The Empress File

CHAPTER 2

We were driving down the river in the long twilight of the summer solstice, a pale witches' moon hung in front of us. Every few minutes we'd go through a raft of river air, cool, damp, smelling of mud and dead carp and decaying vegetation. I watched the moon ghosting through the evening clouds as John laid it out, simply and clearly. They wanted me to destroy the town's political machine, any way I could do it, and leave it in the hands of their friends. Then I asked him another hard question, and he answered that one, too.

When he stopped talking, I cranked back the car seat and closed my eyes, half in contemplation, half in dream.

A long time ago I'd been an idealist of sorts. Somewhere along the line-Vietnam is the conventional answer, but I'm not even sure that's right anymore – the idealism scraped off. After I'd asked him the first hard question, "What do you want me to do?," I'd asked the second: "Why should I do it?" Why should I take any risks for a dead kid I never knew?

"Revenge," John said. He hadn't hesitated. He and Bobby had seen the questions coming and had rehearsed the answers. "Bobby said he was one of you – computer freaks."

"That's not enough," I said. "Good people die all the time."

"Friendship," said John, checking the second item on a mental list. "Bobby's your friend, and he needs your help. He'll do something whether you're there or not. He really doesn't know how. He could fuck himself up."

I shook my head. "I'm sorry. I can't put my ass on the line for something as thin as that. Bobby's a friend, but only on the wires. If he wanted me to do some computer code, illegal code, that'd be one thing-"

"Money," John interrupted. "Lots of it. The town is papered with corruption cash. You could probably figure out a way to grab some of it. And since nobody can talk about where they got it. there'd be no comebacks."

"Money," I said, looking out the window, maybe a little bitter. "Everybody's reason."

"To tell you the truth, it bothers me to think you'd do it just for money," he said. "Mercenaries tend to be. unreliable." He sounded as if he knew.

"I wouldn't do it just to have money, but in this country, today, money is freedom. Anybody who tells you different is bullshitting you," I said, looking over at him. "Freedom's worth chasing."

He nodded. "So you'll do it?"

"Lots of money?"

"Could be," he said.

"I'll talk about it," I said.

The uneasy half dream was shattered when we bounced across a set of railroad tracks. I opened my eyes on a dark town of unpainted shacks, huddled in a grove of dense, overbearing pin oaks. Here and there the ghostly moonlight broke through the canopy of leaves, etching web forms on the shacks, like the work of an enormous spider. We were through the place in less than a minute. If I hadn't later gone through it in daylight – REZIN, POP. 240 – I might have remembered the town as a hallucination, a dreamed remembrance of an Edgar Allan Poe story.

"Nightmare place, probably red-eyed incestuous children with crosses carved on their foreheads, creeping through the cotton with choppin' knives," John said, echoing my thoughts. He'd seen me come awake.

"Yeah." I looked back at the town, a dark hole with a ribbon of moonlighted concrete running into it. Then we were around a curve, and it was gone, just another piece of the Delta. I turned to the front and ran my tongue over my teeth. Moss had sprouted during the nap. When I couldn't dislodge it with my tongue, I leaned over the seat for a beer. I'd kill it with alcohol.

"You want one?" I asked.

"Yeah. Another Coke."

I popped the top off a Coke and a beer, handed him the Coke, and said, "So tell me about Longstreet."

Twenty thousand people lived in the town, he said. Nine thousand were white; eleven thousand were black. The city council districts had been drawn to put three whites and one black on the council.

"They fixed the districts so there'd be five thousand people in each one – one man, one vote, just like it's laid down by the law," John said. "One district covers the heart of the black side of town, five thousand people. Hardly a white among them. That district will always elect a black councilman. But when you take out those five thousand black votes, in one bloc, the whites are a majority in all the rest of the districts. There's about two thousand whites in each, and about fifteen hundred blacks."

"That's common enough," I said.

"It's still a son of a bitch," John said.

"These friends in Longstreet. are they reliable?"

"I don't know," John said carefully. "I've got solid recommendations, but I've never met them myself. Our main contact is a woman, name of Marvel. She's a Marxist, I hear. That means she's probably got her own agenda."

