My Juliet Read online

  “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 thick 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.”

  They sit at the dinette table in the kitchen and the apartment feels as cold as a freezer after the hot, moist air outside. Louis pours Sonny a cup of coffee and Sonny sips it while quietly examining the knots in the face of the cedar cupboard, the checkerboard pattern of the tiled floor, the lines in his hands. Tears grow large in his eyes and he tries to keep from blinking.

  “Sonny, you want something to eat?”

  “Huh?”

  “I could fix you breakfast.”

  “Who can eat after what I just went through?”

  But Louis cooks for him anyway. In a crockery bowl he blends half a dozen eggs with milk, sugar, cinnamon and vanilla, then he dunks pieces of stale French bread in the rich, golden-colored mixture. After letting the bread soak he moves it with a spatula to an iron skillet bubbling with grease. “The cops want to see me again this afternoon,” Sonny says. “Can you believe that?”

  “If you didn’t do it you have nothing to worry about. Tell them everything. Well, tell them everything but what you know about the club.” Louis nudges the steaming bread. “You need to see this, brother. You need to see how pretty this is coming out.”

  Sonny stands at the stove and looks down at the skillet and the bread cooking against the black iron. “The browns and the yellows,” he says. “The hot oil.”

  “You should make a picture.”

  “It would be a good one,” Sonny says as if it were his idea.

  After a while he can feel himself beginning to settle down. The fear and the pain wash away and something else takes their place, a kind of quiet. Sonny stops seeing the police investigator duckwalking into the privet hedge and the Vaudechamp knocked crooked and the face of the handsome detective under the magnolia dripping water from last night’s rain.

  He wonders why Lieutenant Peroux, an intelligent black man in a position of authority, would choose to sound like a redneck and call people “podna.” But then Sonny decides it doesn’t matter what the man calls anyone. He is aware only of the smell of the bread frying and of the cold air blowing and of the taste of the chicory coffee. He is safe in the kitchen with Louis Fortunato at the stove and sunlight streaming in through the water-stained counterpane. And it comes to him that what awaits outside will never find him as long as he remains here and the air is cold and the coffee’s hot and the colors in the skillet are brown and yellow.

  Louis serves him a plate. He sprinkles confectioners’ sugar on the fried bread then adds a generous coating of Steen’s cane syrup from a can.

  “Pain perdu,” Louis says. “That’s how you call this in French.”

  “I didn’t do it. I swear to God, Louis, I didn’t kill that lady.”

  “And you thought I just waited tables. Look at me, Sonny. Look what I did.”

  Sonny eats and when he’s done Louis clears the table. Sonny starts to get up to help but Louis pats him on the shoulder. “I got it.”

  “The doors to my truck don’t lock. They’re broken. She must’ve gone in there last night sometime after she left me.”

  Louis is standing at the sink with his hands in sudsy water. He looks back at Sonny and nods but he doesn’t say anything.

  “One other thing I keep thinking about,” Sonny says. “Juliet sent me to the mansion last night to get something from her mother. She said her bedroom was the third door to the right off the stairs. I get up there and open the door and it’s the maid’s room. It wasn’t even her room, Louis, and she knew it wasn’t her room. She wanted Mrs. Huey to see me. Have her wake up and see me prowling around the house like a burglar and not say anything.”

  “You want some more coffee, Sonny?”

&nb
sp; “Louis, I’m trying to tell you something.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Why would Juliet leave me this morning the way she did?” Louis starts to answer but Sonny interrupts him. “I know why she did it,” he says, “I know exactly why she did it.”

  Louis turns back from the sink, waiting for the answer. “I’m the one person who’d do anything for her. I’m the easiest. The reason she did it, Louis . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Because she could.”

  Louis dries his hands and watches Sonny with a look of great sorrow. “Hey, Sonny? Hey, listen, brother. Why don’t you go in my room and take a nap? You must be exhausted. You seem like anyone but yourself. Go in there and lie down and close your peepers. I’ve got two hours before work. I’ll wake you up when it’s time to get a move on.”

  “I don’t think I can sleep.”

