My Juliet: A Novel

by John Ed Bradley

  He shakes his head.

  “Don’t lie to me, Leonard. They told me they hurt your feelings.”

  “Well, they were rude, all right. They kept threatening to rat me out to Big Leonard. Like I’m afraid of Big Leonard. Then they pushed me around, but let them push me around. I’m not going to jail, Juliet. In jail . . . can you imagine what they would do to a freak like me in jail?”

  She touches the contusion below his left eye, which seems fitted deeper in his skull than the right one, and inches lower. She sees where they hit his mouth, giving it a lump. And the scratch mark on his neck. And the bloody redness at his nostrils.

  “Sonny LaMott is going to fry,” he says. “They’ve got all they need now.”

  Juliet is trying to remember how Tina died, whether it had worms or got hit out in the road. What Leonard said takes maybe half a minute to reach her.

  They come at dawn and park across the street in the weedy strip of ground at the foot of the levee. Sonny watches from the living room window where he’s spent most of the night drinking coffee and listening to Juliet’s tape.

  Peroux and Lentini emerge from one car and a patrolman and a woman materialize from another. The woman is wearing a dress suit and her copper-colored hair hangs to her shoulders in a busy profusion of flips and whorls. She’s carrying an accordion folder file and she walks well ahead of the others. She doesn’t bother to look for traffic as she crosses the street.

  Outfitted in the same clothes he had on yesterday, Sonny opens the door and waits inside as they climb the stairs grousing about the heat and wondering out loud who would live in such a dump. Sonny inhales a breath of air then strides out on the landing and stands with his arms casually hanging by his side. The woman seems startled to come upon him so suddenly. She pauses on the steps before deciding to proceed.

  “Mr. LaMott? Mr. LaMott, my name is Patricia Kimball. I’m an assistant district attorney for Orleans Parish. And this is a warrant to search your premises.”

  She hands Sonny a couple of pieces of paper and nods for the others to enter the house. “When we finish here we’ll also be searching your automobile. Please let me have your keys now.”

  Sonny removes the keys from his pocket and gives them to the woman, who then passes them along to the patrolman.

  “What are you looking for?” Sonny says. “Maybe I can help.”

  The question seems to disarm the young prosecutor, or perhaps it’s Sonny’s attempt at being civil that makes her hesitate. “It’s listed there in the warrant,” she says, pointing. “A ski mask or a skullcap and a pair of gloves, to start with.”

  “I don’t think you’ll find any of that here.”

  She steps closer and holds her face level with his. Her breath smells of toothpaste and mixes badly with the fruity scent of her perfume. “There’s something else we’re here for,” she says. “It might interest you, considering its provenance.”

  “Its provenance?”

  For some reason she doesn’t seem to appreciate the question. She stares at him. “Its history, Mr. LaMott. Where it originated and where it’s been.”

  She waits as if in anticipation of Sonny venturing a guess but all he does is shake his head. “There was one object that Mrs. Huey was curious to discover missing, as it held little value but the sentimental kind.” Her mouth turns up in a grin. “An hourglass, Mr. LaMott.”

  “Forever is a long time,” Peroux announces from the other side of the room. It seems he wants to unload with another of his obnoxious laughs, but instead he says, “Especially when the woman has other plans.”

  “Maybe Juliet has it,” Sonny says. “What would I want with it?”

  “Miss Beauvais could barely remember the hourglass,” Patricia Kimball says, obviously enjoying the opportunity to impart this information. “It didn’t seem to mean anything to her.”

  “Actually, she couldn’t have cared less,” Peroux says in a loud voice.

  “Mrs. Huey remembered it because Mrs. Beauvais insisted she clean the room at least once a week. Mrs. Huey said that every time she stood at the bookshelf to dust, she felt embarrassed for your sake.”

  “Embarrassed?”

  The woman hesitates, plainly relishing the chance to share more. “To think how much you loved her,” she says, “and how little she cared about you.”

  They spend more than an hour searching the house. Sonny sits on the couch by the window, watching for activity on the wharf. Every now and then the air seems to leave the room and something catches in his throat and he has to remind himself to breathe.

  When they finish, Lentini motions him to his feet.

  “Lemme check under them cushions.”

  Sonny moves to the middle of the floor and Lentini inspects the sofa, removing the cushions and running his hands over the batting that covers the springs.

  “You drive a truck, don’t you?” It’s Patricia Kimball again.

  Sonny answers with a nod.

  “Will you take us to it?”

  He walks out onto the landing and points a finger. “That one over there in the grass.”

  Peroux rifles the glove box and the other two men dig around under the seat. They search the headliner, the wheel wells and the bumpers. They open the hood and the patrolman climbs on top of the engine and removes the air filter cover and checks the housing. The three men consult briefly with Patricia Kimball then move to the other side of the house and begin searching the trash cans. The patrolman removes the bags one after the other and throws them on the ground for the detectives to inspect. Finally they huddle on the lawn and Patricia Kimball shakes hands with the detectives before leaving with the patrolman.

