My Juliet (40 page)

From the kitchen comes the sound of a ringing telephone. Anna Huey sits quietly until it stops. “A week later Mr. Johnny killed himself. In case you want to see it Miss Marcelle left a copy of his death certificate upstairs with her things. I can run and get it.”

“That's okay.”

“Suicide by drowning, says so in black and white.”

“I believe you, Mrs. Huey.”

“Miss Marcelle always told people it was an accident, and somehow she kept the
Picayune
from reporting the facts. I guess she was trying to protect Juliet. But the man did it to himself. That's what the Orleans Parish coroner ruled, and that's why in the end there wasn't any insurance for madam to collect. For doing what he did with a little boy he should've gone to prison. Instead he put his wife in one, because when he decided to die he made sure Miss Marcelle was there to see it. I guess he wanted her to have that picture, the last thing.” Anna Huey lifts the teapot but seems to decide neither of them needs any more. “It wasn't just Anthony,” she says. “But we didn't learn that until later.”

“There were other boys?”

“The Quarter is full of children. Some will tap-dance on the bricks for a nickel. For a nickel more others will do other things. To be honest,” she says, “I could never do anything but feel sorry for Juliet. Anything she ever did, I forgave her. Even today I do. That girl came into this world a sweet precious angel, her mother's joy, and the things she saw, sugar. Oh, the things she saw.”

They sit without speaking until Sonny can tolerate the silence no longer. He stands and straightens his clothes but then he sits down again.

“Now's the time to ask,” Anna Huey says, “if there's anything else you need to know. After today I leave all this behind me.”

“Just one more thing, Mrs. Huey. And it's not so much about them as it is about you.”

“Say it, sugar.”

“Why would you pretend to be a cleaning woman and live as Miss Marcelle's servant when you were the one who owned this house? Why allow that indignity?”

“Indignity?” And she sits up in her chair. “I considered it an honor.”

She leads him to the stairway and the portraits showing Juliet's forebears, the entire collection bathed now in light from cans in the ceiling. Sonny notes the Vaudechamp still hanging crooked, and the one of Johnny Beauvais at the top of the stairs. “My mother worked for that man there,” Anna Huey says, pointing to a face. “And my grandmother for that fellow. And my great-grandmother for him. They were ladies, Sonny. As long as there's been a Beauvais in this house, so too has there been an Arceneaux. My people always knew this day was coming. The Bible promised it. ‘The meek shall inherit the earth,' it says. Well, meek or not, it's our turn now.”

Sonny nods to the portraits. “You gonna leave them up there, Mrs. Huey?”

“Hell no,” she says, then laughs as tears grow large in her eyes. “Every last one of them sonsabitches is coming down.”

Anna Huey walks Sonny all the way to the avenue and they embrace in the thin, early dark, the name BEAUVAIS visible through the clumps of morning glory on the gate. The wind stirs the magnolias and crape myrtles and Sonny smells their bright blossoms. Along the sidewalk lamps burn yellow, dropping pools on the black pavement.

“Even after all I've told you,” Anna Huey says, “and all you already know—even after everything, if Juliet came to you and said she wanted you back . . . ?”

Anna Huey is unable to finish, and Sonny unable to answer.

“I never asked if it was you that killed her, did I, sugar?”

He shakes his head. “No, ma'am. You never did.”

She hitches a ride to Bywater with a male white in a big car. The radio plays classical music of all things. Juliet decides to make conversation. “You don't have any jewelry you want to get rid of, do you? Any rings?”

“No.”

“You got that one on your finger there. What about that one?”

The man seems uncomfortable all of a sudden. He is quiet as they thump over the railroad tracks between Faubourg Marigny and Bywater and Juliet gets a better look at him. He's wearing black and his hair is short, his fingernails neat and trim. Something about him is just too clean, too soft, and in that instant her automatic priest detector goes off.

She leans forward and by the light of the instrument panel catches a glimpse of the white tab at his shirt collar. “I'll be damned. You are one.”

“Yes. Yes, I am a priest. Father Michael from Saint Cecilia. Where are we going, miss?”

“Past Piety Street, but you can let me out wherever. Here, if you want.”

He stops by the levee near Sonny's house and Juliet turns to face him. “Let me ask you a question, Padre. It's been on my mind lately.” He nods and she says, “If someone were to come to you and confess a murder, would you be required to keep it a secret? Is there some kind of lawyer-client–type deal working between a priest and his people? Or would you give that person dispensation or whatever and call the cops?”

“Did you say dispensation?”

“I mean the thing you give that forgives him, that makes him clean again.”

The priest keeps both hands on the steering wheel. “Would you like for me to hear your confession?” he says.

Tears show in Juliet's eyes and start to run but she's laughing when she says, “Got a few days?”

He reaches over the back of the seat and retrieves a box of Kleenex from the floor.

“Thank you,” she says. “I hope I didn't scare you.”

“No.”

Juliet snorts into a blanket of tissues, making her nose even drier.

The priest looks at his watch then squirms in his seat pulling a business card from his wallet. “Here's my office number. I wish we could talk more but I'm already late for an appointment.”

“Mama put barbed wire on the drainpipes,” Juliet says, believing that will keep him. “She says it was to train her vines, but we both know better, don't we?”

“Well,” the priest says, “it was nice meeting you.”

