The Dead Key Part 26

"I don't understand."

"The bank holdings were sold off to an out-of-town company, Columbus Trust, and the feds locked the building down to protect deposits. I'm just glad we got a few indictments first. We brought down one crooked family, but the rest got away. Some people disappeared. I think you just found one of them."

The devoured body on the shower floor. She swallowed hard and tried to distract herself from the smell of vomit still lingering in her hair and clothes. She kept her cigarette close to her nose. Two weeks, she thought to herself. The city defaulted on December 15, and the bank was sold on December 29. Didn't Suzanne say that Beatrice had disappeared before the bank was sold? She couldn't remember.

"Did you know anyone who disappeared?"

"My sister for one," the detective said, his eyes trained on his mug. He put up a stony facade, but Iris could tell it still pained him.

"I'm so sorry."

He waved his hand at her apology. "It was a long time ago. I just always thought she would turn up by now, you know? Max was like that."

The name Max hit Iris like a lightning bolt. She'd seen the name before in a book, in Beatrice's book. There were still stacks of scribbled shorthand somewhere in her apartment in folders she'd stolen from the file room. And there was the mysterious suitcase. The suitcase had belonged to a woman.

Iris buried her face in her hands. "I think I need to go home."

CHAPTER 50.

"Iris, this is Charles Wheeler. We've heard about what happened. Take the next week off to do whatever you need to do to recover from this shock . . ."

Iris walked to the kitchen as the message played and downed three shots of vodka. Apparently a week off from work was the going rate for discovering a dead body at the job site. She wasn't sure how her boss had found out so fast, and she really didn't care.

". . . the project has been put on hold temporarily. WRE intends to cooperate with the police and their investigation; however, all drawings and notes regarding the building and all of its contents remain the sole property of the owner. We expect you to keep the details of your survey work confidential. We'll touch base when you get back."

Liquor warmed her stomach as she staggered to her bedroom. She peeled off her clothes and threw them into an overflowing trash can. Sitting on the floor of her bathtub, she let the hot water run down her face until it ran cold. Every time she closed her eyes, all she could see were flies.

Three hours later, Iris still couldn't relax, even after three more shots, fifteen cigarettes, and four sitcom reruns. Her hands twitched. Her thoughts swayed unsteadily from the flies to the detective's voice to the stolen keys in her field bag. Detective McDonnell had said his sister had gone missing. His sister was Max.

She set the bottle of vodka down and stumbled out of her kitchen. Unpacked boxes still littered her living room floor. The cupboards and drawers and closets of her new apartment were empty. All she'd managed to unpack so far was a coffee mug, a spoon, and a shot gla.s.s. Pathetic.

She plopped herself down in front of the closest box and tore off the tape. Plates, gla.s.ses, silverware, cleaning supplies, and books spilled out as she opened box after box. She couldn't see the floor between the piles of this and that, but there was no sign of it anywhere. Beatrice's folder was gone. She tried to remember packing it, but her thoughts spun out of her reach. The mess around her seemed to spin too. She had to get away from it. She hauled herself up from the floor and held on to the wall all the way back to her bedroom.

TV reruns, couch, vodka, crackers, sleep, and nightmares. The next few days were a blur. The only calls were from her mother, and Iris didn't pick up the phone. She knew if she did she would cry, and her mother would come running. Ellie didn't call, but Ellie never did. She wasn't a phone-call kind of friend. Nick didn't call-not even after Monday morning came and went and he'd no doubt heard about what happened. Iris didn't leave the house. She stayed in her pajamas and only got up to use the bathroom. Her guts coiled in knots as nagging thoughts kept clawing through her drunken haze. She still had the keys. Someone might still be looking for her. She'd lied by omission to a police detective. The only way she was able to sleep at night was by pa.s.sing out cold.

Tuesday morning she opened her eyes to an overflowing ashtray and an empty bottle. A rustling sound had woken her. She heard it again-scratching and crinkling papers. She sat up from the couch with a start. The room wobbled, and she grabbed the armrest to make it stop. The sound was coming from the kitchen. She swallowed the acid in her throat and picked her way toward the noise.

"h.e.l.lo?" she croaked.

The sound stopped abruptly. Her heart thumped against her weak stomach as she rounded the corner and peeked into the kitchen. No one was there. Jesus. She had to stop drinking; her imagination was running amok. She pressed her forehead to the wall. As she did, she caught sight of a tiny brown mouse scurrying across the kitchen floor toward her. She leapt away from the wall with a shriek and fell over a box.

