The Empress File (7 page)

The St. Croix enters the Mississippi below St. Paul, at river mile 811.5. From there it was six days to Memphis. One of the days was a hot, unpleasant transit of the Chain-of-Rocks Canal around St. Louis. We were wedged between two river tows, bathed in the fumes of their oversize diesels.

The other five days were as good as days get. The sun was shining from clear pale dawns to rose madder dusks. I painted or tinkered with a little junk shop laser while LuEllen ran the boat, or I ran the boat while LuEllen read or sunbathed. LuEllen would peel off her bathing suit in the most provocative possible manner, warn me to mind my own business, and then roll around nude on the white foam sunbathing pad. Her browning body would relax and open and build a shiny patina of perspiration under the brilliant river sun. I'd keep one eye on the water as we chugged along, another on LuEllen. When I couldn't stand it, I'd drop the anchor and jump in with her. We went along that way until the bad day at Chain-of-Rocks Canal and picked up again on the other side.

Fifty or sixty river miles south of St. Louis, beautiful white sand beaches stretch along the Illinois side of the Mississippi. They are cut off from land access by the marshes along levees and so are virtually untouched by humans. We stopped at a bar on the fifth afternoon, and LuEllen jogged naked along the water's edge, a small woman with a gymnast's body running in a shimmer of heat and sand. She stopped here to look at a piece of driftwood, there to examine the desiccated remnants of a fish or animal that had washed up on the beach.

On her way back to the Fanny, a river tow rounded the bend below us. Rather than duck through the screening willows, LuEllen ran gaily along the edge of the water. The boatmen stood transfixed along the edge of their cabin and the points of the barges as the apparition jogged by in all her glory. As they passed, the tow let out a long, appreciative moan on the whistle, and LuEllen threw back her head and laughed.

And we did business.

I had two computers on the boat. One was a big top-of-the-line 486 with enough hard-disk space to store the complete denials of Richard M. Nixon. That machine ran off a portable generator. I also carried a laptop with built-in hard-disk and telephone modem. Every day, at some point, we'd pass a town where we could walk over the levee and call Bobby for another data dump. In the evenings we'd sift through the new stuff scrolling up the screen.

On the sixth day, late in the afternoon, we motored into Memphis and tied up at the docks below the city front. As I paid the slip rental, John Smith walked down the levee wall.

He politely checked out LuEllen - most of her was visible under a ridiculously small two-piece bathing suit - and said, "Ooo."

"How's Marvel?" I asked. He grinned sheepishly, and I introduced LuEllen.

"I got us rooms in a hotel just over the levee," he said. "Marvel called an hour ago and said she and Harold would be here" - he looked at his watch - "just about now."

"Fine," I said. I glanced at LuEllen. "Why don't you get some clothes on? We'll go up and introduce you to the others."

While we waited for her to change, John said, "Byron Lund came down to see me."

I nodded. Lund was my Chicago dealer. "He said he would, but I haven't heard from him. Is he interested?"

"He's talking about a fall show. He took a bunch of stuff with him..." A shyness crept over his face.

"Hey. Congratulations."

"Yeah. You know, I wanted to tell you..." He looked as though he were going to dig his toe into the deck. "You know, thanks, motherfucker."

LuEllen and I were sitting on the hotel bed, and John was in a side chair, when Marvel and Harold arrived. John let them in.

"Whoa," LuEllen muttered. Marvel was wearing a V neck T-shirt and pleated black slacks. The whole outfit probably cost twenty dollars. On her it looked like a thousand-dollar Rodeo Drive production. She was carrying a white paper bag.

"Isn't she-" I started.

"She sure is," LuEllen said under her breath.

Harold was right behind Marvel, uncomfortable in a brown suit, white shirt, and brown-striped polyester tie. He looked like a magazine salesman assigned to the proletariat.

"Marvel, Harold," John said. "You know Kidd. That's LuEllen on the bed."

"LuEllen what?" Marvel asked, looking her over.

"Uh, just LuEllen," John said.

Marvel nodded. "All right," she said, and turned to me. "Did you figure something out?"

I'd told them bits and pieces on the telephone but saved the overall proposal for the Memphis meeting. If they turned me down, I'd take the Fanny to New Orleans with no regrets. Because whether or not they wanted the whole thing, they were going to get at least part of it...

