I watched her slip over the balcony rail, pause, apparently listening, then pull the rope up behind her. A second later she was at work on the sliding glass doors. They were open in less than a minute, and I heard a telephone ringing. The woman went inside, and the ringing stopped.
The apartment belonged to a fat, unpleasant political hack with bad breath and size 15AAAA feet, who delighted in bragging about the strange things he does to hookers in Las Vegas, and sometimes to women who need his help in the City Hall turf wars. I didn't think I'd feel too bad if he was hit by a burglar.
In the next few seconds I went through a one-hand-other-hand sequence. On the one hand, I wouldn't mind seeing him hit, but on the other hand, it was a bad precedent to let my own apartment house get burglarized. The word could get around the crack houses that it was an easy target, although the woman who had just gone in the window seemed too smooth to be the typical smash-and-grab doper.
On occasion I had gone places uninvited, though not usually to steal so much as to look. I look at chips, plans, production schemes. The places I had gone were factories and offices, never homes or places where people might gather. And I always had inside help. Still, watching the thief go into the apartment, I felt a spark of collegiality. We weren't in quite the same business, but there were similarities.
A few seconds after she went through the sliding doors, I eased back across the roof and into my apartment. I found my auto-everything Nikon still loaded with a roll of Tri-X. I clipped on the strobe and went back out on the roof. Two minutes later she appeared. When she turned toward me, ready to go over the balcony rail, I hit her with the strobe. She froze, probably blinded. After the strobe recycled, I said "Hello," she looked up at me, and I hit her again, full in the face. Then her voice floated across, quiet but distinct.
"Who's that?"
"A neighbor."
"You alone?"
"At the moment. I'm thinking about calling the cops."
"Don't do that. Wait there a minute, and I'll be over. Will you buzz me in?"
I thought about it, thought about the fat fixer, and said, "Yeah."
She went over the balcony rail and down the wall. When she was on the ground, she did something to the rope, and it dropped to her feet. She coiled it and turned the corner, out of sight. It was a full half-minute before I started to feel foolish. She wasn't coming back, she'd be halfway to Minneapolis. I was actually surprised when the doorbell rang.
A few minutes later she stood in the hall outside my apartment, trying to look earnest while I peered at her through the peephole. She was a small woman with an oval face and dark, close-cropped hair. She wore a bright red jacket and jeans.
"Are you going to let me in?" she asked through the door.
"Take off your clothes."
"What?"
"Take off your clothes. Everything. I don't want you bringing in a gun."
She didn't argue, just began peeling off clothes. When her underpants came off, I opened the door.
"Turn around," I said. She turned around. If she was carrying a gun, it was hidden under the butterfly tattoo on her left hip. I opened the door all the way.
"Ease on by, and keep your hands away from your clothes," I said. She walked past me, looking me over. I picked up the pile of clothes and carried them in behind her.
"Look," she said, as I shook them down. There was a pleading note in her voice. "I'm a former. friend of that asshole over there. He had some of my stuff and wouldn't give it back. I had to get in. Please don't tell him. He'll send his cop friends after me."
"What did you take?"
She cast her eyes down at the floor. With a heartbroken sign, she said, "Marijuana. I kept a stash over there. That's why you can't call the cops."
It was an impressive performance, especially done extemporaneously, bare-ass naked in a stranger's apartment. "Did you make that story up on the spot, or did you think it up days ago, just in case, or what?" I asked curiously.
"It's the truth."
"Bullshit. I told you to take off your clothes and you didn't hesitate. You stand there with your hands on your hips and don't even pretend to cover up. You wouldn't do that to protect a stash. Not unless you're crazy. And look at this jacket-bright red, reversible to black. I saw the way you went up that wall. You're some kind of pro."
She looked at me for a moment and frowned, unsure of herself. "What are we going to do about this?" she asked. There might have been an offer in the question, but it wasn't explicit. I caught myself staring.
"Take a good look, sucker," she snarled.
"Sorry," I mumbled. I tossed her clothes to her, feeling like a pervert. When she was dressed, we talked.
She had taken ten thousand in small bills out of the fat man's apartment. The money was intended by him as lubricant on a bar license question. She had no plans to visit the apartment complex again, unless, she admitted, somebody else showed up with ten thousand in untraceable cash.
"He can't even complain that it was stolen, because then he might have to tell somebody like the IRS where he got it," she said.
"Neat." I walked back to the kitchen, got the Nikon, rolled the film back, popped it out, and tossed her the cassette.
"For your scrapbook," I said. "Want a beer?"
She did. Several, in fact. I had several myself. Late at night we found ourselves laughing immoderately at some modest witticisms. Even later she shed her clothes again.
"How come you didn't hit on me when I had my clothes off before?" she asked, propping herself up on a pillow.
"We hadn't been properly introduced," I said.
"You were thinking about it."
"Maybe."
Since then she's visited me a few times, and one cold February we had a pleasant two-week trip to the Bahamas. I've visited her a couple of times in Duluth, which is her hometown, where she never steals. I've never been to her house, or apartment. I don't know where it is, or even that LuEllen is her real name. She's a pro, and she's cautious to the point of paranoia. She picks her targets carefully-never anything too big, never anything that will attract major attention. She takes down $125,000 or $150,000 a year. Some fifty thousand goes into investments. She lives modestly on another forty thousand or so, and drops the rest on expenses, ponies, and cocaine. Every year she pays two thousand to the IRS on nonexistent wages from the Wee Blue Inn; Weenie declares her imaginary $15,000 salary as a business expense.
Weenie is her phone drop. If she was out of town, he'd have told me that he didn't know where she was. Since he didn't tell me that, she was in town, and he'd let her know I was coming. Whether or not she showed up was up to her.
Duluth is a seaport built around the grain and iron ore docks. There were two big Russian freighters taking on wheat at the docks, and a long, low ore carrier was headed out.
The Wee Blue Inn, which is neither wee nor blue, sits on the first bank level above the lake, at the base of the big hill that makes up the heart of the city. It's the kind of place where the bartender throws sawdust on the floor and calls it decor. Eggs and sausage float in scum-filled jars on the bar, sacks of garlic potato chips and cheese balls hang from wall racks, and the mirror was last cleaned in the fifties. Weenie is fat, chews a toothpick, and wears a boat-shaped, white paper hat. He was behind the bar when I arrived a few minutes after two.
"Back booth," he said. I got a bottle of beer and headed toward the back. LuEllen was drinking a Perrier-and-lime.
"How's the painting business?" she asked as I slid into the booth.