The Safe Man: A Ghost Story Read online

  “Mr. Robinette?” he called out.

  “What?” came the reply.

  “I’m ready to open the safe now.”

  Brian headed back to the study. He heard Robinette coming down the steps behind him. He got back into position next to the safe and picked up the mallet. Robinette came into the room.

  “Is it open?”

  “Not yet. I thought you wanted to be here. Do you want a set of earplugs? This metal on metal gets pretty loud.”

  “Can’t be louder than that drill. I don’t want earplugs.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Brian started hammering the spike with the mallet, taking short strokes at first and then lengthening his arc when the gear refused to give. Each strike on the spike sent a sharp jolt through his body. Finally, after three full swings, he felt the gear start to give. He went back to the shorter, more controlled swing and hit the spike five more times before the gear broke loose and he heard it clatter to the bottom of the safe.

  “Sounds like it’s empty,” he said to Robinette.

  “Just open it.”

  Brian reached down and gripped the handle and sharply pulled it down. It came easily. The safe was unlocked. He pulled it up and open, struggling with the weight of the steel door, and was immediately hit with the dead air that had been trapped inside for who knows how long. It was cold and heavy. It smelled like someone’s chilled breath.

  Robinette stepped forward and looked down. He saw that the safe was empty. Brian wasn’t looking at the contents or lack thereof. He was looking at the workmanship of the gears and the slide bolts on the inside of the door. It was a beautiful job, and Brian found himself admiring the craftsmanship behind it.

  “Empty,” Robinette said. “Figures.”

  Brian reached down into the safe to retrieve the free-wheel gear from the bottom. He withdrew it quickly. It had felt strange. It had felt like he was reaching into a refrigerator for a can of beer.

  “That thing must be insulated. It actually feels cold down there. Feel this.”

  He held up the gear. It was ice-cold. But Robinette waved away the idea of touching it.

  “So much for the treasure of Sierra Madre,” he said. “All right. Get the door off it, and if you don’t mind and it won’t cost me too much more, do you have something you can clean that out with?”

  “I have a Shop-Vac in my van. It’s part of the service.”

  “Good. Do it. That dust is already affecting my sinuses. I can’t breathe. I’ll be upstairs when you’re finished.”

  After Robinette was gone, Brian went to work on the door’s single hinge. In five minutes he lifted the heavy door out of its spot and carefully leaned it against one of the bookcases. He thought that it weighed more than forty pounds, even without a back plate.

  For a moment he studied the workmanship of the locking mechanism again. The nine—now eight—gears were clustered in an interlocking pattern that had to have been of original design. He thought it was beautiful, like a painting that should be on display. Almost like a living organism. He was hoping that Robinette would let him take the door, since he no longer wanted it.

  He gathered his tools and took them out to the van. He came back in with his camera and the vacuum, and as he reentered the study, his eyes met those of a young girl who was standing by the opening in the floor. Brian had not replaced the plywood door yet.

  “Careful, honey, you don’t want to fall down in there. You might get hurt.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  She was dark-haired and had a sweet face. Her eyes were dark and serious for such a young girl. She was wearing a dress that looked like it might be a little warm for the summer weather. Something about her was familiar to him—the eyes maybe. He couldn’t place it. He knew there was no reason he would have ever seen her before.

  “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

  “Lucy.”

  Brian’s eyes lit in surprise.

  “Really? That’s my favorite name for a girl. My wife and I are about to have a baby and if it’s a girl, we’re going to call her Lucy, just like you. Do you believe that? How old are you, sweetheart?”

  She smiled, revealing that she was missing a front tooth.

  “Six.”

  “Wow, I would have guessed at least seven. You’re a big girl.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Well, listen, I have to do some cleaning up in here and it might get dusty. You should run along now, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “See you, Lucy.”

  “Bye-bye, Box Man.”

  He watched her leave the room, wondering how she knew to call him that. Had her father used the term? He couldn’t remember but assumed Robinette had told her who he was and what he was doing in the house. He listened to her footsteps padding away and then he went back to work, vacuuming out the safe and then taking photos of the safe’s door, front and back.

  After loading his equipment into the van, he sat in the driver’s seat while writing out a billing statement on his clipboard. He didn’t charge Robinette anything other than the two-fifty already agreed to. He took the bill inside with him and called up the stairs to Robinette.

  Robinette studied the bill as they walked back to the library.

  “I ought to retire and learn how to legally break into safes. What’s this come out to, like eighty bucks an hour for using a drill?”

  “Hardly. I’m lucky if I get one job a day. There aren’t that many safes that need opening. Most of my work is just plain old locksmithing.”

  “Well, I’d say you did pretty damn good today.”

  Robinette dropped the bill onto the desk in the library as if he were dismissing it.

  Brian said, “I usually get paid upon completion of the job.”

  Robinette said, “Well, you didn’t say that before.”

  “It is custom in the service industry. Usually I don’t have to say it.”

