The Juliet (28 page)

“Oh Sarah. You haven’t been paying attention.”

* * *

The morning light filled Centenary like heavy cream flowing into a bowl, and behind every broken wall shadows grew. On one end, there was commotion from the Opera House. On the other end, the black bullet of Hobart’s car churned up dust as it sped across the rim of High Street.

Hobart, still deaf, ran for his life, angling towards his driver, veering off Penance to negotiate a terrain of wreckage, rubble, and creosote bush. The vehicle stopped, and Hobart’s driver exited the vehicle, his hand inside his jacket, as he waited outside the idling car, watching out. In the distance two figures were coming from the Opera House, the old man and one other, assisting him. They either didn’t or couldn’t see Mr. Oliver scrambling up the hillside.

They saw the car, though. Skinner shouted and waved his stick.

Once Oliver reached the road, the driver pushed his employer into the car before diving in himself. He threw the vehicle in reverse, and that was how they exited Centenary, speeding backwards, concealed by a cloud of dust.

When they reached the main road, the driver pivoted towards Las Vegas and maintained speed. Oliver collapsed in his seat, soaked in sweat, holding Rebekah’s gun on his lap. He said, “No one’s coming after us, Richard.”

“Better safe than sorry, sir.” The driver nodded towards the gun. “I see you acquired a new piece.”

The director stared down, still panting even though he’d caught his wind back. It was funny how a story could change with a single decision, but even more interesting was how the creative process was all consuming, even when one was ankle deep in destruction.

He’d put his gun in Sarah’s dead hand, molding her fingers around it and folding her arm to her own breast. Then he took Becky’s gun away, tugging it from her grip. He stepped back and could not quite grasp the implication of the scene he’d created, but he knew it was more exciting and somehow less depressing than the truth.

It was possible to interpret a dark victory from the tableau: a woman and a girl, a murder and a suicide, so close to the newly discovered grave of Lily Joy, the Whore of Centenary. Ultimately, it would be up to the audience to decide.

Hobart wondered what old Skinner would do now.

THIEF

Chapter 10

December 1935: New York City

Marg Beale walked towards the theater amidst the blinding illumination of flashbulbs, and eight-year-old Florian was duly impressed. His mother possessed a set of performative instincts that served her under the most challenging situations. As he stood in the crowd, anonymous along with his nanny Hedda, Marg’s emeralds, set in a silver figure eight hanging from a thick braid of chain, swung like Poe’s Pendulum over the tops of her glowing breasts.

Marg was covered in silver beads. She was as shiny and reflective as a real star, not just one from the movies. Before she entered the lush foyer of The Grandeur, she turned on her glittering heels and waved to the crowd. Her eyes were aflame, her flesh luminous. Florian thought she seemed too exposed, and that anyone could see she was completely mad. He was worried about the crowd. Florian thought they looked ravenous, even when, from time to time someone in the crowd would cry out, “We love you, Marg!”

Marg passed right by Florian and Hedda, skimming over them as if they were only two words in amongst thousands in a giant storybook. Florian could see her eyes were full of flashing lights, but he waved anyway.

When Marg disappeared inside the theater, Hedda pulled at Florian’s hand. It was time to go home. All his life he’d had nannies who did not speak English; they wouldn’t even try. Sometimes he tried to guess at their language, testing words like
gesundheit,
au revoir,
and
facacta
just to see what reaction they produced. These were words he’d heard his mother use, always in a high pitched funny voice to indicate that they were derived from a box of secrets.

Hedda led him away from the crowd. More celebrities had yet to arrive, but Florian and Hedda needed to return to the hotel. It was late, and there were still prayers and cello practice before bed.

Florian did not go to school. He did lessons. He had never been to a playground. He rarely went outside.

The evening before the premiere, Marg had tucked him in under stiff hotel sheets when she showed him her emerald necklace for the first time. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

The two green gems were hinged together, and Florian rocked them with his fingertips. Yes, for once he and his mother agreed on an aesthetic matter. “It’s magic,” he said. He wanted it.

