The Empress File (8 page)

I took the etchings. They all were American, by Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, John Sloan, George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, and even Stuart Davis and Mauricio Lasansky, which suggested that Ballem had either a catholic taste or an art investment consultant, I don't much care for black-and-white prints, but they all were good, and any one of them would pay for a year at Harvard. I was stashing the last of them in the car when LuEllen came back up. "We got a box," she said. "Come look."

The basement was half finished, with tile floors and painted cement-block walls. The ceilings were open.

"Over here," she said, and led me into a nook behind the furnace.

"It's not exactly a safe," she said, nodding at a foot-square steel door set into the concrete wall. A serious-looking combination dial protruded from the front of the door. "It's more of a fireproof box."

"Can you open it?"

"I don't know." She glanced at her watch. "We're at two minutes, forty-five." She walked away from the lockbox, looking at the tools hung on Ballem's basement wall, then around the basement in general. A moment later she ran back up the stairs. I followed, but by the time I got to the top, she was already coming back. She was carrying a maul and a wood-splitting wedge. "From the garage. I saw that firewood around to the side."

I followed her back down and said, "What?"

"Stand back." LuEllen lined up with the maul and gave the box a full-swing whack with the sharp edge. The blade didn't cut through, but it put a dent in it. The impact sounded like the end of the world, like a blacksmith pounding on an anvil.

"Jesus Christ," I whispered. "Somebody'll hear..."

"Not in this neighborhood," she grunted, pivoting for another swing. "Everybody's got air-conditioning, and all the windows are closed."

She took another whack, put another dent in the box. "You do it," she said. "You're a big strong man."

"Fuck, LuEllen..." Now I really was sweating.

"Hit it," she said.

I hit it. A half dozen blows distorted the door enough to see into it. LuEllen fitted the wedge into the seam of the door just above the lock, handed me the maul, and said, "One more time."

I hit it, and the door popped open. Breathing hard, I looked at LuEllen. She was standing with her arms crossed, waiting, not bored but not nervous either.

Inside the safe we found a leather-bound book of stamps, a freezer bag full of currency, and a metal box filled with American gold coins in sealed packages. The stamp collection wasn't much to look at - a few dozen fading squares of red, blue, and green, each in its own archival envelope. We took it all.

"Upstairs," LuEllen said. She looked at her watch. "Seven minutes, thirty-five seconds."

Ballem had an aging computer setup almost identical to Dessusdelit's. While I checked that, LuEllen tore apart the rest of the house. In the bedroom she found a collection of bondage and discipline magazines, both hetero- and homosexual, a new gun, a Smith & Wesson .357 magnum, fully loaded, and a flat metal box, like a safe-deposit box. Inside were a dozen gold Rolex watches, old but in perfect condition.

"We're killing this guy," LuEllen said enthusiastically.

"Good."

I was bringing the paint in from the garage when headlights swept the windows.

"Car," LuEllen said. She said it loudly, so I'd be sure to hear. I crouched and scuttled back into the house. LuEllen was against the front wall, peering out of a crack.

"It's the cops," she said. "The driver's coming up to the porch."

I heard him outside the door and slid over next to it. If he came in... I lifted the paint can above my head. I waited, and the doorbell rang.

LuEllen's face was motionless, pale, watching me from her window spot.

The doorbell rang.

LuEllen's face, pale like the moon.

The doorbell rang.

My arms were aching.

And the cop walked away.

"He's going," LuEllen whispered. Then: "He's gone."

"Jesus Christ," I groaned, dropping the paint.

"Fucking cops," LuEllen said. She picked up the wrecking bar, dashed across the living room to the built-in shelves, and smashed them off the wall. She was in a frenzy, moving around the room, breaking everything breakable, knocking holes in the Sheetrock walls.

"The paint," she panted. "Dump the paint."

She went through the house like a dervish, while I threw the paint around. THIEF. CROOK. SUCK ON THIS. WHERE'S THE CITY MONEY?

"Let's go," she said when the paint was gone. "Let's get the fuck out of here." She threw the wrecking bar on the rug, and I followed her back to the garage. At seventeen minutes and a few seconds we were out of the house.

"That's about the longest I've ever been inside a place," she said. Her voice was half an octave lower than usual.

"You sound a little... turned on."

She let that sit in the air for a minute, then said, "Yeah. I guess I am."

The last part of our trip took us to the edge of town, to what had once been a farmhouse. It was set back from the blacktop, along a twisting dirt track that ran between overhanging trees. We'd made the phone call and got no answer.

