I explained it, and she said, “That means we need more scouting trips. And some more gear.”
“I was thinking we’d go in Saturday night,” I said. “That article that Bobby found said he was a big social guy. Saturday night in Dallas?”
“About ten o’clock?”
“If it’s possible at all,” I said.
“I wish I could get a look at his door,” she said.
For each of the next three days, Green and LuEllen played thirty-six holes of golf on the Radisson course, while Lane and I hung out, sometimes together, sometimes separately. I got a lot of drawing done, and she was online with her business in Palo Alto.
LuEllen, it turned out, was a near-scratch golfer. “I’m damn good,” Green said one night, “But she’s better. I think if she was a little younger, and worked on it, she could probably go on the women’s tour.”
“Can’t putt,” LuEllen said.
“You could if you had a little patience,” he said. “You never look . . . ” And they’d go off on a long, twisted argument about putting—or chipping or pitching or whatever—that would leave Lane and me nodding off.
The nights were more interesting. LuEllen and I scouted Corbeil’s apartment from the golf course, with Green and Lane circling the course, listening to a police scanner, looking for cops. We’d bought Motorola walkie-talkies, apparently used by hunters—they were in camouflage colors—so they could call us instantly if anything came up. We’d found a better place to enter the golf course, where two uneven pieces of fence came together at a corner, next to a sidewalk. From one direction, you couldn’t see us at all; from another, it looked like we’d turned the corner. From the third and fourth, you could see us plainly, but traffic was light enough that we could wait for holes.
On Wednesday night, we took a look at the garage. The garage entry was on the end of the building, and nicely landscaped, which was a break for us. Coming in from the golf course, we could get close without being seen. The garage was enclosed with a steel door, and a key card was used for entry. If I could get fifteen seconds with a key card, I could duplicate the signal easily enough—you can buy the parts at Radio Shack—but getting fifteen seconds with a key card might be a problem. Not an insuperable one, but there appeared to be an easier way.
When the doors opened, they stayed open for as long as the car was in the garage entranceway, and then for a few seconds longer. The doors operated on a simple infrared cell; the key card opened the door, and then, if a car was blocking either of two cells, the doors stayed up. All we had to do was block the cell when a car came out. The door would stay up until we unblocked the cell . . .
Once inside, we would head for the freight elevator.
On Thursday, we got a bunch of photos of Corbeil from Bobby; memorized the face, and wiped them out of the computer. That same night, LuEllen found a tree she could climb, where she could look through the floor-to-ceiling windows of an apartment on the second floor.
“If his door is the same, it’s a standard solid-wood door set in a steel frame,” she told me when she came down. “I couldn’t see the locks, but they’re probably pretty good.”
On Friday night, we were lying out in the grass outside his apartment, listening to a couple make love on a blanket twenty yards away. They continued for longer than seemed probable, then had an intense conversation about two people named Rhonda and Dave, who seemed to have been their respective spouses; then they started again.
“Must be younger than us,” I whispered to LuEllen.
“Younger than you,” she whispered back. “Unless, maybe, you’re entertaining Lane during the day, when I’m playing golf.”
“How could you possibly be that full of shit?” I asked. “What the fuck do you mean . . .”
Like that.
At nine o’clock, a white limo pulled up outside the apartment house, and a young woman got out. A very nice-looking young blond woman, with a long neck like the woman in Emma. She didn’t dress like Emma, though; she dressed like a supermodel. Her short black frock probably cost as much as the average condo and if there’d been any less of it, she couldn’t have crossed a state line without committing a felony.
Eight minutes later, a few lights went off in Corbeil’s apartment, and two minutes after that, as the improbable couple to our left grunted and squeaked toward orgasm, she reappeared, two steps in front of St. John Corbeil. Corbeil moved in that stiff, upright military-academy way, as though he were holding a golf ball in his crotch as he walked. Not an especially tall guy, but one of those small-headed, wide-shouldered types who probably wrestled in high school.
LuEllen, who had the binoculars, focused on them with that kind of silent intensity that an attractive women gets when she feels she might have become a satellite, rather than the planet. That’s what I thought at the time, anyway.
When Corbeil and his date had gone, we lapsed back into the waiting mode, until the adulterers decided they’d had enough. They split up after a last hasty kiss and grope, and as soon as they were gone, we headed across the golf course ourselves. Halfway across, in the dark, LuEllen said, “I’m gonna have to go away for a while.”
We signed off with Green and Lane, and back at the hotel, LuEllen started making phone calls to numbers she’d memorized. She was looking for some specific gear, and she needed a nearby supplier. She got the right guy just before midnight, talked to him for five minutes, and dropped the phone back on the hook.
“Find it?” I asked.
“Yeah. We have a slight change of plans. We’re not going in quietly; we’re gonna go in superhard. We’re gonna go after his safe.”
“He’d probably suspect something . . .”
“Maybe. But maybe not . . .”
She told me about it as she changed clothes, into black jeans and a black jacket. “I gotta have that piece-of-shit car.”
“Where’re you going?”
“Out of town,” she said. “One of my friends.”
“When’ll you be back?”