"I thought Marxism was out of style," I said.

John threw back his head and roared. "In the fuckin' Delta? Listen, even when Marxism was in style, you could get lynched for laughing at Groucho and Zeppo, much less believing in Karl."

We rolled into Longstreet after midnight, past a Holiday Inn, a Taco Bell, and a Dairy Queen, a row of white grain elevators, a few dark stores, and a lot of empty streets.

The Mississippi had been a presence all through the trip. We could sense it and sometimes smell it, but with the levee between the highway and the water, we couldn't see it. Longstreet, though, was built on higher ground. As we came to the center of town, to the first traffic light, we climbed above the levee, and the river opened out below. A ramshackle marina, with a few bare white bulbs flickering on an overhead grid, sat at the bottom of the river-bank. A couple of runabouts, a dozen olive drab jon boats, and an aging houseboat swung off the T-shaped pier.

"You know where we're going?" I asked.

"I've got directions," he said, turning at the light. We crossed the business district, passed a well-lit town square with an equestrian statue at its center, and bumped across another set of railroad tracks. On the other side was a convenience store that looked like a collision between a chicken coop and a billboard. A hand-painted sign on the side of the store, red block letters on white, said E-Z WAY. Three tall light poles, the kind used to illuminate tennis courts and Little League baseball fields, lit up the parking lot. Every bug between Helena and Greenville swarmed around them.

"That's where the kid bought the ice cream before he got shot," John said. Through the open doors we could see a fat white man sitting on a dinette chair. He was mopping his face with a rag. John took a left around the E-Z Way and drove another six blocks on a potholed road past a clapboard Baptist church. Then he slowed and peered out the windshield toward the passenger side.

"It's a green house with a porch and some potted flowers hanging from the eaves," he said, half to himself. We rolled another hundred feet down the street. "There it is."

The house was a concrete-block rambler with an overhanging roof, a small porch, and a picture window. Our headlights picked out a couple of pink metal lawn chairs crouched on the porch. John eased the car into a graveled parking strip. "You wait here. I'll go up and ask," he said.

He climbed out of the car, stretched, walked up to the porch, and knocked. The door opened immediately. John said a few words, nodded, and walked back to the car. I'd cracked the window. "This is it," he said. I climbed out into air that felt as if you could grab a piece, wring it out, and get water. As we walked to the door, John said quietly, "Wait'll you see her."

Marvel Atkins was Hollywood-beautiful, beautiful like you don't see walking about in the streets. Her black eyes were tilted and large as the moon, her face a perfect oval. She was five-five or five-six and moved like a dancer. She was wearing a thin olive-colored blouse of crumply cotton with epaulets, the kind fashion people think the Israeli Army might wear. She stepped back when she saw me, startled, and turned to John.

"Who is he?"

"Bobby's friend," John said. She kept backing up, looking from John to me and back to John.

"He's white," she said.

"You Commies really got it taped," John said wryly.

"I'm a social democrat," Marvel said, momentarily distracted.

"That's what I said," John answered, showing some teeth.

"Maybe we don't need you," she said. She was in her early thirties and wore round gold-rimmed glasses like John's. You hardly saw the glasses because of the eyes.

"You've been sitting here for a month. There's been nothing but talk and whining and bullshit and more bullshit," John said. "If you think it'll ever be more than that, we'll get back in the car and let you handle it. But I think you need us. You need something."

Their eyes locked as she considered him, and John watched her with the gravity of a Jesuit. After a few seconds of the deadlock a man eased out of a back room into the living room behind Marvel. He was short, thick, and looked as if he could break bricks with his face. He stepped close behind her and muttered something. She nodded.

"We'll talk," she said. "Then we'll see."

We talked until four in the morning. John stated the proposition as baldly as he'd given it to me: We'd wreck the machine and the town administration. If possible, we'd leave it permanently in the hands of Marvel and her friends.

"A pipe dream," Marvel said flatly.

"That's why Kidd is here. He knows about politics, and he knows about wrecking things. He'll do us a plan," John said.

I tried to look modest.

