The Empress File

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 cameover 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 MississippiRiver, 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.
    T HE DOG BLOOD SALES were only the most bizarre item on a laundry list of corrupt deals and straight-out rip-offs. Crooked public works employeessold 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