The Empress File (16 page)

Chapter
13

The next morning Marvel asked if we could meet her at the farm home of a friend, out in the country, well away from the river and the prying eyes of Longstreet.

"It's safe and quicker than Greenville, and nobody will see your car," she said. "Half an hour?"

"I'll be there."

LuEllen again decided to stay with the boat, away from new faces.

"You gonna be here when I get back?" I asked.

"Of course," she said gravely. "I'm not leaving until we find some way to grease Hill and St. Thomas."

Marvel's friend's name was Matron Carter, a plain, cheerful woman with short hair and good moves. She was shooting basketballs at a netless hoop hung on the side of a swaybacked, free-standing garage when I pulled into her yard. Marvel's car was around back, next to a vacant chicken coop. A rusty forties-style power mower appeared to be permanently parked in knee-high grass under lilac bushes at the edge of the yard, and a pear tree and a half dozen aging apple trees marched in military file down the edge of an overgrown field.

"They're waiting for you inside," the woman said, dribbling the ball as she talked. She faked one way, turned the other, and popped a fifteen-foot jump shot.

"Nice shot," I said.

"Do it for a living," she answered, running down the ball. Marvel told me later that she was a gym teacher at Longstreet High School and coached the girls' basketball teams.

The house was tired but comfortable. I went through the back door, through a kitchen, and into a small living room, where Marvel and John were sprawled on a broken-down couch.

"Harold's dead," Marvel said. She stopped me in my tracks.

"You found him?"

"We found his car. At Wal-Mart," she said wearily. "And he's gone. I can feel it. The motherfuckers took him someplace and killed him."

Tears started running down her face, and John said quietly, "They go back to when they were babies. They were raised together."

"Jesus Christ," I said, running my fingers through my hair. I was gripped by the temptation to tell them the truth but instead blurted, "We need the FBI in here."

"I don't," John said sharply. "I've had some problems with those boys. And we've still got to take this town. That's the main thing."

"Maybe Harold is OK. Maybe he had to take off for some reason," I said fatuously. I wandered over to a window and looked out. Matron Carter was pumping a wrought-iron water pump and drinking from the spout as the water surged out of the ground. In the dappled sunlight in the yard she looked beautiful, not plain. "Maybe they scared him and he took off for Greenville or Helena."

"And left his car at Wal-Mart?" John asked.

Marvel, turning in John's arms, shook her head. "No. He's dead. I can feel him... gone."

There wasn't much more to say. Marvel insisted that we keep the takeover rolling.

"Matron will be the second appointee to the council if we bring this off," Marvel said. She'd be the third.

"Can she do that? If she lives out here, outside the city..."

"This is her folks' place. They're gone, dead, and nobody lives here anymore. Matron lives in town."

"OK. You can name who you want, that's your call. I'm more worried about John and your contacts at the capitol-"

"Don't worry about that. I talked to an old friend of Harold's, one of the black caucus guys. I told him Harold was missing and that it was connected to our deal. This guy is smart; he knows something's going on, and he's helping. I'll take the fucking books to the governor's man and bring back so many cops it'll look like a convention. And one way or another, on my mama's grave, we'll find Harold."

"Then we've got to set up John's part," I said. "We've got to get the bridge scam going. Get the rumors started."

"I'll start now, from here, on the phone," Marvel promised. "Two hours from now everybody in town'll know there's a rich drug dealer down here snapping up land for the bridge..."

"The more I think about it, the more this sounds like bullshit," John said. "The goddamn pin-striped suit and the car and the hair - why'n the hell would they believe some strange nigger from Memphis?"

"Same reason there are a million con men working the world and making money," I said. "Greed. You're going to offer them something for almost nothing; they'll have to show you some money, but that's it. They don't have to give it to you, just show it. They don't have to put up a cent until the bridge is coming in. By that time, the profit'll be guaranteed."

"A wonderful thing, greed," Marvel said. "Where would we be without it?"

John rubbed her head. "Fuckin' Commie," he said.

When I got back to the boat, LuEllen was slumped in a deck chair with two bottles of beer and a glass, looking glum. A crumpled newspaper lay at her feet.

"Get a beer," she called as I came- aboard.

I got one, climbed up on top, and sank into the chair beside her.

"Pretty bad?" she asked.

"Pretty bad," I said.

"Is John gonna do his act?"

"Yeah."

She squinted up at the city beyond the levee, the brick buildings, the peaks of Victorian mansions beyond. "The place looks like a museum," she said. "It's hard to believe this is all happening... Look what I found."

She handed me the newspaper, folded to an editorial. The headline said LONGSTREET, AN ISLAND OF PEACE.

"Makes you giggle, huh?" she asked sourly, tipping her bottle up.

The Longstreet rumor mill was as efficient as Marvel had said it was. She made her calls and sat back, while John drove around town, made several trips out to the supposed bridge property, and talked to an engineer about soil and perc tests. Bobby phoned again on a voice line.

"I just got a call on our phone cutout about the bridge," he said. "Archibald Ballem."

"The attorney."

"Right."

"Did he buy it?" I asked.

"Yeah, I think so. I got pissed and refused to answer questions. I wanted to know where he got his information and told him the whole thing was secret. I warned him that spreading the information might damage the prospects for construction. He tried to cool me off. I don't think he'll be calling back."

"Keep monitoring the number anyway," I said.

I called John with the news. "They'll be coming," I said. "Be ready."

John got a second call two hours later. Archibald Ballem, a local attorney, wanted to talk to him and to bring along a couple of business associates. I thought it would be Dessusdelit and maybe St. Thomas. It was St. Thomas all right, but Ballem opted for muscle instead of brains; Hill was with them.

