Due Diligence

by Michael A. Kahn

  “Stop here,” I said.

  We were midway down a narrow street. There was a warehouse to our left and another to our right. Visible in the distance and slightly to the right was the descending curve of the exit ramp. The highway itself was beyond and above the tops of the warehouses. You could hear the sounds of cars and trucks rumbling along.

  I got out of the car with both maps in my hands. I handed the cave map to Benny. Flo came around to study them with us.

  “Nu?” Benny said, studying the street map.

  I compared locations on Benny’s map and mine. “Come on, guys.” I walked toward the end of the block.

  “Where are we?” Flo asked.

  “Here,” I said, pausing to point to the spot on the street map Benny was holding. “The tourist entrance was off Grolier Avenue.” We were almost at the end of the block. I checked the cave map again, then the street map. “That means the entrance would have been—let’s see—about a block further east.”

  We both looked up slowly.

  “Shit,” Benny groaned.

  Exactly one block further east was the descending curve of the exit ramp. The ground beneath the entire length of the exit ramp was paved with broad concrete slabs. There wasn’t even a hint of what had once been there. It was all covered by cold gray cement.

  “Rats,” I said in frustration. “It’s gone.”

  “Not gone,” Flo said. “Just covered.”

  “Great.” I gave her a look. “Unless you have access to a twenty-man jackhammer crew, it’s as good as gone.”

  We stared in silence.

  “Come on,” I finally said with a weary sigh. “Back to the drawing board.”

  The three of us walked slowly toward the car.

  Benny paused as he opened the car door and looked around. “This area is the pits,” he said. “Talk about urban decay.”

  I looked up at the warehouse across the street. It clearly was long abandoned: half of the windows were broken, and the rest were filthy. It looked like a rundown building out of a horror film. The sign above the door was battered and grimy. I squinted, trying to read it.

  “What do you know,” I said with surprise. I could barely make out the legend:

  Flo turned to look at the sign. “How about that? Old Mordecai must have owned it.”

  We got in the car to leave, but as Flo started the engine I grabbed her arm. “Wait.”

  She gave me a curious look and turned off the engine.

  I pointed to the exit ramp in the distance. “If that’s over the cave, then so is this warehouse.”

  “So?” Benny said.

  I looked at him impatiently. “Think about it, Benny. If Mordecai Jacobs was storing business records in the cave even after the Highway Department sealed off the tourist entrance to Gutmann Caverns, then he had to have another access to the cave. Maybe that access was through his warehouse.”

  Flo looked at the warehouse and then at me. “Let me see that cave map.”

  I handed it to her.

  Benny leaned over to look, too. After a moment, he grumbled, “How do you read this goddam thing?”

  “Here.” I pointed to the area that appeared to be located below the exit ramp. “You see, the cave splits down there. One branch runs due north, the other runs northwest. Look at the position of the warehouse. It’s due north.”

  They frowned at the map, and then Flo turned to stare up at the warehouse.

  “You’re not serious, are you?” Benny asked incredulously.

  “It’s worth a shot,” I said.

  Flo turned back and winked. “It sure is.”

  “Hold it,” Benny said. “Are you saying you actually intend to go in there?”

  I looked at Flo. She smiled at me and nodded. I turned to Benny. “Come on, stud. Let’s do it.”

  “Jesus H. Christ, Rachel,” he growled at me under his breath as we got out of the car, “and you actually have the nerve to wonder why I prefer the company of bimbos.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  We didn’t need the metal cutters to get into the warehouse. The lock on the front door was rusted and broken. Benny pushed against the door and it creaked open. We stepped inside after him and glanced around.

  “Creepy,” Flo said.

  I nodded. Chunks of plaster hung from the ceilings. There were large cobwebs in the corners and along the edges where the walls met the ceiling. The front part of the building, which had partition walls that divided up the space, must have once been the office area. It was hard to be sure, though, since there was no furniture or equipment anywhere. There were large, jagged holes through several of the partition walls, as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the place. The floors were filthy and sprinkled with rat droppings.

