But I wanted to play it safe. If someone more acute or suspicious than the average city dweller had heard the noise and called the police, I was giving them time to arrive. As long as we were on the roof, the only crime they could charge us with was attempted burglary of an unoccupied building, not a serious rap. Once inside, we would have committed actual burglary, which carried more time. We also had a better chance of getting away while we were on the outside. If the cops rolled because someone heard a suspicious noise, it would only be one car and we would see them before they saw us. If all they did was circle the building and check the doors, we could still do the job. If they made a move toward the fire escape, we might be able to shinny down the palm trees in front and make it back to Norm’s before they found the hole in the roof.
The dogs stopped barking after a few minutes. No one came into the alley. Several anonymous cars went by on Santa Monica, one on the cross street by Norm’s. After ten minutes, I crawled away from the low wall and crouched back over to the hole. Shining a flashlight down into the opening, I saw a typical office bathroom with a vanity and toilet but no tub or shower. The smashed exhaust fan was half buried beneath lath and plaster.
“Let’s go,” I whispered loud enough for Reggie to hear.
He crawled over and looked down into the room.
“Yer gettin’ good at this, bro,” he said.
“Practice makes perfect.”
Or, at least, hopefully, you get better.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I took a coil of rope out of one of the packs and tied it to the cast-iron soil stack that pierced the roof a couple of feet from the hole and lowered myself into the bathroom. Reggie handed the tools down to me, then slid down the rope, dropping heavily to the floor. It was a quarter past twelve.
“How we gonna get back out?” he whispered.
“You don’t have to whisper,” I said. “If we are in good shape, we can climb back up the rope. If we aren’t in such good shape, we can move a piece of furniture in here, climb up on that like an old woman, and have someone pull our fat ass up onto the roof.” I was still in a bad mood because of the thing with Mary.
“Excuse me for not being a fucking orangutan,” Reggie said, taking a wholly justifiable tone. “Where’s the safe?”
“Put these on,” I said, handing him a pair of gloves, “and we’ll go find it.”
Besides the bathroom, the darkened suite consisted of a reception alcove; a large open office area with copying machines, file cabinets, and half a dozen cubicles for secretaries and paralegals; a small kitchen with a sink and refrigerator; and six locked private offices. The name ARMAND HILDEBRAND SR. was engraved on a brass plate on one of the doors.
The door gave way with a single stomp from Reggie’s size-ten boots and we were in the large and finely furnished office of Evelyn Evermore’s attorney. The blinds on the double-pane windows facing Santa Monica Boulevard were closed against the bright sunlight that would have poured into the room in late afternoon. Lawyers don’t like bright light.
The wall safe was well concealed behind a hinged section of bookcase. It took us fifteen minutes to find it. The metal tag riveted to the front of the round steel door identified it as a Mosler, a classic brand that has been made in Hamilton, Ohio, since the nineteenth century. It had a class-A fire rating and an Underwriters Laboratories TRTL-30 security rating-a solid, well-made safe, but not impenetrable. For the first time that evening, I felt the happiness of the crime steal over me.
“Can we crack it?” Reggie asked.
“Yes.”
There are dozens of ways to open safes, ranging from the stethoscope-and-sensitive-fingers method that predominates in the popular imagination to the use of high explosives. But the easiest way is to find the combination. People have a hard time remembering long sequences of numbers, and a surprising percentage of safe owners write the combination down someplace near the safe. We spent five minutes looking on the bottom of drawers and the backs of pictures and anyplace else that seemed likely. We kept our flashlights pointed straight down, careful not to shine them directly at the windows lest a glimmer of light leak through the blinds and alert the outside world that foul play was afoot in lawyerland.
We didn’t find the combination.
That meant drilling.
I knew the Mosler had a hard-plate in the door to defeat attack from the front. The plate is made of special steel that takes a long time to drill through and may be embedded with chips of carbide that will shatter drill bits. The back of the safe would be ordinary high-tensile steel.
The small kitchen was adjacent to Hildebrand’s office, with cupboards on the shared wall. One of the cupboards was a dummy, a matching door panel that didn’t open. When the door was pried off, the back of the safe was exposed.
Before attacking the box, we took two file cabinets from the secretarial pen-one half-size, one full-size-and wrestled them into the bathroom, placing them side by side beneath the hole in the roof. Holding on to the dangling rope, Reggie had no problem climbing up onto the short cabinet, then onto the taller one and from there onto the roof.
“Stay up there and keep a lookout,” I said.
“No way,” he said, scrambling back down into the bathroom with an agility surprising in someone who had slammed into as many immovable objects on as many speeding motorcycles as he had. “I wanna see how you bust that Mosler.”
Up to that night in late January 1996, Reggie’s extensive criminal career had not included safecracking. I couldn’t blame him for wanting to get some OJT, and we didn’t have time to waste arguing. We had not been detected entering the building. The noise we would make drilling the safe would not be audible from the outside. The cops would only come now if we tripped an alarm inside the office that we didn’t know about. If that happened, they would arrive in force and catch us whether we kept a lookout or not.
“All right,” I said, giving the grizzled sergeant his due. “Let’s steal some jewels.”
The windowless kitchen was an ideal work area. I closed the door to contain the noise and turned on the light. We laid our new tools out on the counter and wiped them down again to make sure there were no fingerprints, using the cotton gloves that would not come off until we were back on the ground behind the building. I needed two holes in the back of the safe, one for the borescope, so I could see what I was doing inside the box, the other for the long screwdrivers we had picked up that afternoon.
Traditional safe locks operate via a set of notched wheels called the “wheel pack.” The little click that guys with five o’clock shadows and Lone Ranger masks hear when they slowly turn the combination dial in B-movies is the sound of a lever, called “the fence,” dropping into one of the notches. When all the notches are lined up, the lock bolt slides through a second set of notches and the safe pops open. Attacking from the rear, I would be able to see the wheel pack and move the wheels into proper alignment without using the combination dial.
We hooked up both drills and carved two holes simultaneously, standing shoulder to shoulder and using a series of bits. It’s hard to drill a large hole in high-grade steel. It takes a long time and lot of muscular effort. It is much easier to drill a small pilot hole, then enlarge it with bits of increasing size. We started with bits three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter, followed by three-eighths, three-quarters, and one inch. The oily-factory smell of electric motors straining and the whine of steel cutting steel filled the small room. Hot metal shavings piled up at our feet.