Allen would wait as long as he could for Tommy to show up. When he didn’t come, Allen would leave and sign the work order “completed” or write that the apartment door had been “dead-locked,” which meant that he couldn’t get in. But some tenants would call back three or four times to complain that the work hadn’t been done. Once after four callbacks, Sharon decided to drive to the apartment with Billy to see what the problem was.

“For God’s sake, Bill,” she said, staring down at the dishwasher that wouldn’t fill. “Even I can see how to fix that. You’re supposed to be a maintenance man. You’re supposed to repair appliances.”

“I did fix it. I repaired the drain line.”

“Well, that’s obviously not where the problem is.”

When he dropped her off at the rental office, he knew she was angry with him. He suspected she was going to have him fired.

Allen told Tommy it was important for him to get something he could hold over John Wymer and Sharon Roth to keep them from firing him.

Tommy’s first idea was to build a telephone blue box for John Wymer’s car and bug it.

“It’ll be a simple thing to make,” Allen told Wymer. “Then you’ll have a car telephone you can use without the phone company even knowing about it.”

“Wouldn’t that be illegal?” Wymer asked.

“Not at all. The airwaves are free.”

“You can really do it?”

“Only one way to prove it to you. You pay for the materials and let me make one for you.”

Wymer questioned him closely, surprised at Milligan’s knowledge of electronics. “I’d like to look into it first,” Wymer said. “But it does sound interesting.”

A few days later, while Tommy was buying some materials for his own blue box at an electronics supply shop, he discovered a taping bug that could be inserted into a telephone and activated by the phone ringing. All he would have to do was to dial the personnel or rental office, pretend he had called a wrong number and hang up; then the tape recorder would begin. By taping conversations in Roth’s or Wymer’s office, he might learn if there was something illegal going on, and he could use it to threaten them and get them off his back if they tried to fire him.

Tommy charged the electronic bugs to Kelly and Lemmon, along with other electrical supplies.

That night, he slipped into the rental office and inserted the recording device into Roth’s telephone. He did the same in Wymer’s office. Then Allen took the spot and went through some of the filing cabinets to see if there might be any useful information. One folder caught his eye—a listing of what the front office called the “blue-chip investors,” stockholders in Channingway and Williamsburg Square, normally kept secret. These were the people who employed Kelly and Lemmon to manage the apartment complexes. Allen made copies of the names.

With the bugs in tha phones and the list in his pocket, he felt that whatever happened, his job was secure.