A black form crossed the driveway like a shadow from hell, and the hair stood up on my arms.

"Look at that," LuEllen said. "Jesus, look at..."

There were three dogs, black and tan, pointed ears and noses.

"Dobermans," LuEllen said. "All three..."

She rolled her window down a couple of inches, and the dogs were there, snapping, nobody to call them down. LuEllen reached over the backseat, got the steaks out, rolled the window down another inch, and pushed them out. The dogs were on them in an instant.

"Eat, motherfuckers," LuEllen said. She broke another cap herself. She wouldn't look at me while she snorted it. "Eat."

Outside, the dogs were starting to wobble. Dobermans, when they're in good condition, look semiskeletal, hard muscle rippled over a frame of bones, the whole thing held together by craziness and tension. When the tension goes, as it will when the load of barbiturates is big enough, the dogs seem to come apart.

"Let's go," LuEllen said.

I stepped gingerly out of the car and around one of the dogs. The dog could apparently pick up the motion because he made a weak attempt to react but couldn't get himself coordinated.

We were parked in the yard, just down the steps from Hill's front door. There was a light in one window, but no movement. From the porch we could hear the phone ringing. LuEllen shoved a pry bar into the door, threw her weight against it, and ripped it open.

"Whoa," LuEllen said. The house stank of spoiled food and cigars, an unwashed human, bad plumbing, neglect. Old wallpaper sagged from the plaster-and-lath walls, and there were water stains on the ceiling.

Hill had no computer. LuEllen went straight into the basement, while I went upstairs and began ripping apart the bedroom. Neither of us found anything, and we met on the first floor.

"Where?" she said, one hand on her hip. She walked slowly through the house, taking it in. There was no question of art; there was nothing on the walls but calendars and a couple of stuffed deer heads. I knocked the deer heads off, but there was nothing inside. I looked in the stove and pulled the drawers out of the kitchen cabinets. Nothing.

"Kidd. C'mere."

"What?"

"Look at this."

When the house had been built a century ago, a bookcase had been built under the first flight of the staircase. Hill had piled the shelves with junk; spark plugs; cans of two-cycle oil; a few paperbacks. LuEllen had dumped one of the shelves and pulled it out.

"They're too shallow," she said. "So I pulled the shelf out, and it looks like it's been cut down."

I looked at it. The shelf had been cut lengthwise with a power saw. Once it had been a foot wide or wider. Now it would barely hold Hill's few paperbacks.

"You check the other side?"

"There's a storage space on the basement side, but it's full of cobwebs, and there's an old wall. No way to get in. I'm thinking the stairs..."

The stairs were carpeted with a wool rug that must have been nearly as old as the house. I looked at the bottom of it. There was a loose place, and I grabbed it and pulled. The rug came up with a ripping sound.

"Damn. Velcro," LuEllen said. Velcro tabs had been glued to the rug and floor, to hold it in place. The rug covered the steps, and when we started working on them, three of them came cleanly away.

Tightly wedged into the space beneath the stairs and behind the bookcase's back wall was a pile of ordinary plastic garbage bags. LuEllen pulled one out and dumped it. Cash. She pulled another. More cash.

"Son of a bitch," she whispered. "The mother lode."

We had the bags in the car in five minutes, stepping carefully around the feebly thrashing dogs. They were coming back but not quickly.

"Paint?" LuEllen asked.

"Fuck it," I said. "Anything we did to that place would be an improvement."

"All right."

We saw no more cops. LuEllen dropped me next to the Continental in the Wal-Mart parking lot, and less than an hour after we had pulled into Chenille Dessusdelit's garage, we were gone, out of town, up the highway to Memphis. We dumped the take at the Fanny just after midnight. The cars we left in a hotel parking ramp, keys under the front seats. Neither of us had taken off our driving gloves, so they'd be clean.

Back at the boat we counted the cash from Hill's safe. Three hundred and seventy thousand dollars, with bills that went back more than ten years. Ballem's coins made the total take much higher. There were sixty-five of them, sealed individually and certified by a numismatic rating service. She called a friend in Las Vegas and got a price: another two hundred thousand, and that might be low.

She was most interested in the stamps.

"Stamps are money if they're not too rare. You don't want a one-of-a-kind, where everybody in the world would notice the sale. But if you get stamps that are worth a few thousand dollars each - investor kind of stamps, like those coins are investor kind of coins - they're just like money. They're money everywhere. Fuckin' Bolivia, Bangkok, Saudi Arabia - there's always somebody who'll buy. Especially these - British issues."

