The Dead Key

by D. M. Pulley

  CHAPTER 33

  Within thirty minutes, Iris had the conference rooms, the bathrooms, and the storage closets mapped using the fourth floor as a template. She returned to the Auditing Department and began to sketch the layout. She opened one office door after another, marking the windows and partitions. By the time she reached “Joseph Rothstein,” her hand was aching from holding the clipboard. She set it down on his desk and stretched.

  Mr. Rothstein’s old office was a mess. His desk was piled high with files and books, his shelves were crammed full of binders, and there were stacks of reference manuals on the floor. Rothstein didn’t have his own bathroom or that big of an office, but he worked really hard, or at least spent his time trying to look like he did.

  Volumes of books sat on the shelf with titles like Full Reserve Banking, Macroeconomics Volume I, and The Gold Standard. There wasn’t even room for her to write on the desk. She shoved a stack of spiral-bound notebooks aside. Mr. Rothstein’s calendar for December 1978 was buried underneath them.

  Iris scanned the appointments and notes etched in blurred ink on yellowed paper. They were mostly illegible. She moved another notebook so she could see the most important date of all. On December 29, the day the bank closed, it looked like Joseph was on vacation. The word “Bermuda” was circled—at least she thought that’s what it said. Poor Mr. Rothstein went to spend the holidays in the tropics and came home to find out he’d lost his job.

  Iris suddenly felt like she was trespassing. She didn’t need to know the intimate details of the man’s life. She started to cover the calendar back up when small red letters caught her eye. “Det. McD---- --6.555.----” They’d been smeared in a coffee stain, but the letters directly below them still read “FBI” clear as day.

  Did bankers often call the FBI? she wondered, staring up from the blotter. Opposite the desk an enormous bulletin board hung from the wall, covered in charts and graphs and financial gobbledygook. Then she spotted what was looming large in her own mind. It was a question mark. “Cleveland Real Estate Holdings Corp.?” was written on a little slip of paper. She’d seen the name before somewhere but couldn’t quite place it. There were other little notes tacked up on the board scattered between the graphs—“Cleveland Urban Growth Foundation?,” “New Cleveland League?,” “Cuyahoga Coalition?”

  There had to be more to it. She searched each little day on Rothstein’s calendar for another clue, but between the smears and bad penmanship it was hopeless. The ink was all blurry shades of black and blue—all of it but the note about the FBI and something peeking out from the upper corner in red ink. She pulled the paper out of the black leather corner of the blotter. “Where is the money?” was written in blazing red. She read it again and still couldn’t make any sense of it.

  Her watch reminded her she was actually supposed to be working. With an exasperated sigh, she grabbed her tape measure and took the room’s dimensions. Iris stepped out of Rothstein’s office and assessed the number of rooms she had left to measure. Even though it was a thousand times better than sitting at her desk back in the office, the survey work was getting monotonous. What she really wanted to do was to sit down and read Beatrice Baker’s notes.

  Iris headed down the dusty green carpet to the next office. It looked wrong. Iris slowed her pace. The room had been turned upside down. Sheets of paper were strewn all over the floor as if someone had torn open a feather pillow. The drawers had been pulled out of the desk and upended. Most of the books had been thrown from the built-in mahogany shelves. Paper, books, pens, paper clips, and a few broken picture frames covered the marble floor tiles. Dust covered everything, and the papers had yellowed in the sunlight coming through the skewed blinds.

  Iris bent down and picked up a shattered photograph. It was a family portrait. A stout middle-aged man grinned at her with his rail-thin wife and two pimple-faced daughters. Everyone was in printed polyester. The man reminded her of one of her father’s golf buddies. Whoever he was, he never got a chance to clean out his desk. Looking at the mess, she could almost hear the racket of slamming drawers and falling books. Someone had been pissed.

  Iris waded through the wreckage to take her measurements. On her way out, she nearly rolled her ankle on a cracked coffee mug. It said “Best Dad on Earth,” with a little green alien giving a thumbs-up sign. She kicked it out of her way, sending it crashing against a bookcase.