  I walked past what I assumed was the front offices and into the main portion of the warehouse. It was a large open area, vaguely divided at regular intervals by rusted support beams. Here, too, the floors were filthy. As I moved around, I saw signs of occasional human habitation: several empty beer and wine bottles, many of them broken; ashes from cooking fires that had been built right on the floor; two empty cans of baked beans; the front page of the sports section from the July 9, 1982, edition of the Globe-Democrat (“Redbirds Dwarf Giants in 10th; Win 4-2”).

  “Over here,” Flo called. She and Benny were standing by a partially open door near the back of the main area.

  I walked over to join them. “What?”

  “These stairs go down,” Flo said. “Let me have the flashlight.”

  I turned so that she could remove the flashlight from the backpack. She clicked on the beam and started down the narrow stairs into the darkness.

  “Hold it, Rambo,” Benny said to Flo. He turned to me. “Don’t you think we ought to call the cops?”

  “Benny,” I said with an exasperated shake of my head, “what are we supposed to tell them? That we’d like them to poke around in an abandoned warehouse with us?” I took his arm. “Come on, boychik.”

  “Great,” he said with a sigh of resignation. “I thought I was just the caterer for this event.”

  The air grew cooler as we descended. There was a vague odor of rotting plaster and moldy wood. When we reached the bottom, Flo moved the flashlight beam around. This space looked much like the one above, although the ceilings were lower.

  “Shhh,” I said, touching her arm.

  “What?” she whispered.

  “I heard something.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Down here. A rustling noise.”

  We stood motionless, and then the rustling started again. Flo quickly swung the beam around toward the noise.

  “Holy shit,” Benny said as the flashlight momentarily illuminated a fat gray rat, which scurried into the darkness.

  “Gross.” I shuddered.

  “We should have brought a shotgun,” Flo said.

  “Shotgun?” Benny said. “We should have brought the fucking marines.”

  “Let’s work fast,” I said. “Look for a subbasement.”

  We moved cautiously around the area, blind except for the beam of light from the flashlight. There were three small rooms along the far wall. The first one was a men’s room—two urinals, one stall, one sink. The second room was smaller and appeared to be some sort of utilities control area: there were fuse boxes on the wall along with rusted water, gas and electric company meters.

  I pushed open the door to the third room. It was even smaller than the first two.

  “Ah,” Flo said as the flashlight beam illuminated the trapdoor set in the floor.

  The trapdoor was surrounded by low guardrails on three sides. A lightweight chain hung across the open fourth side of the guardrail. I unhooked the chain and leaned over the trapdoor. It was about three feet square, with a door handle on the near side. A
s Flo shined the light, I tried to pull the handle down to unlock the door. The handle didn’t budge.

  “Yank it hard,” Flo said.

  I tried, but it still didn’t budge.

  “Okay,” Benny said. “Out of my way, Earth girl.”

  He leaned over the trapdoor, put both hands on the handle and, with a grunt, yanked hard. The handle jerked open and the door swung down. Startled, Benny lost his balance and almost followed the door through the opening.

  “Whoa!” he shouted in panic.

  I grabbed his arm and Flo clutched his belt from behind.

  “That was close,” I said when we got him steadied.

  He looked at us wide-eyed for a moment and then forced a smile. “Good work, girls. Just thought I’d test your reflexes. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go back to the car for a change of underwear.”

  We turned to watch the heavy trapdoor swing back and forth, squeaking on its hinges. Flo moved closer to the opening and shined the flashlight down. She looked back at me and winked.

  “I think we found it.”

  I peered through the opening. There was about a twelve-foot drop into what appeared to be an underground tunnel. Holding onto one of the guardrails, Flo leaned over the opening and pointed the flashlight down. On the tunnel floor near the wall was a metal ladder lying on its side. The ladder looked long enough to reach through the trapdoor opening into the warehouse basement, but there was no way to tell if after all these years it was still strong enough to function as a ladder.

