My Juliet: A Novel

by John Ed Bradley

  Lentini leads Sonny to a room nearly identical to the first. They sit on metal chairs and wait facing each other until the print analyst appears in the open doorway. She’s wiping her hands on a brown paper towel, and she smiles when they rise to their feet in unison.

  “Mrs. Townsend,” Lentini says with a nod. “This is LaMott.”

  “Hello, LaMott.”

  She needs all of five minutes to take Sonny’s prints, a process that somehow inspires in Sonny a feeling of solidarity with the woman. “I have paint on my hands,” he says.

  “None that’s getting in my way.”

  “I used to be an artist in the French Quarter,” Sonny says, no less surprised by the statement than both she and Lentini seem to be.

  “Did it hurt?” Peroux says when Sonny returns to the first room.

  Sonny holds up a hand. “It makes your fingers kind of powdery after she puts on the cream. But you really don’t feel anything.”

  “Sonny, you know somebody name of Coulon?”

  “Coulon?” He waits, figuring it necessary to give the impression that he’s thinking about it. “No, I don’t know a Coulon. Not personally anyway.”

  “You know one impersonally maybe?”

  “Sure I do. I bump into people all the time I don’t know but impersonally.”

  “Do you know any old veterinarian named Coulon you might’ve beat up one night with a club on the Esplanade Avenue neutral ground?”

  “I’ve never beaten anyone with a club, Lieutenant.”

  Peroux is nodding his head as if he’s known this all along, that of course Sonny has never beaten anyone with a club. “And I suppose since you never beat Dr. Coulon with a club, then I suppose it follows you never stuck a piece of paper up that woman’s privates, huh, podna?”

  Something clicks shut in Sonny’s throat and it is half a minute before he is able to say anything. His face burns red and he lowers his head and thumbs his eyes closed. “Did somebody really do that, Lieutenant?”

  The detective reaches over and stops the recorder, just as Sonny feels Lentini, awake now, drawing the chair out from behind him.

  “One more thing,” Peroux says. “Since you made such good friends with Mrs. Townsend, we were hoping you might enjoy meeting another friend, Mr. Arias. He’s a polygraph expert. If you’d rather not meet him, or if you’d rather have your lawyer present when you do, it won’t be no skin off my back. We can arrange to have the two of you sit together later on.”

  “Let’s do it now,” Sonny says.

  When it’s over, Sonny leaves the building with only a dim recollection of where he parked the truck. Outside, the humid air dumps a dense weight in his lungs and he begins to sweat so much that his clothes cling to his skin. Traffic thumps by and Sonny wonders how the state of Louisiana executes people these days, whether with the chair or an IV drip.

  From behind him comes the sound of footsteps, then Peroux’s voice. “That’s the first time in my twenty-some-odd years as a peace officer where a suspect didn’t ask right off how he did on the lie detector.”

  Sonny glances at the man then turns back to the street.

  “You may’ve impressed Mr. Arias, podna, but it still don’t add up. No sir, it don’t add up worth a good goddamn. Now go home, LaMott. I’m tired of looking at you.”

  The parlor is empty but for the maid and her mother, who lies on white satin with a glass rosary in her hands. Juliet makes the sign of the cross and kneels next to the bier, her hands shaking as she brings them together in a steeple at her chest. The mortician did a good job, she has to admit. He succeeded in getting her hair and makeup right. And he’s put her in a dress that appears to be from the days before her mother’s wardrobe, once the envy of many a grande dame, was limited to purchases from the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store.

  Miss Marcelle’s face shows no evidence of the beating. If not for puffiness around her mouth she would look perfectly normal. Juliet, breaking her prayer steeple, brings a hand to her own lips. She stands and places the same hand on her mother’s mouth. She is not past acknowledging the similarity in construction, and yet a voice sounds in her head: “My heavens, you have that man’s mouth? Where did you get that man’s mouth?”

  Juliet recites a “Hail Mary” but for some reason today struggles to remember the prayer. She makes up words of her own to fill in where there are memory lapses. The effort calls to mind her days at Sacred Heart and the hours in chapel given to venerating a woman who had a child without ever being intimate with a man. Juliet was as mystified by the story then as she is today—Juliet who at sixteen entrusted her innocence to Dickie Boudreau, and who came away from that first experience neither pregnant with God’s child nor particularly satisfied. When it was over, she cried with her face in a pillow as he snored loudly in his sleep, oblivious to her need to be stroked and spoken to. “Do you still think I’m special?” she said into the dark. Dickie answered with another noisy exhalation, his loudest yet.

  Juliet moves away from the coffin and approaches Anna Huey sitting in front. “I guess now me and Mama will never have that talk,” she says.

  “Juliet, what do you have on? You should’ve worn a long skirt.”

  “Anna Huey, why are you always so mad at me?” And before she can answer, Juliet retreats to the back of the room and sits alone on the last row of chairs.