"I'll believe it when I see it." She deliberately looked me up and down again, not impressed, and John grinned. The thick man, whose name was Harold, watched me impassively.

"He's a technician," John said, letting the grin die. "If you called somebody to fix your telephone, you wouldn't care if the repairman was white as long as he fixed your phone."

"I'd rather he be black, even to fix the phone," Marvel said.

John said, "Right on, sister," and gave her a sarcastic black power salute.

Marvel waved him off. "OK." Then she looked at me and asked, "Why don't you say something?"

" 'Cause you're pissing me off." It came with an edge, and Marvel glanced away, embarrassed. She'd been rude to a guest, a cardinal sin anywhere in the South.

"I try to be civil," she said. "But I can't help wondering what outsiders can do."

"The town is corrupt," I said. "John says it's in the hands of a voting minority. If that's right, there may be some way to take it."

"How?"

"I don't know yet. I have to know about the place to figure that out. I have to know about the people who run it. What they're up to."

"We can tell you that, all right," Marvel said. She was looking straight at me with those incredible liquid eyes, and I thought of the Empress card in the tarot. "Anything you want to know. The question is, If you wreck the machine, who runs things afterward?"

I shrugged. "Not me."

"I've got a job and an. organization. in Memphis," John said. "I don't have any interest in moving in."

She pursed her lips. "I heard about your organization. Bunch of old lame-ass ex-Panthers, is what I hear."

"Maybe our asses are lame, but they're not getting kicked by a bunch of Delta peckerwoods," John snarled. I was thinking uh-oh. They were knocking sparks off each other, in the angry, confrontational way that tends to lead directly to the bedroom. Harold felt it, too, and was looking back and forth between them.

"How about this?" Marvel suggested, turning to me. "You figure something out. A plan. If we don't like it, we can get out anytime."

John looked at me, and I shook my head. "We can't have key people bail out at a critical moment. That could kill us."

"How do we handle it?" he asked.

"We lay out a proposal," I said, turning to Marvel. "If you like it, you're in. If you don't, we go home. But you tell us up front."

She thought about it for a moment, then said, "I've got to talk with Harold." She led the thick man into a back room and shut the door.

"The problem with Commies is double crosses are built into their system," John said when the door had closed behind them. He was leaning back in his chair, his arms crossed over his chest. "It's all hobby politics. They never have to deal with anything real. They just fuck with each other. We got to think about that."

"Maybe you should hold down the Commie bullshit," I said. "At least until we decide something. And stop talking to her tits, for Christ's sake."

"Was I?"

"Yeah, you were."

Marvel and her friend spent ten minutes in the back. When they came out, she plopped down on a couch, and the thick man moved behind her. They both looked us over. "We're in for now," she said. "What do you want to know?"

I opened the portable and said, "Notes."

"It's still not easy for black folks to get decent city jobs," Marvel said, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees. I'd asked where she got her inside information on the machine. "There are a few black cops and clerks, but most of the blacks who work for the city have menial jobs. Nobody pays any attention to them; it's a hangover from segregation, when a nigger was less than nothing. You wouldn't hide anything from a nigger cleaning lady any more than you'd hide it from her mop. So there are still a lot of invisible people around – cleaning ladies, janitors, garbagemen. Some of them are pretty smart. And we talk. There's not much that gets past us."

There were four men and a woman on the Longstreet City Council. The woman, Chenille Dessusdelit, was mayor and was also the city's chief administrative officer. She had an insatiable hunger for money, Marvel said. And she was intensely superstitious.

"Her mama and her husband died about six weeks apart, and that's when she really got strange," Harold said. "She was always superstitious, but after that it was stars and crystals and talking to the dead. There used to be a Gypsy fortune-teller in town, an astrologer. Chenille'd see her every week. Then the Gypsy died, too. Come to think of it, a lot of people die around Chenille."

"What kind of name is that? Chenille whatever it is?" I asked.

"Deh-soos-da-leet," Marvel said, and she spelled it. "It's old French. The French go way back here in the Delta, back even before the English."

"All right."

Of the other four council members, one was black: the Reverend Luther Dodge. Besides presiding over a Baptist church, he ran a city recreation center on the black side of town. He had demanded a special investigation of Darrell Clark's killing but agreed that it should be done by local officers, one black, one white.

