The Empress File

CHAPTER 14

We had taken out one hundred thousand dollars in cash. After counting it, we put it back in the bag and stuck the bag in the Fanny's engine compartment, where it would be safe from accidental discovery. The boat was now a floating time bomb; on board we had LuEllen's burglary tools, the books from the Longstreet machine, a hundred thousand dollars in stolen city cash, and the murder photos.

Dessusdelit arrived promptly at ten o'clock, and we cold-decked her. I almost, but not quite, felt sorry for her. She was as nervous as a hen, settling into the querant's chair with a series of twitches and unconscious starts. She'd been up all night, rolling the crystal ball in her hands. The ball had been dead, she said as she handed it back to LuEllen, except for a few moments around three in the morning. For a few seconds then she thought she saw her mother again.

"She seemed to be welcoming me," Dessusdelit said bleakly.

"Maybe that means you're going to visit her," LuEllen suggested ingenuously.

"She's dead," Dessusdelit snapped. "I thought I told you."

"Oh. I'm sorry," LuEllen said, covering her mouth in embarrassment.

We shuffled the cards, and Dessusdelit cut them. LuEllen reached out and touched her arm and said, "You can keep the ball for a while if that will help you reestablish a channel."

When Dessusdelit turned her head to reply, I switched the decks and started laying down the Celtic Cross. Out came the Tower or, as some tarots have it, the Tower of Destruction, symbolic of the wrath of God. The card shows a medieval tower struck by a lightning bolt, with two people tumbling out of it.

"Things seem to be stirred up," I said as Dessusdelit turned back. I tried to put the best face on it but let enough sickly kindness ooze into my voice that she had to know what I was doing.

Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times, and finally she blurted, "I've had some personal difficulties."

"That's what we're seeing then. But remember, the Tower doesn't always mean disaster," I continued with a patently false heartiness. "Remember when I told you that sometimes it's as simple as looking at the picture? One time I had an opening scheduled for a Chicago gallery. For me it was a big deal. I don't usually do the magical kind of tarot spreads, but I was worried about this opening; my career was in the balance. So I said, what the heck and did a spread-"

"And the Tower came up?" she asked eagerly. She was looking for reassurance, and since I had obviously survived the Tower.

"Exactly. Well, you can imagine how I felt. I even considered canceling the opening. But that was ridiculous. I couldn't do it. Food had been ordered, and wine. There were dozens of invitations out, including to the newspaper critics. Besides, I kept telling myself, it was just superstition-"

"What happened at the opening?" she asked, cutting me short.

"At the opening? Nothing. It went wonderfully." She allowed herself a small smile. "But before the opening. well, the question I had asked the cards was, 'How will my day go tomorrow?' Thinking, of course, about the opening. And I got the Tower. The next day I was eating breakfast, English muffins with orange marmalade. I was using a toaster to toast the muffins, and one got stuck and started to burn. When I thought about it later, I knew I'd been blindly stupid, but I wasn't thinking at the time. What I did was, I used a table knife to try to pry the muffin out. I got a terrific shock. Threw me across the room. My arm and hand spasmed for days."

Dessusdelit's smile slowly died.

"Everything was fine with the opening. The Tower was simply a picture that portrayed something that would happen to me. The card shows a lightning bolt, like the electricity in the toaster. I damn near electrocuted myself."

As I said that, the blood drained from her face. The state had the electric chair, and after Harold and Sherrie, it must have been on her mind.

"Could I look at your ball again?" she stuttered at LuEllen.

"Sure." LuEllen got it from its bag, and Dessusdelit rolled it through her hands. Nothing.

"No color," Dessusdelit said.

"Maybe things just aren't right," LuEllen said. "You've got to be able to focus. If you can't focus your mind, the ball won't have anything to react to."

"Goddamn," Dessusdelit muttered. I nearly dropped the cards, and LuEllen sat back, surprised. Dessusdelit's bony hands clenched on the table in front of her. Her mouth was running as though she were speaking in tongues. "We've got these goddamn niggers in town, goddamn nigger bitch, ruining it for ever'one, ruinin' ever'thing. Started happening when that shitheel dickhead cop shot that nigger kid trash fuckin' coon down on the tracks."

She rambled on insanely for a moment, then seemed to run down. She sat for another few seconds, staring blindly at her hands, then suddenly stood and walked out.

LuEllen followed her to the door, said, quietly, "Take care of yourself, Chenille," and watched her go up the levee wall. Over her shoulder she said, "The fuckin' mayor's cracked, Kidd. We cracked her open like a fuckin' egg. And it's amazing what leaked out, was it not?"

