My Juliet: A Novel

by John Ed Bradley

  “Kiss me, Sonny. Sonny, kiss me.”

  “Your mother was fine when I left the house.”

  “Sonny? Please. Kiss me, Sonny.”

  “You planted that club. You wanted them to think it was me. How could you do that? I loved you. How could you do that?”

  “Darling?”

  “No!”

  Sonny pushes past her and runs to the front of the cemetery. She calls again but this time he doesn’t stop, doesn’t look back.

  Louis is waiting on the other side of the gates, his car parked against the curb nearby. Standing casually with his back against the fence, his weight propped up on his prosthesis, he might be out enjoying the sun, people watching, trying to decide how to spend his Saturday. “You knew I’d be waiting,” he says. “You knew you could count on me, didn’t you, bubba?”

  Sonny staggers past him without a word.

  In her rumpled clothes and torn hose she eats étouffée at the counter, this dish, though called the special, not nearly on par with the one she had at Dooky Chase’s a few days ago. She avoids the rice and picks at the crawfish, forking up one at a time. She doesn’t trust their general appearance, which is more red than brown, the color she knows they’re supposed to be when prepared properly. “Take it,” she says to the counterman, then gives the plate a nudge.

  “Too seasoned?”

  “Too red,” she replies.

  “Too red? Nobody never told me too red.”

  “Too red,” she says again.

  She lights a cigarette and sips a cup of coffee. It might be the worst coffee she’s ever drunk in her whole, entire life, and she considers telling the counterman as much. Considers saying, “Hey, motherfucker, you make this shit with coffee beans or pinto beans?” But instead she settles on a different topic. “My poor mama. They buried her today.”

  “Who did?”

  “We did, the ones that knew her. She died unexpectedly.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” he says, wiping down the Formica.

  “Yeah, well, it’s sad all right. Somebody murdered her—beat her then strangled her to death. Stuck some kind of paper way up in her private area.”

  The counterman’s Adam’s apple moves in his long, thin neck.

  “What’s really weird, though,” and Juliet laughs now, “what’s weird is I’m sitting here trying to remember if it was me.”

  “If it was you what?”

  “If it was me that did it.”

  She pays and leaves. Out on the sidewalk she looks back through the lettering on the café window. Humming Bird, it says. Two words instead of the regular one. It is nighttime now and electric lamps glow on every corner and a streetcar squeals as it lumbers past, tourists watching from open windows. Juliet runs after the train, figuring she’ll kill time by riding uptown to the end of the line, but she’s too low on energy to catch it. Finally she heads back to the Lé Dale, glad to find someone other than Leroy working the desk.

  Juliet is slow climbing the stairs to her room, slow getting the key in the door. Slow to respond in the instant when she reaches for the light switch and a figure moves toward her through the darkness.

  A sharp pain radiates from her throat and prevents her from shouting out, and she understands only vaguely that someone has grabbed her by the neck.

  She latches onto his forearm with both hands and claws at his bare arms. As she begins to black out he lets her go. Coughing roughly, a thread of saliva hanging from her mouth, she falls against the door and watches as he steps back raising both arms high above his head. He is holding something and though she knows to avoid it he moves quickly and brings it down hard against the top of her head. She’s been hit harder, and by harder things, but then a second blow buffets against her jaw and rattles her teeth.

  She’s digging in her mouth, assessing the damage, when the club strikes a third time and the floor comes up fast to meet her.

  She rolls over on her back and stares straight up waiting for whatever is next and when he hits her again grains of sand splash against her face and momentarily blind her.

  “What did I do to you?” she says as blood starts to pool in her mouth.

  The club thumps against the floor. Her assailant, breathing heavily, flings the door open. When he enters the lighted hallway she can see nothing of his face for the ski mask he’s wearing. Of his clothes she can tell only that his shoes don’t match.

  “What did I do to you?” she says again, blinking against the fire ignited by the sand in her eyes.

  “You killed my Frank,” he replies, then runs limping down the corridor to the stairs.

  In the morning Sonny gets up early and drives to the French Quarter. He sets up at his favorite place under the magnolia across from the bakery.

  A search for routine brings him here, for things whole and simple and uncomplicated.

  Sonny tries to paint but the reason for it is gone and he ends up sitting with a sketchbook in his lap watching tourists move by. At noon a feeling comes over him and he understands that Miss Marcelle is dead and he lowers his head and weeps without making a sound and without tears showing on his face. As he cries, a woman sits in his chair but Sonny ignores her. After a while she stands without saying anything and moves to another of the artists along the row.

  It is midday when the two detectives show up, Lentini gnashing a toothpick, Peroux carrying a copy of the Picayune tucked under his arm. “Hey, podna, you got a minute?” The police lieutenant, wearing the contented expression of a man who just consumed too many hush puppies at lunch, sits before Sonny can answer. “I want you to be honest with me now,” he says, swallowing a belch. “You wore gloves to the house that night.”

