After ten minutes we'd heard nothing, and LuEllen touched my arm. "Let's go." We unfolded the ladder, propped it against the top of the City Hall. LuEllen sat on the hardware store roof, her heels against the bottom rung of the ladder; she'd hold it in place while I crossed. After a last look down the alley, checking against police cars, I crossed. It was about as difficult as climbing a ladder to wash a window, as long as I didn't look down.
I hopped onto the roof of the City Hall, treading lightly, and braced the ladder while LuEllen crossed. She moved like a cat, covering the gap in two or three seconds. I pulled the ladder across and laid it flat on the roof. We waited another minute, listening. Nothing. LuEllen crossed to the chimney, wrapped the rope around it, tied it, and left it lying in a heap. If we needed it, it would be ready.
Unlike the hardware store, the City Hall had a full-size door at the top, its housing sticking out of the roof like a wedge. LuEllen tried the knob, found it locked, and dug in her bag.
"Problem?"
"Naw, it's one of those old warded pieces of shit." She used what looked like two lengths of clothes hanger wire and opened it in fifteen seconds. The stairs were built in a steep spiral, narrow and dark.
"Wait until I call," she muttered. Wooden steps creak; they always creak, it's another of the basic laws of nature. She went down them slowly, her feet spread to the far edges of each step. There wasn't a sound. At the bottom she listened again, opened the door, peeked out, and called me down. I went down as quietly as I could; in my ears it sounded as if I'd stumbled through the cymbal section of the New York Philharmonic.
"We're in some kind of closet," she said. She had pushed the door open about three or four inches; a filing cabinet blocked it from opening farther. Worse, the filing cabinet was jammed against another wall. I reached through, grabbed the top of the cabinet, and tried to pull it farther into the closet. It wouldn't budge.
"Now what?" I asked.
"Take the door off," she said. She found the pry bar in her sack and pulled the pins from the two hinges. We had to do some dancing, but eventually we got the door off and enough out of the way that I could boost her up on top of the file cabinet. The door to the closet was also locked.
"Pain in the ass," she whispered as she worked on it. "If we want to close them all again." She was working blind on the closet lock, reaching down from the top of the file. After a couple of curse words the bolt slipped, and she eased the door open.
"Whoa," she said.
"What?"
She turned back and shone the light on her own face. She was grinning.
"We're inside the clerk's office," she whispered.
"You want me to come?"
"No point."
She climbed down off the cabinet into the clerk's office. I pushed myself up on top of the cabinet, craning my neck until I could see. She went straight to the safe, sat for a moment, listening and watching the glass doors to the outer building, then stood, flicked on the light, and started working the combination dial. She hit on the third try, and the heavy door swung open. She spent a moment pulling drawers, dropped a white canvas sack behind her, pushed the door shut, twirled the dial, and came back to the closet. It took as long to lock the closet door as it had to open it. It took only a minute to put the stairway door back on and another minute to lock the door at the top.
"Got it," she breathed at me. "Jesus, stealing is better than fucking, you know?"
"Thanks," I said dryly.
"You know what I mean." Her voice sounded full, awash with adrenaline or some kind of special burglar hormone. We listened for another minute, heard nothing but LuEllen's breathing. Then she retrieved the rope; we recrossed the ladder and took it back into the store, hooking the hatch behind us.
"This is the worst," she said when we were at the front of the store. "This is where we really could get caught again."
"I haven't seen any cocaine," I said. The thought had just popped into my head, from nowhere.
"I thought I'd try it this way, doesn't feel too bad."
"So."
"I still want it."
"That's the way it is, I guess." I slipped two fingers under her belt buckle and pulled her up against me. "You're more interesting without the coke."
She stood up on her tiptoes and kissed me on the lips, and it went on for a bit.
"This is goofy," she said, pulling away. "This is how you get caught. You forget for a minute."
We'd be going back out into the street blind. A car rolled by. We were ready to go when the lights from a second one showed. It passed, and we went. Outside, she used the pry bar to slip the lock in place, dropped the bar in her shoulder sack, and we were on the sidewalk.
I put my arms around her, and she pressed her head against my shoulder. Lovers, again, walking in the moonlight. We stopped once on the street before we turned down toward the car, to kiss and, incidentally, to drop the latex gloves in a brand-new Longstreet storm sewer.
John was waiting for the call.
"You going?" he asked.
"Just got back," I said. I looked at LuEllen, who was stacking packets of twenty-dollar bills on the kitchen table. "It was smooth as silk."
"Jesus Christ, I'm starting to think Bobby was right about you guys," John said. "I'll call Marvel. I'll send her in."
"I'll call her," I said. "There've been some changes. I think I've figured out how it'll go, all the way to the end."
CHAPTER 14
We had taken out one hundred thousand dollars in cash. After counting it, we put it back in the bag and stuck the bag in the Fanny's engine compartment, where it would be safe from accidental discovery. The boat was now a floating time bomb; on board we had LuEllen's burglary tools, the books from the Longstreet machine, a hundred thousand dollars in stolen city cash, and the murder photos.
Dessusdelit arrived promptly at ten o'clock, and we cold-decked her. I almost, but not quite, felt sorry for her. She was as nervous as a hen, settling into the querant's chair with a series of twitches and unconscious starts. She'd been up all night, rolling the crystal ball in her hands. The ball had been dead, she said as she handed it back to LuEllen, except for a few moments around three in the morning. For a few seconds then she thought she saw her mother again.
"She seemed to be welcoming me," Dessusdelit said bleakly.
"Maybe that means you're going to visit her," LuEllen suggested ingenuously.
"She's dead," Dessusdelit snapped. "I thought I told you."
"Oh. I'm sorry," LuEllen said, covering her mouth in embarrassment.
We shuffled the cards, and Dessusdelit cut them. LuEllen reached out and touched her arm and said, "You can keep the ball for a while if that will help you reestablish a channel."
When Dessusdelit turned her head to reply, I switched the decks and started laying down the Celtic Cross. Out came the Tower or, as some tarots have it, the Tower of Destruction, symbolic of the wrath of God. The card shows a medieval tower struck by a lightning bolt, with two people tumbling out of it.
"Things seem to be stirred up," I said as Dessusdelit turned back. I tried to put the best face on it but let enough sickly kindness ooze into my voice that she had to know what I was doing.
Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times, and finally she blurted, "I've had some personal difficulties."
"That's what we're seeing then. But remember, the Tower doesn't always mean disaster," I continued with a patently false heartiness. "Remember when I told you that sometimes it's as simple as looking at the picture? One time I had an opening scheduled for a Chicago gallery. For me it was a big deal. I don't usually do the magical kind of tarot spreads, but I was worried about this opening; my career was in the balance. So I said, what the heck and did a spread-"