The Empress File

couple of minutes I got up again, went out to the telephone, and called the Wee Blue Inn, a very bad bar in Duluth. Weenie answered. Weenie is the owner. He’s also LuEllen’s phone drop.
    “This is the guy from St. Paul,” I said.
    “Uh-huh.” Weenie didn’t go in for the intellectual discourse.
    “I need to talk to your girlfriend.”
    “Ain’t seen her,” he said. He said that no matter who called. LuEllen might be sitting across the bar from him.
    “If you do, tell her to call me,” I said.
    “Business or pleasure?”
    “Business.”
    “She got your number?”
    “Yeah. She’s got my number.”
    T HE NEXT TWO DAYS were beautiful. Blue skies, light, puffy clouds. I spent them on the Mississippi, in the hill country south of Red Wing, working on landscapes and thinking about Longstreet. In the evenings, back in St. Paul, Itrained at the Shotokan dojo, then walked up to the center of town to an Irish bar off the main drag. A newspaper friend, who once drank too much, still hangs out in the bars, drinking Perrier lime water at two dollars a bottle. He claims bars are his métier.
    “Or maybe they’re my forte. Either métier or forte, I get them mixed up when I’ve had too many lime waters,” he said, looking longingly at my bottle of Miller. “You think I ought to change to lemon waters?”
    “Don’t do anything hasty. You’ll wind up in the gutter,” I said, dabbing at my fat lip. The pure thing about Shotokan is that when you fuck up, you find out right away.
    “Just a lemon water. I could handle it.”
    “Then it’ll be orange waters, and two weeks from now you’ll be shooting black tar heroin into your carotid,” I said. We talked about the state income tax for a while, and then I asked him about corrupt towns.
    “They’re all corrupt,” he said glumly, scrawling wet rings on the bar with the bottom of his bottle. With his lined and wrinkled face, he looked like an aging English setter. “But they don’t think of themselves that way. That’s why the politicians get so mad when a reporter goes after them. They convince themselves that the payoffs were really campaign contributions and if they used the money to buy a hat, well, that was just an accountingerror. There’s nobody more righteous than a guilty Lutheran with a reasonable excuse.”
    “Have you ever heard of a place down the Mississippi called Longstreet?”
    We both looked into the mirror behind the bar. Through the bottles, my hair was looking grayer, and the crow’s-feet at the corners of my eyes were cutting deeper. Too much sun probably. Too much time on the river.
    “Longstreet,” he said, nodding. “Yeah. Don’t know much about it. You got something going down there?”
    “No, no. I went through there my last time down to New Orleans,” I lied. “The place looked kind of… funky. Good light, for one thing. Interesting people. I thought I might stop off the next time I go down. Do some painting. But there’s an air of violence about the place.”
    “Hmph.” He was looking at me. I don’t know how much he knew or suspected about my sidelines, but it may be too much. “There’s violence in all the river towns. But the southern ones are the worst. Jim Bowie and the duel of Natchez, shootin’ and cuttin’ on the levee. Or maybe it was a sandbar.” He took another hit on his lime water. “Stay away from the dogcatcher.”
    “What?”
    “The only thing I remember anybody ever told me about Longstreet is, stay away from the dogcatcher. I took his advice. I stayed away from thewhole fuckin’ town.” He raised a finger to the bartender and pointed at his empty lime water bottle.
    L ATE AT NIGHT , after the days on the river and the evenings in the bars, I sat in front of a computer and went back and forth with Bobby. Bobby’s strong on data bases, and there was no shortage of material.
    From the federal government he got military and tax records, Small Business Administration loan reports, and criminal rap sheets. All of those are closed, of course, but with the right computer keys, anything is available.
    From the state government he got more tax reports and personal driving histories. From the courts he got lawsuits and divorce proceedings. The big credit agencies had records on everybody. So did the insurance companies. He pulled credit card numbers and used them to access billing records. You can learn a lot from bills. Two of the targets, for example, made a couple of trips every year to