"I think we can take them," I said.

Marvel walked over to the countertop that held the sink and dumped the bag. A two-quart carton of strawberry ice cream tumbled out with a box of plastic spoons. She picked up one of the half dozen hotel water glasses that were stacked on the counter, pulled off its cellophane wrapper, and opened the ice cream.

"How we gonna do it?" asked Marvel as she dished the strawberry into the first of the glasses.

"With superstition," I said. "Superstition, an old-time con game, and a little help from the governor."

We talked for two hours. When we were done, Marvel shook her head. "That's the most cynical thing I ever heard," she said. She got up and took a turn around the room. "Do something like that... how do you square it with any kind of ethical position?"

Harold was smiling in a nasty sort of way. "Fuck ethics," he said. "I like it."

Marvel looked at him in surprise, then took another turn around the room before she finally nodded.

"All right. I guess we're in. When do you start?"

I glanced at LuEllen and told them the first lie.

Chapter
5

We'd be in Memphis for a couple of days, getting some equipment and taking care of last-minute personal business, I said. Marvel suggested that we eat dinner together that night, but LuEllen vetoed the idea.

"We can't be seen with you," she said. "Even this meeting is risky. We're talking about felonies. If there's ever a trial, I don't want to be tied to you guys by a waitress or a bellhop or a maitre d' or anybody else."

"That's kind of pessimistic," Marvel said.

"I'm a pro," LuEllen answered. "I've never been arrested on the job because I try to think of everything in advance. If they ever do get me, I want them to have as little as possible."

The decision to attack the town had been a mood elevator. LuEllen's comments sobered them up, and by six o'clock they were gone. The minute they were out the door, LuEllen made a call.

Five minutes later we were standing on a curb along the riverfront.

"We're running late," I said. "If they don't show soon..."

"They will. These guys are good."

"Better be," I said. I was getting cranked and turned away. Below us a string of barges was pushing upriver, driven by a tow called the Elvis Doherty. The pilot sat in his glass cage, smoking a pipe, reading what looked like one of those fat beach novels that come out every June. At the tow's stern an American flag, grimy with stains from the diesel smoke, hung limply off a mast between the boat's twin stacks. I was watching the tow, thinking that it would make a very bad Norman Rockwell painting. LuEllen was watching the street.

"Oh, ye of little faith," she muttered. I turned in time to see a blue Continental turning a corner a block away, followed by a coffee brown Chrysler. Neither was a year old. LuEllen held up a hand, as though she were flagging a taxi, and the two cars slid smoothly to the curb.

"Take the Ford," she said. She picked up a black nylon suitcase that she'd carried up from the Fanny and headed for the Chrysler. I stepped into the street as the driver got out of the Continental, the car still turning over with a deep, un-Continental-like rumble. The driver, a heavyset, red-faced guy with no neck, a Hawaiian shirt, and zebra-striped shorts, peeled off a pair of leather driving gloves.

"Go easy on the gas till you're used to it," he said laconically. "It's clean inside."

That said, he walked around the back of the car, joined the driver of the Chrysler, and they strolled away down the sidewalk. LuEllen waved and got into the Chrysler. I climbed into the Continental, pulled on my own driving gloves, and spent a minute figuring out where the car's controls were. Then I shifted into drive and touched the gas pedal. The Continental took off like a young Porsche. I never looked under the hood or figured out what LuEllen's friends had done to the suspension, but you could have taken the car to Talladega. On the way to Longstreet I found a stretch of flat, open highway and pushed it a bit, climbed through 120, had plenty of pedal left, and chickened out.

"That was stupid," LuEllen snapped. We were in the Wal-Mart shopping center on the edge of Longstreet, with a couple of hundred other cars. It was not quite dark. "A fuckin' speeding ticket would have killed us."

She was in her preentry flow, a weird state of mental focus that excluded everything but the job at hand. She would not be a pleasant woman to be with, not for a while, but she would be frighteningly efficient. "Sorry," I said, and I was.

"Stay with the program, goddamn it." She glanced at her watch. "It's time."