“Perhaps, but it’s not a toy. Mr. Oliver gave it to me. I’m going to wear it to the film debut tomorrow. The emeralds are famous, in a way.”

Florian and Marg did not see eye to eye on Mr. Oliver. He was a producer, she said, but what did a producer do exactly, except take up all of Marg’s time?

Florian said he wanted the necklace. He tried to grab it.

“No-no.” Then she smiled her dazzling smile and said, “They’re cursed, you know. The stones.” She touched them the way she might touch Florian’s forehead, in a caress.

Nighty-night.

Another child might have been confused to see his mother delight in possessing a cursed item, but Florian felt his life was made clearer. A curse is a wonderful thing, really. It means you aren’t broken inside. It means you can’t help what happens next.

* * *

February 1947: Hollywood, CA

Most North American decapitation murders are committed by adult sons against their mothers, and the crimes are so unsettling to the community that comfort can only come from blaming the victim for her own death. In the statement, “She should have seen it coming
,”
the pronoun “it” refers to homemade fate.

However, when Marg Beale’s remains were discovered under a tarp in a garden shed on the property where she, her son Florian, and all his silent nannies once lived, no one thought to suggest that she had brought it upon herself. Nor was Florian blamed (except by the courts), not even when exposed under the harsh glare of Freudian clichés. Marg’s head had been severed just under the chin, leaving her neck mostly attached to the rest of her body.

Detective Laskowski was the lead. He was a dapper, vain man, impressed by his own impressions. He said, “Looks like a stem of rhubarb snapped below the leaf.”

His assistant, a young officer named Taylor, said, “I think it looks like a tulip bud.”

Detective Laskowski stared him down. “Wrong side of the garden, kid.”

Around Marg’s neck was the necklace from Mr. Oliver. The chain was slack, but the thing itself was stuck to Marg’s chest, almost unidentifiable under the brown sludge of biology.

It was known that twenty-year-old Florian collected swords. The glamorous, swashbuckling actor Tyrone Power had given the kid his first blade—a rapier on his ninth birthday.

Placed next to Marg’s corpse was a blood-stained saber, an elegantly curved, heavy version of the weapon favored by the Federal Cavalry at the beginning of the Civil War. Taylor identified it as the “Old Wristbreaker” model.

Laskowski asked, “You think it’s the real deal?”

The young officer shook his head no. “Everyone collects Civil War junk these days. And everyone seems to have one of these beauties too, always in perfect condition somehow. If we’d had all that armament back then, it wouldn’t have taken us four years to finish off Johnny Reb.”

“Us? Careful son. I’m from Virginia. Besides, I was talking about
that
bastard.” Laskowski crouched low over Marg’s torso. He withdrew a mechanical pencil from the inside pocket of his jacket and began to probe the necklace. A nickel-sized chunk of dried gore fell away to reveal the spectral green glow of one of its two enormous emeralds.

Laskowski sighed. “From all accounts, the son is crackers, but you know what they’re gonna say, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“They’re gonna say this is The Juliet. ‘Curse Strikes Again.’ And it won’t just be hens clucking on their porches. You wait till the papers get wind of this.” A kernel of excitement hid deep inside the detective’s worry.

Marg’s head lay sideways on a shelf just above. While Florian had made some attempt to hide his mother’s body under an oilcloth tarp, he’d placed her head in full, open view next to a garden trowel and a package of bone meal. Marg’s flesh had contracted over her skull, and her eyelids draped over sockets emptied by insects and time. Her lips had withdrawn over excellently maintained teeth.

Laskowski said, “But that,” and pointed down towards the saber, “did not do
that
.” He pointed up to the shelf.

Officer Taylor nodded. He was learning fast when to be circumspect with his commentary.

