The Empress File

I’d had it in my pocket the night I went into animal control.
    “You know what this is?” he asked.
    “I don’t believe so,” I said, taking it from him. “Looks like what, a key to a Coke machine?”
    “Maybe,” he said, taking it back. “The police found it under St. Thomas, out at animal control,when they picked him up off the floor, dead. It didn’t match up with anything of his.”
    I tried to look puzzled. “Why would I know what it is?”
    He shrugged. “It’s just kind of a mystery. I’ve been walking around for a year, asking a lot of people. Nobody recognizes it.”
    “Me either,” I said.
    “And it’s about time to bury the past,” he said. He pitched the key toward a fifty-five-gallon oil drum being used as a trash can. He was no basketball player, and the key bounced off the side, into the sand.
    “Never be in the NBA,” he said, echoing my thought. “Say hello to Miz LuEllen for me? If you see her?”
    “Sure.”
    He wandered away. I watched him cross the park, speak to Marvel and then to John, then drift over toward the City Hall. He stopped at the corner, looking down toward the river. From there he should be able to see the bridge just fine.
    I got seconds on ice cream, served by Marvel herself.
    “Tonight, about ten o’clock, at my place?” she said.
    “Sure.”
    I finished the ice cream, watching kids on the slides and the swings, and then strolled down to the river to watch the light die on the bridge. Itook a sketch pad with me and got a fair view of the thing, but I doubt I’ll ever do a painting. The angles are all wrong.
    J OHN WAS at Marvel’s.
    “June wedding, up in Memphis,” Marvel said. “You’re invited. And LuEllen. Bobby’s set for best man. On a computer.”
    “You’re looking pretty fuckin’ smug,” I said to John.
    “What can I tell you?” he said. “I’m old, bald, and dumb, and she said she’ll marry me.”
    “Let’s not talk about old,” I said. “You’ve got about three weeks on me. Let’s talk about somebody else being old.”
    Marvel said she had been disappointed by the ice cream social. Ninety percent of the kids had been black, she said. They had to do better with the whites.
    “We’ll do better,” John said. “It’ll take a while. Maybe we should have another social in the summer.”
    “Maybe,” she said. “I sure do like ice cream.”
    “How’d you figure the bridge out?” I asked her.
    She shook her head and turned away.
    “He’s got a right,” John said softly. “Wasn’t no white boys beat him up in Memphis. You know that.”
    She looked at me, and I shrugged.
    “Tell him,” John said.
    “I bought it,” Marvel said. “With the money you took out of the City Hall.”
    “Bought it?”
    “Ain’t it wonderful?” John asked.
    “I did what had to be done,” Marvel said. “I called up my man at the capital, told him in one minute what was happening—how close we were to taking the town—and then I asked if seventy-five thousand dollars in untraceable cash would buy me the bridge. He said if I got it to the right three or four legislators, it’d buy me a bridge and two ferryboats if I wanted them. I said the bridge would be enough, but I had to have a commitment quick. He got a phone number from me, for Bell’s office. Then I went and sat there, chewing my nails, and fifteen minutes later, with Bell getting pissed, the phone rings, and the speaker of the house tells Bell he might be able to work some kind of deal on a bridge.… Said I ‘was a pretty convincing gal,’ is what he said.”
    “And Bell went out and voted against your ticket, but you had the votes,” I said.
    “That’s right.”
    I looked at John and remembered that he’d said something about Commies and hobby politics. “Doesn’t sound like hobby politics to me,” I said.
    “Woman learns quick,” he said.
    “What about Darrell Clark and his family? Did you reopen the case?”
    “No, no, we didn’t,” Marvel said, her eyes shifting away from mine. “We were having control problems. We didn’t want there to be any more uproar than there already was. Not until we got the election districts redrawn.”
    “How about now?”
    “Well, it’s just kind of… awkward,” she said.
    “Not good politics,” I said, “to reopen the case.”
    “That’s right. And Darrell’s gone… can’t get him back. And there’s no money left for the family. That all went.…” She gestured in the general direction of the state