  “Do it for me, Sonny. Sleep for old Louis.” Louis walks over and stands behind Sonny and pulls his chair back. “Sleep and don’t worry about a thing. If you want to stay longer than two hours, that’s fine, too. Stay as long as you like. Move in, I wouldn’t mind.”

  Louis rests his hands on Sonny’s shoulders and guides him to the bedroom. He helps him out of his boots and clothes and when Sonny falls back on the bed Louis covers him with a blanket.

  “She set me up,” Sonny says, laughing. “She framed me.”

  “Okay, boy. Okay.”

  The small room holds two of Sonny’s paintings from when he was new to the fence, efforts that display as little talent as technical proficiency. Louis was his first customer, and his first to buy anything. For fifty dollars he got pictures of the Old Brulatour Courtyard and the Saint Louis Cathedral, Vieux Carré landmarks that Sonny has since painted a thousand times, though never as badly again. Sonny’s signature was large then, back when he was destined for things.

  A pennant from their high school days at Holy Cross, a collection of Robert Ruark paperbacks, a mammy doll in a soiled linen dress. And this on top of the chest of drawers: a framed black-and-white photograph showing would-be track star Sonny LaMott handing a baton to Louis Fortunato. An old photograph from when Sonny ran third leg, and Louis anchor, on quite possibly the slowest mile-relay team in New Orleans history.

  Sonny tries to remember whether they even finished that race. Doubtful, since they finished so few. In the picture he looks like a child, only fifteen years ago. And it occurs to him that he was involved with Juliet at the time and he felt like nothing if not a man.

  Sonny lies in the dark with his eyes closed and Juliet is all he sees. She’s standing at the fence with a finger at her chin studying his still-wet painting of the Beauvais. She’s naked on the porch at home with her back turned to him, a wisp of pubic hair glowing in the streetlight, her breasts thick, shadowy globes hugging each side of her rib cage.

  Then Sonny sees her on the dance floor at the F&M Patio Bar and the way she looked the night they met. The jukebox is playing and she’s still in her uniform from school, her hair in a ponytail, long woolly socks pulled up to her knees. “Are you with anybody?” he says.

  She nods and points to a group of high-born girls sitting at a table nearby. “Do they count?”

  “My name is Sonny LaMott. I’m a senior at Holy Cross. If it’s not too much to ask—”

  “Juliet,” she answers, bringing her mouth close to his ear to be heard above the music. “Do you know, by chance, the mansion on Esplanade . . . ?”

  After the bar closes they walk to Napoleon Avenue past the unmanned gatehouse of a rail yard and over the tracks to the river. The port this morning is quiet. They sit on warm boards in the shade of a crudely built lean-to and watch a ship approaching on the dark water. Juliet smells of smoke and lilac shampoo and her hand, when at last she surrenders it, is small and moist in Sonny’s. He tries to kiss her and kiss her deep but she clenches her lips and gently nudges him away. “I just broke up with somebody.”

  “You still love him?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t want to.”

  “I could be your boyfriend, Juliet.”

  “Just be my friend first.”

  Now in Louis’s room a suffocating heaviness bears down on Sonny’s chest and for minutes it seems he is unable to breathe. He opens his eyes and gasps for air and he doesn’t relax until he feels Louis’s hand press deep into his own.

  “I love her anyway,” Sonny says.

  “I know you do.”

  “I’ve always loved her, I’ll always love her.”

  “I know it, Sonny. I know you will.”

  5

  SHE HAS SOME ÉTOUFFÉE FINALLY. IT’S at Dooky Chase’s Restaurant, a black place just across Orleans Avenue from the Lafitte housing development, and she is disappointed when after only a few bites she is unable to eat any more. Fifteen years of life in the California sunshine has made her a lightweight in the cayenne pepper department, and she feels as if she has betrayed her Creole people. As if she should apologize to someone: “Look, I let you down. I let us all down. God!”

  When the waiter returns she holds air in her cheeks to show how fat she feels. She starts to give an excuse for not finishing her plate but the man nervously stops her. “They got two police outside waiting to speak to you.”

