The Empress File

wonder.”
    “He’s not one of your friends,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
    “No. When he was in third or fourth grade, he used to steal from my husband’s store; we own the department and sporting goods stores in town, the family does. I caught him once and sent him on his way. The second time I took him by the ear and dragged him down the street to his parents’ house, for all the good that did. The Hills were always… trashy, I suppose. The third time I caught him, I took him down to the police station, and he went to juvenile court. He’s not forgotten those trips with his ear stretched out like a rubber band.” She smiled. “I like to think his head is lopsided, but I suppose it’s wishful thinking.”
    She had me laughing. “I hope this won’t cause you any trouble,” I said.
    “Oh, no. Duane knows where the lines are drawn. He came to look at you because the way things work here, he’s sort of the town—” She groped for a word.
    “Dogcatcher,” I said.
    She looked at me, no longer smiling. “Exactly,” she said. “I hear from the rumor mill that he’shad some trouble lately. Someone broke into his home.”
    “Crime is everywhere these days,” I said distractedly, in my flattest voice.
    “Yes, it is.” She looked at the painting on the easel, and the smile came back. “Very nice.”
    “Not so good,” I said. “I’m just getting a feel for it. It’s a complicated subject. I’m not really painting the house, you know. I’m painting the light.”
    “I understand from Chenille that Lucius Bell owns one of your works, bought it in N’Orleans.”
    “That’s what he says.”
    “He’s a nice boy, Lucius,” she said. “Grew up poor, put together a very nice farming business. Educated himself.”
    “Poor but not trashy?”
    “Definitely not trashy. Poor and trashy don’t have much to do with each other, do they?” she said.
    “Not much,” I conceded. “Listen, Mrs. Trent, you want a Dos Equis? I got a couple of bottles in a cooler.”
    “Well…” She looked around, as if spotting neighbors peering from behind curtains. “Well, yes, as a matter of fact, that would be nice on a hot day. But why don’t we sit on my porch?”
    W E HAD a nice talk, and then she went back to her air-conditioning, and I spent the rest of the afternoonworking on the painting. LuEllen was in town, ostensibly shopping but also checking out the City Hall and the city attorney’s personal office. About four o’clock the dogcatcher’s van crossed the street a block down, slowly, and I could see Hill’s face in the driver’s side window, looking my way.
    There’s a myth that bullies can’t handle a real fight, that if they get into a real fight, they fold. My experience is just the opposite: Bullies like to fight. They go far out of their way to fight. They are men who look for slights—imagined ones will do nicely—as an excuse. Hill, I thought, was probably one of them. He had that look, the narrow, scarred, righteous eyes of a sociopathic brawler. I hadn’t seen the last of him.
    A little after five, when the light started to go red, I dumped the water, closed up the easel, and put the painting gear in the Chevy. On the way back to the marina I stopped downtown. Just a look, I thought.
    The Longstreet City Hall was kitty-corner from Chickamauga Park, the town square. The square was a busy place; there was a children’s play area, with swings, a slide, monkey bars, and a huge sandbox. Metal benches lined the walks, and one or two old men were perched on each of them. The equestrian statue, of old Jim Longstreet himself, was at the center of the square, a major attraction for passing pigeons.
    The City Hall looked like most of the other business buildings in town: squat, brick, undistinguished, vaguely
moderne
. The streets on the front and one side were not particularly busy and were fronted mostly by service stores selling hardware, office equipment, auto parts, and so on. An alley ran down the back of the building, to a small blacktopped parking lot and an entryway with a lighted glass sign that said POLICE . On the fourth side, the side with no street, was a hardware store. The store was separated from the City Hall by a ten-foot-wide strip of grass.
    I walked through the square, stopped to look at Longstreet on his big fat horse, then waited for two traffic lights, crossed to the City Hall, and went up the steps. Inside, it was cool and slightly damp, the kind of feel you