We took the Chrysler, as the less noticeable of the two cars. LuEllen drove downtown, taking the routes she'd scouted in her trip the week before. The city council was meeting, and two dozen cars were parked in the lot sideways across the street from City Hall.

"Chrysler," she said, nodding. The mayor's car was there, identical to the car we were driving. "I don't see Hill's pickup."

"And I don't see the Continental..."

"May be on the street in front."

The Continental would be easy to recognize because it looked exactly like the one we'd left at the Wal-Mart. It belonged to Archie Ballem, the city attorney. We took a left, past the front of the City Hall. No pickup and no Continental.

"Ballem's got to be here for the bond hearing," I said. "Hill, we can't be sure."

"I thought he came to all these things."

"That's what Marvel said."

"I'd hate for her to be wrong this early," LuEllen said. We'd continued down the block past the City Hall. "Let's go around... Wait a minute. There he is. There. Ballem."

A man in a seersucker suit and a white straw hat was walking down the street toward us. He turned to look at our car as we rolled past. "Are you sure?" I asked.

"Ninety-nine percent. I saw him last week, on the street. His office is down this way."

We found the Continental outside Ballem's office, three blocks from the City Hall.

"If we could find Hill..."

"If we don't, we'll call it off," she said. "But we've got the other two."

"We go?" I asked.

"Yes."

The phone company was a little redbrick cubicle on a side street, with a lighted blue and white phone booth hung on the side wall. We knew Chenille Dessusdelit, the mayor, was at the meeting. And we knew she was a widow and lived alone. But there might be a guest... We called her home, but there was no answer. With the twentieth ring LuEllen nipped the receiver off the phone with a pair of compact bolt cutters. The phone would still be ringing at Dessusdelit's, and with the receiver gone, it was unlikely that anyone would come along and hang up our public phone.

"Get the portable," LuEllen said. I knelt on the passenger seat, leaned into the back, unzipped her suitcase, took out the cellular phone, sat down again, and plugged it into the cigarette lighter. Dessusdelit's line was still busy.

"Maybe we could get Bobby to kill the call records, so we could just use the cellular and not have to mess with public phones," I suggested after I had hung up.

LuEllen shook her head. "Too complicated. Something could get fucked up and we'd be on paper." She feared paper more than anything: tax records, agreements, leases, checks. Phone bills. Paper left a trail and couldn't be denied.

We cruised Dessusdelit's house just once. A well-kept rambler, it was stuck at the end of a cul-de-sac, in a yard heavy with shrubbery. Trees overhung the streets from both sides, but there were no sidewalks and nobody out for a stroll. Too hot, probably. One light burned in a window at the center of the house, a virtual advertisement that the place was empty. The house on the south side of Dessusdelit's showed a few lights, but the house on the other side was dark. We came out of the cul-de-sac, took a left past the country club, did a U-turn, and headed back. I dialed Dessusdelit's house again, and the phone was still busy. I was looking out the window when I heard LuEllen take the first hit of coke. She carries it in small plastic capsules, one long snort apiece.

"Jesus," I said.

"Don't give me any shit."

The coke was on her in a second, but her driving was rock-steady.

"Zapper," she said.

"LuEllen..."

"Get the fuckin' zapper..."

The zapper was a specialized scanning transmitter that looked like a long-nosed hair dryer. It came with its own batteries. I got it out and started hyperventilating. LuEllen likes this part, with the adrenaline. I don't. LuEllen took us into the cul-de-sac and, without hesitating, into Dessusdelit's driveway. When we were still a hundred feet down the street, I pointed the zapper at the garage door and pulled the trigger. After a few seconds the door started up, and LuEllen barely had to slow down before we were inside. I dropped the door behind us, she killed the engine, and we sat in silence.

"Listen," LuEllen said. She was trembling with intensity. I listened and, after a second, picked out the faint ringing of the telephone.

The door to the interior was unlocked. Small towns. Lots of crime but not on the streets. LuEllen led the way in and then quickly through the house, stopping to answer and hang up the phone. There were three bedrooms. One had a queen-size bed, a couple of chests of drawers with jewelry boxes on top, and an antique oval mirror. Neat but lived in. Another was obviously a spare bedroom, with twin beds covered with decorative quilts. The third bedroom had been converted into a small home office with an IBM computer.

