The Empress File

mayorin the most natural way. Harold suggested that we catch her during lunch.
    “She eats a political lunch every day, with the city attorney or the city clerk and maybe one or two other people,” Harold said. “You could bump into her there at the restaurant.”
    We paid the marina operator, and he moved us to a permanent slip. While the two of us did the phone, power, and sewage hookups, LuEllen went back into the houseboat to make a quick addition to her wardrobe. When we walked up the levee into town, she was wearing a slender, glistening quartz crystal the size of my little finger, wrapped in gold wire and strung around her neck on an antique gold chain. The crystal rested between the swell of her breasts, the swell provided by her new uplift bra. You’d have to be blind to miss it. The crystal, not the bra.
    Most of the Mississippi River valley below Memphis had been wiped out by the great flood of 1927. In rebuilding, a lot of towns turned their backs on the river, fortifying themselves behind the levees. Some of them simply picked up and moved away from the water altogether.
    Longstreet hadn’t been hurt as badly as other places. The residential heart of Longstreet was on naturally high ground. When the flood came, it took out the first couple of blocks of the business and warehouse districts along the river,but most of the town stayed dry. As a result, the rebuilt business district was a collection of redbrick thirties and forties architecture, backed up by a residential area that was much older.
    The town square, Chickamauga Park, was on the first major terrace up from the river, at the center of the business district. Two blocks beyond that, the business buildings started shading into the white residential neighborhoods. The white neighborhoods went on up the rising ground, across the crest to the railroad tracks. The black neighborhoods were on the far side of the tracks.
    We didn’t get that far. We took our time strolling up the ridge, getting acquainted with the town. It was hot but not yet unpleasant. The mix of river odors and flower perfume was as rich and interesting, in its own way, as new-mown hay.
    “Uh, by the way, what’s your name today? Your last name?” I asked.
    Across the street, a heavyset woman in a sun-bonnet was tilling a garden with an ancient Case lawn tractor.
    “Case,” LuEllen said, watching the woman in her beans. “LuEllen Case, okay?”
    “Sure,” I said. “And thank Christ she wasn’t driving an International Harvester.”
    The restaurant where the mayor ate lunchwas a ferns-and-antique-bricks place called Humdinger’s, down the block from the City Hall. Most of the local movers and shakers would be there between eleven-thirty and one o’clock. I knew the mayor’s face from political advertisements Marvel had sent us, and LuEllen had seen her on the street during her scouting trip. Her face fixed on us as we crossed the street toward the restaurant.
    “There she is, like Harold said,” LuEllen murmured.
    “I see her. Ballem’s with her,” I said. I took LuEllen’s elbow in my hand as we crossed the street. “There’s an open booth just before theirs. That’s the one we’ll take. You sit closest to the door, so you’re facing her. Let her get a look at that crystal.”
    “I’m cool,” she said. I glanced at her, and her face looked dewy from the heat and humidity, but otherwise serene.
    “You didn’t put any of that shit up your nose, did you?”
    A flash of irritation crossed her face. “That’s only for hard targets,” she said.
    “Just checking.”
    “You’re not my father.”
    “No, but—”
    “But what?”
    “Nothing.”
    Humdinger’s had creaky wooden floors andrough brick walls and framed reproductions of English sporting prints, a place that strained for sophistication without quite making it. The general lunch hour buzz dimmed noticeably when we stepped inside, heads turning in our direction. There was a sign near the cash register, PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED . The waitress who came to seat us took a good look at LuEllen, a shorter one at me, decided LuEllen was in charge, and said to her, “This way please.”
    We were headed toward the windows, but just to make sure, LuEllen touched the woman on the arm and said, “I wonder if we could have that window booth.”
    “That’s where I was taking you, honey,” the waitress said.
    I sat in the booth with my back to Dessusdelit, so she could see LuEllen. Even without the