  They’re standing in the lot next to the Mustang, leaning against the trunk. “And I thought it was the cayenne pepper giving me indigestion,” she says as she shambles toward them.

  Peroux comes to his full height and crosses his arms, as if to protect himself. “Nice to see you again, Miss Beauvais. And how was your meal today?”

  “I’ll tell you how it was, Lieutenant. Someone needs to franchise Dooky Chase and open fast-food restaurants all over the country. Instead of a billion hamburgers sold, I want to see signs boasting the same about stuffed jumbo shrimp and breast of chicken à la Dooky.”

  It seems incredible, but she’s managed to make even Lentini laugh.

  “You think people would give up their Quarter Pounders for Dooky?” Peroux says.

  “One day this Louisiana cooking will catch on, mark my words.”

  “I’m glad to see your sense of humor has returned, Miss Beauvais.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant Peroux. Now, tell me, how is the investigation going? Are you making progress? Is there anything I can help you with?”

  Peroux glances over at the project across the street, half a dozen children watching from a piece of ground stripped clean of vegetation, rectangular-shaped buildings with graffiti on the walls and plywood covering windows. “Just one question,” he says. “Miss Beauvais, before he went to the mansion last night, did you give Sonny LaMott something to give to your mother?”

  She waits, closely considering the question. “Something for my mother,” she says, then feigns a sudden burst of enlightenment. “Like a piece of my mind, do you mean?”

  “No. Something else. Like a letter or a sheet of paper.”

  “You’re confused again, Lieutenant. I didn’t send Sonny LaMott to the Beauvais with a piece of paper. He volunteered to go there and bring me back one.”

  “The check?”

  She nods. “What else would I want from Mother?”

  Sonny follows Lentini to the small room where Peroux sits waiting at a cafeteria table cluttered with yellowing, weeks-old sections of the Times-Picayune. The room holds the sharp odor of Pine-Sol even though the floor looks as if it hasn’t been cleaned in months. A fan with blue blades churns the torpid air and riffles the dust, while failing utterly to cut the heat.

  “Sonny LaMott,” comes a voice, then the slap of a hand on metal. It is Peroux, shoving his chair out from under him as he rises to his feet. “Come have a seat here, podna.”

  The detective pulls back a folding chair directly across from where he was sitting. A service revolver, neatly tucked in a glossy leather sleeve, hugs his belt.

  “You’ve had a rough day, haven’t you, podna?”

  “I’ve had better, Lieutenant. Thank
you for asking.”

  Only now does Sonny notice the tape recorder on the table, a light on its face glowing red.

  “Well, if it means anything, I’m glad you could make it,” Peroux says, reaching over to depress the machine’s Record button. “You ever get interviewed by the police before? I was telling Sergeant Lentini here how impressed I was with you earlier. You seem to have an answer for everything.” Peroux leans back in his chair, as relaxed as a man in his favorite recliner at home. “Hey, Sonny, you know I’m just playing, right?” He points a finger at the recorder. “This is more for your protection than for mine. When I’m taking notes, I can’t keep up too good when my interview gets a head of steam. You don’t want me to screw up your statement, do you?”

  “No sir.”

  “We’re just trying to figure out who would want to hurt that old lady like that.”

  “They killed her, Lieutenant.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, they did kill her. And I bet nothing hurts more than that, huh, podna?”

  Overhead banks of uncovered fluorescent tubes burble against the ceiling, several of them dripping rusty water. Something tugs at Sonny’s memory and he recalls the year 1971 and a building on Gravier Street and his own voice as he and Juliet start down the long hall: “I don’t think I can go through with this . . .”

  Lentini shuffles over to a window and sits against a radiator housing, a look of such boredom on his face that his eyes flutter as he struggles to keep from nodding off.

  “Sonny,” Peroux says, “last night when you went to Esplanade for Juliet’s check . . . ?”

  “Yes sir. We already talked about that.”

  “It was raining pretty hard, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was. Pretty hard. Real hard, as a matter of fact.”

  Peroux takes out his notebook and looks over a page. “Sonny, you said you went in the house through the front door and walked right straight up the stairs.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And a little later Mrs. Beauvais told you something from her bedroom?”