The Dead Key

by D. M. Pulley

  The detective stared at her hard, and she felt the prison bars slam down around her. She clamped her lips together to keep from wailing.

  His glare softened. “So you found some keys. Why would someone be following you, Iris?”

  She swallowed hard. “They’re not just any keys. I did some checking around. These are the bank’s keys to the vault, and this”—she grabbed the blank key with shaky fingers—“this is the master key. They call it a dead key. Together these can open any safe deposit box in the vault.”

  “You did some checking around?” He rolled his eyes at the ceiling of his car and raised his voice to a roar. “What the hell is it with people wanting to play detective? You sound like my goddamn sister with this crap! Do you know what happened to her when she went poking around that vault? She vanished! For all I know, she’s dead and buried somewhere under the city. Is that what you want?”

  Iris shrunk into the corner of her seat. He noticed her cowering and ran his fingers through his hair. The toll the bank had taken was written in the creases of his forehead.

  He took a deep breath and said calmly, “I’m sorry, Iris. This thing is bigger than you, okay?”

  She gave him a small nod.

  “So, someone is following you because of these keys. Do you have any idea who it is?”

  She took a moment to consider it rationally, though it was hard to think straight with the hysterical shrieking in her head. “Well, I think someone was trying to open a safe deposit box when I surprised him. He left these keys hanging from a lock.”

  “And you took them?” he asked as though she might just be the dumbest woman on earth.

  “I don’t know, I thought it was Ramone. I was going to give them back to him. I was hoping he would explain how he got them. They were supposedly lost twenty years ago, and I’ve sort of been trying to find them myself. But it wasn’t him. I was going to put them back. I never meant to keep them . . . It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said flatly. “I don’t think you realize the kind of people you’re dealing with.”

  “You mean people like Mr. Wheeler?” She searched the detective’s face. “I think he threatened me today. Did you know he used to work at the First Bank of Cleveland?”

  “Mr. Wheeler?”

  “Charles Wheeler is a lead partner at WRE. He used to be a board member or something at the bank. He told me I’d better give back everything I might have taken from the building or he’d press charges, and then he nearly broke my fingers with a handshake.”

  “Wheeler,” the detective repeated, and began flipping through his worn notepad. “He was on the board of the real estate investment company that had bought the property at auction when the building was sold in 1979—Cleveland Real Estate Holdings Corp.”

  Iris nodded, trying to piece it together. Mr. Wheeler worked for the same company that bought the building at auction. He also worked for the bank. “Do you think he’s following me?”

  “Wheeler? I doubt it’s actually him, but it may be someone who works for him. He’s just one of the players in this. The most powerful men in Cleveland have ties to the old bank. Another former bank officer, James Stone, was elected county commissioner a few years back. Now he’s running for Congress. Too many important people want to keep the truth buried. If they think you’ve uncovered something, they’ll want to bury you too.”

  “But I don’t know anything!” she protested. Her brain was reeling. Someone working for Mr. Wheeler had been following her. Somehow Amanda and Mr. Wheeler knew about her affair with Nick. Nick. Nick was always popping up out of nowhere in the old bank and outside her car window. He had been in her apartment. A chill coursed through her body. Nick was just a guy looking for a good time, she argued. He wouldn’t be wrapped up in some weird conspiracy. The detective was studying her as she fought back the panic. She didn’t want to have to explain Nick.

  “You must know something, Iris.”

  “What do I know? I’ve seen strange files and cryptic notes. I found some keys. I found a pile of dead flies, and I’m still having nightmares. It doesn’t mean I understand any of it. I even tried. I stayed up late deciphering some weird language, and I couldn’t make sense of any of it. All I know is that a secretary disappeared because she knew something about the safe deposits. She left behind these notes for someone to find.”

  “Notes?”

  Her eyes watered as her voice raised an octave. “Yes! Then there was this suitcase I found full of her clothes. She probably died in there, and no one even cared. Now you’re telling me someone’s following me . . . Am I next?”

  “Wait. You found women’s clothes? Where?” he asked.

  “In a closet. Here I think I’m going crazy. I think I’m being haunted. Someone’s been following me around the building messing with me, dusting things, taking things, whispering my name. I don’t know shit all right. I wish I did, but I don’t.”

  The detective was staring at the photograph of his sister as if he’d forgotten Iris was there.

  “Do you?” She angrily wiped the tears from her eyes. “What really happened when the bank closed?”

  “All I can tell you is that when the city defaulted, they were eager to blame somebody. City council opened a full investigation of the First Bank of Cleveland, talking about how the rich had defrauded the public. At first the bank cooperated. They gave us access to files and corrupted accounts. We indicted one big fish.”