"What if these are one of a kind?" I asked, paging through the book. "What if they're worth too much?"

"Fuck, I don't know," she said. "We throw them away, I guess."

She didn't know any stamp freaks but was hot to peg the values. I called Bobby.

Need number of philatelic data base Hold.

Three minutes later he came back. He knew only one that was on-line twenty-four hours. He gave me numbers, code names, and patched me into an anonymous telephone line out of Memphis. The first stamp was worth thirty-five hundred dollars if it was perfect. To me it looked perfect. The second stamp was worth forty-two hundred dollars if it was perfect. It looked perfect, too. They all looked perfect.

"A hundred and forty stamps. Say, thirty-five hundred to four thousand each..."

"Another half million," I said.

"All right," she said, satisfied. "And I've got a friend who can handle it all."

"What about the diamonds?"

"Another friend. He can sell them, but it'll take a while. We'll get fifty percent of face."

"I wonder about Dessusdelit. I don't think we touched her."

"Maybe we'll get another chance."

"Maybe."

LuEllen was examining the Cassatt lithograph, a sweet child from another age. "I don't know about the art."

"That's the problem," I said. "There's a worldwide registry of stolen art, out in New York."

"Dump them?"

"I won't do that," I said, shaking my head. "Let me think about it. I'll stick them in a safe-deposit box for now."

She nodded, looked at the loot scattered around us.

"This was a good job. Really good. I mean, it was great." She stepped over next to me, like a cat approaching a sardine. "A little tense maybe."

I got up and took a turn around the cabin, walking away from her. "So we're rich again," I said.

"I don't give a fuck about the money," she said. "I like the way I feel."

I looked at her for a while, then got down a couple of tall glasses, two bottles of diet tonic water, a jug of Tanqueray, and a lime. "I was afraid it was getting like that," I said as I cut up the lime.

"Why afraid?"

I passed her a drink and tried mine. It was tart. Very tart. " 'Cause addicts always get caught."

Chapter
6

Before bed LuEllen made two calls from a public phone, and the next morning we did some running around in a rental car. We dropped the gold coins at a dumpy motel near the airport, the diamonds at a bar downtown. She wouldn't let me come inside at either place.

"No need for you to show your face," she said.

She came back from the motel with an expensive black leather briefcase. I opened it and found cash.

"A hundred and twenty-seven thousand," she said. "On the low side, I think, but it was take it or leave it."

We did better than expected with the diamonds. Just after noon we left about a half million dollars in a safe-deposit box in downtown Memphis. The stamps, with Ballem's prints, went in another box at another bank.

"Satisfied?" I asked.

"Mmm," she said. "Tell you the truth, it's the best I did, for money. But the rest of it..."

"We owe people now," I said. "We'll do it and get out. Lay low for a while. Mexico. The Caribbean. There won't be any taxes on this money..."

"I'll teach you about offshore banks," she promised.

We left that evening for Longstreet, running the Fanny down the river.

To wreck the Longstreet machine, we had to wipe out a majority of the council - three people - at one stroke.

By state law a city council could replace members who died or resigned. If we got only one or two of the machine's councilmen, the rest of the council could legally appoint replacements. They'd simply appoint other members of the machine. But if we could take out three, the council could no longer legally act; it needed at least three members for a quorum.

If it couldn't get a quorum, the replacements would be appointed by the governor.

The governor, as it happened, had already served two terms in the statehouse and was barred from succeeding himself. Not ready to retire, he was looking at a race for a U. S. Senate seat. He had a shot at it, too, as long as the black wing of the Democratic party didn't raise too much hell. The black caucus had been complaining that it wasn't getting enough goodies in return for the votes it delivered, and there were noises that sounded like the beginnings of a revolt. If the blacks bolted and the party fractured, the governor would be retired whether he liked it or not...

And right there was the crux of a deal.

Marvel and Harold would talk to the leaders of the black caucus. They, in turn, would talk with the governor's hatchet man. If the governor agreed to act on Marvel's request to clean up Longstreet, the black caucus would back off...

When I outlined the idea to Marvel at the hotel meeting, she first thought it over and shook her head.

"It's an idea," she said, taking a lick of the ice cream. "But no matter how much he wanted to help us - help himself - the governor couldn't appoint a black majority to the council. That'd kill him for sure. The black caucus has got some clout, but there's a country boy caucus, too. They've got more clout than the black caucus, and they wouldn't stand for that shit."

