The Empress File

unscrewed the car’s dome light, so it wouldn’t come on when the door opened. I took the car into the cul-de-sac, as though lost, and slowly rolled through the turning circle. When we passed Dessusdelit’s driveway, I stopped just for a second, said, “Go,” and LuEllen rolled out the back door. She pushed it shut before shecrawled away, and I continued out onto the road.
    LuEllen said ten minutes max. I drove back to Ballem’s house and parked on the street near the entrance to the country club. Hill’s car was still in Ballem’s driveway, and I once saw a shadow on a curtain, moving across the living room.
    Eight minutes. I started back. At nine minutes, forty-five seconds, I was a block from the entrance to the cul-de-sac. I stopped at a corner, reached back, and opened the right rear door. The only turn I had to make was a right turn, so it shouldn’t swing open.…
    At ten minutes and ten seconds I rolled through the cul-de-sac a last time. I paused again at the end of Dessusdelit’s driveway. LuEllen popped into the backseat, staying low, and held the door shut with her hand.
    “Get it?” I asked.
    “Yeah, but I don’t know what I’ve got,” she said. “It’s the briefcase, but I didn’t find it until about a minute before your pickup. She had it hidden behind some built-in drawers under the linen closet.”
    When we were well away from Dessusdelit’s, she screwed the dome light back in and climbed into the front seat. We were sitting at a downtown stoplight when she dug into the briefcase and came up with a handful of small white envelopes,the same kind I’d taken out of the wall cache.
    “More stones?” I asked.
    “A fuckin’ river,” she said, dumping a glittering tracery of light into the palm of her hand. “Diamonds. Emeralds. Some rubies. Jesus Christ, Kidd, there’s so many you could make a snowball out of them.”
    “So she’s paid.”
    “Oh, yeah. She’s paid.”

J OHN WALKED DOWN to the boat the next morning, just as we were getting up.
    LuEllen had gone out to the main cabin, wearing only a pair of underpants and a T-shirt. I was sitting on the bed with my feet flat on the floor, suddenly bone-tired, when she called, apprehensively, “John’s coming.”
    “What?” I stood up, pulled on my artist’s shorts and a T-shirt, and padded barefoot into the cabin. John was at the bottom of the levee wall, just stepping out on the pier. I went out to meet him, shading my eyes in the bright morning sunlight. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with Beethoven’s face on the front. He waved cheerily to the marina manager, then came right up to the boat.
    “Hey, Kidd, how’s the work going?” he called in a voice loud enough for the manager to hear. He scrambled aboard, and we shook hands.
    “I’m John Smith, Memphis artist,” he saidquietly. He was sweating harder than seemed necessary, even with the heat. “We need to talk. I didn’t think you could risk coming to Marvel’s, and we don’t have time to go out in the country.”
    “Come on inside,” I said.
    “Bizarre shit,” John said as soon as the door was shut. “Did you hear about Dessusdelit?”
    “What about her?”
    “She’s dead. The cops think it was suicide. Last night.”
    LuEllen stared at me, deadpan.
    “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Do you know anything else?”
    “They found her in bed, wearing a pink nightgown. She took a bunch of pills and whiskey, I guess. There was a note, but I don’t know what it said. The cops are talking to Ballem, I know that.”
    “What about the meeting tonight?”
    “That’s still on, as far as I know, but I thought you needed to hear about Dessusdelit, and I was afraid to call on the phone. Quite a few people know she was seeing you, getting her cards read.…”
    “You think the cops are coming here?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t know what the note said.”
    “Jesus.”
    “T IME TO GO ,” LuEllen said when John left.
    “We can’t now,” I said. “If the cops want to talk to us, we’ve got to be here. If we take off and they come looking for us…”
    “What a fuckin’ mess. We did another one,” LuEllen said.
    “How’re you gonna know?” I said. “Assholes aren’t supposed to kill themselves.”
    “We’ve got to clean the boat out,” she said. “If they go through it, they’ll find my tools.”
    We decided to go out on the river.
    “That was an artist guy from Memphis, haven’t seen him in years,” I told the manager as we cast