The Empress File

CHAPTER 15

"We've got trouble," I told LuEllen as we stepped out in the sunshine. A dozen people milled around on the sidewalk below us, as though they'd just come out of a church wedding.

"What?"

"Marvel squeezed my arm when we walked through the hall. Hill saw it. He knows. something. Or he'll figure it out."

"Shit," she said. She raked her fingers through her hair in a gesture I recognized as one of mine. "Why now? We're so close."

"She's not a pro. She wasn't thinking." I squinted up the street, into the sun. Longstreet looked hard and dusty, and more than that: priggish, self-righteous. I've been in a lot of river towns, some of them a shambles compared with Longstreet, all of them tough. But they were all more or less likable. Longstreet was not. It wasn't so much tough as mean. "We've got a couple of more things to do, and then we go."

We went back out on the river, hunting downstream. The river off Longstreet had been thoroughly contained by the Corps of Engineers, the banks stabilized, the current directed by submerged wing dams. For long stretches it was as much a canal as a river, and that was our best hope for finding the bodies. There just wasn't a lot they could get hung up on.

We ran the hunt with a program-editing technique; computer programming teaches you things that often have nothing to do with computers. Searching for bodies was one of those things.

When you finish writing a computer program, there are always a few bugs – mistakes. Some are obvious and easily corrected. Some are not. Finding the hard ones can be a nightmare; imagine reading a phone book, looking for a number that should be 6966996 instead of 6996996, without knowing precisely what you are looking for.

There are two ways to go about debugging.

One is intuitive: You jump around the program, looking for spots where the trouble may be.

The other is logical: You start at the most likely place and methodically search every possibility until you find it.

The intuitive approach has its proponents. You may find the problem very quickly. On the other hand, you may never find it; the mistake may not be where you think it must be. The logical approach gets the job done, but it's glacially slow.

I tend to go with the intuitive because the logical is boring. But to hunt for the bodies, where we couldn't fuck up and where intuition was blunted by a lack of knowledge of the river, the logical route was a necessity. We searched downstream from the point where the bodies had gone into the water, giving detailed attention to Bobby's highest-percentage areas.

"There's too much river," LuEllen said. "And if we keep looking at it in the sun, we're going to get. snow-blind, whatever you'd call it."

"If we find them, though, that'll be the last thing we need."

We never did find Harold.

The Bolivar County Sheriff's Department found him, in the river above Rosedale. Or rather a cat-fisherman did. The body was floating off a wing dam. The catfisherman called the sheriff, and the deputies pulled the body out, just about the time the city council was meeting. We got the word from Bobby that night, when we came off the river.

I'd put in the hookups and gone back for a shower when the phone rang; Bobby had been auto-dialing every minute or so, waiting for our return. I answered it, got the carrier tone, and punched up the computer. A block of newspaper text slid onto the screen:

ROSEDALE, MISS. (AP)-The body of an unidentified man was found in the Mississippi River near Victoria Bend above the city of Rosedale late Saturday, according to a spokesman for the Bolivar County Sheriff's Department.

The body was partially decomposed and apparently had been in the river for several days, the spokesman said. The dead man was black and was wearing a yellow dress shirt and gray dress slacks. No identification was found with the body.

An autopsy is scheduled for this week in Greenville. The sheriff's spokesman said there was no sign of foul play.

Appended to the story was a note from Bobby:

That's all. Could it be Harold?

It seemed likely. The body had been found in one of Bobby's high-probability areas. And if Harold's body had gotten there, maybe Sherrie's had, too. I called Bobby back.

Don't talk to Marvel or John about the body. We'll tell them later, OK?

There was a moment's hesitation as he thought it over, then:

OK.

LuEllen and I were looking at the corps's navigation maps of the lower Mississippi when Marvel called.

"There's a meeting tonight," she said. She was quietly triumphant. "The governor has announced his appointments, and Bell called a meeting at eight o'clock to swear them into office. Ballem, Hill, and Brooking Davis."

"Was anybody upset by Davis?"

"No. He's an attorney, and the governor's people were running around telling everybody that it was political-a gesture to the black caucus in the legislature. They understand that kind of politics down here. It's considered smart and harmless. Especially with Ballem and Hill going on the council."

"All right. It's time for you to talk to Reverend Dodge."

"We're ready."

"Take John with you. Just in case. You've got to get him by the balls-"

"We got him."

"Then just sit tight. We'll take care of Ballem and Hill."

We spent the rest of the evening talking, sitting on the top deck, watching the river go by. We were almost done, we agreed. We should take the boat on down the river, to New Orleans. Hang out awhile. French Quarter. Take our time heading back up north.

"Maybe you could stay with me awhile," I suggested.

"That's kind of scary, Kidd," she said.

More river went by. "Listen, I kind of wanted to ask. is your name really LuEllen?"

She looked amused. "Yeah, it really is."

Marvel called at ten o'clock. It had worked, she said. Hill, Ballem, and Brooking Davis had been sworn in as the new city councilmen.

"And the Reverend Dodge's ass is mine," she said. "His ass, and his vote."

