One miserable winter afternoon in St. Paul, with sleet beating against my north windows, we lounged in bed and LuEllen tried to teach me how to pick locks. I failed – I'm not patient enough – but I learned some of the technique and the names of the picks: the half-round and round feelers, the rakes and diamonds and double diamonds, the readers, extractors, mailboxes, flat levers and tensioners, circulars and points.
The lock on Ballem's door was a pin tumbler, in which a lock cylinder rotates to throw the bolt. The cylinder is prevented from rotating by five spring-loaded pins. The ragged edge of a key moves the pins up to a sheer line; when all the pins are moved up exactly the right distance past the sheer line, the cylinder can rotate.
LuEllen was locating each of the lock's five pins and gently moving them, one at a time, up to the sheer line. At the same time she kept pressure on the cylinder with a spring steel tensioning tool. It took time. I was sweating when she said, "Ah," then, "Wait." She made some more delicate movements; then, with a quick twist of her wrist, the door was open.
"Got too enthusiastic with that last pin, got it up too high," she said. She was panting from the stress; when you're picking a lock, you tend to hold your breath.
Ballem's office smelled of pipe tobacco and paper, with an undertone of bourbon. Most of the furniture was turn-of-the-century oak, practical, sturdy.
"Watch the light," LuEllen said quietly. A flashlight beam on a Venetian blind will bring the cops faster than an alarm. We didn't really need it anyway; the windows were at the same level as the streetlights, and enough illumination came through the shades that we could easily move around the office.
Two walls of the office were given to lawbooks, another to a series of English court prints taken from Punch. A narrow worktable ran along the fourth wall, with a row of file cabinets at one end. A half dozen plaques and framed certificates, testifying to service and study, hung on the wall above the table. The computer was on a walnut side table next to the desk. An IBM-AT, Marvel had said, and it was, with a low-tech printer on a stand behind it and a small three-hundred-baud modern. I breathed a sigh of relief. If it had been Macintosh or an Amiga, I'd have had to dump the high-capacity internal hard disk to smaller floppy disks, and that might have taken a while. As it was, I should be able to do the job in a few minutes.
I hooked up the Laplink, then handed the light to LuEllen, brought the machine up, stuck in a disk, and loaded a utility program of my own. A minute later I was looking through the hard disk, sending to my machine any text or financial files.
While I did that, LuEllen looked around the office, checking drawers. The file cabinets were locked, but she opened each in a matter of seconds and began going through the files.
"Not much here," she said. "It's all routine legal stuff. Real estate transfers, car accidents, workers' compensation forms. There's some city work, but it all looks like insurance and ordinances and printed budgets. Public stuff, nothing secret."
"Check the desk."
The desk was locked. She opened it, glanced through a few files, and shook her head.
"Nothing financial," she said. "No taxes, no books. Couple of Playboys. Toothpicks. Floss. Bottle of mouthwash."
"I'll be done in a couple of more minutes," I said. "I'm almost there."
She walked down the length of the bookshelves, pushing her hand over the tops of the books, feeling behind them. Then she got on her hands and knees and crawled around the perimeter of the room, pulling at the carpet. There was an expensive National Geographic globe in one corner, on its own rolling stand, and when she pushed it out of the way and pulled on the carpet, the corner came up.
"Got something," she said. She folded back the carpet and lifted the board underneath. I stepped over and squatted beside her. There was an old green metal cashbox set in the floor. She popped the lid. Inside were a stack of cash, a chrome-plated.38-caliber revolver, and what looked like legal papers.
LuEllen lifted out the cash and the papers.
"Two thousand," she said, thumbing the cash. She put it back in the box, in exactly the position that it had been. I went back to the computer while she examined the papers. "There're copies of a will and some kind of inventory and divorce papers. You want me to copy them? There's a Xerox out in the hall."
"Do it."
I finished pulling the files from Ballem's computer, shut it down, unplugged the Laplink cables, and started stuffing them back in the black satchel with the portable. I was zipping the satchel when LuEllen came into the room, moving fast, said, "Ssst," and eased the door shut.
"Somebody's outside," she whispered. She scrambled over to her satchel, took out two pairs of black panty hose, and threw one at me. I could hear the outer office door opening as I pulled it over my head. LuEllen, with the panty hose on her head but not yet pulled over her face, was digging in her satchel. She came up with a potato and a gym sock, put the potato in the sock, and stationed herself behind the door. I hid behind the desk.
On other jobs we'd decided that the only answer to detection was flight or surrender. We wouldn't hurt anyone for money. But in Longstreet surrender would not likely result in a trial. We wouldn't be talking to lawyers. And we decided after the episode with the cop at Ballem's, when I was prepared to hit him with a paint bucket, that we'd better come up with a new answer.
The potato in the sock made an excellent sap, and neither the potato nor the sock was illegal. And the potato, LuEllen had heard, was soft enough to be non-lethal.
We waited, LuEllen dangling the sock. The late visitor did not turn on the office lights but came straight down the hall, moving in the dark. From the light footsteps I decided that the visitor was female. The steps passed Ballem's door, went on for a few feet, then stopped. There was a moment of silence, then a distracted humming. A woman's voice, and a saccharine tune from the fifties called "Tammy"; I remembered it from my piano lessons.
We waited, stressing out, huddled in the dark, and the Xerox machine started. And went on. And on. For more than half an hour, without stopping, the copy light flashing under the door like distant lightning. Then, just as suddenly as she'd shown up, she left, whoever it was. The Xerox machine stopped, the footsteps retreated down the hall, and the outer door clicked shut.
"Jesus Christ, she must have been copying her fucking novel," LuEllen said. I stood up, pulled the panty hose off my head, and handed them to her. She stuffed them in her satchel, returned Ballem's will and the other papers to the hidden box, folded down the carpet, and wheeled the globe back into place.
After a final, meticulous check of the office, to make sure that everything was back in place, we were out. In the hallway we heard the unseen woman laugh again.
"Her boyfriend must be a sex machine," LuEllen muttered as we went down the stairs.
"This is no time for jealousy."
I talk a good burglary, but on the street I was gasping for air. "I'm glad you didn't have to slug anybody," I said after a while.
"So am I," she said. "I'd do it, but I think."
"What?"
"Whacking people on the head. I don't know. The theory sounds OK, with the soft potato and all, but I've got a feeling that some of them might die."
An entry floods your system with adrenaline. Riding the high, with sleep an impossibility, I spent most of the night reviewing the files from Ballem's computers. And found nothing but two cryptic, and nonincriminating, letters about the sewer pipe company.
"Nothing at all?" LuEllen asked.
"Nothing," I said. But the letters about the sewer pipe bothered me. "You're sure there was nothing in his desk or the files about the sewer pipe company?"
"I'm sure. That's one of the things I was looking for."
"Well, shit. The thing is." I called up one of the files. "Look at the numbers in this thing. He was using some kind of reference. you don't just remember those kinds of pricing and engineering details; you don't pull them out of thin air. Marvel noticed the same things about those letters her people found: too many details without references."