The Empress File

paid too much, though. I wanted to seem anxious but like I was trying to hide it. And I wanted him talking around town about how he stuck it to the city boy.”
    “Does he seem like the sort to do that?” I asked. “I hope.”
    “Actually, no,” John said with a grin. “Heseemed like a pretty decent guy. But the real estate dealer was an asshole. She’ll talk. She asked me what I wanted the land for. I told them my heritage was in cotton farming and I was thinking of going back to it. She had to stick her hankie in her mouth to keep from laughing. I was wearing the wing tips. They figure I’m a crack dealer from Memphis.…”
    “OK,” I said. “So the word’ll be around.”
    From the bed, Marvel was saying, “If
Outhouse
is the bar payments, what’s
Suburb
?”
    “Sounds like they’re getting it,” John said.
    I T TOOK three hours to nail down the printouts. Davis, who’d seemed frail when I first met him, was as intense as Marvel or Harold, and they often deferred to him. But not always. There was one heated argument over a series of entries on recreational fees. The entries might have exposed the Reverend Dodge, and Marvel didn’t want to take the risk. Davis, who apparently hated Dodge, did. Marvel won.
    John whispered: “That woman can talk the bark off a tree.”
    “How’s your… uh, relationship?”
    John glanced covertly at Marvel, then looked back at me. “I’m trying as hard as I can, man. Sometimes I think she’s about to haul my butt back to the bedroom, but then… I mean, Jesus,this is takin’ longer than it has with any woman I ever met.”
    “Is she real, or is she teasing?”
    “She’s real, I think.”
    “Then that’s probably a good sign,” I said. “All the time…”
    “You think so?”
    We both looked at Marvel and realized that everybody in the room was looking at us. We’d been whispering in a way that immediately attracts attention.
    “Uh, we didn’t want to bother you, talking,” John said.
    “Uh-huh,” said Marvel.
    “H ERE ’ S THE SITUATION ,” Marvel said, a half hour after her argument with Davis. She rolled off the bed and whacked a rolled-up copy of the printout against her thigh. “This is good stuff. It lays out the kickbacks and the payoffs, how much and where it went, but everything is done by code numbers. We
know
who the code numbers represent, but we couldn’t prove it immediately.”
    “If the IRS gets it, they could check bank deposits.”
    “Sure,” said Davis, “but that would take some time. If things drag out, we might not be able to get all of them out of the office simultaneously.”
    “Not even if they steal a hundred thousand bucks?” John asked.
    “That’d do it, but that’s an extra risk, and we don’t know if that whole crazy con game with the bridge is going to work,” Marvel said. “We were talking back in Memphis about blackmailing them out of office.”
    “Not the first three,” I said. “Only the governor’s redneck appointments.”
    “Why not try it now?” Marvel asked. “The bridge idea has always seemed kind of… shaky. If we can get around using it, we’d expose John to less risk, you and LuEllen to less risk, and we might get to the same place.”
    I thought about it for a moment. If we could blackmail them out of office, there
would
be less exposure. And LuEllen was worried already.… I looked at John. “What do you think?”
    “Sounds OK to me,” he said. He turned to Marvel. “How would we do it?”
    “Harold will call Dessusdelit, tell her he’s got to see her, that it’s important,” Marvel said. “She knows him, she knows he wouldn’t bullshit. He’ll go over to her house and lay the books on her. Tell her that all he wants is her resignation. Hers and St. Thomas’s and Rebeck’s. They quit, and he loses the books.”
    “Can you pull it off?” I asked Harold.
    “I don’t know,” he said pensively. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at Marvel, and I realized he would do about anything she wanted him to. “It’s worth a try, I guess.Dessusdelit’s a politician, and she used to sell real estate. She’s been cutting deals all her life. Maybe she’ll figure she can cool out the books and come back later. She won’t know the rest of it—the part about us taking over the town.”
    I glanced at John again, then turned to Marvel.
    “OK with me,” I said. “But it’s your call.”
    “Let’s try it,” she said with satisfaction. “If it doesn’t