The Dead Key Part 3

It had taken them eight hours to finish one and a half floors on Sat.u.r.day. Iris did some quick math in her head. If they were going to continue working their normal shift at the office and then do the survey work after-hours, she'd be working around the clock.

"So, are we supposed to work until 2:00 a.m. every night?" Iris demanded in a voice much harsher than she intended. s.h.i.t. She had just breached the unspoken professional credo-thou shalt not b.i.t.c.h and moan. She sweetened her voice. "I mean, I don't see how we can do that without help."

Brad turned to look at her with deadpan eyes. "You want to keep this job, right?"

The color drained from her face. "Of . . . of course I do!" She couldn't afford to lose her job after three months. It would ruin her resume. Was he threatening to report her to Mr. Wheeler? Wait, was he laughing?

"I'm just messing with you, Iris!" He chuckled. "Mr. Wheeler wants you working on this building full-time, starting tomorrow."

Iris wanted to hit him on the head with her bag for teasing her, until the second thing he said registered. "You mean I get to work here instead of the office?"

"Yeah. Ha! I really had you going!"

"Yes, you did, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d! Who knew you were such a prankster?"

"Well, you should never underestimate the quiet guy." He grinned and opened the door at the end of the hall. She followed him through it and down a dark stairwell.

The heavy door thunked closed behind her. The stairwell was almost completely black, and a cold draft wafted up from wherever they were heading.

"Will you be working here too?"

"Not too much." He clicked on a small flashlight. "I'm supposed to supervise you and keep up with the other work at the office."

Iris was being furloughed from the office fishbowl. Her days would be spent unsupervised, in sneakers and jeans. She smiled in the darkness at the thought, until something crawled across her hand. She let out a squeak and shook it violently. There were cobwebs clinging to the handrail. She yanked her hand back and told herself that the tickling on her neck couldn't possibly be a spider. The winking beam of the flashlight streaked the cinder-block walls with shadows as they climbed down deeper into the bowels of the building.

After two flights of stairs, the flickering light finally stopped moving. When she caught up to Brad, he was struggling to open a heavy steel door. He gave it a solid kick, and it swung open, crashing loudly into the adjacent wall. The stairway landed in a narrow corridor that led to a large room with two enormous round doors.

"Holy s.h.i.t!"

She stared at one of them. Cursing was not professional, but the one door must have been eight feet in diameter. There was a giant wheel spiked with handles in the center of the door that reminded Iris of a pirate ship's helm. She reached out and spun it. It wasn't locked. The door was twelve-inch-thick solid steel with locking bolts the size of soup cans lining the perimeter.

Brad walked the vault door open and laughed. "Hey, who wants to rob a bank?"

"Whoa."

Iris stepped inside. It was a long, narrow room not more than five feet wide but at least twenty feet deep. The ceiling was polished bronze. The two side walls were lined from top to bottom and end to end with hundreds of little doors lined up in rows like apartment mailboxes.

"What the heck are these? This isn't where they keep the money, is it?"

"Nope. That vault is over there." Brad motioned across the marble corridor to the second, larger vault door on the opposite wall. That one was so huge, the floor stepped down in front of it so it could swing open. Iris could see from where she was standing that the larger vault was full of empty metal shelves.

"So what is this?"

Each little door lining the walls was identical, except for the numbers engraved in Gothic script. Each door had two keyholes. Iris reached out and touched one.

"This is the vault with the safe deposit boxes. It's the place where people lock away their most precious possessions. Or, you know, stuff they don't want anyone to find."

Iris scanned all the little metal doors and saw that one of them hung open. She walked over to it and peered inside. The door concealed a steel-lined cubbyhole. It was empty. Iris reached in past her elbow. The walls were smooth and cold. She pulled her hand out and closed the door. It swung freely back open.

"I guess you need a key to lock it," she said to no one.

Her footsteps echoed off the bronze floor as she headed back out of the vault. Round corkscrews of shaved metal crunched under her feet. She bent down to pick one up and came face-to-face with a safe deposit door that was riddled with holes.

"What the heck happened here?"

"They drilled it open," a gravelly voice said behind them. It belonged to an older black man in a blue collared shirt that said "Security." An ID tag hung around his neck, and a giant ring of keys dangled from his belt.

"Oh, hi." Iris straightened up. "You must be Ramone."

"That's me." He was tall, thin, and slightly crooked. Looking at his short gray hair and tired eyes, Iris guessed he was at least fifty years old. His dark brown skin looked as dry and dusty as the vault floor.

"I'm Iris. I think you're going to be stuck with me for a few weeks."

He walked over to her, his black sneakers silent on the vault floor, and shook her hand. It was a gentle handshake, but his hand felt like sandpaper.

"It's nice to meet you. Do I need to get another set of keys for this young lady?" he asked Brad.

"No, I'll just give her mine," Brad said.

