The Empress File

little to do with it, I’m afraid,” Bell said.
    I’d never asked LuEllen about the death of Duane Hill, and I never would. If she wanted to tell me about it someday, I’d listen.…
    Bell was still talking. “After Duane died, Arnie must have killed himself. Took us all day to figure out what happened. We thought at first that somebody else might have been involved. Then the police started getting photographs. Somebody took some pictures of Duane and Arnie killing these two black people, man and a woman, putting their bodies in the river. One of them was Hill’s girlfriend. The other one, the man, was a guy around town here. We think he maybe was bumping the girl, and Hill found out.”
    “So he killed them? Hill did?”
    “No doubt about it,” Bell said. “We had the photographs, and when the state crime lab checked Arnie’s gun, they found it was the same one that was used to kill the black woman. Test bullets matched the ones they took out of her body, and Arnie had powder traces on his hands and face, like you get from firing a gun. And a couple of boys who worked out there said, ‘Yeah, it looked like a gun Arnie sometimes shot out there.…’”
    “Hill was nuts,” I said. “I kept telling people that. I don’t know about St. Thomas.”
    “You were right about Duane, though I didn’t see it at the time,” Bell admitted. “All the river towns have a Duane Hill somewhere. I knew he was rough, but I didn’t know he was insane. Not until they did the autopsy on the black fella.”
    “Hmmm?”
    “They couldn’t figure out what killed him at first. After Hill was killed in the vacuum box, the pathologist down at Greenville suddenly had an idea what it might have been. They did some tests, and sure enough, it seems like the black fella had been killed in a vacuum box. Just like a big old German shepherd.”
    “I love the South,” I said, finishing the ice cream on my plate. “Your ways are so quaint.”
    “Well, I just thought you might like to know how it came out, you having left so soon after, and all.”
    “It is interesting, in a sort of distant way. I mean, not being from here, and all,” I said. Time to change the subject. “Nice bridge you’ve got there,” I said.
    The bridge’s superstructure was painted with a reddish anti-corrosion paint. You could see the top of it over the park trees, glowing in the setting sun.
    “It’s the mayor’s doing, and it’s gonna save my financial butt,” Bell said. He looked across the grass at Marvel, standing behind the table with a scoop in her hand. “The empress of ice cream.”
    “I saw her picture on
Time
magazine when she got it,” I said. “She’s a pretty woman. The Red Marvel, they called her.”
    “
Time
magazine. We couldn’t believe it. The only American town with a Communist mayor.”
    “She says she’s not.”
    “Yes, yes, she says she’s a social democrat. Nobody believes it. Not down here. ’Course, she’s got reelection locked up, since she brought in the bridge, and the way the council went and gerrymandered the new election districts. But I don’t care, as long as the bridge comes along.”
    “
Time
says the state legislators were stumbling over themselves, approving the funding.”
    “They had a remarkable change of attitude,” Bell said dryly. Then he laughed. “Two weeks after we elect her mayor, with the town in an uproar, she drives into the capital, meets with thegovernor and the old redneck who’s the speaker of the house, and they all get their picture taken on the capitol steps, shaking hands on the deal. That stopped a little traffic, I’ll tell you.”
    “It’ll be a pretty bridge,” I said. “There are lots of pretty bridges over the Mississippi. I’m happy to see you keeping it up.… How about you? For reelection?”
    “No. I’m gone,” he said, shaking his head. “I never did like this peckerwood town anyway. I moved back across the river, where I belong. Besides, it took the folks about fifteen minutes to figure out what I should have done that night: that I should have walked out and prevented a quorum. They figure I made a deal with Marvel.”
    “Did you?”
    He squinted down at me with a small grin. “Yep.”
    I nearly choked on my last bite of cake, laughing, and Bell stood up and brushed off the seat of his pants. Then he dug into a pocket and took out a computer key. The key, if anyone had bothered to check, would fit the front panel of my North-gate IBM clone.