"What do you think?" I asked her. She was looking straight up through the windshield.
"I'd like to see the roof," she said.
"LuEllen." I'm just the tiniest bit afraid of heights.
"It's gonna be a tough building," she said. "That guard desk is a twenty-four-hour operation, and we know there are guards wandering around at night. Jack supposedly shot one who was making a routine round of the building. We could probably crack one of the doors in back, but then, the question is, could we get up? We can't tell without going inside."
"Gotta be a way."
"Probably. The fact that there's some kind of government top-secret connection makes me extra nervous. If we came down from the top. look, the building across the street from the south side is an office building. Turn here, I'll show you."
The building across the street was just as she said: another old warehouse, renovated, with glitzy neon-signed shops on the bottom floor, and what must've been offices on the floors above.
"The thing is, the security'll probably suck. There's no lobby, it's a little shabby, so it's probably a lot of individual offices. We could get access during the day, hide out inside, and get onto the roof at night. It's twelve floorstwo higher than TrendDirect," LuEllen said. She looked back and forth between the two buildings. "Narrow streets here. I bet it's not more than forty feet between the two cornices. We heave a climbing line across, slide down, and the TrendDirect roofs probably got no security at all. It'd be really unusual if it did."
"Why don't we get fake IDs and fool the guards," I said. "Or keys for the back doors?"
"Those are options."
"Or we could do a sneak." Sneak is private language. It amounts to doing an easy reconnaissance, like a phony delivery, to look over a target. LuEllen has done them twenty times. I usually go on public toursmost big companies have them, and they are very informative, if you know what to look for.
"That's another option," she admitted. But she liked the roof idea. She'd like the rush it'd bring, swinging out over the street at three o'clock in the morning. We spent another fifteen minutes looking at the building, and LuEllen shot a couple of rolls of color-slide film. She also got out of the car and looked into one of the window wells.
She came back, shaking her head. "Why would you put glass brick all the way up and down?" she complained. "People working in there have to breathe, for Christ's sakes. It's inhuman."
"LuEllen, the voice of the working man," I said.
"But you know what? It all looks very secure," she said. "Somebody went out of their way to be secure. and something else I just thought of."
"What?"
"How often are building guards armed? Like the old guy who got shot?"
I thought about that and shook my head "Not often."
"The place is tough," she said. "I'd turn it down, if I were working on my own, unless I had a very tight inside connection "
"Huh." We both thought about that as we rolled away, leaving the building behind. Neither of us had ever spent serious time in Dallas, and it turned out that the West End Historic District was historic not only because it was old, but because that was where John Kennedy was assassinated. We went past the memorial, not knowing exactly what it was until LuEllen spotted a Dealy Plaza sign.
"Do you remember Kennedy?" she asked, her face turned to the memorial as we passed by.
"Sometimes I think I do," I said. "But I think I mostly remember my folks telling me about him."
"I've only seen him in old TV shows," LuEllen said. "He seemed like an okay guy for a president."
On the way back to the motel, we found a phone and got online with Bobby. He'd been doing research on AmMath, knowing that we might try to go in. I said:
trenddirect looks tough. any online options?
cannot find online option but did look at corbeil home. he has t-1 line
excellent. give address.
Corbeil lived in a snazzy glass-and-brick low-rise apartment budding on a North Dallas golf course; a gated community called Lago Verde. The T-1 line meant he was probably working from home on his downtown computer system.
"This is the place to do a sneak," she said, as we rolled past the gate "I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that all the security is out here, on the fence, with maybe some drive-by guys in golf carts at night."
"So let's go in," I said
"Let's call Bobby again," she said "We need to nail down Corbeil's exact address, and we need the name of a single woman who lives in there, anywhere. Maybe he could check elevatorsdon't elevators have to be inspected or something?"
"I think so."
Bobby came back and said that Corbeil, according to the local phone and electric companies, lived on the eighth and ninth floors of a nine-story building called Poinsettia. All of the apartments in the building were two storieson two and three, four and five, six and seven, eight and nine. He couldn't find out what was on one, nor could he find anything about elevators. There was a state elevator data bank, but you had to know the serial number to find the right one; the bank was not searchable by address.
He did get the name of a single woman, an Annebelle Enager who lived in the Primrose building.
"That's a start," LuEllen said.
"We're gonna do a sneak?"
"An easy one," she said.
One thing the movies never tell you is that burglars spend about half their life shopping. We bought a small paint brush and jars of red and black water-soluble poster paint at a kids' store. At an office supply place, LuEllen picked up a bottle of rubber cement, a roll of duct tape, an X-Acto knife, and one of those roller-receipt boxes with a roll of receipt paper to go with it. The receipt paper went on a spindle-bar inside the top of the box-like a toilet paper holder- fed to the outside, across a plate where a customer would sign, and then back inside the box to a take-up spindle.
We rented a white van from Hertz, took the van to a mostly vacant parking lot outside a thirty-six screen theater, and I used the poster paint to create a business on the side of the van: Rose's Roses.
"That looks great," LuEllen said, when I'd finished. "You missed your calling. You should have been a sign painter."
"Yet, I think I would be unfulfilled," I said. I'd painted two intertwined red roses, with black stems, above the name, in red. You had to hope nobody looked at both sides of the truck, because the roses were not exactly the same.
While I was painting, LuEllen sat on the back bumper and used a screwdriver to rip the guts out of the roller-receipt box, and the X-Acto knife to cut a quarter-sized hole through the plastic side. Her JVC miniature camcorder fit snugly inside, held in place with the duct tape; she used the rubber cement to glue a receipt across the face of the box.
"We ready?" she asked, as I finished up the roses.
"If you are."
"Let's go."
I didn't have to do anything, truth be told. LuEllen drove the truck up to the gate, said something to the gatehouse guard, who pointed, and let her m. I waited a block away, in the car.
She was inside for exactly twenty-two minutes, about ten more than I thought reasonable. She waved at the guard as she left, took a left, and five minutes later, we met in a weedy, litter-strewn strip under a freeway. When I got there, she'd already gotten out a gallon jug of spring water and a roll of paper towels, and was wiping Rose's Roses out of existence.
"No problem," she said cheerfully, as I walked up. "I even got a date, if we need it."
"Who with?"
"Guy named Ralph Carnelli, he's an office guy there; some kind of low-level manager, I think."
Inside the compound, she'd driven around until she spotted the Poinsettia building. The first and basement floors were parking, she said. That was as much as she could see. Then she found the clubhouse, which sat on the edge of the golf course. The clubhouse included a receiving area, the upstairs management offices, and a lounge and exercise room for the residents.