The Empress File

CHAPTER 19

The afternoon was getting on.

I'd left New Orleans the day before, heading north. The winter and spring had been dry, and both days were hot and hazy. From the highway you could see long trails of gravel dust kicked up behind the plantation pickups as they rolled along the good earth to the west.

The first day I went only as far as Vicksburg, with the excuse that I'd never inspected the battlegrounds as thoroughly as they deserved. And I like Vicksburg; back in '80 I rode down the river on a pontoon boat and camped on a Louisiana island in the Vicksburg harbor. I was sitting there, eating freeze-dried beef Stroganoff, when a dozen wild turkeys rambled by, beautiful birds that looked to me as large and foreign as ostriches.

After the last night in Longstreet I woke up with LuEllen beside the hospital bed. Consciousness came slowly. I didn't hurt anywhere, but I'd been pumped full of drugs. When I did come up, we were alone.

"Can you hear me?" she asked.

I could hear her, but she seemed to be several miles away. And I wasn't much interested anyway.

"Water," I mumbled.

"Fuck water," she said, her voice as harsh as the light that was breaking through my eyelids. "Listen to me. We drove up last night, just to get some ribs. We left the car by the waterfront and wandered down some alleys, looking for a rib joint in a basement. We got lost, and we got mugged. You tried to fight three guys. White guys. Long hair. One of them broke his glasses. You got that? I ran."

"Water."

"Fuck water, Kidd. Listen to what I'm telling you."

The Memphis cops came by but, after hearing my story, decided there wasn't much to go on. They were apologetic, but I told them I figured I'd screwed up, it wasn't their fault. They said no, no, people ought to be able to walk in the streets, but I could see they agreed with my assessment. The dumb Yankee fucked up.

I stayed in the hospital for two weeks. When I got out, LuEllen drove me south to New Orleans. It was a painful trip. When we arrived, I was generally confined to my apartment for the best part of a month. An invalid, I was, afraid to laugh or sneeze or cough or sit up too quickly, afraid of the tearing pain in my chest and sides.

Hill had done a good job on me: eight broken or cracked ribs and a punctured lung, bruised kidneys, broken arm, massive bruising down my arms and legs, broken nose, cracked cheekbone, a concussion. I'd never gone back to Longstreet. John had come to see me at the hospital, and Marvel.

"We've got the town," Marvel said. "It's ours. They'll never get it back."

There wasn't much more to say.

Bobby called when I got a laptop set up, and we went back and forth for quite a while. Mostly about loyalties.

It worked.

Barely.

Good enough. Thanx.

Most of a year had passed since then. I was more or less back to normal, returning to St. Paul in time for the Minnesota fishing opener. LuEllen, last I heard, was in Singapore.

LuEllen had picked up St. Thomas's new gun, left the old one beside him, turned out the lights, and locked the animal control building. Then she drove me straight out of Longstreet to Memphis.

"Just praying you'd stay alive," she said. "I kept asking, 'You OK, Kidd?' and you kept saying, 'Jes fine,' and I figured you were dying."

At the hospital she told them the rib story.

" 'Crank,' one of the docs said. 'He must have run into a pack of speed freaks.' That's what they told me," LuEllen said.

When they took me away to the operating room, she drove back to Longstreet as fast as she could, then ran through the night to animal control. Everything was as she had left it. She climbed the levee, walked down to the boat, set it loose, and took it up to the marina. Then it was back in the car, and Memphis again.

"I waited until you woke up and gave you the story. Then I took the car back, paid, got on the boat, and brought it up to Memphis. I got here at five o'clock in the afternoon," she said. "No sweat."

No sweat. By the time she arrived in Memphis with the boat, she'd been up for a brutal thirty hours.

I left Vicksburg in the early afternoon. North of Greenville, I was on remote control, flying through the flat bean and cotton fields with the window down, through the stink of anhydrous ammonia and rotted cow manure, up the river, the sun burning my left arm and the sound of gravel banging up under the fenders.

The ice cream social was scheduled to start at six o'clock. It would be something of a political event, Bobby said, when he called on the wire to relay the invitation, part of Marvel's campaign to get Longstreet's blacks and whites talking to each other.