  Flo looked at Benny and then me. “Who wants to go first?” she asked.

  I looked at them and shrugged. “I’ll go,” I said.

  I tied one end of the rope snugly to the guardrail. Benny pulled on it several times to make sure that it would hold and that the guardrail was strong enough. We tossed the other end of the rope through the trapdoor opening.

  “Hey,” Flo said, “just pretend we’re the Hardy Boys.”

  I sat on the edge of the opening with my feet dangling through. I grabbed hold of the rope with both hands and frowned. “I never liked the Hardy Boys.” I looked over at Benny. “Did you?”

  “Fuck the Hardy Boys,” he said. “You people are nuts.”

  Flo clicked off the flashlight and stuffed it into my backpack. I lowered myself into the darkness, my body swaying as I descended. When I touched down, I shouted up, “Okay, next.”

  It was creepy standing down there alone in complete blackness. As Flo descended on the rope I removed the flashlight from the backpack and turned it on.

  “Whew,” she said when she reached the bottom. “Haven’t done that since grade-school gym.”

  I pointed the beam up through the trapdoor opening. Doing my Price Is Right announcer’s voice, I said, “Benny Goldberg, come on down.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he grumbled as he lowered himself slowly.

  Once he reached the bottom, I moved the flashlight around. We were at the end of what looked like a man-made tunnel. It was about fifteen feet wide and thirty feet long. Directly behind us was a solid wall of rock. In front of us, off in the distance, the tunnel appeared to intersect with another tunnel. Except for the ladder against the side wall, our tunnel was empty.

  “No files,” I said as I moved the flashlight around.

  Flo was kneeling by the ladder. “If there are any,” she said, “they’ll be somewhere else in the cave. Down there somewhere.” She pointed toward the far end of the tunnel. “There’s too much moisture here. Look at the floor.”

  I moved the beam along the floor of the tunnel. She was right. It was slick with water, and there were several puddles.

  “This ladder looks okay,” Benny said.

  We positioned it under the trapdoor opening. It was long enough to reach up into the basement. The top end rested against the side of the trapdoor opening with at least three feet to spare.

  “Let’s test it,” I said, handing Benny the flashlight.

  Moving cautiously at first, I climbed up the ladder through the trapdoor and back down. “It’s perfect,” I said.

  Benny turned the flashlight beam toward the front end of the tunnel. “I say we try to find those documents and get the fuck out of this hellhole.”

  We walked slowly down the tunnel. It connected with another tunnel, which ran perpendicular to ours, like an intersection of two roads. As we stepped into the main tunnel, Benny flashed the light toward the ceiling.

  “This is the real thing,” Flo said.

  The ceiling was fifteen feet high and festooned with hundreds of little, pointed stalactites. Benny pointed the flashlight down the cave to the right and then to the left.

  “Which way?” he asked.

  I removed the cave map from my backpack and tried to pinpoint our location. Unfortunately, the short tunnel from the warehouse to the cave wasn’t shown on the map, and I couldn’t align the warehouse layout to the caves on the map.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We may have to try both ways.”

  “Let’s go this way first,” Flo said, pointing to the right.

  “Okay,” I said, “but I want to go back for a moment.”

  “Why?” Benny asked.

  “Because I’m nervous,” I said. “I don’t want to leave that ladder standing up like that. What if someone came along and removed it?”

  “We’d still have the rope,” Flo said, and then thought better of it. “You’re right. The rope, too. Let’s go back.”

  We went back down the tunnel, untied the rope, lowered the ladder, and placed them both against the side wall of the tunnel. Then we returned to the cave intersection and turned right. The cave was much narrower than the warehouse tunnel—roughly six feet wide. As we walked, Flo moved the flashlight beam from the floor to the sides to the ceiling and back to the floor.