"That guaranteed that the cop'd get off," Marvel said. "The local boys wouldn't cut on one of their own." When the final report came out, whitewashing the shooter, Dodge had acquiesced to it.

"If we take down the town, is Dodge a potential front man for whatever's left?" I asked, taking it down on the portable.

"Not for me," Marvel said. "He's as bad as any of them. He's in on the city council deals, and he clips the receipts at the recreation center. We figure he takes a hundred dollars out of the swimming pool receipts on a hot summer day. And we have a lot of hot summer days."

"He has an eye for the girls," Harold said suddenly. It was something of a non sequitur, but he carefully didn't look at Marvel.

"What Harold's saying is, Dodge has been trying to get into my pants since I was twelve," Marvel said.

"So he's human, big deal," John said, not quite under his breath.

Marvel suppressed a grin and started to say something, but I broke in: "We take him, too?"

"Yeah. Take him."

The other three city councilmen were white.

Arnie St. Thomas, Marvel said, was a loan shark – and he used the city's money in his operation. Another, Carl Rebeck, was an insurance agent. He didn't do much, just voted the way he was told, and collected a piece of pie. "He's not smart. I doubt that he even knows that what he's doing is illegal. To him, it's just business. The councilman does favors for people, and they pay him for it."

"Who's the fifth guy?" I asked, typing.

"Lucius Bell. He's a cutie pie," Marvel said with a genuine smile. "He's a farmer. He's honest, I think, 'cept for one thing."

"What's that?"

"Our bridge fell down a few years back. Got hit by a runaway barge. To make a long story short, it never got replaced. Bell's a farmer, mostly on the other side of the river. He came over here and got himself elected to the council for no other reason than to get the bridge back. Everybody knows it; hell, everybody agrees with him."

"But he's not a big mover with the machine?"

"No. That's the mayor."

The mayor, with the council's advice, oversaw nine city departments. Every one of them was corrupt. Even animal control.

"The dogcatcher is a separate department?" John raised an eyebrow.

"Gotta lot of mean dogs around here," Harold drawled. He said dawgs, like a country boy.

"Duane Hill – he's animal control – is the machine's muscle," Marvel said simply.

"Like when?"

"Like we had some young lawyers go through here, from the rural legal services. They looked like they might set up shop. Duane got a bunch of his lowlife friends to hassle them. Every time those boys went out, somebody wanted to fight. The cops were always saying they couldn't do anything, it was just some boys gettin' drunk. That was bullshit. Duane himself beat up one of them. With a pool cue. Hurt him so bad the boy had to go to Memphis to get his teeth fixed. Eventually they all went away, and they never came back."

"Nice guy."

"Duane's the meanest man on the Mississippi River, I believe," Harold said, with what sounded almost like a note of rueful pride, "He gets a piece of the city council's take, of course, but he also sells dog blood on the side. You know, to veterinary hospitals. He has customers all over the mid-South. The way he gets the blood, he sticks a big needle into the dog's heart and lets it pump out. The more it hurts the dog, the better it is, because the heart beats harder. They say some nights, down at that end of town, you can hear dogs howling for hours."

"Do you have a contact out there?" I asked Marvel.

"I've got somebody I can work on," she said.

"Do it. Now, you mentioned the city attorney a while ago. How does he fit in?"

"He's the fixer. and maybe, with Chenille, the brains behind everything," Marvel said. "He drinks too much, and he's a bad man. He doesn't like black people, or anybody else, much. He's got two kids – they're both gone now, up North working – and the word is, he doesn't even like them. I'd say he's right at the heart of the action."

"Hold that thought," I said. "Who's the center of the machine? That's what we need."

Harold and Marvel looked at each other, and Marvel pursed her lips, then turned back to me. "I'd say the center of the machine is Dessusdelit, the mayor; Archie Ballem, the city attorney; Arnie St. Thomas, the councilman; and Duane Hill, the dogcatcher. Dodge and Rebeck have their own constituencies, but they're mostly along for the ride. They don't make any decisions. And there are a lot of smaller fish. The city clerk helps Dessusdelit run things, and then there are the department heads, individual cops, and so on."

