“Could I give you some… advice? Something to think about?”
Dessusdelit stopped with her hand on the doorknob, looked carefully at LuEllen, then nodded.
“I was once involved in a situation… well, it wasn’t the best situation, and there were some police involved. I don’t want to say more. But I will tell you something about the American legal system: It’s quite difficult to convict anyone of anything, and when time passes, it becomes almost impossible. You know what I did, when I had my… trouble? I went away. And nobody really looked for me. It was too much trouble, I guess. I went back four or five years later, talked to some people who were involved with me, and it was like… nobody even remembered that the police once were looking for me. Nobody cared.”
“You’re saying I should go away?”
“I don’t know what your problems are exactly,” LuEllen said. “I’m just saying that… there are options. There are some really wonderful places in the world and here in the United States. Longstreet isn’t everything.”
Dessusdelit nodded a last time, stood silently for a few more heartbeats, then said, “Thank you,” and walked out.
When she was on the levee, LuEllen turned to me and said, “She told Hill to kill Harold and the woman, Sherrie.”
“Yes. I think that’s what she was telling us,” I said. “What was all that bullshit about running from the cops?”
“Give me the car keys,” LuEllen interrupted. “C’mon, quick.”
I handed her the keys. “Where’re you going?”
“After Dessusdelit,” she said hastily. “You call Bobby. Ask him to monitor Dessusdelit’s phones. We want to know if she’s going anywhere tonight or if anybody’s coming over.”
LUELLEN WAS GONE for four hours. I filled the boat’s diesel tanks and got some gas for the auxiliary generator, then climbed up on the top deck with a sketchbook. John called in the early afternoon.
“Two things,” he croaked, as though he were losing his voice. “We identified Harold and Sherrie. Marvel and I stayed away, though. Sherrie’s brother did it. He freaked out and told the cops that Sherrie was screwing Hill and about how all this weird shit was going down in Longstreet.… I suspect the deputies will be calling on Hill—or the Longstreet cops will.”
“You didn’t tell her brother?”
“We didn’t tell him anything except that we’d heard it on the radio. I told him that he had to make the identifications because Marvel couldn’t stand to do it, and I didn’t know either one of them. He went along.”
“Was it bad?”
“Man, Marvel is fucked up. I’m going to have to take some time with her.”
“Jesus, John, I’m sorry…”
“And there’s the other thing,” he said. “The council’s called another special meeting, but it’s not until tomorrow night.”
“Hmph. I would have thought… I guess that’s OK, but I would have thought they’d do it quicker.”
“Maybe stalling for time. Maybe trying to figure out who knows what. You take care.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You, too.”
When LuEllen returned, she was wearing the intent look she develops when she’s working, when she’s turning a job in her mind.
“Where were you?” I asked.
“Greenville,” she said. “I shadowed Dessusdelit back to her place and waited for a few minutes, to see what she’d do. She came back out, got in her car, and drove down to Greenville.”
“To do what?”
“Visit a bank,” LuEllen said. “She had a briefcase with her when she came out of her house. She was carrying it by the handle and threw it in the backseat of the car. When she came out of the bank, she was carrying it with both hands.”
“She took something out of the bank,” I said.
“Yeah. Out of the safe-deposit box in a town where she’s not known.”
“She had some money stashed.”
“She had something stashed, and now she’s got it in her house. She’s thinking about running.”
“And you…”
“I’m going to hit her again. She killed Harold and Sherrie, and she’s got to pay.”
“You weren’t that close to Harold, and you never even knew Sherrie.”
“They’re fuckin’ Nazis,” LuEllen snarled. Then, in a milder voice, she said, “Besides, there’s some bucks in it. Truth be told, she’s the kind of fat cat I’d hit just for the money, and the first time around we never really touched her.”
BOBBY REPORTED a flurry of calls between Dessusdelit, Hill, St. Thomas, and Ballem, all cryptic but increasingly testy. Ballem had gone to the chief of police about the burglary of his house but hadn’t formally reported it, Bobby said. And he’d gotten the murder photos in the mail, delivered while Dessusdelit was in Greenville.