“Really late, or early tomorrow morning,” she said. “Actually, there’s no reason for you not to know. I’m driving to Shreveport.”
“I could take you.”
“Nah. Better if I go alone. This guy is okay, most of the time, but he’s nervous.”
“Most of the time?”
“You know. As long as he’s on his meds . . .”
17
That night I stayed in LuEllen’s room, and spent twenty-seven bucks on pay TV, waiting, unable to sleep before LuEllen returned. She knows lots of people who do bad business, and not all of them are her friends, and not all of the places she goes to are good places for women to be after dark. That’s not sexism: it’s the simple reality of the redneck ghettos where she buys her tools.
When I wasn’t watching movies, I worked over the architect’s drawings, following every wire and line through the building, and everything that went outside. Two of the lines were particularly troublesome: one may have been—probably was—a camera that scanned the inside of the parking garage. No way to tell where it pointed, or whether it was live video only, or if it spooled onto a continuous tape. Another line ended in several vertically stacked switches in the service-elevator shaft, and I thought they almost surely were floor indicators going out to the elevator. If they were something else, like infrared motion detectors, we would have an even bigger problem. LuEllen had night glasses in her scouting bag, along with her cameras, and once we were inside the elevator shaft, could use the glasses to check for security devices.
And we would be in the shaft, going up the cables with climbing gear. It’s easier than it sounds, with good gear. The only alternative, with a keyed elevator, was to steal a key, or wreck the elevator getting to the wiring behind the key. That would take time, make noise, and tip anyone who decided to use the elevator after we did. Climbing was easy, and out of sight.
LuEllen was gone for a bit over seven hours; I was at the door when she came in. She was carr
ying a hand duffel, the same kind I packed for an extended fishing trip. She dumped it on the floor and it clanked.
“Sounds like construction equipment,” I said.
“Deconstruction equipment,” she said. “There better be something in that safe. This stuff isn’t cheap.” She was very sharp, each word clearly defined, coming out rapid fire. She was eager, hot, ready-to-go, bright-eyed and . . .
“Ah, man. You got your nose in it, didn’t you?”
“Just a little bit. And a little bit for tomorrow. Today.”
“Goddamn it.” I turned away.
“Hey . . .”
All right; I let it go, like I always did. LuEllen did a little cocaine from time to time—and, from time to time, more than a little. I hated the shit. I might smoke some weed after a long day on the water. I might even do a tab of amphetamine if there were enough reason. But cocaine, heroin, crystal meth . . . that crap will kill you. And if the dope doesn’t, the dealers will.
We stayed in bed well past noon. LuEllen had been bouncing around all night, the residuals from the cocaine. Later in the day, she’d be sleepy. At two in the afternoon, I was up, feeling groggy, looked out the window. Another great blue-sky day. I cleaned up, and as I got out of the shower, LuEllen was finally crawling out of bed.
“You okay?” I asked.
“No.” Still coming down.
“Go stand in the shower.”
“Yeah.”
When she got out, still a little groggy, I put her in the car, along with the equipment, and we went out for food. She began to revive, and we drove to Corbeil’s place and sat across the street watching the reception area. The reception area, as shown on LuEllen’s movies, had a single guard monitor.
“Look at this,” she said. “You see where the guy is standing?” We were two hundred yards away, but I could see him through the glass of the reception center.
“Yeah?”
“The monitor is just to his left. Now watch.” She took a cell phone from her pocket and dialed a number. The guard straightened, took a couple of steps to his right, picked up the phone.
LuEllen said into the phone, “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” And clicked off.
The guy behind the glass shook his head, put the phone down, and went back to where he’d been standing before. He might’ve been reading something.
“So . . .”
“So when he’s answering the phone, he can’t see the monitor,” she said. “If the monitor is rotating between sites, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t be on it, anyway.”
“Take us ten seconds to walk inside and get to the freight elevator,” I said.
“Mmm.”
“But we won’t know whether they’ve seen us or not.”
“That’s the fun part,” she said. “The waiting.”
When we left Corbeil’s, we drove up to the Radisson, and LuEllen and Green spent time hitting golf balls on the driving range, while I went over the drawings again. Lane, looking over my shoulder, chewing on a raw carrot, suggested that one particular group of rooms in the Corbeil apartment could be for a live-in maid. It was labeled “guest suite,” but it could have been either. We debated it for a while, and I finally pulled up the wiring diagrams. We decided that the questionable area had no wiring for a stove or for an electric clothes dryer, so it was probably a guest room.
“We’ll have to call,” I said. “Every fifteen minutes.”
We started calling right after dark. The phone would ring four times and we’d get Corbeil’s answering service. I was getting cranked on adrenaline, and LuEllen took a walk around the closed-down driving range and did a little cocaine. At ten o’clock, we left, LuEllen and me in one car, Green and Lane in the other.
I dropped LuEllen on the corner where we crossed the fence, and she was gone in an instant. I took the car around the block, parked, and crossed the fence myself five minutes later. LuEllen was waiting. We’d wrapped all of her tools in towels, and we were decently quiet as we moved slowly through the trees toward Corbeil’s apartment. Halfway there, we stopped for a radio check with Green:
“Got us?”
“Gotcha.”
