We looked at the picture some more, and then she went back to her apartment, and I went into the study to call Bobby.
What?
Need everything available on Whitemark Aerospace. Top execs with personal data. Access control to all internal computer systems. Any trouble with the law, political connections, business connections. Need soonest; will pay big bux.
Hundreds or thousands?
Stop for now at $5,000; could be much more later. May need major backup for big project. Also need information on Rudolph Anshiser, his secretary Maggie Kahn, assistant named Dillon, and other key Anshiser personnel. Also data on company.
Leave terminal on receive.
If I was going to do it, I’d need help.
A few minutes after midnight I walked into town for a snack. When the American fries and eggs were on the grill, I stepped across the street to the Greyhound station and called long distance to the Wee Blue Inn, a beer joint down by the Superior docks in Duluth. A man answered.
“Weenie?”
“This is him.”
“This is the art guy from St. Paul. I came in that time with your girlfriend?”
“Yeah.”
“I need to see her. I’m coming through town tomorrow at two o’clock. If you see her around, let her know?”
“Yeah. I don’t know if I’ll see her . . .”
“Sure. But if you do.”
“Okay.”
LUELLEN IS a thief. She steals only from the rich, for the excellent reason that they’re the only people worth stealing from. Jewelry, coin and stamp collections, bearer bonds, cash. She’s never ripped off a stereo in her life.
I met her one hot summer night when she was breaking into a neighboring apartment. I was lying in a hammock on the roof outside my living room window, lights out, looking at the stars. I was almost asleep when I heard a clunk at the opposite end of the building. It was an odd sound—distinct, but furtive. I crawled across the tarpaper roof and peered over the edge. A slight, dark figure was climbing the wall opposite mine, a woman, moving like a professional gymnast. She’d thrown a muffled grappling hook over the balcony outside the third-floor apartment, and was swinging up the rope hand over hand.
I watched her slip over the balcony rail, pause, apparently listening, then pull the rope up behind her. A second later she was at work on the sliding glass doors. They were open in less than a minute, and I heard a telephone ringing. The woman went inside, and the ringing stopped.
The apartment belonged to a fat, unpleasant political hack with bad breath and size 15AAAA feet, who delighted in bragging about the strange things he does to hookers in Las Vegas, and sometimes to women who need his help in the City Hall turf wars. I didn’t think I’d feel too bad if he was hit by a burglar.
In the next few seconds I went through a one-hand-other-hand sequence. On the one hand, I wouldn’t mind seeing him hit, but on the other hand, it was a bad precedent to let my own apartment house get burglarized. The word could get around the crack houses that it was an easy target, although the woman who had just gone in the window seemed too smooth to be the typical smash-and-grab doper.
On occasion I had gone places uninvited, though not usually to steal so much as to look. I look at chips, plans, production schemes. The places I had gone were factories and offices, never homes or places where people might gather. And I always had inside help. Still, watching the thief go into the apartment, I felt a spark of collegiality. We weren’t in quite the same business, but there were similarities.
A few seconds after she went through the sliding doors, I eased back across the roof and into my apartment. I found my auto-everything Nikon still loaded with a roll of Tri-X. I clipped on the strobe and went back out on the roof. Two minutes later she appeared. When she turned toward me, ready to go over the balcony rail, I hit her with the strobe. She froze, probably blinded. After the strobe recycled, I said “Hello,” she looked up at me, and I hit her again, full in the face. Then her voice floated across, quiet but distinct.
“Who’s that?”
“A neighbor.”
“You alone?”
“At the moment. I’m thinking about calling the cops.”
“Don’t do that. Wait there a minute, and I’ll be over. Will you buzz me in?”
I thought about it, thought about the fat fixer, and said, “Yeah.”
She went over the balcony rail and down the wall. When she was on the ground, she did something to the rope, and it dropped to her feet. She coiled it and turned the corner, out of sight. It was a full half-minute before I started to feel foolish. She wasn’t coming back, she’d be halfway to Minneapolis. I was actually surprised when the doorbell rang.
