The Empress File

supposed to warn her against going to work, but I was with John, and shit… I forgot. Fuck me, I forgot.” There was a tone of finality in her voice, with an undertone of bitter anger.
    “Jesus,
forgot
?” And now Sherrie was dead. I wanted to shout at her but I couldn’t. “There’s no chance that they did go off?” I was floundering, trying to react the right way, when I didn’t feel any of it. I had already reacted to the murders the moment that I saw them and this, now, was just playacting, deceiving a woman I liked.
    “No!” She almost shouted it. “What do you think they are?”
    “Marvel, I don’t know what to tell you. I didn’t see this coming.”
    “Neither did I.” She sighed. “We should have known. We’re playing with fire.”
    “Keep hoping,” I suggested. “Maybe… I don’t know… Look: Let me talk to John again.”
    John came back on the phone. “Yeah?”
    “Listen, if something was done to Harold and the woman… This Hill guy, the guy who came to see you with Ballem, is the town muscle. He’s nuts, I think—a psycho. You can take care of yourself, but there’s Marvel now, and her friends. People in town must know she was tight with Harold.…”
    “I’ve got some people coming down from Memphis,” John said. “Don’t worry about us, and don’t worry about what Duane Hill might do. If he gives us any shit, Duane’ll need a new head.”
    J OHN TALKED to Ballem again the next morning, and this time Dessusdelit sat in.
    “Like a crow,” John said. “She sat there with her head bobbing up and down, like she was pecking on me.”
    John had parked the white BMW on the street outside the lawyer’s office, where everybody might have a chance to look it over. In his time as an underground activist in Memphis, he’d pickedup the language of municipal development; the three of them, John said, had an intense discussion of tax increment financing. When he left, Ballem was seeking references to TI financing in the state statutes.
    They were excited, he said, but something else, too.
    “This Dessusdelit woman, man, she looks fucked up. I mean, she looked a little crazy. Are you sure she’s all right?”
    “She always seemed wrapped a little
too
tight, if anything,” I said.
    “Not now,” John said. “She looked frazzled.”
    John went to Memphis, more for show than anything, and returned to the Holiday Inn Friday morning, as Marvel was leaving for the capital. LuEllen sat in the Coffee Klatch Café across from the City Hall, watching the City Hall and prowling the adjacent stores. I was on the boat alone when Dessusdelit showed up. John was right: She seemed to be coming undone and asked if I was in the mind to do a reading.
    “Guess I could,” I said. “LuEllen’s not here, she’s up in town shopping—”
    “I simply would like to see what the cards say.” She was on the dock, and I was on top of the cabin, looking down. She was gray-faced, haggard. In the cabin I got out the deck, shuffled thecards, and pushed them across at her. She shuffled a dozen times, pushed them back.
    “Cut?”
    She hesitated, nibbling her lip, and finally cut.
    The cards rolled out, and as happens in most tarot readings, there was no clear, dramatic direction. What the cards said was more subtle than that. The Five of Pentacles—sometimes interpreted as a poverty card—popped up, and her sharp intake of breath indicated that she knew what it was.
    “Remember that everything is relative, and the cards have a hard time dealing with relativity,” I told her. “I could roll the Five of Pentacles for a Rockefeller, and it might mean that he’d be cut back to his last billion.”
    “It’s so much different from the last time,” she said in a small voice, seeming almost lost.
    The last card to come up was one of the major arcana, the High Priestess. I was startled but kept my face straight and started picking the spread apart.
    “There’s a secret,” I concluded, tapping the High Priestess. “I don’t know whether you have a secret or somebody has a secret they’re hiding from you. But if the secret comes out, there’ll be terrible problems. You can see how that influence in the High Priestess cuts right back to the Five of Pentacles, the loss card, the poverty card.”
    She was becoming increasingly agitated, clutching a wadded Kleenex in her fist, her knuckles white as marble.
    “Is it going to come out?”
    I shrugged. “I can’t see that.”
    “Can we do another