The Dead Key Part 35

"When the feds seized Halloran's a.s.sets, 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 another 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 a.s.sets 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 cus.h.i.+ons. 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 f.u.c.king 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 pa.s.sageway. 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 pa.s.sage 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 m.u.f.fled 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.

Detective McDonnell found Box 547. "So, how does this work?"

"Well," Iris said, clearing her throat, "Suzanne's key must go here, and the bank's key goes in this larger hole."

"And these are the bank keys?" He held up the ring of keys she'd found not far from where they stood. "So which one do we use?"

"Why don't you just try them all?" There were only twelve keys, each with its own cryptic letter engraved on its face.

"The lock might break. The pins could be set to snap if the wrong key is forced in."

She raised her eyebrows, and he raised his back.

"What, you think you're the only one who does detective work? These markings don't make sense. The keys are lettered, but the boxes are numbered."

He handed the keys to Iris, and she looked through them. "U," "I," "N," "D," "E1," "O," "S1," "P," "E2," "R," "A," "M" the letters read around the ring. She'd wondered the same thing ever since she found them. There were tiny numbers on a few, but not all of them. Just on the letters that repeated, she realized.

"Oon Day-O Sper-Am." Iris sounded out the letters aloud as she turned the keys over.

"Well, Deo is Latin for 'G.o.d.'"

"Huh?" Iris scowled at the detective.

"It's Latin. Twelve years of Catholic school," he said with a shrug. "But who cares. I'm sure no one was thinking about G.o.d when they rigged this key system."

"In G.o.d We Trust is the key!" she nearly shouted, and then clapped a hand over her mouth. In a lowered voice she explained. "That's it! It was written in one of the files. 'In G.o.d We Trust' is written all over the dollar bill, isn't it?"

Iris scrambled back to the vault corridor, where she had dropped her bag, and yanked out the file. "See! It says right here 'In G.o.d We Trust is the key.' Wait, there's more."

She pulled out another sheet from the file she'd found in the suitcase. "It's a code or something." Iris sat down on the vault floor with the notes and slowly translated.

"What the h.e.l.l is all of that?" the detective asked, pointing his flashlight at the page of tick marks and bird tracks. "Where did you get those?"

"This stack of notes was in Beatrice's personnel file. I thought it was weird, so I took them. And I found these"-Iris held up the other stack of paper-"in that suitcase up on the eleventh floor. Did you want to see it?"

His face was a stone. "First things first. You can read that?"

"It's shorthand. I found this book, and I've been trying to make sense of it for weeks." She dug out a pencil and wrote in the margins what she deciphered. "'IN DEO SPERAMUS, one hundred at a time.'"

"In Deo Speramus means 'In G.o.d We Trust,'" the detective confirmed softly.

"What's the first box number?"

He walked deeper into the vault, searching both sides until he found the smallest number. "001," he said, walking back to her. He paused and added, "The last number is 1299."

"Okay, there are thirteen hundred boxes. If there was a key for each hundred of them, there should be thirteen keys, but there are only twelve." Iris lay the keys on the ground and s.h.i.+ned her light on them again. She arranged them until they read "I, N, D, E1, O, S1, P, E2, R, A, M, U." Iris trained her light back to where she'd found the keys hanging from a lock. The key still stuck there was labeled "S2." That was the thirteenth key. The man in the blue s.h.i.+rt must have forced it into the wrong lock. It was stuck.

"So, then, which one do we think goes to Box 547?"

"If I is 000, N is 100, then D, E1, O . . ." She spun the key ring, counting. "S1 must be 500, right?"

"Your guess is a h.e.l.l of a lot better than mine." The detective picked the keys out of her hand. "There's only one way to find out."

He stood up and slid the S1 key into the lock. He winced ever so slightly and gave it a gentle turn. The key rotated freely. Iris slid Suzanne's key into the other hole, turned it, and the door swung open. Iris couldn't help jumping up and down a little. They had done it.

"I guess they don't let dummies into engineering school, huh?" He grinned.

Iris smiled back triumphantly. She had finally done something right. It was all going to work out now. Somehow.

Detective McDonnell reached in and pulled out a long, silver box. It looked like a miniature coffin to Iris. He carried it carefully to the counter outside the vault. The detective lifted the lid, and they both peered inside.

CHAPTER 70.

Thursday, December 14, 1978 A scream tore out of her throat. Beatrice recoiled from the thin fingers she'd felt in the blackness of the tunnel. She lurched backward, right into the body connected to the hand. It was moving.

Beatrice leapt up to run and cracked her skull soundly on a steam pipe. Camera flashbulbs exploded in her head with pain, and she fell to her knees. She let out a sharp cry and doubled over. A flashlight clicked on, flooding the tunnel like a firebomb. Beatrice sucked in a scream and blindly scrambled through the muck away from whoever held the light.

"Beatrice?" a familiar voice croaked behind her. "Is that you? How? How did you . . . ?"

"Max?" Beatrice squinted at the light.

The body lying in a heap on the floor was Max. She looked like she'd been beaten with a lead pipe. Her eye was swollen shut, and half her face seemed crushed in blood.

"Oh my G.o.d! Max! What happened?" she gasped, and rushed back to her side.

Beatrice lifted her friend's head off of the filthy concrete floor and held it in her hands. She searched the dirty water pooled around them for anything to stop the bleeding.

"They found me." She coughed. Her lungs rattled with blood.