The Empress File

tension forcing out a bad joke. LuEllen paid no attention.
    “He’s backing out; he may be coming back this way,” LuEllen said.
    “Do I turn or keep going?” I asked. The cop car was two blocks behind us, then two and a half, and I picked up his headlights.
    “Go straight. Let’s see what he does. We’ve got nothing in the car—”
    “Except your bag with the wrecking bar and the zapper. And your coke.”
    “He’s got no probable cause.…” But she dug into a shirt pocket and took out a half dozen red coke caps. If the cops got too close, they’d go out the window.
    “This is the fuckin’ Delta, LuEllen. That’s probable enough.” The lights were still back there but not closing. Then they swerved, off to the side of the road.
    “He was looking at something else,” she said, the relief warm in her voice. “Let’s get out of sight.…”
    Three minutes later, we were at Ballem’s.
    “Love those fuckin’ automatic garage door openers,” LuEllen said as the garage door rolled up. She broke another cap.
    “Christ…”
    “Shut up.”
    I’m always tense when I work with LuEllen, and the cocaine made it worse. She loved it, the rush of the work and probably, I was afraid, the rush of the coke. She’d have done it all for free.…
    “Have you ever done a triple-header before?” I asked as we pulled into the garage and waited for the door to roll down.
    “Not exactly. One time I went into a players’locker room during an NBA play-off game and hit every fuckin’ locker in the place. That was about a twenty-header… if that counts.” The door hit with a bump, and we sat, listening, and heard the phone. “Let’s go.”
    B ALLEM WAS NOT like Dessusdelit. Dessusdelit kept her wealth hidden, and we didn’t know where. Ballem put it on the walls—some of it anyway.
    “Jesus,” I said when we stepped into the living room. The floors were wood parquet, covered with rich maroon carpets. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase held knickknacks and books and framed a group of black-and-white prints. “Those are real.”
    LuEllen squinted at the signature on a lithograph of a young girl in a bonnet. “Cassatt?”
    “Yeah.” I took one off the wall and turned it over. A framer’s tag was glued on the back panel, dated 1972. “Ballem would’ve gotten a great price on them way back then. Now they’d cost you an arm and a leg.”
    “Take them.” She was in motion, headed for the basement. “Women hide stuff in the bedroom and kitchen; men hide it in the basement,” she said simply.
    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 suggestedthat 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 mauland 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