"Does the machine run everything in town? Is there anybody high up we can talk to?"

Marvel was already shaking her head. "Not everybody is on the take, but everybody important is getting something, somewhere. You couldn't make a move here without the machine finding out."

"So it's Dessusdelit and Ballem and St. Thomas and Hill?"

"Yes."

"Power or money? Are they getting rich?"

"Sure," Harold said. "They try not to let it show too often, but every once in a while you see it. With Chenille and Ballem, anyway; Hill, you don't see it so much. But I'd bet every one of them is a multimillionaire, the money they've taken out of this town."

I made a note. I made several notes.

The dog blood sales were only the most bizarre item on a laundry list of corrupt deals and straight-out rip-offs. Crooked public works employees sold tires, gasoline, car parts, even grass seed and fertilizer. The council routinely got kickbacks on city purchases. There was a regular business in false receipts, showing larger-than-actual city purchases of expendables.

The city got suspiciously low rates of interest from the banks where they kept city cash; at the same time it paid suspiciously high interest rates on general obligation bonds issued to build a new sewer system.

As she listed the payoffs, kickbacks, fraud, and outright thefts, Marvel paced the living room, excited. Finally she stopped, turned into the kitchen, and we could hear her banging through the cupboards. A minute later she stuck her head into the living room. "Who wants ice cream?" she asked.

Five minutes later Harold sat behind a bowl of butter brickie ice cream and detailed how you could buy the municipal judge, how the cops took payoffs from the local bars, and how the chief wrote bid specs on new police cars to favor a particular car dealer. The cops stole from the parking meters, took bribes from drunk drivers, and accepted kickbacks from bail bondsmen for steering clients after arrests.

"The fire department?" I prompted.

"Now that's different," said Harold. "They're separate from everything else, not on the take anywhere. Except, like, they handle the dope traffic in town."

"What?"

"Yeah. Ain't that weird? All the cocaine that comes through Longstreet, all the good stuff, comes through fire. They split up the profit right there in the station house."

"Jesus Christ," said John. "I didn't even know they had that shit out here."

"I don't know how it got started," Harold said, "but that's what they do. They're good firemen, though."

"Yeah," said Marvel. "For one thing, they're awake all the time."

"Tell me one really big thing. Something that's going on right now," I said.

Marvel had picked up a pencil, a yellow one, and pressed the eraser against her lips. John was staring at her fixedly, as if he were about to jump on her, and Harold kept glancing at John.

"The sewers," Harold prompted after a moment.

"Yeah." Marvel rubbed her forehead, thinking, trying to get a grip on a complicated subject. "Two years ago the federal government took the city to court for polluting the river. Sometimes our sewage was a little too raw. So we had to get new sewers and a new sewage plant.

"The city got some grants and passed special obligation bonds, got bids, and hired a New Orleans contractor. The feds were watching it, so the money was all accounted for. Just by accident, we found out that the contractor was buying his sewer pipe from a pipe broker registered in Delaware. Because of the way Delaware registers its corporations, we couldn't find out who really owned the pipe broker. We did find out that the broker was buying the pipe from a regular supplier in Louisville, and the supplier shipped the pipe down here by rail. The broker doesn't seem to do anything except jack up the price between here and Louisville."

"How much?"

"Ten percent. On a contract worth several million bucks. For doing nothing."

"The council?" I asked.

"Sure. We never would have found out, except the cleaning lady at the city attorney's office saw a letter to the contractor from the pipe broker. It was signed by Archie Ballem, the city attorney. We don't know the details, but we know the council is in there; the council's the pipe broker. The council must be taking down a hundred thousand a year, just on the pipe."

I made a note to call Bobby about Delaware and scratched my head.

"What?" asked Marvel.

"These guys are crooks, but they're also running a pretty complicated business. There're dozens of people on the payroll. So they must keep books. They must track what's going where and who gets how much."

"I don't know," Marvel said doubtfully, looking at Harold. He shook his head. "We never considered that possibility."