  He read the name from his notepad: “Theodore Halloran, vice president of Finance. He was as dirty as they come. We had him for embezzlement and racketeering. He was on this advisory committee to the city back in the early 1970s to develop an urban planning initiative. They petitioned the government for funds to buy up blighted real estate for redevelopment. ‘Urban renewal’ they called it. ‘Eminent domain.’ Millions of dollars disappeared overnight. Technically, I guess you could say they didn’t disappear. They were ‘mismanaged.’ ”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The whole thing was a scam. Halloran and his buddies already owned most of the properties they were buying. They had bought up half of Cleveland through bullshit front operations, like nonprofits, and real estate investment firms, like the New Cleveland League. So Halloran was acting on behalf of the city, buying acres of blighted housing from himself, negotiating with himself, and fixing the prices. He sold properties to the city at an outrageous profit. What did he care? It was federal money. The money went right into the bank’s coffers and was never seen again.”

  A freight truck rolled past the loading dock. Iris thought of the black truck she’d seen leaving the old bank. Cleveland Real Estate Holdings Corp. was a front organization owned and operated by former bank officers. Mr. Wheeler was one of them. They owned the building and were removing evidence. Suzanne had said, “You’d be surprised how many of those fat-cat bankers is still around.” She was right.

  They might hide behind different company names, but they were the same people.

  The detective was still talking. “Target neighborhoods got leveled and then completely abandoned. Neighborhoods like Hough were overrun with displaced families. Rents went through the roof, while the whole place went to hell. When it came time to redevelop all that land the city had bought, none of the real estate developers were interested. And the real crime of it was that they were the ones that lobbied the feds for the whole plan and the grant money in the first place.”

  The detective chuckled. “Jesus, I sound like Max talking about this stuff.”

  “So what happened?” Nothing he was saying was calming her nerves.

  “When the feds seized Halloran’s assets, they found over three hundred thousand dollars in gold brick in a safe deposit box he had rented from the First Bank of Cleveland. He was going to cooperate too. The way I heard it, he was about to roll over on half the board of directors, but he found an
other way out. He committed suicide. At least that’s what the coroner called it.”

  Iris remembered walking into Mr. Halloran’s ransacked office on the top floor of the building. Someone had torn the place apart.

  “People started dropping like flies. Old Man Mercer was killed in a car crash. We kept running into dead ends. By the time CPD got a bench warrant to raid the bank, we found out it had been sold. All assets transferred to Columbus Trust in the middle of the night. They were an out-of-town company with no use for the building at 1010 Euclid. It was shuttered and locked up by morning. The building sold at auction a few weeks later. It stopped us cold.”

  “I don’t understand. Why did that matter?”

  “The feds were more interested in keeping the bank from failing during the sale than completing the investigation.”

  The detective noticed the confused expression on Iris’s face and tried to explain. “The FDIC insurance on the deposits was over three billion dollars. If a scandal broke during the sale, there could have been a run on the bank. Everyone hears the bank is being sold, people get nervous, and they run to withdraw their money—Great Depression stuff. I tried to work through the red tape for weeks, but I was taken off the case. They said I could no longer be impartial, due to my personal connection to the bank.”

  “Your sister,” Iris whispered, and looked back at the picture of Max taped to the dashboard. She was somehow mixed up in all of it back then just like Iris was now. “I saw a note she wrote. It was in a book I found.”

  He lifted his downcast eyes. “What?”

  “She’d written this note to Beatrice Baker.” Iris dug the shorthand manual out of her bag and handed it to the detective. “I found these strange notes in Beatrice’s personnel file, and then I saw your sister’s name in this book. I guess I thought if I could decipher the notes, I might find a clue to where Max went . . .” Iris didn’t complete her thought that she’d hoped the detective would show her leniency in return.

  “Did you find anything?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

  “Not anything I could make sense of. Just a bunch of odd notes from the Bible and a few names.”

  The detective gazed at the photograph of his sister and smoothed the tape with his fingertip. “I think she was having an affair with Bill Thompson.”

  The name struck a nerve. “You don’t mean . . . ?”

  “The body you found.” He nodded. “I haven’t told anyone that. According to Max, he was involved in some small-time theft. He was raiding unclaimed deposit boxes, and she got tangled up in it somehow. I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t help Beatrice either. I just hope she managed to leave town.”

  “You knew Beatrice?” Iris’s eyes grew wide.

  “The last time I saw Beatrice, she was in over her head with all of this. She was just a kid.”

  She reached down and began searching her bag. “Beatrice called a secretary named Suzanne right before the bank closed. She asked her about a safe deposit box that was in her name. I found the key to the box in Suzanne’s desk and tracked her down.”

  The detective did a double take. “What?”

  “It’s a long story.” She sat up when she finally managed to fish the key out her bag. “But this number 547 shows up all over the notes. I think it means something.”

  “Beatrice called some woman about a deposit box?” He frowned as if remembering an ancient conversation.

  He eyed the key in Iris’s hand. She gave it to him. He didn’t examine it; he just kept looking expectantly at Iris. She squirmed a moment, unsure what he wanted. He finally glanced down to the pile of keys in her lap and back to her face with his eyebrows raised. She nodded awkwardly and handed over all of the bank keys.

  He sighed. “It will take me months to get a warrant. I doubt they’ll even give me one.”

  Seeing the keys in the detective’s hands instead of her own did nothing to calm her nerves. Iris had finally come clean and confessed, but someone was still following her. Someone thought she knew something. People had disappeared. People had died. A lonely brown suitcase was still filled with clothes and hiding in the building. She felt as though she were right there with it. A tear fell down her cheek.