Juliet glances at his card. “Father Michael Manny,” she says. “You don't look like a Manny to me. When I see a Manny I see a hairy Italian behind a meat counter. I see a guy from the old country. He lives in a house full of screaming kids. His breath, even after he brushes, smells of pickled olives. Your name isn't Manny.”

“Maybe not,” he says. “Good-bye, dear.”

Not two minutes after Juliet's left the car she realizes that she hitchhiked to the wrong neighborhood. It wasn't Sonny she meant to see. It was the other boy. Leonard.

She stands in weeds looking at the little houses, each a disaster on its own terms. She can't recall which of them belonged to Sonny. “It's me,” she calls with hands around her mouth. “It's Julie.”

Hammered by June bugs drawn to porch lights, she climbs front stoops and knocks to be let in, first one door, then another, now a third. “Oh,” she says, finally finding a face past a frieze of black burglar bars, “I was looking for someone.”

“You got the Labiche residence.” The man, who must be eighty, points to the room behind him.

“Well, I wanted the LaMotts. You know where they are?”

“Cecil LaMott's in a home, but they live a ways up the street. The son, anyhow. The lady, I forget what they called her, a stroke killed her right in the yard.”

Although it's a little more information than Juliet needs at the moment, at least there is someone to talk to. “You don't have any wedding rings you want to get rid of?”

“What?”

“Wedding rings?”

The man holds his hand up. “It's the only thing she left me. That and the hole in my heart.”

“Let me be honest with you a second. Let me lay my cards out on the table. I've got this blistering cocaine hangover and only one thing will make it right.”

“You said a hangover?” He leans in closer, his robe coming open, chest dark and hairless against the terry cloth. “You got a hangover try tomato juice. Something about the acid.”

Finally she remembers the stairs. A pickup parked in the grass. Banana plants and weeping mimosas. “Let me go,” she tells the old man. “You have a nice life.”

“You, too,” he says, and for once somebody really seems to mean it.

Juliet searches the street, her back to the levee. She doesn't find any trucks, but a flight of stairs, rickety and water-damaged and snapping beneath her weight, leads her to a door that feels right. She punches a lighted bell, and a woman, what looks like a woman, presents her face in the slot past a police chain. “Sonny LaMott live here?”

“Curly,” the woman says to the room behind her, then disappears from view.

Now a fat man holding a can of beer, the lower third of his belly showing under his undershirt. “You still can't find him?”

“Find who?”

“Sonny. I told him you were looking for him.”

Juliet looks past him at the small apartment, yellowed newspapers on the floor, a can of bug spray on the wagon-wheel coffee table. “Was I here earlier?”

The man takes a swallow from his can. He spends a long time looking at her. “Why don't you come inside and rest your feet. When Sonny gets back I'll walk you over.” Stepping back he opens the door wide, and points to a mat on the floor where he seems to want her to wipe her feet. “Florence, we got any tuna surprise left?”

Florence, hugging her arms at her chest, stands in front of a TV set, framed by rabbit-ear antennae and illumined by a purplish glow. “That was last week,” she says. “But maybe they got some left in the box.”

Curly points to the kitchen. “Be polite and go get our company a plate.” He glances back at Juliet and gives his head a shake. “Florence stepped into a door last night, in case you were wondering where them bruises came from. Florence, tell our company you stepped into a door.”

“I stepped in a door.”

“It was the bathroom door. Florence, which door was it?”

“Bathroom.”

“I don't want any tuna surprise,” Juliet says. “I'd take some tomato juice, though.”

“We don't drink tomato juice in this house. But how about a V8?”

“You drank all the V.O.,” Florence yells from the kitchen.

“It's okay,” Juliet tells him. “I was just trying to find Sonny.”

She steps back out on the landing and Curly joins her, pulling the door closed. It's a small space and they stand within inches of each other. She wonders if she spilled something on her shirt and it is a second before she understands what he's looking at.

“Well, I guess I'll be going back to the Lé Dale.”

“That's a fine hotel.” Curly could back off a little, there's room. But he seems to want to crowd her. “The Lé Dale, places like that. Give me a room where you don't feel self-conscious peeing in the shower, I always maintained that.”

It isn't easy walking back down the stairs. Juliet keeps both hands on the railing, looking back over her shoulder every few steps. When she reaches the bottom she spins around and offers a wave. “Made it.”

Curly clears his throat, preparing for a pronouncement. “I was digging around in the trash out back, this was a while ago. Guess what I found?” He takes a last sip before flattening his can underfoot. “I guess Sonny threw it out. You might not remember this but it was a movie and you were in there sucking off some boy.” He kicks the can and it sails past her, landing in the grass without a sound. “Boy had a dick on him, now.”

Juliet uses her hand to block his porch light, to try to see his face better. “The guy with the penis? That was my boyfriend.”

“What about the girl, that one that licked you?” He laughs and his shirt pulls up higher. “She reminds me of Florence the way she's kind of scrappy.”

Juliet starts walking toward the street, through the damp weeds, past an iron pole on the top of which rests a rotten birdhouse, its roof a ragged, open maw. “That was another life for me,” she says. “I've straightened myself out since then.”

“I'll give you fifty dollars you come let Florence lick you like you did that girl.”

Juliet stops and spins around and looks back at the light.

“Florence,” Curly shouts, flinging the door open wide. “Go wash your toot-toot, baby. Daddy's got a surprise and it ain't tuna.”