“He didn’t tell her what the pictures were, but he wants to see her tonight. They’re meeting at his house after dark. He’s only about three blocks from her, so she’s going to walk over. Hill’s going to be there, but they haven’t said anything about St. Thomas. I think they’re cutting St. Thomas out.”
“Or planning to set him up for the murders,” I said.
HILL WAS INSISTING that the “goddamn artist” had something to do with the machine’s problems, but the others weren’t listening, Bobby said. “Dessusdelit told him she knew all about the problems between you and Hill. She said that if they wanted to get out of this trouble, they had to stop fantasizing and understand that they caused the problems themselves, by making a mistake, and now they have to straighten it out themselves.”
“Sounds like she’s recovering herself,” I said to LuEllen when I passed on Bobby’s information.
“It also sounds like she’s going to be out of her house tonight,” LuEllen said.
We argued about whether to hit Dessusdelit, and LuEllen won.
“Look,” she said, “the heart of the machine is Ballem, St. Thomas, Hill, and Dessusdelit. We know we can take Hill and St. Thomas, because the cops have the bodies, and we have the photos. We already ripped Ballem for those stamps, and now we’re siccing the IRS on him; plus he’ll be tarred with the killings whether or not he’s convicted of them. But Dessusdelit—Dessusdelit slides free, unless the IRS gets her for evasion or the state gets her on a corruption charge. That’s not enough. But if we take her stash, we take her heart out. Everybody says that she lives for money. Even the cards said so, didn’t they?”
“The cards are bullshit,” I said.
“Yeah, right.”
LUELLEN TOOK DESSUSDELIT by herself. The house was an easy target the first time, and it was easy the second. It was, however, a little tough to watch, so we watched Ballem’s instead.
Dressed in navy blue sweats and running shoes, we parked in the country club lot—there was a dance going on, and the lot was full—and jogged along the edge of the golf course to a small copse of trees off the third tee. From there we were looking right down at Ballem’s front door. Hill arrived first, a little before nine, and then Dessusdelit walked in. We jogged back to the car, called Dessusdelit’s place from a pay phone, and, when we got no answer, nipped off the receiver.
As we drove down to Dessusdelit’s, LuEllen 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 she crawled 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 wa
s 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.”
JOHN 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 said quietly. 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.”
“TIME 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 off. “He’s always going up and down the river collecting stuff for his sculpture.”
“Oh, yeah? He does river stuff?”
“Yeah, out of water-worn glass and old bottles and driftwood and shit,” I said.
“I’d like to see some of that,” he said, and he sounded as if he did. When we were out of the marina, I turned upstream. LuEllen wanted to keep on going to St. Paul.
“Hill’s fucked,” she argued. “We send some pictures to the cops and forget it. Toss the gun overboard.”
“The photos might not be enough if the cops don’t know where they come from. A good defense attorney might be able to keep them out of evidence. And we can’t tell them where we got them, unless we want people looking at our backgrounds, … But if they find the gun out at animal control… that’d seal it up tight.”
“I’m getting scared, Kidd. We’re walking the edge, with Hill and the cops and everybody.”
“I know. One more night, and we’re out of here.”
A mile or so above town we cut through a side channel behind a sandbar. The channel was too clogged to go all the way through, but it got us out of sight of the main river. LuEllen tossed her burglary tools over the side, one by one, along with the case. All could be replaced, and she had not an ounce of sentimentalism for them. She held the lockpicks out; we’d need them at animal control.
Her camera equipment I could claim as my own, if the cops searched us and asked about it. I’d say I used it to shoot landscapes. We still had the extra prints of the murder photos, the gun, and the jewels. LuEllen hid the jewels by cutting tiny holes halfway through the carpet in the corner of the bedroom. She pressed the stones into the holes until they were out of sight, but before they came through the underside of the carpet. Even if somebody lifted the carpet, the jewels would be invisible and secure.
