He thought for a moment and then said, "Will it hurt them?"
"No," I said. "Their feelings would be hurt not to know, but they don't really need to know. In fact, if they did, they might do something that would hurt all of us. Especially Marvel – and John's in bed with her now."
"All right," he said after another minute. "You and me."
"You know Harold's gone missing?"
"Yeah."
"Hill killed him. And the Sherrie woman."
Bobby whistled. "For sure?"
"For sure. Put their bodies in the river. I need you to do two things. First of all, I need you to call Dessusdelit. You should tell her that you know Harold was at her house and you know what he was doing there. Tell her that you know that Hill took him away in the van and that Hill killed Harold and Sherrie. Tell her you know that she was in on it. Tell her she ought to quit the city council anyway, but if she doesn't, along with St. Thomas and Carl Rebeck, you're gonna turn her in. Mention the electric chair. Tell her you want her to quit Monday morning with the others."
"You want me to call her right now?"
"Right now. Shake her out of bed."
"All right. What's the other thing you need?"
"The Army Corps of Engineers runs computer models of the Mississippi on all kinds of things."
"Yeah?"
"I want you to get into their data base in St. Louis, or maybe it's down at Vicksburg, whatever, and run a model on a body dumped into the river just below Longstreet. See where it'd get in a week."
Sunday.
I had the feeling that mobs should be in the street with torches, storming the castle gates. But Dessusdelit didn't live in a castle; she lived in a rambler. And instead of mobs in the street, we got church bells from three different directions. I sat on the upper deck and sketched, while LuEllen would pace the cabin, come up and sunbathe for a while, then go below and pace some more. Halfway through the afternoon we both started drinking gin and tonics and got mostly in the bag, something we rarely do.
With our blood alcohol levels about as high as they get, we had a wonderful idea. We talked about it for a few minutes. Then we went below and called Rebeck's house. His wife answered.
"I gotta talk to Carl," I said urgently.
"Can I ask what this concerns?" The voice of a politician's wife.
"Well, uh, I just been talking to one of them state boys," I bumbled. "You better tell Carl to get his ass on this telephone, this is important."
Rebeck picked up an extension a minute later. "Yes?"
"Carl, I don't want to say who this is 'cause I could get in trouble myself. But you know me, and I know you, and I'm here to tell you, those state boys have got more than some money shuffled around. Somebody's got themself hurt. I don't know who, but they got homicide investigators comin' in. If I was you, I'd go have a talk with them state folks. Maybe you can get out while the gettin' is good."
"What-" he started, but I hung up.
"There," I said drunkenly, "that'll fix things."
"You need another gin and tonic," LuEllen said, and we fell around the inside of the cabin, laughing about Rebeck.
At four o'clock Bobby dumped to the computer and tapped the alarm. By that time we were sobering up, and the call to Rebeck no longer seemed like such a good idea.
"What the fuck were we doing?" LuEllen moaned.
"Shit, it'll be OK," I said, grimacing. I hadn't gotten loaded in two years.
When I brought up Bobby's file, I found a series of calculations based on current, channel shape, and flow that suggested that the bodies would be anywhere from three to twenty-five miles downstream. He listed a series of probabilities for each location but warned that "the bodies could have gotten hung up on something two minutes after they went in the water and maybe went nowhere."
On the other thing, he said, "I did Dessusdelit."
"Fuck it," I said to LuEllen as I crawled back up the ladder. "Let's go out on the water."
The marina operator was reseating planks at the end of the dock, working with a power drill, a couple of crescent wrenches, and a stack of two-by-sixes. LuEllen waved to him, glass in hand, as we went out, and he waved back with his own beer bottle.
We headed south past the warehouses, elevators, and the tank field, past animal control. There was nobody in sight at the complex, and at the revetment, where Hill and St. Thomas had dumped the bodies in the water, I put LuEllen ashore. She jogged up the levee path, watching the weeds for snakes, and peeked at animal control. Nobody home.
She came back, and we examined the last of the murder photos, the shot of Hill throwing the pistol into the river. I had no idea how much the lazy current would deflect something as heavy as a pistol, so we anchored ten feet above where it had gone in the water and began working with the magnet. LuEllen didn't have a great deal of faith in the possibility of finding it. I thought it was mostly a matter of patience.
I was using a muskie rod to cast with, with the magnet tied on instead of a lure. The magnet was heavy, but if I got my shoulders into it, I could toss it twenty-five or thirty feet downstream and then crank it back upstream to the boat.
And I found the pistol, just about the time my arms started to tighten up. There was a clank transmitted through the rod, and I said, "Whoops," and gave the rod to LuEllen and went back and eased up on the anchor. When we had the line running pretty much straight up and down, I slowly retrieved it. It was a.45. A good old government model from Colt. I detached the gun from the magnet, cut the magnet from the line, and threw it overboard.
"Why'd you do that?" LuEllen asked.
"I hate magnets. Damn dangerous things, around computers and software."
We spent another hour poking along to the south, scanning the banks for any sign of a shirt. Bobby's note said the shirt was what we'd see, since the decomposition gases gathered in the abdominal and chest cavities.
Nothing. I cleaned the gun as we went along, lubricated it with some WD-40, and put it back together. Good as ever. Some people like guns, some people don't, but you can't deny their quality as machines.
We hid the pistol with the money bag, down in the engine compartment; as the sun went down, we turned the Fanny's nose upstream and headed back. Five minutes after we arrived at the marina, Marvel called.
"They're going to quit," she exulted. "It's all over town. They had a meeting at Dessusdelit's house, and St. Thomas went home and told his wife. They're out of here."
On Monday Dessusdelit called at nine-fifteen. I was still asleep, and LuEllen crawled over me to answer the phone, then handed it over.
"I'm. I really need. some help. Would it be. could you come to the City Hall, my office? And bring your tarot?" She sounded ragged, desperate.
"Now?"
"Yes. Right away. You'll have to hurry. I've got a meeting at ten."
We took quick showers, then grabbed my tarot and LuEllen's crystal ball and drove up to the City Hall. Dessusdelit's office was in the city council suite. There was a secretary's desk in an outer office, a conference room, then a series of four closet-size offices for the councilmen, and a double-size closet for the mayor. A dozen people milled around the ground floor, outside the council meeting chambers, and a couple more slouched against the walls in the council's outer office.
The harried secretary said, "Mr. Kidd?" as soon as we walked in, and ushered us through to Dessusdelit's office. Dessusdelit was with one of those young-old people you find in corners around city halls, a guy maybe twenty-five, who'd seen fifty years' worth of corruption and showed it in the weary, overly wise crinkles around his eyes.
As tired as he looked, Dessusdelit looked worse. She'd aged ten years in two days. She'd tried to cover her distress with makeup, but now she looked like a painted puppet.
"Could you excuse us for a minute, Robert?" she asked the young-old guy. "I have to talk to these folks privately for a few minutes."