I rolled into town a few minutes early and took a turn past the marina. From the levee you could see the new bridge going up. The pilings were already in, and part of the superstructure. A couple of work barges were tethered below the pilings, with warning blinkers already operating on the river-side corners. If John had actually bought the land we'd used in our Brooklyn Bridge scam, he'd have lost his shirt. The bridge was going in at the opposite end of town.

When I got to Chickamauga Park, a swarm of kids covered the slides, the swings, the teeter-totters. Ladies in pastel dresses scooped ice cream out of cardboard buckets and cut cakes out of aluminum baking pans. Marvel was directing traffic at the kitchen end of things: more ice cream there, we're running out of cake, like that. She didn't notice me. I got in line at the ice cream tables, paid a dollar for an adult ticket, got a scoop of Dutch chocolate and a healthy chunk of carrot cake, and went and sat on the rim of a tractor tire being used as a sandbox.

Marvel was as beautiful as ever, and then John showed up, no longer the phlegmatic radical I'd met in Memphis. He was laughing, fooling with her. In love.

A few minutes later, while I was waiting to catch Marvel's eye, another body settled in next to me.

"Mr. Kidd," Bell said. He was wearing his seersucker jacket and had a paper plate full of ice cream and cake, just like mine, and a red plastic spoon. "I thought it was you. You've changed your dress."

"Just passing through," I said easily enough. I was wearing a blue work shirt and jeans and was clean-shaven again. The Gauguin image died on the operating table in Memphis. "Closed the place in New Orleans. I'm heading back to Minnesota for the fishing opener."

"Lot of excitement down here 'bout the time you left," Bell said, taking a cut of the ice cream.

"Yeah. I heard Miz Dessusdelit killed herself."

"She wasn't the only one. Had a murder-suicide out at the animal control. Grisly thing; the whole town was in an uproar," he said, shaking his head.

"Yeah?" I didn't want to ask because I'd already heard enough about it. "What happened?"

"Don't know exactly. But it looks like Arnie St. Thomas forced Duane Hill. you remember Duane, the guy you fought in the parking lot? – he forced old Duane into the vacuum box they used to kill dogs and pushed the button on him. Duane died scratching at the Plexiglas doors, trying to get out."

"Goddamn," I said.

"It was ugly," Bell said, licking the spoon. "He could just barely get a grip on the edge of the Plexiglas doors, and he broke off all his fingernails trying to pull them open. Blood all over the place in there. There was a lawn chair set up in front of the doors. We think old Arnie sat there and watched him try to scratch his way out."

"Jesus."

"He had very little to do with it, I'm afraid," Bell said.

I'd never asked LuEllen about the death of Duane Hill, and I never would. If she wanted to tell me about it someday, I'd listen.

Bell was still talking. "After Duane died, Arnie must have killed himself. Took us all day to figure out what happened. We thought at first that somebody else might have been involved. Then the police started getting photographs. Somebody took some pictures of Duane and Arnie killing these two black people, man and a woman, putting their bodies in the river. One of them was Hill's girlfriend. The other one, the man, was a guy around town here. We think he maybe was bumping the girl, and Hill found out."

"So he killed them? Hill did?"

"No doubt about it," Bell said. "We had the photographs, and when the state crime lab checked Arnie's gun, they found it was the same one that was used to kill the black woman. Test bullets matched the ones they took out of her body, and Arnie had powder traces on his hands and face, like you get from firing a gun. And a couple of boys who worked out there said, 'Yeah, it looked like a gun Arnie sometimes shot out there.

"Hill was nuts," I said. "I kept telling people that. I don't know about St. Thomas."

"You were right about Duane, though I didn't see it at the time," Bell admitted. "All the river towns have a Duane Hill somewhere. I knew he was rough, but I didn't know he was insane. Not until they did the autopsy on the black fella."

"Hmmm?"

"They couldn't figure out what killed him at first. After Hill was killed in the vacuum box, the pathologist down at Greenville suddenly had an idea what it might have been. They did some tests, and sure enough, it seems like the black fella had been killed in a vacuum box. Just like a big old German shepherd."

