Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  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 modem. I breathed a sigh of relief. If it had been a 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 d
o 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 aftertax 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.…”

  LUELLEN ROUSTED ME out of bed at ten o’clock. She doesn’t like getting up early any more than I do and was grumpy about it.

  “Visitor coming,” she said shortly. She was staring at a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios like Somoza reviewing the Sandinistas. “Get your ass in gear.”

  I try to stay away from breakfast as much as possible. Instead of eating, I brought up the computer, called Bobby, and told him that we’d failed to find the books. I gave him the names of the banks Ballem had listed in his will and suggested a wide-gauge search of credit company files for more background. And I mentioned the modem hooked into Ballem’s computer.

  Possible Ballem on-line w/books somewhere.

  Will check.

  How?

  Phone analysis.

  Fast?

  Don’t know. Toggle auto-answer 2nite, I’ll message progress.

  OK.

  Before Bobby got into data bases, he was a major phone phreak. Still is, I guess; he’s made the combination of the two into an art form. I wasn’t sure what he was planning—not the details, anyway—but I suspected he’d look at the pattern of Ballem’s office phone calls and try to spot possible on-line hookups. Then, in the evening, he would check those numbers for a computer carrier tone.

  When I got off-line, I locked the big computer, unplugged it, and toted it back to the bedroom. The portable I tucked away in a cupboard. Computers were not part of our image.

  While LuEllen set up the main cabin for Dessusdelit’s visit, I cleaned up and got back into the shorts and Knicks T-shirt.

  “Are you ready?” I asked LuEllen when I got out of the bathroom.

  “Yeah, just about. You better get up above.”

  I climbed on top of the cabin with a bucket of water and a sketch pad and did a few quick studies of the waterfront. I don’t get too much involved with detail, going instead for the pattern and emotional impact of the color. The waterfront had some nice effects. The river water formed a long olive band across the bottom of a composition, with the longer darker band of the levee above that, then suddenly the vibration of sunlight on orange brick— Never mind.

  Dessusdelit showed up a few minutes before noon, stepping carefully down the levee steps. She was wearing a snappy black-and-white striped dress that looked both summery and businesslike at the same time and low heels.

  “Mr. Kidd,” Dessusdelit said as she came out on the dock.

  “’Lo,” I called. “Come aboard.” I stamped twice on the deck, and LuEllen popped out a moment later, saw Dessusdelit, and waved. LuEllen was wearing a bleached-out Mexican peasant top with an oatmeal-colored skirt and leather sandals, with Indian turquoise-and-silver earrings. Sartorially it was a standoff.

  “I’ve made a light lunch, a salad, and some white wine,” she said. “You come on, too, Kidd. You’ve been up there for hours. You’ll burn your brain out.”

  Dessusdelit disappeared into the cabin, and I took a last look at the sketches, washed my brushes, and followed her down.

  “Need a shower,” I said. I grabbed the bottle of white wine as I went by the table. “Back in a minute.”

  I shut myself in the head, poured a couple of swallows of wine down the sink, sloshed some more around in my mouth, and took the shower, spending some time with it. When I got back, LuEllen and Dessusdelit were halfway through their salad.

  “LuEllen has been telling me that you’re an expert on the tarot, Mr. Kidd,” Dessusdelit chirped brightly. She reminded me of a sparrow with fangs.

  “I use the tarot, but I don’t believe in any mystical or magical interpretations,” I said. “I use it in a purely scientific way.”

  LuEllen snorted. “He says that because whenever he does one of his scientific spreads, he can’t figure it out. When he does what he calls a magic spread, it usually reads right.”

  “That’s interesting,” Dessusdelit said, peering at me. “I didn’t think such things as the tarot would work if the person wasn’t sincere in using them.”

  “Oh, Kidd’s sincere about using them,” LuEllen said before I could answer. “He’s being insincere when he says he doesn’t believe. He had this scientific training in college, and the implications of belief… frighten him.”

  “Is that so, Mr. Kidd?”

  “I leave the pop psychology to LuEllen, Miz Dessusdelit.” I poured myself another white wine. “This is my idea of a great lunch,” I said jokingly, saluting her with the glass.

