The Dead Key

by D. M. Pulley

  Her eyes darted around the abandoned office. It wouldn’t really be stealing if she took it, she argued. She wasn’t taking it for herself. With that, Iris slipped the key into her back pocket.

  CHAPTER 12

  Iris left the old bank late that evening with the key still in her pocket. She needed a drink. Outside the loading dock, the sweltering heat of August was waiting, but at least the air wasn’t full of dust. She lit a cigarette and hiked up East Ninth Street, past the office building where WRE occupied the ninth floor. There wasn’t a bar in sight. East Ninth was a no-man’s-land for blocks. She didn’t want to walk all the way down to the bar district known as the Flats. Not by herself. She was about to turn back when she saw a small lit sign for Ella’s Pub on Vincent Avenue.

  Dank, smoky air greeted her at the door. The pub’s shotgun layout included a long bar on one side of the aisle and seven vinyl booths on the other. The place was deserted except for the barkeep and another man, slumped at the far end on a bar stool. She shoved her heavy bag into one of the empty booths and slid in beside it. Her back and fingers ached from walking all day, clutching a clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other. No amount of stretching seemed to help, but she tried again, lit a cigarette, and closed her eyes.

  “Hard day?” a voice asked next to her. The little old man from behind the counter looked like he’d been living under the bar for fifty years. He was wrinkled and smoke stained from head to toe. His bushy eyebrows were raised in a smile.

  “Hard enough.” Iris couldn’t help but grin at him and his rosy, bulbous nose and impossibly large ears. One of Santa’s naughty elves had apparently been banished to Cleveland. She tried not to stare at his earlobes as they hung like mud flaps nearly down to his collar.

  “What can I get for you?”

  “Guinness. Do you serve food?”

  “Ah, I wish we still did. We have some snacks at the bar. Do you like peanuts?”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  “It’s my pleasure, and please . . . call me Carmichael.” He bowed a little and went to fetch her beer and nuts.

  Iris took the key out of her pocket and turned it over again, thinking about the desk where she’d found it. Suzanne was older but not that old in her company photo. She was probably still alive. She’d be at least sixty, but that was hardly dead and buried.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Carmichael coming back with her order and palmed the key. He set down her drink and a bowl of nuts with the flourish of a five-star waiter.

  “Thank you, Carmichael.”

  “You let me know if you need anything else.” He winked and went back to his perch behind the beer taps. A small black-and-white TV was playing a baseball game in the corner. Carmichael and the guy at the end of the bar stared at it without speaking.

  Iris took a gulp of beer and opened her hand to look at the key again. She had technically stolen it. But only to give it back to its rightful owner, she argued. Who was that exactly? There was Suzanne, who may or may not be alive. Then there was the owner of the building, which was some real estate holding company that bought it for a song, from what Brad had told her. They didn’t care about the building; it was just a tax write-off. First Bank of Cleveland shut down twenty years ago and left its files and furniture behind. They weren’t exactly abandoned to vandals, Iris reminded herself. The doors were chained, and the building was guarded. Still, would the owners even care about Suzanne’s desk, or would they just pitch everything into a dumpster when they sold the building? Suzanne, she decided, was the only person who might know who owned the key.

  The beer went down too easy as she crunched the peanuts and perused the bar. It was frozen in time, just like the old bank. All of the beer signs and music posters were at least fifteen years out of date.

  Carmichael noticed her eyes wandering and waved. She pointed to her beer glass, and he nodded. He poured a second pint and brought it over. He was about to go back to his game when she decided to strike up a conversation.

  “This is an interesting place.”

  “You like it?” He smiled.

  She nodded. “How long have you been here?”

  “Oh, I bought the place must have been thirty years ago,” he said, looking up at the tin ceiling. “It was different then. We called it the Theatrical Grille. Ever heard of it?”

  Iris shook her head.

  “Once upon a time there was a famous jazz club right where you’re sitting. It was the hottest spot in town. Ella Fitzgerald played right over there.” He pointed to a corner in the back. “I was just a kid then, but it was something.”

  Iris raised an eyebrow and tried to picture a band packed into the tiny corner. “What happened?”

  Carmichael threw up his hands. “Times change. Music changes. Even a city as old and rusty as this one changes. Short Vincent was the hottest strip in town back forty years ago. Shoot, twenty years ago. Now everyone is down in the Flats listening to that god-awful dance music. I can’t stand the stuff. Makes my head hurt. Young girl like you, you probably like it, right?”

  “Not so much,” she lied. “Sounds like you’ve seen a lot over the years.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.” He chuckled and shook his head.

  Iris glanced around at the dated décor and decided to risk a more personal topic. “Do you remember the First Bank of Cleveland?”

  He frowned and ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “Of course! It was only a few blocks away. Used to get all sorts coming in here after five o’clock.” He moved to the other side of the booth to sit down. “You don’t mind if I sit, do you? I have a terrible back.”

  “No, please.” Iris took a swig from her pint glass. “Do you know why the bank closed?”

