The Empress File

the best face on it but let enough sickly kindness ooze into my voice that she had to know what I was doing.
    Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times, and finally she blurted, “I’ve had some personal difficulties.”
    “That’s what we’re seeing then. But remember, the Tower doesn’t always mean disaster,” I continued with a patently false heartiness. “Remember when I told you that sometimes it’s as simpleas looking at the picture? One time I had an opening scheduled for a Chicago gallery. For me it was a big deal. I don’t usually do the magical kind of tarot spreads, but I was worried about this opening; my career was in the balance. So I said, what the heck and did a spread—”
    “And the Tower came up?” she asked eagerly. She was looking for reassurance, and since I had obviously survived the Tower…
    “Exactly. Well, you can imagine how I felt. I even considered canceling the opening. But that was ridiculous. I couldn’t do it. Food had been ordered, and wine. There were dozens of invitations out, including to the newspaper critics. Besides, I kept telling myself, it was just superstition—”
    “What happened at the opening?” she asked, cutting me short.
    “At the opening? Nothing. It went wonderfully.” She allowed herself a small smile. “But
before
the opening… well, the question I had asked the cards was, ‘How will my day go tomorrow?’ Thinking, of course, about the opening. And I got the Tower. The next day I was eating breakfast, English muffins with orange marmalade. I was using a toaster to toast the muffins, and one got stuck and started to burn. When I thought about it later, I knew I’d been blindly stupid, but I wasn’t thinking at the time. What I did was, I used a table knife to try to pry the muffinout. I got a terrific shock. Threw me across the room. My arm and hand spasmed for days.”
    Dessusdelit’s smile slowly died.
    “Everything was fine with the opening. The Tower was simply a picture that portrayed something that would happen to me. The card shows a lightning bolt, like the electricity in the toaster. I damn near electrocuted myself.”
    As I said that, the blood drained from her face. The state had the electric chair, and after Harold and Sherrie, it must have been on her mind.
    “Could I look at your ball again?” she stuttered at LuEllen.
    “Sure.” LuEllen got it from its bag, and Dessusdelit rolled it through her hands. Nothing.
    “No color,” Dessusdelit said.
    “Maybe things just aren’t right,” LuEllen said. “You’ve got to be able to focus. If you can’t focus your mind, the ball won’t have anything to react to.”
    “Goddamn,” Dessusdelit muttered. I nearly dropped the cards, and LuEllen sat back, surprised. Dessusdelit’s bony hands clenched on the table in front of her. Her mouth was running as though she were speaking in tongues. “We’ve got these goddamn niggers in town, goddamn nigger bitch, ruining it for ever’one, ruinin’ ever’thing. Started happening when that shitheel dickhead cop shot that nigger kid trash fuckin’ coon down on the tracks.…”
    She rambled on insanely for a moment, then seemed to run down. She sat for another few seconds, staring blindly at her hands, then suddenly stood and walked out.
    LuEllen followed her to the door, said, quietly, “Take care of yourself, Chenille,” and watched her go up the levee wall. Over her shoulder she said, “The fuckin’ mayor’s cracked, Kidd. We cracked her open like a fuckin’ egg. And it’s amazing what leaked out, was it not?”
    “First-degree murder ain’t shoplifting,” I said.
    D ESSUSDELIT LEFT around ten-thirty. At noon the state attorney general’s auditors hit the town like the great flood of ’27. They came in a convoy, six plain brown government cars and three state police cruisers. LuEllen and I were eating cheeseburgers at Humdinger’s when they went by.
    “The cavalry,” LuEllen muttered over her chicken noodle soup.
    “Too late for Harold,” I said. “C’mon, let’s go.”
    “Where to?”
    “That hardware store we hit last night. I saw some really big magnets in there.”
    J OHN HAD TAKEN the BMW back to Memphis the night before and dropped it at the dealership where he’d rented it. After catching a couple of hours of sleep, he drove back to Longstreet in hisown car. He was hiding out at Marvel’s, a non-person, cleanly shaved, what little hair he had cropped to a stubble, carefully wearing faded