"Okay. How's the burglary business?"
"Not bad. Nice and steady."
"Any scary moments?"
"Just one. Nothing serious."
"So tell me," I said. I tell her about my unconventional jobs, and she tells me about hers. Therapy, she called it.
She had been tracking a guy in Cleveland, the manager of three busy fast-food franchises on the Interstate. Every Saturday evening he picked up the collections from Friday and Saturday-all cash, no checks accepted. Most weekends he drove downtown and dropped the money-as much as twenty-five thousand-at his bank's night deposit. Sometimes, though, when he had a big date with his stewardess girlfriend, he'd take the Friday and Saturday receipts back to his apartment, where he lived alone, and leave it there overnight.
"So I'm talking to the stew-a friend called me about her-and she tells me about this guy. Doesn't like him. He's got money, all right, but he's a little rough and serious about his blow jobs, which she doesn't like so much. She's looking to dump him. So we talk about this and that, and she says she'll take twenty percent. I say okay and she lays a couple of keys on me."
"Just a little girl-talk," I said.
"Right. So on this one Saturday afternoon, the stew calls him up and he says, 'What's happenin', babes,' which is the way he talks. She hums a few bars from the 'Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy from Company C,' and he says, 'Let's go.' "
LuEllen watched him take the money bag to his apartment.
"Ten minutes later, he's out of there, and I follow. I get him with the stew, watch them take off downtown, and then I head back to his place. There's no doorman, just the outside key and the apartment key. I go up and straight in. I get the door open and head for the kitchen-the stew tells me he puts the cash in the refrigerator when he's leaving it overnight. And there it is, in the freezer. I'm taking it out and all of a sudden there's this voice, a man's voice, from the back where the bedrooms are, saying, 'Is that you, Steve?' "
"Whoops."
"Yeah. Must've been a friend or something, staying over."
"What did you do?"
"Took the money and walked back out the front door, down the fire stairs and out."
"And?"
"Nothing. I walked out, got in my car, and drove away. Never saw the guy."
"Jesus. What do you do if he sees you?"
She shrugged. "Depends. Maybe I scream. I say, 'Don't hurt me, I'll call the police.' He says, 'Who the hell are you?' I say, 'Tina,' and come on like his friend's secret lover. But I act very nervous about being alone with this strange guy. Make him feel like a bully. Get out of there."
LuEllen had never been caught by the police or done jail time. There had been a few close calls, even a few actual encounters, like the one she'd had with me. But she'd always managed to talk her way out. So far.
We chatted a while longer, and finally she popped the question. Why was I in Duluth?
"How much more do you need to retire?" I asked.
"Maybe a quarter million."
"That's another four or five years?"
"Unless I get lucky. Or unlucky."
"Your coke bill still going up?"
"What am I going to do?" she asked sharply. "I need it to work. I can't do it cold anymore."
A customer walked past the booth toward the rest rooms in the back, and we both shut up until we heard the door close behind him.
"I've got a project," I said. "I haven't decided to do it, but I might be looking for help."
"Me?"
"I've got no one else who could do it."
"Jeez, Kidd. What are you into?"
"It's weird, but there's a big payroll. I get a million and change. You get half a million. There's another guy I'll talk to, he'll take a quarter. I pick up all expenses. It's illegal, but it's not stealing. Nobody gets hurt. And I'll cover you. When the guy pays me, I pay you. You might have to meet them, but they won't know where you come from or who you are."
She lifted her Perrier bottle toward the light and inspected the bubbles that streamed up through it, thinking it over. "That's an awful lot of money, Kidd," she said finally. "It couldn't be as clean as you say."
"I believe it will be. Like I said, it's weird."
"What do you need me for?"
"I'll want to get into some houses. General backup. Driving cars. Carrying stuff around. Maybe some computer stuff-I'd show you how. You'd have time to think about it. A week, anyway."
"Why don't you do it yourself? You've gone into some places."
"Never residences. I've always been set up from inside. I don't know the first thing about breaking into private homes."
She considered it for a full minute, and sighed. "I don't think I can take another four years," she said finally. "Okay. Tell me about it."
We spent the night in a Holiday Inn. The next morning I flew to Chicago and caught a noon flight to Washington. On the way, I rolled out the tarot cards. The Fool showed again. That's cool, I thought, that's okay.
I was at Washington National by three o'clock and took a cab down to a shabby, secondhand business district, a place called the Sugar Exchange. Judging from the lobby, the last white powder exchanged in the place hadn't been sugar. Dace Greeley was locking his third-floor office when I came up the stairs.
"Hey, Kidd," he said. He brought up the shaky remnant of a once-great smile. He had always been thin, even delicate, but now he was gaunt. In his twenties, he'd had an odd effect on young women: they wanted to take care of him. And those who were most likely to be burning their bras in the morning were most likely to be taking care of Dace in the evenings. It wasn't that he was hustling all the time. He'd go to a party, sit on a couch. Twenty minutes later the most interesting women in the place were hustling him. One told me it was his eyes, big dark pools under an unruly shock of black hair. His eyes were still dark, but now, against his starved face, they looked almost lemurlike. His hair had thinned and was shot through with streaks of gray.
The last time I heard about him, a mutual friend said he was spending his days in out-of-the-way bars.
"Why don't you buy me a drink?" I suggested as we shook hands.
"Sure. If you want to crawl through a dive. I've got about four dollars on me. On the other hand, you could buy me a drink and we could go someplace decent."
"Okay," I said. "I'm buying."
We skipped the aging elevator and took the stairs down.
"You're looking good," he said. "Still training? Shotokan?"
"Yeah. How about you?"
"Shit, do I look like it?"
"Hey, you look like you're doing okay."
He grabbed my coat sleeve on the bottom landing before we went into the lobby.
"Kidd, my boy, we have had some interesting times together, so don't bullshit me. I look like a wreck. I can't get a reasonable job. My wife dumped me and moved to L.A., and I don't blame her. Let's go have a couple of drinks, but no bullshit." He was pleading.
"All right. But I need to know something right now. How bad is the booze? You a drunk, or what?"
Dace laughed, a high-pitched whinny that wasn't quite a giggle. "Jesus, if I was only a drunk, I'd be okay. But if I take a fourth drink, I puke all over myself. Can't keep it down. The doctor says it's an allergy. Says I'm lucky."
"Okay. So let's go have two or three."
Dace worked at the Post back in the Watergate days, when everybody there was young and hot and tough. He was an investigator specializing in the Pentagon. He had a nose for dirt. He did one story after another, probing the cozy relationship between the generals and the industrial complex. Then he found a big one. A group of ranking Army officers helped a defense contractor cover up critical faults in a particular run of artillery shells. Correcting the problem would cost a bundle. The Vietnam War was obviously winding down. If it had ended soon enough, the defective weapons could have been routinely retired and nobody would have known. But the war didn't end soon enough. A dozen grunts were killed by the friendly fire.
Dace had a leak, a disgruntled colonel with some combat ribbons of his own. The story was big. A brace of generals-a total of three stars' worth-and a half-dozen colonels found themselves looking for work. Dace was on his way. Or so he thought.