“Miss Beauvais?”
“You’re a doctor, so let me ask. What do you think hurts more? Having a dirty speculum and a dirty curette rooting around in your volvo and spreading all variety of infection or sticking a Barbie doll up your rectum?”
The doctor seems to have completed the examination. He refits his eyeglasses on his face and touches his mouth with the sleeve of his lab coat. Another gurney rolls by, and he spends a long time watching after it. “Are you allergic to anything, Miss Beauvais? Any kind of medication?”
“No.”
“Percodan?”
“Nope. Me and Percodan are like this.” She shows two fingers entwined.
The doctor excuses himself and leaves the room. When he returns he’s holding in one hand a soufflé cup half-filled with water and in the other two pale green tablets. “You have anyone to drive you home, Miss Beauvais?”
“No,” extracting the pills from his palm. “An ambulance brought me here.”
“I can arrange for a cab to drive you.”
“I’ll just catch one out in the street.” As she swallows the medicine, he watches from behind the flat, opaque reflection on his glasses, watches as if trying to decide where they’ve met before. You look familiar, he wants to say. How do I know you?
“Ever get a girl pregnant, Doctor?”
“Well, yes. Yes, I have, as a matter of fact.” He adds, after a pause, “I’m married to her. My wife and I have three children.”
Juliet squeezes the cup flat and hands it back to him. “Up until I was sterilized, and even for a long while after, I dreamed about having children myself. I’m from a famous family—as a matter of fact, I’m the last of them. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Beauvais Mansion on Esplanade?”
The doctor’s hand comes up and touches his mouth again. He looks around to make sure no one is listening. “Miss Beauvais,” he says in a dry, conspiratorial tone, “would you like for me to arrange for a private consultation with someone here?”
“You’re a doctor,” she says.
“I’m an emergency room physician. I’m talking about a specialist.”
“You’ve helped plenty.” She slides off the gurney and spends a moment straightening her clothes. “Thank you for listening, Doctor.”
“You’re welcome,” the doctor says in a frail whisper that suggests exhaustion. “I have patients now.” But a minute goes by before he turns and walks away.
Toward dusk the jangling telephone shakes Sonny awake and brings him charging off the little sofa by the window. He bumps against a lamp and nearly knocks it to the floor, then he bangs his shin trying to hurdle the coffee table. A pain bright and screaming drops him to his knees, but closer to the source of the miserable noise.
“Wait,” he mutters.
He stops the ringing and holds the mouthpiece to his chin. He grunts a rough greeting.
“Hi, sugar. It’s Anna Huey.”
“Mrs. Huey,” he says with only a dim understanding.
“Sonny, they’ll be reading the will day after tomorrow. Miss Marcelle’s will?”
Where he hit the table his leg beats in time with his heart. “Okay.”
“Sonny? Sonny, are you all right? You don’t sound well.”
“Yes, Mrs. Huey?”
“I’m sorry to wake you, sugar. But it’s my duty and responsibility to call. They’re reading the will, Miss Marcelle’s will? You know Nathan Harvey?”
“Nathan Harvey? No. Who is Nathan Harvey?”
“Nathan Harvey is a lawyer on Poydras Street, Sonny, in that Shell Building. You know the Shell Building where they have all those offices?”
“Are you talking about One Shell Square, Mrs. Huey?”
“Right. He’s the one handling madam’s estate. You should be there, at his office, at three P.M. this coming Friday. You don’t have to, it’s not the law or anything, but you should be.”
Sonny looks around for a clock. “Why me?” he says.
“Miss Marcelle put you in her will, sugar. Mr. Harvey . . . well, they call it bequeathing. Something like that. You know what they call me?”
Sonny waits.
“Executrix. Isn’t that a word?” She gives an embarrassed laugh. “I like it.”
Almost three hours. Past the open door to the kitchen Sonny sees the digital clock on the face of the microwave oven. He slept that long. It’s past seven o’clock suddenly.
“Mrs. Huey,” Sonny says, his head thick and cottony. “Mrs. Huey, those two detectives . . . ? They took my fingerprints and now they’re saying I have to stand in a lineup.”
She lets several seconds pass before speaking. “If you didn’t do it, then you have nothing to worry about. That’s how it works, right?”
The remark, though spoken plainly, isn’t quite the vote of confidence Sonny was hoping to hear. “I guess so,” he says.
“Listen, sugar, if it makes you feel any better they haven’t been so nice to me, either. Had me answer their questions and do the lie detector and write on some paper. Had me give my fingerprints. Don’t feel bad, Sonny, you ain’t the only one.”
“I wish I’d never gone that night for Juliet’s check. None of this would’ve happened.”
Another long pause. Too long. “How do you mean, sugar?”
“I don’t know. I guess I don’t know what I mean.”
“Friday at three,” she says. “Nathan Harvey’s on Poydras.”
