The Empress File

“We can’t just let it go.”
    “OK, but please, please, we don’t tell Marvel or John what happened. We don’t tell anybody. This is for us, man.” She was looking up at me and it occurred to me how small she was. “An investigation would drag us out in the open.”
    “For us.” I threw an arm around her head and tightened up in a wrestler’s headlock. She wrapped her inside arm around my waist. Not your basic
Gone With the Wind
clinch, but it felt right.
    “Bobby will talk to them, tell them he called us.”
    “So we tell them that we went out to Dessusdelit’s house, saw no sign of Harold’s car, so we just kept going,” LuEllen suggested. “We looked around for a while, checked animal control, but there just wasn’t anything to see.”
    “Jesus.” I ran my hand through my hair. There was an impulse to go out on the bow, take off the lines, and head south. That was impossible now.
    LuEllen looked at me closely. “Kidd, sometimes you have these… impulses… to do the right thing. You’ve got to keep them under control. There’s not a goddamned thing we can do for Harold or that woman. Nothing that would be worth going to prison for.”
    “I’d better call Marvel.”
    “What for?”
    I shrugged. “To start working both ends against the middle.”
    M ARVEL WAS frantic.
    “I don’t know,” I kept saying. I suggested that she and her friends start hunting for Harold’s car.
    “You don’t think he’s hurt?”
    “You know these people better than I do,” I said, a sour taste in my mouth.
    “All right. We’ll get people out looking. Maybe I ought to go over to Dessusdelit’s house, confront her—”
    “No, no. Don’t do that. If they have done something with Harold, you could be in trouble. Especially the way they’ve got the cops fixed. The best thing is, find him. Find his car. Figure out what happened. But don’t do anything to derail the plan. If worse comes to worst, and something happened to him, it’s more important than ever that we take the town.”
    It occurred to me that none of us was using the words
killed, murdered
, and
dead
. It was
if something happened… if he’s hurt.
…
    The day dragged by. Marvel launched her search, while LuEllen processed her film and began printing.
    “You want something to weep about, look atthese,” she said when she came out of the bathroom/darkroom. She was printing on RC paper to cut the wash time, and the prints were still soft and damp. She laid them out on the table like grotesque place mats.
    The killings were graphically portrayed, as real as anything I’d seen from Vietnam, Beirut, or Salvador. She laid them out in sequence, from the time Hill and St. Thomas came out the door carrying Harold’s body to the instant when the murder gun hit the river. If LuEllen had been a newspaper photographer, she’d have had a Pulitzer locked up.
    “Christ, it could be out of the thirties; even the people look the same. Hill’s got that haircut, those short-sleeve shirts.…”
    You couldn’t quite see the pores in Hill’s face when he pulled the trigger on Sherrie, but close enough. If the photos ever got into court, they’d send the two men to the electric chair.
    LuEllen slumped in a chair. “I’m feeling pretty bad for a cowgirl.”
    LuEllen had processed both the negatives and the prints wearing vinyl gloves, and I carefully avoided touching them, even when they were dry. Photo material is notorious for picking up and preserving fingerprints. When I was done looking at them, we sealed the prints inside a plastic garbage bag and taped them to the underside of a drawer.
    Marvel called every hour or so. Finally she decided she had to see us. We’d meet at the Holiday Inn, at John’s room, in an hour.
    She and John were waiting when we arrived.
    “Not a fuckin’ thing,” she said, pacing the room. “Can’t even find his car. What do you think?”
    “He wouldn’t go off by himself?”
    “No, of course not,” Marvel said angrily.
    “Then… I think… he may be dead.”
    She stopped, looked at John, and a tear ran down her face. “I think so, too,” she said. “They couldn’t just grab him and let him go later.…”
    “No.” I turned and looked at LuEllen, and her face was like a rock.
    “Oh, God.” Marvel sighed. She was standing close to John, and he slipped an arm around her waist and squeezed her.
    Jesus, I thought, these people trust us.
    W ITH NOTHING MORE TO SAY , we left Marvel to continue her