The detective rested an elbow on the ground, making it appear as if he were settling in for a spooning session with Marg Beale’s desiccated remains. “So my guess is she was killed somewhere else. Her noggin was removed post mortem with a much more precise tool, like a hunting knife. This hunk of steel is just for show.”

“How long do you think she’s been here, sir?”

“Maybe a month. Maybe a year. Did you ever see any of her movies?”

“Not when they first came out.”

“She was a skinny dame. Not an ounce of jiggle on her. Wouldn’t take long for her to turn into this pile of jerky in our climate.”

Taylor and Laskowski shared a few other horrible jokes with each other while supervising the removal of Marg’s corpse. In their minds, the detective and the officer felt they were as close to the truth of death as any sane men could be. They talked about her body, and they talked about the evidence. They even talked about The Juliet, but only in the most nonromantic of ways.
How much was it worth, how much did it weigh? Did Marg Beale wear it around the house, or did Florian put it on her himself?

And then they talked about it some more, strictly limiting the content of their discussion to facts and evidence, which meant they were bound to repeat themselves.

How much was it worth, how much did it weigh? What would happen to it when the trial was over?

After a while, this repetition became a fancy. Neither man would admit to his fascination or how fast it had come upon him, but both grew silent at the same time.

Short ornamental palms lined the garden, and their fronds trembled in a breeze that no one felt. The grass felt spongy, though there hadn’t been rain. Nature making promises and telling tales. Laskowski was accustomed to what he privately referred to as “the dream moment” of any murder scene. It happened when all the rough talk and quick thoughts finally synched up with the grim reality of the suffering that had occurred. Any cop who cared about his career needed to figure a fast way out of that dream, needed to get ahead of it.

The Juliet was helpful in this regard. The two green stones occupied both halves of the brain.

So came the coroner, the photographer, more officers, the drivers… And each one marveled,
Is that the Lady, the Wicked Juliet? Has she claimed another victim?
The same joke over and over. These were men who had all been through the terror and glory of the last Great War, now reduced to giggling children. Detective Laskowski and Officer Taylor endured it, but in the laboratory of their cold hearts where Death was flayed and pinned to an examination tray, there was a new measure of doubt, confusion where before there had been only masculine, forthright clarity.

A magnificent cat appeared near the back corner of the bungalow. She was a Russian Blue, and she sat still, watching the commotion at the shed. Laskowski spotted her first, but it was Taylor who noticed the tiny, slim green lizard clamped in the cat’s mouth, its tail writhing like smoke from a cigar. The cat ran off before either man could make sense of her.

This is how gods creep in, how desire blinds, through doubt and mystery. From that moment on, the detective and the officer would never stop thinking about The Juliet.

Only rumor confirmed that the emeralds in the necklace were the lost halves of The Juliet. The Steig family, from whom the gem had been stolen some forty years before, demonstrated a near pathological disinterest in the case, and it was determined that an expert analysis would be too costly and have no real bearing on Florian Beale’s trial. Nevertheless, sometime during the proceedings, the green and silver lady went missing. No one would admit officially that it had been stolen. The LAPD was always like that, simultaneously proud and ashamed of its most notorious officers. Excellent training imparts excellent skill, and there would never be a better thief than a cop.

* * *

Florian was coherent during his trial. He was peaceful and focused as he described his mother’s final moments: “It was a beautiful sunny day, and she was relaxing on the patio, drinking a Gin Ricky that I had prepared for her. I wasn’t angry with her, but I wanted to get her attention.”

He hit her in the back of the head with a hammer and then had second thoughts. Marg Beale deserved more spectacle than that. At first he tried dressing her and posing her in various locations on the property, but no matter what he did she looked sloppy, and that was unacceptable. Especially when he placed the necklace around her neck. In life, Marg Beale projected a vibrancy that was a match to The Juliet’s mesmerizing glow, but in death the emeralds triumphed over the flesh and mocked mortality itself.