My Juliet: A Novel

by John Ed Bradley

  Juliet stares straight ahead without saying anything.

  “Mrs. Huey?”

  “Go on, Mr. Harvey.”

  “If we might look back several years now, Miss Beauvais, you’ll recall the extreme situation your father’s business affairs were in at the time of his death. For starters, he owed everyone, having committed to assorted risky ventures that put him on the brink of bankruptcy. To protect the mansion, he logically concluded that he had no choice but to separate his and your mother’s community assets. In other words, he elected to make your mother the sole owner of the family estate to keep from losing it to his creditors. Simultaneous to taking this action, your father created a trust in your name and funneled everything he had left into it, some two hundred thousand dollars. This money was to be for your college education and expenses, to be spent at your discretion. Your father died shortly after taking these steps, leaving you a generous legacy, but leaving your mother insolvent and with a vast house to keep.”

  “I don’t know how vast it is,” says Juliet.

  “Pardon?”

  “It isn’t so vast. It’s big, maybe. Maybe even real big. But I wouldn’t call it vast.”

  Harvey seems lost for a response. “Fine. However you wish to describe it.”

  “Just admit to me it isn’t vast.”

  “It isn’t vast,” he allows. “Now may I continue?” Harvey glances down at his notes. “Marcelle Beauvais, faced with ruin, was forced to get by on her wits. She approached area banks about obtaining a mortgage, but none was interested in making such a loan because of the condition and location of the house, and because she was without means to pay back what she hoped to borrow. Banks are not in the business of real estate, let me remind you. And a place such as that one would’ve been difficult to unload in the likely event Miss Marcelle defaulted on her loan.”

  Harvey pauses for a drink of water.

  “It was a lot of things but it was never vast.”

  “Miss Beauvais?”

  “You must have it confused with someplace else.”

  Harvey waits until all is quiet again. “Your mother did everything in her power to keep the mansion,” he says. “In the fall of 1971, a few months after you ran away to California—” he drinks again—“she opened it up to boarders but that ended when one of her guests was mugged at the front gate. She sold off important pieces of furniture and some of the more significant works of art. NOPSI eventually cut off her power when she failed to pay her bills, and soon after both her water and gas services likewise were suspended. The house began to deteriorate from neglect, and her lawn without a gardener began to resemble a jungle. She fired Mrs. Huey although in actual fact she hadn’t paid her in many months. To trace back a bit now if I may, Charles Huey had died nearly four years before your father did, and at last came the trial and subsequent verdict. Mrs. Huey, through my office, hired an appraiser to assess the value of the mansion, and another—an art and antiques expert—to fix a price on its contents. These figures, added together, came to just under two million dollars. I myself considered the sum to be on the low end, but the gentleman who appraised the house, a Mr. Girault . . . he maintained that if the place were situated on Saint Charles Avenue and not in a blighted neighborhood it would be worth several times as much. ‘Location, location, location,’ he made a point of reminding me.”

  “Vast my ass.”

  Harvey places a hand on top of a document in front of him and slides it down the table. “This is a copy of the deed conveying the property to Mrs. Huey. You may pretend to know nothing about the sale, but I think you’re familiar with the money it generated, as it’s my recollection that your mother, after paying taxes and honoring your father’s debts, which were many, sent the entire balance to you.” Harvey smiles a cheerless smile. “It seems she thought you deserved it.”

  Juliet mumbles. Harvey again: “For the record, Mrs. Huey, in buying the house and its contents, elected to pay twenty percent above appraisal, acting against my better counsel. She also allowed Marcelle Beauvais to remain rent-free as a resident of the mansion, and—forgive me if I’m revealing too much, Mrs. Huey—she gave your mother a monthly allowance of five hundred dollars. In consideration she received nothing but your mother’s companionship. Now, Miss Beauvais, you may choose to hire a lawyer to contest the sale’s validity, but I think he or she will have a hard time prevailing, as the transfer of funds is well documented and you alone ultimately were the party enriched by the deal.”

  Harvey lowers his head, examines more papers. “Am I leaving anything out? Ah, yes.” He brings his gaze back to Juliet and holds her with it until she looks away. “Miss Beauvais, Mrs. Huey has asked me to ask you to turn over your house key before leaving my office today.” He collects his papers and puts them back in the folder. “She also would like to tell you something in the presence of those of us here today as witnesses.”

  Juliet scans the room, but even Sonny pretends to be occupied with other concerns, in this instance a sketch of Nathan Harvey on his legal pad.

  She swivels in her chair and faces Anna Huey.

  “Juliet, get the fuck out of my house,” says the maid, before quietly exiting the room.

  She doesn’t remember leaving the law office. Was it Sonny who brought her back to the Lé Dale? She thinks they took the streetcar. She thinks she can remember sweating tourists, locals reading sections of the Times-Picayune, the high shine of the few empty seats as the afternoon light struck the blistered varnish. Sonny, what a hero, reaching up and pulling the cord to tell the conductor to stop.