  The bronze plate on the door read “William S. Thompson, Director of Audits.” Iris felt a nagging twinge in the back of her head as though someone was watching her. It was becoming a familiar feeling, walking around by herself in the empty building, but every now and then she felt the urge to run as if someone were chasing her. Her imagination was getting the better of her. There was no one there.

  Iris had wasted enough time. She marched back to Beatrice’s desk for her things. Her feet slowed to a crawl as she got closer. The contents of her field bag had been emptied onto the desk. Beatrice’s book was open.

  She hadn’t left the things that way; she was sure of it. She spun around, certain someone was standing behind her. There was no one. But between her sitting at the desk and leaving Thompson’s office, someone else had been there and gone through her stuff. She barely breathed as she listened for footsteps, trying to remember what Ramone’s had sounded like. She heard nothing.

  “Hello?” Iris called out loudly into the empty room. “Is somebody there? Ramone?”

  No one answered. Maybe it was the intruder with a flashlight on the fifteenth floor. Ramone had said it was probably a homeless person. She scanned her pens, calculator, cigarettes, screwdriver, and box cutter. It was all there. Maybe she was going fucking crazy. She would have heard if someone were there, she told herself, but grabbed the box cutter anyway.

  Beatrice’s book was lying open to the page where a man named Max had left a note. Iris snatched the book off the desk and threw it back into her bag with everything else—everything except the box cutter.

  Brandishing the razor, she slowly stepped out into the hallway. There was no one there. All she could see were footprints in the dust. She grabbed the flashlight out of her bag and shined the light on them. All of the footprints looked like hers. Iris clicked off the flashlight. She must be fucking crazy. She must have emptied her own bag, too obsessed with Beatrice Baker and Mr. Rothstein to remember. She snapped the box cutter closed.

  By the time Iris walked through her own front door, her nerves were fried. Every sound made her jump. She turned on all the lights before collapsing onto the couch. The hairs on the back of her neck didn’t settle down until she’d finished an entire beer and two cigarettes. Even then, the feeling that someone was following her kept twitching. She stood and double-locked the front door for good measure.

  Anxious for a distraction, Iris pulled Beatrice’s stolen file from her field bag. She glanced over the weird writing again, then fished out the shorthand manual. She skimmed through a few pages of chapter one, but the instructions blurred together. There was no easy decoding chart. It was going to take some time to learn.

  She set Beatrice’s personnel file down next to the manual. Each swirl looked like the next. The system seemed to depend on how they were arranged together. After twenty straight minutes, all she had was, “Fuck, city, bribes.” That couldn’t be right. Shit. Maybe she wasn’t cut out for all this decoding crap. She closed the book and tossed it onto the cluttered coffee table.

  The image of her field bag emptied out on the desk kept creeping back into her head. Had she emptied the bag herself somehow? If not, what the hell had Ramone or whoever it was been looking for?

  All of the items she had taken from the building looked up accusingly at her from the coffee table—the shorthand manual, Beatrice’s file, and Key 547. No one could possibly know she had taken them, and the odds were that no one would even care. She was going crazy. It was that simple. All of Suzanne’s loony talk about threats and
investigations had wormed its way into her brain. Talking with that old bartender the other day certainly hadn’t helped either.

  “There’s a saying where I come from,” Iris said in her best Italian accent, and lit a cigarette. “Never steal from a graveyard. You might disturb the ghosts.”

  It wasn’t funny.

  CHAPTER 34

  Monday, December 4, 1978

  Daylight pounded through Beatrice’s eyelids as the main lobby of University Hospitals began filling up with the sounds of people. Doctors were on their way to work. Patients in faded gowns were pushing their IV stands toward the cafeteria. She stretched painfully and blinked in the harsh sun. It was Monday. She bolted upright and searched the walls for a clock. It was only 7:00 a.m. She still had plenty of time to get to work.

