The Empress File

gun.”
    Marvel nodded. “Harold and I have beenthinking 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.”
    W E 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 extremesituation, 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.
    “S TARS 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 brickle 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-wrappedsap 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.

W HEN J OHN AND I got back to Memphis, the temperature was already climbing into the eighties. Instead of going straight to the airport, he took me through a section of narrow streets of small houses with dusty turnouts in front. The children in the yards were all black.
    “Your plane doesn’t leave for two hours,” John said when I asked where we were going. “I want to show you something.”
    We stopped at a gray clapboard house with a deep green lawn inside a quadrangle