by D. M. Pulley
She smiled sheepishly and took a seat at the bar. She was exhausted.
“What in the world is a beautiful girl like you doing down here at this time a night all alone?”
She had no idea. “It’s kind of a long story. Could I get a cup of tea?”
“Of course!” He began searching behind the bar for a mug. “A pretty girl like you needs to be more careful.”
“You’re right. Um . . . I’ll be right back.” She stood up and walked hastily to the ladies’ room in the corner. Once she was alone in a locked stall, she pulled out Max’s key from her change purse. Its blank face rested in the palm of her hand like a question mark. Why didn’t Max just hide it herself? She could have given it to anyone, but for some reason Max wanted her to have it. Her eyes circled the bathroom stall. Where would she even hide it?
Sighing, Beatrice slid the faceless key onto her own key ring right next to her aunt’s bewildering safe deposit box key. Her breath caught as they clinked together. They were nearly identical. Beatrice held them up to the light. They were the same size and shape. Doris’s key had a full inscription for the bank and the box number, while Max’s key was blank. But they matched. They were both from the bank. She frowned at the blank key, more puzzled than before.
She stuffed them back in her purse and tried to focus on the more pressing question of where she was going to sleep that night. There were no good options.
After what must have been a suspiciously long time in a bathroom, she finally headed back to the bar to drink the warm tea Carmichael had made for her. She nodded in gratitude at him but avoided looking him in the eye. He took the hint and went back to his paper.
If only there was a way to get back into the bank, she mused. It was too late to make up a story about having left something behind. The doors were locked. Then it occurred to her that she probably had the key.
Max’s keys were still hiding at the bottom of Beatrice’s purse. There were at least thirty keys on the ring. She gulped her tea and left a pile of coins on the counter for Carmichael.
“Thanks, I needed that.”
He glanced up from the sports section. “You want for me to call you a cab?”
“Oh, no thanks. I’ll be fine.”
He frowned, and his eyes followed her as she left the bar.
Icy winds howled down Euclid Avenue. The street was deserted. Even the homeless had found warmer places to huddle for the night. Traffic lights flashed red as she hurried across the empty road. The bank tower where she worked was just a shadow overhead. Its windows were dark, all of them except two on the top floor. She stared at the lonely lights and wondered who could possibly be working at this hour.
She slinked toward the three revolving doors that led to the main lobby of the bank. The front room was dark. There were no signs of a guard at the security desk, but she kept her distance and her face hidden until she was certain the lobby was empty. She looked down both sides of Euclid Avenue. There wasn’t a soul or a car in sight, only the blinking Christmas lights. She stepped up to the one side door in the storefront and pulled out Max’s keys.
She crouched, trying keys one after the other for what seemed like an eternity. Every rustle of stray newspapers and creak of the streetlights made her heart race faster. Her hot breath fogged the glass door as she struggled with frozen-stiff fingers to find the right one. Glancing up into the lobby, she was terrified someone would hear the rattle of the key ring against the doorframe. It was still deserted.
A key finally slid into the lock. She held her breath and turned it; the dead bolt slid open and the door swung free.
Beatrice gently pushed the door open and waited. Sirens did not sound. Men with guns did not come running. She shut the door behind her and turned the lock. The lobby floor was streaked with long shadows, and she hid in one of them, listening. She slipped out of her boots and ran in stocking feet to the marble stairs behind the elevators. She took them two at a time, carrying her dripping boots in one hand and her jingling purse in the other. She didn’t stop running until she was through the second floor and back to the emergency stair tower.
Beatrice silently closed the emergency exit door and sat down on the landing to catch her breath. Her heart was fluttering like a rabbit’s, and her legs were quaking. She couldn’t believe what she’d just done. She must be crazy. She put her head between her knees to keep from hyperventilating.
Once her head felt steady, she gazed up at the endless spiral of stairs. She took a deep breath and got back on her feet. It was a long way up.
After five flights of climbing, she still had quite a way to go. Her legs burned. She gripped the railing and took a rest.
A door slammed several stories up, sending a shock wave down the stairwell. Beatrice sucked in a yelp and backed against a wall. She could hear faint voices overhead.
“I don’t care what Teddy says. We have to think about relocating the accounts now. The boxes aren’t secure.”
“It’s a temporary glitch. Let’s not overreact.”
“Keys are missing. The mole hunt is a bust, and we’ve lost our inside man. This is not a glitch. We have got to move the accounts now before the shit hits the fan.”
“What shit exactly?”
“The board isn’t ruling out dissolution . . .”
The voices faded, and Beatrice heard another door close. She stared up after them, still frozen to the wall. Mr. Halloran had mentioned something about a mole. When he asked her to spy on Max, he said he was looking for “someone who’s trying to sabotage the company from within.” But the mole hunt was a bust. The inside man had been lost. What did that mean? She slowly counted to twenty before having the stomach to keep climbing.
She stayed close to the wall as she tiptoed up the rest of the stairs, rushing past every doorway. The winding stairs spun over her head around and around, until she was dizzy. She grabbed the doorknob to the eleventh floor to steady herself. Pulling it open, she poked her head out into the corridor. It was perfectly dark and still. She exhaled a sigh and staggered back to the corner office where she slept, wobbly from the climb. She pushed the door to her hiding place open, ready to collapse.
