“Let me go talk to Lulu, Julie.”
“I must hate men. I know I hate you. Does it hurt to hear me say that, Sonny?”
“It’s funny but hurt seems to feel like everything else lately.”
“I hate almost everything about you,” she says. “I hate how you need me. Sometimes I think it’s my hate that you need because my hate is what confirms your opinion of yourself. It gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Without it you could never go to that fence every day and hang your pictures. You could never accept the rejection. My hate—and I realize this might sound like a reach . . . but my hate defines you, Sonny LaMott. It defines you because it’s all that stands between you and what’s ordinary. The little ranch-style house in Saint Bernard Parish, bingo games every Wednesday night in the church recreation hall, the minivan, a barbecue kettle in the backyard. My hate has spared you that. Without it you join the rank and file. Just another working-class boy from the Bywater without a ticket Uptown. And certainly not an artist.”
“Am I really an artist, Julie?”
“Oh, shut up, Sonny. You’re an artist even in your sleep.”
“They’re going to arrest me,” he says. “They’ve got motive and they’ve got opportunity. That’s what they look for, you know? Motive and opportunity,” he says again.
She points to the cash on the table. “I really, really need this.” Cigarette clenched tight in her mouth, she folds the money and holds it in the palm of her hand, as if to weigh it. “We should have had us that baby, huh, Sonny?”
“Yes.”
“Everything would be different.”
“Everything. Everything in this world.”
Outside the streetcar moves past with a roar and squeal, wheels grinding, electric line overhead reflecting the last of the afternoon light.
Juliet doesn’t hear the car doors slam. She’s in the middle of a dream. She’s in her yellow Ford Mustang rental car but she’s in California stuck in traffic on the I-5. Up ahead there’s a wreck and no one is moving. People are getting out of their cars and trying to see. They block the sun with the flats of their hands. Horns are blowing beep beep beep. The jam extends for miles in a single direction, while on the other side of the interstate there isn’t a car in sight. The lanes run forever, empty.
Maybe she doesn’t hear the doors slam because in the dream people are slamming doors, too.
“We should try the other side,” Juliet says in her sleep.
“I don’t think I like it that way as much as just regular.” Sounds like Sonny LaMott, but what is he doing in California?
“The other road,” she says. “No one’s there.”
When they come through the door he rises to his feet and staggers to the middle of the room. He holds his hands out in front of him, as if at their mercy, ready to be cuffed. He is naked, his body washed yellow by the ceiling light.
Several seconds pass before it comes to her that he in fact is Sonny and she Juliet, that they are back in her room at the Lé Dale.
“And a happy good morning to you, podna,” the male black says.
Behind him stand the male white and two uniforms. There is also a woman.
“Put your clothes on,” the male black says.
Sonny reaches for his undershorts, his trousers. He places a hand on top of a chair and carefully steps into them.
“I didn’t mean you,” the male black says. And only now does she remember his name. Peroux. “I meant you, Miss Beauvais. Get out of bed. Let’s go.”
Juliet props herself on an elbow and pulls a sheet up over her chest.
The woman crosses the room and stands next to the bed.
“Juliet Beauvais, my name is Patricia Kimball. I am a prosecutor with the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office, and you’re under arrest for the murder of Marcelle Lavergne Beauvais.”
“Get up,” Peroux says again, stepping past Sonny. He grabs Juliet by the arm.
“Tell them it wasn’t me,” she says to Sonny. “Tell them.” Sonny doesn’t speak and she says, “You’ll find the hourglass in his cart, Lieutenant. He hid it there, he told me.”
“Is that true, LaMott?”
Sonny steps back from the detective and looks at her—he just looks at her.
“Only reason I ask, Leonard Barbier told me not two hours ago that a certain black boy from a certain housing project put it there, and that a certain Juliet Beauvais paid this certain boy to do it. Oh, and then we spoke to the kid.” Peroux lowers a hand into the pocket of his jacket and fishes out her mother’s wedding band. “This look familiar, Miss Beauvais? No? How ’bout this, then?”
