The Fool's Run

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