The Empress File

“consensus of the council” that committed the new members to resign when the former members were found innocent of wrongdoing.
    Only Hill voted with him.
    Then two black members of the audience got up and demanded a new investigation of the shooting of Darrell Clark. After some heated discussion—and a recess, during which Marvelspoke to Brooking Davis—the proposal was rejected, three to two, with Bell and Dodge voting in favor. Both Bell and Dodge were surprised by Davis’s decision to vote with Hill and Ballem, as were the black members of the crowd.
    “Brooking is going to take some shit, but we figure we’ve got to lay back. We don’t want anybody having second thoughts about who is on that council. We want him solid with the whites in town. I’d have told Dodge to vote against, too, but he’d already suggested a new investigation, so he couldn’t.”
    After a few more angry exchanges about the state investigation, Bell was about to adjourn the meeting when Davis brought up the bridge. Instead of looking to the state legislatures for money, he said, the city should look into the possibility of a revenue bond issue and build its own bridge. A toll bridge, if necessary.
    Bell said the idea had been proposed before, and the financing looked impossible. Davis insisted that it was worth exploring. Ballem was positively enthusiastic. There’d been some problems, but there’d been problems before, and the machine always kept rolling. Revenue bonds were just the thing to fuel it. The vote was unanimously in favor of Davis’s idea.
    “We figured that would get Davis in solid with Bell, just in case we need him later,” Marvel said.“Now, the real question is, When can we dump Ballem and Hill?”
    “Right away,” I said. “We’ll start working on it tonight.”
    “How’re you going to do it? The state cops could take a while with those books.”
    “Don’t worry about it. You just be ready to move.”
    E VERYTHING WAS rushing together.
    We got up early the next morning, drove to Greenville, and mailed sets of LuEllen’s murder photos to Ballem and Hill. We’d give them a chance to stew over the photos, and then LuEllen would call them. Using her best phony southern-belle accent, she would say that she had been on the hill, making landscape photographs, and that she’d seen Harold’s body and the shooting of Sherrie. She wouldn’t want to send a white man to the electric chair for killing a Negro, she’d say, but she would, if they didn’t quit and leave town.
    “How’re we going to convince Ballem? He wasn’t even there.”
    “Hill’s his errand boy. Everybody in town knows it. When he sees the pictures, he won’t argue. Not right away. He might go looking for the photographer later, but the first thing he’ll do is quit. Just to keep things quiet, so he can maneuver. When he does that, we’re outa here,” I said.
    We were back in Longstreet before noon. Themarina operator told us that Hill had been there and had asked after us but hadn’t left a message.
    “I heard that you and him had a misunderstanding sometime back, outside the Holiday Inn,” the marina man said.
    “It cleared up,” I said.
    “Yeah. Well, you take care,” he said, spitting in the river.
    We cut the boat loose and headed downstream again, looking for Sherrie’s body. As we passed the animal control complex, we could hear the ooka-ooka-ooka of the vacuum pump, working the death box.
    Late in the afternoon, a couple of miles above Victoria Point, LuEllen took the binoculars down from her eyes and pointed out over the water.
    “Over there. Yellow.”
    “Another float?”
    “Doesn’t look like a float. Looks like it’s stuck on a tree.”
    Sherrie’s body was hung up on a dead cotton-wood sweeper near the Concordia Bar Light.
    “Jesus,” LuEllen said as we drifted up. The smell of decaying flesh was overwhelming. I had intended to tangle the body in a wad of heavy monofilament fishing line and tangle the line in some brush, to anchor it, but in the end, neither of us had the stomach for the job. Instead, we calculated the distance the body lay above the light and turned back upriver.
    “We’ll call it in as soon as we get back,” I said.
    The run back upstream was depressing.
    “How come we keep getting people killed, Kidd?” LuEllen asked.
    “You keep asking, and I keep telling you: We don’t,” I said. “They get themselves killed. We’re just unlucky enough to be around when it happens.