"First-degree murder ain't shoplifting," I said.

Dessusdelit left around ten-thirty. At noon the state attorney general's auditors hit the town like the great flood of '27. They came in a convoy, six plain brown government cars and three state police cruisers. LuEllen and I were eating cheeseburgers at Humdinger's when they went by.

"The cavalry," LuEllen muttered over her chicken noodle soup.

"Too late for Harold," I said. "C'mon, let's go."

"Where to?"

"That hardware store we hit last night. I saw some really big magnets in there."

John had taken the BMW back to Memphis the night before and dropped it at the dealership where he'd rented it. After catching a couple of hours of sleep, he drove back to Longstreet in his own car. He was hiding out at Marvel's, a non-person, cleanly shaved, what little hair he had cropped to a stubble, carefully wearing faded jeans, old T-shirts, and ragged tennis shoes. He looked nothing like the slick Mr. Johnson from Memphis. If anybody made that connection, we were sunk.

Just after nightfall LuEllen and I turned a corner downtown, John's Chevy stopped beside us, and we climbed in back.

"Is Marvel back?"

"No, but she should be anytime now. She's stopping at a friend's place – the cleaning lady at the City Hall, Becka Clay. Becka was there this afternoon when the state police came in."

"What happened with the governor? Marvel took a long time."

"The usual bullshit. He wouldn't deal directly, but he had to approve every little detail, so his hatchet man was running back and forth like a trolley car. By the way, when I talked to her on the phone, she said you wanted Hill and Ballem appointed to the city council, along with our man?"

"Yeah."

"Why the change?"

"We figure if Harold is dead, Hill did it," I said. "If Hill and Ballem are appointed along with our guy, then we tip the state cops to the computer out at animal control. They'll go in, grab the computer, find the books, and this time they'll include Ballem and Hill. Marvel can supply the state people with the code words I fixed in the machine. And as soon as the state guys go in, Hill and Ballem both get anonymous calls. A woman, I think. Somebody who can do a white-southern-lady accent. She calls them up, says she knows Hill killed Harold and says she doesn't want to turn in a white man for killing a colored, but she doesn't want killers running the city either. So they have a choice: Quit or burn. They'll know that the cops have the books, so their council seats are probably gone anyway. When the woman calls. why would they fight it? They'll go."

John grinned. He liked it. "A little racist judo," he said. Then he frowned. " 'Course, if Hill didn't do it, he's gonna freak out."

"He did," I said shortly. John gave me an odd look, and I shrugged. "The tarot says so."

Marvel came in twenty minutes after we got to her house. She looked exhausted but determined.

"Harold?" she asked John. John shook his head, took her by the elbow, and led her to the couch.

"How'd it go?" I asked.

"The deal's done," she said. "The governor will appoint Hill, Ballem, and Brooking Davis just as soon as Dessusdelit, St. Thomas, and Rebeck quit."

"What if they don't quit?" John asked.

Marvel shrugged. "I don't see how they can avoid it. Becka fixed it so she was cleaning the second-floor toilets when the state people arrived. Wells and Dessusdelit were there. She said they went straight to the safe, opened it, and didn't find any money. She said Wells sat down right in the middle of the floor and started to bawl. Dessusdelit was talking about a lawyer."

"Did you talk to the newspaper?"

"Yeah. I called the managing editor, anonymously, and told him what happened – the missing money from the bank. I told him the TV was on to it, too. I told him I was with the state and wanted the word to get out before it could be covered up. He freaked out. He said he'd talk to the head auditor and confirm it. Then I called the TV and told them the same thing."

We sat and looked at each other for a moment. Then she said, "That should do it; I don't know what else we can do."

The television response was disappointing. The local station's ten o'clock news mentioned that state officials were doing an audit of the city's books. "There are unconfirmed rumors circulating that some funds have been improperly transferred between accounts," the anchorman said with a fairly puzzled air. A reporter talked to St. Thomas outside his house, but St. Thomas, standing in a pool of TV light, claimed he'd been on the river, fishing, and knew nothing about it. Dessusdelit refused to comment.

At one o'clock John called.

"Drive up to the E-Z Way and get yourself a newspaper," he said. "Better hurry before they're gone."

There were four left when we got there. Elvis, the counterman, shook his head and allowed how the papers were selling like rubbers at an AIDS convention.

The paper led with the story, reporting virtually word for word what Marvel had told them. A hundred thousand dollars were missing from the bank. The state people wouldn't confirm it but didn't deny it, either, given several chances.