Ramone seemed satisfied to get the business settled. He glanced at one of the safe deposit boxes, then turned to Iris. "Is this your first time down here?"

"Yeah. It's like being inside a coffin!" Brad answered for her. He kicked the outside walls and walked around the corner. "You know, these vaults are solid steel. The walls are like a foot thick. They don't build 'em like this anymore."

Iris nodded in agreement. When Brad had wandered down the hall with his tape measure, she dropped her voice and asked, "What do you mean, they drilled it open?"

"The box," Ramone said in a three-pack-a-day baritone. "Whenever someone wants to claim their stuff, they have to drill 'em open. You know, after they submit a formal request to the State of Ohio and get a warrant."

"I don't understand. Aren't there keys?"

"Yeah, I guess there are somewhere, but I don't think anybody knows where."

"What do you mean? Don't the people who put their stuff in here have a key?"

"Not always. Sometimes people die and no one ever finds the key. But that ain't the problem." He grinned like it was an inside joke.

"What's the problem?"

"Problem is, the bank fired everybody so fast when they shut down, they lost track of the master keys!"

"The master keys?"

"Yeah." Ramone pointed to a door. "You see, you need two keys to open the box: the key they give to the person who rented the box, and the master key for the box."

Iris stared at the two keyholes and noticed one hole was larger than the other. She looked at the box and then back at Ramone. He seemed to know an awful lot about it.

Ramone pointed to Box 1143. "I got to watch them drill this one. It took 'em forever to find the sweet spot. That little old man was p.i.s.sed. Said it took him two years to get all his paperwork approved." He laughed a raspy belly laugh like it was yesterday.

"How long ago was that?"

"Must've been ten or fifteen years ago. No one's been down here in ages."

There were rows and rows of locked doors inside the vault. Her eyes widened as she processed what he had said. "Do you mean there's still stuff in these boxes?"

"Yeah, a few of 'em. Hard to say how many. At least, for the time being anyway." He tapped on a door.

"What do you mean?" Iris asked.

"Well, the owner's going to gut it and sell the place, last I heard. I don't know what they're going to do with all of this stuff, but time is running out." He waved his hands at the walls as if he'd be glad to be rid of them. From the looks of his hands and crooked back, he had been stuck in the building for decades.

"But don't the people want their stuff back?"

"Beats me." Ramone shrugged. "Lot of 'em are probably long gone. Dead or moved away. After all the years I spent working in this place, I keep my money in a coffee can."

Iris looked again at the doors that had been forced open. There were ten. She quickly scanned the rows and columns of doors. They were stacked twenty high and over thirty deep on each side. That was at least twelve hundred boxes, she calculated, and only ten had been drilled open. That left hundreds of boxes that might still contain G.o.d knows what.

Brad emerged from around the corner, holding his tape measure. "Hey, let's see if we can't get this bas.e.m.e.nt laid out today."

Iris heard a note of irritation in his voice. She jumped to attention and grabbed her clipboard. A few steps down the hall, she glanced back. Ramone was still standing in the vault, studying the boxes.

CHAPTER 7.

Monday, November 6, 1978 The head of Human Resources led Beatrice up the elevator to the ninth floor, down a hall, and into a large room. There were eight desks paired into four rows. The desks were surrounded on three sides by a ring of closed office doors. There were no windows to the outside. The room was lit only by buzzing fluorescent bulbs and the occasional green desk lamp.

"Ms. Cunningham will be in charge of you," the woman in the polyester suit explained.

"Oh, I thought I was working for Mr. Thompson." Beatrice scanned the seven women corralled in the room, each at her own desk.

"Honey, all of these ladies work for Mr. Thompson. He's the head of the department." The HR lady rolled her eyes. "Ah, here's Ms. Cunningham now."

A powder keg of a woman barreled toward them. She was short and round, and her stockings rubbed together loudly as she went. She had an exasperated look in her eyes and a worn-down pencil in her hair.

"Is this the new girl?"

"Yes, this is Miss Baker." She turned to Beatrice. "Ms. Cunningham will show you the ropes around here. Let me know if you have any problems."

Ms. Cunningham nodded in agreement and marched back toward her office. Beatrice had to run to catch up.

She pointed Beatrice to the chair and slid her large girth behind the desk. "Where are you from, Miss Baker?"

"I'm from Marietta originally." Beatrice crossed her fingers that that would be the end of the inquiries regarding her past.

"What brings you to Cleveland?"

"I came to stay with my aunt in Cleveland Heights two years ago."

"Interesting."

Ms. Cunningham examined Beatrice intently. The woman must have been at least sixty, but there was nothing grandmotherly about her. It became clear to Beatrice that this was going to be the real interview for the job.

"Why did you leave home, Miss Baker?"

"My father died and my mother . . ." Beatrice took a moment and let her voice break. "My mother became very . . . um . . . ill." She lowered her eyes to the floor as if shamed by her mother's mental health. "I had nowhere else to go."