The kitchen counter was strewn with paper plates and garbage. It was no wonder. The floor was still covered with her unpacked s.h.i.t. The Friday night s.e.x sheets were still on her bed. Her clothes were piled in disorganized heaps all over her bedroom floor. The walls began to sway. She felt her way into the bathroom and threw up.

An hour later, Iris staggered into her bedroom, stripped the sheets off of the bed, and laid them on the floor. She piled all of her dirty laundry into the middle and wrapped up the whole mess and threw it over her shoulder. She grabbed a fistful of quarters and marched off to the corner coin laundry in her sweatpants.

The Wash N Rinse was deserted. She filled up three washers. As she slammed quarters in each one, a small bit of the weight lifted off her shoulders. She'd finally done something right. She plopped down onto a plastic chair and watched her clothes spin around in soapy water. If only she could throw her whole body in as well and come out clean and ready to start over. She dropped her throbbing head into her hands and shut her eyes.

A fly buzzed past her ear and settled onto the arm of the chair next to her. It rubbed its greedy little hands together, watching her. She lurched away from it. No one in the world could possibly want her used underwear anyway, she told herself as she backed out of the Laundromat, leaving her clothes unattended.

She flung open the door to her apartment and surveyed the mess she'd made of a once-sparkling new home. It was supposed to be her first grown-up apartment for her new grown-up life. It looked like a vagrant had moved in. It didn't look that different from the homeless hovel on the eleventh floor of the old bank tower.

Four hefty bags of garbage, some bleach, and an entire roll of paper towels later, Iris was ready to finally unpack. One by one the moving boxes were broken down and thrown onto the curb. Dishes stacked in cupboards, books piled on shelves, silverware shoved in drawers, and her carpet slowly reemerged from the chaos. The apartment was starting to look as if a functional adult lived there.

She pulled out the last box she'd stashed in the hall closet and ripped it open. It was the junk box that held everything that didn't have a proper place in her life. She pulled out a flashlight, a pack of batteries, a screwdriver, chewing gum, bandages, a box cutter, and a book.

It was Beatrice's guide to shorthand. Under it she found Beatrice's missing notes, along with the files from the lonely suitcase and the key she'd taken from Suzanne's desk. Key 547. She ran a finger over the number. It couldn't really be the reason Beatrice vanished, she told herself, and tried to believe it. She sat down in the middle of the room and turned to the back page of the shorthand manual, where Max had left a note. She traced Max's pen strokes with her fingertip. Max was a cop's sister. She had disappeared when the bank closed. Just like Beatrice. From the look on his face, the detective was still searching for Max. The old bank haunted him the way it haunted Iris.

That's it. Detective McDonnell still didn't know what had happened to his sister. If Iris could find some clue to her whereabouts somewhere in these notes, maybe he would forgive her for not telling him the whole truth. Maybe he would believe her when she explained she'd taken a few things from the building but she wasn't a thief. She wasn't after whatever was buried in the vault or anywhere else in the bank. She never meant for any of this to happen. It might be her way out of this mess.

Iris picked up the manual, determined to decipher the bird scratch that pa.s.sed for writing in the 1970s. The first sheet of paper from Beatrice's file was filled top to bottom with scribbling. She grabbed a pencil from her field bag and began decoding the words.

After five minutes the thrill of unraveling the mystery wore off as she stared down a page of nonsense. "Mole hunt bust." "Inside man lost?" Iris decided she must be doing something wrong.

She grabbed the other file, the one from the suitcase. Translating the first sheet, she came up with a jumble of letters and numbers and "D is for three hundred, E is for four hundred . . ." She scanned down, until she finally found something that seemed to make sense. "In G.o.d We Trust."

She read the words again and then tossed the shorthand manual aside. In G.o.d We Trust? Was Beatrice some sort of religious nut or something? It was getting dark outside. It was way past dinnertime. c.r.a.p. She'd forgotten her laundry.

Iris stumbled out into the evening to collect her clothes. A gray sedan parked across the street pulled out and headed the same direction. She only noticed because it was driving behind her a bit slow. She turned to look at it, and it sped away.

CHAPTER 51.