I called Bobby on a voice line.

"This has got to be between you and me and LuEllen," I said. "John's not to know, or Marvel. If you can't handle that, I'll go some other way."

He thought for a moment and then said, "Will it hurt them?"

"No," I said. "Their feelings would be hurt not to know, but they don't really need to know. In fact, if they did, they might do something that would hurt all of us. Especially Marvel – and John's in bed with her now."

"All right," he said after another minute. "You and me."

"You know Harold's gone missing?"

"Yeah."

"Hill killed him. And the Sherrie woman."

Bobby whistled. "For sure?"

"For sure. Put their bodies in the river. I need you to do two things. First of all, I need you to call Dessusdelit. You should tell her that you know Harold was at her house and you know what he was doing there. Tell her that you know that Hill took him away in the van and that Hill killed Harold and Sherrie. Tell her you know that she was in on it. Tell her she ought to quit the city council anyway, but if she doesn't, along with St. Thomas and Carl Rebeck, you're gonna turn her in. Mention the electric chair. Tell her you want her to quit Monday morning with the others."

"You want me to call her right now?"

"Right now. Shake her out of bed."

"All right. What's the other thing you need?"

"The Army Corps of Engineers runs computer models of the Mississippi on all kinds of things."

"Yeah?"

"I want you to get into their data base in St. Louis, or maybe it's down at Vicksburg, whatever, and run a model on a body dumped into the river just below Longstreet. See where it'd get in a week."

Sunday.

I had the feeling that mobs should be in the street with torches, storming the castle gates. But Dessusdelit didn't live in a castle; she lived in a rambler. And instead of mobs in the street, we got church bells from three different directions. I sat on the upper deck and sketched, while LuEllen would pace the cabin, come up and sunbathe for a while, then go below and pace some more. Halfway through the afternoon we both started drinking gin and tonics and got mostly in the bag, something we rarely do.

With our blood alcohol levels about as high as they get, we had a wonderful idea. We talked about it for a few minutes. Then we went below and called Rebeck's house. His wife answered.

"I gotta talk to Carl," I said urgently.

"Can I ask what this concerns?" The voice of a politician's wife.

"Well, uh, I just been talking to one of them state boys," I bumbled. "You better tell Carl to get his ass on this telephone, this is important."

Rebeck picked up an extension a minute later. "Yes?"

"Carl, I don't want to say who this is 'cause I could get in trouble myself. But you know me, and I know you, and I'm here to tell you, those state boys have got more than some money shuffled around. Somebody's got themself hurt. I don't know who, but they got homicide investigators comin' in. If I was you, I'd go have a talk with them state folks. Maybe you can get out while the gettin' is good."

"What-" he started, but I hung up.

"There," I said drunkenly, "that'll fix things."

"You need another gin and tonic," LuEllen said, and we fell around the inside of the cabin, laughing about Rebeck.

At four o'clock Bobby dumped to the computer and tapped the alarm. By that time we were sobering up, and the call to Rebeck no longer seemed like such a good idea.

"What the fuck were we doing?" LuEllen moaned.

"Shit, it'll be OK," I said, grimacing. I hadn't gotten loaded in two years.

When I brought up Bobby's file, I found a series of calculations based on current, channel shape, and flow that suggested that the bodies would be anywhere from three to twenty-five miles downstream. He listed a series of probabilities for each location but warned that "the bodies could have gotten hung up on something two minutes after they went in the water and maybe went nowhere."

On the other thing, he said, "I did Dessusdelit."

"Fuck it," I said to LuEllen as I crawled back up the ladder. "Let's go out on the water."

The marina operator was reseating planks at the end of the dock, working with a power drill, a couple of crescent wrenches, and a stack of two-by-sixes. LuEllen waved to him, glass in hand, as we went out, and he waved back with his own beer bottle.

We headed south past the warehouses, elevators, and the tank field, past animal control. There was nobody in sight at the complex, and at the revetment, where Hill and St. Thomas had dumped the bodies in the water, I put LuEllen ashore. She jogged up the levee path, watching the weeds for snakes, and peeked at animal control. Nobody home.

She came back, and we examined the last of the murder photos, the shot of Hill throwing the pistol into the river. I had no idea how much the lazy current would deflect something as heavy as a pistol, so we anchored ten feet above where it had gone in the water and began working with the magnet. LuEllen didn't have a great deal of faith in the possibility of finding it. I thought it was mostly a matter of patience.

