"Maybe we could get Bobby to kill the call records, so we could just use the cellular and not have to mess with public phones," I suggested after I had hung up.
LuEllen shook her head. "Too complicated. Something could get fucked up and we'd be on paper." She feared paper more than anything: tax records, agreements, leases, checks. Phone bills. Paper left a trail and couldn't be denied.
We cruised Dessusdelit's house just once. A well-kept rambler, it was stuck at the end of a cul-de-sac, in a yard heavy with shrubbery. Trees overhung the streets from both sides, but there were no sidewalks and nobody out for a stroll. Too hot, probably. One light burned in a window at the center of the house, a virtual advertisement that the place was empty. The house on the south side of Dessusdelit's showed a few lights, but the house on the other side was dark. We came out of the cul-de-sac, took a left past the country club, did a U-turn, and headed back. I dialed Dessusdelit's house again, and the phone was still busy. I was looking out the window when I heard LuEllen take the first hit of coke. She carries it in small plastic capsules, one long snort apiece.
"Jesus," I said.
"Don't give me any shit."
The coke was on her in a second, but her driving was rock-steady.
"Zapper," she said.
"LuEllen."
"Get the fuckin' zapper."
The zapper was a specialized scanning transmitter that looked like a long-nosed hair dryer. It came with its own batteries. I got it out and started hyperventilating. LuEllen likes this part, with the adrenaline. I don't. LuEllen took us into the cul-de-sac and, without hesitating, into Dessusdelit's driveway. When we were still a hundred feet down the street, I pointed the zapper at the garage door and pulled the trigger. After a few seconds the door started up, and LuEllen barely had to slow down before we were inside. I dropped the door behind us, she killed the engine, and we sat in silence.
"Listen," LuEllen said. She was trembling with intensity. I listened and, after a second, picked out the faint ringing of the telephone.
The door to the interior was unlocked. Small towns. Lots of crime but not on the streets. LuEllen led the way in and then quickly through the house, stopping to answer and hang up the phone. There were three bedrooms. One had a queen-size bed, a couple of chests of drawers with jewelry boxes on top, and an antique oval mirror. Neat but lived in. Another was obviously a spare bedroom, with twin beds covered with decorative quilts. The third bedroom had been converted into a small home office with an IBM computer.
The living room was a double-jointed affair with two levels and a big brick fireplace, perfect for political soirees. The kitchen was ample, and there was a small first-floor utility room with a washer and dryer just off the kitchen. A quick tour of the unfinished basement turned up nothing of interest.
LuEllen started with the bedroom while I went back out to the car for my laptop and a stripper program. I was a little surprised that Dessusdelit had a computer at all; women of her age and status don't usually mess with them. Along with the computer were a slow modem, a desperately outmoded printer, and two double-drawer filing cabinets.
I loaded the stripper program into her machine, stripped her floppies and the hard disk, looking for data. I came up empty. There were two application programs, a word processor, and a spreadsheet, but no data.
I dumped the cabinets and again came up empty. Nothing but routine business letters. I carried the laptop back to the car and started working through the kitchen.
There was nothing subtle about what we were doing; we were tearing Dessusdelit's house apart. I dumped the cupboards onto the floor, shook each can and bottle before I tossed it aside, tore the drawers out of the refrigerator, checked the ice cube trays. Halfway through, there was a noisy crash from the bedroom, and I stopped to look. LuEllen had broken the bed apart.
"Loud," I said.
"Go work," she said coldly.
When I finished the kitchen, LuEllen was tearing through the living room. She had cut open the living room furniture and was tearing through a bookcase when I came out. "Where's the circuit probe?" she asked.
"Here." I patted my breast pocket. We'd been in for a while, and I was starting to sweat. LuEllen looked frozen, focused.
"Check the bedrooms, then the bathroom, then the kitchen. I'm going downstairs. I don't know, it should have been in the bedroom." She checked her watch again. "Seven minutes."
We didn't know what we were looking for. We did know that Dessusdelit had taken a lot of money out of the city over the years and that Bobby couldn't find it: couldn't find money, investments, long-distance trips that might point to a foreign money laundry. Nothing. She could have been buying land in some backwoods town under an assumed name, but that didn't feel right. She'd want it where she could see it. She did have a safe-deposit box at the Longstreet State Bank, but Bobby went into the bank records and found that she visited the box only once or twice a year.
Wherever she was putting the money, there should have been some sign of it in the house. There wasn't. The furnishings were good but not great; she hadn't stashed the money in antiques or art. I'd feared the possibility that she'd put it in antiques; we didn't have a moving van.
We hadn't yet found a safe. That's what the probe was for.
A circuit probe is simply a lamp the size of a pencil. There's a plug at one end, a light in the middle, and a screwdriver at the other end. The screwdriver fits the screw in the middle of common everyday home power outlets. Electricians use them to check the outlets to see if they're live.
I checked the outlet next to her bedroom door, one under a window on an outside wall, one next to a closet. I got a light every time. The last outlet, the one behind the bed's headboard, came up dead. I turned the probe over and used the screwdriver to loosen the outlet plate.
Lying on the floor, working, I could feel my heart pounding in my chest; we were getting long on time. I gave the screw a last turn and pried off the plate.
Ah. A wall cache. Inside was a metal box, and I used the screwdriver to pull it out.
"Find something?" LuEllen asked from the doorway.
"Yeah, a cache. shit."
"What?"
"Money. Goddamn it." The cash was packed tightly into the metal box, fifties and hundreds. I pulled it out, a folded-over wad some four or five inches thick, and tossed it to LuEllen. In the bottom of the box was a small white envelope. I fished it out with my fingertips, squeezed it, and found three hard bumps like cherry pits.
"Not more than a few thousand here," LuEllen said. "We've got to get going-what's that?"
I tore open the folded envelope and poured a little stream of ice into the palm of my hand.
"Diamonds," I said, holding my hand up to LuEllen.
"Damn, those are nice if they're investment grade," she said. She took the stones and tucked them in a shirt pocket with the cash. "We're running late."
"Find anything in the basement?" I asked as we headed back toward the car.
"No."
"Goddamn it, we're not doing that good."
"Get the paint."
We had two gallons of paint in the car, red oil-based enamel. We popped open one can and started spreading it around the house.
THIEF, I wrote on one wall, with a newspaper dipped in the paint, STEAL THE CITY BLIND. LuEllen splashed out, YOU DIE PIGGY on another two, and CROOK-CROOK-CROOK. We wrote some more garbage, hitting every wall in the house and most of the ceilings. The last of the paint we poured on the living room carpets.
"Dump the can, and let's go," LuEllen said. We checked the street from the house. Clear. We ran the garage door up and back down and were gone.
"I've never done anything like that," LuEllen said. "It didn't feel that good."