The Empress File

CHAPTER 8

Small-town people tell a story on themselves, an illustration of their closeness to their neighbors. Folks in small towns don't use the turn signals on their cars, they say, because whoever is behind them knows where they're going to turn.

Longstreet wasn't that small. It was a city, with better than twenty thousand good citizens and a few hundred rummies, bums, and lowlifes. It was not quite big enough to have a real slum, but it did have Oak Hill, which wasn't so much a hill as the back end of the white cemetery. The city also had a lot of middling and a couple of good neighborhoods in both the black and white areas and one upper-middle-class subdivision spread around the Longstreet Golf and Country Club. During our stay a half dozen people mentioned that two black families lived out by the club: a doctor and a veterinarian.

One thing Longstreet didn't have was apartment buildings. Most of the town's apartments were in the business district, above stores. That was a problem.

When we left the Holiday Inn, we went straight back to the boat and changed. Gym shoes and jeans. LuEllen wore a deep red long-sleeved blouse, and I put on a long-sleeved navy blue polo shirt with a crushable white tennis hat. When we got close to the target, I'd pull off the hat and stick it in my pocket.

We'd put the computers out of sight, but now I needed them and got down the portable IBM clone and a piece of gear called a Laplink. With the Laplink, I could dump the contents of one computer's hard disk to the hard disk in the portable. The whole works fitted in a black nylon bag that looked like a briefcase.

"Ready?" LuEllen asked. She was carrying the leather shoulder bag I'd had the camera in. It looked better on her than it did on me.

"Let's go."

"Don't try to hide when we get to the door," she said. "Don't look around; don't get up next to the wall; don't touch me; don't stand too close to me. Try to slump a little bit. Look tired."

"All right."

The night was hot, and the flying insects were fluttering up from the weeds around the marina into town. The streets were well lit; we walked from one pool of orange sodium-vapor light to the next. We passed one man, a black man, who nodded and disappeared around a corner.

We strolled. Ambled. There were lights above the stores, and I saw a woman's shadow on a beige curtain and, below the window, walked through the strong, acrid smell of home permanent. Metallica pounded from a radio down an alley.

"The problem with nights like these, where you've got apartments above the stores, is that people without air-conditioning sit in the windows, in the dark," LuEllen said. "If somebody sees us go in, I hope they don't notice that no lights come on inside."

It was just after ten o'clock. The time and temperature sign on the Longstreet State Bank said eighty-three degrees.

"There it is," LuEllen said. "The one with the brick."

The door was set at a shallow angle into the wall, surrounded by yellow brick. A brass plate was screwed onto the brick.

"Easy," LuEllen said. "Not too close to me. Look tired and impatient."

She walked up to the door, tugged at it, and used the key. The whole entry took five seconds. We pulled the door shut behind us and stopped to listen. We could hear the buzz of the lights from outside. The sound of an air conditioner in the building. Nothing else.

"When did Marvel say the janitor left?"

"Never misses a Cardinals game. He'd have been home an hour ago," LuEllen said. The hallway was lit by a single dim light. LuEllen led the way past a bank of elevators and into a stairwell, picked out the steps with a miniature flashlight, and led the way up one floor. At the landing she opened the door a crack, watching, waiting. Nothing. Then a sound. A voice. Muffled.

"Shit," she whispered. "There's somebody up here."

We listened some more.

"Two people. Man and a woman. They're. fooling around," she said.

"Where's Ballem's office?"

"Down to the right."

The sounds were coming from the left.

"So what do we do?" I asked.

"Let's go." She led the way into the hall, holding the door. When I was through, she eased it shut, and we walked carefully down to Ballem's office. The unseen woman laughed. LuEllen paused at Ballem's office door, her ear to the glass panel, waited five seconds, then unlocked it. Inside, she stopped me with a hand and disappeared into the dark. A moment later her light flicked on, and she said in a low voice, "All clear."

Ballem's personal office was at the end of a railway. LuEllen tried the door, found it locked, knelt on one knee to look at the lock, and grunted.

"Hold the light," she said. I took the flash, and she dug into her bag, coming up with a cloth roll tied with a string. Lockpicks. She unrolled the cloth, laid it on the floor, and, after a few seconds' study, selected a pick and a tensioner.

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."

"Maybe he dumped whatever reference he was using."

"Yeah, maybe. But none of Marvel's friends knows about any books, and they know everything else. And Ballem had that modem hooked into his computer terminal. I assumed he used it for the on-line legal data bases, but I wonder if they might not have the books on-line somewhere. If they're plugged into a data base somewhere, anybody who knew the sign-on codes could call it up and work."

She shrugged. "How do we find out?"

"Bobby," I said.

I was still mulling it over when she asked me if I'd looked at the papers she'd copied.

"I'd forgotten," I said.

The papers were a find.

Ballem's will listed bank accounts in Grand Bahama and Luxembourg. The inventory listed household goods, noting the value of specific items: paintings, Oriental carpets, coins, and stamps. The stamp collection "should be assessed by a certified philatelic appraiser." The divorce papers indicated that he'd paid his ex-wife an after-tax half million dollars over three years.

"We got a good chunk of him, but most of it is out of town," LuEllen said. Her voice reflected a mixture of satisfaction and disappointment.

"We did just right," I said. I walked over to the computer and punched it up. "I'll ship this to Bobby. If we can nail down these accounts, we might have the leverage we need against him."

"How's that?"

"I doubt that he bothered the IRS with the details of his income," I said. "So when the time comes, we tell him, 'Get out of town, or deal with the feds.' And we send along the numbers on these very pretty accounts."