"The governor doesn't have to appoint a black majority," I said. "Suppose we take out three white council members, leaving the Reverend Dodge and this Lucius Bell, the guy you say might be honest. OK?"

"OK," she said, nodding.

"So the governor appoints the replacements: one of our people and two more machine members. They can be the worst rednecks in the state, we don't care. But they have to be from our list, the list of people we can control-"

"That we got dirt on," Marvel chipped in.

"That's right. When the council is legally functioning again, we take out those two. We either sic the state cops on them, or the IRS, or just go right straight to them, show them the evidence, force them out-"

"Blackmail," said Harold.

"Right. Push those two off the council. That still leaves three: our appointee, the reverend, and Bell. Three council members is a quorum. Three members can appoint replacements. You've got the reverend by the balls, for diddling these little girls, plus our new guy..."

"And those three appoint the two new members. That gives us four to one," Marvel said, sitting up straight, the ice cream forgotten.

"With four to one, we've got the votes to redraw the election districts," I said. "We gerrymander it just like the machine did, but in our favor."

Marvel stared at Harold. "It could work," she blurted.

It could work, but everything had to go right. Longstreet was six hours down the river. We did two hours that night and anchored behind the point of a sandbar. I hadn't shaved since we left St. Paul, and the beard was coming on.

"There're too many white whiskers in it," LuEllen said. "Writers have white beards; painters are supposed to have black. I've never seen a movie where the painter had a white beard."

"I look like Hemingway," I suggested. "Except taller and better-looking, of course."

The next morning I added to the effect with my artist outfit: tan baggy-assed shorts, Portuguese rope sandals, a New York Knicks T-shirt, and a broad-brimmed canvas hat. LuEllen admired the outfit extravagantly. During the final run down the river she fell into periodic bursts of the giggles. I put it down to stress. We arrived at Longstreet at eleven o'clock and eased into the ramshackle marina I'd seen on my first trip down.

The marina operator wore a cap that said "Port Captain." He had an easy, sun-lined face that hadn't seen much of anywhere and didn't much care.

"How y' doin'?" he asked cheerfully. He took a quick look at me and a longer one at LuEllen. LuEllen was wearing a beige sundress that had a pattern of small rectangular holes across the bodice. There was no indication that she was burdened by a brassiere.

"Pretty good," I admitted. "You got hookups?"

"Sure do," he said. "Y'all planning to stay awhile?"

I hopped up on the dock. "Maybe a week, maybe two, it depends," I said. Up in the town I could see the tops of Victorian-era clapboard houses lapping around the edges of the business district. "I'm a painter. Last time I came through here, I saw some nice landscape."

As soon as I said the word painter, his eyes shifted, and I figured we'd be paying in advance.

"I'm sure there is," he said.

"How about if I give you a week in advance? If it works out, we'll give you another week."

My stock went back up. He hadn't had to ask for the money, and we had avoided an awkwardness. "That'd be fine," he said. "It's fifty cents a foot, up to twenty dollars a day, with another dollar for every person over four?"

There was a question in his voice, and LuEllen said, "There are only the two of us."

"So that's twenty dollars a day for seven days; that'd be a hundred and forty dollars," I said. I took out a pad of traveler's checks. "Do you take American Express?"

At the Memphis meeting, we'd talked about how we'd bring ourselves to the attention of the mayor in the most natural way. Harold suggested that we catch her during lunch.

"She eats a political lunch every day, with the city attorney or the city clerk and maybe one or two other people," Harold said. "You could bump into her there at the restaurant."

We paid the marina operator, and he moved us to a permanent slip. While the two of us did the phone, power, and sewage hookups, LuEllen went back into the houseboat to make a quick addition to her wardrobe. When we walked up the levee into town, she was wearing a slender, glistening quartz crystal the size of my little finger, wrapped in gold wire and strung around her neck on an antique gold chain. The crystal rested between the swell of her breasts, the swell provided by her new uplift bra. You'd have to be blind to miss it. The crystal, not the bra.

Most of the Mississippi River valley below Memphis had been wiped out by the great flood of 1927. In rebuilding, a lot of towns turned their backs on the river, fortifying themselves behind the levees. Some of them simply picked up and moved away from the water altogether.

Longstreet hadn't been hurt as badly as other places. The residential heart of Longstreet was on naturally high ground. When the flood came, it took out the first couple of blocks of the business and warehouse districts along the river, but most of the town stayed dry. As a result, the rebuilt business district was a collection of redbrick thirties and forties architecture, backed up by a residential area that was much older.