I was using a muskie rod to cast with, with the magnet tied on instead of a lure. The magnet was heavy, but if I got my shoulders into it, I could toss it twenty-five or thirty feet downstream and then crank it back upstream to the boat.

And I found the pistol, just about the time my arms started to tighten up. There was a clank transmitted through the rod, and I said, "Whoops," and gave the rod to LuEllen and went back and eased up on the anchor. When we had the line running pretty much straight up and down, I slowly retrieved it. It was a.45. A good old government model from Colt. I detached the gun from the magnet, cut the magnet from the line, and threw it overboard.

"Why'd you do that?" LuEllen asked.

"I hate magnets. Damn dangerous things, around computers and software."

We spent another hour poking along to the south, scanning the banks for any sign of a shirt. Bobby's note said the shirt was what we'd see, since the decomposition gases gathered in the abdominal and chest cavities.

Nothing. I cleaned the gun as we went along, lubricated it with some WD-40, and put it back together. Good as ever. Some people like guns, some people don't, but you can't deny their quality as machines.

We hid the pistol with the money bag, down in the engine compartment; as the sun went down, we turned the Fanny's nose upstream and headed back. Five minutes after we arrived at the marina, Marvel called.

"They're going to quit," she exulted. "It's all over town. They had a meeting at Dessusdelit's house, and St. Thomas went home and told his wife. They're out of here."

On Monday Dessusdelit called at nine-fifteen. I was still asleep, and LuEllen crawled over me to answer the phone, then handed it over.

"I'm. I really need. some help. Would it be. could you come to the City Hall, my office? And bring your tarot?" She sounded ragged, desperate.

"Now?"

"Yes. Right away. You'll have to hurry. I've got a meeting at ten."

We took quick showers, then grabbed my tarot and LuEllen's crystal ball and drove up to the City Hall. Dessusdelit's office was in the city council suite. There was a secretary's desk in an outer office, a conference room, then a series of four closet-size offices for the councilmen, and a double-size closet for the mayor. A dozen people milled around the ground floor, outside the council meeting chambers, and a couple more slouched against the walls in the council's outer office.

The harried secretary said, "Mr. Kidd?" as soon as we walked in, and ushered us through to Dessusdelit's office. Dessusdelit was with one of those young-old people you find in corners around city halls, a guy maybe twenty-five, who'd seen fifty years' worth of corruption and showed it in the weary, overly wise crinkles around his eyes.

As tired as he looked, Dessusdelit looked worse. She'd aged ten years in two days. She'd tried to cover her distress with makeup, but now she looked like a painted puppet.

"Could you excuse us for a minute, Robert?" she asked the young-old guy. "I have to talk to these folks privately for a few minutes."

"What's happening?" I asked. "I saw the papers."

"There's been a serious problem," she answered. She glanced at her watch. "I have a question about your tarot. Must I ask you a question? Explicitly? Or can I just hold the deck and think a question?"

"You can do it either way," I said. "A lot of tarot readers don't believe the question should ever be spoken. I think it clarifies a reading, but no, you don't have to speak it."

"I'd like to try it that way if we could."

We couldn't cold-deck her, so I simply took the deck out of its box, unwrapped it, shuffled a few times, passed it to her, and had her go through the routine. She might be asking any of a number of questions: Should I quit the council? Where did the hundred thousand go? Will the murders be found out?

"You know, stress can twist a reading," I said conversationally as she shuffled the cards. "Maybe we should wait until you're a little more relaxed."

She stopped shuffling long enough to glance at her watch and shook her head. "No. It has to be before the meeting."

So. It had to do with the meeting. That most likely meant that she was asking whether she should quit, although I couldn't be sure how she would formulate the question.

"Don't try to formulate a precise question. Just let your mind settle on a situation, and let's see what the cards have to say about it. They're really not best for yes or no answers."

I rolled the cards out. We got a spread that could have meant a lot of things. Her eyes darted around like a bird's looking for a worm, past the Three of Swords, a deadly card, to the Nine of Pentacles, a card suggesting attainment, and finally settled on the Hanged Man. I tapped the card with my index finger.

"This is the key," I said in my most portentous voice. "It stands for sacrifice, giving up something held dear, to clear the way for greater gains in life. This is what I call a forked reading because you can see that the possible futures" – I tapped the Three of Swords and the Nine of Pentacles – "are wildly split. You're at the crux of a situation. If you make the sacrifice, the road leads to the Nine. If you don't, it leads to the Three."