  Brian could tell that Robinette didn’t like that service thing thrown back at him.

  “All right,” he said curtly. “I’ll go up and get you a check.”

  “Thank you.”

  Just before Robinette left the study, Brian spoke up again.

  “What do you want me to do with the door? It’s heavy. I could take it and get rid of it, if you want.”

  “No, no,” Robinette answered quickly. “I want you to carry it out to the curb and prop it up so it can be seen.”

  Brian was confused.

  “Sure, but why?”

  “Three words: In Cold Blood. Trash pickup doesn’t come until Thursday. That means it will be out there a couple days, and maybe the word will get out that there is no longer a safe in here.”

  Brian nodded though he didn’t really follow the logic.

  “What’s that old song say? Paranoia will destroy ya.”

  Robinette turned fully around to confront him.

  “Look, I don’t expect you to understand me or my life. Do you have children?”

  “Got one on the way. I’m not trying to—”

  “I don’t care what you are trying or not trying to say. Just do your job and don’t worry about my paranoia. My paranoia got me this place and this life. I think in some ways it’s like drilling through steel plates for a living, but I like it better. It’s not as noisy. Now if you don’t mind, I will go up and get you a check while you take that damn thing out to the curb. Okay?”

  “You got it.”

  At dinner Brian told Laura all about his encounter with the arrogant writer and she told him that Robinette hadn’t had a book out in at least three years. She suggested that maybe that had something to do with his paranoia and arrogance.

  “I was reading in one of the baby books about how when babies get constipated, they can be really miserable,” she said. “Maybe Robinette is creatively constipated.”

  Brian laughed but said some people are just mean, plain and simple. He thought about the girl he had briefly met in the house. Growing
up in that place with that father, how would she turn out? How would she make it through? He wondered where the mother was.

  When he got up to clear the plates, Brian first touched his wife’s swollen belly. They were less than a month away. He was excited and scared. Scared about the money mostly.

  “Hey, Robinette’s daughter’s name is Lucy,” he called from the sink.

  “Does that change your mind about it?”

  “Not if it’s a girl. I still like it. And that house? It was the Blankenship place.”

  “Really? What was it like inside? I’ve seen it from the outside.”

  “It was big. In the kitchen I saw two of everything, even dishwashers. I guess Arthur Blankenship’s old man was the guy who put the safe in. When he built that place with money from the plant.”

  After dinner Brian spent time in the workshop in the garage and posted a report on the Le Seuil safe on the Box Man website. On the chat list, he posted a note asking if anyone else out there had ever encountered such a safe and then signed off to go to bed.

  Brian dreamed of darkness with swirling motion. Movements like wisps of smoke that then, for just a moment, came together to form a face he did not recognize as man or woman, adult or child. Then it was gone and he woke up.

  “What is it?” his wife whispered.

  “A dream. Just a bad dream.”

  “What was it about?”

  Laura always asked about dreams. She thought they were important.

  “I don’t know. It was more like a feeling. A bad feeling.”

  He got up and walked the house, checking every lock. This was his routine but it wasn’t comforting. He had the best locks money could buy but he knew how to pick and break every one of them. He knew there were other people with the same skills. He could never feel totally secure.

  He sat in the kitchen in the dark and drank a beer. He wondered if he was paranoid like Robinette. He wondered if he would become like the writer once his own child was born. He started humming the Kinks song. “Paranoia will destroy ya…”

  He took the beer into the nursery and looked around in the dark. The room was completely outfitted and ready, save for the things that Laura wanted to be gender specific. They’d had a disagreement. Laura wanted to know early on whether a boy or girl was coming. Brian wanted to be surprised. So she knew and he didn’t. She had done a good job of keeping the secret.

  Brian’s secret was that he wanted a girl. He didn’t want to find out beforehand because he feared if he learned he was the father of a boy, he would lose his edge of excitement, that he might actually become depressed before the baby was even born. The reason he wanted a girl was that he considered his own life and thought that it was too easy for boys to get messed up, to go down the wrong path. With girls there seemed to be more two-way streets. They could turn around and come back if they wanted to. With boys it was all one-way streets. No turning back.

  Brian picked up a complete-change-of-hardware job the next day. The house was an old Victorian in the Heights. Eight doors, including the garage. All Medeco locks and Baldwin brass. It was a six-hour job. That and the markup on the materials made it a good day. He came home relaxed, a big check in his wallet. He and Laura went out to eat at the Bonefish Grill. They figured that once the baby came, they wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while. Might as well do it while they could.

  But that night wasn’t perfect. The dream came back. He saw the face form in the darkness again. A face made of cigarette smoke. In the dream it smelled like his burning drill. He awoke and sat on the side of the bed. He felt Laura’s hand caress his back. Being pregnant had made her a light sleeper.

  “Was it the same dream?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you remember any more of it?”

  “Not really. It’s just this bad feeling. It’s dread. It’s like I let something loose in the world. Like it was all my fault.”