Iris spent half the night trying to find some clue to the disappearance of Beatrice or the detective's sister, with no luck. What she had produced was a disjointed collection of words-"In G.o.d We Trust is the key . . . Inside man lost? . . . Mole hunt bust . . . f.u.c.k the mayor . . . Move the accounts . . . Teddy and Jim . . . Tell Max to stay on vacation . . . A bank's only as good as its records . . . the meek shall inherit the earth."

Eventually, she dozed off on the floor and drifted back into the building. It was late. Iris was working overtime again. She was in the old HR office, sitting in Linda's chair, clicking away at her keyboard. The plans were coming together well. She picked up her hand-drawn sketch and squinted, trying to decipher her own sloppy writing. Something dropped next to her keyboard with a metallic clank.

It was a key. A skull and crossbones was etched into its bronze face. She picked it up and stared, mesmerized. A key marked for death. She turned it over and shrieked. There was blood on her fingertips. The key was bleeding.

Iris sat bolt upright on the floor. Heart racing, covered in sweat, she swore she could hear flies buzzing. She clawed at her arms and neck, checking for phantom bugs, and then leapt up from the carpet, itching with them.

"Jesus f.u.c.king Christ!" she hissed.

Iris stumbled into the kitchen for something soothing. No more booze; her liver couldn't take it. She opened the fridge and settled for a gla.s.s of warm milk. She'd never actually tried warm milk but figured it might help. As the gla.s.s spun in the microwave, she rubbed her forehead. For days she'd been too drunk to remember her nightmares. The image of the key from her dream turned in her head. It had been covered in blood. There was a skull on it or something. She suddenly had to check the key she'd taken from the dead man's room to be sure it wasn't there.

She rushed to her field bag and fished the lone key out from the front pocket. Remembering where she'd found it, she took it to the kitchen sink and washed it under the hot water until her hands burned. After the suds rinsed away, she studied the key carefully. The face on each side was blank. There was no skull, but there were no marks for the type of lock it opened or of any kind. It seemed wrong.

Iris went to her purse and pulled out her key rings. She checked her house key, her car key, and her key to the office. Each one had an inscription of some kind. "Schlage," "Mazda," and "Larson" the keys read. Her eyes wandered across the counter. Even Suzanne's mysterious key had the name of the bank and the box number on it.

The keys Brad had given her for the old bank were of all shapes and sizes, but none were blank. She pulled the key ring someone had left in the vault from the bottom of her field bag. Someone who had been trying to open a safe deposit box, she reminded herself. Someone who was not Ramone, or at least he claimed it wasn't him. The keys were all marked with letters and the name of the bank. She still had the dead man's key in her other hand. She looked from the vault keys to the blank key and realized they were very similar. They were all bronze with round heads. She pressed the blank key against one marked "D." The blank key was shorter. They didn't match.

The microwave dinged. Iris set the keys on the counter and went to get her warm milk. She looked into the gla.s.s skeptically. It didn't smell appetizing, but she took a sip anyway. The sickly warm liquid slid down her throat, leaving a sc.u.mmy film behind.

"Uck!" She grimaced and dumped the milk in the sink. She grabbed a beer from the fridge and gulped it down until the taste of thick, sweet milk had rinsed away.

Head now buzzing, she turned back and faced the keys scattered around the counter. The dead man's key sat next to Suzanne's safe deposit box key. Iris narrowed her eyes. She picked them both up and sandwiched them together. They were exactly the same shape and size, and the teeth almost matched. It wasn't a door key that had been left in the room with the body. It was a key to the vault. A nagging feeling crept back into her gut . . . It shouldn't be blank. She paced the kitchen, trying to shake the feeling that the key was somehow the reason the man was dead. She never should have taken it.

Iris finally fell back to sleep around five in the morning with the two keys lying on the table in front of her next to her open phone book.

First thing the next morning, Iris staggered to her car. She had spent an hour the night before searching the yellow pages for a locksmith or key shop. A pimple-faced teenager working the key station at the hardware store wouldn't be much help. She needed an expert.

She had settled on the Lock and Key in Garfield Heights. Its yellow pages ad featured old-timey lettering and a cartoon of an old man carving a key. He was the one she needed to see.

On Turney Road she found the hole-in-the-wall shop. She pushed through the door into a tiny room where the walls were covered in doork.n.o.bs-old-fashioned ones, high-tech ones, fancy long-handled ones. She walked straight back to the service counter, where a worn stool sat empty by the cash register. An open door led to a storage room in the back. Iris. .h.i.t the little silver bell on the counter and waited. There was a hand-painted sign on the back wall that read, "Lost Your Key? We Pick Locks."