We started moving again. There’s a technique to the movement—hunters call it “still hunting,” and it takes some discipline. LuEllen and I learned it, separately, as a method of staying out of jail. You take three slow steps and stop, and listen. Then five more, and stop. You cover ground more quickly than you’d think, and quietly, and almost always hear other people before they hear you.
We took fifteen minutes crossing to Corbeil’s, and it was all worth it, for our own self-confidence. If we were caught with LuEllen’s black bag, there’d be no point in explanations.
At the edge of the golf course, we stopped under cover of a low twisted pine, and listened. In twenty minutes, we heard nothing, nor did we see anything move. Corbeil’s apartment was dark, except for the IR glow through the night glasses.
“Gonna do it,” I said.
“Got the reel.”
She had an old Penn level-wind reel filled with fishing line. We’d attached a piece of a black 3.5-inch computer floppy disk to the end of the line, as though we were going to cast it.
What I was going to do was easy enough, but I would be out in the open: a risk. After checking around one last time, I stepped out of the landscape planting and walked up to the garage door, towing the line behind me.
Six inches from the garage door, a small electric eye looked across at its illuminator on the other side of the driveway. I taped the floppy to the edge of the metal case around the illuminator, so it was hinged, and could fall up or down. Then I walked along the side of the building into the back, as though I were heading for the golf course. A minute later, I sprawled out next to LuEllen.
Normally, a driver would pull up to the door inside the garage, and tap his radio-operated garage-door opener to send the door up. Electric eyes both inside and outside the door would make sure that the door would not come down on top of the car, should it stop for some reason. As long as the electric eye’s illuminator was blocked, the door would stay up. The normal up-and-down cycle would not give us enough time to get inside, without taking the risk of being seen by the driver of the departing car. With the electric eye blocked, however, the door would simply stay up until we cleared it.
We couldn’t just cover the eye, though, because if a car came from the outside, and the eye was blocked, the door wouldn’t come back down—and whoever had just driven into the garage would probably notice that. So we needed the hinged cover.
All of that was easy enough: we’d both done something like it in the past. But the wait was a killer. During the week, when we were scouting the place, a car might come out or go in every fifteen minutes or so. The longest we’d had to wait was a half hour. This time, we had to wait for forty-five minutes, but we lucked out. When the door finally went up, the car was inside the garage, heading out.
I put the radio to my mouth, and said, “Up yours.”
Green came back: “Sounds good to me.”
I pulled the straps for LuEllen’s black bag over my back, and got to my knees. The brown Town Car cleared the garage and started around the approach drive, the door still up. As it began to exit, LuEllen pushed the speed-dial button on her cell phone. When the car disappeared, LuEllen whispered, “Go.”
We went. As we crossed the drive, she said into the phone, “George? Is this George?” Then, “Don’t tell me this is a wrong number, buster . . .”
The guard at the reception center, on the other end, eventually hung up, but by that time we’d walked thirty feet across the garage and were sheltered behind a concrete pillar at the freight elevator. The elevator doors were shut, but opened when we pushed the call button. A roof light came on, and I reached up and covered it with the black bag until LuEllen got the doors closed.
“Hatch,” she whispered.
I made a hand stirrup, as I had for Lane back in Jack’s house, and Lu
Ellen stood up in it and pushed the elevator hatch askew. LuEllen peered up the elevator shaft with the night glasses. Looking for an infrared motion detector or anything else that might trip us up.
“We’re clear,” she whispered, and pushed the hatch up out of the way. I boosted her through, handed her the bag, and followed behind. Using the light of two needle-flashes, we put our Jumar climbers on the cable, replaced the hatch, and started up in the dark.
A five-minute climb, eight floors. Hanging off the elevator door at Corbeil’s floor, LuEllen first took the stethoscope out of her pocket, and listened. Nothing. Then she dialed the next number on her speed dial—Corbeil’s apartment. Again, no answer. She patted me on the shoulder. I had her mechanical door-openers ready. I forced the jaws between the doors, and we pried the doors open. LuEllen did a quick peek with a mirror, then clambered into the hallway. I was five seconds behind her, with the bag.
The hallway was arranged like many rich people’s hallways—so that the rich people would encounter each other as seldom as possible. A vestibule at the main elevator branched into two hallways, one for Corbeil’s apartment, one for the other apartment that shared this entry floor.
Both hallways made a sharp turn just off the vestibule. When we crawled out of the service elevator shaft, we were already on Corbeil’s side of the floor, but too far down the hall, past his door.
We went back to his door and LuEllen took the jaws from me and forced them between the door and the steel doorjamb. Then she attached a steel wheel, like a small steering wheel, to a square screw-end at the top of the jaws, and moved behind me so I could turn it. The mechanical advantage was huge: the big wheel must have spun five or six times for every quarter-inch that the jaws opened, but nothing could stand against them. Slowly, slowly, the door moved; then suddenly, popped.
LuEllen had moved around so that she was below me, facing the door, a heavy utility knife in her hand. When the door popped, she shot inside, making for the closet where we thought the alarm console was fixed. As she did that, I began uncoiling 150 feet of climber’s rope from the black bag.
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