The living room was a double-jointed affair with two levels and a big brick fireplace, perfect for political soirees. The kitchen was ample, and there was a small first-floor utility room with a washer and dryer just off the kitchen. A quick tour of the unfinished basement turned up nothing of interest.

LuEllen started with the bedroom while I went back out to the car for my laptop and a stripper program. I was a little surprised that Dessusdelit had a computer at all; women of her age and status don't usually mess with them. Along with the computer were a slow modem, a desperately outmoded printer, and two double-drawer filing cabinets.

I loaded the stripper program into her machine, stripped her floppies and the hard disk, looking for data. I came up empty. There were two application programs, a word processor, and a spreadsheet, but no data.

I dumped the cabinets and again came up empty. Nothing but routine business letters. I carried the laptop back to the car and started working through the kitchen.

There was nothing subtle about what we were doing; we were tearing Dessusdelit's house apart. I dumped the cupboards onto the floor, shook each can and bottle before I tossed it aside, tore the drawers out of the refrigerator, checked the ice cube trays. Halfway through, there was a noisy crash from the bedroom, and I stopped to look. LuEllen had broken the bed apart.

"Loud," I said.

"Go work," she said coldly.

When I finished the kitchen, LuEllen was tearing through the living room. She had cut open the living room furniture and was tearing through a bookcase when I came out. "Where's the circuit probe?" she asked.

"Here." I patted my breast pocket. We'd been in for a while, and I was starting to sweat. LuEllen looked frozen, focused.

"Check the bedrooms, then the bathroom, then the kitchen. I'm going downstairs... I don't know, it should have been in the bedroom." She checked her watch again. "Seven minutes."

We didn't know what we were looking for. We did know that Dessusdelit had taken a lot of money out of the city over the years and that Bobby couldn't find it: couldn't find money, investments, long-distance trips that might point to a foreign money laundry. Nothing. She could have been buying land in some backwoods town under an assumed name, but that didn't feel right. She'd want it where she could see it. She did have a safe-deposit box at the Longstreet State Bank, but Bobby went into the bank records and found that she visited the box only once or twice a year.

Wherever she was putting the money, there should have been some sign of it in the house. There wasn't. The furnishings were good but not great; she hadn't stashed the money in antiques or art. I'd feared the possibility that she'd put it in antiques; we didn't have a moving van.

We hadn't yet found a safe. That's what the probe was for.

A circuit probe is simply a lamp the size of a pencil. There's a plug at one end, a light in the middle, and a screwdriver at the other end. The screwdriver fits the screw in the middle of common everyday home power outlets. Electricians use them to check the outlets to see if they're live.

I checked the outlet next to her bedroom door, one under a window on an outside wall, one next to a closet. I got a light every time. The last outlet, the one behind the bed's headboard, came up dead. I turned the probe over and used the screwdriver to loosen the outlet plate.

Lying on the floor, working, I could feel my heart pounding in my chest; we were getting long on time. I gave the screw a last turn and pried off the plate.

Ah. A wall cache. Inside was a metal box, and I used the screwdriver to pull it out.

"Find something?" LuEllen asked from the doorway.

"Yeah, a cache... shit."

"What?"

"Money. Goddamn it." The cash was packed tightly into the metal box, fifties and hundreds. I pulled it out, a folded-over wad some four or five inches thick, and tossed it to LuEllen. In the bottom of the box was a small white envelope. I fished it out with my fingertips, squeezed it, and found three hard bumps like cherry pits.

"Not more than a few thousand here," LuEllen said. "We've got to get going-what's that?"

I tore open the folded envelope and poured a little stream of ice into the palm of my hand.

"Diamonds," I said, holding my hand up to LuEllen.

"Damn, those are nice if they're investment grade," she said. She took the stones and tucked them in a shirt pocket with the cash. "We're running late..."

"Find anything in the basement?" I asked as we headed back toward the car.

"No."

"Goddamn it, we're not doing that good."

"Get the paint."

We had two gallons of paint in the car, red oil-based enamel. We popped open one can and started spreading it around the house.

THIEF, I wrote on one wall, with a newspaper dipped in the paint, STEAL THE CITY BLIND. LuEllen splashed out, YOU DIE PIGGY on another two, and CROOK-CROOK-CROOK. We wrote some more garbage, hitting every wall in the house and most of the ceilings. The last of the paint we poured on the living room carpets.