"Consider it now. Have your people check around."

"OK." We all looked at one another for a moment; then Marvel asked, "Can you do it? Dump them?"

"I don't know," I said after a moment. "We need something spectacular, a crime. A big one. This institutional corruption. even if we could get somebody to listen to us, somebody who could do something about it, we'd probably get a slow, long-term, low-priority investigation. It might go on for months or even years."

"We had one, a few years ago, before Dessusdelit was mayor. It petered out," Harold said.

"That's what I'm talking about," I said. "Politics tangles up everything. We need a Watergate. We need a smoking gun, something dramatic. Something that'll piss people off, that can't be ignored. Once we get that, we can throw all the other stuff in. Then it'll count. But first we need the smoking gun."

Marvel nodded. "Harold and I have been thinking ever since Bobby called. You don't have to dump the police, or the fire, or public works, or the dogcatcher. You don't have to get rid of all the bad people. Just get us the council. Once we're in, we'll take care of the rest."

We talked for a while longer, but we'd covered the heart of it. I shut down the portable and leaned back in the easy chair.

"It'll take a while to figure this out," I said.

"How long?" asked Marvel.

"A month. I'll need more information. I have to research state law, for one thing. How do you remove a city council? What are the technicalities? What contacts do we have at the state level, who might help? Do we have any influence with the feds? The IRS? I'll be calling you. For anything else – any documents you find, that sort of thing – get them to John. He can be the liaison."

"I can do that." John nodded.

"Can you get to a fax?" I asked.

"Sure. At the legal services-"

"OK. I've got a fax board on one of my PCs. You can pick stuff up from Marvel and ship it to me or to Bobby, depending on what we need-"

"I do have something else to say," Marvel interrupted. We all looked at her. "Whatever you do. I mean, I know we're dealing with an extreme situation, but there has to be an underlying ethical base to our action. OK? The ends won't justify the means."

We all continued to look at her, and finally John slipped a hand inside his shirt and scratched his chest. "Uh, sure," he said.

"Stars are fading," I said as we pulled away from Marvel's house. "It's getting light. You want me to drive?"

"You see that woman?" John asked, ignoring the offer.

"Marvel?"

"She's something else," John said, and I thought again of the Empress, serving butter brickie ice cream.

"She knows where the bodies are buried," I agreed.

"Ethics." John laughed. "Kiss my ass."

A cop car was parked at the E-Z Way. Two cops were standing over a guy in a T-shirt, who was talking up at them from the blacktop. John pulled in, down at the end, away from the action.

"I'll get it," I said. We needed caffeine for the drive back to Memphis, and the E-Z Way would be the last chance. I hopped out of the car and walked to the door. The cops were fifteen feet farther on, big guys in dark blue uniforms. One of them was dangling a nasty leather-wrapped sap on a key chain. The guy on the ground had brilliant white teeth. He was trying to smile, to placate them, and there was blood on his teeth. He was young, in his late teens or early twenties, with dirty blond hair and a beat-up face. I went inside, got the Coke, and paid the fat counterman. "What happened out there?"

"Danny Oakes, running his mouth again. Boy'll never learn," the fat man said.

"Sounds like a bad town to run your mouth in," I said. I meant it as a wisecrack, but he took it seriously.

"It surely is," he said, nodding solemnly.

At the door I put a quarter in an honor box and took a copy of the Longstreet daily. The headline said something about a hearing on a new bridge for the city. Outside, the cops were putting the blond in the backseat of the squad car.

"What'd he do?" John asked. The cop car's light bar was still bouncing red flashes off the E-Z Way's windows.

"Ran his mouth," I said. John nodded. The Delta.

We rolled along for a while, quietly. I was thinking about the blond kid and white teeth slick with blood and spit when John blurted, "You think she's fuckin' Harold?"

"I don't think so," I said when I caught up. "They didn't. vibrate that way. Maybe a long time ago."

"That's what I think," he said.

"This won't be a problem, will it?" I asked.

John said, "I fear I'm in love." He said it so formally that I didn't laugh.

"Should I. chuckle?" I asked.

"I don't think so," he said, and we drove out of town toward Memphis.