  After several minutes a man enters from a side door and takes a seat near hers, and even though his face is turned away Juliet can clearly see that it’s her father. She thought maybe Sonny LaMott or Leonard Barbier would attend the wake, but this is unexpected.

  Johnny Beauvais removes his panama and places it on the seat next to him. “Hello, darling,” he says at last, then motions her over with a finger. “This is just your father talking, but maybe you shouldn’t have done that with your slip of paper.”

  “What paper?”

  “I think we know.”

  Juliet shrugs and moves closer, sliding over the cold cushions. She’s tempted to reach out and touch him, but something stops her. Her father is a ghost, after all; her hand would go right through him. “They won’t be able to trace it back to me, will they, Daddy?”

  Her father shakes his head. “Not the way you write.”

  “Daddy, I thought you said I had somebody named Etienne’s mouth. It turns out I have Mama’s mouth. It’s been such a long time since I really let myself look at her that I was stunned just now to see my inner tubes on that woman’s face.”

  Juliet suddenly is aware of a presence nearby. Anna Huey, smiling in a way that would suggest triumph, is standing in the space between the rows of chairs. “Who were you talking to?”

  Juliet swivels her head to look back at her father but he’s already disappeared, along with his panama. “I was saying my prayers.”

  “It didn’t sound like praying.”

  “Somehow I feel like God hears me better if I say it out loud.”

  “You were talking about Etienne and his mouth. I heard you, Juliet. You said something about inner tubes.”

  Juliet touches his seat and tests for warmth. Nothing. And he was just there!

  “You’re still hooked on drugs, aren’t you?” Anna Huey says. “You’ve been snorting coke. You come to your mother’s wake high as a kite. Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  “Oh, go swab a toilet,” Juliet says, then stares until Anna Huey leaves.

  Later that night at the Lé Dale Juliet can find no way to satisfy her terrible longing. Leroy, the clerk from downstairs, does what he can but it only adds to her emptiness. She feels completely hollowed out inside, and when she closes her eyes she sees the rooms of the Beauvais as if through a veil of gauze. The furnishings have been removed and the floors lie bare and dusty underfoot. Shutters slap against the side of the house, their loud arrhythmicity a torture. The voices of her parents—arguing, as usual—echo in the open space.

  “Do you still think I’m special?” Juliet says.

  “Better believe I
do,” says Leroy.

  “As special as before?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Juliet turns over on her side and hugs herself. Maybe she and Leroy should go to the French Quarter and get loaded and recruit others to help with her loneliness. Maybe more partners are the answer. They could fuck her into forgetting. Fuck her until tonight’s horror replaces all the other horrors. But her emptiness has a weight and it’s too heavy to budge. Juliet can barely lift herself to a sitting position. It takes all of her strength to move to the side of the bed and put her feet on the floor.

  She wishes her father would return and talk to her again. She asks him to. “You need to explain a few things,” she says. “Come to think of it, you weren’t so perfect, either.”

  “I don’t remember ever hearing myself say I was perfect.”

  “Maybe she was from the yam fields, but she was still my mother. And she was your wife. If she was so terrible then why’d you go and marry her?”

  “Hey, baby, I never even met your mother let alone married the bitch.” Leroy drags a hand across her back. “I told you to go easy on that shit. God, how much did you take?”

  Juliet looks at him past the sheet of hair hanging in her face. Her lips are so numb she can barely move them. “Now for the rest of your life,” she says, “you’ll be able to tell everyone you made it with an actual Beauvais.”

  “It was good,” says the clerk, smiling a mouth colored red from too many candies. “But don’t let it go to your head. Pussy’s pussy no matter the pedigree.”

  They entomb Miss Marcelle beside the body of her husband in the Beauvais family mausoleum at Metairie Cemetery. Sonny shares pallbearing duties with Louis Fortunato and four gardeners who formerly were employed to keep the yard at the mansion. Anxious to recruit strong-armed males to handle the coffin, Sonny could think of no one but Louis, who agreed to the assignment despite his disability. Then Anna Huey remembered the gardeners, each of whom accepted the detail for his standard fee of four dollars an hour.

  “May I speak to you alone, please,” Juliet asks Sonny when the service at the cemetery ends.

  Her lips are dry and chapped, the flesh beneath her eyes dark with bruises. In one hand she holds a twisted rope of tissue, in the other the crucifix that minutes before was fixed to the top of her mother’s coffin.

  “I don’t think I want to be alone with you, Julie.”

  “Please, sweetie. Just a few minutes.”

  “No way.” He looks over at Louis waiting by his car. Louis holds up an arm and taps the face of his watch. “I’m not here for you today, Julie,” Sonny says. “I’m here for your mother.”

  “Oh, darling, please.”

  “No.”

  “Please, Sonny.”

  Louis waits inside his car now, the motor running. He lowers his window as Sonny walks up and leans with his back against the top of the doorframe. “Hey, look, I think I’ll stay awhile.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She wants to talk.”