  The elevator dropped her off at the front desk of the intensive care unit. The desk sat empty. It was the morning shift change. Beatrice stepped up to the clipboard and signed herself in as usual. Then she remembered that her “uncle” must have signed in at some point as well. She flipped through the book and was dismayed that the records from the previous days had been removed. She flipped back to the page she’d signed and skimmed the list of visitors. The names of strangers who had been on the floor in the last twenty-four hours ticked by without a glimmer of Mr. Thompson or anyone from her family tree, until a name jumped off the page. “R. T. Halloran” had signed in after 9:00 p.m.

  The name of the patient R. T. Halloran visited was left blank. There were twenty rooms in the ICU. She had walked past them many evenings stretching her legs. R. T. could have been there for any one of them. R. T. might not even be Randy anyway, she rationalized. She still couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling in her gut. She’d been asleep in the chair next to Doris when R. T. Halloran had been on the floor. She shivered at the thought of Randy watching her sleep.

  Beatrice backed away from the list. The hiding place for her bag of clothes suddenly seemed less secure. She rushed down the hall to her aunt’s room and barely cast a glance at Doris before ripping open the closet door.

  When her suitcase came crashing out and onto her foot, she let the breath she’d been holding out in a grunt. The shooting pain in her foot was a relief. At least she still had her clothes. She pulled the heavy bag off of her shoe. She couldn’t keep living like this.

  By the time Beatrice had washed up in a public restroom, changed clothes, and arrived downtown, it was only 8:15 a.m. The bank didn’t officially open until 9:00 a.m., and the main lobby was empty except for a lone security guard. It was a stroke of luck. The overstuffed suitcase she was dragging behind her wouldn’t draw too much attention. She couldn’t leave it in the hospital closet again. It contained everything she owned in the world, along with Max’s odd files and her aunt’s key.

  The security guard at the desk was the same one that caught her rifling through Max’s desk three nights before. She nodded at him and read the name “Ramone” off his shirt as she shuttled her bag through the lobby. Thankfully, he didn’t ask her any questions as she scurried quickly out of his line of sight to the elevator bank.

  As she waited for an elevator, she looked down at the worn, brown leather suitcase. It was far too big to fit under her desk. There was nowhere to hide it in the coat closet she shared with seven other secretaries and three accountants. There must be someplace to stow it in a fifteen-story building. Watching the floor numbers light one by one as the elevator made its way down to the lobby, she remembered something Max had told her. The offices on floors eleven through fourteen were vacant. The previous tenants had moved out years ago when the East Ninth Street corridor was expanded.

  Beatrice stepped into the elevator and tentatively pressed “12” on the control panel. It refused to light. She tried again and then started pushing all of the buttons from “10” to “15.” None of them would light. She pressed “9” and frowned at the other numbers as the elevator doors slid closed. There was a small keyhole in the control panel. She touched it with the tip of her finger. Could a key lock and unlock entire floors? The keyhole was smaller than a door key. She studied it and then rummaged through her suitcase until she came up with the key ring she’d found in Max’s hiding spot.

  The elevator doors pushed open at the ninth floor as she was sifting through the keys. She quickly pressed “2,” and they closed again. She needed more time. One after the other, she searched. Small letters and numbers were etched in the faces—“11S,” “TR,” “WC.” She stopped at a smaller one. It was labeled “E.”

  “Elevator?” she whispered.

  She slid the key into the elevator control panel. It fit. She turned it just as the door opened outside the cafeteria on the second floor. Beatrice could see the kitchen staff milling around, unloading a delivery. She shrunk against the side of the elevator so no one would see her and pressed “12.” The number lit up, and the doors closed again.

  The twelfth floor was gutted. Bare steel columns were spaced around the room like a sparse forest, and fluorescent light bars hung from naked wires. Bare windows flooded the space with daylight. There was no place to hide her bag. A security guard could easily stumble on it and throw it away or figure out it was hers. The dust on the floor made it seem like no one had set foot on the linoleum in years, but she couldn’t risk it. She stepped back in the elevator and pressed “11.”