  “What was? What did you do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think it’s about the baby?”

  Brian laughed.

  “No, it’s not that.”

  He checked the house again. Making sure it was secure even though he did not feel secure. When he went back to the bedroom he started getting dressed.

  “What are you doing?” Laura asked. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to take a drive.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I just want to take a drive, put the windows down.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I will be.”

  The phone didn’t ring the next day. No jobs came in. Brian called a foundry in Michigan and ordered drill bits to replace those he’d broken on the Robinette job. He then spent the rest of the morning in the garage workshop, trying to research the Le Seuil safe. He wrote a letter to his father about it. He went on the computer and Googled the name Le Seuil but only came up with a book publisher in France using the name. He checked the Box Man website, but no one had responded to his earlier post other than to say they had never encountered a safe of that brand.

  When it was lunchtime he opened the side door to go into the house. Two men were standing there. They wore suits and dour expressions. It had been twenty years since he’d had to deal with cops, but he still knew the type.

  “Officers, what can I do for you?”

  “Actually, I’m Detective Stephens with the police department, and this is Agent Rowan with the FBI. Are you Brian Holloway?”

  “Yes. Is it Laura? The baby? What happened?”

  “Who is Laura?” Stephens asked.

  “My wife. She’s at work. She—”

  “This is not about her. Can we come in?”

  Brian stepped back. Despite the relief of knowing this was not about Laura, he felt the same sense of dread that he had awoken from the dream with building in his chest.

  “Then, what is it?”

  “Have a seat,” Rowan said.

  Brian sat on the stool next to the workbench.

  The two lawmen remained standing, their eyes moving around the shop as they spoke. The detective looked like he was deferring to the agent in this matter, whatever it was.

  “This is how I would like to work this,” Agent Rowan said. “We’re going to ask you some questions here, and the first time you lie to us we pack it in and put you in a cell to think about it. Fair enough?”

  “This is a joke, right?”

  “No joke.”

  “Then questions about what? Am I a suspect in something?”

  “Not yet. We think you are just a witness. But like I said, the first time you lie to us, you become a suspect and we treat you like one.”

  “Witness to what? What happened?”

  “I said we are going to ask the questions. But let’s start this thing off right by getting everything right. You are Brian Holloway, thirty-nine years old, and you reside in the home that this garage is attached to. Do I have all of that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your father has spent the last twenty-two years in an Illinois state correctional facility serving a life sentence without parole for the crime of murder.”

  Brian shook his head. The sins of the father always visited the son.

  “This is about my father? I was nineteen when he went away. What’s that got to—”

  “He was a box man, too, wasn’t he? Only he opened boxes for the Outfit in Chicago. He taught you everything you know, right?”

  “Wrong.”

  “He killed a man who came home and caught him in the act, didn’t he?”

  “He didn’t do it. The man he was doing the job for did it. He panicked.”

  “Oh, I guess that makes it okay.”

  “Look, what do you want? I haven’t talked to my father in three years.”

  “Do your clients know that you’re the son of Harry ‘Houdini’ Holloway?”

  “Look, I run a clean, legal business. Why
would I tell someone who my father is? Why would I have to? This isn’t Chicago and I’m not my father.”

  “Where were you last night?” Stephens asked, suddenly joining in, changing the direction of things.

  Brian started to think. Maybe the whole thing was choreographed. Maybe it wasn’t about the old man. Maybe it was all misdirection and sudden change.

  “Last night? I was here. I was home.”

  “From when till when?”

  “Um, I got home around three yesterday and I did some work in here and then my wife and I went out for dinner and we got home about eight-thirty and that was it. We stayed home after that.”

  “Okay, eighty-thirty until when? When was the next time you left?”

  Brian hesitated. He looked at their faces, wondering what had happened and how much they knew. Cops always had the advantage. He knew this. His father had always said that when it came to cops, to lie was to die.

  He shook his head.

  “Until now. I haven’t left yet.”

  Each of the men in front of him visibly stiffened and their faces took on a stony resolve.

  “Turn around,” Stephens said. “Assume the position. Your dad probably taught it to you, too.”

  Instead Brian raised his hands as if to stop their advance on him.

  “Okay, look. I took a drive last night. I was gone less than a hour.”

  “When last night?”

  “I never looked at the clock. I woke up, couldn’t sleep, and took a drive. It was the middle of the night.”

  “And you never looked at the clock in the car, huh?”

  “No, I took my van. The clock in it doesn’t work and I forgot to put on my watch.”

  “Where did you go on your drive?”

  “I just drove around. All over the place. I even went over the bridge and cruised around the island.”

  Brian knew he had to give them that. He knew they had something. It must be the electronic toll pass on the van’s windshield. There would be a record of him crossing the bridge.

  “Why the island? What did you do while you were there?”

  Brian let out a deep breath. They were cornering him. He didn’t understand this. The FBI doesn’t come around for stealing trash. There was something else going on.