t send him here last night?”

  “I sent him here for a check. But I didn’t send him here to kill my mother.”

  “Why’d you hate her so much? What did that old lady ever do to you?”

  “What did she do?” But Juliet stops herself and glances back over her shoulder. In her ear the voice of Dickie Boudreau just said “Good.”

  “Miss Beauvais? Miss Beauvais, tell me about your mother. Help me to understand.”

  “You know those icicles you put on Christmas trees, Lieutenant? They’re not real icicles, of course. They’re little metallic things—shiny pieces of paper or something.”

  “I know them.”

  “Then you know they cost only about nineteen cents a pack. But even at that price Mama insisted on reusing them every year. Instead of throwing them out with the tree, she’d make me take each one off and put it in a freezer bag. If I left any on the tree, she’d throw a fit. Would you resent your mother if she did that to you?”

  The detective, still staring, doesn’t say anything.

  “Here’s another one for you. When I was about four or five she caught me in the bathtub touching myself in a manner that she found unacceptable. In actual fact I was just washing my . . . well, my genitalia, using a rag and soap. Anyway, Mother yanks me out of the tub and spanks my naked bottom, then she showers rice on the kitchen floor and makes me kneel on it and pray to a crucifix up over the door. I’m still naked, understand? I spend hours on that rice and I suppose I’d still be kneeling there today had Daddy not come home and saved me. Tell you about my mother, Lieutenant? Have a seat, sir.”

  The detectives exchange glances.

  “Does that help any?”

  “Yes, it does. The picture is starting to clear up.”

  “I could make a list,” she says, “all this proof why I had every reason to kill her.”

  “Yes,” says the lieutenant, removing his notebook and starting to write. “Yes, we could make a list. Let’s start one now, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Fine. Let’s start at the beginning, when I wasn’t breast-fed.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. And you’ll have a list but nothing else. No evidence, anyway. No proof. You think those icicles made me kill her? Or was it the bathtub incident? Which one threw me over the edge?”

  Peroux puts the notebook back in his hip pocket. “Miss Beauvais, are you using drugs?”

  “None that’s illegal, unless the state of Louisiana’s got a law against Midol.”

  From the pocket of his jacket Peroux removes a neatly folded sheet of computer paper. “In June of 1984, then again in August of that year, you were charged with unlawful possession of marijuana. In January 1985 it got a little more serious: criminal possession of a controlled substance. You violated probation and subsequently spent thirty days in jail.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “You also had an arrest for shoplifting.”

  “I had to eat.”

  “You stole food?”

  “No. I stole a watch from a pawnshop then sold it to some people I knew and used the proceeds to put food on the table. Lieutenant, is there anything on your list about parking tickets? I got a bunch of those.” Juliet drops the towel on top of the wet clothes piled on the floor. “You should’ve read me my Miranda rights, by the way.”

  “We’re conducting an interview, Miss Beauvais.”

  She points at his notebook and gestures for him to write. “Then leave California alone, please, and ask me about last night?”

  “Okay, Miss Beauvais. Tell me about last night.”

  “Last night Sonny and I shared what I thought was a very romantic, very gratifying evening together. At around midnight he left me at his place in Bywater to run an errand. My mother owed me some money, and Sonny generously offered to get it from her. Long story short, it was two thousand dollars, the amount I spent to fly here from Los Angeles, rent a car and hotel rooms, and feed myself.”

  “Go on.”

  “Sonny was gone for little more than an hour and when he came back he immediately went into the bathroom and changed his clothes and took a shower. Immediately after that he walked back to the laundry room and put his clothes in the wash. Believe me, nobody was more surprised than I when he came into the bedroom and presented me with that check.”

  “Why’s that? It’s what you sent him here for.”

  “Mother, Mother’s why. I’d tried everything to get her to pay me and time and again she’d refused. Just the other day, for example, I stopped by and politely asked her for the money. She pretended I wasn’t there and read aloud from a book as I tried to reason with her. I threatened to break one of her lamps if she didn’t pay me. I told her the same about a clock. Mother was so determined that I ended up destroying both the lamp and the clock and she still wouldn’t give me the money.” Juliet tosses the shoes out toward him in the middle of the room. “Lieutenant, I’ll answer your questions but only if one of you goes upstairs and gets me some shoes that fit.”

  “You still have that check?”

  “I returned it to the bank this morning. I knew it wasn’t any good. Mother had closed her accounts there years ago. She’d duped Sonny. As a further insult she wrote the check out for five thousand dollars—three more than I told Sonny I needed. I don’t know how he got her to do that. Or maybe she did it without his asking. Whatever the case, Mother had the last laugh. When Sonny gave me that check—” She stops, suddenly overcome.

  “When Sonny gave you the check?”

  “Forgive me, Lieutenant Peroux. When Sonny gave me the check I said, ‘Sweetie, what did you have to do to get this? Beat her over the head with a pipe?’”

  “Sergeant? Please go upstairs and get Miss Beauvais some shoes.”

  “Make sure they’re eights,” Juliet calls after him.

  Sonny finds him sitting on the back stoop of his apartment house, reading the Times-Picayune sports section and sipping coffee. He’s wearing a Tulane sweatshirt and sweatpants without shoes or socks, and Sonny can see the foot and ankle of his prosthesis—some parts wood, some plastic, all of it hard for him to look at.

  “I told her about the club,” Sonny says as he climbs the rusty metal stairs.

  “Huh?”

  “Then I told her about whacking the vet. I didn’t name you, but I did say I was with a friend. Which friend won’t be hard for the police to figure, since you and Roberts are the only ones I have.”

  Louis lowers the paper and brings the coffee to his lips. He seems to be trying to decide whether to drink it or to throw it at Sonny. “Bubba, what’s wrong with you?”

  Sonny stands only a few feet away, one hand firm on the railing leading up the steps, the other pulled in a loose fist. “She set me up. She’s trying to make it look like I did it.”

  Louis is quiet, waiting. “Bubba, what’s wrong?” he says again.

  Sonny’s nose has begun to run and he wipes it against the sleeve of his shirt. His gaze travels from Louis’s face to his prosthesis then off to a sky dull with scudding clouds. “Somebody went in the Beauvais last night and beat Miss Marcelle with that club you made.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “No, man, they killed her.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Sonny. I got a bad hangover.”

  “Now get this, Louis: the cops are acting like I did it.”

  It seems Louis wants to speak but is unable to. His face grows red and veins show t
hick and blue in his neck. He lowers the cup through the rails and throws the coffee out into the yard, a brown curtain melting in the grass. “Jesus.”

  “I was there a while ago when the cops found the club. Then they come down the stairs hauling her body out in a bag.”

  “Jesus,” Louis says again. His artificial leg bangs against the rails as he struggles to stand. “Sonny, come inside. Here. Help me up.”