Aunt Doris had insisted that her story had to reveal something terrible, humiliating even, to satisfy her interrogator. When Beatrice glanced up, she could see that Ms. Cunningham's eyes had softened.

"Can you type?" she asked.

"Eighty-five words per minute."

"Excellent. Let me give you one word of advice, Miss Baker. I take everything that happens in my department personally. If you have any concerns or observe anything that doesn't meet our standard of excellence here at the bank, I need you to report it to me immediately." She looked Beatrice hard in the eye, and then smiled. "Let's get you started."

An hour later, Beatrice sat at a small metal desk in the third row of the secretarial pool, staring at her shiny, new electric typewriter. It must have cost a fortune, she thought, as she turned the switch on and off, fascinated by the low hum of the motor as it whirred to life. She ran a finger over the soft b.u.t.ton keys. They felt like the control panel of a s.p.a.ceship compared to the long claws of Doris's old Remington.

Standard-issue stapler, tape dispenser, steno pads, pencils, pens, paper clips, binder clips, and scissors all gleamed in their wrappers under the fluorescent lights. She hadn't received any a.s.signments from Ms. Cunningham yet, so Beatrice slowly unwrapped and studied each one. She opened the drawers of her desk one by one, inspecting the insides before carefully placing every item in its proper place.

Years earlier, organizing her dollhouse had given her the same giddy satisfaction. Even though every little chair and bedside table she'd collected was mismatched and came to her dirty or broken, Beatrice meticulously cleaned each one and positioned it perfectly in its proper place. Her mother would mock her for caring more about the insides of that little three-foot box than her own house. But the house she grew up in wasn't really hers. She was just a guest in it-that's what her mother would say. It turned out the dollhouse wasn't really hers either. One day when she was thirteen, she came home from school and it was gone.

Beatrice was lining her pencils up in a tight row when the polished black phone on her desk rang. The sound made her jump, and for a moment she just stared dumbly at it. No one had taught her the correct procedure for answering outside calls. It was her first test in her new position. She straightened herself in her seat and picked up the phone. Summoning her most formal voice, she said, "Good morning, First Bank of Cleveland."

"You need to relax. You're making me nervous," a woman's voice whispered into the phone.

Beatrice blinked at the rotary dial on her desk for a moment. "Wha-? What do you mean?"

"It's just your first day. Take it easy. Your obsessive organizing is making the rest of us look bad."

Beatrice realized it must be another secretary in the room. She lifted the phone away from her ear slightly and glanced at the desk next to hers. The older woman sitting beside her was swiftly typing. Francine was her name. When they were introduced, Francine had glanced up from her work with only the slightest nod. With her horn-rimmed gla.s.ses and pursed lips, she reminded Beatrice of an old schoolmarm. It certainly wasn't her on the phone.

Beatrice glanced furtively at the women seated in front of her. In the next row, two overweight motherly types were seated side by side, quietly filing. An almost elderly woman sat at a desk two rows up, separating a pile of papers into neat stacks while speaking tersely into her phone: "No, I don't have the C-3 form. I sent you a C-44, and that should have been sufficient . . ."

Next to the angry grandmother sat a pretty young woman who couldn't have been more than twenty years old. She was struggling with her typewriter, trying to force several pages through the roller. Beatrice heard her softly curse when one of them tore. None of the women in front of her had called.

Beatrice had no choice but to turn around to find the voice on the phone. She cautiously scanned the ring of closed doors surrounding the work area. m.u.f.fled voices were coming from behind several of them. Mr. Rothstein was on the phone. A tall silhouette moved across the frosted-gla.s.s panels of Mr. Halloran's office. She only knew their names from the little signs on their doors. The coast was clear, so she slowly turned in her seat and looked behind her.

There were two women seated in the last row. One had her head down, typing. The other was holding a phone. Beatrice heard her whisper "Bingo!" in her ear. "Meet me in the ladies' room in five minutes." She hung up before Beatrice had a chance to answer.

Beatrice snapped her head back around, having barely glimpsed the mystery woman's bra.s.sy blond hair and red lipstick. Ms. Cunningham hadn't specifically said that chitchatting in the secretarial pool was frowned upon, but she hadn't heard any friendly conversation so far. Speaking aloud seemed to be reserved for business purposes only.

Five minutes ticked by one at a time on the big clock hanging over the front of the room. Beatrice finally stood up at her desk and looked around. Ms. Cunningham hadn't so much as cracked her door since showing her to her chair. The surrounding office doors were still shut tight, and the other secretaries' heads were down in their own business. Beatrice was unsure if she needed to ask permission to use the bathroom but was too embarra.s.sed to ask. She tiptoed out of the secretarial pen toward the ladies' room. Her small feet padded silently on the olive-green carpeting until she reached the hall, where her shoes clacked loudly on the linoleum tiles. The racket sent her scurrying like a startled cat into the restroom.

"Good Lord! Why are you so high-strung?"