Sonny hangs up and lies in the heat and the dark watching occasional pieces of light float across the ceiling. “If you didn’t do it, then you have nothing to worry about.” Weren’t those Louis’s words as well? Sonny wishes he shared such a pure and noble faith, but the picture of what awaits him isn’t any good: prison and death row, a tomb nobody visits, an eternity of regret.
A breeze, smelling of river sludge, stirs the curtains and riffles the pages of his father’s fishing magazines. When the next horn blows you will get up, he tells himself. But several horns blow and Sonny remains unmoving on the floor.
He seems to sleep again but after a time he understands that it isn’t sleep at all but a sort of paralysis. His nervous system has shut down. His brain . . .
The next horn, he tells himself.
The microwave tells him it is eight, then nine, then ten o’clock. At ten-thirty Curly and Florence Bonaventure entertain him with a festive argument that culminates in a noisy fuck. Curly’s groans, never louder, are like those of a dog at its bowl. For her part Florence alternates shouts of pleasure with ones of pain, her constant nattering laced with obscenities that Curly answers with epithets of his own. Against the common wall they share with Sonny their headboard beats a rhythmic tattoo. In the background Sonny hears a second set of voices, and these are muffled somewhat but no less agitated. Have the Bonaventures brought in another couple? Music plays, if the noise produced by an electronic synthesizer and canned drums qualifies as music.
Sonny understands finally that his neighbors are screwing to porn.
“I’m innocent,” he yells at the top of his lungs. “It wasn’t me! I didn’t do it!”
A silence follows, then the couple, louder than before, goes at it again.
Sonny comes to his feet. Aiming to shut them out he turns on his boom box and raises the volume way past his personal comfort level. It’s the tape that he and Juliet listened to the night she stayed over. A saxophone explores a haunting melody to a live audience that erupts in warm applause at song’s end.
On a hunch Sonny stops the recorder and removes the tape, which isn’t labeled. He and Juliet listened to the “B” side only, and now Sonny flips the tape over to the “A” side, rewinds it to the beginning, and punches the Play button.
An announcer is introducing the group. “Messieurs et mademoiselles,” he says, then ticks off names to a riot of shouts and whistles.
“And on alto sax,” the man announces at last, providing the name that draws the loudest cheers of all.
They stop her as she’s clearing th
e hospital’s automatic sliding glass doors. “Miss Beauvais,” the usual one says. “Can we give you a lift home?”
“Sorry, Detective. But the Beauvais isn’t officially mine yet.”
She means to be clever, and they allow her this. “To your hotel, then?”
“Okay,” she says. “The Lé Dale on Saint Charles. Scene of the crime.”
Lentini drives. Peroux rests his arm on top of the seat and tries to engage her with a smile. “We understand he used a pipe. What do you remember about him?”
“Mainly that his shoes didn’t match. His heels, his shoe heels, were really worn, but one looked to be more worn than the other.”
Neither cop says anything. Maybe they knew this.
“I asked him why he was beating on me, and he said I killed his Frank. Just like that, he says, ‘You killed my Frank.’ ”
Lentini and Peroux look at each other. She feels like saying “Bingo.” Then Peroux again: “He didn’t happen to mention who this Frank was?”
“I don’t know any Franks that I know of.”
“No Franks? What about pets? You know any pets named Frank?”
“I haven’t known a pet named Frank in my whole, entire life—not when I was a child, and not now. Where I live, in my little orbit, people aren’t much into pets. You know why that is?” She looks at the scenery passing by: a used car lot, a carpet remnant store, an abandoned hotel decorated with for-sale signs and sheets of warped plywood peeling off the plate glass windows. “It’s because people in California can’t take care of their own selves. How do you expect them to take care of a pet?”
“No Franks, then. What else do you remember?”
She thinks about it. Shakes her head. “He limps.” And now of course it comes to her. The man with the club was Louis. Who else but Louis?
“Maybe you should’ve hired somebody to whack you with a pipe a long time ago,” Peroux says. “Get the heat off that way. I got to give you credit.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You get him to beat you with a pipe the way he beat your mother and that automatically eliminates you as a suspect.”
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but I have better things to do with my time than rearrange my own face. Now why are you talking to me this way? I’ve been very nice to you.”
They pull up in front of the Lé Dale and Juliet gets out. Peroux rolls down his window. “Tell your boyfriend who’s a boy we didn’t mean to hurt his feelings.”
It takes her a second to understand. “You talked to Leonard?”
“Sergeant Lentini didn’t appreciate his attitude. He thought he was hiding something.”
Juliet glances at the other one. “What can I tell you?” he says. “I’m a terrible person.”
“I don’t know what it is about him and the fruits,” Peroux says with a resigned attitude. “But Sergeant Lentini can smell a fruit. He claims they put out an odor.” Lentini is quiet, and Peroux laughs without apparent feeling. “Hey, podna, one more thing. Do you remember a little hourglass Sonny LaMott gave you back in school?”