"I love the South," I said, finishing the ice cream on my plate. "Your ways are so quaint."

"Well, I just thought you might like to know how it came out, you having left so soon after, and all."

"It is interesting, in a sort of distant way. I mean, not being from here, and all," I said. Time to change the subject. "Nice bridge you've got there," I said.

The bridge's superstructure was painted with a reddish anti-corrosion paint. You could see the top of it over the park trees, glowing in the setting sun.

"It's the mayor's doing, and it's gonna save my financial butt," Bell said. He looked across the grass at Marvel, standing behind the table with a scoop in her hand. "The empress of ice cream."

"I saw her picture on Time magazine when she got it," I said. "She's a pretty woman. The Red Marvel, they called her."

"Time magazine. We couldn't believe it. The only American town with a Communist mayor."

"She says she's not."

"Yes, yes, she says she's a social democrat. Nobody believes it. Not down here. 'Course, she's got reelection locked up, since she brought in the bridge, and the way the council went and gerrymandered the new election districts. But I don't care, as long as the bridge comes along."

"Time says the state legislators were stumbling over themselves, approving the funding."

"They had a remarkable change of attitude," Bell said dryly. Then he laughed. "Two weeks after we elect her mayor, with the town in an uproar, she drives into the capital, meets with the governor and the old redneck who's the speaker of the house, and they all get their picture taken on the capitol steps, shaking hands on the deal. That stopped a little traffic, I'll tell you."

"It'll be a pretty bridge," I said. "There are lots of pretty bridges over the Mississippi. I'm happy to see you keeping it up. How about you? For reelection?"

"No. I'm gone," he said, shaking his head. "I never did like this peckerwood town anyway. I moved back across the river, where I belong. Besides, it took the folks about fifteen minutes to figure out what I should have done that night: that I should have walked out and prevented a quorum. They figure I made a deal with Marvel."

"Did you?"

He squinted down at me with a small grin. "Yep."

I nearly choked on my last bite of cake, laughing, and Bell stood up and brushed off the seat of his pants. Then he dug into a pocket and took out a computer key. The key, if anyone had bothered to check, would fit the front panel of my North-gate IBM clone. I'd had it in my pocket the night I went into animal control.

"You know what this is?" he asked.

"I don't believe so," I said, taking it from him. "Looks like what, a key to a Coke machine?"

"Maybe," he said, taking it back. "The police found it under St. Thomas, out at animal control, when they picked him up off the floor, dead. It didn't match up with anything of his."

I tried to look puzzled. "Why would I know what it is?"

He shrugged. "It's just kind of a mystery. I've been walking around for a year, asking a lot of people. Nobody recognizes it."

"Me either," I said.

"And it's about time to bury the past," he said. He pitched the key toward a fifty-five-gallon oil drum being used as a trash can. He was no basketball player, and the key bounced off the side, into the sand.

"Never be in the NBA," he said, echoing my thought. "Say hello to Miz LuEllen for me? If you see her?"

"Sure."

He wandered away. I watched him cross the park, speak to Marvel and then to John, then drift over toward the City Hall. He stopped at the corner, looking down toward the river. From there he should be able to see the bridge just fine.

I got seconds on ice cream, served by Marvel herself.

"Tonight, about ten o'clock, at my place?" she said.

"Sure."

I finished the ice cream, watching kids on the slides and the swings, and then strolled down to the river to watch the light die on the bridge. I took a sketch pad with me and got a fair view of the thing, but I doubt I'll ever do a painting. The angles are all wrong.

John was at Marvel's.

"June wedding, up in Memphis," Marvel said. "You're invited. And LuEllen. Bobby's set for best man. On a computer."

"You're looking pretty fuckin' smug," I said to John.

"What can I tell you?" he said. "I'm old, bald, and dumb, and she said she'll marry me."

"Let's not talk about old," I said. "You've got about three weeks on me. Let's talk about somebody else being old."

Marvel said she had been disappointed by the ice cream social. Ninety percent of the kids had been black, she said. They had to do better with the whites.

"We'll do better," John said. "It'll take a while. Maybe we should have another social in the summer."