One of the uniforms steps forward holding the hourglass in a plastic evidence bag.
“How long is forever, Sergeant Lentini?”
“Oh, it’s a long time,” Lentini says, “especially where she’s going.”
“Miss Beauvais,” Patricia Kimball says, “you have the right to remain silent. Any statements you make can and will be used as evidence against you.”
“Get dressed,” Peroux says again.
“You have the right to the presence of your own counsel. If you can’t afford your own counsel, the court will provide one for you prior to any questioning.” The woman hands Juliet a sheet of paper. “Miss Beauvais, this document is for you to sign. It states that you have been apprised of your rights under the Miranda Rule. Do you have any questions, Miss Beauvais?”
“How long did you say forever was, Sergeant Lentini?” Peroux says. He has removed a dress from the closet, the same one Juliet wore on her trip in from California.
Juliet offers no resistance as the detective squeezes it past her head and pulls it down over her upper torso.
Lentini takes her shoes, the blocky ones, and checks them for contraband before placing them on the floor at her feet. “Forever?” he says, contemplating the possibilities. “Forever in Saint Gabriel? That’s about as long as forever is in hell, I’d say.”
“Know where Saint Gabriel is?” Peroux says to Juliet. “That’s where we put our women prisoners in this state. And that’s where you’re going.”
“Saint Gabriel,” Juliet says in a whisper. “Gabriel was an archangel. Sonny, you were an altar boy. Wasn’t Gabriel an archangel?”
From the pocket of his dress shirt Peroux removes Sonny’s postcard of the Beauvais Mansion, the sepia one describing New Orleans as an unexpected paradise. “Mind if I give her this?”
Sonny shakes his head.
“We went by your place earlier, thinking she might be there. I hope you don’t mind.” He offers the card to Juliet and she holds it loosely in her open hands. “Something to look at in case you don’t get a room with a view,” he says.
They put her in cuffs and lead her past Sonny. She tries to get his attention but he keeps his head down. At the door Peroux stops and wheels back around, and Juliet waits with her back to the room. “I hung your picture in my bedroom,” the detective says to Sonny. “But it’s a funny thing, art. The longer you look at it the less you see what it shows.”
“How do you mean, Lieutenant?”
“If you look long enough, and I mean give it some real quality time, it’s the artist you see in the picture, not the person he painted.”
“I think I understand, Lieutenant.”
“I bet you do, podna. I bet you do.”
They walk her down the stairs and past the lobby where Leroy waits in the doorway. “I hope you enjoyed your stay at the Lé Dale,” he says, smiling red teeth. “If ever you’re in our fair city again, please consider us as your destination of choice.”
“Sonny,” Juliet says, trying to break free of their hold.
“Easy now, Miss Beauvais,” Lentini tells her.
“Sonny,” she says again. “Sonny! Don’t let them take me, Sonny!”
Outside on the sidewalk another streetcar rumbles past, its occupants watching as the two detectives usher her down the stairs and into the backseat of a Chevy sedan.
Juliet glance
s up at the building just as Sonny presses through the front door. As before in the room, he’s wearing only trousers.
“What else did Leonard say?” she asks as they start on their way.
Peroux moves his head a little but doesn’t answer.
“Did his father the fancy lawyer cut him a deal? I bet Leonard pled out probation and turned state’s evidence. Tell me, Lieutenant. Did you give him immunity?”
“Leonard Barbier is a fine, upstanding young man with a promising future ahead of him.”
“Leonard,” she says quietly.
“Oh, it’s true he might be confused about a few things at the present time but in my book he’s made a hard turn toward straightening himself out. Give that boy ten years and he’ll be Rex, king of Carnival, leading a parade down this very street.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Lentini says, then taps a finger on the rearview mirror. “Sammy, you ain’t gonna believe this.”
Peroux turns in his seat and stares through the back glass, prompting Juliet to do the same. Sonny LaMott, still half-dressed and barefoot, is running after them down the middle of the street. His arms pump hard by his side, and he lifts his knees high like those of a sprinter with the finish line in sight. Through stop signs he runs, weaving around traffic, dodging occasional pedestrians. The wind bells out his cheeks and throws his hair back.
