Little Girl Lost 6: The Return of Johnnie Wise (38 page)

Johnnie knew for certain that she had been charged with Sharon’s murder, and she had narrowly escaped the ultimate penalty. But she couldn’t remember if the prosecutor had included the bellhop in the indictment or not. She wasn’t about to find out either. She had gotten out of New Orleans in one piece. She wasn’t going back to ask the prosecutor if he had tried her for both crimes. She thought of calling her lawyer, Jay Goldstein, but all she knew was that he was from Chicago, and there were probably thousands of attorneys with the name Goldstein, making it difficult to track him and the other attorneys down. The thing that bothered her more than anything at the moment, even Earl’s untimely arrival, was that she could be indicted for the murder of the child she had been carrying prior to visiting Madam De Mille. Goldstein, if she found him, could quite possibly get her out of impending murder charges for the bellhop, but there was nothing he could do about abortion. She would definitely go to jail for that.

After much contemplation, her eyes found Earl’s. As she looked into them, she wondered where all of this was going. She wanted to know what he wanted. He obviously wanted something. He had driven almost three hours to have this conversation.

Chapter 71

“
Is that all that you came here to say?”

I
s there more that you have to say to me or what?” Johnnie said. “You’ve asked me to let you finish, but you’re not saying anything. And what’s in that bag?”

“We’ll get to the bag in a minute. In the meantime, I think you really ought to read this article in the
Sentinel
. It’s about you and your ‘family.’”

Johnnie hesitated for a few seconds before she took the paper out of Earl’s hand. In the brief moments that passed, she remembered the articles that had been written in the
Sentinel
and
Raven
newspapers. While Ashland Estate had survived, both articles led to a bloody riot that the poor Negro community was still reeling from. Without even looking at the article, she knew it would be inflammatory at the very least, given everything that had happened prior to her New Orleanian Exodus. She looked at the society page headline: did Johnnie wise get away with murder? She looked into Earl’s eyes again.

She looked into his eyes for a few more seconds, wondering why he was being so nice, also wondering when he was going to say the vicious words she expected. She lowered her eyes to the newspaper she held, and then read the following:

This trial, as short as it was, was a regular smorgasbord. It had everything. It had the makings of a Hollywood production: murder, blackmail, private detectives . . . the only thing missing was Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Some say had the trial continued the New Orleans Syndicate would have been brought into it. Well, folks, if you’re wondering how a seventeen-year-old Negro girl, who dropped out of high school, constantly escapes the clutches of the law, you are not alone. No, sir. Either she is the personification of celestial brilliance and God himself is her guardian angel, or she is by far the luckiest female that ever lived. What happened in that courtroom was nothing short of legendary. And I have no doubt, no doubt I say, that this one will grow with each succeeding generation as if it were a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, ever expanding, turning every life in its wake into a wasteland.

If I hadn’t been in the courtroom, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears, I would have never believed it. Not in a million years. It was the most puzzling thing I’ve ever seen and heard in all my days. Probably the most tragic aspect of the trial was its unpredictable ending as Ethel Beauregard, one of the principle witnesses for the defense, attempted to kill her Negro niece right there in a court of law. The sound of gunfire exploded in my ears as the reigning matriarch of the Beauregard clan fired round after round, at the judge, the defense attorney, Johnnie Wise, and finally herself. All of this happened after Jay Goldstein’s blistering cross-examination of Meredith Shamus, who by the way, was president of Buchanan Mutual Insurance before she got in the way of a bullet meant for Johnnie.

Mr. Goldstein had threatened to call Ethel to the stand to testify, and that’s when all hell broke loose. Mrs. Shamus left the stand and ran at young Johnnie, presumably to do bodily harm after it was revealed that she had hired private detective, Tony Hatcher, to follow her husband. Well, folks, Hatcher did exactly what he was paid to do. And guess where Mr. Shamus was going? Yes, sir, you guessed it, Mr. Shamus was seeing Johnnie Wise. Mr. Goldstein asserted, by the nature of his questions, that Mr. Shamus had been seeing Johnnie for quite some time and was paying her for the privilege. Apparently, Mrs. Shamus had paid Johnnie some fifty thousand dollars to leave her husband alone, which explains where a portion of the money Sharon Trudeau stole came from.

If you folks have been keeping up with my articles on the Wise and Beauregard families, you know that they are related by blood. For the last month or so, member after member of the Beauregard family has been killed for one reason or another. I think it’s important to note that every death in the Beauregard family happened a few months after Johnnie’s Creole mother, Marguerite Wise, was murdered, presumably by Ku Klux Klan Leader, Richard Goode, who by the way, was paying her for unmentionable services. Now I know what you good folks are thinkin’, like mother like daughter. I confess that I’m thinkin’ that, too. I guess these two “ladies” were running an illegal enterprise that would have normally been found in a district that was specifically set aside for that sort of illicit activity.

With everything going on, I know it’s hard to keep up so let me remind you once again that the Beauregard and Wise families are related by blood. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been keeping score. The murder rate is now five to one in favor of the Wise family. But get this folks, none of the Beauregards died until after Marguerite was brutally murdered. Call it a coincidence if you like, but I think something’s wrong. Now I know they say death comes in threes, but five deaths in one of the Financial District’s riches families over the course of two months? Is anybody paying attention to this? If we find out that Johnnie Wise gets the bulk of the money and the estate of her white relatives, I think we can safely conclude that she either murdered her own family, or she manipulated them into killing each other and themselves, so she could inherit a fortune. Folks, I don’t even think famed mystery novelist Agatha Christie could make this stuff up.

