The Empress File

shuffling was dead, I spread the deck across the table and looked at Dessusdelit.
    “Do you know about the tarot?” I asked before she picked a card.
    “Just a bit,” she said diffidently.
    “I like to warn people that the Death card doesn’t mean death. It means change, often for the good. I don’t want somebody to pull the Death card out of the deck, misinterpret it, and drop over dead of a heart attack.…”
    “I know about Death,” she said. She drew a card, held it for a moment, facedown, then flipped it over.
    The Empress. I sat back, a little startled. “Have you actually done tarot readings before?” I asked.
    “Yes, a few times.”
    “What card did you choose to represent yourself? Was it the Empress?”
    “No, no. Usually the Queen of Cups.”
    “Which is a minor arcana analog of the Empress,” I said. I tapped the Empress with myindex finger. “Perhaps you underrate yourself. In any case, the Empress would suggest success, fulfillment in an enterprise you’re involved with. Something you rule or manage. But that’s just a taste.”
    “Just a taste,” she said.
    “Sure. I have to warn you, I really don’t believe in this stuff,” I said. And if I did, I wouldn’t have picked her for the Empress or even the Queen of Cups. I pushed the cards together and rewrapped them in the silk.
    “Well, I thank you,” Dessusdelit said. She found her purse, and we went back out into the sunshine, with LuEllen trailing behind.
    “If you’re really interested…” I said.
    “I am,” she said promptly.
    “I read best in the morning. Frankly, I like to… have my beer, you know, and alcohol seems to interfere with the necessary connections.…”
    “I thought you didn’t believe in the magical interpretations,” she said in amusement.
    “Well.” I shrugged. “You got me, I guess.”
    “Come down tomorrow,” LuEllen said. “About ten o’clock. Kidd can do a reading, and we can do the ball again. And then maybe you can tell me where the best shopping is.…”
    “I’ll be happy to,” Dessusdelit said. She looked at me again. “The Empress…”
    “Just a taste,” I said.
    LuEllen and I watched her step off the end ofthe dock and start up the levee. “How’d you do that?” LuEllen asked, shading her eyes as she watched Dessusdelit disappear over the top of the wall. “Produce the Empress card?”
    “I didn’t,” I said.
    L ATER , while I put the computer back up, LuEllen went out to a grocery store and ran into Lucius Bell in the fresh produce department. He was the councilman who owned my painting.
    “He wants us to come over tonight,” LuEllen said as she unloaded her bags into the refrigerator. “After dinner. For bourbon and branch, whatever that is.…”
    “Water,” I said.
    “Whatever.” She closed the refrigerator door and stretched like a cat, as she tends to do when she’s feeling sexy. “That boy could develop a serious case of the hots for me.”
    “And would it be reciprocated?”
    “Could be,” she said, grinning. “He has the nicest eyes, good shoulders…”
    “Probably wears nylons and lipstick when there’s nobody around. Does strange things with carp.”
    “Not my Lucius,” she said in a southern simper.
    “Why, God?” I asked, appealing to the ceiling. “Why women? Wasn’t the fuckin’ bubonic plague enough? Wasn’t the H-bomb—”
    We were kidding. On the way over to Bell’s, though, I noticed she was wearing her Obsession.
    I’ D DONE
Sunrise, Josie Harry Bar Light 719.5
five years before, in about twenty minutes, sitting awkwardly on a sandbar a few feet from a rented pontoon boat. I’ve done a lot of traveling on the river over the years, though never before in the style of the
Fanny
. It had always been in little fourteen-foot bass boats and rented pontoons and even canoes.
    Josie Harry
was one of the good ones. I spotted it, hung on a white wall between two built-in book cabinets, as soon as I walked into Bell’s dining room.
    “Wonderful,” I said. “Who did the framing for you? The gallery?”
    “No, I had it done here in town,” he said.
    “You found a good framer,” I said. “It looks fine.”
    I went over it inch by inch. After a minute or two LuEllen and Bell wandered back to the sitting room, chatting. They liked each other, all right, but I didn’t expect any trouble. LuEllen had a penchant for variety but only when her security wasn’t at stake. She would never let sex step on that.
    “Satisfied?