  Sonny lays the sketchbook on the ground under his chair. “We already talked about that.”

  “Maybe you heard the question wrong the first time. I’m a big believer in second chances, and I wanted to give you an opportunity to get it straight.”

  “I’m starting to think I might need a lawyer, Lieutenant.”

  “Well, we already told you you should get one, did we not?”

  “You never told me that,” Sonny says.

  Peroux shrugs. “Look, I go back to them gloves only because our people have been unable to lift any prints of yours off any of them doors upstairs. We have you in the parlor. You’re all over that goddamn parlor. But it’s a mystery to me why when we climb them stairs and check them doors and them doorframes and all that furniture up there . . . why there ain’t a single miserable print.”

  Now it’s Sonny’s turn to shrug. “Maybe Mrs. Huey did some cleaning afterward and wiped them away. How am I supposed to know?”

  “Nobody contaminated that crime scene,” Peroux says. “Don’t even come with that shit.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Lieutenant. I admitted I was up there. What else is there for me to say?”

  “Not a single deposit,” the detective says. “Not a single goddamn one.”

  “Okay, and what does that tell you?”

  “That’s an interesting question. As a matter of fact, that’s the exact same question me and Sergeant Lentini been trying to answer ourselves since the print analysis came in.”

  Peroux springs to his feet and slaps his newspaper against Sonny’s chest. He holds it there until Sonny understands that it’s his to take now.

  “Call your lawyer, LaMott. Ask him if it puts you in a bind to tell us you wore gloves, and while you got him on the horn ask him if he has any reservations about you standing in a lineup.”

  Sonny tries not to show alarm or panic, but despite the effort he can’t hold the detective’s gaze. He drops the paper on the seat of his chair.

  “Sonny, you like cop movies? For some reason they always got a lineup in a cop movie.” Sonny doesn’t answer and Peroux says, “Have your lawyer call me at his earliest convenience.”

  “I don’t need a lawyer,” Sonny says.

  “How’s that?”

  “Lieutenant, I haven’t done a
nything. I swear to God.”

  “Then I tell you what. You come down to Broad Street tomorrow at twelve noon and we’ll get us some more proof you haven’t done anything.”

  “I didn’t kill her,” Sonny says.

  “Hey, look. Just because you’ll be standing in a lineup doesn’t mean you did. We’re working on a lead and this’ll help us to understand something.”

  Sonny takes a long time but he answers finally with a nod.

  “All right now. At ease, podna. See you tomorrow.”

  When they’ve gone Roberts hobbles over and removes a paint-stained bandanna from his pocket and wipes the sweat from Sonny’s face. “Ah, Sonny. Ah, boy,” he says, his hands trembling as he moves the rag over Sonny’s forehead.

  They want him for a lineup. But why? Sonny is unable to come up with an answer. Did somebody see him entering the Beauvais that night? What does it matter if they spotted him coming or going when Sonny’s already admitted he was there?

  “Let’s go to du Monde and get us a drink of water.”

  “No. I’m fine, Roberts. Thank you.”

  The old man shows Sonny his sketchbook. On the top sheet he’s scribbled an image of a fellow who vaguely resembles Sonny being choked into a nervous sweat by two meaty brutes. One of the strongmen grips a copy of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and over a two-column story on the bottom half of the page Roberts has penned a headline: ATTACKS ON ESPLANADE BAFFLE POLICE.

  Only now does Sonny check out the newspaper the detective gave him.

  French Quarter veterinarian Thomas P. Coulon, 75, a lifelong area resident, has intrigued police with the revelation he was attacked on the Esplanade Avenue neutral ground by a masked man wielding a club less than a month before Marcelle L. Beauvais was slain April 28th in her historic residence known as the Beauvais Mansion.

  According to NOPD sources close to the investigation, the Coulon incident and the Beauvais case have several similarities, among them an assailant who targets the elderly and assaults them with a sand-filled pipe made of plastic. Coulon did not report the beating to local authorities until after learning details about the homicide from a television news program. Coulon declined to comment yesterday when reached at his office, but sources say he has provided police with the best lead yet in a murder case that horrified the city.

  Mrs. Beauvais, widow of New Orleans real estate developer John Duffilo Beauvais, was the city’s 45th murder victim this year. Police have made no arrests in the case, but the investigation has intensified since Coulon came forward.

  “We think we can connect what happened to Dr. Coulon and what happened to Mrs. Beauvais to a single individual,” said a homicide detective who asked that his name not be used in this story.

  The Beauvais Mansion is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. During the Civil War it served as a hospital for Union forces. Police say the neighborhood has been the site of many robberies in recent years, but that the slaying appears unrelated to a break-in.