  Sonny hears Peroux and his partner coming back up the stairs. This time they have no smart remarks and Peroux knocks a fist against the side of the house even though Sonny has left the door open.

  “Come in,” Sonny calls from inside.

  Peroux is sweating so hard tiny beads of perspiration shine in his goatee and the dark outline of his chest hair shows through his shirt.

  “What time do you want me for that lineup?” Sonny asks before either of them can say anything.

  Peroux tosses the truck keys on the coffee table. “There isn’t going to be any lineup.”

  “What about your witness?” Sonny says. “What about the story you planted in the paper? What about the print analysis and the polygraph? Ask me, you’ve gone through a lot of trouble. And just a minute ago you were digging in my trash.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, LaMott.”

  “I’m not fucking with you, Lieutenant. Why would I fuck with you? You’re the one who’s been fucking with me.”

  Peroux walks to the kitchen and returns wiping the sweat from his face with a dish towel. “What do you think we’re gonna do?” he says. “Line you up with a bunch of flunkies in ski masks? Let that old vet stand there playing eeny, meeny, miney, moe? No,” and he’s still wiping himself, “there won’t be any lineup.”

  “Then why’d you tell me there would be one?”

  The detective carefully considers the question. He balls up the towel and throws it back in the kitchen. “Sometimes things happen when people think they’ve reached the end. They find a memory for things they meant to lose, only can’t. Now let me ask you something, podna.” And he pauses now, glancing back at Lentini. He resets his feet beneath him. “What were you planning to do with all them pictures you got in your bedroom closet? You planning to sell them or keep them stored in there like that or what?”

  “That a work question, Lieutenant, or a personal one?”

  “Just a question. I saw the nudes. And, well . . . I mean, Jesus . . .”

  For some reason Sonny finds comfort in the way Peroux is looking at him now. That one is a cop and the other a murder suspect suddenly doesn’t seem to matter at all.

  Sonny walks to the bedroom and removes a painting from the closet—this one, like most of the others, bearing the title My Juliet scrawled on the reverse.
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  “Back when I was at Warren Easton,” Peroux says, “there was this girl in my class looked something like this. I could never get her to even notice me.” Staring at the image of Juliet, the detective chuckles and shakes his head. “I had this buddy used to say if a woman could put a pencil under her breast and it didn’t fall she’d never have a problem for as long as she lived.”

  Lentini laughs from where he’s standing at the door.

  Outside on the river a horn blasts, disrupting the quiet. Peroux starts for the door. “You know she’s been pretty busy since she came back to town? You’re not the only one. I’d tell you the names of the others we know about if I thought it would help.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Sonny says.

  “Mainly it’s that Barbier—he’s the son of this big-shot lawyer in town. He plays at a dive in the Marigny and lives in a cheap hotel on North Rampart. You might want to pay him a surprise visit sometime. He deserves whatever you got for him.”

  Sonny doesn’t say anything.

  “Mind if I tell you how I see it? How I figure it happened?”

  “Please,” and Sonny nods. “Enlighten me, Lieutenant.”

  “You go up to the Beauvais and it’s crazy and you can’t believe you’re doing it but somehow you get that check. The old lady isn’t happy and she tells you to leave and never come back and so you go. You’re a good guy and you’re embarrassed and you could kick yourself for letting that little bitch run you like she does. You even go all the way down to the street where you’ve parked. Maybe even put the key in the ignition. Maybe even start the engine. But then you remember something. It’s that hourglass. You remember what it represents. And you say to yourself, ‘Ah, what the hell. They’ll never miss it.’ And so you start back.

  “This time, though, you’re wearing a few things you didn’t have on the first time. You’ve put your gloves on and your ski mask and you’re lugging your piece of PVC, your club. Not a long time before you scared the living shit out of one old man on the neutral ground and if need be you’re prepared to scare the shit out of those two old women. So you’re in the room now—in Juliet’s room—when who but Mrs. Beauvais walks in.” Done with the story, a lopsided smile brightens the detective’s face. He nods at Sonny for a response.

  “Sounds possible,” Sonny says. “I suppose it could’ve happened.”

  “You suppose and me and Sergeant Lentini suppose and in my book that means it’s damned likely. In my book two supposes almost always equal one damned likely.”

  Sonny shakes his head. “But then why couldn’t you find my prints on the second floor? If I wasn’t wearing gloves when I went up the first time and got the check, why didn’t I leave any prints then? I told you I handled three different doorknobs.”

  “May I?” And the detective brings a finger up to the side of his head.

  “Please.”