"Did he freak out?"

"Nope. He was cool as a cucumber," Marvel said. "I told him about this one girl, and then a second one, and he just reached out and patted me on the knee, and he said, 'Marvel, what exactly is it that you want?' I told him, and he said, 'Well, I guess you got me,' and asked if we wanted a beer."

"That's cold," I said.

"I actually kind of admired him, the way he kept his shit together," Marvel said.

At the meeting, she said, Ballem tried to get a "consensus of the council" that committed the new members to resign when the former members were found innocent of wrongdoing.

Only Hill voted with him.

Then two black members of the audience got up and demanded a new investigation of the shooting of Darrell Clark. After some heated discussion – and a recess, during which Marvel spoke to Brooking Davis – the proposal was rejected, three to two, with Bell and Dodge voting in favor. Both Bell and Dodge were surprised by Davis's decision to vote with Hill and Ballem, as were the black members of the crowd.

"Brooking is going to take some shit, but we figure we've got to lay back. We don't want anybody having second thoughts about who is on that council. We want him solid with the whites in town. I'd have told Dodge to vote against, too, but he'd already suggested a new investigation, so he couldn't."

After a few more angry exchanges about the state investigation, Bell was about to adjourn the meeting when Davis brought up the bridge. Instead of looking to the state legislatures for money, he said, the city should look into the possibility of a revenue bond issue and build its own bridge. A toll bridge, if necessary.

Bell said the idea had been proposed before, and the financing looked impossible. Davis insisted that it was worth exploring. Ballem was positively enthusiastic. There'd been some problems, but there'd been problems before, and the machine always kept rolling. Revenue bonds were just the thing to fuel it. The vote was unanimously in favor of Davis's idea.

"We figured that would get Davis in solid with Bell, just in case we need him later," Marvel said. "Now, the real question is, "When can we dump Ballem and Hill?"

"Right away," I said. "We'll start working on it tonight."

"How're you going to do it? The state cops could take a while with those books."

"Don't worry about it. You just be ready to move."

Everything was rushing together.

We got up early the next morning, drove to Greenville, and mailed sets of LuEllen's murder photos to Ballem and Hill. We'd give them a chance to stew over the photos, and then LuEllen would call them. Using her best phony southern-belle accent, she would say that she had been on the hill, making landscape photographs, and that she'd seen Harold's body and the shooting of Sherrie. She wouldn't want to send a white man to the electric chair for killing a Negro, she'd say, but she would, if they didn't quit and leave town.

"How're we going to convince Ballem? He wasn't even there."

"Hill's his errand boy. Everybody in town knows it. When he sees the pictures, he won't argue. Not right away. He might go looking for the photographer later, but the first thing he'll do is quit. Just to keep things quiet, so he can maneuver. When he does that, we're outa here," I said.

We were back in Longstreet before noon. The marina operator told us that Hill had been there and had asked after us but hadn't left a message.

"I heard that you and him had a misunderstanding sometime back, outside the Holiday Inn," the marina man said.

"It cleared up," I said.

"Yeah. Well, you take care," he said, spitting in the river.

We cut the boat loose and headed downstream again, looking for Sherrie's body. As we passed the animal control complex, we could hear the ooka-ooka-ooka of the vacuum pump, working the death box.

Late in the afternoon, a couple of miles above Victoria Point, LuEllen took the binoculars down from her eyes and pointed out over the water.

"Over there. Yellow."

"Another float?"

"Doesn't look like a float. Looks like it's stuck on a tree."

Sherrie's body was hung up on a dead cotton-wood sweeper near the Concordia Bar Light.

"Jesus," LuEllen said as we drifted up. The smell of decaying flesh was overwhelming. I had intended to tangle the body in a wad of heavy monofilament fishing line and tangle the line in some brush, to anchor it, but in the end, neither of us had the stomach for the job. Instead, we calculated the distance the body lay above the light and turned back upriver.

"We'll call it in as soon as we get back," I said.

The run back upstream was depressing.

"How come we keep getting people killed, Kidd?" LuEllen asked.

"You keep asking, and I keep telling you: We don't," I said. "They get themselves killed. We're just unlucky enough to be around when it happens. Harold knew what he was doing."

"How about Sherrie?"

"I won't take the blame," I said. "Hill's a fuckin' psycho. Period. It's not us. It's them."

"I'll try to remember that," she said. And after a minute: "The money we took from City Hall – I think we're going to have to give it back."

"What?"

"When we were over at Marvel's house, she mentioned a couple of times what they could do with the money. Give some of it to the family of the kid that got shot – they've got a couple of more kids – or give some of it to Harold's family. She was talking like the money belonged to all of us."

"Huh." I'd planned to keep it.

"The point is, everybody knows our faces. And they know what we've done. Some of it, anyway. And so far you'd have a hell of a hard time proving that anybody else has done anything wrong. If we take expenses out – she'd expect that – and give them the rest and they spend it, then we've got something on them. I like Marvel, all right, but she's a politician."

"I see," I said. And I did, sour as the taste was.