  Sonny hands the paper to Roberts and the old man pulls nervously at his ear as he reads the account. “The reason you’ve been hanging your lip has suddenly come much clearer to me. If only I could offer a solution.”

  “They think I did it,” Sonny says.

  “They think you beat an old man with a pipe?” Roberts shakes his head. “Absurd.”

  “It’s worse than that, Roberts. They think I murdered her.”

  Roberts lets go a roar of laughter that is both unfelt and unconvincing. “Preposterous.”

  “I wouldn’t murder anybody, would I, Roberts?”

  “No,” the caricaturist says in a big voice, then throws Sonny a look that seems to belie his true feelings. “My lord, son. You’re an artist!”

  She doesn’t have health insurance, so they take her to Charity Hospital. The EMS unit travels with interior lights on, one man at the wheel, a second in the rear with Juliet. She hears the siren only faintly but its effects are obvious as cars pull over to let them pass and pedestrians rubberneck with faces creased and dark.

  Juliet sits up on her elbows and watches through the windows as an old bomb station wagon jumps the curb and barely avoids a group of onlookers. “Idiot,” she says. “Did you see that?”

  The attendant smiles.

  “I bet you see some wild shit.” She glances back at the man. He’s sitting on a metal stool at the foot of the bed. “I knew this paramedic in LA,” she says. “One time him and his partner get this call. It’s a guy with a Barbie doll stuck up his behind. My friend showed me the X rays.”

  The attendant is quiet. He doesn’t seem impressed.

  “You ever see anything like that?”

  The man looks at the front of the vehicle, as if to make sure the driver isn’t listening. “Only thing, we had this woman once with a lightbulb broke off in her vulva.”

  “Her vulva? What do you mean, her vulva?”

  “Deep inside her private areas, miss.”

  “Okay. All right. I gotcha. I thought for a second there you’d said her Volvo.”

  The man looks up front again. “She bled a lot,” he says. “Apparently she and her boyfriend were high on crystal meth and he wanted to see if you could see the light shining through her belly.”

  They drive on awhile, Juliet imagining it. The world is full of crazies. And Barbie dolls and lightbulbs are just the beginning. “Well, could they?” she says, unable to wait for the punch line any longer. “Could they see that light shining from inside her volvo?”

  “I couldn’t answer, miss. By the time we arrived on the scene it’d already gone out.”

  They wheel her into the emergency room, the gurney fixed so that she can lounge in a sitting position. A cop shows up and listens without saying anything as somebody who must be a doctor looks her over, asks questions, barely responds when she answers. He flashes a small light in her eyes. He reaches under her clothes with a stethoscope and places a cold, flat piece of metal against her back and chest. His hands, covered with rubber gloves, explore her chest and rib cage, and pinch her skin as he examines her mouth and teeth. They grab at her hair when he feels for the contusion on top of her skull.

  “I’m at the auction barn,” Juliet says. “I’m a heifer.”

  The doctor, touching and probing, doesn’t seem to hear.

  She gives him a loud moo, and even this fails to get his attention.

  “So he just hit you?” the cop says. “Just came out of nowhere and hit you?”

  “Hit me with a pipe.”

  “You think you could ID this person?”

  “His shoes maybe. They looked worn at the heels. He must be on his feet a lot.”

  The cop looks at her and says, “You sure it was a pipe? Must not’ve been a very hard pipe. A hard pipe would’ve cracked you open like a watermelon.”

  “I think it was plastic like the kind plumbers use. It broke and I got sand all over me.” She pulls at the ends of her hair. “See this? This is sand. I guess it’s sand.”

  The cop leaves and the doctor removes his gloves. “You’re a lucky young woman,” he says. “I can find nothing broken. This bump here on your skull, a few cuts where you appear to have bitten yourself, but the bleeding has stopped. Cosmetically there’s no evidence of trauma. No bruises or lacerations.” He shakes his head and bunches his lips into the shape of a snail. “Still couldn’t have been a pleasant experience. Are you in any pain?”

  “I’m in a lot of pain,” she says, “but to be right honest I’ve been hurt worse.” Juliet knows she should leave it at that, but the cop has left the room and something compels her to give voice to the picture that occupies her head. “In 1971, when I was a recent honors graduate of the Academy of the Sacred Heart and mere months away from being crowned a debutante queen, I underwent an illegal abortion in an office building downtown. Now that hurt.”

  The doctor removes an instrument from her ear.

  “This happened not long after my father drowned in Lake Pontchartrain in
a, quote unquote, sailing accident. Long story short, my boyfriend took me to an abortionist who fixed me so that I could never have children again.”

  The doctor puts his instrument away. “Are you kidding me?”

  Juliet gives her head a shake. “The abortionist, I learned later, was a former Tulane medical student who apparently liked raiding hospital pharmacies more than he did sawing the bones of cadavers. The school gave him the boot for this. Want to know who my boyfriend was?”