I got up from the machine and put an arm around him. “The worst thing you can do in an investigation is slow yourself down chewing over what you did wrong. When the case is finished you can take some time and try to learn from your mistakes. But when you’re in the middle of it—you just have to be like the Duke of Wellington—forget about it and go on.”

“Duke of Wellington, huh? He’s the guy that beat Napoleon, right?”

“The very one.” I sat back down at the typewriter. “Tell me something evil-sounding that could go wrong with someone’s electrical outlets—something so bad, we can’t let anyone watch us while we work for fear they’ll fry their eyeballs.”

Mr. Contreras pulled one of my client chairs next to the typewriter. “I don’t know, doll. All this fancy, modern equipment folks have in their offices, I don’t know what they’d have, and tell you the truth, I don’t know what could go wrong with it.”

“Don’t worry about that. The junior legal beagles we’re going to run into won’t know either. Dick probably has a computer, and his secretary will have a CRT to the company’s big system.” I tried to imagine my ex-husband’s office. “Maybe she has a big printer, because she’ll be printing a lot of forms. Since he’s one of the senior partners, she might not have to share it with anyone.”

Mr. Contreras thought about it slowly, drawing himself a diagram on a piece of scrap paper. “Okay. Put in something about a high-voltage short to the cover of the machine—maybe it knocked an operator out, or blew her across the room or something.”

I typed that in, adding a date and time of call. Then I made a fake form for Klosowski by using the header from the work order and a blank piece of paper in my copier. On Mr. Contreras’s suggestion I used that to type in a report of an earlier inspection of a short in the building’s air conditioner that had been traced to R. Yarborough’s office. The whole thing was about as spurious as I could imagine, but it might get us in the door.

47

A Short in the System

Despite the hour, a bevy of tireless young lawyers were fluttering around Crawford, Mead’s offices. We got in through their locked mahogany doors simply by showing our work order to the night guard in the main lobby and getting him to phone up to the office for us.