"Maybe," she said. "I sure do like ice cream."

"How'd you figure the bridge out?" I asked her.

She shook her head and turned away.

"He's got a right," John said softly. "Wasn't no white boys beat him up in Memphis. You know that."

She looked at me, and I shrugged.

"Tell him," John said.

"I bought it," Marvel said. "With the money you took out of the City Hall."

"Bought it?"

"Ain't it wonderful?" John asked.

"I did what had to be done," Marvel said. "I called up my man at the capital, told him in one minute what was happening – how close we were to taking the town – and then I asked if seventy-five thousand dollars in untraceable cash would buy me the bridge. He said if I got it to the right three or four legislators, it'd buy me a bridge and two ferryboats if I wanted them. I said the bridge would be enough, but I had to have a commitment quick. He got a phone number from me, for Bell's office. Then I went and sat there, chewing my nails, and fifteen minutes later, with Bell getting pissed, the phone rings, and the speaker of the house tells Bell he might be able to work some kind of deal on a bridge. Said I 'was a pretty convincing gal,' is what he said."

"And Bell went out and voted against your ticket, but you had the votes," I said.

"That's right."

I looked at John and remembered that he'd said something about Commies and hobby politics. "Doesn't sound like hobby politics to me," I said.

"Woman learns quick," he said.

"What about Darrell Clark and his family? Did you reopen the case?"

"No, no, we didn't," Marvel said, her eyes shifting away from mine. "We were having control problems. We didn't want there to be any more uproar than there already was. Not until we got the election districts redrawn."

"How about now?"

"Well, it's just kind of. awkward," she said.

"Not good politics," I said, "to reopen the case."

"That's right. And Darrell's gone. can't get him back. And there's no money left for the family. That all went." She gestured in the general direction of the state capital.

As I was leaving, I asked, "Was it worth it?"

"Yes," she said, looking straight into my eyes. "Harold would have died for this. He would have told you so himself. And he did. But we got what he wanted."

"If you're satisfied."

"I am, but that doesn't mean I'm not sad. Harold's murder damn near killed me. And there are loose ends all over the place. Archie Ballem is oozing around like a slug. He's got trouble with the IRS, but he's still kicking, and he hates me. And we can't pry Mary Wells out of the city clerk's office. Not yet, anyway, because of civil service. Carl Rebeck got immunity to testify against the machine and now thinks he can run on a clean house ticket – and he's already going around calling me a Commie nigger. But for now I'm satisfied. Satisfied and sad."

"All right," I said. "Maybe that's the best you can hope for."

On the way out of town I stopped at Chicka-mauga Park, scuffed around the trash can until I found the computer key, and pocketed it. Then I drove on to the E-Z Way and bought a couple of Diet Cokes. I'd need the caffeine for the run into Memphis.

It was still hot when I got to the store, and a billion bugs were diving around the pole lights. The fat guy sat behind the counter, mopping his face with a rag that once was a T-shirt; you could still see the yellow deodorant stains in the armpits.

"Hot," the counterman said, in a sort of neutral way. He was ready to agree with a different opinion if I had one. It was that kind of town.

"Yeah." I put a dollar and a quarter on the counter. He slid it into the palm of his hand and poked at the cash register. He was wearing a plastic pin that said ELVIS, and under that, in smaller letters, NIGHT ASSISTANT MANAGER.

He gave me a nickel back. As I was going out the door, I thought he said something to me and half turned. He was looking out the open window at the pole lights, with a dreamy look in his little pig eyes.

"Pretty fliers," he crooned. His mouth was half open, his heavy pink lips glistening in the overhead lights. "Pretty, pretty fliers.

LuEllen.

She hung around for a month or so in New Orleans, while I was recovering. One morning at breakfast she said, "Do you love me?"

I said, "Yes."

"I don't know if I can handle that," she said.

"I don't know what to tell you," I said.

"I'm going away for a while."

"Like Charade, or whatever her name was," I said.

"Chaminade," she said absently. "But not like her. 'Cause I'll be back."

"For sure?"

"Yeah." She has dark eyes like great northern lakes. "For sure."