  “You wiped everything down. You get the hourglass, you kill the old lady, then you do what anyone else in your situation would do. You wipe down the doors and the doorknobs and the bookshelf. You wipe down the stairway banister. Everything you might’ve touched you wipe down. And I’ll tell you something else. I’ll tell you what you used. The ski mask on your head,” Peroux says. “You used the ski mask, didn’t you?”

  “None of that is true, Lieutenant.”

  “You get outside and dispose of what’s left of the club in the bushes out back. I bet you lost sleep over that, leaving it like that for us to find and not taking it and dumping it somewhere.”

  “Nope.”

  “So you saying you didn’t lose sleep over leaving it behind?”

  “I’m saying none of that happened. I’ve lost sleep, sure. I’ve lost plenty lately. But not over a club in some bushes.”

  Peroux shrugs. He is staring at the painting in his hands. “Sometimes I want to feel sorry for you, LaMott, I really do. I think about your family situation—you coming home that day to find your mama dead in the yard, your father who’s so lost he can’t figure out how to wipe his own ass. I think how you chose this line of work where every day people tell you how no good you are—how they do this just by walking past your paintings without looking at them let alone asking to buy one. And I think how lonely and how shitty it must be loving a woman who’s had everybody else but still won’t have you. It gets to me, LaMott. It puts a lump the size of an elephant turd right here in my throat. I even get tears in my eyes. Goddamn, look at me now, would you?”

  “Right,” says Sonny, who in actual fact sees nothing in the detective’s eyes.

  “She had an illegal operation in 1971? Was that with you?”

  “Sir?”

  “Juliet Beauvais told someone she can’t have children because she ruined herself with an abortion when it was still illegal in this country. Was that with you?”

  Sonny doesn’t answer.

  “Nothing to worry about on that count, podna. It was a long time ago, the statute of limitations applies. Besides that, nobody could give a shit anymore.”

  “Right.”

  “Your Juliet,” the detective says, glancing at his picture again. “What a dream, huh?”

  “Right,” Sonny says again, amazed that he’s able to speak at all.

  Juliet drives the Mustang to the house on Saint Charles Avenue where Dickie Boudreau grew up and parks in front next to a fire hydrant. In terms of square footage the house nearly doubles that of the Beauvais, although it holds far less historical significance. A wealthy American built the palace as a testament to his financial and cultural superiority, and in doing so he proved not only that he was nouveau riche but also that he was worth nothing, or il vaut pas rien, as the Creoles referred to him.

  Locals call the place the Wedding Cake House because the filigree on the façade resembles the icing on a wedding cake.

  Juliet’s been there only a few minutes when a police cruiser stops behind her and a cop walks over. “What else could you possibly want to know?” Juliet asks, lowering her window just as he’s about to rap on it. “Have you been following me?”

  The cop stares from behind the black pools of his aviator shades. “What did you say?”

  “What have I done now?”

  “You don’t see that fireplug?” He points to the one on the corner then leans in close to get a look inside the car. “Are you on drugs?”

  “Me? You’ve got to be kidding. I don’t use drugs.”

  “Lady, move this thing before I write you up.”

  Juliet makes a U-turn and parks on the other side of the avenue, this time occupying a legal space, but one at such a distance from the Wedding Cake House that when a man who might be Dickie miraculously appears at the front door and walks to the driveway she can’t cross the neutral ground fast enough to confirm his identity.

  The back of the man’s head, like the top and the sides, is completely bald. Dickie’s hair, if she recalls correctly, was a bushy mop.

  Another thing about the man that confuses her is his size: Dickie was short, while this person is so large that he has difficulty squeezing into a Mercedes-Benz sedan.

  As she crosses the avenue Juliet dodges a streetcar and oncoming traffic and by the time she reaches the fence that surrounds the property the man has driven away. (Come to think of it, neither does he drive like Dickie, who was always peeling out.)

  Juliet tries to open the front gate but it’s secured with a deadbolt lock.

  She yells Dickie’s name but nobody comes to the door.

  On her way back to the Mustang, Juliet stops between a pair of train rails and stands waiting in the path of an approaching streetcar. As the conductor draws closer he begins to clang his bell in warning, but Juliet, crying now, stays put. More bells and now the frantic shouts of onlookers. The conductor is braking; she can hear the streetcar decelerating and the squeal of its metal wheels against the rails.

  It stops finally with only a foot or two to spare, and Juliet steps aside.

  “Wanna do it?” she y
ells at the conductor, her voice broken by a sob.

  As Juliet continues on her way to the Mustang the conductor and his passengers stare as if at a crazy person.

  Juliet shouldn’t have given the militant bastard enough room to stop. Nobody would be staring then.

  6

  IN THE MORNING JULIET FARES BADLY on the polygraph exam. It is unintentional. Even responses to questions with no connection to her mother’s death produce results that indicate she is being deceptive.