A security guard was crouched on the floor. He held a flashlight and one of her files. A small cry caught in her throat, and she crumpled to her knees. It was Ramone.
She was caught.
CHAPTER 47
“How do you know Max?” The security guard was holding Max’s personnel file. It was the one Beatrice had stolen from the third floor.
Beatrice couldn’t find her voice.
He had Max’s picture in his hand. “You know you weren’t foolin’ nobody when you said you was her the other night.”
Blood was pumping through her at a dizzying pace. She stayed crouched next to the door, clutching the handle.
“Relax. I’ve been watching you for days. If I wanted to have you arrested, I would have done it already.” He waved his hand at her like they were old friends.
Her brain struggled to process the words. He didn’t want her arrested. But they were alone in the middle of the night, she had broken the law, and she was completely at his mercy. She instinctively clutched her coat.
“How do you know Max?” he asked again, showing Beatrice the picture he was holding.
“She was my . . . friend,” she said slowly, unsure how to even think of Max now.
“She’s my friend too,” Ramone said, and tucked the picture back in the file. “We grew up together. She helped me get this job. Or at least she told me about it . . . ‘Arrest on sight’ . . . She’s in some real shit now, boy.”
Beatrice nodded in agreement and felt her shoulders relax a little. If Max was friends with Ramone, maybe she could trust him. But then again Max had once trusted Bill. From under her lowered lashes, she eyed Ramone’s blue collared shirt, worn-out shoes, and dark brown hands. She knew wh
at her mother would think just looking at his skin, but Beatrice searched Ramone’s eyes for a threat and found none. They looked worried. He cared about Max.
“She’s missing,” Beatrice whispered.
“Yeah.” Ramone lit a cigarette. “I told her not to go messin’ with this shit. She wouldn’t listen to me.”
“What was she messing with?”
“Big money, man, big money. You go messin’ with people that have that kind of money, there’s no way you gonna win. I told her that. These bankers here ain’t no different than anybody else. They lie, they cheat, they steal. Difference is, they don’t get caught. They got the system tied up.” Ramone took a hard drag off his cigarette and blew out a thick cloud of smoke. “Max kept talking about bringing people to justice and going to the police. Man, there’s no justice. Not in Cleveland anyway. Probably not anywhere.”
He was right. Teddy and Jim’s conversation about bribes replayed in her head. Even Tony admitted that the police department might be compromised. The money men had friends on city council, and they would be protected.
“She’s worried that they’re going to try to blame her.”
“How they gonna do that exactly?” Ramone demanded, glaring at her.
Beatrice instinctively shrunk away. He might care about Max, but that didn’t mean he was above getting angry or possibly violent. Beatrice breathed the wave of panic out slowly. He’d been watching her for days, and if he had wanted to harm her, he could have easily done it already. She was going to have to trust him.
“There’s a safe deposit box with her name on it. I think someone has been stashing stolen money and other things in there. I really don’t know how it all works.” Beatrice paused. “She’s not the only one. It happened to my Aunt Doris too.”
Ramone stared at her for a long moment and rubbed his eyes. “Son of a bitch. Well, that explains some things.”
“Like what?”
“Like why Max wanted me to make copies of some keys. Like why she was always asking about the vault. Why I caught her red-handed in there at three in the morning the other night.” He paused. “She didn’t know it was me, so she ran off. I tried to catch up, but I lost her in the tunnels. I haven’t seen her since.”
Beatrice thought of the huge ring of keys she’d found in the ladies’ room. Maybe Max hadn’t stolen them. Maybe Ramone had made copies of the keys. “I saw her tonight. She’s okay. She was in disguise.”
“Disguise?” Relief seemed to wash over him.
“Her hair and clothes were different. She looked awful.” She paused, trying to process everything Ramone had said. Max had been in the vault. “Did you say something about tunnels?”
“Yeah, there are old steam tunnels under the building. They connect to all sorts of places downtown.” Ramone studied her closely for a moment, his eyes hardening. “If you’re gonna keep stayin’ here, you need to find a better way to get in and out of the building. I don’t know what you was thinkin’ using the front door.”
Her little mouth fell open. He’d seen her. He’d been watching the door. “Can you help me?”
“Help you do what exactly? Why you here?”
“I didn’t have anywhere else to go.” She couldn’t hold back the tears and hid her face. “I don’t know if I can help Max, but my aunt’s involved too, and . . . and she’s dying, and I can’t just leave her. Men from the bank are watching her hospital room. They destroyed her house, and I can’t go back.”
A huge hand shook her gently by the shoulder. “Okay, okay. I’ll help you, but you can’t just hang around here forever. You need to figure out a plan. You need to find a way out for good.”
She nodded at him, and he helped her stand up.
“First off, what’s your real name?”
“Beatrice.” She wiped her eyes.
“Okay, Beatrice. I’m Ramone.” He shook her hand gently. “I’ll help you find your way in and out of the building. I’m not going to ask how you got Max’s keys, and I’m not going to tell anyone you’re here. But you listen to me.”