Now, I know some of you good people wanted to know how Johnnie was able to get away with killing Sharon Trudeau. I gotta tell you folks, I’m wondering about that, too. I was sitting in the courtroom, and I don’t believe it myself. For some reason, one Jay Goldstein, a Yankee from Chicago, was able to make the trial about the prosecution witness, and the Judge allowed this chicanery to go on unchecked for the better part of the trial. The trial was supposed to be about Johnnie Wise killing Sharon Trudeau because Sharon had stolen her money, but that assertion was somehow lost in the minutia of the prosecution’s witness’s supposed extra-martial affair with the defendant.

Just in case you weren’t at the trial, let me say unequivocally that there was no proof presented of an affair between Mr. Winters and Miss Wise. The thing that twisted my mind into several knots was that even if Mr. Winters had an affair with Miss Wise, how would that change the fact that Miss Wise had pursued Sharon Trudeau all the way to Fort Lauderdale, knowing that she was going to kill her and retrieve the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars she had stolen, which by the way, has never been found. Consider this too, friends, with all of Ashland Estates burned to the ground, it makes one wonder if Johnnie Wise, covering her tracks, set her house ablaze, so that it wouldn’t look suspicious when she left town permanently.

Now, I’m sure you good folks heard that members of a particular Holiness church supposedly went over to Ashland Estates and set the fire as retaliation for the previous riot. But I say don’t even give ear to that sort of nonsense. Pay attention to your eyes. Your eyes will tell you that Johnnie is gone, only God knows where, and a quarter of a million dollars is missing, too. First, the money disappears, and then she disappears. Now is that a coincidence or what? For the life of me, I swear I don’t know how New Orleans is going to survive the memory of the Wise family. Stay tuned folks, because I’ve got to believe that we haven’t heard the last of her. I think at some point, Johnnie Wise will return to the Crescent City, if only to claim whatever monies her white relatives left her.

Johnnie looked at Earl. “So . . . they still think I killed Sharon, took my money back, and burned my house down to cover my tracks, huh?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you think, Earl?”

“What I think really doesn’t matter, now does it? The citizens of New Orleans think you’ve gotten away with murder. They don’t care anything about the fact that Sharon stole your money. If they have anything to say about it, you won’t get to spend one dime of it.”

“But I don’t have the money, Earl. None of it.”

“I know that, and you know that, but the white people in New Orleans don’t know that. As far as they’re concerned, you’re guilty of first degree murder. When I left, the atmosphere was so charged that I think they’d kill you on sight. No questions asked. I think they’d kill you because you’ve been so lucky with the law that they wouldn’t leave it up to the law this time. This time they’d take the law into their own hands.”

Shaking her head, she said, “So, I can never go home again?”

“It looks that way. No time soon anyway. You probably won’t be able to go back home until the current generation dies out. Perhaps their children will have forgotten Sharon Trudeau, the virginal Saint of New Orleans.”

“Okay, thanks for letting me know I can’t go back to New Orleans for at least twenty years. Is that all that you came here to say? And what’s in that bag?”

“No. That’s not all I came here to say.” He picked up the bag, set it on the table, and opened it. He looked at her, expecting her to look in the bag, but she didn’t. She just kept staring at him, waiting for him to say whatever was on his mind and leave. “Aren’t you going to look inside the bag?”

“What’s in there? A Cobra?”

Laughing, he said, “No. Take a look.”

Tentatively, she leaned forward, peering over the edges of the bag like she was expecting something to jump out and bite her, but when she saw the money, her eyes lit up.

Smiling, Earl said, “Count it.”

Chapter 72

“
So . . . what’s your answer?”

T
here was a twinkle in Earl Shamus’ eyes. It was a twinkle that Johnnie had come to know and expect when he first started “visiting” her about a month after her fifteenth birthday. She sat quietly in her chair as what he wanted slowly came into view, watching him without interruption, seeing the desperation in his eyes, and the maddening craving he had that her sexual prowess had produced. She realized that in spite of everything she had said to his face and had done to him behind his back, he still wanted and needed her to supply the opiate that her body manufactured. With that bit of knowledge, she figured out the rest. He had brought the newspaper and told her that she could be tried for murdering the bellhop. And if that didn’t work, he could make sure she was tried for the murder of her own innocence. Either way, she was going to be a resident of the New Orleans penal system for a very long time as it would love to lock her up and throw away the key.

Still looking into his eyes, she realized that he had several other aces up his sleeve, a repercussion or two he had not yet revealed and probably wouldn’t unless he had to. What he hadn’t insinuated yet, but would if it became necessary, was that the authorities could probably get Sadie as an accessory to the abortion. And if that happened, what would happen to her children? Johnnie didn’t think Mrs. Mancini would allow her husband’s children to live at their mansion without their mother living on the premises with them. How would it look to have pickaninnies running around the Mancini mansion that looked just like Santino only with much darker skin? What if they, being children, slipped up and called him, “daddy” in Mrs. Mancini’s presence? The other insinuation would be that Madam De Mille would be hunted down and brought to justice, too. In other words, lots of people would be hurt if she didn’t cooperate. But Earl wasn’t charging in like he was Genghis Khan, prepared to take whatever he wanted, knowing that she really didn’t have a defense, nor did she have a choice. Not yet anyway. Instead, he would appeal to her sense of logic and practicality first. He, therefore, presented a very calm businesslike exterior, walking her through his plan, taking his time, offering what she thought was a gift that she could ill-afford to turn down at this juncture, particularly since he had the means and the motivation to make sure she and Sadie went to jail.