  She thinks maybe he helped her up the stairs and she thinks she remembers Sonny saying something to Leroy and Leroy looking up from his red hots and his TV. She thinks she remembers Sonny saying when he finished putting her to bed he’d come back down and write a check for what she owed and Leroy mentioning how his boss had a policy against hookers in the building and perhaps it was time Miss Beauvais take it on down the street.

  But then maybe it was a dream. Maybe what she thinks she remembers she only imagined.

  Juliet would like to wake up if only the sleep would let her. And then the door opens a crack and an eyeball looks in. It’s who else and when he sees she’s presently indisposed he quietly closes the door behind him. “Oh, please,” she says. “Daddy! Daddy, don’t go . . .”

  She follows him out into the hall and glimpses the black form his shadow makes stretching along the length of the stairwell as he descends to the lobby. She chases after him taking two steps at a time and speaking his name and the moment she throws the door open Leroy spins around and holds a finger in her face. “What are you following me for? You’re naked.”

  “Oh, please.”

  He guides her back to the stairs. “You’re not bad-looking and everything but let me give you a piece of advice, lady. Always leave something to the imagination.”

  “You opened the door to my room. You looked inside. That’s against the law.”

  “Call the cops. I was checking on something.”

  “What?”

  “The maid knocked and you wouldn’t answer. Your door was locked with the chain. We needed to see you wasn’t dead.”

  “Maids,” Juliet says. “Goddamn maids are about to ruin my life.”

  The desk clerk looks at her standing there, not even bothering to cover herself with her arms. “Ask me, baby, you seem perfectly capable of doing that yourself.”

  Back in the room she finds a wedding band on the bedside table. She wonders if she’s in the wrong place, some other person’s room, then she recognizes the ring as the one belonging to her mother. There’s a note next to it and she reads by the slatted light from the streetlights pouring through the blinds. “Mr. Harvey told me to tell you he’d have your check shortly, to call his office with an address where they should send it. Anna Huey says she thinks it’s three hundred dollars . . .”

  Not bothering to finish, Juliet squeezes Sonny’s letter into a ball and throws it acro
ss the room. “Don’t even know you’re going to jail,” she says, talking to the empty space.

  She puts some clothes on and goes back down to the lobby.

  “You remember where I parked my car?” she says to Leroy.

  “You had a car?”

  “I think I remember having one. A rental.”

  The news is on. Leroy turns down the volume. “What kind was it?”

  “Yellow Ford Mustang convertible.”

  “I didn’t know they even made those anymore. So how would I know where you parked yours? What I got to wonder,” and he’s nearly shouting now, “how somebody like you can pay for a rental car when this hotel’s got to get your boyfriends to pay for your room. I bet you money you didn’t so much rent that car as borrowed it.” She doesn’t respond and he says, “You know what happens when you keep a car past time and don’t return it? They consider it stolen. They come and find it and charge you with felony theft.”

  “Is they the cops or is they the car place?”

  He seems to have said all he means to, because he doesn’t answer.

  “Morris Barstow is my lawyer, by the way,” she says. “His office was shocked to learn about my clubbing. They’re doing the paperwork now. We’re going to bring a lawsuit and Mr. Barstow promises me a check.”

  Leroy stares. “Ask me the only promise you got coming is an early grave, lady.”

  At last she remembers where she parked the Mustang: a metered spot on the street at One Shell Square, right at the foot of the building. But when she returns to the place, after hopping a downtown streetcar, the thing is nowhere to be found. She takes a stroll around the block but it’s gone, all right. “Motherfuckers took it,” she says to a businessman who seems to be waiting for a cab. “Second time since I been back they did that.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Motherfuckers towed it.”

  She starts on foot in the direction of the French Quarter. They can have the car, they want it that bad. They took her house. What’s a yellow car compared to a house? “Vast my ass,” she says out loud, momentarily forgetting that the meeting at Nathan Harvey’s adjourned hours ago.

  When she reaches the cemetery the party man is standing in the same place in the same clothes and the same puffed-out drawers. “You see what I mean by hourglass?” she tells him. “I wasn’t wrong, was I?”

  “When I turned it over it only ran for like a minute. But I’ll call it whatever you want. Hourglass, two-hour-glass . . . shit.”

  “Leonard paid you your money?”

  “Who?”

  “The male white likes to act black.”

  “Yeah. Uh huh.”

  “So he paid you?”

  “Right.”

  She digs in her pocket and retrieves her mother’s wedding ring and only now does she notice the inscription inside the band: yet another man promising forever. “What could you give me for this?”

  The boy inspects it then leads her past an iron fence into the cemetery and deep in the tombs washed a milky blue by the lights from the housing project nearby. He stops about halfway in and digs around under a wire flower basket and pulls out a clear plastic sandwich bag with less than half of what she and Leonard got before. “This is the best I can do,” he says. “Maybe if you had some diamonds in it.”