  “I heard they sold it, but I can’t be sure. It was the strangest thing. One day it was there, and the next day it was gone. Chains on the door, boards on the windows. They even took the sign off the front of the building in the middle of the night.” Carmichael’s forehead creased into a road map as he frowned.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It was terrible. All of those people went to work one morning and found out they’d lost their jobs. The way I heard it, most of them didn’t know until they tried to open the door. Some people lost a lot of money in the deal.” Carmichael’s eyes darkened and his shoulders seemed heavy. “Some of those people came in here that day. It was a mess . . .”

  Iris nodded. If she’d been fired like that, she’d go to the nearest pub too. Talking about it seemed to deflate Carmichael.

  “Ah, well.” He waved his hand at the past and turned his attention to Iris. “What is a young girl like you doing asking about the old bank? That must have been at least fifteen years ago!”

  “It was twenty years ago actually.” She took another big drink. “I’m working in the old bank right now, if you can believe that.”

  Carmichael’s smile dropped a little. “I don’t believe that. What do you mean?”

  Crap. Iris was supposed to keep the work at the bank confidential. That’s what Mr. Wheeler had said. The county didn’t want anyone knowing their plans for the building. “Oh, you know. The owner is doing a . . . routine inspection. I’m working for the architect.” Iris congratulated herself on thinking fast and took another drink. Hell, what would a bartender care about the county plans anyway? “I have to survey the building, and I’m telling you, it’s weird!”

  She described the cafeteria with its empty tables and ancient vending machines. She told him about the conference rooms that still had notes scribbled on the chalkboards. She stopped herself from saying more. The personnel files, the safe deposit boxes, the fact that she was working alone in a huge building seemed like information best kept to herself. Besides, Carmichael’s intense stare was starting to weird her out.

  “You mean no one has been in there for all these years? Amazing
!” He slapped the tabletop, grinning, but his eyes still seemed way too focused. He pointed to her beer. “Let me get you another.”

  The two beers on an empty stomach were hitting her hard, and the place was starting to give her the creeps. She shook her head. “No, I should be going, but thanks!”

  The old man nodded and tore a handwritten bill for seven dollars off of his notepad. As Iris waited for change, she scanned the sketch on her clipboard. The graph paper read, “Wheeler Reese Elliot Architects, LLC” at the top. Next to the crisp logo, her sloppy writing looked like a third grader’s. She sighed as she scanned her messy drawing. She would have to clean it up before handing it in for review. As she studied the sheet, something else began to bug her. She rifled through her file until she found the plan for the second floor. She compared the sketches of the second and third floors and discovered that they didn’t match. Somehow she’d missed a full column bay on the third. Her drawing was ten feet short. She smacked herself in the head. She examined the two drawings side by side, trying to reconcile the discrepancy. She threw up her hands and stuffed the drawings back in her bag. She would have to go back to the third floor and see what she’d missed. It would only take fifteen minutes, she decided, and tamped out her cigarette. She had to go back to the building to get her car anyway.

  Carmichael handed her the change. “It was very nice to meet you, miss.”

  Iris stood up from the booth and extended her hand to shake his. “I’m Iris. It was nice meeting you too, Carmichael.”

  She headed out the door but stopped short.

  Carmichael was behind the bar, rinsing out her glass. He raised his bushy eyebrows. “Did you forget something?”

  “Yeah, sort of. I meant to ask when we were talking about the old bank. Did you ever know a woman named Suzanne Peplinski? I think she used to work there.”

  “I can’t say that I did. Was she a friend of yours?”

  “No. I just think I found something that might belong to her.” Iris shrugged and waved good-bye.

  His voice stopped her. “You found something?”

  Iris didn’t answer.

  “There’s a saying where I come from, bella. Never steal from a graveyard. You might disturb the ghosts.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Behind the old bank, Iris pressed the worn white button on the squawk box and waited. It was nearly dark outside, and the streets were deserted. The words “you might disturb the ghosts” echoed in her ears, and she pressed the button again. She stared into the black, recessed lines of the speaker box as if it were a video camera and Ramone was watching. But he wasn’t.

  She pressed the button again. Her car was trapped behind the metal door. After a solid two minutes had passed, she kicked the garage door and stomped to the front of the building to search the windows for signs of life.

  The streetlights filled Euclid Avenue with a yellow haze. She pressed her nose to the glass next to a revolving door and peered into the main lobby. It was murky with shadows, and there was no sign of Ramone inside. She banged on the glass anyway.

  “Shit!” she hissed.

  She took a step back. The front of the building was clad with rough-hewn granite blocks. The street number 1010 was carved deep into one of the stone quoins above the sidewalk. Next to the address was a shadowy blank spot, where a large plaque had been bolted. Iris guessed that this must have been where the First Bank of Cleveland sign had been removed in the middle of the night. The hollow metal sleeves for the bolts were still embedded in the stone as if they were waiting for another sign to come along.

  Iris craned her neck up. Red brick and sandstone stretched up to the chemical-orange sky. Each little window was topped with a stone crown, and all of them were dark. The roofline cornice hovered high over the sidewalk. Even in the near dark, its ornate brackets and stone flowers were majestic.

