I shrugged. "Not me."
"I've got a job and an. organization. in Memphis," John said. "I don't have any interest in moving in."
She pursed her lips. "I heard about your organization. Bunch of old lame-ass ex-Panthers, is what I hear."
"Maybe our asses are lame, but they're not getting kicked by a bunch of Delta peckerwoods," John snarled. I was thinking uh-oh. They were knocking sparks off each other, in the angry, confrontational way that tends to lead directly to the bedroom. Harold felt it, too, and was looking back and forth between them.
"How about this?" Marvel suggested, turning to me. "You figure something out. A plan. If we don't like it, we can get out anytime."
John looked at me, and I shook my head. "We can't have key people bail out at a critical moment. That could kill us."
"How do we handle it?" he asked.
"We lay out a proposal," I said, turning to Marvel. "If you like it, you're in. If you don't, we go home. But you tell us up front."
She thought about it for a moment, then said, "I've got to talk with Harold." She led the thick man into a back room and shut the door.
"The problem with Commies is double crosses are built into their system," John said when the door had closed behind them. He was leaning back in his chair, his arms crossed over his chest. "It's all hobby politics. They never have to deal with anything real. They just fuck with each other. We got to think about that."
"Maybe you should hold down the Commie bullshit," I said. "At least until we decide something. And stop talking to her tits, for Christ's sake."
"Was I?"
"Yeah, you were."
Marvel and her friend spent ten minutes in the back. When they came out, she plopped down on a couch, and the thick man moved behind her. They both looked us over. "We're in for now," she said. "What do you want to know?"
I opened the portable and said, "Notes."
"It's still not easy for black folks to get decent city jobs," Marvel said, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees. I'd asked where she got her inside information on the machine. "There are a few black cops and clerks, but most of the blacks who work for the city have menial jobs. Nobody pays any attention to them; it's a hangover from segregation, when a nigger was less than nothing. You wouldn't hide anything from a nigger cleaning lady any more than you'd hide it from her mop. So there are still a lot of invisible people around – cleaning ladies, janitors, garbagemen. Some of them are pretty smart. And we talk. There's not much that gets past us."
There were four men and a woman on the Longstreet City Council. The woman, Chenille Dessusdelit, was mayor and was also the city's chief administrative officer. She had an insatiable hunger for money, Marvel said. And she was intensely superstitious.
"Her mama and her husband died about six weeks apart, and that's when she really got strange," Harold said. "She was always superstitious, but after that it was stars and crystals and talking to the dead. There used to be a Gypsy fortune-teller in town, an astrologer. Chenille'd see her every week. Then the Gypsy died, too. Come to think of it, a lot of people die around Chenille."
"What kind of name is that? Chenille whatever it is?" I asked.
"Deh-soos-da-leet," Marvel said, and she spelled it. "It's old French. The French go way back here in the Delta, back even before the English."
"All right."
Of the other four council members, one was black: the Reverend Luther Dodge. Besides presiding over a Baptist church, he ran a city recreation center on the black side of town. He had demanded a special investigation of Darrell Clark's killing but agreed that it should be done by local officers, one black, one white.
"That guaranteed that the cop'd get off," Marvel said. "The local boys wouldn't cut on one of their own." When the final report came out, whitewashing the shooter, Dodge had acquiesced to it.
"If we take down the town, is Dodge a potential front man for whatever's left?" I asked, taking it down on the portable.
"Not for me," Marvel said. "He's as bad as any of them. He's in on the city council deals, and he clips the receipts at the recreation center. We figure he takes a hundred dollars out of the swimming pool receipts on a hot summer day. And we have a lot of hot summer days."
"He has an eye for the girls," Harold said suddenly. It was something of a non sequitur, but he carefully didn't look at Marvel.
"What Harold's saying is, Dodge has been trying to get into my pants since I was twelve," Marvel said.
"So he's human, big deal," John said, not quite under his breath.
Marvel suppressed a grin and started to say something, but I broke in: "We take him, too?"
"Yeah. Take him."
The other three city councilmen were white.
Arnie St. Thomas, Marvel said, was a loan shark – and he used the city's money in his operation. Another, Carl Rebeck, was an insurance agent. He didn't do much, just voted the way he was told, and collected a piece of pie. "He's not smart. I doubt that he even knows that what he's doing is illegal. To him, it's just business. The councilman does favors for people, and they pay him for it."
"Who's the fifth guy?" I asked, typing.
"Lucius Bell. He's a cutie pie," Marvel said with a genuine smile. "He's a farmer. He's honest, I think, 'cept for one thing."
"What's that?"
"Our bridge fell down a few years back. Got hit by a runaway barge. To make a long story short, it never got replaced. Bell's a farmer, mostly on the other side of the river. He came over here and got himself elected to the council for no other reason than to get the bridge back. Everybody knows it; hell, everybody agrees with him."
"But he's not a big mover with the machine?"
"No. That's the mayor."
The mayor, with the council's advice, oversaw nine city departments. Every one of them was corrupt. Even animal control.
"The dogcatcher is a separate department?" John raised an eyebrow.
"Gotta lot of mean dogs around here," Harold drawled. He said dawgs, like a country boy.
"Duane Hill – he's animal control – is the machine's muscle," Marvel said simply.
"Like when?"
"Like we had some young lawyers go through here, from the rural legal services. They looked like they might set up shop. Duane got a bunch of his lowlife friends to hassle them. Every time those boys went out, somebody wanted to fight. The cops were always saying they couldn't do anything, it was just some boys gettin' drunk. That was bullshit. Duane himself beat up one of them. With a pool cue. Hurt him so bad the boy had to go to Memphis to get his teeth fixed. Eventually they all went away, and they never came back."
"Nice guy."
"Duane's the meanest man on the Mississippi River, I believe," Harold said, with what sounded almost like a note of rueful pride, "He gets a piece of the city council's take, of course, but he also sells dog blood on the side. You know, to veterinary hospitals. He has customers all over the mid-South. The way he gets the blood, he sticks a big needle into the dog's heart and lets it pump out. The more it hurts the dog, the better it is, because the heart beats harder. They say some nights, down at that end of town, you can hear dogs howling for hours."
"Do you have a contact out there?" I asked Marvel.
"I've got somebody I can work on," she said.
"Do it. Now, you mentioned the city attorney a while ago. How does he fit in?"
"He's the fixer. and maybe, with Chenille, the brains behind everything," Marvel said. "He drinks too much, and he's a bad man. He doesn't like black people, or anybody else, much. He's got two kids – they're both gone now, up North working – and the word is, he doesn't even like them. I'd say he's right at the heart of the action."
"Hold that thought," I said. "Who's the center of the machine? That's what we need."
Harold and Marvel looked at each other, and Marvel pursed her lips, then turned back to me. "I'd say the center of the machine is Dessusdelit, the mayor; Archie Ballem, the city attorney; Arnie St. Thomas, the councilman; and Duane Hill, the dogcatcher. Dodge and Rebeck have their own constituencies, but they're mostly along for the ride. They don't make any decisions. And there are a lot of smaller fish. The city clerk helps Dessusdelit run things, and then there are the department heads, individual cops, and so on."