  “Hey, look,” she said.

  The beam illuminated an empty light fixture overhead. We could see a dark electric wire that had been threaded through the stalactites to the light fixture. The wire continued along the ceiling past the light fixture. We came to another empty fixture twenty feet further down the path. As we walked, I noticed that the floor and the walls were moist.

  “What’s that up ahead?” Benny asked.

  Thirty feet ahead our narrow corridor appeared to open up. We quickened our pace until we reached the opening.

  “Holy shit,” Benny said as Flo moved the flashlight around.

  Although the beam only illuminated a narrow area at a time, it was soon apparent that we were in an immense underground room. It was at least two hundred feet long, fifty feet wide, and thirty feet high. There were large stalactites overhead, but the floors were smooth and level. Even more unusual, the walls were bricked from the floor up to at least fifteen feet.

  “What’s that?” I said as the flashlight beam swept past a huge object on one side of the room.

  We walked over to see. It was an enormous wooden cask. In front was a sign that read:

  THIS IS A GENUINE GUTMANN BREWERY FERMENTATION CASK DATING FROM 1873. THE GUTMANN BREWERY STORAGE ROOM, WITH ITS CONSTANT 52-DEGREE TEMPERATURE, PROVIDED NATURAL COOLING CELLARS WHERE THE SPECIAL LAGER COULD BE STORED WHILE FERMENTING.

  “We’re on the tour,” Flo said as she swept the flashlight beam around the room.

  “This ought to be a dry enough area to store documents,” I said.

  But there were none. At the opposite end of the room, however, we did find an opening the size of a double door. On the wall beside the opening was another sign:

  THIS WAY TO THE GUTMANN FAMILY CAVERN

  How could we resist? We walked through the opening and down what could have been an ordinary, low-ceilinged corridor, except that instead of drywall and plaster there was chilly limestone. The corridor ran about fifty feet and opened into a much larger area. The sign at t
he entrance read:

  WELCOME TO THE GUTMANN FAMILY CAVERN

  PLAYGROUND OF THE SUPER RICH OF ST. LOUIS

  Like three gawking tourists, we moved through the perfectly preserved playground. We passed the theater that had been constructed, according to the sign, for young Augustus Gutmann, who fancied himself a great actor. It was a real theater, with elevated stage, flood lights, wire-and-plaster scenery, and seating for fifty. We passed an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The pool was drained, and there was a skeleton of a small mammal at the bottom of the deep end. In the middle of the pool was a cast cement grotto tucked beneath a fake Greek temple where, according to yet another sign, “the decadent Gutmann grandchildren scandalized genteel St. Louis society by holding bacchanalian orgies.”

  “Look at that,” Benny said, gesturing toward the sign and shaking his head sadly. “Maybe Rush Limbaugh is right. The old-fashioned core values are dead. It’s hard enough to find a decent orgy these days, much less a bacchanalian one.”

  We passed the gymnasium and the dance studio and eventually came to the “gracious marble staircase, carpeted with genuine Persian rugs, that connected the Gutmann Family Cavern to the bounteous extravagance of the Gutmann Mansion.” The carpets were gone, and the stairway now connected the Gutmann Family Cavern to a giant slab of concrete that formed the ceiling at the top of the stairs. If one could bore through the concrete slab and the several feet of dirt above it, you would emerge somewhere in the outfield of the Gutmann Park ball fields.

  Although we had found no documents in the Gutmann Family Cavern or the Gutmann Brewery Storage Room, by marking two spots on my cave map I was finally properly oriented. We retraced our steps back through the Storage Room, pausing several times for me to track our course on the map. We got all the way back to the intersection with the tunnel to the warehouse—the spot where we had chosen to turn right. This time we moved in the opposite direction. After about twenty feet, we came to a fork in the path as a channel branched off the main cave tunnel to the right.

  “Well?” Flo said as we paused.