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 puttingor chipping or pitching or whateverthat 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 huntersthey were in camouflage colorsso 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 enoughyou can buy the parts at Radio Shackbut 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 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."
CHAPTER 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 though the building, and everything that went outside. Two of the lines were particularly troublesome: one may have beenprobably wasa 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 carrying a hand duffel, the same kind I packed for an extended fishing trip. She dumped it on the floor and it clanked.