  The eleventh floor looked like it hadn’t been touched since the previous tenant moved out. Gold letters still read “Goldstein & Stack Attorneys at Law” on the door at the far end of the elevator lobby. Beatrice stepped off the elevator and tried the door. It was unlocked.

  The office was almost identical to the one where she worked, but the furniture was gone. There were the public restrooms in the hall, the coat closet, the open area for support staff, where she could see shadows of the missing desks in the green carpeting, and a ring of private offices. All of the doors were open, and the offices were empty.

  Office to office she wandered, looking for a good hiding place, until she reached the largest one in the corner. It was twice the size of Randy’s, and the sight of it made her stop and gape. Rich wood paneling and thick shag carpet stretched from wall to wall. The ceiling was adorned with gilded carvings and a large mural of a half-naked Grecian goddess in the center. She tiptoed across the soft carpet and into the executive’s private washroom. A thin layer of dust coated every surface. The large porcelain sink had two antique bronze faucet handles—one for hot water and one for cold. She turned one knob out of curiosity. Brown water sputtered out of the faucet and then ran clear. The wheels in her head turned as she eyed the toilet and the shower. She hadn’t had a shower in days.

  From the dust, it must have been months since a maid or security guard had been in the room. The elevator behind her whirred to life. People would begin crowding the lobby below her any minute. She was out of time.

  She ran back to her suitcase in the elevator lobby. There was a utility closet just down the hall. She dragged her bag over and shoved it inside. Max’s heavy ring of keys jingled in her purse as she ran to the elevator. She pressed the button. It occurred to her too late that she would have some serious explaining to do if the elevator doors opened and some executive found her standing there. She was still debating whether to run and hide when a set of doors slid open. Thankfully, there was no one inside.

  Eight hours later, Beatrice was back in the dark ninth-floor restroom, waiting for everyone to go home. Walking through the five-o’clock rush in the lobby with her suitcase would raise too many eyebrows. Besides, she couldn’t even get back to the eleventh floor unnoticed until the office was empty. So she waited. The prospect of going back to the hospital for another sleepless night was unthinkable. She’d rather sleep right there in the toilet stall. At least it would be quiet.

  When the glowing border around the bathroom door went black, she knew the lights had been shut off. Another ten minutes passed before she
crept cautiously into the elevator lobby and looked around. Everyone was gone. She pressed the elevator call button and waited.

  The eleventh floor was dark and deserted. Beatrice felt her way to the utility closet and pulled out her suitcase. It was just where she’d left it. She dragged it across the empty office to the huge corner room, with its luxurious, albeit dusty, bathroom. The orange night sky streamed in through one small window, giving her just enough light to see the ghostly outline of the white porcelain sink.

  The shadow of her suitcase was hulking black against the soft white carpet in the other room. She reached down and touched the deep-pile rug. The cushy carpet would certainly be more comfortable than a wood bench. It would probably be safer too. It would only be for a few days, she told herself, just until she could find a place of her own.

  She closed and locked the heavy wood door to the corner office and said a little prayer she wasn’t making a terrible mistake. It was too dark in the room to see. She decided to risk turning on the lights. No one in the building would know, and no one on the street would care, she told herself.

  The overhead light clicked on brightly, making Beatrice squint. The carpet was dusty, but there were no signs of bugs or rodents. The windows still had their wooden blinds. She walked over and pulled them all shut.

  She closed the blinds in the bathroom as well, then flipped on the light over the sink. The face in the mirror nearly made her jump in fright. Her eyes were ringed in red. The makeup around them was smudged, making them look sunken into her head. Her hair was dull and stringy. Her face was thin and gaunt. She’d forgotten to eat dinner again. She would have to plan better tomorrow.

  The faucet handle in the shower stall was a little rusted but eventually turned. The water poured out brown and red like dried blood. The sight was sickening against the muted white marble. Beatrice shut her eyes until she was certain that clean, hot water had reached the eleventh floor, and the room was filled with steam.