The Empress File

couldn’t get himself coordinated.
    We were parked in the yard, just down the steps from Hill’s front door. There was a light in one window, but no movement. From the porch we could hear the phone ringing. LuEllen shoved a pry bar into the door, threw her weight against it, and ripped it open.
    “Whoa,” LuEllen said. The house stank of spoiled food and cigars, an unwashed human, bad plumbing, neglect. Old wallpaper sagged from the plaster-and-lath walls, and there were water stains on the ceiling.
    Hill had no computer. LuEllen went straight into the basement, while I went upstairs and began ripping apart the bedroom. Neither of us found anything, and we met on the first floor.
    “Where?” she said, one hand on her hip. She walked slowly through the house, taking it in. There was no question of art; there was nothing on the walls but calendars and a couple of stuffed deer heads. I knocked the deer heads off, but there was nothing inside. I looked in the stove and pulled the drawers out of the kitchen cabinets. Nothing.
    “Kidd. C’mere.”
    “What?”
    “Look at this.”
    When the house had been built a century ago, a bookcase had been built under the first flight of the staircase. Hill had piled the shelves with junk; spark plugs; cans of two-cycle oil; a few paperbacks. LuEllen had dumped one of the shelves and pulled it out.
    “They’re too shallow,” she said. “So I pulled the shelf out, and it looks like it’s been cut down.”
    I looked at it. The shelf had been cut lengthwise with a power saw. Once it had been a foot wide or wider. Now it would barely hold Hill’s few paperbacks.
    “You check the other side?”
    “There’s a storage space on the basement side, but it’s full of cobwebs, and there’s an old wall. No way to get in. I’m thinking the stairs…”
    The stairs were carpeted with a wool rug that must have been nearly as old as the house. I looked at the bottom of it. There was a loose place, and I grabbed it and pulled. The rug came up with a ripping sound.
    “Damn. Velcro,” LuEllen said. Velcro tabs had been glued to the rug and floor, to hold it in place. The rug covered the steps, and when we started working on them, three of them came cleanly away.
    Tightly wedged into the space beneath the stairs and behind the bookcase’s back wall was a pile of ordinary plastic garbage bags. LuEllenpulled one out and dumped it. Cash. She pulled another. More cash.
    “Son of a bitch,” she whispered. “The mother lode.”
    We had the bags in the car in five minutes, stepping carefully around the feebly thrashing dogs. They were coming back but not quickly.
    “Paint?” LuEllen asked.
    “Fuck it,” I said. “Anything we did to that place would be an improvement.”
    “All right.”
    We saw no more cops. LuEllen dropped me next to the Continental in the Wal-Mart parking lot, and less than an hour after we had pulled into Chenille Dessusdelit’s garage, we were gone, out of town, up the highway to Memphis. We dumped the take at the
Fanny
just after midnight. The cars we left in a hotel parking ramp, keys under the front seats. Neither of us had taken off our driving gloves, so they’d be clean.
    B ACK AT THE BOAT we counted the cash from Hill’s safe. Three hundred and seventy thousand dollars, with bills that went back more than ten years. Ballem’s coins made the total take much higher. There were sixty-five of them, sealed individually and certified by a numismatic rating service. She called a friend in Las Vegas and got a price: another two hundred thousand, and that might be low.
    She was most interested in the stamps.
    “Stamps are money if they’re not too rare. You don’t want a one-of-a-kind, where everybody in the world would notice the sale. But if you get stamps that are worth a few thousand dollars each—investor kind of stamps, like those coins are investor kind of coins—they’re just like money. They’re money everywhere. Fuckin’ Bolivia, Bangkok, Saudi Arabia—there’s always somebody who’ll buy. Especially these—British issues.”
    “What if these are one of a kind?” I asked, paging through the book. “What if they’re worth too much?”
    “Fuck, I don’t know,” she said. “We throw them away, I guess.”
    She didn’t know any stamp freaks but was hot to peg the values. I called Bobby.
    Need number of philatelic data base.
    Hold.
    Three minutes later he came back. He knew only one that was on-line twenty-four hours. He gave me