A few minutes later she stood in the hall outside my apartment, trying to look earnest while I peered at her through the peephole. She was a small woman with an oval face and dark, close-cropped hair. She wore a bright red jacket and jeans.
“Are you going to let me in?” she asked through the door.
“Take off your clothes.”
“What?”
“Take off your clothes. Everything. I don’t want you bringing in a gun.”
She didn’t argue, just began peeling off clothes. When her underpants came off, I opened the door.
“Turn around,” I said. She turned around. If she was carrying a gun, it was hidden under the butterfly tattoo on her left hip. I opened the door all the way.
“Ease on by, and keep your hands away from your clothes,” I said. She walked past me, looking me over. I picked up the pile of clothes and carried them in behind her.
“Look,” she said, as I shook them down. There was a pleading note in her voice. “I’m a former . . . friend of that asshole over there. He had some of my stuff and wouldn’t give it back. I had to get in. Please don’t tell him. He’ll send his cop friends after me.”
“What did you take?”
She cast her eyes down at the floor. With a heartbroken sign, she said, “Marijuana. I kept a stash over there. That’s why you can’t call the cops.”
It was an impressive performance, especially done extemporaneously, bare-ass naked in a stranger’s apartment. “Did you make that story up on the spot, or did you think it up days ago, just in case, or what?” I asked curiously.
“It’s the truth.”
“Bullshit. I told you to take off your clothes and you didn’t hesitate. You stand there with your hands on your hips and don’t even pretend to cover up. You wouldn’t do that to protect a stash. Not unless you’re crazy. And look at this jacket—bright red, reversible to black. I saw the way you went up that wall. You’re some kind of pro.”
She looked at me for a moment and frowned, unsure of herself. “What are we going to do about this?” she asked. There might have been an offer in the question, but it wasn’t explicit. I caught myself staring.
“Take a good look, sucker,” she snarled.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. I tossed her clothes to her, feeling like a pervert. When she was dressed, we talked.
She had taken ten thousand in small bills out of the fat man’s apartment. The money was intended by him as lubricant on a bar license question. She had no plans to visit the apartment complex again, unless, she admitted, somebody else showed up with ten thousand in untraceable cash.
“He can’t even complain that it was stolen, because then he might have to tell somebody like the IRS where he got it,” she said.
“Neat.” I walked back to the kitchen, got the Nikon, rolled the film back, popped it out, and tossed her the cassette.
“For your scrapbook,” I said. “Want a beer?”
She did. Several, in fact. I had several myself. Late at night we found ourselves laughing immoderately at some modest witticisms. Even later she shed her clothes again.
“How come you didn’t hit on me when I had my clothes off before?” she asked, propping herself up on a pillow.
“We hadn’t been properly introduced,” I said.
“You
were thinking about it.”
“Maybe.”
Since then she’s visited me a few times, and one cold February we had a pleasant two-week trip to the Bahamas. I’ve visited her a couple of times in Duluth, which is her hometown, where she never steals. I’ve never been to her house, or apartment. I don’t know where it is, or even that LuEllen is her real name. She’s a pro, and she’s cautious to the point of paranoia. She picks her targets carefully—never anything too big, never anything that will attract major attention. She takes down $125,000 or $150,000 a year. Some fifty thousand goes into investments. She lives modestly on another forty thousand or so, and drops the rest on expenses, ponies, and cocaine. Every year she pays two thousand to the IRS on nonexistent wages from the Wee Blue Inn; Weenie declares her imaginary $15,000 salary as a business expense.
Weenie is her phone drop. If she was out of town, he’d have told me that he didn’t know where she was. Since he didn’t tell me that, she was in town, and he’d let her know I was coming. Whether or not she showed up was up to her.
DULUTH IS a seaport built around the grain and iron ore docks. There were two big Russian freighters taking on wheat at the docks, and a long, low ore carrier was headed out.