  A vague look of disapproval crossed Dessusdelit’s face, but she was southern, and in the South, where men drink, nothing is said.

  AFTER THE LUNCH LuEllen cleared the table and sat Dessusdelit with her back to the bow windows. I retreated to an easy chair at the rear of the cabin while LuEllen brought out her crystal ball. It was real crystal, antique and six inches in diameter, bought at a store in Minneapolis. One day after we’d been out on the river, learning about the houseboat, she left it on the table while she went to shower. When she came back, I was juggling the ball, a broken Ambassadeur 5600 bait-casting reel, and a conch shell. She’d gone visibly pale and snatched the ball out of the air, causing me to drop the reel.

  “You know how much this fuckin’ thing cost me?” she hollered. I hadn’t messed with the ball since.

  “It’s very old,” she said now, in a dark, hushed voice, unwrapping the ball’s velvet sleeve and passing it to Dessusdelit. “There are rumors of Gypsy blood in my family, way back, and this ball supposedly came from them.”

  “It’s so heavy,” Dessusdelit said, marveling at the size and weight. The ball was a perfect sphere, but the interior was a complicated geological dance of inclusions and tiny fractures. A rainbow of colors flickered inside, depending on how the light hit it.

  “Just sit and hold it,” LuEllen said.

  “Lots of colors in there,” Dessusdelit said, peering into it.

  “Let your mind go, but try to track the color,” LuEllen said. “Look for greens for opportunity, red for danger or conflict. Those were my grandma’s interpretations.…”

  “OK,” said Dessusdelit, fascinated.

  “I think yellow might have something to do with prosperity, blue with peace; black, I think, is death.… Orange is warm; I think that may mean excitement in the good sense or pleasure. I saw a lot of orange in the ball before we started down the river. This whole trip is kind of new for me, kind of exciting.…”

  “Wonderful,” Dessusdelit said. She was rolling the ball in her hands. “I don’t see too much just now. Maybe if I were closer to the window and the light…”

  “No, no, stay where you are,” LuEllen said. “I put the good chair there for a purpose. You should be comfortable. Don’t worry, if you have the ability to see things, the colors will come.”

  That’s when she gave the laser a goose with a foot pedal we�
�d wedged under the rug. The laser, a little two-hundred-watt deal with an output that was no bigger in diameter than a filament of spider web, was mounted in the bedroom. I’d fixed it to do a skittering scan across the area of the chair, a tiny dot of light moving so fast it was virtually invisible. Except when it hit the ball. When it hit the ball, the crystal fluoresced, and the veil lit up with some of the pulsing reaction of the northern lights. I knew when the laser hit because Dessusdelit suddenly caught her breath.

  “It… did something,” she said.

  “I thought it might,” LuEllen said. “I thought you had the power when I saw you in the restaurant. Were you able to pick out any particular colors?”

  “Well…” Dessusdelit was rolling the ball in her hands. “There was green.”

  “Opportunity, that’s wonderful. Maybe it means the opportunity to explore your psychic self,” LuEllen gushed.

  “Is that what it usually means?” Dessusdelit asked, looking up. She was hooked.

  “It can mean any kind of opportunity—often money, frankly—but in this case… unless you’re expecting some money?”

  “No, no, nothing special. In fact, there have been some problems in town.…”

  “Then it may simply be the opportunity to explore yourself,” LuEllen said, brushing away the hint at the burglaries. She touched the laser again.

  “There it is,” Dessusdelit said, brought back to the ball. “There’s a lot of red, and my God… I can feel the power. And I thought I saw…”

  “Yes?” LuEllen prompted.

  “My mother’s face. She’s been gone now for ten years.… Is this possible?”

  “Anything’s possible if you have the power and the right crystal,” LuEllen said.

  I broke in. “This is not my style, I’m afraid. I’ll leave you alone. I’ll be on top.”

  “I think that would be best,” LuEllen said, her voice now dreamier than ever. “I think Chenille and I have some work to do.… Red, you say? Red sometimes means danger.…”