The Empress File

me and LuEllen,” I said. “John’s not to know, or Marvel. If you can’t handle that, I’ll go some other way.”
    He thought for a moment and then said, “Will it hurt them?”
    “No,” I said. “Their feelings would be hurt not to know, but they don’t really need to know. In fact, if they did, they might do something that would hurt all of us. Especially Marvel—and John’s in bed with her now.”
    “All right,” he said after another minute. “You and me.”
    “You know Harold’s gone missing?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Hill killed him. And the Sherrie woman.”
    Bobby whistled. “For sure?”
    “For sure. Put their bodies in the river. I need you to do two things. First of all, I need you to call Dessusdelit. You should tell her that you know Harold was at her house and you know what he was doing there. Tell her that you know that Hill took him away in the van and that Hill killed Harold and Sherrie. Tell her you know that she was in on it. Tell her she ought to quit the city council anyway, but if she doesn’t, along with St. Thomas and Carl Rebeck, you’re gonna turn her in. Mention the electric chair. Tell her you want her to quit Monday morning with the others.”
    “You want me to call her right now?”
    “Right now. Shake her out of bed.”
    “All right. What’s the other thing you need?”
    “The Army Corps of Engineers runs computer models of the Mississippi on all kinds of things.”
    “Yeah?”
    “I want you to get into their data base in St. Louis, or maybe it’s down at Vicksburg, whatever, and run a model on a body dumped into the river just below Longstreet. See where it’d get in a week.”
    S UNDAY .
    I had the feeling that mobs should be in the street with torches, storming the castle gates. But Dessusdelit didn’t live in a castle; she lived in a rambler. And instead of mobs in the street, we got church bells from three different directions. I sat on the upper deck and sketched, while LuEllen would pace the cabin, come up and sunbathe for a while, then go below and pace some more. Halfway through the afternoon we both started drinking gin and tonics and got mostly in the bag, something we rarely do.
    With our blood alcohol levels about as high as they get, we had a wonderful idea. We talked about it for a few minutes. Then we went below and called Rebeck’s house. His wife answered.
    “I gotta talk to Carl,” I said urgently.
    “Can I ask what this concerns?” The voice of a politician’s wife.
    “Well, uh, I just been talking to one of them state boys,” I bumbled. “You better tell Carl to get his ass on this telephone, this is important.”
    Rebeck picked up an extension a minute later. “Yes?”
    “Carl, I don’t want to say who this is ’cause I could get in trouble myself. But you know me, and I know you, and I’m here to tell you, those state boys have got more than some money shuffled around. Somebody’s got themself hurt. I don’t know who, but they got homicide investigatorscomin’ in. If I was you, I’d go have a talk with them state folks. Maybe you can get out while the gettin’ is good.…”
    “What—” he started, but I hung up.
    “There,” I said drunkenly, “that’ll fix things.”
    “You need another gin and tonic,” LuEllen said, and we fell around the inside of the cabin, laughing about Rebeck.
    A T FOUR O ’ CLOCK Bobby dumped to the computer and tapped the alarm. By that time we were sobering up, and the call to Rebeck no longer seemed like such a good idea.
    “What the fuck were we doing?” LuEllen moaned.
    “Shit, it’ll be OK,” I said, grimacing. I hadn’t gotten loaded in two years.
    When I brought up Bobby’s file, I found a series of calculations based on current, channel shape, and flow that suggested that the bodies would be anywhere from three to twenty-five miles downstream. He listed a series of probabilities for each location but warned that “the bodies could have gotten hung up on something two minutes after they went in the water and maybe went nowhere.”
    On the other thing, he said, “I did Dessusdelit.”
    “Fuck it,” I said to LuEllen as I crawled back up the ladder. “Let’s go out on the water.”
    The marina operator was reseating planks at the end of the dock, working with a power drill, a couple of crescent wrenches, and a stack of two-by-sixes. LuEllen waved to him, glass in hand, as we went out, and he waved back with his own beer bottle.
    We headed south past the warehouses,