  “Why would Mr. Wheeler and all of those people still care about the bank? Why are they following me?” she pleaded.

  “You know what was so unusual about the gold we found in Teddy Halloran’s safe deposit box?”

  Iris shook her head.

  “We only found three hundred thousand bucks. The public records I’ve researched over the years suggest that, when you adjust for inflation, over fifty million public dollars had been grossly mismanaged between 1960 and 1978, when the bank closed.”

  “So?”

  “We were closing in fast on the case when Teddy offed himself. The feds were involved, and people were starting to get anxious. I think the other members of the board pulled the trigger on the sale to lock up the records and holdings under the FDIC veil, but maybe they messed up. Maybe they didn’t have enough time to pull the money out.”

  “What are you saying? That the money is still in the bank somewhere?”

  CHAPTER 69

  Iris shook her head in disbelief. How could $50 million just go missing? That kind of money doesn’t just get lost in the couch cushions. She hadn’t seen any sign of bags of cash lying around, and she’d been snooping. Then it hit her. The vault.

  “They lost the keys!” Iris laughed nervously. It was something she would do. “The safe deposit boxes are still full with all of that money, and they lost the fucking keys!”

  “Or someone hid them.”

  She stopped laughing. Keys to $50 million in stolen money had been sitting in her purse. She sucked in a breath. She was a dead woman.

  “But it makes no sense,” she said, on the verge of hysterics. “Why would they need the keys? They could just drill the boxes, or blow them up for that matter.”

  “I’m not sure. You’re going to have to stick with me until we figure this thing out.” He squeezed her hand. “I’m not going to let you disappear too, okay? I’m going to forget where these keys came from as long as you give me your full cooperation, got it?”

  Iris was going to be sick.

  “Following police protocol for the past twenty years has gotten me nowhere. It may have even cost Max her life. I’m not going to let it happen again.”

  With that, he climbed out of the car.

  Iris sat frozen in her seat until she heard a tap on her window. The detective motioned for her to get out. They were in an alley somewhere downtown. Terminal Tower loomed above them.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’re going to show me this vault,” he said, searching around the alley until he found what he was looking for. “I did some checking on those steam tunnels you mentioned. One of them dead-ends right here.”

  He walked to a small shed and tried the handle to the door. It was locked. He pulled a pair of metal picks out of his back pocket and knelt down. Iris glanced nervously around the alley. It was broad daylight, but the street was deserted. Everyone was at work except her. She hoisted her field bag onto her shoulder and fought back the urge to run. Within a few seconds the detective had picked the lock, and the door swung open.

  He carefully shut it behind them and clicked on a flashlight. There was a giant hatch on the floor between them. It opened with a loud clank. Detective McDonnell followed Iris down a narrow ladder and into a tiny passageway. She pulled her own Magnum flashlight out of her bag and held on to it for dear life as the two of them headed down the dank tunnel.

  After what seemed like miles, they reached a brick-lined, vaulted room that served as a junction point. Iris had been there before. She took the lead down the narrow passage that ended at the steep metal staircase. The sign above it read, “First Bank of Cleveland.” The first stair creaked loudly
, and her heart skipped a beat. She froze and listened, before continuing to climb. At the top, Iris clicked off her flashlight and tried the handle to the access door. It wasn’t locked.

  Daylight trickled down the stairs above them, giving just enough light to find their way across the lower lobby. The red carpet muffled their footsteps as they snuck across the floor toward the vaults in total silence. Iris dug her fingernails into the palm of her hand. This wasn’t happening, she told herself. It was just another bad dream. A police officer would not break into a bank. But that’s exactly what they seemed to be doing.

  This was a terrible idea, but she had no choice. She was in danger. Someone knew about the keys. Someone had been watching her. The detective needed her help, and she needed his. There wasn’t a better plan, but she searched for one anyway. Maybe she could just try to leave town. The image of an abandoned brown suitcase was still hiding in a closet in her mind. Beatrice had tried to leave too.

  The round doorway between the lower lobby and the vault corridor stood open. Iris couldn’t shake the feeling that they were walking into the open jaws of a beast.

  All of the red velvet curtains of the private viewing rooms were pulled open except one. It was the shower curtain all over again as Iris stared at the red fabric from across the room. She stopped and strained her ears for the sound of a madman whispering her name. Detective McDonnell nudged her. They had to keep moving.

  Through the round opening, they were greeted by total darkness. Iris felt her way across the marble corridor toward the vault that held over a thousand safe deposit boxes, each with its own little secret.

  It felt wrong. Every other time Iris had visited the bank, the fluorescent lights had been buzzing, and Ramone had been wandering the halls. The detective clicked on his flashlight and examined the hundreds of tiny doors. He pulled out the keys he’d taken from her and began searching for Suzanne’s box.

  The silence was closing in around her. She couldn’t shake the feeling of someone watching. Phantom voices whispered in her ears. She tried to tell herself if anyone was there, it would be Ramone. But he didn’t answer the ring of the call box. Maybe he was gone.