The Devil's Code

anything about the place?”
    “We came up with these,” I said, touching the drawings. “I’ve seen a couple of things in them; everybody ought to take a look, and see if we can spot anything else.”
    W e did that, spreading the drawings around on the beds like pages from The New York Times on a Sunday afternoon. LuEllen said, eventually, “Look at this.” She was pointing at a blank box.
    “It’s a blank box,” Green said.
    “It’s a safe.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Bet your ass it is,” she said. “Let me look at the drawings for that wall . . . and for the opposite wall. Where are the materials specs, anyway?”
    A fter a while, Lane and LuEllen went out for Cokes, and Green and I continued to look at the blueprints.
    “You’re pretty good at this,” Green said after a while. It sounded like a statement, but there was a question inside of it.
    “I’ve done it for a while—not exactly this, but related stuff.”
    “I know a little bit about Longstreet,” he said. I looked up at him: Longstreet was supposed to fade away into the past—a political seizure of a small town in the Mississippi delta, engineered with severaltastefully chosen burglaries and a few bad moments at the dog pound, to say nothing of the weeks of hospitalization and physical rehab that followed.
    “I wish people would forget about all of that,” I said, finally.
    “Most of them are forgetting, but not everybody,” Green said. “What I’m saying is, my friends tell me that I should go all the way with you. That it’s important.”
    “I’m not sure how important it is outside our little group,” I said. “I wouldn’t want you to be misled.”
    “Not too worried about that,” he said. He stood up, stretched, looked out the sliding glass doors toward the golf course. “What I’m worried about is, I’m getting bored. Hard to stay sharp when you’re bored, stuck in hotel rooms.”
    “Do you play golf?”
    “Does a chicken have lips?”
    “Why don’t you take LuEllen out for a round? She’s getting antsy herself. I’ll read through these drawings for a while longer, keep an eye on Lane.”
    “Okay.” He chewed on a lip for a minute, then said, “Think Lane has a little thing for you.”
    “Yeah?”
    “A little thing,” he said.
    “I thought, maybe, you guys have been hanging around for a week or so . . .”
    He shook his head: “I’m not from the right social-educational strata.”
    “She’s a bigot?”
    “No, no. Never that. She’s got a Ph.D. and I neverquite went back for my GED, if you know what I mean. She’s got this thing about . . . diplomas. Degrees.”
    “Huh. Don’t know what to tell you,” I said. And I didn’t.
    W e spent some more time looking at the architect’s drawings and when LuEllen got back, I said, “We go in through the garage. I can get us up to Corbeil’s floor, but after that, I’ve got no guarantees. If we want to make it a quiet entry, I don’t know. You’d need some lock picks or something. I don’t think we could use an autopick. There are three other apartments up there.”
    “How are you going to get us up? If we don’t know how long we’re gonna be up, I don’t think it’d be a good idea to take the elevator apart.”
    I explained it, and she said, “That means we need more scouting trips. And some more gear.”
    “I was thinking we’d go in Saturday night,” I said. “That article that Bobby found said he was a big social guy. Saturday night in Dallas?”
    “About ten o’clock?”
    “If it’s possible at all,” I said.
    “I wish I could get a look at his door,” she said.
    F or each of the next three days, Green and LuEllen played thirty-six holes of golf on the Radisson course, while Lane and I hung out, sometimes together, sometimes separately. I got a lot of drawing done, andshe was online with her business in Palo Alto.
    LuEllen, it turned out, was a near-scratch golfer. “I’m damn good,” Green said one night, “But she’s better. I think if she was a little younger, and worked on it, she could probably go on the women’s tour.”
    “Can’t putt,” LuEllen said.
    “You could if you had a little patience,” he said. “You never look . . . ” And they’d go off on a long, twisted argument about putting—or chipping or pitching or whatever—that would leave Lane and me nodding off.
    The nights were more interesting. LuEllen and I scouted Corbeil’s apartment from the golf course, with Green and Lane