“Yes?” she asked obediently.
“Stay away from the big money men, okay? You can’t win.”
CHAPTER 48
Stay away from the money men. Beatrice thought about it the rest of the night and all the next day of typing and filing. That meant leaving Teddy and Jim alone. The next night, she stared at the door from her bed in the dark office, wondering what the money men were up to and what it all had to do with Bill and Aunt Doris.
There was a soft knocking on the other side. Beatrice scrambled into a corner as the brass knob turned and the door slowly swung open. It was Ramone. He couldn’t help smiling at her petrified expression, and motioned her into the hall. She followed him to the service elevator and down to the lowest level of the building.
He led her through a large corridor with two huge, round steel doors. “These are the vault doors. They’re always locked, and they’re rigged with alarms, so don’t get any crazy ideas. There’s TV cameras too.” He pointed to a large gray box with a round, black lens near the ceiling.
“What do you mean cameras?” She’d never noticed cameras in the building before.
“Closed-circuit monitoring. They just installed it in the vault last year. They still workin’ the bugs out. If the little red light is on, watch out. Someone might be watching.”
Beatrice froze, staring at the camera. “Who?”
“Well, that’s one of the bugs. During the day, the guard watches the monitors from out in the lower lobby.” He led her through a huge round doorway into a lobby area and pointed to the desk. There was a small TV sitting on the corner of it. “At night they usually turn this shit off.”
“What’s the bug then?”
“People upstairs can’t make up their minds when they want it turned off and when they want people watching.”
He was walking too fast to answer any more questions. She ran to catch up around the corner toward a large marble stairway that led up to what must be the main lobby. Ramone stopped at the side of the stairs and pushed on the wall. To Beatrice’s amazement, the wall swung open, and she found herself in a room no bigger than a closet, staring at a metal door.
“This door leads to the steam tunnels,” he explained, pulling out a key and unlocking it.
The door opened to a dark stairwell. Stale, dank air wafted up to where she was standing.
“The best way in and out is through the Stouffer’s Inn. The tunnel will spit you out in the loading dock. Security is pretty lax over there. If anyone sees you, just look lost. They’ll pat you on the head and send you down the road.”
“You don’t think they’ll suspect something?” She stared down into the dark well, her stomach crawling up inside her rib cage.
“Little white girl like you?” He laughed and slapped her on the back. He handed her a small flashlight and looked over his shoulder at the room behind them. “Now go down and see if you can find your way there and back. I’ll be around even if you don’t see me.”
Beatrice nodded and gripped the flashlight with white knuckles. Down the steep stairs she went. One shaking step at a time, she sank into the darkness below. Ramone closed the door above her and the light vanished, except for the tiny stream of the flashlight. The beam only stretched a few feet ahead down the tunnel before being devoured by the shadows. Her heart hammered loudly against her ribs. It was the only sound except for the occasional drip from the ceiling. It was like being trapped in a cave or coffin.
She crept along the narrow hall with one hand stretched out in front of her. She whacked her head with a howl on a low-hanging pipe but kept going. The walls got tighter and the ceiling got lower as she went. The urge to run, kicking and screaming, swelled in her brain stem. Beatrice sucked in a breath and began to hum the words she knew so well.
“Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry. Go
to sleep my little baby. When you wake, you shall have . . . All the pretty little horses . . . Way down yonder, in the meadow . . . lies a poor little baby . . .”
The humming helped, and she began to walk a bit faster. She would no longer be a prisoner in the bank, trapped without food all weekend. She might even be able to visit her aunt one last time.
As if the tunnel shared her renewed optimism, it opened into a large cavern. She could stand up straight and stretch. She looked around with her flashlight at the many tunnels that emptied into the room. One would take her to the loading dock of the hotel. One of the placards said “Terminal.” That had to be the one. The Stouffer’s Inn was next to the old Terminal Tower building. She took another deep breath and began barreling down the tunnel.
The narrow passage went on for what seemed like miles. There were a few turns and bends, but for the most part it was a long straight line. Every once in a while, the tunnel would split. There would be a small plaque that read something like “May Company,” or sometimes nothing at all. The smell of rotting leaves grew stronger as she went. The air was thick with it, until it felt like wet sludge moving in and out of her lungs. Beatrice kept humming.
A faint rustling echoed in the dark. Startled, she dropped the flashlight with a gasp. The rustling sounded louder. She fumbled for the light. The beam bounced off the tunnel walls as she scrambled past the rustling noise coming from somewhere low to the ground. She slowed her feet. It was a rat chewing on some paper. She never thought in her life she’d be relieved to see a rat. She let out the air behind the shriek she’d been holding and kept moving. Her feet sloshed through shallow puddles, and cool water seeped through the seams of her shoes.
Finally, there was a bend in the tunnel with a placard that read “Hotel Cleveland.” She decided that it must be the right path and turned. After another city block, the passage came to an end at a steel ladder. It stretched up over fifteen feet. Beatrice tucked the flashlight in her belt and began to climb. The higher she went, the more her hands trembled.