The Three shows three swords driven through a red heart, a card of sorrow and loss.

"I see," she said softly. She swiveled in her chair and looked out the window. LuEllen rolled the crystal ball out of its velvet sack and passed it to her.

"Look inside, focus on yourself," LuEllen said.

Dessusdelit rolled the heavy ball in her hands, moving it into the light from the window. "So much inside," she said almost dreamily.

She sat like that for a moment, then turned and said, "Thank you."

We were dismissed. "Is this meeting open?" I asked as we went out.

"Yes. All meetings are open. But I'm afraid it won't be a happy one."

By the time we left Dessusdelit's office, a few minutes before ten o'clock, the council chambers were packed. We were standing in the hallway, looking over the heads of the crowd, when an argument blew up down the hallway. Carl Rebeck, wearing a suit and sunglasses and escorted by a state trooper, was standing nose to nose with Duane Hill. I hadn't seen Hill come in, but he had apparently been waiting for Rebeck.

"What the fuck are you doin', Carl?" Hill blurted. The trooper moved between the two men.

"I just wanna go vote and have it done with," Rebeck said, staying in the shadow of the cop. The cop had one hand on Hill's chest, but Hill kept peering around him.

"You gotta come talk to us, Carl. You don't wanna be listening to a bunch of bullshit put out by these piss-ant state jerk-offs," Hill said, his voice rising almost to a shout.

The state trooper, who wore mirrored glasses and had a face like the sharp side of a hatchet, said something to Hill and shoved. Hill gave a step, and Rebeck slid past with the cop.

"Maybe it wasn't a bad idea, calling Rebeck," LuEllen muttered.

The argument in the hall had pulled some of the crowd out of the meeting room, and we managed to push inside. Marvel and two men were sitting toward the back, to the right. We went to the left and stood against the wall. The meeting started twenty minutes later. Lucius Bell showed up right on time and took a seat, looking around expectantly. The Reverend Mr. Dodge, wearing a dark suit with an ecclesiastical collar, showed up a couple of minutes later, carrying a sheaf of papers, and sat at the opposite end of the curved council table. Even from where we were standing, you could see his collar was soaked with sweat.

Dessusdelit, St. Thomas, and Rebeck came in a few moments later and settled behind the table. There was no talking. Dessusdelit pounded a gavel twice, called the meeting to order, told Mary Wells to turn on her tape recorder, and started.

Money was missing, she said, taken in the night from the City Hall safe. It had been withdrawn from the bank with the approval of herself, St. Thomas, and Rebeck as a test of the bank's and the city's accounting procedures. Now it was gone, and there was a state investigation. They were innocent of any wrongdoing and were sure that the state would find it so.

Further, she said, there were unfounded allegations that other funds had been diverted. Again, these were allegations from a small minority and had been given undue weight by state investigators. They also would be proved false.

"It now seems clear, however, that I, Mr. St. Thomas, and Mr. Rebeck will have a full schedule simply demonstrating to the state that these charges are incorrect. Therefore, we feel we have no option but to leave the council, at least for the time being. We all look forward to running again in the fall if, by the grace of our Lord, the state has realized the falseness of these allegations."

Dessusdelit seemed to be holding up well, after the near breakdown we'd seen on the boat. I glanced over at Marvel; she was sitting forward, half smiling, watching with rapt attention. Dessusdelit first stepped down as mayor, and Lucius Bell was unanimously elected to succeed her. Bell took the gavel. Then Dessusdelit, St. Thomas, and a tight-lipped Rebeck, each asking to be recognized in turn, read short messages of resignation. When they were done, there wasn't a sound in the chamber until Dessusdelit pushed her chair back, and the leg scraped on the wooden floor.

Suddenly everybody was talking. A half dozen people gathered around Marvel, chattering at once. Bell remained seated, looking at the gavel in his hand, talking to Dodge. Dessusdelit said a few words to St. Thomas, ignored Rebeck, and walked out toward her office.

"That's it," LuEllen whispered. We were trapped in a corner and were among the last to get out of the meeting room. Marvel was in the hallway, talking animatedly with another woman. As we passed, she suddenly, without thinking, reached out and squeezed my arm. I instinctively smiled but kept walking. When I turned away from her, I saw Hill standing on the steps going to the second floor, to Wells's office.

He'd seen Marvel reach out to me and squeeze. His eyes narrowed, and he fixed on me. While I kept walking, swiveling my head as though I were simply interested in watching the crowd, the little man in the box at the back of my brain was chanting, "Damn, damn, damn."