The Empress File

confession.
    “Painting?”
    “No, no.” He slowed for a moment, letting a woman in an old canary yellow Ford Pinto squeeze in front of us. Traffic in Memphis is usually tangled, especially when you get close to the water. The heat didn’t help, and the people who weren’t sealed in air-conditioned cars were drivingwith an air of desperation. “I make things. Out of wood and glass and rocks and clay, from down along the river.”
    “Sell it?”
    “Shit,” he said in disgust.
    “I’d like to see it.”
    He looked over at me for a moment. “Maybe.”
    We lapsed back into silence. Ten minutes later we were on a narrow two-lane highway lined with recapped tire joints and motels with signs that said TRUCKERS WELCOME . Memphis was disappearing in the rearview mirror.
    “Where’re we going?” I asked.
    “Downstream,” he said. We were running along the river in the gathering evening twilight. “It’ll take a while. Town of Longstreet.”
    “What’s in Longstreet?”
    He didn’t answer. Instead, he braked and turned into a roadside convenience store. When we’d stopped, he said, “I want to get Cokes and ice. I’ve got a cooler in the trunk.”
    “Get a six-pack of beer, too,” I said. I took a five-dollar bill out of my pocket, passed it to him, and asked again, “What’s in Longstreet?”
    “A problem. Maybe some trouble. A lot of hate.”
    “A garden spot,” I said.
    “It’s in the fuckin’ Delta,” he said, as if that explained everything. “There could be some money in it.”
    “That sounds interesting,” I said.
    “Yeah. Bobby thought it might.”
    W HILE HE WAS in the store, I considered the possibility that Bobby had dipped into my IRS files. I hadn’t decided one way or the other when John returned. He stashed the cooler on the backseat, and we each popped a can of Coke. It was a small piece of camaraderie and seemed to loosen him up. He started answering questions.
    “Where’s Bobby?” I asked, as John barely beat a tractor-trailer onto the highway. “In Longstreet?”
    “I don’t know. I never met him,” John said, sounding a little puzzled. “I thought you’d know.”
    “No. I’ve never met him face-to-face.”
    “Huh. I wonder if
anybody’s
ever met him face-to-face.”
    “
Somebody
must have. He’s got to eat.… You’re a computer jock?”
    “No. I work for a legal services company, investigations. The company’s got a computer system, with electronic mail. One day I got a piece of mail from Bobby. About a case I was working on—he’d read about it in the papers, developed some information from data bases. He gave me a number to call on the computer gizmo—”
    “Modem.”
    “Yeah. I called, and we’ve been going back andforth ever since. Five years. I even got my own computer so I could talk to him… privately. He can get anything. Crime reports, credit records, secret research you’d never see. I don’t know where he gets it, but it’s always right.”
    “Data bases,” I said. “He’s a genius with them. But that still doesn’t tell me about Longstreet.”
    T HERE ’ D BEEN a kid named Darrell Clark, John said, fourteen and computer smart. A friend of Bobby’s. Knew his math. Knew his logic. At least, that’s what Bobby said. Bobby sent him a book called
A Primer for the C Language
along with a pirated copy of a C compiler. Darrell came back three days later with a sophisticated Mac II program. Sent him
Assembly Language for the Mac II.
Talked to him in a month and got back an assembler program of breathtaking complexity.
    “The kid was smarter than Bobby. That’s what Bobby says.”
    “You keep saying
was
,” I said. “What happened to him?”
    “Longstreet cops killed him.” John tipped his head for a mouthful of Coke. “They say Darrell came at one of them with a knife and the other one had to shoot. Everybody knows it’s bullshit. What really happened was, they thought Darrell was a purse snatcher and they shot him by mistake. In the back. With a machine gun.”
    “Jesus. A mistake?”
    “They had this new toy, this machine gun. The cop had to try it out. Blew the kid all over the railroad tracks.”
    “So what happened to the cop?”
    “Nothing. That’s why we’re going down there,” John said. He glanced over at me. “Darrell Clark won’t get justice. His family won’t. The town is sewn up tight by an old-time political machine. The cops are near the center of it, and they won’t let their man get taken