Lentini puts a spinning police light on the dash and begins to accelerate. He takes the car without braking through a couple of red lights and in seconds Sonny has faded to a black speck lost in a field of black specks. He disappears altogether after Lentini makes a few turns.
The city rushes past now. Entire blocks have gone by when it occurs to Juliet that they’re headed in the wrong direction. “This isn’t the best way,” she complains, all the more dismayed when Lentini turns from Canal Street onto North Rampart Street. “Are you taking me to Esplanade?”
“We thought we’d let you have a last look,” Peroux says.
“I don’t want to see it.”
“No?”
“Please, Lieutenant. Please don’t take me there.”
They drive on and she lifts her feet and kicks the back of the seat. “Don’t do this to me, Lieutenant. Please. Lieutenant, please. Please don’t do this to me. Please.”
When they reach the Beauvais Peroux throws an arm over the seat and faces her with a smile. “Well, how’s it look?”
“Please . . .”
“Oh, they’re some busy around here today. Why, look at that.”
Nerves send her bouncing in the seat, but she confronts it finally, and in that instant all the blood seems to drain from her heart.
People come and go through the open front door, none of them familiar. One pair carries her mother’s wing chair out into the grass, a second a sofa, a third the desk from her father’s library. Maids beat rugs with sawed-off broomsticks, sending clouds of dust floating in loose spirals. Gardeners, an army of them, trim the lawn with riding and push mowers, while others use electric clippers to prune the trees and shrubs. An ironworker is removing the name on the arc over the front gate, and the gate itself, propped open with a brick, is getting a fresh coat of paint. So too, Juliet notices now, is the house. Tiers of scaffolding stand on both the north and south sides. Crews of painters work in the fading light.
“Who’s that?” Peroux says, pointing to the upper gallery.
Juliet’s head snaps on a swivel. She strains to see and, yes, there really is someone standing at a window upstairs. She can see the silhouette, a shadow past lace curtains. What feels like an electric charge shakes her body and raises gooseflesh on her arms. “Oh, you,” she says, watching now through the fan of fingers covering her face. “Oh, Mama!”
But a light comes on in the room, revealing the figure to be someone else entirely.
The detectives are quiet as they start for Central Lockup, quiet as upstairs Anna Huey sends them off with a wave.
7
HIS FATHER DIES IN JUNE 1988. AT THE cemetery Agnes from the nursing home stands beside Sonny and stares at the half-filled tomb. “Do you have anyone else?” she says, reaching for his hand.
“Oh, sure. Sure, I do.”
“A man doesn’t really become a man until he loses his father. Remember that.”
“I will. Thank you, Agnes.”
She puts an arm around him and he is not uncomfortable with the intimacy. She is wearing a uniform from work and she smells of the home, the boiled meals, the diapered adults. “You’ll still come visit us, won’t you, Sonny?” Her voice is warm and cheerful. “Can we count on that?”
“Yes, I’ll come. Of course I will.”
But Sonny never visits the Maison Orleans again. And on those occasions when he happens to drive near the place he tries not to dwell on those days when his father was a patient there. In memory Mr. LaMott is forever the top salesman at Paul Piazza & Son. He has life in his eyes. And eternally he sprawls in a field of grass, gaze turned upward, as purple martins turn circles in the near-evening air above his birdhouse.
That same year Louis Fortunato marries and moves back to Bywater. It is wholly unexpected, least of all because of his disabilities. “Tell you the truth I had a pump put in,” he explains to Sonny. “All you gotta do is give me a little time and I’m as good as in the old days.”
Sonny stands as best man at the wedding. The bride, Claire Lousteau, is a caterer for a French Quarter B-and-B. She and Louis plan to adopt as soon as possible, and so together they’ve been trying to find a home for Frank.
“Frank?” says Sonny.
“Frank my calico. Where’s your head, bubba?”