The Wee Blue Inn, which is neither wee nor blue, sits on the first bank level above the lake, at the base of the big hill that makes up the heart of the city. It’s the kind of place where the bartender throws sawdust on the floor and calls it decor. Eggs and sausage float in scum-filled jars on the bar, sacks of garlic potato chips and cheese balls hang from wall racks, and the mirror was last cleaned in the fifties. Weenie is fat, chews a toothpick, and wears a boat-shaped, white paper hat. He was behind the bar when I arrived a few minutes after two.
“Back booth,” he said. I got a bottle of beer and headed toward the back. LuEllen was drinking a Perrier-and-lime.
“How’s the painting business?” she asked as I slid into the booth.
“Okay. How’s the burglary business?”
“Not bad. Nice and steady.”
“Any scary moments?”
“Just one. Nothing serious.”
“So tell me,” I said. I tell her about my unconventional jobs, and she tells me about hers. Therapy, she called it.
She had been tracking a guy in Cleveland, the manager of three busy fast-food franchises on the Interstate. Every Saturday evening he picked up the collections from Friday and Saturday—all cash, no checks accepted. Most weekends he drove downtown and dropped the money—as much as twenty-five thousand—at his bank’s night deposit. Sometimes, though, when he had a big date with his stewardess girlfriend, he’d take the Friday and Saturday receipts back to his apartment, where he lived alone, and leave it there overnight.
“So I’m talking to the stew—a friend called me about her—and she tells me about this guy. Doesn’t like him. He’s got money, all right, but he’s a little rough and serious about his blowjobs, which she doesn’t like so much. She’s looking to dump him. So we talk about this and that, and she says she’ll take twenty percent. I say okay and she lays a couple of keys on me.”
“Just a little girl-talk,” I said.
“Right. So on this one Saturday afternoon, the stew calls him up and he says, ‘What’s happenin’, babes,’ which is the way he talks. She hums a few bars from the ‘Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy from Company C,’ and he says, ‘Let’s go.’ ”
LuEllen watched him take the money bag to his apartment.
“Ten minutes later, he’s out of there, and I follow. I get him with the stew, watch them take off downtown, and then I head back to his place. There’s no doorman, just the outside key and the apartment key. I go up and straight in. I get the door open and head for the kitchen—the stew tells me he puts the cash in the refrigerator when he’s leaving it overnight. And there it is, in the freezer. I’m taking it out and all of a sudden there’s this voice, a man’s voice, from the back where the bedrooms are, saying, ‘Is that you, Steve?’ ”
“Whoops.”
“Yeah. Must’ve been a friend or something, staying over.”
“What did you do?”
“Took the money and walked back out the front door, down the fire stairs and out.”
“And?”
“Nothing. I walked out, got in my car, and drove away. Never saw the guy.”
“Jesus. What do you do if he sees you?”
She shrugged. “Depends. Maybe I scream. I say, ‘Don’t hurt me, I’ll call the police.’ He says, ‘Who the hell are you?’ I say, ‘Tina,’ and come on like his friend’s secret lover. But I act very nervous about being alone with this strange guy. Make him feel like a bully. Get out of there.”
LuEllen had never been caught by the police or done jail time. There had been a few close calls, even a few actual encounters, like the one she’d had with me. But she’d always managed to talk her way out. So far.
We chatted a while longer, and finally she popped the question. Why was I in Duluth?
“How much more do you need to retire?” I asked.
“Maybe a quarter million.”
“That’s another four or five years?”
“Unless I get lucky. Or unlucky.”
“Your coke bill still going up?”
“What am I going to do?” she asked sharply. “I need it to work. I can’t do it cold anymore.”
A customer walked past the booth toward the rest rooms in the back, and we both shut up until we heard the door close behind him.
“I’ve got a project,” I said. “I haven’t decided to do it, but I might be looking for help.”
“Me?”
“I’ve got no one else who could do it.”
“Jeez, Kidd. What are you into?”