  Headlights flashed three blocks down, reminding Iris it was too late at night to be walking alone on the streets of Cleveland. The traffic light at East Ninth and Euclid turned green, but no cars were at the intersection. An overweight woman was waiting in the corner bus shelter for her ride home.

  “I cannot believe I’m taking the friggin’ bus home tonight,” Iris muttered to herself as she crossed the deserted five-lane road toward the shelter. She turned back and surveyed the old bank again. There were no lights on. “You just had to go get a beer. Great idea, Iris.”

  She turned toward the bus stop when a flicker caught her eye. Squinting up at the fifteenth floor, she saw the flicker again. It was a flashlight. She wanted to scream at the top of her lungs to Ramone but knew it would be a waste of breath. He wouldn’t hear her, and there was no way she would be able to throw a rock far enough to hit a nearby window.

  A passing car reminded Iris she was still standing in the middle of Euclid Avenue. She ran back to the rolling garage door on Huron Street. Her smoker’s lungs were burning by the time she reached the call box. She pounded the white button three times. Almost instantly the door sprang to life. Iris closed her eyes in relief. Thank God. She could get home tonight. When she opened them, Ramone’s face was just inches away.

  “Oh God!” she yelped.

  Ramone just glared at her. Apparently, pounding the button on a speaker box could be highly irritating.

  “Ramone! You scared the shit out of me!”

  “Was you expecting someone else?” he said in his smoker’s growl. “Don’t ever bang on the button like that again, okay?”

  “Sorry. I’ve just . . . How did you get down here so fast?”

  “I was just around the corner.”

  “No. I saw you. You were up on the fifteenth floor.”

  “What the hell you talkin’ about?” He looked at her like she was on drugs.

  “You. With a flashlight. Up on fifteen. I saw the light through the windows.”

  His focus sharpened. “You sure about what you saw?”

  “Yeah, there was definitely a flashlight moving around up there.”

  “You stay there,” he said, motioning to her car. “I’ll go check it out.” He reached under his shirt to grab a humungous flashlight hanging from his belt. She caught a glimpse of a black gun in a holster next to it. That settled it. She scuttled over to her car like she was told and watched him disappear down the service corridor in her rearview mirror.

  Iris locked her car doors and laid her seat back to hide. You might disturb the ghosts, Carmichael’s voice taunted her. “Shut up, Carmichael!” she whispered.

  For the first few minutes, she sat frozen, fretting about what was happening up on fifteen. Then she picked her fingernails clean. She counted the cigarette burns on the ceiling of her car until she finally broke down and lit one. She cracked the window and listened for the sound of a gunshot or a flashlight beating someone over the head. The digital clock glowed 9:01 on her dashboard. Five more minutes, and then she was getting the hell out of there.

  She turned her thoughts to who the intruder might be and came up with nothing. The bank had been shuttered for twenty years. Why the hell would anyone be skulking around now? It’s probably just Ramone’s girlfriend putting her pants back on. The thought made her chuckle, but nothing about the guard’s grizzled demeanor said he’d been laid in the last decade.

  Her cigarette burned down to the nub. To keep from lighting another one, Iris pulled the plans for the second and third floors out of her purse and examined them again. There was the same number of columns running north to south, and the elevators were in the same location, but something was missing around the service corridor. There was no way she was going up there alone in the dark that night. The clock read 9:04. Two more minutes until she drove to the police station.

  She was just about to turn the car on when Ramone came lumbering down the loading dock stairs in the rearview mirror.

  “Whoever it was must’ve left.” He looked annoyed
and tired.

  “But who could it have been?” She couldn’t believe how nonchalant he seemed. He was a frigging security guard. Wasn’t he supposed to be in riot gear or something?

  “Every once in a while a homeless person finds their way into the building. They’re harmless. Just looking for a place to sleep.” He lit a filterless cigarette with a paper match. Ramone may not have been much of a guard, but he was hard-core.

  “But how do they get in?” She hadn’t noticed any broken windows or giant holes in the wall while walking around the building.

  “Oh, you’d be amazed. They’re like rats. They find their ways. Mechanical ducts, roof hatches, tunnels . . .”

  “Tunnels?”

  “The old steam tunnels. They connect a lot of buildings downtown. This building is linked up to the whole block.”

  “But we surveyed the whole basement. We didn’t see any tunnels.”

  “I’ll show you ’em tomorrow. You should be gettin’ home.”

  Iris nodded in agreement and then thought to ask, “How about you? Don’t you ever go home?”

  “Yeah, every few weeks. I’m what you call a full-time guard. They pay me to sleep here.”

  “That sounds terrible,” she said without thinking. She didn’t mean to be judgmental, but between the dumpster and the dreary silence, she felt for the guy.

  “Oh, they pay me pretty good.”

  “Aren’t you worried? You know, about the intruder?”

  “Who, me?” He seemed surprised at her concern. “Shit, I’ve been here thirty years. If somethin’ was going to happen to me, it would’ve happened already.”

  He opened the dock entrance for her and shuffled back into the building as the door rolled shut.

  CHAPTER 14

  Thursday, November 23, 1978

  Beatrice was about to leave the apartment and go see Doris at the diner when she heard a knock at the door. She froze. No one ever knocked on their door.