“Did Sonny give me an hourglass? When was that?”
“Long time ago.”
“I don’t remember, no . . . oh, okay, hold on a sec. Yes. Yes, Sonny did give me an hourglass. It was a birthday gift, as I remember. He gave it to me before I left for California. It was about yay big.” She demonstrates with her thumb and finger held apart.
“Hard to remember that far back, is it?”
“I guess fifteen years is a long time when you’re busy beating yourself with a pipe.”
“When’s the last time you saw it?”
“Last time I saw it? Well, the last time I saw it also happens to be the last time I thought about it.” She backs away from the window. “The day he gave it to me and I put it on a shelf.”
They roar off without so much as a wave and Juliet climbs the stairs to the lobby, where Leroy strays from his TV long enough to check and make sure she’s still alive. “When you left it wasn’t looking too good,” he says.
“I don’t like being victimized. I don’t like a hotel with no security.”
“And I don’t like cops asking me questions. And I don’t like whores. And I don’t like worrying whether I caught something after screwing one.”
“You mean a whore or a cop?”
He gets out of his chair and walks around from behind the desk. She’s wondering if maybe she’ll be making another trip to the hospital, but then he hands her a letter without a postmark or return address. “Colored woman brought it,” he says.
Juliet tears it open and reads particulars about a meeting Friday in the law office of Nathan Harvey, Esquire. “I called maybe ten times and you’re never there,” the note ends. “I’m starting to wonder if you even want what your mother left you . . .”
“It isn’t Mama that left it,” Juliet says.
“Huh?”
“You must have me confused with somebody else.”
“No. That letter is for you.”
“It’s always been mine. It’s just she took it for a while.”
“Well,” says Leroy, “she brought it back. Now get out of here.”
Up in the room Juliet takes her clothes off and curls up in bed, thinking she’ll have to write the gimp a thank-you note for inadvertently removing her from suspicion. She’d beat him with a pipe of her own but that would do for him what he just did for her and she isn’t feeling at all charitable at the moment.
Juliet takes her medicine then lies on her back smoking. She remembers back to pets she’s known and she speaks their names into the darkness.
There was a toy Chihuahua of her father’s, small enough as a puppy to fit in the palm of your hand. Juliet can see the precious thing snoozing in the sun of the upper gallery and yapping whenever the mailman came. It had bug eyes and sharp toenails that clicked against the wood floors.
From outside comes the thwumpthwump of rubber tires on train rails, then the loud electric whoosh and squeal of the streetcar itself. That sound seems never far from her consciousness, background music of her very own. Even when she lived in California Juliet could summon the sound of the streetcars, and it kept her company the way a good friend would, without any expectation but for occasional acknowledgment. If you live forever hearing streetcars then how can you ever truly be free of New Orleans?
Juliet lights a second cigarette and uses a plastic cup for an ashtray, holding it steady in one of her armpits. Mystified as to how someone who cleans house for a living can write such clear, declarative sentences and with such a practiced hand, Juliet reads yet again Anna Huey’s letter about the meeting Friday at Nathan Harvey’s office.
When the house is officially hers, the first thing she’ll do is hand that woman her walking papers. “You’re dismissed,” Juliet says out loud now, smoke issuing from her mouth along with the words. “Get your belongings and beat it.”
Once she’s gone Juliet will throw the doors and windows open and let some air in.
Then she’ll call Salvation Army and have them send a truck for her mother’s clothes and personal effects. Then she’ll trip some bug bombs and fumigate the place.
Juliet is still lying in bed when her father opens the door and enters the room. He strides with that same old Cary Grant confidence and who is he holding today but the little Chihuahua whose name Juliet couldn’t recall. It squirms in his arms and drives its nose against his neck and face. “I was just thinking about you,” Juliet says to the dog. “Tu aussi,” she says to her father.
Johnny Beauvais puts his free hand on top of Juliet’s head and runs it through her hair. For a ghost his hand has a powerful weight and she feels pinned to her place. “Was it Tiny?” she asks.
The dog whimpers and shoots her an unhappy look.
“Tinker?” she tries again.
“What are you talking about?” her father asks in a peculiar voice. “Come on, Juliet. Snap out of it, snap out of it!” He takes her by the should
ers and shakes her until her head snaps back. “Juliet? Juliet, what’s wrong with you?”
“Tina,” she says. “It was Tina. Was it Tina?”
The cup has tipped over and ashes stain the sheets. The butt of her cigarette lies cold on her neck. She looks at her father and understands that he’s really Leonard Barbier. He’s Leonard with his face so disfigured that it possesses a Picassoesque aspect.
Juliet shoves up to the head of the bed and leans against the wall, her naked breasts stamped with the pattern of the sheet she was lying on. She can smell the rot of her own breath. She knows now that she was sleeping. “Did you tell them anything?”
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