“It’s weird, but there’s a big payroll. I get a million and change. You get half a million. There’s another guy I’ll talk to, he’ll take a quarter. I pick up all expenses. It’s illegal, but it’s not stealing. Nobody gets hurt. And I’ll cover you. When the guy pays me, I pay you. You might have to meet them, but they won’t know where you come from or who you are.”
She lifted her Perrier bottle toward the light and inspected the bubbles that streamed up through it, thinking it over. “That’s an awful lot of money, Kidd,” she said finally. “It couldn’t be as clean as you say.”
“I believe it will be. Like I said, it’s weird.”
“What do you need me for?”
“I’ll want to get into some houses. General backup. Driving cars. Carrying stuff around. Maybe some computer stuff—I’d show you how. You’d have time to think about it. A week, anyway.”
“Why don’t you do it yourself? You’ve gone into some places.”
“Never residences. I’ve always been set up from inside. I don’t know the first thing about breaking into private homes.”
She considered it for a full minute, and sighed. “I don’t think I can take another four years,” she said finally. “Okay. Tell me about it.”
WE SPENT THE night in a Holiday Inn. The next morning I flew to Chicago and caught a noon flight to Washington. On the way, I rolled out the tarot cards. The Fool showed again. That’s cool, I thought, that’s okay.
I was at Washington National by three o’clock and took a cab down to a shabby, secondhand business district, a place called the Sugar Exchange. Judging from the lobby, the last white powder exchanged in the place hadn’t been sugar. Dace Greeley was locking his third-floor office when I came up the stairs.
“Hey, Kidd,” he said. He brought up the shaky remnant of a once-great smile. He had always been thin, even delicate, but now he was gaunt. In his twenties, he’d had an odd effect on young women: they wanted to take care of him. And those who were most likely to be burning their bras in the morning were most likely to be taking care of Dace in the evenings. It wasn’t that he was hustling all the time. He’d go to a party, sit on a couch. Twenty minutes later the most interesting women in the place were hustling him. One told me it was his eyes, big dark pools
under an unruly shock of black hair. His eyes were still dark, but now, against his starved face, they looked almost lemurlike. His hair had thinned and was shot through with streaks of gray.
The last time I heard about him, a mutual friend said he was spending his days in out-of-the-way bars.
“Why don’t you buy me a drink?” I suggested as we shook hands.
“Sure. If you want to crawl through a dive. I’ve got about four dollars on me. On the other hand, you could buy me a drink and we could go someplace decent.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m buying.”
We skipped the aging elevator and took the stairs down.
“You’re looking good,” he said. “Still training? Shotokan?”
“Yeah. How about you?”
“Shit, do I look like it?”
“Hey, you look like you’re doing okay.”
He grabbed my coat sleeve on the bottom landing before we went into the lobby.
“Kidd, my boy, we have had some interesting times together, so don’t bullshit me. I look like a wreck. I can’t get a reasonable job. My wife dumped me and moved to L.A., and I don’t blame her. Let’s go have a couple of drinks, but no bullshit.” He was pleading.
“All right. But I need to know something right now. How bad is the booze? You a drunk, or what?”
Dace laughed, a high-pitched whinny that wasn’t quite a giggle. “Jesus, if I was only a drunk, I’d be okay. But if I take a fourth drink, I puke all over myself. Can’t keep it down. The doctor says it’s an allergy. Says I’m lucky.”
“Okay. So let’s go have two or three.”
Dace worked at the Post back in the Watergate days, when everybody there was young and hot and tough. He was an investigator specializing in the Pentagon. He had a nose for dirt. He did one story after another, probing the cozy relationship between the generals and the industrial complex. Then he found a big one. A group of ranking Army officers helped a defense contractor cover up critical faults in a particular run of artillery shells. Correcting the problem would cost a bundle. The Vietnam War was obviously winding down. If it had ended soon enough, the defective weapons could have been routinely retired and nobody would have known. But the war didn’t end soon enough. A dozen grunts were killed by the friendly fire.
Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4 Page 5