"They all sat real close to me," John said later. "You could feel the threat. They were pushing, and they talked about it in advance."

The meeting, John said, started with the politely inadvertent racism that southerners fall into when they want something from a black: talk about basketball, break dancing, and hip-hop. St. Thomas liked it all, to hear him tell it.

After the chitchat Ballem put the question, What about the bridge? John asked, "What bridge?"

Ballem said, "We're all businessmen here and civic leaders. Mr. St. Thomas is one of our prominent city councilmen, and I'm the city attorney, and Mr. Hill is a city department head..."

That got them down to it. Permits would be no problem. Zoning could be arranged. All for the future financial progress of the city of Longstreet. "Would there be any space for more investors, Mr., ah, Johnson?"

There might be... but I'll have to talk to my friend in Memphis...

"They bought it all right," John said. He was with Marvel and Brooking Davis, and I could hear them talking in the background. "They were so hungry they were drooling on my fuckin' wing tips."

"OK. So do a little back and forth. If they don't call you, you call them to check on things. Talk about a Delaware company. They know about Delaware companies."

"I already started hinting about money. Let them know that they won't get in cheap, that the project's too big..."

"Anything about Harold?" I asked.

"No, and there's something else... let me put Marvel on."

She took the phone and said, "Something else, I can't stand it. There's a rumor that Harold went off to Memphis with Sherrie. I don't believe it for a second."

"Is she missing? Sherrie?" I was afraid the fraud was audible in my voice. If it was, she didn't hear it.

"Can't find her," Marvel said. "I was supposed to warn her against going to work, but I was with John, and shit... I forgot. Fuck me, I forgot." There was a tone of finality in her voice, with an undertone of bitter anger.

"Jesus, forgot?" And now Sherrie was dead. I wanted to shout at her but I couldn't. "There's no chance that they did go off?" I was floundering, trying to react the right way, when I didn't feel any of it. I had already reacted to the murders the moment that I saw them and this, now, was just playacting, deceiving a woman I liked.

"No!" She almost shouted it. "What do you think they are?"

"Marvel, I don't know what to tell you. I didn't see this coming."

"Neither did I." She sighed. "We should have known. We're playing with fire."

"Keep hoping," I suggested. "Maybe... I don't know... Look: Let me talk to John again."

John came back on the phone. "Yeah?"

"Listen, if something was done to Harold and the woman... This Hill guy, the guy who came to see you with Ballem, is the town muscle. He's nuts, I think - a psycho. You can take care of yourself, but there's Marvel now, and her friends. People in town must know she was tight with Harold..."

"I've got some people coming down from Memphis," John said. "Don't worry about us, and don't worry about what Duane Hill might do. If he gives us any shit, Duane'll need a new head."

John talked to Ballem again the next morning, and this time Dessusdelit sat in.

"Like a crow," John said. "She sat there with her head bobbing up and down, like she was pecking on me."

John had parked the white BMW on the street outside the lawyer's office, where everybody might have a chance to look it over. In his time as an underground activist in Memphis, he'd picked up the language of municipal development; the three of them, John said, had an intense discussion of tax increment financing. When he left, Ballem was seeking references to TI financing in the state statutes.

They were excited, he said, but something else, too.

"This Dessusdelit woman, man, she looks fucked up. I mean, she looked a little crazy. Are you sure she's all right?"

"She always seemed wrapped a little too tight, if anything," I said.

"Not now," John said. "She looked frazzled."

John went to Memphis, more for show than anything, and returned to the Holiday Inn Friday morning, as Marvel was leaving for the capital. LuEllen sat in the Coffee Klatch Cafe across from the City Hall, watching the City Hall and prowling the adjacent stores. I was on the boat alone when Dessusdelit showed up. John was right: She seemed to be coming undone and asked if I was in the mind to do a reading.

"Guess I could," I said. "LuEllen's not here, she's up in town shopping-"

"I simply would like to see what the cards say." She was on the dock, and I was on top of the cabin, looking down. She was gray-faced, haggard. In the cabin I got out the deck, shuffled the cards, and pushed them across at her. She shuffled a dozen times, pushed them back.

"Cut?"

She hesitated, nibbling her lip, and finally cut.

The cards rolled out, and as happens in most tarot readings, there was no clear, dramatic direction. What the cards said was more subtle than that. The Five of Pentacles - sometimes interpreted as a poverty card - popped up, and her sharp intake of breath indicated that she knew what it was.

"Remember that everything is relative, and the cards have a hard time dealing with relativity," I told her. "I could roll the Five of Pentacles for a Rockefeller, and it might mean that he'd be cut back to his last billion."

"It's so much different from the last time," she said in a small voice, seeming almost lost.

The last card to come up was one of the major arcana, the High Priestess. I was startled but kept my face straight and started picking the spread apart.

"There's a secret," I concluded, tapping the High Priestess. "I don't know whether you have a secret or somebody has a secret they're hiding from you. But if the secret comes out, there'll be terrible problems. You can see how that influence in the High Priestess cuts right back to the Five of Pentacles, the loss card, the poverty card."

She was becoming increasingly agitated, clutching a wadded Kleenex in her fist, her knuckles white as marble.

"Is it going to come out?"

I shrugged. "I can't see that."

"Can we do another spread?"

I shook my head. "If you do too many, the influences tend to get mixed up. If you'd like a really good reading..."

"Yes?"

"Focus on a question. You don't even have to tell me what it is. But focus, spend the day and the night thinking about it, and come back tomorrow morning. Then we'll take out the cards, and we'll see if we can do something more definitive."