"Hang on." I got my drawing box, dug around, and came up with a compass and a set of dividers. Using the compass, I drew the missing portion of the dial over Wells's intruding finger. With the dividers, I measured the intervals between the visible numbers and marked them off around the rim of the dial.

"If this is the centerline," I said, indicating the line with a ruler and a sharp pencil, "then the digit is. sixty-six. Give or take a digit."

LuEllen looked at me and grinned. "You do have your uses. Other than sexual, I mean."

CHAPTER 11

It was all coming together. Smoothly. Too smoothly, LuEllen said. She was born and raised in Minnesota and was automatically suspicious of pleasantness. No matter how nice the summer is, winter always comes.

With the printouts of the Longstreet books in hand, I called John and Marvel. We agreed to drive to Greenville, where we could meet in a motel without dodging the Longstreet locals.

LuEllen stayed with the boat. There'd be new people in Greenville, and she was paranoid about her face becoming known. At two o'clock Marvel let me into her room at the Sea-B Motel. John was there with Harold and a man I hadn't met before.

"This is Brooking Davis," Marvel said, nodding at the stranger. Davis was a slender, bird-boned man with a square chin, a dark mustache, and the liquid eyes of an Arab. "He's a lawyer and does appraisal work for the county assessor's office. Brooking will be our first appointment on the council. If Harold and I don't know where the bodies are buried, Brooking will."

"Well, we found you some grave sites," I said, handing over the printouts. "It looks simple enough, but I don't know how it breaks down."

Davis had two boxes full of city budgets, memos, and reports. He unloaded them on a credenza, and Marvel and Harold pulled chairs up to the bed. In two minutes the three of them were in deep discussion, comparing numbers on printouts with expenditures and collections in the city reports.

"How'd it go with Brown?" I asked John.

John smiled. "He was a little surprised when I turned out to be black, looking like I did – and driving that BMW – but we're all set," he said. He stepped over to a black nylon briefcase, unzipped it, and pulled out a sheaf of papers. "I gave him a cashier's check for a thousand dollars for a thirteen-week option on six hundred acres, at nine hundred and twenty dollars an acre. He was asking a thousand, but I dickered a little. I still paid too much, though. I wanted to seem anxious but like I was trying to hide it. And I wanted him talking around town about how he stuck it to the city boy."

"Does he seem like the sort to do that?" I asked. "I hope."

"Actually, no," John said with a grin. "He seemed like a pretty decent guy. But the real estate dealer was an asshole. She'll talk. She asked me what I wanted the land for. I told them my heritage was in cotton farming and I was thinking of going back to it. She had to stick her hankie in her mouth to keep from laughing. I was wearing the wing tips. They figure I'm a crack dealer from Memphis."

"OK," I said. "So the word'll be around."

From the bed, Marvel was saying, "If Outhouse is the bar payments, what's Suburb?'"

"Sounds like they're getting it," John said.

It took three hours to nail down the printouts. Davis, who'd seemed frail when I first met him, was as intense as Marvel or Harold, and they often deferred to him. But not always. There was one heated argument over a series of entries on recreational fees. The entries might have exposed the Reverend Dodge, and Marvel didn't want to take the risk. Davis, who apparently hated Dodge, did. Marvel won.

John whispered: "That woman can talk the bark off a tree."

"How's your. uh, relationship?"

John glanced covertly at Marvel, then looked back at me. "I'm trying as hard as I can, man. Sometimes I think she's about to haul my butt back to the bedroom, but then. I mean, Jesus, this is takin' longer than it has with any woman I ever met."

"Is she real, or is she teasing?"

"She's real, I think."

"Then that's probably a good sign," I said. "All the time."

"You think so?"

We both looked at Marvel and realized that everybody in the room was looking at us. We'd been whispering in a way that immediately attracts attention.

"Uh, we didn't want to bother you, talking," John said.

"Uh-huh," said Marvel.

"Here's the situation," Marvel said, a half hour after her argument with Davis. She rolled off the bed and whacked a rolled-up copy of the printout against her thigh. "This is good stuff. It lays out the kickbacks and the payoffs, how much and where it went, but everything is done by code numbers. We know who the code numbers represent, but we couldn't prove it immediately."

"If the IRS gets it, they could check bank deposits."

"Sure," said Davis, "but that would take some time. If things drag out, we might not be able to get all of them out of the office simultaneously."

"Not even if they steal a hundred thousand bucks?" John asked.

"That'd do it, but that's an extra risk, and we don't know if that whole crazy con game with the bridge is going to work," Marvel said. "We were talking back in Memphis about blackmailing them out of office."

"Not the first three," I said. "Only the governor's redneck appointments."

"Why not try it now?" Marvel asked. "The bridge idea has always seemed kind of. shaky. If we can get around using it, we'd expose John to less risk, you and LuEllen to less risk, and we might get to the same place."

I thought about it for a moment. If we could blackmail them out of office, there would be less exposure. And LuEllen was worried already. I looked at John. "What do you think?"

"Sounds OK to me," he said. He turned to Marvel. "How would we do it?"

"Harold will call Dessusdelit, tell her he's got to see her, that it's important," Marvel said. "She knows him, she knows he wouldn't bullshit. He'll go over to her house and lay the books on her. Tell her that all he wants is her resignation. Hers and St. Thomas's and Rebeck's. They quit, and he loses the books."

"Can you pull it off?" I asked Harold.

"I don't know," he said pensively. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at Marvel, and I realized he would do about anything she wanted him to. "It's worth a try, I guess. Dessusdelit's a politician, and she used to sell real estate. She's been cutting deals all her life. Maybe she'll figure she can cool out the books and come back later. She won't know the rest of it – the part about us taking over the town."

I glanced at John again, then turned to Marvel.

"OK with me," I said. "But it's your call."

"Let's try it," she said with satisfaction. "If it doesn't work, John can still try the bridge scam, you and LuEllen can still hit City Hall, and we can still go to the governor. But if it does work, we avoid all that trouble."

"That's a lot to do before Friday," I said. "If we're going to work the bridge scam, it has to be on Friday, so we've got to move."

"We'll be back home before supper," Marvel said. "Harold can call Dessusdelit tonight. Maybe even go over tonight. And just in case, I'll start calling around and put the word out about John. Smart Memphis dope dealer just bought some land, and there's something happening with the bridge. It'll get back to the mayor and her crowd tonight, same time as Harold."

"Good. And if Harold can't convince Dessusdelit and the others to quit, we'll need some help next week, after the state cops come in. We'll need a half dozen people with white-southerner accents, to call the paper and the TV station, demanding that the council resign."

"That's fixed," Harold said simply. He was wearing his brown suit again and sweating lightly despite the air-conditioning.