The Empress File

cheerfully. “But she was bound to go. You are an impossible motherfucker to live with.”

L U E LLEN SPENT THE night on the sofa. When I wandered through the living room the next morning, she was still asleep. She was wearing one of my old T-shirts for a top and a pair of pink underpants. She had twisted her blanket into a coil and wrapped her arms and legs around it, like a kid climbing a rope. I stepped over to wake her, but at the last minute, with my hand already at her shoulder, I stopped, eased myself into an overstuffed chair, and just looked at her.
    She was a burglar. A good one. She stole cash, mostly, because it couldn’t be traced. I’d done some work in the same line, though I’d taken something even harder to trace than cash. Trade secrets—ideas, if you will. At first I thought there was a difference; later I wasn’t so sure.
    When she wasn’t working, LuEllen wore hand-stitched ostrich-skin cowboy boots and too-tight jeans. Her shirts had piping on the back and littlearrows at the corners of the breast pockets, unless she was wearing one of those little puffy white baby doll numbers that let the black bra show through.…
    She knew nothing about painting or computers, never made it out of high school. But she was intensely intelligent, a friend, and more than a friend. Sometimes we were in bed together; sometimes not. We tended to develop outside relationships, and we told each other that it was OK.
    Maybe I believed it. But in the post-Chaminade
tristesse
, I was glad to have her back. Her legs looked great, not to mention her ass, and I eventually sneaked out of my chair, got a sketch pad, and started to draw. I laid out her body shape in a half dozen lines, blocked in her hair mass with charcoal, laid out the shadow beneath her waist, and stopped. I’d done this before, caught a sleeping woman unawares with a sketch pad. Sure. Maggie Kahn. Lying in the sunlight, on the bed in the Washington apartment, before the world started to come apart.
    I was sitting there, staring at nothing, when LuEllen woke up. She woke like a cat, all at once, and spotted me.
    “You’ve been drawing my ass, Kidd.”
    “I confess,” I said. She rolled off the sofa andwalked around my chair to look over my shoulder.
    “Pretty good. But what I want to know is, Would you love me without the ass?”
    It was a throwaway line. We dealt with each other with a careful sarcasm, with metaphorical pokes and winks. But with Chaminade taking a walk, and the hollow she left behind, with the flashback to Bloody Maggie, I was seized with an instant of what felt like honesty. I looked up and said, “Yeah. I would.”
    Our eyes hooked up for a moment. Her grin slowly faded, and a tear started down her cheek. “Fucking men,” she said. She turned away, banged into the bathroom, and stayed there for half an hour.
    When she came back out, we both were struggling to get back to normal.
    “So what do you want me to do?” she asked brightly.
    “I’ve got to pound on the computers. Bobby’s shipping me more data than I can handle. While I do that, I want you to start looking for a boat. Something we can rent for a month or so.”
    “A boat?”
    “Yeah. You know, one of those white plastic things with a pointed end? They hold out the water when you—”
    “OK, OK,” she said, waving me off. “Whatkind of boat? How big? What are we going to do with it?”
    “A houseboat. Good-size. Air-conditioned. Something you’d tend to notice.”
    “You’re going to live on it?” LuEllen has an oval face with dark hair, big, interesting eyes, and a few freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose.
    “
We’re
going to live on it.”
    “Down in Longstreet?”
    “Yeah. Down in Longstreet.”
    I SPENT TWO WEEKS compiling Bobby’s raw data into economic and psychological profiles of the individual city council members—the same kind of work I often do for politicians. Hill, the dogcatcher-enforcer, was a gambler and probably a loser. Dessusdelit and Ballem, though, were hoarders. I couldn’t yet tell how much money they were taking out of Longstreet, but it was substantial. They couldn’t invest it legally, because then they’d have to explain where they got it; none of it showed up on their IRS returns. Neither Dessusdelit nor Ballem had a passport, so they weren’t personally taking it out of the country. They had to be stashing it.
    Marvel talked to a man who worked for Ballem’s lawn service and heard a story that