  Louis watches Juliet with the appropriate level of suspicion. He gives a laugh and slaps a hand against the steering wheel. “Tell me something, brother. Did I dream your visit to my apartment the other night? All that business about Juliet setting you up? Did you really say that or was that conversation something I imagined?”

  “Go home, Louis.”

  Louis shakes his head. “No, I think I’ll wait.”

  “Louis, go home. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  After he’s gone Sonny and Juliet start along an asphalt path meandering through the vast city of the dead. Cedar and oak trees filter the sunlight and a breeze sends freshly cut chips of grass swirling between the massive aboveground tombs. Despite ninety-degree heat it’s comfortable in the shade and they stroll a few feet away from each other reading the names of the families engraved on the marble and granite façades. Here at Metairie Cemetery the rich and the powerful repose in miniature versions of the ostentatious mansions they left behind, while in other cemeteries nearby the poor, the lower classes and the ordinary have graduated from shotgun shanties to brick-and-mortar crypts with hardly more than fresh white paint to adorn them.

  “This way,” Sonny says.

  “Huh?”

  “I want to see Mama.”

  It is a long time before they do anything but walk. They cross under the overpass and hike down City Park Avenue to Greenwood Cemetery. They pass tombs with modest cement-cast statues, many of them angels with faces staring off in the blue distance, wings tightly tucked. They pass the figure of a cherub and Juliet stops on the path and attempts to imitate the pose.

  She puffs out her cheeks to match those of the cherub, then she holds her hands at her shoulders and flutters her fingers like a pair of small dancing wings.

  And only twenty, thirty minutes ago, Sonny thinks with amazement, they were sliding her mother’s coffin into a vault no bigger than a broom closet tipped on its side.

  When they reach the LaMott family tomb Sonny stands with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his jacket. He studies the legend carved in the cement wall, his mother’s name and the dates of her birth and death. The crypt is a traditional “fours,” as the city’s ancestors referred to tombs designed to accommodate four bodies. “If she doesn’t mind being low-rent,” Sonny remembers his mother saying years ago, in a rare moment of acerbity, “and if she ever really does agree to marry the son of a shrimp salesman, maybe you and Juliet can join us when the time comes. There’s room.”

  On the weedy floor in front of the tomb rests a wicker basket crowded with plastic flowers so faded that it’s hard to tell their original color. Juliet stoops down and rearranges the blooms, and Sonny says, “Did you kill her?”

  “What?”

  “Your mother. Did you kill her?”

  She stands clutching the stem of a washed-out chrysanthemum and brings her face close to his. “No, Sonny, I didn’t kill her. Did you?”

  “Why would I kill her?” he says. “Because you asked me to?” Unable to hold her gaze, he runs a hand over his face and glances back at the cemetery gates. “I don’t think so, Julie.”

  “I do,” she says. “I think so. And if I think something is so, then it is so.”

  Sonny can hear traffic on the interstate, the low murmur of lawn mowers. Leaves scatter between his ankles, catch in the grass. “Julie, I know about your life in California. I know about the arrests and the drug rehab. I know things about you you don’t even know I know.”

  “Do you know about this,” she asks, then licks her mouth.

  Sonny takes a step back. “Look,” he says, “coming here obviously was a mistake.”

  “What about this?” she says now, but spares him the demonstration.

  “I’m leaving,” he says, then starts back down the path to the cemetery gates.

  He’s covered about fifty yards and still she remains behind, waiting in a splash of light, the tomb at her back. He stops and turns around.

  “It was you,” Juliet says again, shouting now. “I know it was.”

  She steps off the paved surface and walks around to the rear of the tomb, and when he returns he finds her standing in weeds, arms held out to embrace him. Her face holds a look he’s seen before, and Sonny recalls that Juliet, in the film he and Louis watched together, was staring at the tall blond man this way, with a desire that bordered on the comic, tongue teasing her lips to emphasize her intentions.

  “Cut it out,” he says. “Goddammit, Julie. Cut it out, do you hear?”

  But Juliet says nothing as she removes her blouse and skirt, flips her shoes off and draws her hose down to her ankles. She isn’t wearing underwear and her body shows no tan lines as the sun-darkened, hairless flesh of her pubis blends evenly with the flesh of her legs.

  “You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to do that.”

  “Tell me you killed her. Say it.”

  “No.”

  “You hit her with that pipe—”

  “Sh
ut up.”

  “You hit her and when she wouldn’t die you wrapped your hands around her neck and you strangled her. I know it was you. Sonny, I went to the mansion that night. I was there after you’d left and Mother was already dead upstairs on the floor.”

  “Goddammit, Julie.”

  “Admit it. You did it for me. You did it for your Julie.”

  She reaches a hand out and touches his face and even as he instructs himself not to Sonny can feel his body leaning to meet her. He closes his eyes and pushes her away. “No,” he says. “No, Julie. That’s not how it happened.”