A couple of miles below the Longstreet landing a sleek glass bass boat was goofing along the shoreline. One man was on the back deck; the other, on the bow. When I first saw them, I assumed they were casting. I didn't immediately look closer because a tow had rounded the bend above us, pushing a string of barges. The first priority on the river is to avoid the tows; they can't stop in time to miss anything that they're close enough to see.

We took the tow down the right side. When we cleared it, the bass boat was arrowing out from the shore on the other side, to intercept us.

"That's fuckin' Hill," LuEllen said. She put the glasses on the bass boat. "And that's St. Thomas up front. Bet they were looking for the bodies."

There was no chance of running – the Fanny was a pig, and the bass boat was carrying a big 115-horse Mariner outboard – but I pushed the throttle full forward. If we could fend them off long enough to get to the marina, they'd be limited in what they could do.

Ten seconds later they were on top of us, throwing off a fat, curling wake, the outboard's normally deep roar climbing toward a scream. Hill stood at the bow while St. Thomas sat behind the wheel, maneuvering to come beside us. Hill was shouting something, but with the two motors and the sound of the water breaking under the hulls, I couldn't make it out. I waved him off and kept drifting right, away from the bass boat.

When Hill saw that I wouldn't voluntarily let him come aboard, he shouted something back to St. Thomas, then stepped up to the edge of the bow casting-deck and crouched, one hand on the low gunwale to steady himself, ready to leap aboard the Fanny. He had a lump on his hip under his white short-sleeved shirt and when his shirt flapped in the bow wind, I could see flashes of gun-metal blue.

The Fanny had a rail all the way around and her deck was a foot higher than the low-riding bass boat's. Coming aboard could be tricky.

St. Thomas, his brow wrinkled in concentration, brought the bass boat six feet from the Fanny, then edged closer. I stepped away. He bored in again. This time, I flipped the wheel toward him, and the distance between the two hulls went from six feet to nothing. The bass boat was faster and more maneuverable, but the Fanny was bigger. If the two hulls hit, the bass boat would fold like a beer can. Anything caught between the two hulls would be crushed. St. Thomas flinched.

Hill had been tensing to jump. When I cut in, St. Thomas almost jerked the boat out from under Hill's feet. He staggered, swayed, caught himself, and screamed something either at Hill or at me, his face red with rage.

They came back in. This time they came an inch at a time. St. Thomas was watching me now, instead of the boat. If I moved the wheel, he was right with me.

Hill put his hands up to grab the rail and LuEllen was there, facing him across the rail. She'd cracked the boat's emergency kit and was pointing an emergency flare gun at Hill's chest from no more than three feet away. Hill reached back and I thought for a second that he was reaching for his pistol. LuEllen must have thought so too, because the barrel of the flare pistol drifted up until it was leveled at Hill's eyes. They stared at each other for a beat, then two, LuEllen's face as hard as a chip of flint, before St. Thomas flinched again. He took the bass boat to the left, paced us for a moment, then accelerated away, hotfooting it back toward the marina.

"Guess Hill wanted to keep his face," LuEllen said laconically, as she climbed up on top. "Wouldn't know why."

Hill was waiting on the dock when we came in. St. Thomas was up toward the top of the levee, hurriedly walking away. There were a half dozen people around, messing with boats, talking, coming and going. We nosed in, coasted, bumped, and LuEllen tied us off.

Hill walked down the dock and yelled up at me: "What the fuck you think you were doing?"

"What the hell were you doing?" I called back. "I thought you were going to sink us."

He was operating in the kind of blind rage that infects psychotics when they're countered. His hand went to his hip, but he wasn't actually far enough gone to pull the pistol with witnesses around. "I'll get you, computer man," he screamed. "I'll be looking for you."

LuEllen was watching him climb the levee when I dropped down to the lower deck. "Computer man?" she said.

"Somebody's been doing research," I said. "If they found out I do computers and suspect I'm with Marvel, then they may have put together the whole thing: the state having their books, John coming in, everything."

"Time to leave," she said.

"Soon," I said. "We're close."

Late that night we got the City Hall money out of the engine compartment, agreed that seventeen thousand dollars was about right for expenses, and took the rest of it to Marvel's friend's house in the country.

"We took expenses out," I told Marvel, handing her the package. "There's eighty-three thousand left. You can't give it back. That might jeopardize the case against Dessusdelit and St. Thomas, and there just wouldn't be any explanations."

"We've got some things we can do with it," she said. "Thank you. I mentioned to John that I thought the money should be for all of us, but he said it was yours."

John, who was lounging in an easy chair, shook his head. "It ain't right," he said. "You two are working an angle somewhere, but I can't figure what it is."

I shrugged. "You could just give us credit for a selfless act."

He looked at us for a moment, then said, "Nah."

Back on the boat I called Bobby:

Will tell John/Marvel about Harold body. Will call cops anonymously and give them IDs. Will tell John/Marvel you found body reports in data searches. Please back up if John inquires.

He came back:

OK. But need long talk soon.

He was getting nervous, thinking about friends and loyalties. I answered:

Yes. Tomorrow, day after. Soon.