She waited for a full minute and was about to ring the bell again when a pretty young woman popped through the doorway. Iris's face fell in disappointment. She couldn't have been more than thirty years old. The little old man who carved keys was nowhere to be found.

"Can I help you?"

Iris doubted it. But she decided she'd driven all this way so she might as well ask.

"I'm not sure . . . I found these keys, and I don't know what they're for." She placed Suzanne's key and the dead man's key on the counter.

"Huh," the woman grunted, and picked each one up. She turned them over in her hands and asked, "Where'd you find them?"

"In my grandpa's old desk," she lied. To make it seem less like she stole them, she added, "He died last year."

The woman nodded, seeming to buy the story. She pointed to Suzanne's key. "Well, this one is for a safe deposit box."

"Really? How can you tell?"

"The name of the bank is here, and this would be the box number."

Thanks for nothing, Iris thought wryly, straightening herself up to leave.

Then the woman scowled. "Did your grandfather work at the bank?"

"Uh, I don't know." Iris suddenly felt nervous. "He was retired for years. Why do you ask?"

"Well, this key would only belong to someone at the bank." She eyed Iris carefully.

"Really? Why?"

"It's a master key." The woman set it back on the counter. "It matches the lock pins for this key and any others like it."

"I don't understand." Iris swore she could feel a fly crawling up her neck. She swatted it away.

"Well, they're illegal now, but years ago banks kept master keys for safe deposit boxes so they wouldn't have to ruin the housings by drilling them open-you know, if the other keys were lost. They were obviously very tightly guarded. I'm shocked you found one in your grandpa's old desk."

"How do you know that this is that kind of key?" Iris asked defensively. The pretty woman behind the counter couldn't have been more than ten years old when the bank closed.

"Keys are my business. I might not look like I know much, but I was trained by the best." She pointed to a small photograph of an old man by the register. "What was your grandfather's name, hon?"

Iris felt her stomach tighten. This was a key shop. They probably got odd requests all of the time, maybe even illegal requests. Cleveland was no stranger to larceny. The lady behind the counter might even have a legal obligation to report her to the police.

"I . . . I'm sorry. This is all so confusing, I just . . . need to go." She quickly grabbed the keys and stuffed them back into her pocket. "Thank you," she muttered, and nearly ran out the door.

CHAPTER 52.

Wednesday, December 13, 1978 "Coffee, black!" Randy Halloran slammed his coat and scarf onto Beatrice's desk.

Not a minute later, she could hear him yelling into the phone through his closed door as she scrambled to hang up his things in the executive coatroom. She fetched the coffee and then stood outside the frosted gla.s.s, watching his shadow pace back and forth as he ranted, afraid to knock.

"Jesus! I don't care what you have to do, call a G.o.dd.a.m.n locksmith! I don't give a d.a.m.n what Stone says. We have a business to run!"

She heard him slam the phone onto its cradle.

Beatrice lifted her small fist to knock, but an older man in a tweed suit thundered down the aisle to Randy's door. He opened it without knocking and slammed it behind him. m.u.f.fled voices argued behind the frosted gla.s.s. She scurried back to her desk, knowing better than to interrupt.

"I don't give a good G.o.dd.a.m.n what you think it is your duty to do," a voice bellowed. "You will stick to your job description, or you're fired!"

The door opened, and the old man stormed out. His steel-gray hair framed his blazing face. Beatrice glanced back at Mr. Halloran's office. The door was closed.

She waited a full five minutes and freshened the coffee before gently rapping on the door. "Excuse me, Mr. Halloran."

She heard footsteps thundering toward her and took a step back. The door swung open. He glowered down at her. "I would very much like not to be disturbed this morning."

She lifted the coffee mug in his direction without a word. He yanked it from her hand, spilling coffee on his shoe and pant leg.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, sir!"

"G.o.ddammit, Beatrice!" he thundered, making her jump. "Get my coat."

He shoved the mug back to her, splashing her wrist with scalding coffee.

She scurried away, eyes watering, certain the entire office was staring after her. She dumped the offending coffee in the sink and rinsed her red skin with cold water. She ran back to his office carrying a mountain of cashmere and leather. Her feet halted at the threshold, and she peeked over the top of the pile for Randy.