  She takes the bag, halfway surprised he’d give this much. “Let me ask you something,” she says in a little-girl voice. “Could you give me some more if I gave you the best, most amazing fellatio you ever had in your whole, entire life?”

  The boy shakes his head. “I don’t eat Mexican.” He takes off in a trot through the tombs.

  Sonny drives to the Napoleon House for a drink and something to eat. Even as he’s walking through the door he’s placing an order with Louis: a tall glass of Crown, a dressed shrimp poboy, a double order of French fries and bread pudding minus the rum sauce. Sonny doesn’t feel like talking, and come to think of it he doesn’t really feel like eating.

  Sensing his friend’s desire for privacy, Louis stays away until the crowd thins and there’s no one else to talk to, no one else to bug.

  “Just for the record,” he says in a voice too loud to ignore, “I found another Frank.”

  “Who?” Sonny, distracted, was watching beef gravy congeal in his plate.

  “You whack an old vet on the neutral ground and don’t remember?” Louis doesn’t look up from his order pad. “This one ain’t Siamese, though. It’s calico. That means two things.”

  “A calico is one of those cats colored three different ways,” Sonny says.

  “That’s one thing. Now guess the other.”

  “Don’t make me do that,” Sonny says. “I’m not in the mood.”

  “A calico is almost always a female. So if ever you see a strange cat with three colors you can impress whoever you’re with by remarking as to how it’s a female.”

  “You think it would impress whoever I’m with to go up to a strange cat and lift its hind leg and inspect its genitalia?”

  Louis doesn’t answer, doesn’t laugh. He puts the check on the table and glances back at a couple of tourists who just entered the room. “You’ll never guess where I found him.”

  “You just said all calicos are females and already you’re calling her a him.”

  “Coulon, the vet on Esplanade. He had a sign in the window for baby kittens.”

  Sonny puts his fork down and pushes the plate away. “Don’t fuck with me, Louis.”

  “I went in and Coulon’s assistant has maybe five left and I pick the one I want and then Coulon walks in from the back through these saloon doors and we shake hands and he thanks me for coming in. Then guess what he says next?”

  “I’m tired of guessing. All I ever do when I talk to you is guess.”

  “He says, ‘So what are you going to call it?’ And before I can think to stop myself I say the name. I look at him and I say, ‘Frank.’ I’m halfway out the door by now, and when I swing back around our eyes meet. It must be hell getting old. There’s no way he made the connection.”

  “Louis,” Sonny says, “tell me you’re not being serious.”

  “I just kept walking. I left with the cat and brought him home and showed him the windowsill where the original Frank always sat. Then I went to Popeye’s and got him some fried chicken livers, gave him a bowl of buttermilk and some ice cream and a peanut butter cup, showed him where the litter box was, demonstrated how to use it. Did everything possible, in other words, to make him comfortable. Are the cops going to come and arrest me? No. Am I worried about it? No. Settle down, Sonny. What’s the fun of pulling off a crime if you can’t go back and visit the scene?”

  Sonny just now remembers something. He tugs at Louis’s sleeve. “Roll it up.”

  “Huh?”

  “I said, roll it up, roll up your sleeve.”

  Louis puts his pad on the table and does as he’s told.

  “Now roll up the other one,” Sonny says.

  Louis complies after hesitating a moment. He holds his arm out to Sonny, the wounds coated red with Mercurochrome, the scabs yet to form.

  “Does Frank think you’re one of those claw poles covered with carpet?” Sonny says.

  “Yeah, well, it has been a problem. I should enroll him in obedience school. I’ve already tried spanking him with newspaper. They hate the noise, the sound of the paper. It’s not the spanking that makes them stop.” Louis rolls his sleeve back down and buttons the cuff. “Look,” he says, “she has no idea it was me. It happened too fast and I went incognito.”

  Sonny pushes his plates over to the other side of the table. He finishes off the Crown and hands the empty glass to Louis. “The cops are going to come by to see you,” he says.

  “The cops? That’s crazy.”

  “Did you whack Miss Marcelle, too, Louis?”

  “Come on, Sonny. Shit.” Louis looks around to make sure no one is listening. “I can’t believe you’d ask me that. What’s wrong with you?”
>
  Sonny puts twenty dollars on the table and leaves the restaurant. Outside a heavy rain has begun to fall and gullies of white water wash down from the rooftops and splash in the streets. Against the haze an occasional umbrella, colored stripes amid the gray. Sonny and Louis stand side by side on the banquette under a metal roof extending to the curb. “Dr. Coulon’s going to call the detectives who’ve been investigating what happened to Juliet’s mother,” Sonny says. “I’m sure they’ve already interviewed Juliet. Next they’re going to want to talk to you, Louis.”