“Okay. All right. Frank!”
At the reception the two friends stand in rented tuxedos in the formal parlor at Claire’s B-and-B, spearing broccoli balls and fried crawfish with toothpicks crowned with swirls of colored celluloid, while a spirited jazz band performs “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.”
“So I call Coulon,” Louis says. “I call his office and explain the situation. He agrees to try to help us out. Says he’ll post a notice on the corkboard in his waiting room. Can you believe that?”
“What a guy.”
“Yes, isn’t he?”
Louis points to an old man in seersucker guzzling champagne. “Recognize him, Sonny? The one on his fifth glass already?”
Sonny does a double take.
“Think he was loaded when he killed my first one?”
Years later, it is April now, the tourist season is in full swing, Sonny and his comrades plant a tree in Jackson Square. It is a white dogwood, a sapling yet, and it enters the ground next to the magnolia across from the bakery.
A group of perhaps twenty attend, all of them fence artists but for the Vietnamese cashier from Café du Monde. Sonny, as chairman of the Jackson Square Artists Alliance, has organized the event. He’s bought the tree, provided the spade, won permission from the city to dig the hole.
As it happens, he alone is aware of the tradition.
“Okay, maybe he made it up about the trees,” Sonny says in his impromptu remarks. “But it’s a good story and inspiring and it’s helped me through some hard times. When you look at the flowers on this tree, and I hope you’ll do that . . . I hope you’ll remember him. They bloom for Roberts now and they’ll bloom for him always. ‘Am I worth it?’ he used to say. He was talking about the people whose portraits we are commissioned to paint, but I always suspected he was talking about himself.”
Sonny shovels a spade of dirt and carefully spreads it over the root ball. “ ‘Am I worth it?’ ” he repeats. “Yes, of course you are, Roberts.”
Over time fewer artists make their living at the fence, as more and more tarot card readers successfully vie with them for space along the pedestrian mall, and tourists seem more inclined to pay to have their future foretold than to have their likeness preserved. Street musicians, jugglers and fire-eaters add to the rivalry for outside dollars, and Sonny realizes that the days
of the Jackson Square artist truly are numbered when Japanese visitors begin rushing past portraitists to have their palms read.
In the beginning of Sonny’s career some two hundred licensed artists practiced their craft at the fence but now there are fewer than fifty, some with families to raise, but most with no other idea of what to do with their lives. Sonny’s cart fades to pink, the gold lettering chips and becomes unreadable. His claim to world fame vanishes along with his dream of being rich. And yet the dealers find him. They stand some distance away as he works at his easel and watch as if for a revelation. “So this is the boyfriend? And we passed on him, remember?”
They invite him for coffee at Café du Monde. Or would he prefer something stronger at the Old Absinthe House?
“Trying to cut back,” Sonny says, shaking his head.
They leave business cards on his stool. Goldstein, the auctioneer. Elisabeth Someone from a gallery in the Warehouse District.
“It was a long time ago,” he explains.
“But it was yesterday!”
“Sorry.”
“No more Juliets?”
Sonny shakes his head. “No more Juliets.”
He receives a letter with a postmark for the Hunt Correctional Center in Saint Gabriel, Louisiana. By now fourteen years have passed. The letter arrives in a manila envelope with Juliet’s identification number and cellblock printed on the upper left side. As for the letter itself, the handwriting is a child’s scrawl, though considerably easier to understand than the illegible snippets of “The Proof” that appeared in facsimile form in the Times-Picayune during Juliet’s murder trial. In the margin she has drawn a picture of a stickman hanging from a noose.
. . . she didn’t fight but I wasn’t surprised. They’re like that, her people. I sat in my room and finished “The Proof” while Leonard wiped down the doors and stair rails. It’s funny but as I wrote those last words I understood and forgave her finally.
After we put “The Proof” where we put it I tried to take it out. I had one more thing to add. Forget the red plastic dinner plates and the Christmas tree icicles. Forget the spiders on the window and the rice on the floor. The worst thing she ever did was give birth to me.
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