The town square, Chickamauga Park, was on the first major terrace up from the river, at the center of the business district. Two blocks beyond that, the business buildings started shading into the white residential neighborhoods. The white neighborhoods went on up the rising ground, across the crest to the railroad tracks. The black neighborhoods were on the far side of the tracks.

We didn't get that far. We took our time strolling up the ridge, getting acquainted with the town. It was hot but not yet unpleasant. The mix of river odors and flower perfume was as rich and interesting, in its own way, as new-mown hay.

"Uh, by the way, what's your name today? Your last name?" I asked.

Across the street, a heavyset woman in a sun-bonnet was tilling a garden with an ancient Case lawn tractor.

"Case," LuEllen said, watching the woman in her beans. "LuEllen Case, okay?"

"Sure," I said. "And thank Christ she wasn't driving an International Harvester."

The restaurant where the mayor ate lunch was a ferns-and-antique-bricks place called Humdinger's, down the block from the City Hall. Most of the local movers and shakers would be there between eleven-thirty and one o'clock. I knew the mayor's face from political advertisements Marvel had sent us, and LuEllen had seen her on the street during her scouting trip. Her face fixed on us as we crossed the street toward the restaurant.

"There she is, like Harold said," LuEllen murmured.

"I see her. Ballem's with her," I said. I took LuEllen's elbow in my hand as we crossed the street. "There's an open booth just before theirs. That's the one we'll take. You sit closest to the door, so you're facing her. Let her get a look at that crystal."

"I'm cool," she said. I glanced at her, and her face looked dewy from the heat and humidity, but otherwise serene.

"You didn't put any of that shit up your nose, did you?"

A flash of irritation crossed her face. "That's only for hard targets," she said.

"Just checking."

"You're not my father."

"No, but-"

"But what?"

"Nothing."

Humdinger's had creaky wooden floors and rough brick walls and framed reproductions of English sporting prints, a place that strained for sophistication without quite making it. The general lunch hour buzz dimmed noticeably when we stepped inside, heads turning in our direction. There was a sign near the cash register, please wait to be seated. The waitress who came to seat us took a good look at LuEllen, a shorter one at me, decided LuEllen was in charge, and said to her, "This way please."

We were headed toward the windows, but just to make sure, LuEllen touched the woman on the arm and said, "I wonder if we could have that window booth."

"That's where I was taking you, honey," the waitress said.

I sat in the booth with my back to Dessusdelit, so she could see LuEllen. Even without the sundress, the uplift bra, and the breast exposure, the crystal would have been hard to miss. The light flickering off it made it seem alive.

"She sees it," LuEllen said in a low voice, around the menu.

LuEllen ordered a chicken breast salad, and I had an open-face hot beef sandwich, which arrived swimming in brown gravy. We talked about painting locations in town, LuEllen worried about the cholesterol in my lunch, and we both tried unsuccessfully to eavesdrop on the booth behind me. I was just finishing the sandwich when I felt the mayor and Ballem slide out of their booth. LuEllen winked.

"I don't mean to interrupt," the mayor said, pausing by our table. She was looking at LuEllen. Ballem walked on a few steps before he stopped and turned. "That is a beautiful crystal."

"Why, thank you," LuEllen said sweetly. "It's a Herkimer diamond. My great-great-grandmother found it near her farm in upstate New York... It's sort of our family channel-"

"Oh, you're interested" Dessusdelit said with enthusiasm. She had a narrow, sallow face framed by a short, dark, thoroughly lacquered hairdo. The bags under her pale eyes seemed fairly new, as though she hadn't slept for a couple of nights. A chain of braided gold, like LuEllen's but thinner, hung around her neck. She fished it out. "I have one of my own..."

Her crystal was bigger than LuEllen's but not quite as clear. And while LuEllen's was double-ended, the mayor's had a rough cleavage at the bottom, where the crystal had been broken off its base.

"From Mount Ida," she said.

"Oh, sure," LuEllen said knowledgeably. "They're famous. Did you collect it yourself, or-"

"Yes, yes, I bothered Ralph, that's my late husband, I said to Ralph, 'Ralph, I swear, if you don't take me, I just don't know what I'll do.' One day he said, 'Let's go, girl. Then maybe you'll leave me alone.' I looked at crystals until I thought my eyes would fall out. This one just sort of spoke to me, you know?"

"I know exactly, I know," LuEllen gushed. "Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night just having to hold it. I can actually feel the spheres intersecting through my diamond... Have you ever tried using a ball?"