That left two sets of photos and the negatives. Working with gloves, LuEllen packaged the prints and wrote short notes, in block letters, to the county sheriff and to the commander of the state police district headquarters. The negatives she put in another envelope. We’d mail that to a reliable friend in St. Paul, an old lady who lived in the apartment below mine and who took care of my cat while I was gone.
Finally, the gun.
“There’s nothing we can do with the gun except keep it hidden,” I said. “We need to hide it only until tonight.”
“What if there’s a reception committee waiting back at the dock?”
“Then we’re fucked anyway, because we’ve still got the photos.… Look, the main problems are the jewels and the lockpicks. The jewels they won’t find, and we can throw the picks overboard if we see somebody waiting. We can’t dump the gun or the photos, but we can explain them if we have to. We say we were taking landscape shots from the top of that hill, saw the killings, and were afraid to do anything because we believed Hill was psychotic. Because we didn’t know the town, and we were scared, and because Hill was friends with all the cops—”
“Sounds like bullshit,” she said.
“It’s all I got,” I said.
THERE WAS NOBODY waiting for us. Even the marina manager had gone off somewhere. We stuck plenty of stamps on our packages and put them in separate mailboxes.
As we were walking back to the Fanny, LuEllen asked, “Is there anybody in this whole thing that we haven’t lied to at one time or another?”
I had to think about it for a minute. “Bobby,” I said finally. “I don’t believe we’ve lied to Bobby.”
AFTER SOME ARGUMENT we decided I should go to the city council meeting that night, while LuEllen went to the animal control complex with the gun.
“What if somebody wonders what you’re doing there?” LuEllen asked.
“I just tell them I’m hanging out, that Dessusdelit was a friend. Shit, at this point I don’t care. Hill and Ballem will be there, if only to quit. But I’ve got to see them. If something went wrong…”
“OK.”
“I’ll call you from City Hall. If Hill and Ballem are there, you can drift the boat down, tie off on that wall. If it’s clear, you go in, dump the gun—put it up in the ceiling maybe—and get out. Coming in from the river, at night, you should be OK, if you’re careful about scouting it out.…”<
br />
“I’d rather go without you anyway,” she said. “Safer that way.”
“Yeah. And as soon as I see what’s going on at City Hall, I’ll cruise animal control, just in case. If there’s a problem, turn on a light. If everything’s OK, get out. I’ll see you back here.”
“And we leave tomorrow morning.”
“As soon as I get the car back.”
The meeting was scheduled for seven-thirty. I left the boat fifteen minutes early, expecting a mob at the City Hall. When I pulled into the lot across the street, there was already a crowd on the sidewalk. Neither Hill nor Ballem seemed to be around, but I waited, watching, until people began drifting inside.
The city council chamber was a small semicircular auditorium with seats for perhaps fifty people. Folding chairs had been brought in, and thirty lucky spectators were occupying them. Another dozen people were standing against the wall. The air-conditioning couldn’t keep up. The temperature inside must have been in the nineties, and the sweating townspeople used stacks of agendas from the last meeting to fan themselves. Nobody was giving up a seat.
Marvel and Matron Carter, the basketball coach who’d be the fifth council member, were sitting together near the front. John was absent; still a little nervous about showing his face, he was waiting at Marvel’s.
The word about Dessusdelit had gotten around, and it was the major topic of conversation as we waited for the council to show. The wait went on for ten minutes, fifteen. Then Bell came in through a side door, looking harassed, and said to a long groan that the meeting would be delayed until eight o’clock.
I stepped outside, relieved to be in the relatively cool hallway, and walked down to a pay phone and called LuEllen.
“Wait,” I said. “I haven’t seen either Ballem or Hill, and they’ve delayed the meeting. I don’t know what’s going on.”
“I’ll wait,” she said.
At ten after eight Bell reappeared, apologized again, said the meeting had been delayed another twenty minutes, and suggested that the townspeople adjourn to the sidewalk.
“You all are starting to parboil,” he said. Then he looked out into the crowd, searching the faces, and stopped when he got to mine.
Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4 Page 43