"Dump the can, and let's go," LuEllen said. We checked the street from the house. Clear. We ran the garage door up and back down and were gone.

"I've never done anything like that," LuEllen said. "It didn't feel that good."

"I know."

We both were private people. Maybe even pathologically so. What we'd just done to Dessusdelit was close to rape. There'd been a point to it, though: We wanted to hurt her financially, beyond stealing her little stash. We wanted her angry, and a little frightened, and disposed to flex her machine muscle. We wanted her scraping for cash when a big opportunity came along...

LuEllen dropped the three stones into a Ziploc bag and put them under the passenger seat as we headed back to the Wal-Mart. "How much?" I asked.

"No way to tell," she said. "Everything depends on quality. If they're a good investment grade, anything between thirty and a hundred thousand."

"Not so good," I said. "There must be more somewhere."

We switched cars at the Wal-Mart, moving to the Continental, the twin to Ballem's car. Next we checked the City Hall. The parking lot was still full, and this time Duane Hill's personal Toyota pickup was in the lot.

"So we got him inside," LuEllen said. "Hope the meeting lasts."

"There's a public hearing. Marvel said it should be a couple of hours at least."

Ballem's car hadn't moved from the spot in front of his office. We stopped at a second public phone on the way to Ballem's house and made the call. When there was no answer, I nipped the phone receiver, and we started toward Ballem's.

"There's going to be hell to pay about those phones," LuEllen said, tongue in cheek. "We're fucking with Ma Bell..."

Two blocks from the phone a cop car turned a corner in front of us, coming in our direction. As we passed, the driver lifted a hand in greeting. The Continental's windows were lightly tinted, so I doubt that he could see much, but I returned the wave.

"He thinks we're Ballem," I said.

"He's supposed to..."

We went on another block when we saw the cop car's taillights come up.

"He's turning into a driveway," LuEllen said.

"Quite the trick. He should be on The Tonight Show," I said, the sudden tension forcing out a bad joke. LuEllen paid no attention.

"He's backing out; he may be coming back this way," LuEllen said.

"Do I turn or keep going?" I asked. The cop car was two blocks behind us, then two and a half, and I picked up his headlights.

"Go straight. Let's see what he does. We've got nothing in the car-"

"Except your bag with the wrecking bar and the zapper. And your coke."

"He's got no probable cause..." But she dug into a shirt pocket and took out a half dozen red coke caps. If the cops got too close, they'd go out the window.

"This is the fuckin' Delta, LuEllen. That's probable enough." The lights were still back there but not closing. Then they swerved, off to the side of the road.

"He was looking at something else," she said, the relief warm in her voice. "Let's get out of sight..."

Three minutes later, we were at Ballem's.

"Love those fuckin' automatic garage door openers," LuEllen said as the garage door rolled up. She broke another cap.

"Christ..."

"Shut up."

I'm always tense when I work with LuEllen, and the cocaine made it worse. She loved it, the rush of the work and probably, I was afraid, the rush of the coke. She'd have done it all for free...

"Have you ever done a triple-header before?" I asked as we pulled into the garage and waited for the door to roll down.

"Not exactly. One time I went into a players' locker room during an NBA play-off game and hit every fuckin' locker in the place. That was about a twenty-header... if that counts." The door hit with a bump, and we sat, listening, and heard the phone. "Let's go."

Ballem was not like Dessusdelit. Dessusdelit kept her wealth hidden, and we didn't know where. Ballem put it on the walls - some of it anyway.

"Jesus," I said when we stepped into the living room. The floors were wood parquet, covered with rich maroon carpets. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase held knickknacks and books and framed a group of black-and-white prints. "Those are real."

LuEllen squinted at the signature on a lithograph of a young girl in a bonnet. "Cassatt?"

"Yeah." I took one off the wall and turned it over. A framer's tag was glued on the back panel, dated 1972. "Ballem would've gotten a great price on them way back then. Now they'd cost you an arm and a leg."

"Take them." She was in motion, headed for the basement. "Women hide stuff in the bedroom and kitchen; men hide it in the basement," she said simply.