“It only took you five hours to figure it out.” Mr. Contreras said. “What’d you have to do—take off yoar shoes and socks and think it through with your toes?”
We hadn’t actually been arrested yet, just taken to one of the small side offices for questioning. Mr. Contreras’s adrenaline level was about high enough to send the Galileo probe hurtling past Mars. I kept hoping he would calm down before the charges against us multiplied—illegal entry and snoopery were bad enough. Although we’d managed to get most of the evidence packed up in time, Mr. Contreras was still rewinding coils of wire when the cops showed up.
His last comment was certainly justified. It miffed Fred Roper no end. He explained for the third time, in detail, how he started getting suspicious when the last of the Crawford, Mead, employees left—around one-thirty—and we were still up there. He finally made up his mind that we might not be up to any good and called his boss. The security firm’s night manager phoned the building engineers’ night manager, and confirmed that all the appliances and wiring were functioning smoothly. On his boss’s instruction, Roper called the cops.
Roper’s dull, nasal voice and his excited repetitions made me want to jump up and strangle him. The police were no doubt using him as a weapon to torment me into confessing.
“What were you doing here, anyway?” the senior member of the patrol demanded. “And no more of this shit about you being an electrician and this being your neighbor helping you out. The unions don’t operate like that. And your normal neighbors don’t carry guns or PI licenses.”
Officer Arlington was a thickset man in his late fifties, with a bald spot that he tried to drape his few lingering hairs across. As soon as he’d pushed us into a conference room—before saying a word—he’d taken off his cap and combed his hair.
“No, I know,” I said quickly, before Mr. Contreras could step to the mat again. “Mr. Contreras is just trying to protect me, which is really sweet of him. The truth is, well, this is painful to have to talk about to strangers.”
“Get used to it, girlie—you’re going to see a lot of strangers before you finish telling your tale.” Officer Miniver, a younger black man, shared his partner’s menacing attitude toward suspects.
“Well, it’s like this.” I spread my hands in a pantomime of feminine helplessness. “The man whose office we were in, he’s my ex-husband. And I can’t get him to keep up with his child-support payments. I don’t have any money, I can’t afford to take him to court—and anyway, how could I win against a big lawyer like him?”
“Lots of ladies can’t get their child-support payments, but they don’t go breaking into their husbands’ offices. What was that supposed to do for you?”
“I was hoping to find, well, evidence, I guess, of his ability to pay. That’s what he keeps telling me, that he can’t afford it because of his mortgage and his new family and everything in Oak Brook.”
“And you needed a gun for that?” Miniver said derisively.
“He’s threatened me in the past. Maybe it was foolish of me, but I didn’t want to be beaten up again.”
“He’s a terrible man, terrible,” Mr. Contreras confirmed. “How he could treat a sweet girl like Vic here so mean I’ll never understand.”
I could see neither Arlington nor Miniver’s heart was going to break over this. They seemed pleased to think Dick was clever enough to evade his obligations. They asked me a series of questions about our decree and how Dick had managed to avoid paying me anything for years.
In the end, Arlington whistled admiringly. “Guess all that legal education gets you something after all… Too bad you didn’t spend your money on a lawyer sooner, girlie, instead of breaking in here. Because you’re sure going to have to come up with the dough for one now that we’re arresting you.”
“Why don’t we call Richard Yarborough first? He’s the one who has to press charges in the end.”
“Yeah, but a guy who won’t pay child support sure isn’t going to be very understanding about you digging through his personal papers,” Arlington said.
“Let him decide that. The one thing I know about Richard Stanley Yarborough is that he hates other people making up his mind for him.”
It was four-thirty now. They felt they couldn’t possibly bother such an important lawyer in the middle of the night. Anyway, they were panting to take Mr. Contreras and me to the station and stuff us in holding cells for the remainder of the night.
“I do get the one phone call,” I said. “And I don’t have any scruples about bothering a big man at home. So I’ll call him. You can listen in on the extension, but your watch commander won’t have to know you disturbed him.”
Before either Miniver or Arlington could object I went to the phone standing in the corner and dialed his home. It’s one of those mental perversities that I know Dick’s number by heart.
He answered on the fifth ring, his voice thick with sleep.